Category Archives: Family

2026, Family, home, Kids, Uncategorized

Scientific Furniture Shopping

24 Comments

Daughter is really putting down roots in Tacoma and has purchased a condo. It is quite a bit bigger than than her apartment.

Daughter has enlisted numerous friends to help with the move. She has a dear friend who is an engineer of some sort and who has been through the house buying and refurnishing process and who has taken her in hand regarding buying new furniture.

Daughter needs a new sofa. Friend insisted that the sofa must have a frame made from wood from a certain place in North Carolina for strength and longevity, along with many other caveats for structural stability. The two young women spent the day in Seattle yesterday sitting on sofas. Daughter texted me that she found one she loved at Crate and Barrel and was deciding on fabric swatches. I do hope the internal structure met the engineer’s specifications!

I think I like the advice another friend gave daughter regarding buying furniture: “buy once, cry once”, meaning buy the best you can afford so it lasts longer.

Any furniture buying stories? How do your tastes in furniture style run?

2026, Family, gardening, home, Uncategorized

Heads And Shoulders, Knees And Toes

15 Comments

The childhood song has been going through my head. Husband is 72. Boommate and I are 68. Between the three of us, I think we have one functional body (but three functional brains).

Husband has arthritis and carpal tunnel issues in both hands. Boommate has had both knees replaced. She also had a shoulder repair after getting knocked over by a horse. I was doing pretty well until recently when I seem to have developed arthritis in both my shoulders that has greatly reduced my range of motion and caused a lot of pain. The sciatica issues for me are manageable and just intermittent. I have a broken toe that healed crooked and is totally numb.

It has been interesting seeing how we have managed to get gardening and moving chores done cooperatively. I am the only one who can crawl on my hands and knees. That means I can get down really low and weed and plant and plug things in. Boommate and Husband are taller than I am, so they can stretch and reach things that I can’t. Boommate and I have great manual dexterity to counter Husband’s hand problems. Husband is very strong and can carry stuff we can’t. It is all working out!

How are you joints and tendons these days? What chores are you doling out to others? What is the best team you ever worked with?

2026, animals, Family, holidays, home, pets

Memorial Day with McGee

29 Comments

YA really needed a puppy fix over the weekend, so yesterday we cajoled Jacque into lending McGee to us.  We picked him up in the afternoon and had him for about three hours.

There was a short walk up the block (it was pretty hot and he has little short legs) and then hung out a bunch in the back yard.  He was very well behaved for a puppy – no romping in my plants, no barking, no chewing on my toes.  He did find a good stick:

It was interesting to see him taking in all the new stuff in our city back yard.  Here are the things that McGee was momentarily afraid of:

    • the fire pit
    • birds flying near the bird feeders
    • the birdbath
    • the grill
    • the wind chime

Here are the things that fascinated him:

    • planes
    • the birdseed under the feeders
    • my neighbor Don who was clearing up after grilling
    • the boxer who poked it’s head out the car window and barked (friendly bark)

We pulled out the kiddie pool and lifted McGee into it twice, followed by the application of treats.  He didn’t actually seem to mind the pool but didn’t want to tarry and wouldn’t jump in on his own.  YA thought maybe it was too big a jump for him (until we moved inside and he felt quite at home jumping up on the sofa) but I think maybe the water was too chilly.  There was some tug-of-war and he was very willing to chase a toy when YA tossed it but bringing the toy back is not in his toolbox yet!  We had YA-chasing and some zoomies as well.

He didn’t stop moving the whole time we had him… Jacque, I assume he slept well last night?

How did you spend YOUR Memorial Day?

 

 

2026, Family, gardening, home, Nature

Memorial Blooms

39 Comments

The iris is my favorite flower; I have always loved them.  It’s probably an inherited trait; I’m pretty sure it was one of my mother’s favorites.  To be honest, I don’t know for sure as my mom was never a flower planter.  She did like to do yard maintenance but didn’t add shrubs or flowers in any of the homes we lived in.  She did however take us kids to the Missouri Botanical Gardens every year, always during the time that the iris gardens there were in full bloom.  That can’t be a coincidence. 

