All posts by reneeinnd

books, Media, News, Uncategorized

How’s That Again?

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The most informative sections of our local newspaper are the District Court record and the obituaries. When you live in a small community  it is important  to know who died and who got convicted of what.

Yesterday I was hastily scanning an obituary of an 86 year old farm wife from a tiny village south of our town when I ran across this sentence: “Lorraine loved doing the polka with Christ.”  That sure stopped me in my reading! What a wonderful image!  I never knew Jesus did the polka. I wondered if he did the Fox Trot and the Lindy, too.  More careful scrutiny of the obituary reveled that her husband’s name was Christ, as in Christoph,  and it was he with whom she loved to polka.   I was sort of disappointed,  but it sure brightened my day.

When have you misread  or misheard something? What are some funny misprints you have read lately.  What is your experience with the polka?

 

 

 

education, Food, home, Travel, Uncategorized

Frozen Treats

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I have always loved popsicles.  I ate so many as a small child that I got lots of cavities in my teeth. My early favorites were the blue raspberry ones. Ice cream bars were never a favorite,  not until I spent a month in the summer after Grade 11 in Saltillo, Mexico studying Spanish. It was hot there in July, and I discovered a world of wonderful frozen confections. My favorite were strawberry ice cream bars with a ripe strawberry at the base. I looked for them in vain in the grocery store back home, but never found them again. I stopped eating popsickles and ice cream bars over the years.   My frozen treat consumption had dwindled to mainly bowls of vanilla  ice cream.

Just the other day I was wheeling my cart past the frozen treat section at Walmart when I spied some interesting looking frozen treats with a lot of Spanish words on the boxes. I bought some ice cream ones and some fruity ones that had the slightest hint of hot chili. They were all wonderful, and the strawberry  ones were very much like the Saltillo strawberry bars. I am in Heaven!

What were your favorite summer treats as a child? What do you like now?

 

100 Words, education, Gatherings, Health, home, Media, Uncategorized

Staying Home

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Perhaps I’m odd. Perhaps my early years as an only child enhanced my ability to entertain myself. Perhaps I have forgotten what it was like to be young.  I just can’t understand why people are having such a hard time staying at home.

I see in my Facebook feed challenges to live for  a couple of months off the grid in a remote cabin, and winning a bunch of money. Heck, we have all sorts of entertainment in our living spaces, yet people continue to crowd into bars and large parties.

My  question for the Baboons today is:

Why is it so hard to stay home?  What would you include in a tutorial that would help people stay put?  How would you manage in a remote cabin off the grid for a couple of months?

education, Family, Kids, Travel, Uncategorized

Identifying Marks

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Daughter told me that when she was at a farmers market in Tacoma last Saturday, she ran into another graduate of Concordia  College.  (I and both our children graduated from there). I asked her if she knew the person. Daughter said no, but the woman recognized her Concordia ring and identified her as a Cobber. As you can see from the header photo, it is a pretty plain ring and not all that easy to spot on someone else’s hand.

The College magazine is full of stories of Cobbers encountering  other Cobbers in odd places, always identifying each other by their rings. “Marlys Swensrud (’64) was surprized to meet up with Lars Lindstrom (’88) on a bird watching trip in Cyprus last August”.  You would think all we alums do is stare at people’s hands hoping to find a fellow graduate.  It isn’t even that the ring tells much about what sort of people we are, only that we have a shared experience of a certain place.  I think that if I wanted to let people know about me by wearing something symbolic, it would be small ceramic pins in the shape of a pie or a garden hoe, or perhaps a Welsh Terrier.

What symbol would you wear to let people know about you?  What do you think are some symbols that could identify us as Baboons?

Family, Health, History, Music, Songs, TV, Uncategorized

Does It Hurt and Have A Temperature?

62 Comments

Today’s post comes from Wessew.

That is line from a 1963 Bayer Children’s aspirin commercial. The little boy makes an inquiry of his playmate’s health and receives reassurance from her mother that things will be fine. His delightful response? “Mothers are like that. Yeah, they are.”

With the C-19 pandemic, many of us have heard similar screening questions. “Pain? Temperature?”

