Tuesday, Bismack got torrential rains, between 4 and 5 inches over the space of about an hour that caused flooding all over the city. One of the major hospitals flooded. There were photos of the flooded MRI room all over the internet.
The hospital was somehow able to remain open. People were hydroplaning all over the place, and there were many flooded basements and businesses. It took my supervisor who works in Bismarck 1.5 hours to drive 6 miles to his house. Some cars floated away. I guest there weren’t any people in them at least. Wednesday they had another 1.58 inches in about an hour. I can’t imagine the mess. It was bad enough when Husband left a hose on and we had about an inch of water in two basement bedrooms. I imagine the water damage mitigating companies and insurance agents in Bismarck are pretty busy right now. Ish!
Ever been in a flood? Any insurance horror stories to tell? Do you own an umbrella??
We typically have pretty good luck with orders and deliveries here, that is, until recently. On July 30 I ordered six, 2 oz packages of fresh yeast on Amazon. Husband has a Nordic baking book that uses fresh yeast in the recipes. Since I had thrown out the remainder of a huge shipment of fresh yeast that I had ordered about a year ago (it got too old in the freezer) it was time to order a more manageable amount.
The order was supposed to arrive on August 5. I tried to track it on Amazon as soon as I got notification that it had shipped, but had no luck. The 5th arrived, and still no yeast. I knew it had to be kept cold or it would start to do its yeasty thing and start growing and expanding. I received a notice that it would arrive on the 9th. It didn’t. By this time, I knew something had gone amiss, and finally Amazon said that it was lost and I could have a refund. It was a bit of an ordeal, but I got the refund and ordered more. This time around I have been able to actually track where it is. It is to arrive today or tomorrow.
The most unreliable delivery service seems to be the US Postal Service. UPS, FEDEX, and Speedee Delivery all do a good job. The latter always makes me think of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood. Husband is excited that the yeast will arrive soon. I worry that it hasn’t been kept cold. We shall see.
What delivery disasters have you encountered? What are your favorite memories of Mr. Rogers or other children’s programming? What are you worrying about these days?
Most mornings I try to squeeze in an online crossword puzzle. My default is the Washington Post puzzles, partly because I already have a WAPO account and partly because there are options, depending on how much time I want to spend. I’m not too much of a purist… if the puzzle is hard and it’s starting to take too long, the “show me my errors” button gets clicked. If I make it all the way through without having to “cheat”, I like it, but not enough to struggle and struggle.
Yesterday morning, early into the puzzle, I read the clue “Godzilla’s rival” for a five-letter word across. Easy peasy – Rodin. Then as I was circling back to do the down words, nothing was fitting with Rodin. And when I got to “Tallinn’s Country” and “Estonia” didn’t fit, I knew something was wrong with my Rodin answer. I sat for a few minutes thinking of the other monsters that Godzilla doesn’t like. Gigan? No. Manda? No. Zilla? No. Mothra? Too long. Megalon? Too long. King Ghidorah? Way too long.
The only hard/fast rule that I have for crosswords is not to click onto another tab on the internet and look up a word. So I sat for a bit more, not coming up with any other five-letter Godzilla nemeses. Then my eyes focused on the clue list and realized that I had mis-read it. It wasn’t “Godzilla rival”, it was “Godiva rival”. That was good a for an out-loud laugh – I startled the dog.
Sad but true, I didn’t get the correct answer until I had a couple more letters (Lindt). What does it say about me that I know so many more of Godzilla’s enemies off the top of my head than I know worldwide famous chocolate companies?
What is Godzilla’s favorite candy? What’s YOUR favorite candy?
I grew up with a dad who had a small business and a mom who, when she wasn’t teaching, was helping my dad at his coffee shop. That left me at home to fend for myself for meals. If my mom cooked, it was usually on Sunday. During the week and after school I lived on toast, bologna sandwiches, and cereal until I was about 10 when I started to cook real food for myself. Husband grew up in a more traditional family that had three set meals a day, as his mom was a homemaker who had the time to plan and prepare meals. It was easier for me to adjust to his expectations for daily meals than it was for him to scrounge without planning. That made him anxious.
Our meals lately have been planned on the spur of the moment, as we never know what fresh veggies we may find in the garden or the Farmers Market. We can’t bear to let anything go to waste, so we are always planning how to cook up the surplus veggies that weren’t used in any dish we just cooked. So, if I cook too many white beans or chickpeas, we have to find another recipe that will use up the surplus, which usually means yet another trip to the grocery store to get what we don’t have for the new recipe to use the leftovers in.
I blame Bill, the Hutterites at the Farmers market, and the New York Times for the unusual dishes we made recently. I mentioned the other day on the Trail that we had 8 eggplant plants, and Bill commented that was a lot of Baba Ghanoush. Well, that forced me to buy a large jar of tahini, and Husband decided we should make a tahini-yoghurt sauce for some lamb burgers he cooked on the grill, and then I suggested that if we just bought one more pint of cherry tomatoes to go with the leftover pint we had from an earlier white bean caprese salad, and got some curly pasta, we could make this tahini-parmesan pasta salad recipe from the NYT. We did, and it was delicious.
