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?
As I drove to Brookings this week I heard MPR play a recording by Van Cliburn. I remembered my confusion, as a child, regarding his name. I could never figure out why no one ever mentioned his first name. My confusion stemmed from growing up in an area heavily populated by Dutch immigrants. There were Vanden Hoeks, Van Neuenhuizens, Van Roekels, etc, so I thought Van Cliburn was his full last name. Imagine my surprise when I realized Van was his first name and he wasn’t Dutch!
This memory triggered another language based misunderstanding regarding Offenbach. In one of my first piano books I had a very simple piece written by Offenbach, but I didn’t know that was a formal name. I thought it was a German word that meant that you had to stand up when you played the piece, getting “Off the bench or off your backside”. I remember my piano teacher trying not to laugh when I explained my reasoning for why I stood up to play the piece.
A few weeks ago I was complaining to my daughter in law about my dislike for my exercise class, but how it was helping me improve my strength and stamina. Grandson was eying the Tylenol bottle at the time, and asked why, if I took Tylenol and it said “extra strength” did I even go to my class, since the Tylenol would give me extra strength. We explained it was the Tylenol that was strong, but it didn’t make me strong.
I think my favorite childhood misunderstanding was that held by a good friend from college. He was an accomplished oboe player from a small town in Eastern ND. The summer after he graduated from high school he travelled to Europe with a concert band from the International Music Camp (located on the ND/Canadian border). They played a concert in Washington, DC before heading overseas. He told me his confusion hearing the length of time the flight to Europe would take from DC, because it seemed so short, and his embarrassment realizing that his entire life he thought Washington, DC was in Washington State, hence the shorter travel time!
There’s never any warning. Trader Joe’s Fearless Flyer doesn’t have a set schedule – without any notice it shows up in my Inbox. In the olden days (back when the dinosaurs roamed the planet) it would appear in the snail mail box. It’s the same document these days but I have to admit that I enjoyed relaxing with a cup of coffee or tea and leafing through the hard copy.
But this is not a rant about the death of print. I swear. It’s more a rant about how YA and I are completely helpless in the face of this flyer. It’s unbelievable; we are both completely drawn to the new (and probably never-to-be-seen-again) products that are featured. A little bit like the seasonally colored items that I can’t stay away from.
The theme of the flyer and the seasonal items this time is “strawberry”. While I love fresh strawberries and I practically live on my strawberry jam, I’m not otherwise a massive strawberry fan. But YA is. And there are certainly lots more items featured in addition to the strawberry-laden stuff. We made a list and I headed out. Managed to find everything on the list with the assistance of a customer service gentleman who went to the back and found two items that were out on the shelves. Here is a partial list of what I came home with:
Pickle Potato Chips: these were primarily for YA – she’s also a fan of Pickle Pizza at the fair.
Parmesan Tapenade: I love all kinds of tapenade, so this looked promising. It made a great pizza topping on Tuesday.
Potato Cheese Stix: like it says. Cubed potatoes, mixed with cheese, frozen on a stick. YA says they’re pretty good.
Spicy Taco Sauce: This turned out to be a great sauce for the afore-mentioned potato-cheese stix.
Strawberry Gummy Bears. Completely for YA. I never even liked jujubes when I was a kid, so no gummies for me now.
Turkish flatbread with cheeses, spinach and onion. In the freezer section – can’t wait.
Spicy Spuds. Another freezer options – spicy roasted potatoes.
Oat Bites. There are two kids – PB&J and Raspberry. Bitty little muffins with filling.
Strawberry Snickerdoodles. I might try this although YA will probably eat most of them
Garlic Salted Mixed Nuts. They also have little garlic toasted chips in the can. Quite nice.
There were several other things, including a six-pack of San Pellegrino; we splurge on this a couple of times a year. None of these items were necessary and neither of us had a plan for any of it, although I did get a pizza dough while I was there, thinking about the tapenade. I’m of two minds about this silliness. One the one hand, it was a lot of money for nothing that we had a plan for. On the other hand, it’s food; we have to eat regardless of the absurdity of the food items.
