All posts by verily sherrilee

Directionally challenged, crafty, reading mother of young adult
2026, Food, History, Kids, Mysteries

Condiments Muscle Memory

36 Comments

Muscle memory is an amazing thing.  On Saturday, YA and I had our next-door neighbors over for lunch.  Just veggie burgers and corn on the grill.  At the last minute, we decided it was a little too chilly to eat outside, so I set the table inside.

I set out seven little bowls in the kitchen.  Onion slices, tomato slices, pickles and Boston lettuce to get started.  Just as I started to squirt ketchup into the fifth bowl, YA walked in and immediately said “what are you DOING?”  I told her I was putting the condiments in bowls and she pushed back with “WHY?”  It took me a few minutes of standing at the counter, looking at the bowls before I realized why I was about to put ketchup, mustard and mayonnaise in little bowls.

When I was growing up, condiments went into little bowls. Not just for when we had company, but all the time.  Even when we had dinner at my Nana and Pappy’s on Saturday nights, condiments went into little bowls.  In fact, if condiments ever went on the table in their bottles, it was called “pinkert style”.  It wasn’t until I was in high school that my mom told me why.  When she was growing up, they lived a few houses down from the Pinkerts.  Apparently the Pinkerts never put their condiments into little dishes… they always just set the bottles out willy nilly.  So it turns out that my grandparents calling that “pinkert style” was actually quite pejorative – I never knew.

While I almost automatically put out little bowls when company comes over, YA and I do not do this when it’s just the two of us.  Of course, YA and I eating a meal that requires condiments on the table is fairly rare.

On Saturday I put out the bottles; I really don’t need to be the third generation getting little bowls dirty in the name of shaming some family up the block from my grandparents!!

Any habits that have come down the generations in your family?

2026, animals, Family, Gatherings, Nature, Uncategorized

Zoo Happiness

15 Comments

Neither of my folks liked crowds. Long lines, throngs of folks – count them out.  I’ve never been sure why I can take lots of folks but whatever propensity I have, it has been handed down to YA. 

The two busiest days at the Minnesota Zoo are always the last Saturday and Sunday of their very popular Farm Babies program.  They have all kinds of activities and music out at The Farm and there are always plenty of babies; this year baby cows, llamas, goats, lambs and piglets.  YA and I had other things going on for the first four weekends so it was this past weekend or no Farm Babies program until next year.  We’ve been to the last weekend of Farm Babies before but it was even more crowded than we remember. 

Of course, almost everybody was a young family with kids (and those proverbial strollers – I promise I’m not whining about strollers, despite the photo above).  It was, however, truly amazing to see the number of strollers, especially when they were “parked” in several locations.  Wow!

YA and I have different modus operandi at the zoo.  She will walk at my pace but doesn’t always stay right at my side if I dilly dally.  I am more than able to stand and watch a moose do basically nothing for 10 minutes but if I do this, sometimes YA will wander off to see something else.  Conversely, she can pet a baby cow forever.  On Saturday, there was a restaurant chain sponsoring a scavenger hunt.  There were three stations that you had to find and have you little map stamped.  I thought it was a hoot but YA didn’t want to play (this was when she went off to pet that baby cow).

One of the projects in the Activity Barn was making homes for mason bees who apparently are solitary bees that don’t live in hives.  I thought this was very interesting and I let the volunteer tell me everything.  When I was done there, I found YA petting goats.  The one time we were perfectly synced was when we got hungry for lunch! 

Toward the end of our day we stopped at the Service Desk – I wanted to ask when Llama Trek was going to open and to find out if the snow monkeys (whose exhibit is being re-vamped right now) were still here in Minnesota or if they were hanging out at a different zoo until their habitat is finished.  The guy behind the desk was talkative and I’m not even sure how we got from the snow monkey habitat discussion to the Kodiak bear who broke the window at the zoo several years back.  Or how the zoo has multiple possible plans for adding new bears now that there is only one left. 

As we were leaving YA said “I didn’t think he was ever going to stop talking.”  I laughed and said “I could have stayed and listened to him talk about the zoo all day.” 

I guess it’s different strokes for different folks.  But neither of us were bothered by the big crowds!

When was the last time you visited a zoo?  Any favorite zoos?  Zoo animals?

2026, Family, home, Mysteries, Uncategorized

YA Cave

20 Comments

Claustrophobia, agoraphobia, hydrophobia, hemophobia, acrophobia, Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia.  There are a LOT of phobias out there.  Luckily I’m only stuck with two that occasionally bug me. 

