Category Archives: home

Family, History, home, Kids, Uncategorized, work

Being in the Right place

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Last week as I was struggling with my usual insomnia, I started to do a room  by room inventory in my mind, visualizing each part of the house and deciding what furniture we would take with us when we moved, and what we would discard. I haven’t done that before, and I have no idea why I did it last week.  We have no firm moving date.  It could be as long as  five years  before we  leave here.   Doing that inventory sure didn’t help my sleep, since I got increasingly anxious about all the stuff we have, and how we could possibly move it.  The next day we got a New Yorker and wouldn’t you know, there was an article about a woman who decided that  her possessions were too burdensome and  her actions to get rid of the unnecessary.  I believe that both these incidents were signs from the Cosmos to sit up and pay attention and prepare for action. 

Husband and I had a discussion the other day about our tenure out here, and how we seem have been in the right place at the right time for us and for the communities we have worked with/for.  We both felt, though, that it was time for us to seriously think about that time ending.  Husband had just returned from doing some expert witness testimony for the Tribal Court in New Town,  his first time on the Reservation since March, 2020.  He felt good about his testimony, but decided that he really didn’t want to make that 100 mile journey any more.   I talked about how useful and needed I still felt at my agency, but how exhausting it was getting for me. Both of us are sick to death of the constant attention in the state to extraction industries like oil and coal.  The isolation from family is feeling keener.  

We have lived here for 34 years.  Given our family health history, we could both live another 30 years, and I really don’t want to spend all those years here.  I think I am going to start getting rid of the unnecessary stuff in the basement.   We may not move for several years, but I want to be ready.

When have you been in the right place at the right time?  How did you know? When did you know it was time to go somewhere else?  

animals, Family, home, Kids, pets, Stories, Uncategorized

The Pacifier

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With the nice weather over the weekend, my nextdoor neighbors got their chalk out and went to work creating a village on their driveway (designed by Margot, who is 6).  When I stepped outside to appreciate it, Matilda (the almost 2-year old) informed me that she had a new bed.  Turns out it is just her crib but with the side down and a bed rail attached, but she was happy about it.  There was more big news… last night was her first night without her pacifier.  It was apparently a trade – the pacifier for the big girl bed.  I laughed and thought about my experience with pacifiers when YA was little.

When I went to China to pick up YA, there was a big list of “suggested” items that I take with me; a pacifier was on the list so I dutifully packed it.  YA, even as Tiny Baby, was not interested.  After a couple of futile attempts, I stuck it back in the duffel bag.  Nonny was at the airport when we got back to Minneapolis and she stayed for a week or so while I got my feet underneath me.  Nonny was absolutely sure that if she presented the pacifier enough times, Tiny Baby would accept it and all would be right with the world.  (It’s funny looking back because Tiny Baby was not fussy, there really wasn’t a great need.)  But Nonny kept trying and every time TB rejected a nook, it would end up on the side table or a chair or someplace where it became irresistible to someone else:  Baron. 

Baron was an 85-pound ball of fluffy, sweet, calm Samoyed.  He wasn’t the brightest bulb but he was sure that these pacifiers that Nonny kept leaving around were meant for him.  Of course as soon as he absconded with one, it became off-limits for the baby; slowly but surely over that week, we went from having a collection of 10 baby pacifiers to a collection of 10 dog pacifiers.  If ever there was a dog that didn’t need a pacifier, it was Baron.  He had self-soothing down to an art.  Eventually he chewed them all enough that I had to throw them away and we never had any more, since Tiny Baby didn’t need or like them.  Nonny wasn’t amused but I thought it was hilarious.

Do you have any self-soothing practices?  Are they working well for you?

2021, Business, Family, home, Uncategorized

BestSeller

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When I was a kid, the only things I ever sold were Kool-Aid (from a card table on the sidewalk) and Girl Scout Cookies every year.  We didn’t have school fundraisers back then and I don’t ever remember my family having a garage sale.

But YA is a selling whiz. She has all the apps and programs down pat and excels at the various online ways to get paid and how to ship things or if something needs to sold locally.  She says she doesn’t use “C_list” anymore because everybody wants to bargain the price down to nothing.  We have a small stockpile of boxes in a corner of the attic that she uses for sending things off to various buyers.