The Hutterites were selling sweet corn on Saturday at the Farmers Market, and wouldn’t you know, the NYT featured a charred corn and chickpea salad with lime crema. We had limes we needed to use up. I cooked a pound of dry chickpeas and we ate that salad Saturday night. I only needed half of the chickpeas I cooked, so we had the other half last night in an Indian curry. You see how this goes.
I feel fortunate to have a love for cooking, a partner who also loves to cook, and a budget that allows us to eat the way we do. I will probably need to get another jar of tahini sometime next week, though. The eggplants have set fruit and are getting bigger.
What is your strategy for meal planning? What was your family’s pattern for meals? Favorite pasta salads?
This week we get to combining, or harvesting the oats. This hot humid weather did not aid drying the oat stems or mixed in grass. Other guys were saying the moisture was high on their oats, but usually they’re cutting it while it’s standing. That only works if you don’t have too much grass standing with the oats. . Swathing it allows the stems to dry out and then combine better.
Parm stated to combine on Wednesday afternoon. I ran a sample up to Elgin to have it tested for moisture and test weight. Moisture was 10.8%, almost too low, and TW was 30. For food grade, they want it 36-40 pounds. And the local elevators won’t even take it if it’s not at at least 34. Remember the test weight is what a standard bushel of a particular crop should weigh. So a bushel of oats should weigh 32 pounds and lighter than tat you get docked on the price.
Other years I’ve not had a problem with test weight. Inside the combine harvester, there are fans to blow out the chaff, bits of cob, or lighter crop material. Typically, buy turning the fan up, it allows you to blow out the lighter oats and keep the heavier stuff. Course, if it’s all light, lie it seems to be this year, either it blows all the crop out, or the test weight is light. For whatever reason, the experts say that letting it sit for a day will increase the test weight. And moving the oats through a grain cart and into the semi will gain a point. But I am not sure I can gain 5 points.
Yield wasn’t too great either, For all the grain that looked like was in the field, well, I mean that the deer didn’t eat and what hadn’t broken off, I’ve only got 25 bushels /acre. this year was too wet, I guess, and the rusts fungus must have been more of a problems than I expected. An d last year I complained it was too dry. I am never happy.
And then we got 2 inches of rain Wednesday night. Surprisingly, Parm was able to come out Saturday and get the rest combined. I took a sample out the the grain cart up to my local Seed dealer because I knew I could get the grain gossip from him. this time my test was only 27 pounds but the moisture was up. He said everybody was struggling to make the test weight and even our local oat champion, who is the one pushing the food grade stuff, said he was struggling to get the 34 test weight.
By the time Parm finished combining, all 25 acres I had was less then a semi load. Thankfully, I have this one neighbor that always buys some oats to mix with his calf feed and was willing to take the whole thing. I called the co-op to ask how much dockage would be on this low test weight. With a base price of $3.05 per bushel, their chart only goes down to 28 and it’s $.52 dockage at that point. 30 test weight would be $.32 dockage. Well fudge.
I like having Oats in the crop rotation, and honestly, I have made money on other years, so I remain optimistic. Maybe next hear will be better. I mean it pretty much has to be.
WHAT WAS YOUR WEIGHT IN HIGH SCHOOL? CAN YOU STILL FIT INTO YOUR UNIFORM / WEDDING DRESS / LETTER JACKET?
I work in a two story office building that was converted from an open design with few walls or offices to a labyrinth of cubicles and offices to meet the needs of our agency. I have a lovely office with a window. It is the most uncomfortable place I have ever worked.
When all the walls were put in to replace the open concept that the previous company had, the contractor had to also put in a heating and cooling system for each new work space. There are several different heating and cooling zones on each floor, each with its own thermostat and heater/cooler. It is unfortunate that the contractor didn’t make a schematic of what offices were in which climate zones. It appears that some of the upstairs offices are on some of the downstairs thermostats. It is impossible to control the heat and cooling. No matter what the thermostats are set at, they each stay at 70 degrees, while the office temperatures are sometimes in the lower 60’s or upper 50’s.
My office is usually freezing. The office across the hall from me is usually too hot. I have two ceiling vents, and we suspect they are on different thermostats. The day it was 108 outside last week, I had my space heater on and was wrapped in a shawl while I worked at my desk. Many of my coworkers have space heaters they use on a daily basis. The temperature control is no better in the winter. None of the windows can be opened, so we can’t cool or heat using outside air either.
What is the best/worst work environment you ever had? Are you usually too hot or too cold?
My agency is going through a national accreditation review this week, which involves visits from the accreditation agency personnel and extensive reviews of our policies and operations. Everyone has been on edge. A positive review with few problem areas is important for us to continue to receive various forms of Federal funding and grants.
