Imagine my surprise as I was heading out to run some errands and discovered the little robot vacuum at the back porch door.
As I carried it back into the house and hit the “dock” button so it would return home, I felt a little bad. Was I keeping it from its freedom? Had it been trying to escape from the onerous duty of trying to keep the fur and dust at bay in our house? Did it hear the clarion call of others of its kind? Was it a quashed robot uprising?
What do you think? Should I have given it its freedom?
There has always been a vision in my mind for the backyard. Over the years we’ve added a patio, then a little bigger patio. A table and chairs for the patio. An umbrella for the table. A friend of mine gave YA a fire pit years ago. Another friend gave me a swing when they moved to an apartment. Of course, there are all the flowers and the bales. About 15 years ago I had enough credits at work to purchase a hammock, which I installed toward the back of the yard. Over the years I’ve had to replace the fabric several times as well as having to MacGyver the suspension a couple of times when the fabric wasn’t exactly the right size.
YA has always detested the hammock. First is that it is a collection spot for leaves and twigs that come off the trees. Then there is the issue of having to mow around it, requiring moving it about. YA thinks it makes the backyard look “cluttered”. When I suggested we get right of her Adirondack chairs and little table, she didn’t respond well. She has a point. We use the Adirondacks quite a bit and truth be told, I probably only lay in the hammock once or twice a summer. It’s not actually all that comfortable and I get impatient really fast.
As I’m pursuing my pre-downsizing project, I decided that I really needed to pay attention to the reality of the hammock instead of my emotional attachment to the idea of a hammock. To that end, YA and I carried it down to the boulevard. When we got down to the boulevard with it, YA had to shore up my determination. The miracle of my street worked as usual – within an hour someone was taking it apart to shove in their truck.
I thought I might be unhappy in the first few days after the hammock was gone but that hasn’t happened. That says to me that I made the right decision.
Tell me about something you have an emotional attachment to.
You all know I’m a little obsessed with a certain event each August. I like to be organized but normally don’t start getting going until a couple of weeks before (athough before retirement I used to request the days off several months in advance).
YA and the State Fair, on the other hand, are rarin’ to go now. In the past couple of weeks there has been a barrage of emails. Grandstand announcements and ticket offers. Highlighted fair beverages (of which there seem to be A LOT). New vendors and new foods.
YA has definitely inherited some of my love of lists; over the weekend she came into my room with a pad of paper and announced that it was time to make our food list. She started doing this a few years ago so that we remember what we want to get while we are at the fair. This list includes our favorites as well as items from the new foods email that look interesting to us. It looks like a long list but it’s spread out over several days and we don’t always get to everything. I did notice that nothing from last year’s new items have jumped to our “old favorites” list.
The floodgates are open now. I printed off all our tickets as well as my fair packing list. Can’t go off to the fair without all we need in the turtle bag. We even started a little pool of cash for the big event.
Anything you’re preparing for (or obsessing over) this summer?
On Friday YA made our annual trek to pet deer and goats and llamas at Fawn-Doe-Rosa. The route to get there is straight through Lindstrom, which is a pretty little town with deep Swedish roots and one of the cutest water towers ever (see photo above). But it turns out that it’s not actually a water tower any longer.
Back in 1992, the city built a new water tower because the original was no longer able to meet the demand. At that time, the older water tower was “repurposed” as the world’s largest coffee pot. A local business owner funded the conversion – adding the spout, handle and knob along with repainting it. Initially there was a steam function but it hasn’t been working for years.
Several months ago the city council approved an initiative to spruce up the paint job and also to restore the steam function. This time around, much of the cost was raised by the said of small water tower replicas. Four weeks ago, the steam poured out of the pot again for the first time in years.
Just by luck, we were driving through Lindstrom at exactly 10 a.m., which is one of the two times per day that the steam functions. YA was telling me about all this so I did a quick u-turn so we could circle back and get a good look. There were folks hanging out on the street corners to watch as well. It was cloudy, so while we could see the steam, I think on a clear day it would be more impressive.
A fun tangent, I recently read Off Main Street by Michael Perry and one of the essays is called “You Are Here” which is about water towers in the Midwest. It was entertaining and I learned there’s more to a water tower than meets the eye. Highly recommended reading. Fun confabulation of reading and traveling!
Have you seen any fun water towers? Ever climbed up one?
I had a fun surprise yesterday morning. As I stood in my kitchen, thinking about breakfast, I got a text from one of my donut haunts, telling me that I had a reward coming – a free donut or a free coffee. So much more exciting than eggs and toast. Since I was going out for a couple of errands anyway, I decided to go the donut route for breakfast.