Alice Hahn Goodman Iris Garden (photo credit: Heather Osborn)

I have iris planted all over my yard, front and back, and in a wide variety of colors.  The iris in the header photo is the first to bloom this season – I don’t even know the name of it.  It was supposed to be an orange variety but when it came up the following spring it was this startling white.  Gertens actually credited me for them so not only are the gorgeous, but they were free.  Two of my favorite things.

Of course this year these blooms are bringing my mother to mind so today I am remembering her and thanking her for infecting me with the love of iris!

Any blooms you’re remembering today (literal or metaphorical)?

2026, animals, Family, Gatherings, Nature, Uncategorized

Zoo Happiness

15 Comments

Neither of my folks liked crowds. Long lines, throngs of folks – count them out.  I’ve never been sure why I can take lots of folks but whatever propensity I have, it has been handed down to YA. 

The two busiest days at the Minnesota Zoo are always the last Saturday and Sunday of their very popular Farm Babies program.  They have all kinds of activities and music out at The Farm and there are always plenty of babies; this year baby cows, llamas, goats, lambs and piglets.  YA and I had other things going on for the first four weekends so it was this past weekend or no Farm Babies program until next year.  We’ve been to the last weekend of Farm Babies before but it was even more crowded than we remember. 

Of course, almost everybody was a young family with kids (and those proverbial strollers – I promise I’m not whining about strollers, despite the photo above).  It was, however, truly amazing to see the number of strollers, especially when they were “parked” in several locations.  Wow!

YA and I have different modus operandi at the zoo.  She will walk at my pace but doesn’t always stay right at my side if I dilly dally.  I am more than able to stand and watch a moose do basically nothing for 10 minutes but if I do this, sometimes YA will wander off to see something else.  Conversely, she can pet a baby cow forever.  On Saturday, there was a restaurant chain sponsoring a scavenger hunt.  There were three stations that you had to find and have you little map stamped.  I thought it was a hoot but YA didn’t want to play (this was when she went off to pet that baby cow).

One of the projects in the Activity Barn was making homes for mason bees who apparently are solitary bees that don’t live in hives.  I thought this was very interesting and I let the volunteer tell me everything.  When I was done there, I found YA petting goats.  The one time we were perfectly synced was when we got hungry for lunch! 

Toward the end of our day we stopped at the Service Desk – I wanted to ask when Llama Trek was going to open and to find out if the snow monkeys (whose exhibit is being re-vamped right now) were still here in Minnesota or if they were hanging out at a different zoo until their habitat is finished.  The guy behind the desk was talkative and I’m not even sure how we got from the snow monkey habitat discussion to the Kodiak bear who broke the window at the zoo several years back.  Or how the zoo has multiple possible plans for adding new bears now that there is only one left. 

As we were leaving YA said “I didn’t think he was ever going to stop talking.”  I laughed and said “I could have stayed and listened to him talk about the zoo all day.” 

I guess it’s different strokes for different folks.  But neither of us were bothered by the big crowds!

When was the last time you visited a zoo?  Any favorite zoos?  Zoo animals?

2026, Family, home, Mysteries, Uncategorized

YA Cave

20 Comments

Claustrophobia, agoraphobia, hydrophobia, hemophobia, acrophobia, Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia.  There are a LOT of phobias out there.  Luckily I’m only stuck with two that occasionally bug me. 

Acrophobia bugs me the most.  I don’t like to take the escalators at the Mall of America.  I don’t like to stand near the edge of anything and a couple of those tall tall buildings in London did throw me for a loop.  Three weeks ago, my next-door neighbors got a new roof and after a couple of hours, I had to take my book and move downstairs because watching them work out of my bedroom window was giving me the heebie jeebies.

My claustrophobia is milder and mostly manifests in my deep desire to not be underground or in a cave.  Oh, and I don’t care much for curtains – give me a good valance any time.  I’ve passed twice on the underground river at Xcaret in Mexico and doing the big cave on Gibraltar really got my heart going.  I even stopped reading the Anna Pigeon series after a book set in a cave.  Ish. 

YA doesn’t have a titch of claustrophobia and years ago hung curtains in her room in addition to window shades (I am NOT a window shade kind of gal).  Yesterday a package got delivered and she swooped on it immediately.  Curtains.  When I asked why she needed new curtains she said that her shades had started to curl on the edges and she decided black out curtains would be better.  Black out curtains.  I’m not making this up.   If she only pulled these curtains during the night, when we have a lot of ambient light from living on a county street, I could kind of understand, but like her previous curtains, these have been pulled shut 24/7.  It’s dark in there.

