Category Archives: 2024

2024, education, home, Mysteries, Uncategorized

Pajama Time

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Getting dressed is the official start of my day.  All the things I do before I get dressed (Connections, crossword, Wordle, Duolingo) don’t count.  This part of the day I am still in my jammies.  While there were a couple of times I never changed out of my pajamas for the entire day (working from home, no zoom meetings), those were complete anomalies.  Once I get dressed, I get on with my day.

Of course the problem is Wednesdays and my doughnut habit.  For some reason, all bets are off about going to the bakery early in the morning and there are a sizeable number of Wednesday that see me at the bakery in my nighttime garb.  Mind you, this is in colder weather when I can cover up with a sweatshirt or a winter coat – my summer nightgowns don’t lend themselves to early morning bakery forays.

This past Wednesday morning, I looked down as I was getting into the car and realized I was still wearing my slippers.  Long story as to why I still had my slippers on, involving having to let the dog out earlier and it being quite cold that morning.  I did sit for about 15 second debating whether to go back in the house to put on shoes and decided “what the heck”.  Really what’s the difference between my Birkenstock clogs and slippers anyway, except for the faux fuzz.

This made me think about fashion in general.  There aren’t really any rules about going out in slippers, are there?  For that matter, except for not going out naked, are there any rules at all?  Even the never wear white before Memorial Day or after Labor Day is just silly, right?  And what’s the difference between my jammie pants and overshirt and any other nylon/orlon pants and matching shirt?   In fact, why do we even HAVE pajamas?

Do you have a favorite pair of slippers?  Pajamas?

2024, holidays, Music, Theatre, Uncategorized, work

Glitter And Be Gay

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Last weekend, in honor of St. Patrick’s Day, one of our employees came into our building and spread gold glitter all over-in the elevator, in all the hallways on both floors, in our offices, and on our desks along with green paper shamrocks and candy. Whoever it was had a master key to get into all the offices. Administration has been oddly silent, so I think it was one of them who did it..

All I could think was how awful for the cleaning staff to try to vacuum up all the handfuls of glitter that were strewn all over. The glitter has spread everywhere. One of my colleagues took her work laptop to a meeting at a local elementary school, and when she opened it up, glitter spilled out onto the table they were all meeting at. We are even carrying it into the community! After a couple of days for the cleaners to vacuum you can still see it in the carpet. Husband had some on his face at lunch yesterday.

For some reason Leonard Bernstein ‘s Candide came to mind when I saw all the glitter

What are some of your favorite Bernstein works? What is the biggest mess you ever made?

2024, Health, Technology

Therapy Routine

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Went for my first physical therapy appointment yesterday.  It went fairly smoothly; she poked and prodded and measured.  Made me stand on one foot and then the other.  Walked up and down the hallway.

She showed me four exercises to start with – one with a strap and one with a stretchy thing.  Two on steps.  All fairly straightforward but when I got home I realized that a couple only get done once a day, one gets done twice and day and the last one gets done three times a day.  I sat with the paper in my hands for about a minute before I knew what I had to do.  A spreadsheet!  It’s pretty simple, just a chart with each exercise listed the prerequisite number of times for each day of the next week.  I imagine, since I’m a morning person, I’ll do the four together in the morning and then slot in the rest as the day goes on.  

Spreadsheet isn’t pretty, but enough to keep track of what I’m doing on a daily basis… a rustic spreadsheet as it were.  What in heaven’s name did I do before Excel?

Do you have a daily routine (with or without a spreadsheet!)?

2024, Family, Travel, Weather

Where in the World is….YA?

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Second airport run of the week yesterday morning.  YA going to Cancun for a week-long program.  Besides her work clothes, she took plenty of other outfits as well saying “well, it is a WHOLE week”.  Two suitcases (one checked, one small for carry-on) along with her backpack. 

As is normal when one of us is traveling we keep each other up to date on the process.  Texts like “at the gate”, “on the plane”, “wings up”, “just landed” are the norm.  I’m not sure why we started doing this but we just keep on. 

It was pretty chilly when I dropped her off at the airport so her first text from Cancun was a bit of a lemon-juice-in-a-papercut when she landed and texted me this photo

Then about an hour or so later, I got the photo in the header.  Sigh.  She had told me she thought she was staying downtown, but I actually recognized the view from her window… it’s on Coral Beach in the hotel zone….a pretty swanky place that I have visited a couple of times.

