Category Archives: Family

2022, books, education, Family, Kids, Mysteries, Uncategorized

Chip off the Old Block

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I’m a little verklempt.

I’ve always been a reader.  I have a photo of myself “reading” to my little sister when I was about three.  I knew all my books by heart, even when to turn the page; many folks thought I was reading well before I actually was.  For all of my school life, I was reading above my grade level.  When I was in fifth grade, I pulled “Hunchback of Notre Dame” off the school library shelf and the librarian told me it was “too old for me”.  Like waving a red flag in front of a bull.

I’m also a serial reader; there is a book on CD in the car, audiobook on my laptop and assorted books in the bedroom and the living room.   Right now I’m reading Eragon by Christopher Paolini (dragon book – thanks for the nudge MiG), Elementary She Read by Vicki Delaney (murder mystery), I am Thinking of You My Darling by Vincent McHugh (science fiction recommended by our Steve), Selected Poems by Amy Lowell (she was a fairly well-known poet in her day, writing at the turn of the 20th century) and finally The Peacocks of Baboquivari by Erma Fisk (memoir of a woman who lived alone for five months banding birds for The Nature Conservancy – I have NO clue where I got the idea about this one). 

But why am I verklempt, you ask?  Because I did not raise a reader.  Saying this out loud is a little like committing hari-kari.  I read to her constantly when she was young, she had a good library of books, she learned to read easily but to no avail; she has just never wanted to read.  Right after Christmas I was amazed to see her toting a book around the house. Some kind of inspirational/self-help/current events thing.  I teared up a little.  Then three weeks ago she came to me and asked if she could use my Amazon account to buy.. wait for it… books!  Now what you need to know is that asking to use my account is YA’s code for “will you buy it for me”.  “OF COURSE YOU CAN USE MY ACCOUNT” I yelled as I hugged her.  When the books showed up on Friday I was so excited — as I was taking the photo, you could have heard her eyes roll from a block away.  She did tell me that I could read the books as well if I wanted to.  I didn’t have the heart to tell her I had already read two of them.

Have you infected anybody with the reading bug?  What are you reading right now?

2022, Family, Games, home, Kids, Media, sports, TV, Uncategorized

You Didn’t Want THAT To Happen!

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Often times in my play therapy room, a toy is inadvertently broken. The child almost always feels horrible, and my stock response is “You didn’t want THAT to happen”, and there is no scolding and we move on.

Saturday, our three year old grandson and a female friend the same age were pretend sword fighting in the family room of our son’s house. Our grandson likes to pretend he is Darth Vader. (He has never seen a Star Wars movie, but knows about Vader.) His friend inadvertently wacked the large screen TV with the wooden block she was using as a sword, and the whole screen shattered. That girl packs a good punch. I am glad she wacked the TV and not our grandson. Our grandson announced at Christmas that he was going to marry her.

Son and DIL were having friends over for a Super Bowl party yesterday so a new TV was hurriedly purchased. I think that any future sword fighting will take place outside. We don’t want THAT to happen again.

What do you remember breaking as a child? Did you ever have any serious accidents? Have you ever participated in fencing or the martial arts?

2022, Family, Food, Kids, Uncategorized, Words

Creative Addresses

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Daughter’s BFF is in grad school in a southern state getting her MFA in vocal performance. I have known her since she was in Grade 1, and consider her a second daughter. She has a beautiful voice, and recently sang in a lead role in a production of The Bartered Bride. She is a cook and loves to bake. She didn’t get a Christmas box of goodies from us, but I baked some of her favorite cookies and sent her a Valentines box yesterday filled with the cookies as well as cocoa mix, interesting pasta, pasta seasoning, fancy pizza crust flour, and a Mr. Rogers figurine who speaks in his actual voice about being wonderful for who you are and asks about your neighbors if you push the button on the trolley.

Her street address is IOOF St. I think this is one of the oddest street addresses I have seen. The clerk at the UPS store sure thought it was odd. I am curious if Baboons know what IOOF stands for, and what other odd or interesting streets names they are aware of. I have my grandfather’s OF sword.

What are some interesting street names you have encountered? What street names would you like to invent? Know any OF’s? What are your memories of Mr. Rogers?

