The Rainbow near my house has recently shut down. Last weekend I went to another store in the shopping center and saw all the grocery cart corrals lined up together. It was like they were all sitting in a big meeting room, listening to a motivational speaker!
What’s the weirdest party you’ve ever been to?
Today’s post comes to us from Steve.
It is always interesting, after the fact, to remember the decisions you made that caused some bad thing to happen. Looking back, you can see the errors. But at the time, you were doing things that made sense.
One of the staple foods I have in my kitchen cabinets is honey. I grew up eating peanut butter and honey sandwiches. In the poverty of my first year of graduate school, I sometimes had peanut butter and honey sandwiches three times a day. I couldn’t afford anything else.
But honey has a nasty habit of crystallizing. The honey gets dull and solid until it will no longer come out of a squeeze dispenser. That just happened to me. But I had an inspiration for melting the crystallized goo back into liquid honey. I popped my honey dispenser in the microwave and nuked it for just 20 seconds. The photo shows what happened. The dispenser will never be the same, and I had to mop up honey from all over the microwave.
That’s one dumb stunt I’ll never do again, for I learned that lesson the hard way.
In the summer of 1970 my erstwife (let’s call her Carol in this story) and I lived along the Saint Croix River. We discovered a wonderful fishing hole north of us, just upstream of Osceola, Wisconsin. Night after night we’d go upriver to our fishing spot at the foot of an island and—quite literally—catch fish until our arms got tired.
Then Carol got busy, and I began fishing alone. The canoe wasn’t stable without a person in the front end, so I found a large boulder that I called “Carol.” I put the rock in the front of the canoe to keep everything steady while I fished. The rock worked so well that I safely walked around the canoe standing up, which is not something the experts recommend.
One afternoon in September I enjoyed what I knew would be my last evening of fishing for that season. Grad school and work were about to start up, so I’d not fish there again until next year. I canoed back downstream to the Osceola bridge where my car was parked. I realized I no longer needed my boulder. With the canoe close to shore, I walked to the front of the canoe, grabbed “Carol” (the rock) and chucked her overboard.
In cartoons when Wile E. Coyote has just made a fatal error there is a terrifying pause. Time stops as he processes what he has done and what is going to happen to him. The cartoon is absolutely true to life. On the river I had my Wile E. Coyote moment. For several seconds I contemplated the fact that I was standing upright in an unstabilized canoe. Then the thing spun like a birling log under a lumberjack. I went sailing, my fishing rod flew even further, and soon we were both in the river. I survived. The fishing rod was never seen again.
And I never walked upright in a canoe again. Well, you don’t forget a lesson you learn the hard way.
What have you learned the hard way?
Today’s post comes to us from Crystal Bay.
I made a big mistake. I decided to paint plastic stackable lawn chairs to match my flower boxes, shutters, and screen doors. I spent three days painting them. They looked great and I loved having everything match. The first time I stacked them, most of the paint peeled off. I was disheartened after all of that work.
Not to be defeated, I googled “How to paint plastic chairs”. Off to True Value to buy a special cleaner, primer, sandpaper, a scraper, and a quart of paint closer to the color I wanted. Then, I set upon laboriously scraping paint off one chair. The first one took 1.5 hours. I decided that since these chairs only cost $5 each, I’d just order six more. $5 dollars aren’t worth 1.5 hours per chair!
In the background are 70 bags of cypress mulch. I’m still trying to find some guys to spread them. My age is catching up to me, and after 15 years of doing this myself, I really do need help! Spring on the lake is labor-intensive and I can’t keep on top of it anymore, hard as I try. I’ve learned to ask for help. This winter, I couldn’t find my cell phone in the house. My neighbors are all in Florida for the winter, so I walked out to the county road and flagged down a car. I asked the man to please call my number. I lost my car in a parking ramp, walked to the door and asked the first person out, “Are you in a hurry to be somewhere?”. She kindly drove me around until I found it. I guess that with age comes with people who feel good helping me?
Now, I’m looking for someone to shovel up a dead, maggot-filled raccoon on my yard.
Do you ask for help?
“But see! nearer and nearer the great fish comes, mouthful after mouthful of the fishes falling into its horrid jaws. It must be starving; so eager is it for its prey that is seems unconscious of the fact that the tide has turned and is moving outward. Now it discovers its danger and turns, but too late. The water has gone back to the dep, leaving it struggling for breath in a shallow pool. It thrashes wildly about with its tail, whose sticky secretions help to envelop it more and more thickly with mud and slime, until at last its struggles cease.”