I’m still glad I’m retired and not doing the kind of travel I used to do, but it did give me a little pang of jealousy when I looked at the photo.  Who would have thought we’d have this turnaround in our lives, where now she travels to glorious places and I stay home with the dog and cat?  Maybe all this texting when we travel isn’t the best idea?

Tell me about a view you’ll never forget!

2024, Automotive, Music, Travel

Volare

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Yesterday morning I drove my next-door neighbors to the airport for a spring break trip to California.  When we were about half way to the airport, the youngest daughter (she’s five) wailed that she hadn’t downloaded any music to her pad.  The older daughter started to chime in as well.  Dad quickly let them know that he had downloaded good playlists to their pads. 

I wouldn’t even have known what most of the previous paragraph meant when I was the girls’ ages.  Both their Mom and Dad are music teachers, so I suppose it’s not too surprising that everybody has to have a playlist for a 4-hour flight.  When they get back, maybe I’ll ask the girls about what Dad had downloaded for them.

I like music but I can’t call myself an aficionada – I rarely know the names of songs and even if I recognize the music, I’m usually stumped about the composer.  Or the band.   So while I know that my phone could play music if I wanted, I don’t have anything set up and I don’t have any ear buds or headphones.  When I’m on the plane, it’s either sleeping or reading for me.   In fact, I almost always take too much reading material on the plane – except for the one time I had a big hard cover from the library in my carry on bag (All the Light You Cannot See) and I plowed through the entire book in between London and Minneapolis!  Luckily by the time I finished the book, we were just about to land so I wasn’t tortured by too much “non-reading” time.

How do you keep yourself entertained when you fly/drive/train/covered wagon?

2024, Business, Farming Update, Food, Mysteries, Nature

Spring Approacheth

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The weekend Farm Report comes to us from Ben.

Evidently at some point last summer, I took the corn planter seed units, the thing in the planter that picks up an individual seed, and drops it in the ground, I took the seed units up to my dealer to be inspected and upgraded as necessary. I say ‘evidently’ because I forgot about that until he called asking what I wanted done with them. Gosh, I’d have been ready to run out and plant some day and sure been surprised by the hole in the bottom of the tank where these go. And I’d have spent a long time digging around in the shop trying to find them!

They are getting new backing plates and brushes. $600 roughly.

I was watching an online auction last week and I had bid on a couple used corn planters newer than mine. I have a John Deere 7000 planter. Had been completely rebuilt when I bought it 20-some years ago. I think I paid $6000 for it. The 7000 planter was made from 1974 to 1986. At the auction were two John Deere 1750, 6 row planters. The same size as mine, but much newer than mine. One was in pretty good shape, and one was pretty beat up. But I figured if I could get it cheap, I could fix it up on my own time. They sold for $16,185 and $14,259 respectively. Plus, commission. Wowzer! A couple nice tractors: a 2020 front wheel assist with 4000 hours, sold for $181,500. A 2012 4-wheel drive with a blade sold for $178,000. I didn’t even bid on those. I should have, early, just to say I did. Golly.

So anyway, $600 for planter unit overhauls is a good deal. The important thing about planting, is having each seed dropped in the right place, 6” apart. That’s called “singulation”. And looking at the fields last year, my singulation wasn’t very good. Lots of misses, or doubles. The repair should help with that.

If you think about an ear of corn, next time you’re having corn on the cob, pay attention to the kernels. Notice the kernels at the bottom are sort of large and round? While the middle ones are flat? Seed is sorted like that, and some guys ask for ‘flats’ or ‘rounds’ in particular. Clyde, did you sort out seed like that?

I did get the starter put back in the  630 tractor. Bailey helped.

A hot air balloon landed at our place on Sunday. The dogs alerted me to it first and I saw it was way off to the south. A little later I noticed it really high off to the south. A little while later, it was very low and close to us, then it went up a bit again, then back down and landed at our place. He took off from the college, which is only a couple miles as the balloon flies, but there was no wind and it took him 90 minutes to get to our place and he didn’t have enough gas to go too much further. It was a real fun crew of people and for the first time in the multiple balloon landings at our place, they actually had champagne and did a toast.

That night I picked up pizza from a new place in Rochester, Red Savoy pizza. I picked it up wearing a John Deere cap, and the owner told me he worked at John Deere in Waterloo for a lot of years and he and I talked about tractors for 20 minutes. It was fun to meet these two diverse groups of such nice people. It felt good to reaffirm there are just fun, nice people out there.

WHAT HAVE YOU FORGOTTEN? HAVE YOU MET FUN PEOPLE LATELY?