She also has a good eye for what might sell and how much she might get for it.  She is careful with her shoes and clothing and likes to have what is current and trendy, so many of the boxes shipped off are her used clothing. Outdated electronics have gone out as well as a bike that she had outgrown.  The big surprise this past year were two corduroy Apple baseball caps that I’ve had in my closet for decades; I got them from a supplier years ago when I was still working for Software, Etc.  I was cleaning out stuff last summer, getting it ready for Goodwill/Value Village when YA spied them.  She sold one for $150 and the other for $140.  I was gobsmacked.  Yesterday she sold off a PS4 game station that I bought her years ago but which went mostly unused.  It works perfectly well and her buyer thought it was a good deal at $250.  Again I was amazed as I would probably have put it out at a garage sale for 10 bucks.

So I’m letting her be in charge of selling off the household bit by bit.  If it’s an item that is clearly mine (hats) or that I initially paid for (PS4) then we split the money.  Right now I’m trying to get her interested in putting some of my old stamp sets on the market. 

What chore/job do you like to offload on others?

Family, Food, home, Uncategorized

Culinary Rescue

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Last weekend’s discussion about the contents of our freezers prompted me to make  spinach quiche on  Saturday. I had pie dough in the freezer along with the correct amount of frozen spinach from the garden. What could go wrong?

Those who don’t learn history are doomed to repeat it,  and I certainly repeated it with the quiche.  I like to use Julia Child’s quiche recipe from Mastering The Art of French Cooking.  It calls for an 8 inch pan with a removable bottom, or else a flan ring.  A flan ring is an 8 inch in diameter by 1 inch high metal ring with no bottom. You use a cookie sheet as the bottom.  You just line the flan ring/cookie sheet combo with the crust. I don’t have a pan with a removable bottom,  but I have a flan ring and I have used it for years. I almost always have trouble with it, though, but I never replaced it despite all the trouble it caused.  It works beautifully if you have just the right pie dough for your quiche, one with a higher proportion of butter to lard or shortening.  It makes for a sturdier crust.

My current favorite pie dough recipe has equal amounts of butter and lard. It is really flaky. I rolled it  out, lined the flan ring, made a lovely fluted rim,  and set to partially baking it preparatory to pouring in the filling.  A few minutes after I put the crust in the oven, the entire flaky and tender fluted rim fell off onto the cookie sheet. My pastry was too delicate.  That left me with a partially baked crust about three quarters of an inch high and no rim to keep the filling from overflowing.  Not to be daunted, I rolled some leftover dough scraps and remade a serviceable rim that I attached to the partially baked crust after it cooled.  I  filled the quiche shell with the delectable filling, and put it in the oven.

I neglected to consider that if my fluted rim was too delicate, so was the bottom edge of the crust. As usually happens when I don’t use the  sturdier crust recipe, the filling started to leak out of the bottom of the crust and onto the cookie sheet.  I felt like the little Dutch boy plugging the dike as I plastered dough scraps at the junction of the cookie sheet and the flan ring where the leaks seemed to be the biggest.  After a bit the eggs and cream started to thicken with the heat, and I suppose only half a cup or so leaked out. The finished quiche was delicious,  but the drama that went into making it! (There was even more drama during all of this  because before I baked the quiche, husband  finished an 11 lb pork shoulder in the oven after he smoked it, and I didn’t realize that it had leaked fat all over the bottom of the oven,  and billows of smoke poured out of the oven every time I had to open it to attend to the crust. We had to open all the windows to let the smoke out. The pork was delicious, too, but what a mess!)

I threw the flan ring in the garbage and ordered an 8 inch quiche pan with a removable bottom. Then we cleaned the oven.

What are some of your memorable disasters? 

Fantasy, home, Movies, Stories, Uncategorized

A Watery Surprise

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For many years, I was a Marvel / DC movie fan.  Not a rapid fan, mind you, but enough of a fan to watch the movies.  And not enough of a fan to pay money for those movies…. that’s another story.  The last few years have soured me however.  I never could keep the X-Men timeline straight and the movies became darker and darker.  When I started to see spoilers about who would die in the last big Avenger extravaganza, I decided it was time to take a pass. 

Over the weekend, I was surfing around the on-demand movies and saw the Aquaman had once again jumped to the top of the list.  I turned it on with a little trepidation, telling myself that I could always just turn it off – not like I had and expensive ticket stub in my pocket or a full tub of popcorn on my lap.

It was a classic underdog good guy against bad guys who just seem to be bad because they can. Aquaman’s human name is Arthur, which was a bit endearing, and I managed to suspend all sense of reality.

