Category Archives: Business

Business, Family, home, Technology, Uncategorized

It’s Ringing

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This past Solstice, one of YA’s gifts to me was a Ring doorbell – you know, one of those doorbells that has a camera in it.  This gift falls into the category of a gift for herself rather than a gift for me.  YA does a lot of her shopping online, so she worries about packages left on our front porch.  Installing this thing required drilling holes into the stucco, so it was very easy to put off at first.  Then it ended up in a box in Nonny’s room and I was hoping a little bit that it would be forgotten.

But thanks to shelter-in-place, YA is stuck in the house and looking for projects.  I resisted a bit by not being helpful but YA was persistent.  She went to the basement and got the drill, looked up directions on YouTube, got out an extension cord.  Then she realized that we should really move the mailbox over a few inches, so she had to collect up the tools to get this done as well.  But eventually I couldn’t put it off any longer, so I drilled the holes for the Ring and then drilled new holes for the mailbox’s new location.  YA has done the rest, including putting the app on my phone.  I guess I still get to pick my own ring tone.

What technology have YOU succumbed to?

Business, Food, Uncategorized, work

Brave Volunteers

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I was happy and proud to read the other day that Minnesota has the second highest rate of volunteerism in the country, bested only by Utah.

North Dakota ranks 15th.  Husband decided that he has sufficient free time to volunteer at our local food pantry, and his first shift is next Thursday.  He will stock shelves. Our church donates the produce from our garden to the food pantry.  Suzy Kapelovitz, a nice Norwegian girl from Reeder, (a really small town in southwest ND), who married this Jewish guy who ran some sort of business in our town in ND, and who has spent her life here helping others, is the head of the food pantry.  She is in her 70’s. She confirmed his shift.  He is to stock shelves. I foresee volunteerism in our future,

Why do you think Minnesota has so many volunteers? What have you volunteered for?

Business, Family, Food, gardening, Health, home, Media, Nature, News, Uncategorized, work

Our New Pastime

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I read an article the other day in which the CEO of King Arthur Flour said that baking has become the “new baseball” in this country.  Yeast sales are up 300% across the country compared to a year ago, and King Arthur has engaged an extra mill to assist in meeting the demand for its flour. There is enough flour to go around. The problem is that most of it is in 50 lb bags not suited to the average home baker. They are scrambling to get it into 5 lb bags and out to consumers.  People are baking out of panic, boredom, and as a way to obtain some comfort right now. I think there has been an increase in the purchase of vegetable seeds and plants for the same reason. I hope that people continue to bake and garden after this is all over.  I think we could use more national pastimes.

What would you like to see as “the new baseball”?  What are you doing for comfort these days? 

 

Business, Family, Food, home, pets, Uncategorized

The Milk Man

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I signed up for home dairy delivery (a milk man) when YA was two.  As a single parent, “running up to the store” isn’t as simple as it sounds, and it felt like we were always running out of Yo-J or milk or eggs.  When a neighbor mentioned that she used to have a milk man, my ears perked up.  I contacted Kemps Home Delivery and two days later, I got a call from Mike.  He started deliveries the next week and he is still bringing us dairy and other assorted food items every week.

There are about 50 milk men in the Twin Cities area and Mike has been in business for more than 40 years.  He loads up his truck every morning at the Kemp’s warehouse and then hits the road.  I leave my order form (and payment for the week before) on the front door.  He gets those items I from his truck, puts them in my fridge, gives the dogs and cats a treat and leaves a blank order form with the amount of the order for me to pay next week.

Mike’s wife, Suzie, does the office and phone management and both of them are as nice as can be.  They have grown kids and two grandkids, who feature in the yearly holiday newsletter.  Every Thanksgiving, they help manage and run a project called The Thanksgiving Free Store.  It’s just what it sounds like, food and other necessities provided for those in need, absolutely free.  They spend the year raising money and getting donations, things like socks, backpacks, warm clothing, coats and food, lots of food.  I’ve been supporting this effort for quite a few years now.

Mike is pleasant and personable.  If I’m home on a Friday when he delivers, it’s always nice to have some conversation with him.  I’m one of his last deliveries of the week, so he is never rushed when he’s at my place.  When we first started deliveries, he used to leave my items in a cooler on the front steps, but after a couple of months, I gave him a key (he has a HUGE keychain).  I figured if we got robbed with no clear break-in, the cops would look to anybody who had keys first; I doubt Mike would want to put his only business at risk for anything I had laying around!