I giggled when I came to work yesterday morning to see, in the parking lot, the van for the business that stocks the candy and soft drink vending machines in the lobby. The workers were unloading boxes to bring into the building. The company is called Braun Distributing, and they stock vending machines all over town. They also are a wholesale vendor of alcohol. That is why Budweiser is emblazoned all over the delivery van that was in the parking lot. We provide both mental health and substance abuse treatment, and it sure looks odd to have the Budweiser van in the parking lot. I teased our clinical director that the accreditation reviewers would be pretty suspicious of how exactly we were keeping our employees and clients happy. It was a rather unfortunate, but funny, coincidence, I thought.
What are some awkward, funny, and/or unfortunate coincidences you can relate?
When we moved to our neighborhood in 1988, it felt as though we had moved to and outpost of the Czech Republic. The Karskys, the Knopiks, the Kovash family, and the Dvoraks all lived next door or across the street. They were all somehow related to one another. Mrs. Karsky described us as “a nice young couple with a young son” to the other neighbors, information she had got from our real estate agent. Everyone was excited when we moved in, as most of the people on the block were older and/or retired. There were no children on the block.
36 years later, we are the older people on the block happy to see new and younger faces in the neighborhood. Only the Knopiks remain as the Czech contingent. There are lots of young children, especially on our side of the street. A couple of houses south of us lives a hard working family from Zimbabwe. They have a teenager who walks back and forth past our house most days during the school year to get to the Catholic High School, as well as several younger daughters and a young son who are friends with the Hispanic family on the corner. The other day I was driving past those houses when I saw the three Hispanic little girls, their brother, and all the Zimbabwe children sitting in a row on the curb. They had exhausted themselves in the enormous jumper house that the Hispanic dad had inflated for them all to bounce around in.
We share surplus garden vegetables with the neighbors, and everyone gets along. It is so nice to see the neighborhood continue to be a haven for young families and for the more mature, longer term residents.
What was your neighborhood like to grow up in? Any “bad apples” or nice grandparent-types as neighbors? Who were your best childhood friends?
When I went to the gym last week, I turned on the tv attached to the stationary bike. This doesn’t sound like front page news, I know, but it’s extraordinary to me for two reasons.
First, I have never turned on the little tv EVER. I joined my gym about 30 years ago. A franchise of a California company was opening and they sent representatives to BIW to scrounge up some memberships. I’ve spent most of my life trying to get myself to exercise; if there were a vitamin I could pop that could replace exercise in my world, I’d be all over that. When the reps offered up an extraordinary rate for BIW folks, I signed up. (And not only was it extraordinary but the price never went up in all the years I was a paying member.) And I went to the gym like clockwork because for most of those years I got money back from my health insurance company and from BIW – for about 15 years the amount of payback was actually a couple more than I paid the gym. It was like getting paid to exercise. These days I do mostly stationary bike and occasionally laps in the pool.
The second reason it was extraordinary was that when I turned on the tv, I searched for the Olympics. You all know I am not a sports fan of any kind. I only follow gymnastics a smidge because YA follows and I hear things from her. Other than that, I know nothing. When I play Trivial Pursuit, I always make sure there is a sports person on my team because I am useless in that category.
But that day, there was an intersection of my issues. I didn’t have a book; I’d had a bunch of errands, including meeting YA for lunch and I completely forgot to grab a book even though the gym was on my to-do list. And no stray books skulking around in the car either, which is also unusual. I thought about stopping at Southdale library (between BIW and the gym) but I just didn’t want to. I figured I’d just fart around on my phone for 30 minutes while I cycled.
When I jumped onto the bike, it occurred to me that I could turn on the little TV and watch THE OLYMPICS! I’m not sure why I am not a jot interested in sports/athletics but I can watch Olympic coverage for hours and days on end. I was in Madison for several days and my friend and I had the games on pretty much full time if we were at home. That’s how it always is; I don’t expect to watch any Olympics and then I watch, follow specific athletes, text a couple of friends who I know are watching. When the games are over, my interest will disappear, pretty much overnight.
So there I was – the person who hates to exercise — watching sports on the gym television. When Leon Marchand was trailing in second place for most of his 200M Butterfly and then poured it on the last 5 seconds to take the gold, I raised up my arms and cheered (quietly)! I feel like a different person lives in my skin during the Olympics.
I have been struggling on and off over the past couple of years with sciatica down both my legs. The whole situation is complicated by my lumbar scoliosis. I have been in physical therapy for the past several months, and it has kind of helped, but I still have a lot of pain, or at least did until now.
My physical therapist changed her strategy a couple of weeks ago and has focused on what she calls the posterior chain, the muscle system that runs from one ankle, up the leg and across the lower back and glutes, and then down the other leg. All the muscles work together, so that I can feel the stretches in my right ankle when she manipulates my left leg. I figured out the source of the whole problem last week on my own, and I am proud to say and the culprit is my bifocals.
I realized last week that I walk consistently with my head down so that I can see where I am going and I don’t trip. I lowered my head to get a clear view right in front of me because of my bifocals. My lowered head was messing up the weight distribution up and down my back. The minute I started making sure I kept my head up. 75% of my leg pain disappeared. Some of my other back muscles have protested with the change, but that is to be expected. I haven’t tripped yet. It is a hard habit to break, though.
How is your posterior chain? What are your recent exciting discoveries?
Trail Baboon 