In order access this reward, I had to use my phone but since I didn’t have a younger person with me, I sat in my car until I got onto the right screen, or so I thought. The young man waiting on me was very patient when holding the phone to the “register” didn’t seem to work. He said he’s do it the “long way” and put my phone number in. He then said I had a $5 off, free donut or 5% discount. Which did I want? And then he said “or all three?” You all know what I said. He started punching in stuff; on my side, the screen was showing 3₵. I kept waiting for it to get to a higher number and it never did. When he confirmed the 3₵, I told him I’d have to go to the car to get a quarter since I didn’t have any cash on me. He smiled and said “let’s take it out of the penny jar” which was on the counter.
So I had my donuts and diet pop for free. And it was a gorgeous morning to boot. What could be better?
Cantus refers to itself as a low-voice vocal ensemble. Sounds a little sterile; it is anything but. They do a wide variety of mostly a cappella offerings: a lot of internation, classical, commissioned pieces. Yesterday it was an entire program of Frank Sinatra covers – amazing.
My BFF and I have been attending Cantus concerts for 30 years; we do six to seven concerts a years, depending on the season’s program. We attended their concerts all over the place – St. Thomas, a church in Excelsior, the McPhail Center, the Ordway. Yesterdays was at Westminster Presbyterian downtown. Over the years we’ve been to the Westminster dozens of times; it’s a great space with wonderful acoustics.
Two thirds of the way through the program, Chris Foss, a bass, stepped up and began a beautifully rendition of I’ll Be Around by Alec Wilder.
About a minute into his performance, which had a piano accompaniment, the bells of Westminster began to rang. It was just loud enough that you could certainly here it but not loud enough to completely drown Chris out. The bells ended very shortly before the song ended. In all the times I’ve been in Westminster for concerts, this has never happened before. Not sure why the bells were ringing at noon on a Thursday. I’m guessing that many performers would have stopped and waited for the bells to stop, but Chris kept his composure and kept going. He got wild applause after his number; I guess because it was a great song but also as acknowledgement of a rotten situation.
I didn’t see Chris in the lobby after the show but I hope that anyone speaking to him praised the other song he did during the concert – not just for his calmness during the bells.
Do you live near a church that still rings their bells?Would you have stopped singing?
Well, things didn’t out like I expected. I was completely figuring that today’s post would be a full-on rant about bureaucracy. Didn’t turn out that way.
I got the dreaded yellow card in the mail about a month ago reminding me that my Class D driver’s license needed to be renewed. It also went on, at length, about the Real I.D.
Pretty sure I chronicled the last time I had to renew; it was during Covid and I ended up arriving at the AAA location at 6 a.m. for their 8 a.m. opening since I had waited too late to get a coveted actual appointment (who knew you needed an appointment). Being one of the first 25 in line meant you could get service that day. I had heard several stories about the trouble in getting the Real I.D. so I had a file folder, papers, copies of papers. Turned out to be fine.
That’s why I was a bit surprised to see all the verbiage dedicated to Real I.D. You’d think in this day and age, it would be easy enough to sort a mailing list by whether or not somebody has already jumped through those hoops.
Checking on line I found that you can’t to appointments any longer, which seemed weird so I picked up the phone and called. (Now I do have to say, even if I were ranting, that one of the reasons I like the AAA is because they do answer the phones.) The gal on the phone confirmed that they don’t do appointment anymore but that weekdays are relatively slow. She also confirmed that I had to re-present all my Real I.D. paperwork again. Sigh.
I gathered the same stuff as four years ago and headed out yesterday morning. I was expecting this process to take at least an hour and I was fully prepared to whine about the insanity of having to basically re-apply for Real I.D. when I was clearly Real already. Full transparency – I was crabby.
Well, I got there at 9:05. I was called 5 minutes later. The little gal behind the counter laughed when I told her that I had been instructed to bring all my Real I.D. stuff; she said “not needed” and didn’t even look at it. I didn’t have to fill anything out except to sign and date the application that she printed off. Picture and eye exam was fast although I’m sure in the history of bad DMV photos, I’m now in the top ten. Final paper and current license snipped and I was out the door at 9:19.
When I was down on the farm last Friday, Ben took me on a tour around the fields – it’s one of my favorite things about visiting. The corn was tall but weren’t showing any ears yet. Ben explained about where the ears start to form and we also talked about the difference between field corn and sweet corn. He commented that sweet corn is a bit ahead of field corn and in Iowa, there might be sweet corn already. I’m such a city girl – I love earning about farm stuff.
