The news these days isn’t usually much of a laughing matter. And then, every now and then…..
Two weeks ago, in Chapel St. Leonard’s, a seaside resort village on England’s east coast, a ritual mass murder was reported to police. Bodies were seen inside the Seascape Café by passersby. Unfortunately when the police arrived, the bodies were mysteriously gone; turns out the passersby had witnessed the end of a yoga class, when all the participants were doing a final yoga meditation.
I couldn’t find any comments from those who had reported the mass murder but the yoga instructor took it very seriously and made sure that everyone in the community was reassured on her Facebook page that the group is not a “mad cult or crazy club”.
What kind of activity do you prefer at a seaside resort village?
½ large white onion (or one medium), chopped
1 green pepper, chopped
2 macho nacho peppers (a smidge hot), chopped
3 cloves garlic, minced
2 Tbsp. olive oil
1 can sliced carrots (including liquid)
1 can yellow corn (including liquid)
¾ c. frozen peas
3 veggie bouillon cubes
3 brandywine tomatoes, chopped
Salt & pepper
1 tsp. Penzey’s Justice spice
½ tsp. chili pepper flakes
Chopped fresh basil
2 c. cooked rice
2 c. water (to make it soup)
2 veggie hot dogs (completely optional), sliced
I’ve told the story of the kitchen sink stew that I took to a church potluck – just threw in what I had and it was a big hit. Well, I did it again!
On my to-do list Saturday was “cook something”. YA and I are staring down the barrel of a large home-improvement project and have discussed some economizing so I decided to just use what I had on hand, from the pantry and the garden. Cooked the onion, pepper and garlic in olive oil, then threw in everything else… finishing up at the last minute with a couple of veggie hot dogs.
Not to toot my own horn, but it is FABULOUS. I mean, stand-in-front-of-the-fridge-with-a-spoon-eating-it-out-of-the-pan good. Even better warmed up with a piece of cornbread. Unfortunately YA agrees so it’s not lasting long. Hopefully I’ll be able to re-produce it again some day.
Going home the other day and I was thinking about the grassy strip down the middle of our driveway. I don’t remember that happening when I was a kid. And maybe it’s because back then several tractors had narrow front tires. Meaning the front wheels were right under the hood and ran down the middle of the road, so maybe that kept the grass down.
Dad bought a ‘wide’ front end for the 730 tractor at some point. It had to do with mowing hay and how you didn’t want to run over what you had just cut. It also gives the tractor more stability, but that wasn’t such a big deal back then. There were even some tractors that had single front tires. (Dad used to talk about getting new rear tires on the 630 tractor, then mowing in the calf pen where there is a pretty good hill and the tractor slid sideways down the hill because the lugs on the new tires were too straight.) After he arrived at the bottom, unscathed, after he got off and kissed the ground and thanked the Lord, he ordered different tires to be put on the tractor. Not that wide front tires would have helped that. All tractors have wide front ends now. And we have a grassy strip down the middle of the road.
Along the lines of ‘remember when’, I miss grocery stores loading your groceries. I know there are a few that will still. Was that a convenience or not? Seems like it would have been. The store employees wouldn’t have to go get carts and there wouldn’t be cart corrals taking up parking spaces. Let alone checking ourselves out in the store. Barlows, which was the ‘fancy’ grocery store when I was growing up, had an underground grocery delivery system. They had two lines of cars picking up groceries; the groceries were put in totes, which came up in an island between two lanes. Faster service, I guess. We never went there. It just sounds like a cool idea. Only once in my life do I remember going to a full-service gas station. It was prom night, and I was in a tux. I got full service that night. No inuendo intended.
I talked about all the acorns a couple weeks ago. Mixed in with the acorns is goose poop. Rochester is known for the Giant Canadian Goose. There are mixed opinions about those gooses. They used to be bragged about and families would travel from all over to see and feed the 5000+ geese at Silver Lake. The power plant discharged warm water into the lake, so it never froze over, which is why the geese liked it so well. As you can imagine, that is a lot of goose poop. I remember the city buying a ‘Mean Green Poop Machine’. The local Post Bulletin had a snipped about it.