Tried anything new (food or otherwise) the past couple of weeks?
Muscle memory is an amazing thing. On Saturday, YA and I had our next-door neighbors over for lunch. Just veggie burgers and corn on the grill. At the last minute, we decided it was a little too chilly to eat outside, so I set the table inside.
I set out seven little bowls in the kitchen. Onion slices, tomato slices, pickles and Boston lettuce to get started. Just as I started to squirt ketchup into the fifth bowl, YA walked in and immediately said “what are you DOING?” I told her I was putting the condiments in bowls and she pushed back with “WHY?” It took me a few minutes of standing at the counter, looking at the bowls before I realized why I was about to put ketchup, mustard and mayonnaise in little bowls.
When I was growing up, condiments went into little bowls. Not just for when we had company, but all the time. Even when we had dinner at my Nana and Pappy’s on Saturday nights, condiments went into little bowls. In fact, if condiments ever went on the table in their bottles, it was called “pinkert style”. It wasn’t until I was in high school that my mom told me why. When she was growing up, they lived a few houses down from the Pinkerts. Apparently the Pinkerts never put their condiments into little dishes… they always just set the bottles out willy nilly. So it turns out that my grandparents calling that “pinkert style” was actually quite pejorative – I never knew.
While I almost automatically put out little bowls when company comes over, YA and I do not do this when it’s just the two of us. Of course, YA and I eating a meal that requires condiments on the table is fairly rare.
On Saturday I put out the bottles; I really don’t need to be the third generation getting little bowls dirty in the name of shaming some family up the block from my grandparents!!
Any habits that have come down the generations in your family?
When I was in high school I was fortunate to have wonderful music teachers and choir/ band directors. My favorite choir director, Mr. Phelps, was a Concordia College, Moorhead grad who eventually settled in the Twin Cities, where he was equally beloved by students there.
Mr. Phelps, aka Showboat Phelps to other local directors, really knew how to put on a show, be it musicals or difficult choral pieces. One Christmas we did The Messiah. It is a demanding piece with a very high First Tenor part. Mr. Phelps had no qualms about enlisting the Second Altos to sing First Tenor in the Messiah as well as on any other song the Tenors struggled with. I am a Second Alto, and to this day I still know the First Tenor part from The Messiah much better than the Alto part.
My speaking voice isn’t particularly low, but singing Tenor in high school as my voice was maturing kept my singing range really low. My voice breaks at the C above Middle C, and I am able to get down comfortably to the D below Middle C. That is pretty low.
Last week in church choir the Bass section was having a hard time with a couple of measures that had several accidentals. it was identical to the Alto part an octave higher. The director joked that it was too bad we couldn’t sing the part with the Bass section in their register. I told her I could, and I did. The Sopranos were astounded I could sing that low. I was the only one who could sing the measures correctly. Thanks, Mr. Phelps. It’s just too bad you didn’t have me sing along with the Sopranos as well as the Tenors. Think of what my vocal range would have been if you had!
What were your best/worst school music experiences? What is your vocal range?
Sometimes I think maybe I should have gone back to school to get a PhD in family manipulation. I got my Masters training from the master – my mother. Even when I could feel her working her magic on me, I succumbed time and time again.
The inheritance of this talent is a two-edged sword. It certainly works wonders sometimes but then I occasionally feel guilty. I should probably feel badly that I don’t feel THAT guilty. Some things are a slam dunk… if I ask YA to clean in the bathroom directly, she might or might not. But if I leave a wet wash cloth on the edge of the tub or some hair from my brush on the counter – voila! Bathroom cleaned in no time. In the dining room (where she works from home on Mondays and Fridays), if I spread all her stuff (bills, junk mail, computer mouse, keys, etc) all over the table, then she cleans it up lickety split. If I just organize it into a pile myself, the pile will sit there forever. I never ask her to come help me with yardwork but if I ask for one thing – like moving a bag of mulch from the back to the front, she almost always stays to work. My latest discovery is that if I just rinse out the kitty fountain and mention that I’ve done it, she will take the fountain apart and do an extremely thorough cleaning. The funniest thing about all this is that if you saw her room or the sink after she’s been working in the kitchen, you couldn’t imagine she would have any cleanliness streaks in her.