Acrophobia bugs me the most.  I don’t like to take the escalators at the Mall of America.  I don’t like to stand near the edge of anything and a couple of those tall tall buildings in London did throw me for a loop.  Three weeks ago, my next-door neighbors got a new roof and after a couple of hours, I had to take my book and move downstairs because watching them work out of my bedroom window was giving me the heebie jeebies.

My claustrophobia is milder and mostly manifests in my deep desire to not be underground or in a cave.  Oh, and I don’t care much for curtains – give me a good valance any time.  I’ve passed twice on the underground river at Xcaret in Mexico and doing the big cave on Gibraltar really got my heart going.  I even stopped reading the Anna Pigeon series after a book set in a cave.  Ish. 

YA doesn’t have a titch of claustrophobia and years ago hung curtains in her room in addition to window shades (I am NOT a window shade kind of gal).  Yesterday a package got delivered and she swooped on it immediately.  Curtains.  When I asked why she needed new curtains she said that her shades had started to curl on the edges and she decided black out curtains would be better.  Black out curtains.  I’m not making this up.   If she only pulled these curtains during the night, when we have a lot of ambient light from living on a county street, I could kind of understand, but like her previous curtains, these have been pulled shut 24/7.  It’s dark in there.

I’ve never wanted a cave of my own so it’s hard for me to get her desire for one, but it’s her room so if she feels the need to have a grotto of her own, so be it!

Any fears you’ll cop to?  Do you like serious darkness for sleeping?

2026, Art, Business, Gatherings, Uncategorized

A Crafty Friday

35 Comments

Crafts shows are a favorite of mine.  I love to see all the stuff that people make and it’s fascinating that other people buy all this stuff.  The Arts & Crafts show at Canterbury is huge – not normally my favorite kind of craft event, but I’m fond one particular vendor so I wait in line, cough up my cash (I get two discounts – one for being old and one for getting a coupon ahead of time).   

The lines are pretty intense so I get their pretty early.  It’s good people-watching in line.

The vendor I like make quilted objects – I met the mother/daughter duo years ago at the State Fair.  I ordered some oven mitts from them and the entry fee to the fair is cheaper than the shipping that’s why I went this year.  I also wanted to check out their inventory of a couple of other items because they are closing their business at the end of the year.  Marie is 84 and ready to retire!  I got my mitts and some toilet tank toppers and a couple of table runners since it’s the last time I’ll be seeing them.  They gave me the last two popcorn bags for free, since YA and I adore those. 

Of course, as long as I’m there, I wander through and look at everything.  This year I ended up getting a couple of dip mixes – they tasted good sampled w/ pretzels.  I also stopped and got some fudge from a vendor I’ve purchased from before.  The Turtle Sundae fudge is very good.  Tried the baked cheese guys this year (won’t do that again).  AND, I got a massive bag to popcorn… a combo of kettle corn and caramel corn.  Normally I don’t get popcorn like that but from where I was standing in line (for almost an hour), the popcorn stand was directly in my line of sight and when they let us in, I was just pulled right to the stand.  Took me six days to finish it.

Without Marie and Stanna, I won’t be going back to this Arts Fair.  Not enough vendors that I’m that interested in.  I’ll still do my Rubber Stamp event in July though and if they have a popcorn vendor, I’ll be all in!

Any arts/crafts events you’ve taken part in?  Any vendors you gravitate to?

2026, Family, gardening, Nature, Seasons, Weather

Spring Yard Disaster

27 Comments

As of yesterday afternoon, the biggest part of my gardening year is over.  Clean-up from the fall, spring weeding, mulching, flower baskets planted and veggies planted in the bales.  Phew!  

It took way longer this year than usual.  Part of this was the weather.  We had spectacular weekends but then I wasn’t following through because Monday – Friday was too cool.  I do not like to garden when I’m cold and I certainly don’t want to wear a coat out there either!  Then the mess from the fall was much bigger than usual.  And all my fault.  A triple whammy, in fact.

My gardening season came to an abrupt end the day after my birthday last August, when I blew out my first knee.  Then right about the time I might have gotten to some fall clean up, the other knee went.  That meant that apart from some watering (most of which YA took care of), I didn’t do ANY fall clean up.  No dead-heading the late summer flowers, no cutting back peony stalks, no raking (although YA is a little bitty bit).

The second problem was last year’s mulch.  For reasons that pass understanding, I chose big chunky wood chips last year.  As we were spreading them about last spring, I was thinking I’d made a mistake, but it didn’t become clear how obnoxious these wood chips were until we were cleaning up this spring.  They didn’t seem to have broken down at all and were a mess to work around/with.

