Category Archives: Nature

Baboon Achievers, History, Nature, Stories, Weather

Inside / Outside

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I love walking through a door into the outside. I noticed this about myself several years ago – a whiff of fresh air, a little breeze and I take a big breath and feel a sense of joy. Sometimes I even open my arms and take an even bigger breath.

Is it claustrophobia? I don’t consider myself to be severely claustrophobic – no problems navigating life, although I’m not sure how long I would last in a full elevator stuck between floors. The idea of crawling into a tunnel (like Phillippe in Ladyhawk) gives me the creeps and I’ve abandoned a book once because all the action takes place in a deep cave (Blind Descent by Nevada Barr). No problems with planes, no problems in crowds.  I have done caves of my own free will, although I’m really not happy while I’m underground.

But I don’t think its claustrophobia; I just think I like going outside. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

What about you? Inside or outside?

Art, Family, gardening, Nature, Science, Stories, Weather

The Arboretum

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On Nonny’s last full day in Minneapolis, we went out to The Arboretum. I have always thought I absorbed my love of gardening from her. She never asked me to participate, but I remember the work she put into her roses, her flowering trees and her vegetable plot.

It was a perfect day for it – not too hot and not too sunny. We took some advice from Lou and did the tram tour before we did anything else. We took the tour driver’s advice and sat in the very back row for the best view and the best sound quality. Nonny loved all the different trees, especially ones with “character” and I marveled at how much of the arboretum there really is!

One of the special exhibits this summer is Gardens of Kaleidoscopes – 15 fabulous sculptures that combine lovely floral arrangements in movable containers within structures that also hold kaleidoscopes. You look through the kaleidoscopes and then slowly spin the flowers (well, you don’t have to do it slowly a little boy of seven showed us). It was amazing and as always when confronted by art, I wonder how the artist thought of the idea in the first place.

View Through Kaleidoscope

What would YOU like to see through a kaleidoscope?

Art, Business, Family, History, Media, Nature, Stories, The Future

You Can Retire….

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This weekend’s post comes to us from Jacque.

Recently I received the content below as an email from a friend who lives in Florida:

You can retire to Phoenix, Arizona where …

      • You are willing to park three blocks away from your house because you found shade.
      • You’ve experienced condensation on your rear-end from the hot water in the toilet bowl.
      • You can drive for four hours in one direction and never leave town.
      • You have over 100 recipes for Mexican food.
      • You know that “dry heat” is comparable to what hits you in the face when you open your oven door at 500 degrees.
      • The four seasons are: tolerable, hot, really hot, and ARE YOU KIDDING ME??

OR

You can retire to California where …

      • You make over $450,000 a year and you still can’t afford to buy a house.
      • The fastest part of your commute is going down your driveway.
      • You know how to eat an artichoke.
      • When someone asks you how far something is, you tell them how long it will take to get there rather than how many miles away it is.
      • The four seasons are: Fire, Flood, Mud and Drought.

OR

You can retire to New York City where …

      • You say “the city” and expect everyone to know you mean Manhattan.
      • You can get into a four-hour argument about how to get from Columbus Circle to Battery Park, but can’t find Wisconsin on a map.
      • You think Central Park is “nature.”
      • You believe that being able to swear at people in their own language makes you multilingual.
      • You’ve worn out a car horn. (IF you have a car.)
      • You think eye contact is an act of aggression.

OR

You can retire to Minnesota where …

      • You only have three spices: salt, pepper and ketchup.
      • Halloween costumes have to fit over parkas.
      • You have seventeen recipes for casserole.
      • Sexy lingerie is anything flannel with less than eight buttons.
      • The four seasons are: almost winter, winter, still winter, and road repair.
      • The highest level of criticism is “He is different,” “She is different,” or “It was different!”

OR

You can retire to The Deep South where …

      • You can rent a movie and buy bait in the same store.
      • “Y’all” is singular and “all y’all” is plural.
      • “He needed killin” is a valid defense.
      • Everyone has two first names: Billy Bob, Jimmy Bob, Joe Bob, Betty Jean, Mary Beth, etc.
      • Everything is either: “in yonder,” “over yonder” or “out yonder.”
      • You can say anything about anyone, as long as you say “Bless his heart” at the end!