2024, books, Fantasy, Mysteries, Nature, Weather

Bowled Over

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Around Christmas I decided that I wanted to re-read the Inspector Gamache series of books by Louise Penny.  They were favorites of mine when I first re-read them and I enjoyed the tv shows although I wasn’t happy they cancelled after the first season.  Short sighted.

I’m on the third book right now, listening to it on CD in the car.  Last week there was a huge thunderstorm in the book and Louise wrote one of the characters as saying that their mother had explained thunder as “angels bowling”.  This caught my attention because this is exactly what my mother told me about thunder when I was a kid.

As an adult I know in my brain that thunder is caused by the shockwave of air that expands rapidly around a lightning bolt.  But it’s way too easy to remember bowling angels or the Zeus in Fantasia orchestrating a huge storm. 

What kinds of stories were you told as a child to explain natural phenomenon?

2024, Gatherings, Music, Songs, Uncategorized, Words

Musical Ear

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We have a new assistant pastor at our Lutheran Church who is working out rather nicely. She is good with youth, preaches good sermons, and is fitting in well with the congregation. There is only one problem, and that is her lack of musicality.

Our pastors sing much of the of the liturgy, and to do that the they have to know to listen to the note the organist gives them to start on the chant. Our new pastor can’t carry a tune in a bucket. No matter how emphatic the organist is in giving the note, the new pastor invariably starts on a pitch three notes below where she should start, and can’t seem to read the intervals between the notes to sing the chant correctly. The liturgy is such that the pastor sings, then the congregation comes in on a pitch based on where the pastor leaves off. We now have to listen for a prompt from the organist to know what our pitch is.

It would be fine with me if our new pastor read the liturgy instead of singing it, but I guess in Lent things need to be sung. We are all suffering through these forty days together!

How are you at singing a capella? What are your favorite metaphors and idioms?

2024, education, Health, Medicine, Mysteries

At Least I’m Upright….

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I think I know why it takes so long to become a doctor. You have to learn a completely different language:

This accessory muscle is located posteromedially, originating from the fascia of the deep posterior compartment at a level posterior to the tibiotalar joint and talus and then extends inferiorly, deep to the flexor retinaculum, posterior and superficial to the traversing tibial nerve and posterior tibial artery within the tarsal tunnel, inserting distally upon the quadratus plantae muscle (axial series 2, Images 6-22, sagittal series 4, images 15-11 and coronal series 7, images 7-10.)

Even after Dr. Moser showed me the MRI images and “explained” it to me, I’m still not sure exactly what the issue is except that it seems to be related to my initial ankle sprain (20 years ago – a bad sprain that took several months to feel better). No pinched anything, no compressed anything, no torn anything and in what was clearly a surprise to the doctor, no arthritis. He did point out what he called some edema – that’s about it. Two co-pays and an MRI to get told my ankle hurts.

Sent home with a brace and a couple of physical therapy appointments. In the meantime, I suppose the fact that there isn’t any arthritis is the good news I’ll try to keep in mind.

Do you have a favorite tongue-twister from childhood?

2024, Food, Gatherings, Mysteries

Easy as Pie

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“In my element.”  That’s the thought that was going through my mind as I headed out of the house yesterday morning to do some grocery shopping.  With Pi Day coming up, I’ve been busy with the prep work.  Organizing things is just about my favorite activity and Pi Day needs all the organization it can get.

Before hitting the grocery stores, I have to pick the pies.  I go through all my appropriate cookbooks and pick out recipes that sound good to me, mark them w/ post-it notes and write them down.  When I’m done with that, I cull the recipes down to 12 (always making sure I have our four regulars listed.  Then I make a list of ingredients, cross check it against what I already have on hand and then head out.  Had to hit three stores to get everything (including finding golden syrup without having to make a separate trip to World Market!) and it took four trips from the car to the house because I packed all the bags at Aldis pretty heavily.

I have two to-do lists for Pi Day… the lead up to Pi Day list and the Pi Day list.  The lead up is all the stuff I can do a day ahead (crumble topping, pre-baking shells, putting out plates/napkins).  Then the Pi Day list is sorted in the order that the pies need to be done The secondary sort is by oven temperature.  The baking times are also on this list so the minute a pie goes in the oven, I can put the cookbook away.

Add making placecards, nametags with this year’s pie clipart and setting up a station for some temporary tattoos that I found and, voila… party time! 

I’m not sure what it is in my personality that all this makes me quite happy, but it does!

How to bakers dress up?