This is from the autobiography The Life of a Fossil Hunter by Charles Sternberg, written in 1909. I stumbled upon this title in the afterward of Dragon Teeth by Michael Crichton. His widow Sherri did a nice epilogue and mentioned the Sternberg book as one that Michael had used in his extensive research for Dragon Teeth.
As you can read in the section above, the style of autobiography and memoir was a little bit different back then than it is today. In today’s memoir, we would learn about how abuse in his childhood caused him to seek out a career in the wilderness, how his career caused lifelong challenges in all his relationships and he overcame all kind of obstacles to achieve his desires. That’s pretty much how every memoir written in the last few years read anyway. In Sternberg’s autobiography, he mentions a son about 1/3 of the way through the book. Then he mentions a son about 2/3 of the way through. We he mentions in the conclusion that he has “raised up a race of fossil hunters”, we learn that there are at least two sons, but that’s it. No courtship, no marriage, no discussion of any toll his work/travels took on his wife… in fact, the word “wife” doesn’t even come up in this book.
But he did know how to breathe life into his fossil finds!
What’s the oldest book you’ve read recently?
Like several other babooners, my folks grew up during the Great Depression, and considered themselves very lucky to get to college, which is where they met – Iowa State Teachers College (now State University of Iowa). They were “upwardly mobile”, and worked hard to be able to eventually own a nice house in the midwest, and be solidly part of the middle class instead of the lower.
When I came home with a hippie-looking guy, they didn’t balk too much. (I think they were still relieved that I was no longer with Wasband.) They were glad when we finally got married, but they had to travel to some unusual places to visit us (and their only grandchild) those first 5 years – a farm outside Winona; a big old 1885 house with carriage barn in Winona; married student housing in Muncie, IN; and back to old Winona house. It was about that place that we had an interesting discussion.
Dad couldn’t see why we would buy such a shabby looking house. Admittedly, we bought it because of low price – it was a fixer upper for sure – and we had more time than money then, as Husband was doing part-time teaching at Winona State. Like all good “hippies”, we had some very shabby used furniture mixed in with a few genuine antiques, which must have reminded him of leaner times as a child. When they saw the “before” version, it looked like this:
But eventually we painted the exterior, replaced radiators with central heat, put in a fuel efficient furnace (some of these were covered by a block grant”), stripped painted woodwork (seven windows/doorways) in one room down to clear pine, and repapered or painted four rooms, getting rid of the black/gold flocked wall paper in the foyer. I’ll never forget how satisfying it was when the folks visited after we were all finished:
My dad looked around in amazement and said “I never would have thought the place could look this good.”
When have you been fooled by appearances?
Today’s post comes from NorthShorer.
Four weeks ago the night after I had the useless shots in my back I could not sleep and decided at 3:00 a.m. to take out the garbage. When I opened the door to the garbage room, I walked into a wall of lights.
The owners of our building finagled two grants to install LED lights throughout the building at only slight cost. I have been hearing about this for a couple months and imagined, I suppose, a few small boxes of bulbs, not that pile, which is only half the bulbs for the hallways, security lights, garage lights, and parking lot lights. Another pile even larger was in the other garbage room at the other end of the building. Reminded me of a few stories of people who failed to estimate the weight and volume of pennies they either ordered or amassed. To be fair these new lights are not just bulbs; they need new fixtures. For instance all the standard recessed tube lights in the three stories will be replaced by a same size fixture holding several LED bulbs.
What also is surprising is how much brighter are the LED lights in the garage and hallways. Our yard is almost daylight from the new security light above us. I have avoided LED lights because they gave such dim light.
On Wednesday they will install LED lights in the attached lights in all apartments, which is nice for me because I cannot reach the ceiling lights. They will also cart away for free all of the fluorescent bulbs we have. Our apartment is about the average. It will get 27 new bulbs. The building has 65 apartments, plus eight other rooms to get bulbs. 27 times 65 equals 1,755 bulbs. Add in another four dozen to get, say, 1,800 or so. How big a pile will that be? I bet each will come in a protective carton. I happened to be in the Batteries Plus store recently. The owner noticed my address and said he was supplying just the bulbs. He, too, had underestimated the volume. The supplier told him the bulbs would have to be shipped to the apartment building because they would not fit in his strip mall store.