For the last couple of months, I’ve been worried about Mike.  The Kemp’s warehouse announced (without much warning) that they would only be open four days a week because there were only a couple of milk men delivering on Fridays.  We got our delivery changed to Tuesdays (not a big deal) but I started to think that maybe the milk man business was dying out.  Although Mike is close to retirement age, it would be better for him to retire when it’s good for him rather than for his business to shrink away.

Well, I don’t have to worry any more.  As someone who delivers food to your house, guess whose business has grown dramatically in the last three weeks?  In fact, the demand has grown so much that Kemps is thinking about re-opening the warehouse on Fridays.  And since Mike works alone, social distancing isn’t a problem; Suzy asked folks to re-instate the cooler system a couple of weeks ago, so Mike doesn’t even have to come in the house right now.  As soon as he drives off (Guinevere always lets us know when Mike is here) we go out and get our items out of the cooler.  The only ones really suffering are the animals, who don’t get their weekly treat from Mike!

Are you having anything new delivered to your place these days?

 

 

 

Business, Health, Uncategorized, work

Moonshine Hand Sanitizer

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The office operations person at my agency is tasked with finding sufficient masks, sanitzer, and sanitizing wipes for our building staff and for staff who transport clients or who visit clients in their homes.  She has networked with her counterparts at other human service centers to find supplies.  Hand sanitizer has been hard to come by,  and they have turned to local distilleries in Fargo and in our community that are making it by the gallon.  She and the other office managers have a Pony Express type of delivery chain, meeting one another at county lines and regional boundaries for deliveries and pick up. She said it feels like they are hauling moonshine and doing something illegal. I like the image of the transfer of distillery products into State vehicles.

Today she sent an email saying that  we should come and get some distillery sanitizer,  but since it smelled so strongly alcoholic we had to put essential oils in it, as the raw odor could trigger some of our addiction clients into relapse. I went down to her office to get some and put some lavender oil in it.  She was right about the odor.  Pineapple essential oil would make it smell like a pina colada!  She told me that when she and another business office staff member were pouring it out of the distillery jugs into smaller bottles, they inhaled a lot of the fumes and it got all over their hands and was absorbed into their skin. She said they both got red in the face and kind of goofy before they knew what was happening.

It is heartening to see how people here are pulling together to solve problems and help, even if it means spraying moonshine all over the place.

What have you seen people do lately to pull together and make things better? Have you ever been to a distillery?

Art, Business, Family, home, News, Uncategorized

Bad Hair Quarter

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I get my hair cut every six weeks or so. I was supposed to get it cut on April 3, but the ND governor had closed all the salons and barber shops by then, and I have no idea when they will reopen. I am looking at a couple of months of shagginess.  Husband made it to the barber just before the shut down. I will under no circumstances try to trim my own hair.  That would be a disaster.

I heard someone in the news comment that during the next weeks we will see people start hoarding hair dye for “do it yourself” touch ups. Imagine all the off-color roots we will see if there is a shortage! I am  glad I have never colored my hair. That, too, would be a disaster if  I ever tried to touch up my grey. I am not a very neat or precise person when it comes to things like that. I am also not very creative when it comes to figuring out ways to deal with hair when it is not cut to the correct length.

Do you have any creative ideas of what to do when you can’t get to the salon or barber? What do you imagine people will be panic hoarding next?

Business, Family, Health, home, Uncategorized, work

Work/Life Balance

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I return to my place of work today. Our Regional Director decided I would be one of the few staff allowed in the building to keep things running.  We have had multiple staff quit to join the private sector in the past few months, and at this point I am one of the few clinical staff left who can do things like sign commitment papers.  I am glad we have quite a few applicants for the vacant positions,  but the virus slowed down the hiring process.

Working in the office is just fine as far as I am concerned.  I really dislike working from home.  I need a separation  between work and home for my own sanity, a reasonable  “work/life balance” not possible when I am at home.  This way I can turn off my computer at the end of the day and drive home and leave work at work.

How do you (or did you) maintain a reasonable  work/life balance?  What happens if you don’t?

