Category Archives: home

2025, Family, home, pets, Uncategorized

Breaking Good Habits

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My mother had a sign on the kitchen wall when I was growing up that said “My house is clean enough to be healthy and dirty enough to be happy”. That has always been my attitude, too, as we tried to find a balance between clean and clutter.

Since July 2, the day our house went on the market, our motto has been “My house is spotlessly clean to try to impress prospective buyers, and happiness is secondary”.

Boy, is it a pain to keep the house clean and uncluttered so that at a moment ‘s notice we can be out the door with the dog so an agent can show the house. I have become really insistent to make the bed pillows uniformly plumped and stacked, the bath towels evenly folded and hung, and the kitchen counters and floor spotless and gleaming. There are no newspapers, magazines, or mail left out. I dust twice a week. All the dog toys are put in the toy bin instead of lying about. I wash the panes in the bay window regularly to remove dog nose prints. Husband keeps all the waste baskets empty, keeps the kitchen sink clear of dishes, and keeps his bathroom clean and tidy. We both have been weeding the gardens and rolling up the hoses as needed. We are exhausted!

I hope this level of cleaning doesn’t become too ingrained, so that I feel as though I am being remiss if I don’t keep this standard of neatness once we move to our new house. This is one habit I want to break.

What habits have you tried to change? How long would it take you to prepare for a showing of your current abode?

2025, Food, home, Uncategorized

Stocking Up

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Husband and I order lots of foods on-line that are imported. We get quite a bit from a Spanish importer, such as tomato sauces, olive oil, dried beans, serrano ham, and Spanish cheeses and pancetta. We also order pasta and parmesan cheese from an Italian importer, and gallon cans of Turkish olive oil from the Syrian grocery store in Fargo. We get beans from Rancho Gordo. I like to have a well stocked larder. We are really spoiled.

I find myself in a quandary now, due to the threat and uncertainty of tariffs, the fact that we are moving soon, and the fact that this is the the time of year to stock up on dried beans and other items as it is harvest time. There is a special bean from Spain called Tolosa beans, for example, that is essential to a soup we love to make, and is hard to find in the States after autumn. We are also trying to use up as much food we have currently so we don’t have to move it.

After the threats of tariffs emerged in the new year I ordered two gallons of Turkish olive oil and two half-gallons of Spanish olive oil before the price skyrocketed. We will have a lot of olive oil to move. Yesterday I ordered eight pounds of Rancho Gordo beans as we were short on some beans we cook often. They won’t take up too much room on the moving truck. I don’t plan to order any more food on-line at this point, but I am feeling increasingly militant about not letting politics interfere with my cooking or my finances.

How might tariffs impact your budget? What imported foods do you purchase? What foods do you make sure you have on hand?

2025, Family, home, Technology, Uncategorized

Photo Finish

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One benefit of moving is the chance to go through things and decide what is good to keep and what is good to go. I spent part of Saturday going through a closet in the guest bedroom that has all our photo albums in it. That was a daunting task.

I am the photographer in the family. Over the years we have kept, organized in albums, most of the many photos I took during our early marriage and of the children as they grew up. We also acquired Husband’s family photos that included photos of his childhood as well as old family photos from early 20th century. We got a lot of those after Husband’s father died. I have my own old family photos organized in another part of the house.

I found I still have the scrapbooks my mother put together of a trip to Europe I took as a high school senior with America’s Youth In Concert in 1976, and my years at Concordia. I had forgotten we had those, since I shoved them in our closet after my parents died 11 years ago. I am glad I made an executive decision then to get rid of most of the volumes of my own baby pictures. I haven’t missed them at all.

The whole problem with the guest room closet is that we have been shoving things in there and forgetting about them. I got rid of empty photo albums and other useless things on Saturday. Why, I asked myself, do we have three pairs of binoculars? I didn’t have the energy to sort through the fifteen or so photo albums that remain. That will be done at our leisure after we move.

Snce the advent of smartphones I no longer use my camera. Those photos are in “the Cloud”. I will have to figure out how to digitize the photos in the albums I decide to keep. Our son assured me it is easily done. We shall see if that is so.

How do you store your pre-smartphone photos? Any Baboon scrapbookers?

2025, Family, Food, home, Uncategorized

Practicing Acceptance

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(This is written somewhat tongue in cheek.)