Then there was the Creeping Charlie fail.  Normally I do a great job of weeding the Creeping Charlie menace but last summer, I was busy in July, thinking I would just do a big push in August.  But, then…. well, you know.  My nemesis ground cover didn’t give a fig about my knees so there was way more weeding needed this year on that front before the mulch could go down.

I’m feeling quite relieved… there will, of course, be plenty of gardening going forward, but not the three/four hours a day grind we’ve been going through.  Time to enjoy!

When was the last time you “shot yourself in the foot”?

2026, Family, home, Mysteries, TV, Uncategorized

Power Washing Premonition

23 Comments

For quite some time, I avoided Hudson & Rex, a Canadian tv show about a cop and his partner, a beautiful German Shepherd Dog.  But I’ve gotten hooked; it shows on a couple of different cable stations so when I find it showing, I’m all in.

I noticed a couple of weeks ago that one of those two stations plays a few ads A LOT.  One of those is about a power washer.  You know the kind where some guy says “after using this, I threw out my old power washer”.  Blah blah blah.  I mute it a fair amount.

Imagine my surprise when a box was delivered yesterday and I came downstairs to find YA assembling a little power washer.  It isn’t the power washer from tv (thank goodness); she bought it with award credits from the merchandise side of her company’s business.  No money actually changed hands.

She had it out yesterday afternoon, doing the side of the garage and the driveway where we had all the mulch piled up for the last couple of weeks.  I guess it works pretty well; she informed me of a couple of other projects she is thinking about. 

I’m glad she likes to take on these kinds of projects because it would never have occurred to me but I am a little spooked that the tv seemed to predict the power washer entering our lives.

Any cleaning projects lately?

2026, animals, Automotive, Family, pets, Travel

Kitty Craze

26 Comments

Our initial plan for heading to St. Louis after Nonny’s passing was to take the dog and leave the cat at home with our fabulous neighbors coming over to feed her and take care of her box.  Then the dog passed and I knew immediately that I simply could not leave the cat at home.  I have a very bad history of pets passing while I’m gone (it’s happened twice).  We did think about boarding Nimue but even that was giving me anxiety. 

I bought a brand-new kitty carrier – bigger than the one we use for the block-and-a-half transport to the vet – and a new harness.  The plan was to let her out every 100 miles or so and I even brought an aluminum cake pan for a litter box and put some litter in it for traveling.  All of this turned out to be pointless.  Nimue had no interest in how comfortable we were trying to make her.  She didn’t make any noise, but the getting out of the carrier on a harness was not on her list of things to get done that day.  The first time we took her out, she sniffed around a bit, but more puffed up than we’ve ever seen her.  She wouldn’t eat a treat, wouldn’t drink any water, certainly didn’t do any business.  Crickets. 

We tried two more times with the same result.  After that we quit trying.  When we arrived at Nonny’s condo, she headed straight underneath Nonny’s bed.  I was pretty sure it would be time to go home before she came out.  For the next three days, we had to keep Nimue in her carrier for most of the day – with people coming in and out, boxing up stuff, tossing stuff – there was no way to keep her safe except in her carrier.  And when we were gone from the condo, we also kept her in the carrier.  Both my sisters, my niece and nephew all had keys and I didn’t want to run the risk that they might stop by for some reason and accidently let her out. 

All of this made me feel terribly guilty – after all, we were torturing her because of my anxiety.  She would probably have been happier at The Cat’s Meow than with us.  So, it was with a bit of joy that I came into Nonny’s bathroom late on Wednesday afternoon to find Nimue ensconced in the sink looking like butter would melt in her mouth.

On Friday, when we headed home, we put Nimue in the kitty carrier with a few treats, put her on the backseat and drove off.  We talked to her quite a bit during the day but never attempted to take her out – 9+ hours.   Within minutes of getting home, she had eaten, done some business and settled down on her kitty bed in my room.  Like nothing had ever happened.  Apparently no kitty ptsd here!

What do cats call mice on a skateboard?

2026, Automotive, Business, Food, Mysteries, Travel

Backwards

46 Comments

On the way home from St. Louis, YA were debating about what we should pick up for lunch and she told me that she had noticed a sign (when we were still in St. Louis) that Steak `n Shake was offering an Orange Dreamsicle Freeze.  I don’t know if I’ve whined about S`nS dumping their original Orange Freeze – but they let go of it at the same time they dropped the grilled cheese.  I haven’t been there since then – about 6 years.

But the new offering sounded good so we decided that fries and a freeze would be an ok lunch.  YA found the closest S`nS and we let GPS get us there.  As we were waiting in the drive-thru line, we noticed several posters in the windows of the eatery touting their all new beef-tallow.  These are their exact words “return to tallow is part of a broader trend to revive traditional cooking methods and highlight authentic flavors.”  Snort.  I asked the person taking the order if it were true that the fries were now being fried in beef tallow.  When he said yes, we cancelled the fries and just got the Freezes. 