“The Green Machine’s days were less bright. Ballyhooed on its arrival as the same equipment put to work around Buckingham Palace (a certain park department leader was heard to exclaim that if it was good enough for the queen of England, it was good enough for the city of Rochester), in the end all the machine delivered was a big, filthy smear to rival that of any political mudfight.”
The machine arrived in May of 1999. It sat in storage for a long time and was ultimately traded in on something else in roughly 2015. They tried hard to market them; there was goose poop art, and the goose is on the Rochester city flag.
There was talk of an updated city flag. I don’t know what became of that since the new design finalists in 2018.
Mother Clucker was down to 9 chicks last time we saw them. They’ve pretty much decided they don’t have to listen to Mom anymore and they spread out all over on their own. She seems to have abandoned them; or at least given up shepherding them. The last few days we just haven’t been down there or around enough to see them. Last night when they were all in the pen, I only found 5 MC Chicks. Four were on one side, one was all alone in mama’s old nesting spot, and all the spring chicks were jammed in behind the screen door. It’s possible there’s more chicks in there somewhere.
My soybeans have begun to turn yellow. You can see from the header photo, they’re not even Humphrey tall. Once they start turning yellow, within a few days the entire field will be yellow, then the leaves all off. Harvest could be a month out yet for me. Some guys will be going any day now.
Had my young friend Josh out last week to climb on the roof and do all those things I *shouldn’t* do anymore.
He made it look so easy! He made it look like I should be able to do that. And I’d climb to the top of the ladder…but that last step from ladder to roof, I just don’t feel comfortable, nor trust myself, doing it. And I didn’t. And he got it all taken care of. Over the new shop area, he replaced the old poly skylights with steel, and replaced a missing skylight down in the pole barn. I checked a couple more things off the list.
Yesterday was the first day of fall, and it was cool and cloudy, I noticed this week that the leaves were just starting to change color. The garden is finally slowing down. I am done canning tomatoes.
Fall has always been my favorite season. Not too hot, not too cold. (We won’t talk about the Ocober 5, 2005 snowstorm that shut the area down for three days and broke off hundreds of tree limbs.) I like the cooler nights.
Things at work always pick up in the fall, especially for those of us who work with children. Bad news at parent-teacher conferences means the phones start ringing at my agency from calls from frantic parents wanting help for their ornery children. Fall is a time of truth and reckoning for some of us.
What are your favorite things about fall? Any favorite fall songs or poems? Did your parents ever get bad news at parent-teacher conferences?
I’ve gotten to the point where if anybody is willing to give me a shot to keep me from getting some disease, lay it on me. So I found myself once again at the pharmacy yesterday getting this year’s flu shot. For many years I didn’t get the shot but then about 15 years ago I got the flu one winter and it was dreadful. Flu shot every year for me since then. I know it’s no guarantee but I’ll take all the help I can get.
When I sat down for my shot, the pharmacist asked me which arm I preferred. In thinking about it, I realized that the last few years, every shot but one has been in my left arm. I asked her if getting all my shots in the same arm would cause me to get a “Popeye” arm. She laughed out loud. And then assured me it wouldn’t happen. (I can’t stomach watching the Popeye cartoons anymore. They are so violent and Olive Oyl is such an irritating damsel in distress. Ick.)
Before I left the pharmacy, she said that I probably wouldn’t have any soreness in my arm but if I wanted to, I could do extra arm movements to help out. So once again I was doing the chicken dance in the car on the way home!
On Friday night my BFF, Sara, and I went to see Arsenic & Old Lace at Theatre in the Round over on the West Bank. This was Sara’s birthday present from me….we decided a few years back to give each other experiences instead of things for our birthdays. She chose Arsenic from a list of plays showing this fall. I was looking forward to it; I’ve seen the 1944 A&O starring Cary Grant and Boris Karloff several times and was interested in how the play would measure up.