2022, Family, home, Kids, Mysteries, sports, Uncategorized

Olympic Multi-Tasking

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YA cares way more about her hair, her make-up and her clothing than I care about mine.  I think I’ve said here before that I don’t even own make-up and I only take the blow dryer to my hair about once a year.  And these days, wearing a pair of jeans instead of sweatpants is really dressing up.  So it didn’t surprise me when she wanted a pair of really sharp “hair scissors” for her birthday recently.  I assumed it would figure greatly into her quest to rid her world of split ends.

On Saturday we were watching the Olympics (the new mixed speed skate relay is fascinating) when she turned the scissors on me.  She’d been hinting (rather aggressively) the last few weeks that my hair is getting too long and scraggly.  Although I was a little worried she would chop off more than I wanted, which she has done before, when she brought it up again, I relented. 

I should have known that wouldn’t be the end of it.  Then she wanted me to blow dry it – I told her if she wanted my hair dry right away, she would need to do that herself.  After she spent way too long (in my estimation) drying and fluffing my strands, she decided that she needed to bring the straightener into my room as well because my ends were “curling too much”. 

All of this cutting and blowing and straightening took about 45 minutes and I will admit that I’m not the most patient.  For some reason that I don’t understand, the commercials showing on the tv coverage of the Olympics were bothering me — and more than usual since I was already ramped up about the hair fuss.  To combat my annoyance I grabbed a book off my bedstand and muted the tv.

So there we were, watching the Olympics, reading and running a hair salon in my bedroom all at once.  Multi-tasking at it’s best!

Do you have a favorite winter sport?

books, Family, Fantasy, Movies, Music, Radio, Uncategorized

The Age of Aquarius

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I was listening to the Broadway channel in the car on my way home from work the other day when The Age of Aquarius came on, a recording from the most recent Broadway revival of Hair. The Broadway cast recording came out in 1969, and I remember buying it at the record store in Sioux Falls not long after. I was about 12, I think. I never saw a production of it until I saw the Milos Forman movie from 1979.

Our public library had a set of Broadway Yearbooks that I just loved to look through. It was so fun to read about these productions through the decades. I read all about Hair, and felt a sort of affinity to it, as my zodiac sign is Aquarius and it made me feel like I was part of the whole anti-war, hippie culture as a Middle School student from middle of nowhere Southwest Minnesota. My parents hated long hair on men and the anti-war protests, but they also hated the war, and never minded what books I read or what music I listened to. Oh, for the time when I could really believe in:

Harmony and understanding Sympathy and trust abounding
No more falsehoods or derisions
Golden living dreams of visions
Mystic crystal revelation
And the mind’s true liberation

Things like this musical and the popular music and literature of the times fueled my youthful idealism that I try to maintain at least a bit of in these most trying times.

What fueled your youthful idealism? What were your favorite Broadway musicals in the 1960’s and 1970’s? What did your parents think about your choices in dress, music, and literature when you were a teenager?

2022, animals, Family, Kids, pets, Uncategorized

New Arrival

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Well, Husband and I are expecting-a new puppy! Husband decided it had been too long (7 years) since we had a terrier in our home, and it was time for another. He did the AKC “What is the best dog for me” quiz, which told him it was an Airdale. Well, we are just too old for an Airdale, and he looked at photos of various terriers and fell immediately in love with the Cesky Terrier, a recognized Czech breed bred for eradicating vermin, originally developed from crossing a Scottie with a Sealyham.

I contacted three breeders who are members of the American Cesky Terrier Fanciers Association, and found one in Oklahoma who has eight puppies who will be ready in early May. All these people are responsible breeders who show their dogs and are very particular who their puppies go to. I have to complete a very detailed application, and we will have phone conversations so they feel we are the right people for their pup. May is a good time for us, as we will have travels over and can devote time to puppy training all summer. It is also good at this point in our lives with Husband’s part-time work schedule.

Getting a puppy is pretty similar to having a new baby in the house. I will expect to be exhausted in May. I think our cat will be very disgusted. It is fortunate that the Cesky Terrier is a very short dog who can’t jump very high.

What are your experiences with new puppies, kittens, or newborn humans? What are your experiences with adoption? Any advice how to integrate a cat and a terrier puppy in the same home?

Family, Technology, Uncategorized

Tailor Made

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Our son was the Best Man in a wedding last September. Instead of renting tuxedos, the Groom and all the Groomsmen had matching suits sewn by a Vietnamese tailor company that specializes in doing precise measurements virtually. Son just happened to be going through Kansas City where the headquarters is, so he got measured in person. Everyone else was measured via Zoom or something. The suits were of such good quality and fit so well (as well as being affordable) that he ordered a sports coat, some dress shirts, and five pairs of chinos from the company. He got them last week and they all fit beautifully. They are of very good quality.

