Public School started yesterday in our town. The smaller, Class B schools in our region started last week, as did the Catholic schools. The children next door were up early today and making a hullaballoo in the front yard in their excitement. Their parents are educators and administrators in the public schools. It was a big day.
I heard last evening from a music educator in my bell choir that one of her colleagues had a most exciting day, having two elementary boys decide to flash each other as soon as they got in the classroom, and another boy who came in the room with a gushing, bloody nose.
I remember being so excited the night before school started that I couldn’t sleep. My mother was a Grade 3 teacher, and loved her job and would have taught until she was 80 had she not been felled by MS. She adored her children and her classroom.
What is your most memorable first day of school? Who were the naughtiest children in your classes, and what naughty things did they do? Who was your favorite elementary teacher, and why?
On our recent trip to Fargo, our family stopped in to the bookstore at Concordia College in neighboring Moorhead, MN to get some Concordia gear. Daughter, son, daughter in law, and I are all alums, and we needed new sweatshirts. I had no sweatpants, so I got some of those, too. Grandson even got a t shirt.
I typically avoid wearing clothes with designer labels or slogans. I don’t feel the need to be a walking billboard. I feel differently about my college, though. The gear is really comfortable, too.
I remember back in the day when it was pretty common to ask people what their zodiac sign was when you met them, as though that would tell you everything you needed to know about the person. I am Aquarius. Husband is Sagittarius. I no longer remember if that makes us compatible or not. We will be married 39 years come September. I still sometimes read my horoscope in our weekly paper, though, just to see what I should expect. It is never correct.
What is your zodiac sign? Is is an accurate reflection of your personality? Ever been to a fortune teller?
When we got our first Welsh Terrier in 1990, the breeder, who lived in Mankato, was dismayed to find out we were both psychologists, since psychologists, in her experience, were not good at being consistent and structured with their dogs. They allowed too many misbehaviors and were too concerned with the dogs’ feelings.
We now are on our fourth terrier, and I must admit the Mankato breeder has a point. I wonder why it took me 30 years to admit she was right. It has also made me realize that I have too high expectations for the parents I work with to be consistent and structured with their children, and that I can do a better job in helping them do that, rather than roll my eyes over their failed attempts at positive reinforcement. This training stuff is hard!
Terriers are all heart and intellect. Punishment doesn’t work with them. They also need clear rules and limits. Children are the same. One of the first things I noticed with our new dog was our inconsistent message to him about shoes. Husband has a pair of gardening shoes he dislikes, and has allowed our new puppy to chew, shake, and toss them. Now, we both are well trained in behavior theory, and know that it is impossible for our dog to discriminate between shoes we like and shoes we don’t like. This has led to Kyrill raiding our closets for any shoes he can find. All we can do is keep the closet doors shut and praise him when he drops the shoes he has stolen. It is hard to be positive in those situations, rather than angry.
It is often hard to explain to parents how important it is to praise their children where they are rather than punish them for what they fail to do. For example, if the most positive thing you can say to your child is “Thank you for not using the F word at breakfast” then that is where you are. It is hard for for me to praise the dog when he drops something I treasure, rather than yelling at him for stealing it in the first place.
This is the first dog we have had when we weren’t actively parenting children. I think that has made me more aware of what I am doing, rather than doing what was expedient to get things done at home. Live and learn, I guess. We all have feet of clay.
What do you preach but don’t practice? What is hard for you to admit? What new things do you want to learn?
I was quite amused yesterday on my way to work to see our insurance agent presumably driving to his office. He was riding a motorcycle. HE WASN’T WEARING A HELMET!
It seems to me that being an insurance agent means you exemplify caution and careful living. I remember the conversation we had together with our son when he got his driver’s license, and our agent told him to never hesitate to phone him any time, night or day, if he had been drinking and needed a ride home. Well, I wonder what he says to young motorcycle drivers he insures about helmets?
Our agent goes to our church and has a lovely tenor voice and sings with us in the choir. I can hardly wait to tease him about this.
What do you like to tease people about? What irony have you noticed this week? Any stories about insurance agents or companies?
With my front and back yards full of flowers, I do need to think about water during the summer months, especially if there are going to be so many 90+ degree days. I watch the weather forecasts like a hawk to try to determine if Mother Nature is going to gift me with any free precipitation. If it’s going to rain, I really don’t to pay the City of Minneapolis for extra water.