OR

You can retire to Nebraska or Iowa where…

      • You’ve never met any celebrities, but the mayor knows your name.
      • Your idea of a traffic jam is three cars waiting to pass a tractor
      • You have had to switch from “heat” to “A/C” on the same day.
      • You end sentences with a preposition; “Where’s my coat at?”

OR

FINALLY you can retire to Florida where …

      • You eat dinner at 3:15 in the afternoon.
      • All purchases include a coupon of some kind – even houses and cars
      • Everyone can recommend an excellent cardiologist, dermatologist, proctologist, podiatrist, or orthopedist.
      • Road construction never ends anywhere in the state.
      • Cars in front of you often appear to be driven by headless people.

What area would add to this list?

Kids, Nature, sports, Stories, Weather

1-2-3 Strikes You’re out

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There was:

  • a human bowling game – someone in a huge plastic bubble running toward 6-foot high nerf “pins”
  • an obstacle course for two teams each with a stretcher and a patient. I’m glad both the patients were mannequins
  • a back to front race in which two strangers were tied side-by-side, but one facing forward and one facing backward. The winning team went pretty fast considering
  • a tire race. Let’s face it, the gentlemen took this one by a landslide
  • an eye ball race – two kids, each wearing a huge eyeball costume. The brown eye won.
  • t-shirt launching into the crown
  • tiny tykes racing teeny motorcars – this makes it clear why five-year olds don’t have licenses
  • a drone contest that made it abundant clear that flying these things isn’t as easy as it looks
  • an adorable big wearing a large pin bow

Oh – and then there was a baseball game. Great seats, perfect weather, no one truly obnoxious sitting anywhere near us, a pedi-cab ride all the way back to where the car was parked.  We lost but it was still a wonderful evening!

Do you root for a home team?

 

Baboon Achievers, Family, Nature, News, Stories

My Life as a Baboon Whisperer

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Today’s post comes to us from Jacque.

Over the weekend I found a new website which I like, ozy.com. It has a variety of news and special interest stories.  I was browsing through it when I came upon this irresistible article, “My Life as a Baboon Whisperer.”    Apparently in South Africa alpha baboons have become a local menace, kind of like the bears in Northern Minnesota. The alpha males are raiding local garbage cans as a food source.

In 2009 a South African city decided to start exterminating the baboons doing the raiding. The article is written by the person who started Baboon Matters. Baboon Matters is an organization which tries behavioral alternatives to shooting the offending animals.   The organization discovered the following:  “so-called ‘raiding baboons’ are almost always alpha males, and killing them creates a vacuum in the troop hierarchy that results in chaos.”

When I read the quote, the first thought flitting through my mind was, “This sounds a lot like politics in the USA at present.” The second thought was, “It is so nice to know Baboons Matter!”

Here is the link to the article:

http://www.ozy.com/true-story/my-life-as-a-baboon-whisperer/79380

After reading this so many questions that might fit at the end of this post went through my head:

What kind of whisperer do I want to be? How does this situation serve as a metaphor for American politics right now?  Who will save us?

What question would you pose for others after reading this?

Family, Kids, Nature, Stories

The Allotment

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Me: Come over and put your head in here so I can take a picture.
YA: No.
Me: Come on.  Please.
YA: No.
Me: Why not?
YA: You’ve used up your allotment of silly pictures.
Me: But I only took one at the zoo.
YA: That was your allotment.

So what’s my take-away from this? That my child used the word “allotment” correctly!

What was your last surprise?

Baboon Achievers, Food, gardening, Nature

Life is Just a Bowl of Cherries

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Today’s post comes to us from Jacque.

 I love cherries.  A bowl of cherries just sends me over the edge of contentment into pure joy.    However, seldom in life have I found life to be consistently as good as the dear old axiomatic bowl of cherries.  It is especially not as good as the cherry pie made from cherries ala Door County, Wisconsin (sour pie cherries).