All the medical facilities in this town will soon get LED bulbs under a grant from the same sources. There are six large clinics and the massive hospital, plus a couple smaller ones. What will those piles look like? I am pleased for this change because the tube lights give me a bad headache while I wait around.
Estimation is a vital skill. Schools are doing more to teach it, for one thing to try to get kids not to just accept what their fancy graphing calculators say. I am usually rather good at estimation, except in extraordinary events like these lights. I am very good at estimating distances and travel times. For weights I am usually far off. I know what time it is quite well without using a clock, a skill I developed working outside as a child. I don’t have to be outside seeing the sun to do this. Not sure if this is estimation, but I almost always know which way is north. When I do get turned around, I get agitated. I used to astound my partner with this ability plus the ability to remember routes we took on a previous visit, sometimes months before. In the post and common roads of the Northeast that is a challenging skill.
The students used to be astounded by how the chemistry teacher and I could quickly estimate calculations and come close. He was a very intelligent man and knew rapid calculation skills. His estimations were often exact..
I am intrigued byhow computers find complex answers through a series of estimations instead of seeking an exact answer when it is not needed. This shortens the time for calculation, often by days.
How are you at estimation of volume, distance, weight, time needed for a task? Do you know what time it is without looking at a clock? Do you know which way is north on unfamiliar ground? Can you guess the number of beans in the jar? Do you always measure carefully for recipes?
Forty years ago I gave myself a quest: to photograph MY North Shore, the stretch from Flood Bay to Silver Cliff, or as locals called it then, Silver Creek Cliff. Because I had use of a darkroom, it was at first all done in black and white, or perhaps with some sepia toning, or duotone effect, or Sabattier effect. Flood Bay back then was not the mass of concrete and curbs and cables it is now. It was then as it is now one of the very few official state wayside rests. Despite that, back then it was just a gravel patch with some posts to keep people from driving into the lake, which every so often people still managed to do. Locals routinely hauled away lake stone and gravel for their use, which left no dent on the amount on the shore. Also, then there was no monstrous resort along the shore. And Silver Cliff was a road, not a tunnel. The pictures I framed in simple shadow boxes without glass. I hung them on our knotty pine living room wall. (More about that later.)
The winnowing process of history to our benefit has eliminated most of the pictures. A few exist in my computer, taken from the negatives. My goal was to push pictures to expressionism. Often with high or low contrast.
[
One picture that I took in the remnants of a lumber mill a quarter mile from Betty’s Pies was our Christmas card picture.
Sometimes good fortune favored me, when it disfavored elsewhere with a massive storm.
A few I have drawn in graphite or pastel, often doing some adjustment of reality.
One sad picture remains, even though I did not frame it. How did history not winnow this poor picture out? It must be a sign, must it not. (Nudge, nudge, wink, wink.)
When this picture first appeared in the developing fluid, my first thought was it not worth making anything of it. My second thought was that here indeed was a sign. It must be from God giving me my life’s quest. (Nudge, nudge, wink, wink.) It could not be just random change. I was, in fact, until recently quite good with needle and thread, which my mother taught me at an early age, despite long sideways glances from my father.
I am sad to report that I never did discover how to fulfill the quest. Sigh. And now my chance is lost. Sigh. But I did fulfill one smaller quest and quite by accident. An undisciplined boy a year older than my son lived down the road from us. He was often in our house as small boy but not later. His teens were much troubled, as were his twenties. Now he is a brilliant photographer. I mean that. Does amazing work in the camera and in his computer. Travels the worlds. Makes a good living. Has a happy life. Most of his work is of the North Shore. He is friends with both of my children on facebook, where he told them that his inspiration came from looking at those photographs on our wall. To think such beauty came from such a shriveled seed!
Did you find a life’s quest? How has it gone?
One of the great things I like about my job is that the management believes in giving back. There are lots of ways during the year to contribute to various programs but one of my favorites is Feed My Starving Children.
FMSC packs food and sends it around the world to places where children are at risk due to malnutrition. But the best part is that this isn’t just an organization to give money to; volunteers actually do the packing of the food. Vitamin mix, veggies, soy and rice make up the “manna pack” that gets reconstituted in places like Haiti, Mali, Pakistan, Cambodia, Guatamala and many more.