Whan Husband and I married in the early 1980’s, we opted for a tailor made suit for him, too, instead of renting a tuxedo. Winnipeg at the time had many tailor shops, most run by tailors who had immigrated from Italy in the 1960’s. All the conversations between the workers were in Italian. It was fun for Husband to meet the guys who made his suit. We still have it, although it doesn’t fit anymore and is sadly out of style.

What are your experiences with tailors or seamstresses? What clothing have you rented? What are your memories of wedding clothes? What are Baboon experiences as tailors?

animals, Art, Family, pets

Faces, Animal and Human

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Today’s post comes from Clyde.

As a farm and woods child I was struck by how animals know to look humans in the face. Or is it just the eyes? Not always easy to tell. Maybe it is obvious for animals to look at our face, but I have never been sure it is. Maybe they are looking at the source of our voice, but the few woods animals with which I had close contact looked at my face and I was being silent. It was the cultural norm in my family to talk to the animals. Many insist that our pets pick up our moods. I think they probably read us well. Not sure they respond to our moods as people believe. I think we anthropomorphize their behavior more than we realize.

The human brain is hard-wired about faces. We memorize them extremely well. When researchers make minute changes in the key landmarks in a photo of someone their subjects know, the subjects recognize something is incorrect. This is why portraiture is so difficult. Maybe all mammals are hard-wired about faces.

As if to throw mud in our faces about this, some eastern Europeans studied the behavior of the brains of our dogs as they encounter us, watching to see how much of the brain lights up on scanners when they interact with us. Their studies show that the dog brain is no more responsive to the owner’s face than to the back of the head. This so far is a one-off study, needed other studies to duplicate, or not, their results.

But it makes me wonder. How much of our truth about our pets is in our heads and not in theirs, so to speak. The great science writer Stephen Jay Gould wrote very often about how scientists’ protocols of study and analysis of results produce the results they want to discover. Objectivity is not really ever very true.

Consider these three faces.

We certainly read all sorts of things into these three faces. The tuxedo cat is my son’s Neon and the St. Bernard is his son’s Melvin. The cat with the fancy ruffled shirt is my daughter’s Bean. (If you are wondering why the dog lacks the usual jowliness of the breed, it is because he is only a year old. The jowliness, my son tells me, starts to develop at that point. And both his parents are small for the breed and are not very jowly. He is small at 120 pounds.) What are you reading in their faces? They are just sitting there looking at their owners, maybe wondering what that thing is they hold up in front of them so often.

Amazon Prime has three series of a competition to find in Great Britain the Portrait Painter of the Year. You watch several painters painting one of three famous people. At each of four rounds they pick one painter to go onto the next round, and then they pick a winner. The three judges are very biased against anything very literal. Yet somehow the best four can capture the face very well in less literal modes. I suspect however the failed literalists get the most commission work. Sandy, oddly, is fascinated by these shows. So we watch them together in the afternoon when I am over there. No matter how you look at it, portraits are a fascinating topic in art history.

All you pet lovers, go ahead and disagree with me about your pets responding to you.

How objective do you think you can be?

Do you have a favorite great portrait or portrait painter?

How would you want your portrait to be painted?

2022, animals, Business, Family, Farming Update, Movies, Mysteries, Nature, Seasons, Uncategorized

The Principle

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Today’s farm/township update comes to us from Ben.

Kelly and I saw “Come from Away” last Sunday. It was fantastic. In the lobby we heard a guy walk up to his wife and say, “My glasses fogged up and I was following the wrong lady in a red jacket.”

It was so cold! How cold was it? It was so cold I wore sleeves. It was so cold I saw a duck standing on one foot. It was so cold the handle on the water hydrant by the barn wouldn’t move. Then it warmed up for a day and the chickens came out, and the hydrant worked, and the ducks just looked at their corn.

In the winter, we get pheasants coming in to eat the corn I throw out for the ducks. Each year there’s a couple more and this year it’s 9 or 10. It’s pretty cool. The crows have learned there’s free food here too. Kelly doesn’t like the crows.

Here’s a picture of some dark colored blobs down there. Those are pheasants.