It seems that almost every forecast of rain the past month has been a chimera – it shows as 50% or 60% and the radar shows the dark green riding right over my location – then nothing! Or else it does a very insulting sprinkle for 3 minutes. Last night I had the sprinkler on in front and when I went to water my baskets in the back, YA gave me grief. She said “it’s going to rain… it’s 80%”. I continued along, watering all the baskets and the bales while she made fun of me. As I finished up, it started to lightly sprinkle. She smirked as I came in the back. Then 5 minutes later I smirked when it hadn’t even rained long enough to wet a tissue.
I know weather is capricious but I would have thought that by now, forecasters could get a better grasp on this. I’ve said many times that if I were to look for another job, it would be as a weather forecaster. Then I could get a big salary to be on tv and the fact that I was wrong half of the time wouldn’t count against me on my annual review!
I guess for the rest of the summer, I’ll just assume there will be no rain, unless I wake up to it in the morning!
I am not usually a procrastinator; in fact, I’m usually the opposite. I almost always start with the thing I don’t want to do and then reward myself with the more pleasure task afterwards – unlike Oscar Wilde, I like to have the dessert at the end.
But every now and then I encounter a project that just throws me for a loop – a project that lingers and lingers while I find excuse after excuse to not get to it. It tortures me and I keep putting it off, even though I remind myself that it won’t take as long as I think, it won’t be as hard, I’ll feel so great when it’s finished. About the only way I’ve found to counteract this is a deadline. Once there is a deadline, then I’m all in for getting it done.
My front porch (yes, she’s going to talk about the front porch again) is right up there. I didn’t have any problem scrapping (although it was taking forever), no issues with sand blasting (although tim helping did set up a deadline if I’d needed it), no issues with replacing the broken glass panes, no issues with getting all the glass to the correct recycling center, no issues with sanding the window frames.
Getting the ceiling done – I’m just tilting at windmills. I simply cannot get myself to stain the ceiling. It started with taping up the plastic – took me a month to figure out how to trick YA into doing it with me. Of course, I could have done all the taping on my own in less than 30 minutes, but I just couldn’t make myself. Now that I don’t have plastic on the to-do list, you’d think the staining would be easy. But no… again, every time I think about it, some other thing that is much more enjoyable “needs” to be done. This past weekend, I spent close to 10 hours in my studio…. cuz I really need more cards, right? Right now I’m trying to think of how to trick YA into the staining as well.
Any projects you’re procrastinating on right now? Any thoughts on how to get YA to do the ceiling for me?
Puppy training is going well. Kyrill bops his potty bells when he needs to go outside. He sleeps soundly with us for five hours at a time before he needs to go out. He even stayed close by us, unleashed, in the front yard for more than an hour on Sunday as we gardened. (That is highly unusual for most breeds of terriers, but typical for Ceskys. )
We have lots to work on in terms of thievery and his refusal to drop objects he isn’t supposed to have. He has yet to learn that our wine glasses and coffee cups are off limits on the lamp tables. He also has a love of cat food, and that requires a baby gate.
Our baby gates are somewhat decrepit, and hale from when we were training our second Welsh Terrier about 20 years ago. It was surprisingly hard to find new ones in town, and I had to order one from Target. We feed our cat in the basement. She, poor thing, has been sorely neglected since Kyrill’s arrival. We need to restrict his access to the cat food but allow her access to the upstairs. We have a strategically placed gate that allows her to jump over but keeps him out of the cat food and litter box. We also have a gate on the backyard deck so he can be outside when we work in the yard and be safe. He howls in frustration when he spies us and can’t get to us. It is hard to meet every creature’s needs these days.
When I was about 3, my parents had an enclosure in the back yard that they put me in so I could be outside but they didn’t need to watch me continuously. My mother said I got so upset when I saw the other neighborhood children running around that the let me run with them all over the block. No disaster ensued, but that was brave of my parents. Of course, this was in the early 1960’s, and things were different then.
What were your boundaries for roaming when you were a child? Did you have curfews? What are your experiences with baby gates?
I’ve got this young man helping me out this summer. Fifteen years old and has his drivers permit. Great kid and we get along well and he’s just fun to have around and I guess he enjoys being out here too.
On his first day he was stumped by the shift lever on the steering wheel of the truck. It’s an automatic, and I hadn’t realized that was unusual, but I guess most cars are on the center console now. Lucky it wasn’t a ‘three-on-the-tree’. Although I do wish I had a clutch for him to learn.
And then his second day, we were driving around in the gator and he said, “Doesn’t this thing have windows?” I said yes, and he realized it had a crank and it was “Oh. OOOOhhhhh!” yeah, I knew the crank was a pretty far out concept for kids today.