He was proved incredibly on the mark. As I was driving home, YA texted me that our former neighbors had dropped off some sweet corn for us; they had been visiting the grandparents in southern Iowa!
YA and I both love corn but for some reason the first sweet corn of the season is really special. We dragged the grill out of the garage on Saturday and roasted all the corn along with some veggie brats. Ate on our little patio in the backyard – it was perfect weather for the first corn lunch.
Yesterday, I used up the last of the ears. I was too impatient to drag out cookbooks and look for recipes so I just kind of made it up as I went along. This is what I made:
Corn Salsa
2 ears of corn, kernels removed from the cob
½ red onion, finely chopped
1 hot pepper, finely chopped (I used a pepper from our garden called “salsa pepper” – it was hotter than I anticipated, but not too hot to eat. A less hot pepper would be fine.)
3 T. chopped cilantro (also from garden)
Juice of one lime
Salt & pepper to taste
Mix it all together. Eat.ll
Elote Off the Cob
2 ears of corn, kernels removed from the cob
¾ c. cotijo cheese, crumbled
1 roma tomato, finely chopped
About 1/3 c. mayonnaise (not Miracle Whip because YA doesn’t like it)
2 T. cilantro, chopped (from garden)
2 T. chives chopped (from garden)
¼ tsp. tajin (if you don’t have tajin, you can use chili pepper & cumin)
Juice of half a lime
Salt & pepper to taste
Again, mix it all together!
Neither of these were big recipes, so I don’t expect the corn will last long. We’ll do plenty more corn this summer, but these first six ears were the best!
It’s been six years now since we lost our Little Jail Bird, Edith. In her memory, I’m running my favorite of her postings on the Trail.
Until last fall, I had never been to Banning State Park. I had driven by it dozens of time, because when I head up to my sister’s house, I always turn off 35W and take Highway 23 into town. I didn’t know much about Banning, but when I was looking for a day trip, it seemed to fit my needs perfectly.
First, I wanted a park where I could drive there and back in one day without getting too tired. Second, I wanted a park that didn’t involve driving several back roads, because I knew that I would be driving in the dark due to the shorter fall days and my night vision and sense of direction is bad enough that I would get lost unless I kind of knew where I was going. And third, I wanted a state park because I had a state park sticker and wanted to use it as much as possible to get my money’s worth out of it. Banning fit all of those qualifications. Plus it has a waterfall, which is a big plus in my book.
So, off I went, one sunny morning in October. When I arrived, I stopped at the visitor center to get maps and ask where the best spots were. I was so excited. It seems that often when I go north, I am early for the fall colors and often find myself driving home just a few days before “peak” and this time I was not too early! I said something about that to the woman at the desk (while trying to not jump and down in excitement) and she shook her head woefully and told me in a discouraging tone, “You’re going to see LOTS of brown out there.” Gee thanks, way to burst my bubble.
Of course, since I drove all the way up there, I figured I better go on the hike anyway even if I would see mostly brown. I drove to the parking area and when I stepped out of the car and looked up, I knew it was going to be a good day (see header photo).
I hiked all the way to the falls and back and shot lots of photos. It was an incredibly beautiful day: that clear, deep blue sky that you only seem to see on autumn days and – surprise! – lots of colorful leaves on the trees. It can be a challenge shooting in bright sunlight, but I was so overcome by the beauty of it all that I just took that in my stride. There was that wonderful northwoods smell in the air – pine trees and dead leaves. Nothing like it! and nothing else invigorates me like that does.
It was getting pretty cool and the sun was going down quickly by the time I was heading back on the trail but the golden evening light only made things more beautiful and the colors more intense. I went home pleasantly tired and very happy and glad that the woman’s prediction of “lots of brown” wasn’t true.
In weird news this week, it’s been reported in the South China Morning Post that a 64-year old man has undergone surgery to remove a toothbrush from his stomach. The kicker is that he swallowed the toothbrush when he was 12. Apparently he was afraid to tell his parents and figured that it would just dissolve. Turns out even stomach acid is no match for hard plastic – his stomach started to bother him last year.
It took the surgery team 80 minutes to remove the 7-inch toothbrush – it was stuck in “a crook of the intestine” where it had been living happily for decades. Yikes.
I’m not sure how you can swallow a toothbrush but as Hamlet said “more things in heaven and earth”. Maybe he is one of those folks who brushes their tongue with their toothbrush and got a little carried away? Maybe the dog surprised him in the bathroom while he was brushing? Maybe he was practicing to become a sword swallower?
What kind of toothbrush do you use? Toothpaste? Floss?
Trail Baboon 