One of the challenges of sharing a kitchen with Husband is his extreme fussiness regarding the foods he cooks and prepares. He has many preconceived expectations as to what goes with what, and is unhappy if the combinations aren’t exactly the way he wants them. When he seasons a dish, he spends quite a bit of time tasting and adding this and that til it is just right in his mind. I can’t tell the difference.

The same goes for his fussiness in pairings of different foods. I can usually put up with his demands for just the right main course with just the right sides. It is a little more difficult now that we are trying to empty our freezers before we move. We have agreed, for example, that we aren’t going to buy any more sausage, brats, or ground meat until the stuff we have is gone. There are a lot of sausages to be used up.

The other day I was pretty exasperated with him for stopping at the butcher shop and buying some ring bologna and summer sausage. I reminded him of all the brats and other sausage that we had that would work just as well as bologna. He insisted that he had to have the bologna because that is always what he has with the particular side dish he was going to have that evening. I told him that we would never get through the food we already had if he keeps this up, and that he might have to change some of his expectations for meals if we are to reduce the food in the freezers. He sighed and stated in a somewhat martyred tone that he would just have to start practicing acceptance regarding our meals. Husband says he owns his culinary idealism.

I am fortunate to be married to someone who loves to cook and loves good food. I just hope he doesn’t get too distressed as he has to change his ideas, at least temporarily, regarding our meals.

What do you have to practice acceptance of? Do you have inviolable expectations for some meals and food pairings?

2025, Food, home, Uncategorized

A Plethora Of Peaches

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Last week was fraught with baking. On July 26 the peach man arrived. He is a guy from Mott, ND, about 50 miles to the southwest of us who spends his summers driving out to Washington and picking dark red and Ranier cherries, and Cling and Freestone peaches, and driving them back to towns in southeast Montana and southwest North Dakota. He sells them in the mall parking lot in our town. The Freestone peaches are the best. We bought half a crate of them. It was very important for my parents to get a crate of peaches in the late summer and gobble them as fast as we could. I continue the tradition.

The peaches went into paper grocery bags and ripened in three days, all at the same time. It was another mantra in my family that it was a sin to let food spoil, so I set to making peach crumble, peach upside-down cake, and a pasta salad with peach, corn and tomatoes. and we ate the rest on Grape Nuts and ice cream. Husband will eat the remaining four peaches on cottage cheese.

We only buy peaches from the guy from Mott. He will come around in a few weeks with cherries from the Flathead Lake area of Montana. We will get them, too. It is unfortunate that Mott has been known in the area for decades as “Mott, the spot that God forgot”. I have no idea why. I think a more apt description would be “Mott, the spot where fruit is hot”.

What were the important traditions you grew up with? What was the town you grew up in noted for?

2025, Family, home, Uncategorized

New Beginnings

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Husband and I find ourselves exhausted these days. We are sorting through our stuff, packing some and throwing some out. We also are at our jobs finishing the last of our professional work, keeping up the house and garden, and going through the work of selling one home and buying another. Husband commented that we are living in the past, present, and future all at once.

I have tried to imagine what it will be like once we move to our new community. I haven’t lived there for almost 50 years. There are still quite a few high school classmates and other people I know there, and I have been thinking how I want to reintegrate into the community. I think it would be a mistake to live in the past, as I am not the same person I was 50 years ago, and I doubt they are the same people they were. We integrated ourselves into our ND community 38 years ago by going to community events, joining a church, and through our jobs. I hope the we can have the same new beginning in our new home.

How have you integrated yourself into the communities you have lived in? How are you different now than you were 50 years ago?

100 Words, 2025, Fantasy, home, Mysteries, Technology

Random Robot?

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Imagine my surprise as I was heading out to run some errands and discovered the little robot vacuum at the back porch door.

As I carried it back into the house and hit the “dock” button so it would return home, I felt a little bad.  Was I keeping it from its freedom?  Had it been trying to escape from the onerous duty of trying to keep the fur and dust at bay in our house?  Did it hear the clarion call of others of its kind?  Was it a quashed robot uprising? 

What do you think?  Should I have given it its freedom?

2025, Family, gardening, home, Music, Uncategorized

Bob

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I can’t remember a more rainy July than the one we are having this year. In addition to keeping the house interior spotless, we are intent on getting rid of garden weeds. The weeds have been horrendous because of the rain.

Weeding for us entails crawling through the garden beds on our hands and knees with dangerous looking implements to remove the weeds, and large buckets to put the removed weeds into. We rarely use herbacides. Husband is currently limping around with a walking stick due to a strained knee muscle from weeding. With apologies to Bob Dylan, this song keeps going through my head every time I pull weeds.