I’m on our local townboard. Been on there since 1998. We have one house on a major road that is city on both sides of this house, and there is 100’ of sidewalk in front of that house. I don’t know if it’s a ‘walking path’ or ‘bike path’ or ‘sidewalk’ but It’s the only sidewalk in the township. (because the rest of the township is rural or subdivisions that don’t have sidewalks). The city clears the walking path out in this area because there are no home frontages here, but they have been skipping that 100’ in front of this house. And the property owner has never plowed it. As it’s in the middle of this stretch of path, it’s a problem for people using the path. I learned all this last winter when I got an angry phone call from a city resident who lives out there and uses this path. I didn’t even know it was a township problem. I didn’t know the homeowner and I didn’t know if he had health issues or what reasons there might be for him not clearing the sidewalk. Took me a few days to connect with him, during which, the county snowplow just pushed all the snow back off the sidewalks and so the path was open. Turns out the guy just refuses to clear the walk on principle. Huh. He figures he didn’t ask for this sidewalk, so he’s not going to plow it. We, as the township, don’t have a sidewalk ordinance and we don’t want to make one for 100’ of sidewalk when we have 33 miles of roads to deal with, therefore we couldn’t force him to clear it. And the city says it’s not theirs, so they don’t want to clear it (even though they’re clearing a mile on both sides of it). Last winter the weather warmed up and the problem went away.

This winter I’ve been watching it as I drive by this area. I’ve seen the guy out there with his small tractor and blower doing his driveway, but he still isn’t doing the sidewalk. And I can’t decide if I admire him for sticking to his principles or if he’s being a jerk. And the city now is clearing it as they’re driving through there anyway. Which makes sense, but I could also see them leaving it… on principle.

Twenty-five years ago, just after I got on the Townboard, we repaved some roads in a subdivision. One resident never paid his share believing no one would come and tear out the road. Jokes on him; the company DID tear up 100’ of blacktop, leaving a section of gravel on this road. Didn’t take long for him to pay up and the road to get fixed. Maybe the neighbors convinced him.

We have a mystery going on at our townhall. It’s an old building, looks like a one room school. (Maybe it was the school that got blown across the road in the great tornado of 1883, or maybe it was always a townhall; depends who you ask and what maps you choose to believe).

For the last 3 years we’ve been picking up Phillips vodka bottles in the gravel parking lot. I wish LJB was still around; we need a good story for this! We have our suspicions… once a week, there will be 1, 2, or sometimes even 3 vodka bottles. Very few are empty. Some have never been opened! Most will be between ½ and 2/3’s full. We’ve got a collection in the hall now of 14 bottles, and there are a lot that have been picked up and thrown out and don’t make it to the hall collection. The hall is at the intersection of two major roads. People park there in summer and ride bikes or jog. A school bus stops there. Sheriff deputies park there to do reports. 

Why are you not finishing the vodka? And why are you leaving them there? Bonus points if you can tie in the glasses fogged up guy.  

Family, Food, gardening, Travel, Uncategorized

Hotsy Totsy

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Last week I made Joanne’s Southwest Salad, a corn, black bean, sweet red pepper, jalapeño, and quinoa mélange that tastes like health and purity. The recipe is in our Kitchen Congress folder.

I usually add the whole jalapeño, seeds and all, but this time I scraped the seeds out of one half of it with my fingers, and added some powdered Chimayo to the mix. It was nicely warm, but not too hot. The Chimayo powder is hot.

I am a life long nail biter, and I was surprised how the jalapeño oils got under most of my fingernails on both hands and made my typical daily nail biting an unpleasant experience the whole rest of the day. I had a choice of being a nervous wreck or having an unpleasantly hot tongue. I opted for the hot tongue.

Our son and Dil love spicy food, and put Sriracha in much of what they eat. Son toyed with Ghost peppers for a while, but decided habaneros are just the right amount of heat for him, and they are easy for him to grow in pots and freeze so that he can throw them into dishes all winter.

We are rather enthusiastic pepper growers and will grow a variety of hot peppers (Chimayo and New Mexico Joe Parker mild red Anaheims), as well as four kinds of sweet red peppers this summer. I am a medium weight for heat. The hottest food I ever ate was my first introduction to East Indian cooking at a Pakistani restaurant in London. I was 21, and the food was so good but so hot I cried all the while I ate it, but I couldn’t stop eating as it tasted so wonderful.

What is the hottest food you can tolerate? What are your favorite curries? Are you a nail chewer?