My construction work at medical facilities requires a negative response to gain entrance into the building. I’m quite sure that over these past months that I’ve had my temperature taken a hundred times and it has consistently been 97.5. This is a surprise, as I recollect normal body temperature being 98.6 or did Keith mis-inform me with the lyric in his 1967 song:

“Hey, 98.6, it’s good to have you back again! Oh, hey, 98.6, her lovin’ is the medicine that saved me! Oh, I love my baby!”

Somehow “Hey 97.5” doesn’t work as a lyric.

 

Do you have a favorite fever song?

books, Family, History, Theatre, Uncategorized

A Different Point of View

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I thought about The Wonderful Wizard of Oz on our recent trip to Brookings, SD, as we drove through Edgely, ND and Aberdeen, SD on our way.  Frank Baum lived in Aberdeen around the time he wrote the book, and the girl he used as a model for Dorothy was his niece who lived on a god forsaken farm near Edgely.  (That girl’s daughter became the first woman senator from ND). The area is pretty swampy and remote, in the James River Valley, close to the Red River Valley, but without the good soil. I confess I never read Baum’s  book, but I really liked Wicked, which was the story told from the point of view of the Wicked Witch of the West.

I liked Jane Eyre as a teen, but I really liked Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, which is the story told from the point of view of the first Mrs. Rochester.

I suppose one could argue that writing a story from the point of view of another character from an established novel or story is an easy way to make a buck, but I think it is so interesting  to consider. I also don’t know how they figure out copyright and royalty issues, but it must be doable.

What novel or story would you like to see written from another character’s point of view? What novel or story would you like to see written from the point of view of a character from a completely different novel or story?

gardening, home, Nature, Uncategorized

Plants on the Move

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Ligularia, or “The Rocket”, is one of my favorite shade plants.  We have several in our yard, and I like to pair them with Hydrangeas.  They can be somewhat alarming when it is hot, as they droop in the day, but then they perk right up again after it cools in the evening. They come in different heights and leaf colors. I like the large ones with big green leaves.

I am an impatient gardener, and I plant things too close. I seem to forget just how big Hydrangeas get, and that they will muscle out anything next to them if it isn’t far enough away. This happened recently on the north side of the garage. I had planted Ligularia too close to the Hydrangeas, and the they became completely covered.  Ligularia can become quite large, as you can see in the header photo.  The ones in the north bed were puny, so last Saturday I decided to transplant them to a more open space in the fern bed. It is shady and they can predominate over the ferns. I was amazed to see how resourceful the Ligularia were, and that they had actually migrated from the middle of the Hydrangea bed to the very edge of it, as though to escape the larger shrubs. I initially planted them in a straight line with the Hydrangeas, and here they had moved at least a foot north to the edge of the bed. It is as though they tried to transplant themselves.

We have become more strategic landscapers in the past few years,  but our tendency is to plant where there is  room and to fill in empty spaces somewhat willy nilly. I suppose that is why we end up transplanting things a lot.

What is your landscaping strategy?  What have been your successful and not so successful outcomes?

 

Business, Media, Uncategorized, work

Chaos

17 Comments

Monday will be a day of reckoning at my work place. It is the day we move to our new building.  There are approximately 80 offices that need to be emptied and moved to the new building.  Over 300 boxes of patient records will be moved.  All the omens predict chaos.

The renovations at the new building are not complete. There still is no internet. Some offices don’t have electricity yet. The  new office and waiting room furniture will arrive on Monday just as the moving company will be moving in all our computers, boxes, filing cabinets, supplies, and everything else we are taking with us.  It will take all week for the new furniture to be installed. The cardboard boxes that we were provided with from Walmart are reluctant to let tape adhere, so I foresee bottoms crashing out of boxes as they are moved. Somehow, in the midst of this, we have to attend to our crisis and emergency clients, and see clients via telehealth from our homes.