Now I am the pleased owner of a sour pie cherry tree.  For many years on holidays like Mother’s Day or birthdays, I have been getting trees and plants for the garden or yard.  There are not many physical belongings I want or need.  So I ask for trees and plants.  They contribute oxygen to the atmosphere and produce for my table.  And every time we plant one of those it is less grass to mow and tend.

The cherry tree was a Mother’s Day gift two years ago.   This year it produced a bowl of cherries, after producing nary a cherry last summer.  And then I produced a cherry pie. It is delicious.  There are two pieces left as of the writing of this post.  By the time you read this, it will be gone.

Recently, when I passed a major professional certification process, my colleague brought me a red Wiegala bush as a congratulations gesture.    The “therapy certification bush” now stands proudly in the front lawn, reminding me that I did this thing.  It makes me smile.

What do you like to get as a gift?

gardening, Nature, Weather

Waiting for Rain

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We are in a severe drought here. All fireworks are banned, no one can grill using charcoal, and all open fires are prohibited. The city fire works display has been cancelled.  Our town usually resounds with the sound of  fireworks the week before and just after July 4. It is always illegal to shoot off fireworks in town, but the police rarely enforce it.  This year we were told the local constabulary would be “heavy handed” in enforcing the fireworks ban.  No one wants their house or neighborhood to go up in flames, and people are being very careful.

Ranchers are selling their cattle, CPR land has been opened up for emergency grazing, and farmers are pretty depressed. It is really too late for anything but the pastures to recover if we would get some rain.  It isn’t promising.  The high temperatures are predicted to be around 100 this week.  We have sufficient water to keep the gardens going, thanks to an upgraded city water system and the Missouri River.  I scowl, though, when I see people watering lawns, especially when they are watering in high winds and more water goes in the air than on the lawn.

The governor has declared our county and several others to be disaster areas.  This is a slow, painful disaster that will take a long time to see a recovery.  We need a good long stretch of several days of rain, and that never happens out here.

How have you coped with disasters?

Business, Food, Nature, Science, The Future, Uncategorized

Shrimp Harbor

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I don’t like shrimp. They are bottom feeders. Harvesting them in the wild is destructive for the ocean floor. I don’t like their taste or texture.

Now I find that 150,000,000 shrimp will be raised annually in my home town in southwest Minnesota, in an ecofriendly “shrimp harbor”.  They will fatten on local corn and soybeans in a covered, 9 acre factory that will use less water than the old meat packing plant did in its heyday. The harbor won’t smell. It won’t pollute. The shrimp will be free of disease and antibiotics.  I hope all the promises made by the company are true.  I wonder  if we can call such shrimp “sea food” or if we will need to find a different descriptive phrase for it.

I am amazed at the technology behind this, and glad for the positive economic impact it will bring to the town.  I still won’t eat shrimp, though.  I can’t get past the texture.

How do you like your sea food?

Nature, Science, The Baboon Congress, Uncategorized

Lyme’s

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Today’s post is from Barbara in Rivertown

I found out early this morning that I have Lyme’s Disease. It is a relief that there is a reason for the red blotches, headaches, fevers, and lethargy I have been experiencing for the past few weeks. I will start a series of antibiotics this evening with dinner.

You’ve probably heard plenty about Lyme borreliosis and the ticks that carry it, often the tiny deer ticks. But just in case you don’t know much detail of what to look for, here are 11 of the common symptoms, according to a site called Daily Health Lifestyles:

  1. Rash
  2. Fever
  3. Headache
  4. Pain in extremities
  5. Lethargy
  6. Pink eye
  7. Memory issues
  8. Arthritis
  9. Droopy face
  10. Insomnia
  11. Heart problems

Wikipedia has this to add:

“Lyme disease is transmitted to humans by the bite of infected ticks of the Ixodes genus.[6] Usually, the tick must be attached for 36 to 48 hours before the bacteria can spread.[7] … The disease does not appear to be transmissible between people, by other animals, or through food.[7] Diagnosis is based upon a combination of symptoms, history of tick exposure, and possibly testing for specific antibodies in the blood.[3][9] Blood tests are often negative in the early stages of the disease.[2] Testing of individual ticks is not typically useful.[10] ”

I am glad there is an antibiotic to help me deal with this disease.

Do you have a tick/insect story to tell?