I talk about crop development and since he’s always in shorts, he better learn what nettles look like. He knows wild parsnip. Nettles: I got a bad rash from them as a kid, but nowdays, if I don’t scratch it when it first burns, it goes away and doesn’t bother. I’m not sure that works on everyone and I told him I don’t want him to find out. Anyone know about nettles?
We measured out 17.5’ on the corn the other day. (that being 1/1000th of an acre on 30” rows. Then count the plants in the 17.5’) Actual stand is about 30,000 plants / acre. Theoretically I was planting corn at a rate of about 33,000 plants / acre based on gear ratios used, which dictate how fast it drops seeds, and the amount of seed I used on the acres I had. Then you expect some won’t germinate and the planter skips a few here and there, and that’s why I measure out the final stand to see what the actual rate is.
We dug up some soybean plants and it was really interesting to see the root development in comparison to the size of the actual plant. And there are already nodules on the roots that are converting nitrogen to the plant from the air.
I cut open an oat plant the other day. The kernels are coming; they’re in the top third of the plant and I’d expect them to start heading out any day now.
Corn is growing fast, it’s already knee high, and can be considered ‘lay-by’ in another week or two. Not that it matters to me; I’m not in there doing anything with it. The header photo is a few days old the corn is twice this tall.
The chickens enjoy making holes in the yard and taking dust baths.
Ducks are still doing well. This photo doesn’t show all of them, but it does show two guineas, a dog, a chicken, and some ducks A little bit of everything.
We’re cutting the roadsides this week and hope to get them baled up in the next few days. Hoping the rain predicted for Saturday doesn’t happen just so I can bale. My helper and I got the haybine out and greased up, and got the baler greased up.
I believe every little town in the land has some kind of summer weekend festival/carnival. The Twin Cities’ one grew into the Aquatennial. Winona calls theirs Steamboat Days, and it happened this past weekend.
Husband and I pretty much steer clear of the crowds and the midway at this point, partly because our bodies no longer enjoys things like the Tilt-a-whirl. But there are a couple of things I like to do:
– the Vintage Car Show – 3 blocks of downtown cordoned off, for a walk down memory lane. (Click on link for actual colorful photo…)
– and The Parade. Quoting from the Winona Post: “The Winona Steamboat Days Grande Parade is… packed with great enterainment including the U.S. Marine Corp Band from New Orleans, the Milwaukee Dancing Grannies, 34th Infantry Red Bull Army Band, area community royalty and several awesome high school bands…”
The Parade at noon on Sunday is kind of a big deal – I think it’s the only city-wide parade all year. People start staking out their territory on Saturday, cordoning off their turf or setting out awnings, blankets, and lawn chairs. I got there right at noon, expecting to just stand, but was able to sit on an unoccupied stair step for a while – Husband came later.
There was an enterprising guy with a wagon stuffed with bags of kettle corn for $6. . There were Clydesdale horses, a collection of colorful Jeeps, and a person on stilts.
Winona’s Clown Club gave the Shriners some competition, and there was a group of little dancers from a local ballet studio that stole the show for a while there.
Winona’s own Little Warriors Drum Corps brought up the rear – they are amazing when they are in there element, many ages and cultures of kids who have found a place to showcase their talent. (Wish you could see the littlest guy better.)
When was the last time you watched a parade, or attended a summer festival?
Where else have you been able to gather where there are people of all ages, and from all walks of life?
Daughter was at some friends’ apartment last Friday helping them get two kittens to the vet as the friends went to a grandmother’s funeral. Both the friends were stressed. One of the kittens had walked across a hot electric stove element and burned a paw. The other kitten had blood in its stool. Both needed medical care. Daughter was going to transport the cats to the vet as soon as the friends left for the funeral.
As the trio of humans and ailing cats tried to leave the seventh floor apartment, the knob on the apartment door jammed. No amount of jiggling the knob unlodged it. The male partner phoned his brother to get ideas how to remove the knob. The brother’s advice didn’t work, either. They had to phone 911.
Three firefighters arrived, and they, too, struggled to unjam the knob. They asked hopefully if Daughter and her friends were sure that the door wasn’t bolted at the top of the door. Well, of course it wasn’t. One of the firefighters eventually removed the whole doorknob, destroying it in the process. There is now a gaping hole in the door, and it probably needs to be replaced.
Daughter and the female friend decided that the male friend’s grandmother jammed the door because she didn’t like what he was wearing to her funeral. I am relieved they didn’t have to climb out of a seventh story window and be rescued by firetruck ladders.
When have you had to phone 911? Ever needed to be rescued? Every been in an Escape Room?
Trail Baboon 