I haven’t been to Theatre in the Round for many years. Actually except for theatre that has been gifted to me, I’ve hardly been to any theatre in years. (Single parenthood kind of whoops the-evening-entertainment-that-costs-money craving out of you.) When I first moved to the Twin Cities, I did volunteer ushering there for a couple of plays but full-time work while my wasband was searching for a job wore me down and I needed my nights back.
The production on Friday was quite nice. The entire play takes places in the living/dining room of the Brewster sisters; no-nonsense set and props (like the sisters) without too much bric-a-brac to pull your attention away. Lighting was pretty straight forward (nothing fancy like I see in Ben’s photos) and the sound was very good. If the actors were mic’ed, I couldn’t tell; we were in the third row and didn’t have any trouble hearing all the dialogue.
Casting was superb! Not that easy when one of the actors needs to resemble Teddy Roosevelt and another absolutely has to look like Boris Karloff (there are repeated mentions of this in the script). I was a little worried that that these two would be weak links, hired for their looks, but they were both great. Jonathan (the Boris look-alike) was particularly good. Both Brewster sisters were excellent; Abby had a great way of waving her arms to punctuate her lines that was very effectives. And a shout-out to the young woman who played Officer Brophy; she really sparkled in her role.
I was easily able to put aside my Cary Grant memories and enjoy the play on its merits. It was very funny and a couple of times I laughed enough to cry. The woman behind me snorted a few times!
If you’re in the Twin Cities and up for a great night of theatre and comedy, I highly recommend it. I think it’s running for a few more weeks.
Tell me about a favorite theatre experience you’ve had!
YA and I had some Subway last week and we each got a bag of chips to accompany our feast. We’ve had chips plenty of times but last week was the first time I noticed that there is are lines of colored dots along the bottom of the bags. I checked other bags in my house and about half had dots similar to these, although they weren’t exactly the same colors.
Didn’t take me to long to research this. These dots (apparently sometimes squares) are called “Printer’s Color Blocks” and they are used as quality control markers for the ink used to print on the bag. If there is too little or too much of a particular color, it affects the colors on the dots and the printer (human or machine) and adjust as needed.
The reason that I didn’t see these color blocks on all my chips bags is that it’s completely voluntary. Some manufacturers don’t use them and some manufacturers trim off the numbers after printing.
According to online articles, the most common colors are the four major colors used in printing: black, magenta, yellow and cyan, although depending on the manufacturer (like my bag above) can use more if they want/need.
This was a much more pedestrian explanation than I was hoping for and has absolutely nothing to do with the food inside the bag. I was really looking forward to some secret code that I could learn and apply when shopping. Oh well; if it had, I’d be spending way too much time standing in the chip aisle at my local Cub!
Maybe the crops won’t be as bad as I feared. I was looking at the soybeans this past week and there are a fair number of pods higher up the plant. The plants are about knee high, and it looks like the weather will hold for a few weeks yet. We’re at 2845 growing degree units. 368 above normal for Rochester. Mind you, I’m not saying great crops, but not as bad as I thought. Ha, probably just be good enough not to trigger a payment from crop insurance, which is based on 70% of expected (average) yields. I did get a $700 credit on the premium for hail damage. So, I only owe $600 rather than $1300. Which is better than a poke in the eye with a sharp cornstalk.
I did plant some rye on Monday and more on Thursday evening. The rain predicted for Friday morning isn’t going to a mounted to much. We wait and see. I spotted a couple sandhill cranes while out planting on both days. They must like this field. It was interesting: On Monday I had gone around the field once, turned around at the end of the field and was coming back when I saw them in the middle of the field. Were they there on the first round? I was maybe 150’ from them and they didn’t pay me too much attention. But then as I came around the corner and got closer, they flew off. Sorry kids, you didn’t get much of a rest here. Thursday was the same thing; didn’t see them on the first pass and then there they were. I adjusted how I planted that field so they could hang out longer. When the time came and I had to go their way, they had flown off.
