My bales look sorry this summer. Saggy and disintegrating looking. Ben explained to me how this can happen – kinda made sense.
But saggy and disintegrating doesn’t seem to be a problem for my veggies. We’re having a bumper crop of everything. Basil, chives, rosemary, cilantro, poblano peppers, hot macho peppers, mint and 4 kinds of tomatoes. Romas, some heirloom, sweet 100 cherry and in a summer surprise, I’ve actually gotten a couple of Santa tomatoes from the plant that I grew from a seed. I’m sure there’s more out there but I haven’t harvested for a couple of days.
Santa Tomatoes
I used up all the cilantro already. Four jars of pesto so far, an ice cube tray of chopped mint with lime juice, another ice cube tray of chopped basil with olive oil. Eight containers of tomato sauce. Gifts of tomatoes to neighbors and friends.
And lots and lots of tomato recipes. (This was all going on while I had a MASSIVE zucchini to deal with as well.) I’ve made my favorite pasta with cherry tomatoes a couple of times. Made tomato butter that was terrific on the zucchini corn bread. This weekend I’m making panzanella, tomato basil soup and some tomato rice. Probably time to consign some of the tomatoes to the freezer as well. Whole tomatoes right into freezer bags for use this winter.
Gosh – I feel like Renee and Chris with all this produce and cooking!
Husband had just finished mowing the lawn on Monday when two boys, looking to be about 11 or 12, came by offering to mow for us. They had their own mower. Husband explained he had just finished mowing, but they would certainly be welcome in the future to do it for us. Their asking price was reasonable.
I never had a “business” as a kid, unless you count babysitting. Girls in Luverne didn’t hire out to do lawn work back then. The boys who came by on Monday looked energetic and excited. There aren’t as many older people in the neighborhood as there used to be, so I hope they don’t get discouraged if they don’t get as much business as they hoped.
Husband has arthritis in his hands. I am having increased mobility issues with chronic sciatica, probably caused by lumbar scoliosis. I can see us hiring more yard work done in the future.
Did you have a business as a kid? What tasks do you see yourself hiring others to do in the future? If you were 12 right now, what business would you start?
We’re coming up on the 10th anniversary of the baboons taking over the Trail. The math is pretty straightforward. 6 posts a week times 52 weeks a year times 10 years. 3120. That’s not exact but close enough for horseshoes.
I think Renee and Ben would agree with me that the QUESTION is the hardest part of writing so many posts. What question relates to what you just wrote? How many times have we asked a similar question. Will the question lead to some good discussion during the day? Will it be too hard to answer? Too personal to answer? Too inane to answer?
Richard Feynman once said “I would rather have questions that can’t be answered than answers that can’t be questioned.” That’s all fine and good for a world-renown physicist but he never had to come up with a good question every day!
So here’s your chance to beat Richard Feynman at his own game.
Going down a rabbit hole isn’t anything new for me but this week I’m down two different rabbit holes and it’s all your fault!
The first is my Alan Bennett rabbit hole. For those of you in Blevins, you may remember that Bill recommended one of our last books, An Uncommon Reader, which we all liked enormously. Since then I’ve read several other Alan Bennett titles. That has led me to a few movies that have been made from his plays/books. Luckily so far the movies are pretty close to the plays/books; it’s clear that Bennett was closely involved in the various productions. I had not realized before this rabbit hole that Alan Bennett is the author of Madness of King George. He also wrote the screenplay when they made the movie from his play. Bennett is unbelievably prolific; the list of his credits from television, plays, books, films and even radio broadcasts is remarkable. I’m pretty sure that I’ll be down this rabbit hole for awhile yet.
The second rabbit hole is thanks to Barbara. Last week I picked up a book at the library, an older volume of something called Lisa & Lottie. I had no memory of why I had requested this title but that’s not actually uncommon. In the reference column of my reading spreadsheet the notation “O&A” is the most common and stands for Out & About, and almost always means I don’t remember where I got the idea. Within about 10 pages I realized this was the book that The Parent Trap was based on which we talked about on the trail a couple of weeks ago.