We had two weeks between my mom’s passing and when we went down to St. Louis to clean the condo and have her service. During that time, YA had two trips, one long work trip to Cancun and another for-fun trip to Washington DC to see the cherry blossoms. She had planned it a couple of months back and was scheduled to get home on Sunday night and we were leaving very early on Monday morning for St. Louis.
A few days before she left for Washington DC, she told me that I should get the car washed and vacuumed before our trip. Luckily I was on my game at that moment so I said “well, I’ll try but I have a lot to do for the service and getting ready for the trip.” Three hours later, I looked out the back window and found her vacuuming my car – see the header photo. Heaven forbid she should have to travel to Missouri and back in what she considers to be a health hazard. (Brekke is NOT a health hazard unless you compare her to YA’s car, which is clean enough that you could eat off the seats!) After she was done, I volunteered to run the car through the little car wash down on 54th while she was in DC.
Win/win, right? What chores do you prefer to outsource?
Things really have been going well so far. Last Saturday we closed the spring college show, the last show for the director, Jerry. He’s retiring at the end of the academic year. He and I have worked together at the college for 25 years, (I was free-lance the first few years) and have known each other longer than that.
Notice the students in the background.
Did you make the connection? His name is Jerry. And we like ice cream.
Our buddy Brian, in a scene from the play. Brian has been around, like, forever. As a student he was the thorn in my side. A fun thorn, but one of those kids that pokes the bear right up to the edge. He’s one of our besties now.
Monday we got 0.65 inches of rain. I had concert rehearsals Monday and Tuesday with a final spring concert on Wednesday and we finished planting the windbreak bushes. The oats started poking out of the ground on Thursday. Got some more corn planted, too. Making progress.
I have 25 Tamarack trees to plant yet. I didn’t realize they’re also known as a Larch. And when I heard that, my head immediately said, in that Monty Python voice, “The Larch”.
Saturday, at one of my other jobs, I’ll be working the Bernie Sanders visit to Rochester. As usual, I’ll be way in the back in the booth. His advance crew has been very nice and on our walk through with six Rochester Police officers, the high school kids were sure staring at us. I saw one young lady, whose mouth fell open at the sight of us, and I said, “You’re in trouble now.”
On Tuesday the township had a culvert replaced on the only road into our place. The neighbor and I just planned on staying home. As part of my township duties, I went up and was an official inspector. They had a shovel I could lean on.
It was interesting to watch them start the project. Another contractor had a high-pressure water jet, and a giant vacuum, and they made a trench to expose the two telephone lines and the fiber optic line that bisected the culvert on the West side. That fiber line through the culvert is what started this whole thing. Turned out to be another phone line on the East side. The old culvert they could cut in pieces to get out. The new one, the contractor put all the way to the west, then slide it in under all the cables. Added the aprons on both ends, and add some rip-rap. Good for another 85 years.
Padawan is getting more experience every day. There are days I feel like I spend all my time explaining things and answering his phone calls. I try to remember he really doesn’t know anything about this stuff. And the more he learns, the more valuable / knowledgeable he becomes. The other day I had him move the tractor and digger on to the concrete, then I showed him how to replace digger points, and I went out and graded the road. He found a broken shank, which he learned how to replace one other day, although this one was a bit more difficult, and it took a few more phone calls but he got it. Two weeks ago he would not have know what a broken shank was or that it was important.
He cut grass. Until he ran it out of gas. I mentioned that it has a gauge. “That thing sucks!” he says. “Don’t blame the tools” I remind him. “That gauge was blinking way over there. I cut grass for another hour!” …so you had an hour’s warning to fill it?? He walked away from me. And got a gas can and refilled the mower.
He has a one-track mind and that track is cars. My goodness he talks about cars a lot.
Friday morning a crew was out to burn the CRP ground. Conservation Reserve Program. They burn every five years as part of the regular maintenence.