But the big surprise was the lead female character, Mera.  She was intelligent, strong, driven and a magnificent warrior.  In every fight scene (and there were many) she held her own and in fact, saved Aquaman at one point.  Never did she scream, faint, shrink back behind the hero or need to be rescued by him.  Towards the end of the final battle, she is the one who plants a whopper kiss on him, not the other way around.   The only other female character (Arthur’s mother) was also fabulous – a warrior queen who made the ultimate sacrifice for her family.

It’s too bad that there were only two of these splendid characters.  The rest of the movie was fairly predictable, although it had a few minutes of wry humor here and there.  It was entirely because of the two women that I can say I enjoyed the overall film. 

Tell me about your favorite women movie characters!

2021, books, History, home, Media, News, Stories, Uncategorized, work

Hometown Fame

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I was never so proud to be from Luverne, MN when it was chosen to be featured in The War documentary.  Luverne wasn’t famous for much of anything before that, except for being where Fred Manfred lived, and for its marching band festival.  It really boosted the town and seemed to make the residents more cohesive somehow

Recently,  two North Dakota towns have been highlighted in the media-Minot in a Feb. 15-22 New Yorker article by Atul Gawande , and Williston in the book The Good Hand (2021) by Michael Patrick F. Smith. Gawande is a surgeon and public health researcher who was part of  the Biden Transition Advisory Board for COVID 19.  He wrote about the struggle in Minot city council over a mask mandate, and all the the antimask rhetoric and hysteria that swept through the community, a community that was severely impacted by the virus.

Smith’s book highlights what it was like to work in Williston during the oil boom, and what he writes about is pretty awful.  He is a a folksinger, actor, and playwright who left Brooklyn  to experience life on the rigs. Much of the book is about his own self discovery, but I don’t think many people would want to move to Williston after reading the book. I wonder what folks in Williston and Minot are thinking about all the publicity.

What is your hometown famous for? What would you write about in a book or article about your hometown or places you have called home?

home, Movies, Mysteries, TV, Uncategorized

Holes

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I’m not a critical movie watcher.  You’ll guess this when I tell you that my favorites include How to Steal a Million Dollars, Sneakers, Laura, People Will Talk, Dial M for Murder, Sahara, Hopscotch, Moonstruck….  If you can find any pattern here, let me know.

Last week I came across Ghostbusters (the original) and although I wouldn’t call it a favorite, I like it enough to watch it again.  About 2/3 of the way through the movie, Bill Murray’s character shows up for a date at the apartment of the Sigourney Weaver character.  She has been taken over by an evil spirit and is waiting for the “key master”.  Bill Murray calls his ghostbuster colleague and during the conversation he says “I’ve got her whacked up with 300 cc of Thorazine”.  I’ve heard the line before in previous viewings but never thought much about it.  Now I’m thinking “why does this guy have Thorazine on him to go on a date”?  (And, of course, he’s a psychologist, so where would he even GET Thorazine?)

This made me think about other plot holes that I’ve willfully ignored over the years.  In To Catch a Thief, Cary Grant gets dropped off at the beach club at Cannes in swim trunks.  How does he get home with no clothing, no shoes, no money?

In Sneakers, all the bad guys are hanging out at their fake company in the middle of the night but for some reason the head bad guy isn’t hanging out in his office (which the good guys are breaking into).  Why?

In Sahara, the bad guy is about to blow up his solar energy plant and is escaping in his helicopter.  His henchman is left behind and instead of wondering why his boss has abandoned him and trying to get away from the plant, he’s still trying to throw Matthew McConaughey off the tower. Why?

In Dial M for Murder, Ray Milland says to Swann (the man he wants to murder his wife) that they only attended college together for a year, since Milland started during Swann’s final year.  Then Milland pulls a photo off the wall, saying it’s a reunion photo and it shows Milland and Swann sitting at a table together.  Why would they be at the same reunion if they were not in the same class?

Obviously these plot holes don’t keep me from watching these movies (repeatedly); I guess I get more from the movies than the logic of plot.  But I do wonder how many plot holes I’ve missed over the years.

Do plot holes bother you?  Can you watch something after you caught an error?

Business, Family, home, Kids, Music, Radio, Stories, Uncategorized

Radio In My Life

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Today’s post comes to us from Steve.


I often think about the impact radio has had on my life. We all are shaped by different influences, but radio has been a major presence in my life.

When I was a kid, we had just one radio in our home. It was a gorgeous cherrywood console that graced our living room. Listening to it was often a family activity.