I am responsible for four offices, including two offices in which we give people tests, my play therapy room, and my personal office. I filled 45 rather large boxes with books, test manuals, toys, office supplies, paper tests and test kits, four computers and their monitors, and our telephones for each office.  I also had to label each piece of furniture with the  number of the new offices to which they are to be delivered. We didn’t have the new office numbers until last Thursday, so I spent Thursday and Friday feverishly labeling my boxes and furniture. I am thankful that a psychometrist and another psychologist from the Bismarck office are coming on Wednesday to help me unpack and set up the testing offices.

The move has been a physical challenge for me.  The boxes are heavy. I removed bulletin boards that were screwed to the wall while standing on top of desks.  I had to disassemble a large room divider for one of the testing rooms.  Monday morning I have to go to the new building and remove two unnecessary desk peninsulas that are attached to the walls in the testing rooms so that there is room for the Psychology filing cabinets. The construction company says it isn’t in their contract to do so.  I better not lose my purse, since that is where I stored all the nuts and bolts and filing cabinet keys.

There is no one to blame for this.  Our regional director worked hard to get the movers, furniture delivery, internet installation, and building construction to align with the deadline from the college that owns our old building to be out by July 20.  It is hard to control the outcome with so many different working parts. I am hopeful that by the end of the week things will be back to normal.

What is the biggest project you have been involved with?  Do you plan or follow others’ plans?

Family, gardening, home, Nature, Uncategorized

Weeds

22 Comments

Husband and I returned home last Tuesday from Brookings to a garden jungle of weeds. It rained every day we were gone, and the temperatures were quite warm, so everything grew. We weeded on Wednesday.  Husband estimated we  hauled about 50 pounds of weeds to the city  grass clippings and weeds dumpsters,

I have never seen the utility of using a hoe to weed. It just cuts the weeds off at the top, and leaves the roots to produce the weeds again. We are hands and knees, crawl through the garden and pull the weeds up by the roots sort of gardeners. We are, however, getting older and Husband has neuropathy in his fingers from diabetes.

This year we tried a new strategy, laying down newspapers between the rows  and on the edges of the beds and covering them with a layer of top soil. That really helped  keep the weeds down. Husband has bought at least 30 bags of topsoil toward this endeavor, and after weeding yesterday he liberally strewed newspaper and dirt in all the places he hadn’t before.  It was a real pleasure to gaze at the garden yesterday and see nary a weed.

What is your favorite garden tool?  What special satisfaction do you get from gardening?

Family, gardening, home

Fomenting Rebellion

46 Comments

Husband and I  have a friend in town who we have been helping with her garden.  I will call her Kay.  She is in her early 60’s, has never married, and lives with her 90 year old mother.  Kay is a college graduate. She has held teaching jobs in small communities in our region, but mainly lived at home.

Kay has lived  under her mother’s power and control her whole life. Her mother is failing now, and in poor health, and yet still tries to boss Kay. They have an enormous vegetable garden and many flower beds impractically designed by her mother, that Kay is expected to keep the way her mother wants.  All the gardening must be done the way her mother expects, and she better not spend too much money on anything,  or water more than every two weeks. Her mother never taught her to garden, however.  (I should also add that she and her mother are devout Baptists and leading lights in the area WCTU. )

Kay has stopped asking her mother how to keep up the flower beds, and takes our advice regarding soil preparation,  plant varieties, soaker hoses, and equipment. She bought twelve bags of peat moss without her mother’s permission and had Little Nick come with his tiller to work it into the vegetable garden. (Little  Nick is 3 ft tall, about 60 years old, and as mean as a snake. He has gardening equipment especially adapted for his height.)  She put down soaker hoses, and waters when the plants need it. She even bought a wheel barrow.

I see gardening as a way for Kay to have a quiet revolution and become liberated from her mother.  I know at a certain level that she has allowed her mother to treat her this way, but it is hard to get yourself out of  situations like this that have gone on for so long. We are making sure she doesn’t become too dependent on us. We also put her in touch with the Regional Aging Services coordinator to discuss Power of Attorney  and care taker support. I don’t think I will ever be able to take her out for a drink, but those twelve bags of peat moss are a real positive sign.

Who have you known who was overcontolled by someone else?  What other rebellious advice would you have for our friend?