I’ve never wanted a cave of my own so it’s hard for me to get her desire for one, but it’s her room so if she feels the need to have a grotto of her own, so be it!

Any fears you’ll cop to?  Do you like serious darkness for sleeping?

2026, Family, gardening, Nature, Seasons, Weather

Spring Yard Disaster

27 Comments

As of yesterday afternoon, the biggest part of my gardening year is over.  Clean-up from the fall, spring weeding, mulching, flower baskets planted and veggies planted in the bales.  Phew!  

It took way longer this year than usual.  Part of this was the weather.  We had spectacular weekends but then I wasn’t following through because Monday – Friday was too cool.  I do not like to garden when I’m cold and I certainly don’t want to wear a coat out there either!  Then the mess from the fall was much bigger than usual.  And all my fault.  A triple whammy, in fact.

My gardening season came to an abrupt end the day after my birthday last August, when I blew out my first knee.  Then right about the time I might have gotten to some fall clean up, the other knee went.  That meant that apart from some watering (most of which YA took care of), I didn’t do ANY fall clean up.  No dead-heading the late summer flowers, no cutting back peony stalks, no raking (although YA is a little bitty bit).

The second problem was last year’s mulch.  For reasons that pass understanding, I chose big chunky wood chips last year.  As we were spreading them about last spring, I was thinking I’d made a mistake, but it didn’t become clear how obnoxious these wood chips were until we were cleaning up this spring.  They didn’t seem to have broken down at all and were a mess to work around/with.

Then there was the Creeping Charlie fail.  Normally I do a great job of weeding the Creeping Charlie menace but last summer, I was busy in July, thinking I would just do a big push in August.  But, then…. well, you know.  My nemesis ground cover didn’t give a fig about my knees so there was way more weeding needed this year on that front before the mulch could go down.

I’m feeling quite relieved… there will, of course, be plenty of gardening going forward, but not the three/four hours a day grind we’ve been going through.  Time to enjoy!

When was the last time you “shot yourself in the foot”?

2026, Family, home, Mysteries, TV, Uncategorized

Power Washing Premonition

23 Comments

For quite some time, I avoided Hudson & Rex, a Canadian tv show about a cop and his partner, a beautiful German Shepherd Dog.  But I’ve gotten hooked; it shows on a couple of different cable stations so when I find it showing, I’m all in.

I noticed a couple of weeks ago that one of those two stations plays a few ads A LOT.  One of those is about a power washer.  You know the kind where some guy says “after using this, I threw out my old power washer”.  Blah blah blah.  I mute it a fair amount.

Imagine my surprise when a box was delivered yesterday and I came downstairs to find YA assembling a little power washer.  It isn’t the power washer from tv (thank goodness); she bought it with award credits from the merchandise side of her company’s business.  No money actually changed hands.

She had it out yesterday afternoon, doing the side of the garage and the driveway where we had all the mulch piled up for the last couple of weeks.  I guess it works pretty well; she informed me of a couple of other projects she is thinking about. 

I’m glad she likes to take on these kinds of projects because it would never have occurred to me but I am a little spooked that the tv seemed to predict the power washer entering our lives.

Any cleaning projects lately?

2026, animals, Automotive, Family, pets, Travel

Kitty Craze

26 Comments

Our initial plan for heading to St. Louis after Nonny’s passing was to take the dog and leave the cat at home with our fabulous neighbors coming over to feed her and take care of her box.  Then the dog passed and I knew immediately that I simply could not leave the cat at home.  I have a very bad history of pets passing while I’m gone (it’s happened twice).  We did think about boarding Nimue but even that was giving me anxiety. 

I bought a brand-new kitty carrier – bigger than the one we use for the block-and-a-half transport to the vet – and a new harness.  The plan was to let her out every 100 miles or so and I even brought an aluminum cake pan for a litter box and put some litter in it for traveling.  All of this turned out to be pointless.  Nimue had no interest in how comfortable we were trying to make her.  She didn’t make any noise, but the getting out of the carrier on a harness was not on her list of things to get done that day.  The first time we took her out, she sniffed around a bit, but more puffed up than we’ve ever seen her.  She wouldn’t eat a treat, wouldn’t drink any water, certainly didn’t do any business.  Crickets. 