The original German title was Das Doppelte Lottchen, (The Double Lottie) and was published in 1949. Disney got his mits on it and the first Parent Trap movie came out in 1961 with the enormously popular Hayley Mills along with Maureen O’Hara and Brian Keith. The movie is actually much closer to the book than I had expected. The biggest difference is that there is not a camping trip at the end during which Brian Keith realizes that his new fiancée is not the woman for him. (In Lisa & Lottie, the new fiancée just gets mad about the twins/mother of twins issues and stomps off into the sunset.) And, of course the names and jobs of all the characters are updated in all versions. I’ve re-watched the Hayley Mills version again; probably won’t watch the Lindsey Lohan version again. It’s actually fairly well done but YA liked the movie a lot and as a consequence I’ve been it A LOT!
I’m actually really glad that I’ve already read both the Blevins selections for this month because I’m not sure how I’d fit them in!
It’s been five years since we lost our Little Jail Bird, Edith. I think of her often and whenever I tell someone about her, I say what a hero she is to me, that she made a courageous decision to go ahead with the risky surgery rather than live the rest of her life with her illness (her words). In her memory, I’m running her most iconic posting 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.
Any comments / reflections on any or your heros welcome
For the first time ever, we ended up with a budget surplus on the Trail! THANK YOU.
It’s not enough that I will be sending everybody a check for two dollars and sorry but I don’t want to set the money aside and remember to deal with it next year. No Verily Bank of Minnesota.
So I decided to donate the money. Took a couple of days to think about it and decided to send it to Project for Awesome 2024. P4A is the brainchild of John and Hank Green, aka The Vlog Brothers. It started as a YouTube kind of stunt – people were encouraged to make and upload videos for charity over a 48-hour period to see if they could overwhelm the algorithm and pop to the top.
It works like this. P4A runs for 48 hours (noon on Friday to Noon on Sunday) once a year. Various YouTube creators take turns “entertaining” on a livestream to collect the money. Hundreds of folks upload videos that advocate for their favorite charities and these videos run throughout the 48 hours and are voted on. Fifty percent of the money is split between Save the Children and Partners in Health (both favorite organizations of the Green brothers). The other fifty percent is split between the 30 videos that garner the most votes. This is serious money – it’s the 17th year for P4A and this year they raised $3.5 million dollars. All the perks are donated by the various creators and the parent company of P4A (The Foundation to Decrease World Suck) covers the shipping so there are hardly any administrative costs.
I’ve been following John and Hank since 2007 and have donated personally many of those years as well, so I feel comfortable that the project represents the kinds of things that we espouse on the Trail. I thought about throwing it open for suggestions but then we’d have to have a run-off election because it wasn’t enough money to be able to give some to all of our choices!
If I HAD asked for suggestions, what charity would you choose as a favorite?
I teared up more than I expected listening to the re-broadcast of the last Morning Show at The Fitzgerald. Since I was in the theatre, none of the re-broadcast should have been a surprise, but 15 years does dull the memory and I ended up crying just as much as I did that day. At the end when Neal and Leandra did “End of the World”, I completely lost it. (I simply could not explain this to YA who happened to come upstairs right at that point.)
When I went downstairs to make a little dinner, I decided I needed comfort food; Ralston Hot Wheat Cereal was on the docket. Ralston isn’t making the hotel cereal any longer; I’ve known this for a couple of months, but I still had my container in the freezer. When I measured it out, I had exactly enough for one serving. Somehow it seemed fitting that the last of one of my favorite comfort foods was eaten after hearing the re-broadcast.
I’ve done quite a bit of research and I THINK that Wheatena may be close. I did purchase some last month but haven’t tried it yet. Fingers crossed that it’s close. The Ralston has been a favorite of mine since I was a kid, so we’re talking DECADES. I’m trying to take it in stride, but it’s hard.
Concerning the LGMS and the final broadcast, I am definitely seeing the bright side, as I would not be part of this fabulous community without the Trail! The Morning Show probably wouldn’t still be on the air at this point anyway and we baboons keep going and going!