Business, Family, Health, home, Uncategorized, work

Telehealth

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I have four more days to work from home until the State is assured I am not full of Covid19 germs from Minnesota.  I was trained last week in the computer platform we will be using for telehealth.  Even when I return to the office, face to face therapy and  psychological testing are to be done only in an emergency, and l will either reach out to clients via phone or the telehealth  platform.  There is some glitch in my work computer that I will need our tech guy to fix, as my screen freezes, usually with my face with a weird expression.  The audio works just fine.

Daughter is doing 5 hours of telehealth sessions a day, and she even figured out how to have the children she sees use their own toys to facilitate play therapy.  (“What feelings do your different color leggo blocks have?  Make a sad building with blue blocks. Why is the building so sad?  How does that red leggo block feel?”)   I wish I was as flexible and creative as she is.  I really don’t like doing therapy remotely, and I don’t think my clients like it, either.  Not all insurances will pay for telehealth sessions. I know that some of the more active and aggressive traumatized preschoolers won’t do well with it at all. I think I will mainly be offering behavior management and therapeutic response suggestions to the foster parents.  I imagine if I do sessions from home,  the cats will wonder to whom I am speaking and will want to walk on the keyboard to see what is going on.

What are your feelings regarding telehealth? What have you done remotely?

100 Words, Business, Family, Food, Health, home, Stories, Uncategorized

Skim vs. Powdered

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Our discussion the other day about paper plates reminded me of stories that my folks used to tell about their early married life.  My dad was in basic training in North Carolina and my mom moved there to be close to him.  She taught gym part-time and they lived in a small trailer.  One of the stories they told me about how broke they were was that they couldn’t afford to buy a set of plates.  So not only did they eat on paper plates, they cut the paper plates in half!

By the time I came along, they were in better shape, although still not great; my dad was in law school with two part time jobs and my mom was forced to quit working the minute the school district found out she was pregnant!  As a kid, things were tight, not destitute, but definitely tight. One of the ways that my mom saved on groceries was by using powdered milk.  I still remember it after all these years, chalky and for some reason never seemed to get really cold.  I hated it.

At least once a month we had Saturday dinner at my grandparents’ house – hamburger and french fry night.  There were a lot of reasons that I liked to eat my Nana and Pappy’s; one of those reasons was that they had “real” milk.  It was always very cold because that’s the way Pappy liked it and there was always plenty.  They had a special half-gallon carton holder that looked like this:

When my younger sister started school and had “real” milk every day, she began refusing to drink the powdered milk at home.  While I hadn’t been brave enough to do this on my own, I quickly followed her lead and my mom gave up and began to buy “real” milk.  I started drinking skim about 30 years ago and I’m still a big milk drinker all these years later.  My mom doesn’t understand how I can drink skim and  has suggested more than once that I “might as well go back to powdered milk”.  Yes, after all these years, she still remembers how we “forced” her to buy milk.

My milkman told me yesterday when he was making our delivery that big local dairies are going to discontinue skim milk production for a bit.  Apparently skim milk requires more steps and production time; during our current crisis, trying to keep up with demand means cutting out skim so more easily produced milks can make it to market faster.  Who would have thought?  Guess I’ll be on a higher fat milk for a while.

Do you remember any meals you enjoyed at your grandparents’?

animals, Business, Family, Kids, Nature, News, Uncategorized

Birth Announcement

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The Birch Aquarium is throwing a baby shower!  They have just welcome two very rare babies – weedy sea dragons.  Apparently sea dragons  are notoriously difficult to breed in captivity and the aquarium has been trying for years.

Sea dragons, as you can see, look like little flotsams of seaweed and are actually distant cousins to the seahorse.  The Birch actually acquired their first sea dragons after years of successful work with other sea horse varieties.  In the wild, most sea dragon species call the waters of Australia home.

The two new additions are about an inch long and will feed primarily on shrimp, like their parents.  At this point, it is now known the gender of the babies; according to the Birch, they “likely won’t know until they reach sexual maturity in a few years. “This bit of sea dragon news caught my eye because we have sea dragons at the Minnesota Zoo; we’ve had them for years, so I didn’t realize they were rare.  In fact, while YA is joyfully trailing her hands in the shark/ray pool (which she can do for a LONG time), I almost always wander over to watch the sea dragons.  Their alcove is kept dark and they are mesmerizing as they float through their habitat, their “weeds” floating gracefully around them.

Do you have a favorite exotic animal?