I spent 6 hours chisel plowing the cemetery field I started running last year. It was the last field to be harvested last fall, just before it snowed, so I didn’t get it worked up last year. After I got that worked up I spent an hour planting corn.
It’s been some real nice weather.
Sunset
Moon rise
BEEN TO A BEN AND JERRY’S ICE CREAM STORE?
GOT A FAVORITE MONTY PYTHON OR FAWLTY TOWERS MOMENT?
Just got through another Tech week. That final week of adding costumes and lighting and sound and dress rehearsals before the show opens. It’s always exhausting and long days and late nights. I only yelled once and that was just to get the cast to be quiet. It wasn’t at anyone directly. I’m pretty good at staying calm around the cast. I tell them that sometimes I yell but it’s not at anyone directly, it’s just to get their attention so they don’t hurt themselves or break something. I make a specific point of telling them we don’t want anyone to get hurt. “Don’t bleed on my set.” You know, showing them that I care.
Then sometimes on opening night I go down and tell them the campus inspector said the building was settling and I had to shift everything two feet to the left and reverse it. So, nothing has really changed for them, they just have to do it in reverse. They stare at me. Finally, one person will call me on it and I just walk away. I love messing with them. They’re so young. I told one girl we’d turn on the AC but it doesn’t have a thermostat so it turns into a meat locker. She looked at me with her big eyes and said, “Meat lockers are cold, right?” …….. She’s a really nice young lady.
And they’re always busy and talking and wiggling and just being young. All that energy wasted on the youth.
Last Friday Kelly took down the snow fence. On Saturday Padawan and I pulled out all the fence posts. I didn’t count, but 75 or 80 posts. There are various methods to removing old metal “T” fence posts: You can wiggle them back-and-forth side to side and front to back enough to make it loose and pull it out by hand. Sometimes you pull it out a couple inches, then wiggle it some more. Typically they’re in the ground about fourteen inches. The stubborn ones, we wrap a chain around it, hook the other end onto the tractor loader, and lift to pull it out. Some people use jacks or other means of mechanical leverage, it just depends. I had gotten maybe 30 loose by hand. Padawan got a good system going of wrapping the chain, pulling it taught, and I’d lift it out. He said he liked the work. I think he’s starting to see the feeling of accomplishment.
Pulling posts
Almost done!
I bought Padawan and me new shovels. Friday I picked up 100 seedlings. Next week I’ll pick up another 75. We are planting gray dogwood and Ninebark to create a natural wind break rather than the snow fence. Kelly is excited not to have to do snowfence anymore but there’s a lot of work that has to go into this before we get to that point. Using a string and a 100-foot tape measure and downward marking spray paint, we painted a dot every 6 feet apart in two rows 8 feet apart. Thankfully, the heavy rains did not wash off the dots. I also bought 500’ of plastic fencing and garden staples, and we’ll try to protect these tiny plants.
Laying it out
The show at the college is called ‘8 Minutes’ by E.B.Lee. It’s 9 different scenes of people with eight-minutes left until the world ends. It’s not as bad as it sounds. It’s really several nice scenes. One is a person who is trying to get home to his dog- from the dogs perspective. One person is taking care of his mother with dementia. Two people are stuck in a car- she wanted to see the cherry blossoms, he has allergies, and now they’re stuck in traffic and why did they wait until NOW to go?
Or the couple with a shelter, but he’s lost the key. So, it’s got funny scenes and touching scenes. My scenic design turned into ‘connections’, some made, some missed.
I am using four, 2000 watt Fresnel fixtures. One wasn’t as bright as the others.
Hmmm, this doesn’t look right.
I love these huge lamps.
I got these light for free from Mankato State when they swapped everything out for LED a few years ago.
It’s not supposed to look like that.
A new one. Ah. Thats better
I’m using two lights called ‘Parcan’s as side light. They take a lamp that looks like an old car headlight. A sealed beam round light. 500 watts. It’s old technology from the hot and heavy days of Rock and Roll before the days of moving color changing lights. One light, one color. They make an oval beam of light, and you reach in the back and spin the bulb to get the oval the way you want it. It used to be a whole big thing. I felt a little nostalgic when I reached in the back and spun that lamp. My gosh I’m old.