What’s a product you’ve had to learn to live without?
It’s been two years since we lost Steve. Below is one of his most iconic posts (in my view).
I’m passionate about music and life, so it is not surprising that the two often meld for me. Certain moments become inextricably associated with the music I was listening to at that time. The most familiar example of this is how couples can have a song or performance that becomes “our” song. But that sort of things happens over and over for people like me. We end up associating music with certain times places we have known. I keep hearing the phrase: “the soundtrack for my life.” And that, for many people, colors how they think of moments from their past.
The worst place I ever lived was a shabby little house on the West Bank near Seven Corners, but that place is also associated with the moment I discovered the music of Leo Kottke at the nearby Scholar Coffeehouse. As awful as that house was, Leo’s music was one of the happiest discoveries of my life. Some of the associations we make are complicated.
Sometimes the soundtrack we can’t help associating with something is wildly inappropriate to anyone else. I discovered the Lord of the Rings trilogy early in grad school. At the same time, I was listening to a lot of Ravi Shankar sitar music. Clearly, the epic trilogy is as thoroughly European and Nordic as Shankar’s music is Indian, but when I read Tolkien I keep hearing sitar music. It is, after all, exotic, and I found the novels exotic.
I think of these matters a lot now because I keep encountering two types of music that are linked in my mind to the pandemic. I discovered the music of the traditional jazz band Tuba Skinny just as the virus reached the US and changed our lives. When I listen to YouTube videos of the band, as I do for maybe an hour each day, I keep reading comments from others who say they could not bear the pandemic without the uplift of Tuba Skinny music.
Similarly, early in the virus shutdown period, Mary Chapin Carpenter began recording Songs from Home. She films herself with her animals (White Kitty and Angus, the golden retriever) at her farm home in Virginia. She delivers her performances (filmed on her phone, I think) with a breathy intimacy that is incredibly calming. Unless you somehow hate her music, I urge you to sample some Songs From Home to read the comments of all the people who say their sole salvation in this difficult time is the music she makes for them.
What about you? What music do you associate with particular moments from your past? Do you have “our song” with anyone?
2 trips to Menards
2 trips to the hardware store
9 stones from the original “patio”
16 new stones
7 bags of sand
2 Carter women
9 hours of labor
2 rounds of ibuprofen
1 new patio big enough for our table AND chairs
Once again YA was the impetus behind this project. The initial little patio used the blocks that I had saved when we got our new sidewalk two years ago, but it wasn’t quite big enough to accommodate the chairs around the table.
And YA was very thorough. She insisted that we dig up the initial stones, lay down a layer of sand underneath everything and was scrupulous about making sure all the stones were level as we laid them down and then she spent considerable time sweeping sand into all the spaces between the stones.
Phew… hopefully no more major projects by ourselves this summer!
What do you like to have when you’re dining al fresco?
In 2018 I retired after 39 years of life in Taiwan. I moved to Holland, MI, and bought a hundred year old house in the city.
The town was platted out sometime in the 1960s, and included alleys in the middle of blocks. One by one, the city “vacated” many of those alleys, but some remain. Near our house there’s one that a community association “neatened up” within the last 10 years. It’s an “art alley”. One back yard installation included a few racks of colored bottles on poles. They attracted me. I figured I could do that, myself, in my own yard.
After examining the installation, I decided that I could do it cheaper too. I sent out a request for empty bottles on a neighborhood bulletin board, and got “not few” responses, sometimes linked to statements that “we didn’t drink all that wine” or “the bottles accumulated over a long time.” (That’s Holland, MI piety speaking). My own installation, because I did it on the cheap side, blew apart in the wind more than once. Lots of bottles and red vases smashed before I finally figured out how to make it secure.
As I live and drink, I accumulate bottles regularly. Three windows in the garage were “bottled up” in 2022. More racks and installations have taken places in the yard. As I write, there are 50 bottles and vases, drilled and washed, waiting in the basement for another inspiration to strike.
Trail Baboon 