We tried two more times with the same result.  After that we quit trying.  When we arrived at Nonny’s condo, she headed straight underneath Nonny’s bed.  I was pretty sure it would be time to go home before she came out.  For the next three days, we had to keep Nimue in her carrier for most of the day – with people coming in and out, boxing up stuff, tossing stuff – there was no way to keep her safe except in her carrier.  And when we were gone from the condo, we also kept her in the carrier.  Both my sisters, my niece and nephew all had keys and I didn’t want to run the risk that they might stop by for some reason and accidently let her out. 

All of this made me feel terribly guilty – after all, we were torturing her because of my anxiety.  She would probably have been happier at The Cat’s Meow than with us.  So, it was with a bit of joy that I came into Nonny’s bathroom late on Wednesday afternoon to find Nimue ensconced in the sink looking like butter would melt in her mouth.

On Friday, when we headed home, we put Nimue in the kitty carrier with a few treats, put her on the backseat and drove off.  We talked to her quite a bit during the day but never attempted to take her out – 9+ hours.   Within minutes of getting home, she had eaten, done some business and settled down on her kitty bed in my room.  Like nothing had ever happened.  Apparently no kitty ptsd here!

What do cats call mice on a skateboard?

2026, Family, Fantasy, Mysteries

The Box

35 Comments

Prologue.  Before YA and I went to St. Louis for my mom’s service and to clean out her condo, my middle sister mentioned that we should keep an eye out for Nonny’s wedding ring. She had stopped wearing it a few years back (due to her arthritis) and apparently it was now missing.  When we arrived and stopped at my sister’s house, she talked about it again.  Over the course of the next 24 hours, it was clear that she has also told everyone else in the family about the ring being missing. 

Everybody looked all over the “normal” places and one of the funnier parts of the week was all of us, one by one, discovering the plastic bag in the closet labeled “Wedding Ring”.  Unfortunately we all had our hopes dashed one at a time as it was discovered over and over again that it was an old quilt in the wedding ring pattern.  Shoot.

On Tuesday, in the back corner of a closet, we found “the box”.  It was a security box – a little surprising since it probably cost more than we figured Nonny would spend.  We were pretty sure we had all of Nonny’s important papers so were a little perplexed as to why she had a high-level security box.  It took us quite a while to find the keys as we had made quite a mess of her condo, emptying out drawers and closets to start sorting into piles of “toss, keep, donate”, and in that time, we had a whole lot of wild speculation going.  Were we all adopted and the papers were in there?  Witness protection proof?  Secret bank accounts?  All most all of us (there were ten of us in the condo at that point) were thinking we would find her wedding ring.

This is what we found when we opened the box:

As a non-believer, I was a little hesitant to unseal this envelope so my nephew pulled it out of the box.  He was a little wary as well.  There was one piece of paper in the envelope:

What?  Wars, Vaccumn (sic), David Surgery, Dorothy, Sunday School.  What?  Two hours of discussion.  The list was obviously made two and a half years ago.  That’s when David’s first surgery happened and was when Dorothy, her neighbor across the hall passed away; we think that wars, David and Dorothy were ideal candidates for God to keep an eye on.  But vacuum and the Sunday School class?  And why this single sheet in this single envelope labeled God and locked by itself in a very secure box?  I mean, Nonny was an inveterate list-maker.  We found several of them while we were cleaning but none of the others made the box.

During our talks, we came up with more wild ideas about why, why, why.  I won’t go into all of them here but I’ll tell you mine, simply because it got the most laughs.

Sometime in the future, 10 people (all strangers) will be staying at a fancy spa on a little island in the Caribbean.  Beginning the first night of their stay, two of these folks have envelopes delivered to their room.  In each envelope is a notecard with the word “wars”.  At breakfast, they all scratch their heads about it, but then later in the day, both folks are found murdered.  And of course, the only boat has been disabled and no one’s phones can get a connection off the island.  Too far to swim to the nearest island.  One the second night, two more folks get an envelope with a card waying “vacuum”.  You guessed it… both those folks are found dead during the next day.  The remaining six folks have one day to figure out the clues before the next deaths….

Any better thoughts?  Do you have a lock-box?  Will it be a mystery to your heirs?