Then radios became less expensive and smaller, enough so that I had a radio of my own. That meant I could choose the music I heard, a major step in my personal growth. I’ll never forget that winter night in 1956 when I first heard Elvis sing Heartbreak Hotel. I was blown away by the angst it expressed, and from that moment on my taste in music diverged from the taste of my parents. I became a great fan of Top Forty pop music, something I listened to on a small Bakelite AM radio in my bedroom. Later the popular life was revolutionized by the availability of inexpensive, portable transistor radios.

When I began grad school, there was a radio station called WLOL broadcasting classical music. I planned my whole day around that station’s schedule. When Bill Kling launched KSJN as a classical music station in the Twin Cities, I became a listener on the first day it hit the air. That classical station had a weird eclectic show in the morning, weird because the host, Garrison Keillor, played an idiosyncratic hodgepodge of country, folk and world music. I was hooked. Keillor later began chatting with his studio engineer, Tom Keith, and I became fanatical about the show. It was the way I started my day, and that remained true when Dale Connelly became the host and whimsical voice of The Morning Show.

The only firm, fixed point in our family’s week was listening to Prairie Home Companion on Saturday nights. We made no plans that conflicted with that broadcast. My daughter grew up thinking of Garrison as something like a family member, a windy storyteller like her dad. She expected her birthday to be hailed by Dale and Tom.

When I joined an online dating service following my divorce I had to define myself so women could judge whether they were interested in talking to me. My personal description mentioned books and outdoor recreation and other activities, but I always felt the most concise and useful identifier was the three words identifying me as a “public radio guy.”

What memories do you have of radio? What has radio meant in your life?

2020, 2021, Business, home, Uncategorized

I’m Not Hoarding – I Swear

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I hate buying toilet paper.  It’s just irritating to cough up cash for something that ends up being flushed away.  The fact that it’s constant doesn’t help and I make it worse by not liking most of the conventional tp.  My preferred is Seventh Generation, which I purchase at my co-op.  It’s unbleached and comes individually wrapped in paper, not plastic. 

I’m not a Costco/Sams kind of person – I don’t have storage space for huge quantities – but for years I have purchased my tp by the case from the co-op.  48 rolls at a time for a huge chunk of change – but this means I only have to be irritated every 10 months or so.  We keep the case at the top of the attic steps and bring down rolls to the bathroom when we need them. 

When toilet paper first became the cause celebre last year, I wasn’t worried; we had plenty.  Or so I thought.  As the spring and summer came and went, I watched our supply dwindle.  Unfortunately, by the time we started to run low, the co-op had suspended bulk orders and for several months I was having to pick up tp on a regular basis.  You’d think I had better things to get irritated about, but you’d be wrong.  As if that weren’t enough, the co-op quit getting the Seventh Generation and what they were carrying didn’t last as long per roll.  Crazy making.

Two weeks ago, just for jollies, I asked somebody at the co-op’s Customer Service desk when bulk orders would be re-instated.  They called the manager out and they said I could again order tp by the case.  Even though I wasn’t crazy about what was available from the co-op, I figured that the lack of irritation would make it OK.  Then about an hour later, they called me from the co-op; the stuff they now carry comes in case lots of 96, not 48.  That would make the price tag close to $200.  Aaarrrggghhhh.  I told them not to place the order.

As I was explaining this to YA, she started banging away on her phone.  “You know, you can get a case of the Seventh Generation at Amazon.”  Calm as could be.  I looked at her phone and confirmed that it was exactly what I wanted, and unbelievably cheaper, than what I used to pay at the co-op.  An additional benefit is that I didn’t have to worry about anybody looking at me funny for getting a case of toilet paper during pandemic.  So now we have the tp I like best and I don’t have to get all worked up and buying more until Solstice!

Is there anything you like to have in bulk (or used to like to have in bulk….)?

Family, Fantasy, History, home, Technology, Uncategorized

Eavesdropping

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The other day I went into the kitchen when Husband was there cooking something,  and I opened a drawer to get out a spoon to eat some yogurt.  I had my phone in my sweater pocket.  I exclaimed upon grabbing the spoon “The silverware drawer is disgusting”!  It had lots of crumbs and crud in it, as happens with such drawers.  I made a mental note to clean it later.

I sat down and pulled out my phone.  There in the Google search bar were the words “The silverware drawer is disgusting” and below were many references to cleaning tips and strategies.  I was both shocked and amused. I never use the Google  function on my phone in which I could ask the phone to look things up for me or search for something. I must have tapped the button unbeknownst when I put it in my pocket.  It really felt as though the phone was eavesdropping on me. I plan to be far more careful in the future to make sure I haven’t engaged that function .

Where and when would you have wanted to be a fly on the wall?