When I became a vegetarian in the early 70s, it was the end of French fries for me as all the fast-food places used animal fats for frying.  Burger King was the first to switch over; for many years I got a whooper with no meat (yes, that’s just a glorified cheese sandwich) and fries.  Then Wendys switched, then S`nS, and eventually even McDonalds gave it up and moved to vegetable oils.  So this move back to beef tallow doesn’t make much sense to me.  I don’t know the science about the health benefits (although RFK touting beef tallow makes me wonder…) but from a planetary point of view, I don’t think we need more cows eating way more grains than it takes to feed humans.  My cynical side says S`nS is grasping at straws trying to deal with their currently financial struggles and think this might be a way to differentiate themselves from the pack.

Regardless, YA and I ended up at Subway for our lunch to go with our Orange Dreamsicle Freezes, which unfortunately weren’t all that great.  I can’t imagine I’ll ever go back to a Steak `n Shake again.

Fries?  Shoestring, curly, seasoned, sweet potato?  Or just pass the tater tots?

2026, Automotive, Kids, Travel, Uncategorized

My Way

30 Comments

Sometimes I think maybe I should have gone back to school to get a PhD in family manipulation.  I got my Masters training from the master – my mother.  Even when I could feel her working her magic on me, I succumbed time and time again. 

The inheritance of this talent is a two-edged sword.  It certainly works wonders sometimes but then I occasionally feel guilty.  I should probably feel badly that I don’t feel THAT guilty.  Some things are a slam dunk… if I ask YA to clean in the bathroom directly, she might or might not.  But if I leave a wet wash cloth on the edge of the tub or some hair from my brush on the counter – voila!  Bathroom cleaned in no time.  In the dining room (where she works from home on Mondays and Fridays), if I spread all her stuff (bills, junk mail, computer mouse, keys, etc) all over the table, then she cleans it up lickety split.  If I just organize it into a pile myself, the pile will sit there forever.  I never ask her to come help me with yardwork but if I ask for one thing – like moving a bag of mulch from the back to the front, she almost always stays to work.  My latest discovery is that if I just rinse out the kitty fountain and mention that I’ve done it, she will take the fountain apart and do an extremely thorough cleaning.  The funniest thing about all this is that if you saw her room or the sink after she’s been working in the kitchen, you couldn’t imagine she would have any cleanliness streaks in her.

We had two weeks between my mom’s passing and when we went down to St. Louis to clean the condo and have her service.  During that time, YA had two trips, one long work trip to Cancun and another for-fun trip to Washington DC to see the cherry blossoms.  She had planned it a couple of months back and was scheduled to get home on Sunday night and we were leaving very early on Monday morning for St. Louis.

A few days before she left for Washington DC, she told me that I should get the car washed and vacuumed before our trip.  Luckily I was on my game at that moment so I said “well, I’ll try but I have a lot to do for the service and getting ready for the trip.”  Three hours later, I looked out the back window and found her vacuuming my car – see the header photo.  Heaven forbid she should have to travel to Missouri and back in what she considers to be a health hazard.  (Brekke is NOT a health hazard unless you compare her to YA’s car, which is clean enough that you could eat off the seats!)  After she was done, I volunteered to run the car through the little car wash down on 54th while she was in DC. 

Win/win, right?  What chores do you prefer to outsource?

2026, animals, Food, gardening, Nature, pets

Bird Food Nemeses

42 Comments

There are many down-sides to not having a dog.  No walking companion, no one to keep the kitchen floor “clean”, no big furry foot warmer on cold nights.

And then there are the squirrels.  They have absolutely figured out that there is no dog patrolling the territory any longer.  And they certainly don’t see me as a threat.  Yesterday I made a trip to get something from the car and the squirrel on the feeder and the squirrel sitting on the swing hardly even looked in my direction, much less fled in terror.

They’re also eating the hot seed cylinder that they’re not supposed to like.  I called Mr. Bird, the company in Texas who makes the cylinders to ask about the problem.  They said at this time of year, when squirrels are having their young, they are particularly ravenous and will deign to eat things that might not taste too good to them.  This phase will probably pass but in the meantime, they also make a hotter cylinder called “Disco Inferno” that I can try.  I looked it up and Gertens carries it.  Guess I’ll add that to the cart when we are there next week!

Hopefully there will be a dog to guard the sanctity of the yard some time this summer; until then we’ll just have to put up with the squirrels laughing at us!

Any critter activity at your place these days?