Buckets of weeds,

Buckets of shears.

Got all these buckets coming

Out of my ears.

Buckets of bind weeds in the yard.

Why does weeding always have to be so hard?

I have not seen the new Bob Dylan movie. Husband reminds me we saw him in concert at the Bismarck Civic Center about 30 years ago. He only had a bass player and a drummer with him. I don’t remember the concert very well. I never was a big Dylan fan, but some tunes just stay with you.

Did you ever see Bob Dylan live? What Dylan tunes stick with you? What is your weeding strategy? At what age is a person too old to weed?

2025, Family, gardening, home, Uncategorized

Swing Time

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There has always been a vision in my mind for the backyard.  Over the years we’ve added a patio, then a little bigger patio.  A table and chairs for the patio.  An umbrella for the table.  A friend of mine gave YA a fire pit years ago.  Another friend gave me a swing when they moved to an apartment.  Of course, there are all the flowers and the bales.  About 15 years ago I had enough credits at work to purchase a hammock, which I installed toward the back of the yard.  Over the years I’ve had to replace the fabric several times as well as having to MacGyver the suspension a couple of times when the fabric wasn’t exactly the right size.

YA has always detested the hammock.  First is that it is a collection spot for leaves and twigs that come off the trees.  Then there is the issue of having to mow around it, requiring moving it about.  YA thinks it makes the backyard look “cluttered”.  When I suggested we get right of her Adirondack chairs and little table, she didn’t respond well.  She has a point.  We use the Adirondacks quite a bit and truth be told, I probably only lay in the hammock once or twice a summer.  It’s not actually all that comfortable and I get impatient really fast.

As I’m pursuing my pre-downsizing project, I decided that I really needed to pay attention to the reality of the hammock instead of my emotional attachment to the idea of a hammock.  To that end, YA and I carried it down to the boulevard.  When we got down to the boulevard with it, YA had to shore up my determination.  The miracle of my street worked as usual – within an hour someone was taking it apart to shove in their truck. 

I thought I might be unhappy in the first few days after the hammock was gone but that hasn’t happened.  That says to me that I made the right decision.

Tell me about something you have an emotional attachment to. 

2025, animals, home, Uncategorized

Bully

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The Mourning Dove in the header photo built a nest on the light next to our front door. She is a sweet little thing who has been sitting on successive eggs all summer. She never leaves messes on the deck, and sits on the nest even when we sit out on the front deck. We consider her our spirit animal.

One of the first real estate agents who showed our house told our real estate agent that we needed to get rid of that nest. Our agent, a real animal lover, reluctantly relayed the information to us, and said she didn’t agree that the nest had to go. She is just ethically bound to let us know comments from other agents. We told her that as long as we own the house the bird stays. She was quite happy with that news.

Ever since we have had our house on the market we have scrupulously cleaned, patched, dusted, vacuumed, scrubbed and tried to make the place look really good. I admit the kitchen and bathroom cupboard fronts need a good cleaning, but it isn’t all that noticeable, and we are having some nice women in later this week to do that as well as scrub the kitchen ceiling above the stove to get rid of grease stains. The agent who complained about the bird showed our house a second time, and then told our agent that our house needed a really good “deep cleaning”.

Our agent relayed this to us, but stated that she didn’t agree, and thought we were immaculate housekeepers. She added that she was never going to allow the complainer into her house. Our agent then told us the complaining agent lived just a few houses from us across the street, and that the complainer had also told our agent that she wanted to make sure that the people who bought our house were people she would want as neighbors. Her house, a new build, is always perfectly landscaped and pristine. There are children, but we never see them.

Well! I don’t know this person and have never met her, but since all the agents who show the house leave their business cards, I know her name. I asked some work colleagues if they knew her. Their responses were really fascinating. One of my coworkers had actually worked in the same long term care facility with the agent several years ago, and knew her sister in law really well, and described her as a terrible bully both at work and in her family. Another coworker stated she had heard awful things about the agent, all related to being a bossy, judgemental bully. Living in a small town has its benefits.

I admit I feel bullied by this person, but I am not taking her criticisms to heart, and I hope that whoever buys our house are even more radical gardeners than we are, and set up bird feeders and bird houses all over the property!

Who have been the bullies in your life? How did you deal with them?