Par 64
Reach in and spin that white thingy
ROCK AND ROLL! Back in the old days with 300 parcans.
Thursday this week I got my Twenty Year award from the college. An engraved marble pencil / flower / thingy holder. It’s nice!
At the farm, one recent day, I replaced shovel points on the digger, replaced a broken bolt, and found a broken bracket that supports the coil tines at the rear. Still haven’t gotten the bracket off. Started with a hammer, got a bigger hammer, got a torch, and a grinder. Back to the torch and grinder again the next day. Ordered new parts, went to John Deere and got them on Thursday. They’re still sitting in the shop. Between planting tree’s maybe I’ll work on that.
Fixing
New shovel vs old worn out shovel. Isn’t it interesting how abrasive dirt is??
Still trying to get that bolt out.
A late Friday update: Padawan and I planted 50 tree’s before we got rained out Friday afternoon. It went well. We had a good rhythm going. The tornado sirens were going off and we just kept working. It all looked fine out there. There was some small hail. We took the dogs and the gator and went up to the highest point on the road and everything looked fine. Then my neighbor texted and asked if we were OK and said, “I saw the trees!”. Uh… what trees?? Oh, you mean the 6 tree’s across the township road? And a few evergreens that tipped over across the road. Power was out, power poles leaning, broken, a couple sheds blown over. Just a narrow swath in our area, maybe some straight line winds. Once again, Thankful for our sheltered little valley. We had several people helping cut up and clean up and a few neighbors stop to check if we needed help.
A good community is invaluable.
As of 11:45PM, power still out and the generator still running.
As an only child, there were very few occasions when I had to share much with anybody. I always seemed to know that no matter what, any friends or cousins would eventually leave and I would have sole possession of my toys. That made it easy for me to share.
It has been interesting watching our older dog struggle with sharing dog toys and chews with the puppy. He wants her to play with him, but just can’t seem to figure out that if he would just let her play with or chew on a particular toy, he could just get another toy or chew thingy and they could both be occupied. Oh no. Any toy or chew she has, he has to have. Why? Why does he need to be King of the Toys? I suppose it has to have something to do with his need to be the Alpha. Why can’t Alpha characters be magnanimous??
Our older dog is only 4 years old and seems solemn and careworn beyond his years since the puppy came home. I will watch with great interest how things change as she matures and becomes stronger and more assertive. Until then, we shall have to referee the distribution of dog toys
How easy was it for you to share as a child? What were your most precious toys?
Big snow storms and big parties don’t go together. I watched the weather like that proverbial hawk for a couple of weeks and was a little dismayed when just a few days ahead of Pi Day, the forecast took a turn for the worse. For the next few days we were hoping the snow would hold off until Saturday night, but it became clear that our hopes wouldn’t be realized. YA suggested that we move Pi Day up to 5 p.m. (instead of 6) to give folks a little more wiggle room so I sent out an email.
I was a bit worried about whether I could be ready by 5. On Thursday and Friday I was… well a little fuzzy. Just not firing on all thrusters. Around noon on Friday, I had some pie shells par-baking; as I waited, I took a quick break on the sofa. When the timer went off, I headed to the kitchen, faced the oven, turned off the timer, put on the oven mitts and then promptly turned right around and opened the dishwasher. Just a smidge loopy I’d say.
YA was an angel and by the time the first folks arrived at 4:30, everything was done except for the whipped cream on the last three pies. We had everything on the table and ready by 5. Phew. Of course not everybody got the email so there was a 5:00 influx and a 6:00 influx. One friend came at 7:15! No worries – enough pie for everybody!
Here is this year’s menu:
Blueberry
Dutch Apple
Peach
Pear Croustade
Oreo Cream
Double Lemon Chess
Nectarine Almond Crumb
Key Lime
Crack
Banofi
Fudge Pecan
Coconut Macadamia
Root Beer Float Whoopies
So you can have a Pi Day celebration when there is a storm and even if you’re a little discombobulated. However I did make everybody who left after 7 call/text me when they got home safe and sound!
Trail Baboon 