I was working at the college one day and I dropped a cable down a ventilation shaft. Course it wasn’t a plain old power cord, it was a special 4 pin data cable. I can see it down there and maybe with a long stick and a hook on the end, I’m thinking I can retrieve it. Stay tuned.
I’ve been scraping gravel from the machine shed approach.
Over the years I’ve added a lot of gravel to the road. Now with the cement pad being the same level as the shed interior, the driveway is 8” too high. I’ve mentioned before the water running in the shed door. So, I’ve been scraping. Man, it’s packed hard. Some rain would help that too. I’m not real good at being an excavator operator. And using the tractor loader isn’t ideal either, but it works. I can’t quite tell yet if there’s just dirt under there or still gravel. Dad must have had rock there when he built this shed in 1981. I may have to go an extra 4” deep and put gravel back on top. I’m using this rock to fill in some holes and the extra will go on the other end of the cement where it is more dirt.
Daughter likes to do her chores: whether it’s hauling out garbage, doing her laundry (I know, right??) collecting eggs, and last night she even threw out corn for the chickens and chicks. Mother-Clucker is down to 12, lost one. The kids are getting pretty independent, and mom is giving them their freedom too. It’s not unusual to see them running 20’ away from mom. They’re between robin and pigeon sized.
Ever had a cement pond at your house? How was that?
(Are you aware Irene Ryan ((Granny)) was a Tony nominated actress and has an acting scholarship in her name?)
I loved the Minnesota Zoo Monorail. It was part of the zoo experience for me; whenever we visited the zoo, we almost always hopped on a car and took a spin. We knew when the best time of day was to go (right around lunchtime) and which car was best (the first one right behind the driver/guide – it was the quiet car which most people avoided).
The monorail was “retired” in 2013 – a nicer sounding word than “abandoned”, but that’s how it felt to me. For the last 10 years the rail remained a sad reminder every time we went. When the zoo announced that they were going to put up a walking trail on the old rail, I was skeptical. And when the scuttlebutt was that they would charge extra unless you were zoo members, I was even more cynical.
The Treetop Trail turned about to be free for everybody, not just members (we’ll see how long that lasts) and is built over the original rail. It’s lovely, especially all the places where it overlooks water; there is actually quite a few bodies of water at the zoo. On a cool day like we had on Sunday, it’s a beautiful hike – about a mile and a half – took us about half an hour (I was very slow as my feet hadn’t quite forgiven me yet for the State Fair). There isn’t much shade or cover so it might be a little less fun on a really hot day. Like the monorail, seeing any animals was a little hit and miss, although there was at least constant narration on the monorail. YA can’t always be counted on for scintillating conversation. The trail is about 8 feet across so we didn’t encounter to many pedestrian traffic jams. For those of us with a little acrophobia, the center feels safe and there are lots of spots that aren’t too terrifyingly high.
My final assessment is that the Treetop Trail is nice. If we can’t have the monorail, I suppose the elevated trail will do. I doubt that it will become a perennial favorite for me and it will be interesting to see how well maintained it is during the winter months (if it’s even open during the winter months). But I will recommend it at least once for anybody visiting the zoo.
I read with interest last week the news story of a company that wants to resurrect the wooly mammoth, perhaps in ND. A fairly intact wooly mammoth tusk with all sorts of usable DNA was found in a coal mine here in the state. The company wants to use it to recreate the mammoth.
What is quite surprising to me is that the ND government is paying this company $3,000,000 to consider locating the company to ND. This a pretty fiscally conservative state, and the public reaction to the Department of Commerce spending money on this venture hasn’t been exactly supportive.
The local climate is more conducive to mammoth well-being than Texas, where the company is located. I wonder what you do with a wooly mammoth once you have de-extincted it? Let it wander around the Badlands here? Can it be fenced in at all? Raise it for meat? Have mammoth rodeos? The company thinks they can have a viable mammoth by 2028. I am glad that I will be living in Minnesota by then. I would hate waking up to find a mammoth in my yard eating the tomatoes.
What would you do with a woolly mammoth ? What would you like to see de-extincted?
Trail Baboon 