Normally we go as a group every other month to one of the Twin Cities’ FMSC locations but today, they came to us. They had all the packing stations set up, surrounded by palates of bales of rice and soy. After all the instructions, we split up among the stations to get going. Today I did the “get the bag onto the funnel” job. After I do that, then other team members put in the ingredients. Then I weigh each filled bag and pass it along to the folks who seal the bag and the packer, who gets the packs into boxes. 6 meals per bag, 36 bags per box, 32 boxes for my station in 90 minutes. If I’m doing the math correctly, that’s 6,912 meals from just my group’s station.
Tonight I’m sore from bending over and my feet are a little achy from standing in the same spot for the whole session, but having done the work is like a salve – I feel like I’ve done a little bit of good in a world that seriously needs it right now.
What’s your favorite rice dish?
For many years my company was closed on Good Friday. Five years ago they made the decision to be open on Good Friday but they didn’t want us to feel like we were being gypped out of a holiday so they gave us each a “floating holiday”. I use my floating holiday every year on Pi Day, March 14 (3.14….). I refer to it as my geek holiday.
This year’s menu:
Dutch Apple Pie
Key Lime Pie
Amish Sawdust Pie
Chocolate Whoopie Pies
Crack Pie
Tangerine Raspberry Pie
Blueberry Pie
Carrot Cake Whoopie Pie
3 Musketeers Pie
Buttermilk Pie
Banofee Pie
Peaches & Cream Pie
It was a stretch to have all these pies on the menu but I couldn’t decide what to cut so I decided to go for it. I always start with the hardest, putzy-est recipes and this year it had me a little panicked at 10:30 when I had a HUGE mess and not much to show for it yet.
But I did get it together… phew!
When have you bitten off more than you could chew?
Sandy spent a couple years saving up money for new living room furniture. Our foldout couch crowded the living room and was breaking down, and a chair was looking a bit old. They were still good enough for a local charity to haul away to sell. In January she chose a love seat and a chair in similar designs. Theoretically I had a say in the choice. However, design is her joy, which I leave to her.
When Sandy told her dear friend, whom I will call Lady, she had replaced some furniture, Lady said, “I hope you got rid of that old wooden bench.” She pronounced the word old as if it meant ugly. Lady is like that and you ignore it. She is actually an outstanding person, a long-time successful speaker for those on the margins, for instance getting shelter for the street people of Mankato. Because the Salvation Army does not provide beds or food for women on the streets, five downtown churches take turns offering food and beds, each church serving a week in turn. But that expanded into providing space for men. The SA now requires people who sleep a night there to be sober, to attend church, and to attend Bible study. Sort of conversion by the bed. My cousin who ran the mission in downtown Seattle for years would be horrified, as they would be in Duluth, unless they too have changed. While the churches struggle to provide food and space, the SA has only a small fraction of its 25 beds in use. In a recent modest storm, they closed! Three of the churches opened in a rush. Lady not only offers financial support, at the age of 78 she also often washes the linen and cooks for the meals.
I should tell Lady that the old wooden bench, which is called a settle or settle bench and is a standard fixture of British pubs, has the official British seal of approval. My English aunt came into our home 35 years ago and spotted the bench and exclaimed, “Oh, a settle!” She ran her hands over the top and said, “It is almost perfect, but it needs to be older.” The last part was her joke. She spent the visit sitting on the settle and drinking the Twinings tea we had on hand. A couple years later an English exchange student was at our house and had a similar reaction.
A few years ago Lady told Sandy that she should put this away, meaning after Christmas, but her tone was that it should be put away permanently.
Lady has good taste in clothes, which are often in marked contrast to the tens of carats of diamonds she always wears. When she dresses to the nines, the carat load rises. I imagine that many people think it must be costume jewelry because of the volume. I admit I have a bias against diamonds in droves.
Yes, our furniture and accessories are a mishmash. As you age you shed style in exchange for memories. Lady’s large living room is its own mishmash of stuffy small town museum and waiting room for businesses of dubious merit.
Because they often stay with us, especially the kids, we discussed this change of furniture with our daughter and family. They said the foldout bed was getting too uncomfortable and they could bring blow up mattresses. Last week ninth grade grand daughter out of the blue announced that we were not to think that she and seventh grader Mr. Tuxedo were not coming to stay with us a few times this summer as they always have. She and her brother had many plans for their stays. That was a warm moment, to think they have not grown out of staying with us.
Do you have a name for your interior design style?
Trail Baboon 