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?
Jacque, VS, LJB, submitted garden photos. I added some, as well. All I can say is that I have garden envy. There is a lot to be said for warmth and rain.
From Jacque, we have:
Here are VS’s bales:
While LJB sends these beauties:
Black Currents
Clematis
Borage
Hydrangea
The herb garden
Twin Two’s Marigolds
It has been cold and dry here In ND, and the garden is behind. Some things are coming along, though. The roses in the feature photo at the top are some Morden roses in our front yard. It has been a good year for roses.
The peas
Red Currents
Tomatoes
Iris (Beverly Sills)
The beans and their extraterrestrial poles
How is your summer shaping up?
This post is from littlejailbird.
As many of you know, I have twin grandsons (I also have two other grandchildren but they live several hours away so I don’t see them as often). I will refer to these 3-year-old boys as Twin One and Twin Two in order to protect their privacy.
These glasses you see in the photo are powerful glasses. While they may not have lenses, they can still enhance a certain little boy’s vision.
Twin One uses these glasses when he watches TV (things like Daniel Tiger) because, as he says, “They help me see better.” And the other day, he said, as he headed upstairs after dark,“These glasses help me see in the dark!”
Twin Two sometimes wears these glasses but he does not seem to gain the same benefits from them as Twin One.
Do you have any funny or interesting stories about people using their imagination?
My father brought all his remaining tools with him when he moved in with us the last five months of his life. He gave lots away before he left Luverne, and took pride in how he arranged and organized his tools in his new home in North Dakota.
Since his death, we haven’t kept the tool bench as neat as Dad would want it. To be honest, it has been a disgrace for a couple of years, and Husband decided that today was the day to straighten it up. The feature photo is a before picture. Dad didn’t care that he had duplicates of many of his tools, and we just keep them the way he displayed them.
As you can see from the photo, we will never need to purchase a socket set for the rest of our lives.
The coffee containers are full of drill bits, screws, nails, wall anchors, sand paper, garden staples, utility knives, nuts, bolts, washers, holders to use on the peg board, and just about anything anyone could need at a tool bench.
I am glad Husband took the initiative to get this done. I hope we can keep it this way for a while.
It is the weekend. What would your parents want you to accomplish before Monday?
I took the photo for this post from my office window earlier this week. Our building looks out on the college football practice field where a high school football camp was in session. It is always rather entertaining to see them run around, skip, hop, and tackle while the instructors scoot around on golf carts. I can hear the grunts and sounds of tackle impacts all the way up to my fourth floor window. There must have been a hundred players. Their buses fill the college parking lot. Many come from little towns from Montana or the eastern part of North Dakota, and get to stay in the college dorms for the duration of the camp. We can hear them clatter past our building in their cleats on their way to the practice field.
You can always tell who the local campers are, since they drive their own vehicles, park along the drive up to my building, and then strip down to their skivvies while they change into their football uniforms. We drive past them on our way to our parking lot. Some have the decency to go behind the large spruce trees that line the drive, but most just stand there in their shorts while they change.
I never went to a sports camp in high school, but trips for speech and music were both fun and stressful at the same time. I hope the boys at the camp had the same sort of experiences. I have worked at my agency for 18 years, and I have seen the local campers in their underwear every year. They sort of signify the arrival of summer, just like the return of the swallows to Capistrano. I think, though, that I would find the birds more interesting.
What are some of your high school camp and activity memories?
We’ve been completely on our own for almost six months now – our followers are up and we’re managing to keep daily posts going. Dale had a few unwritten rules for the trail and I thought it wouldn’t hurt if we spelled them out.
It is a baboon congress, so it’s not a very long list.
#1. Be kind.
#2. Don’t worry if you reply in the wrong place
#3. Avoid publishing any email addresses, phone numbers or addresses. (We do have more than 5,000 followers, so this is a just in case)
#4. Pass on the right
#5. Don’t worry if you are Off Topic!
#6. Try to find photos that are licensed for re-use.
#7. Be kind.
Do we need any other tips for the trail?
The North Platte Canteen
Imagine that it’s between 1942 and 1945, and you have enlisted in one of the armed forces – Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force, Army Air Corps, Coast Guard. You are traveling cross country on a troop train, perhaps headed to boot camp – maybe never been away from home before. Since you boarded, you have been sleeping in your seat, had no showers, and had only K-rations to eat. As you approach North Platte (pop. 12,000) in west central Nebraska, you are told that at the next stop, you’re not only allowed to get off for 10-15 minutes, but encouraged to do so while the train takes on water and fuel. You see the sign CANTEEN above the depot entrance as the train approaches the station.
When you enter the Canteen, you see ladies serving at tables crammed with food – (from among) sandwiches, apples, small bottles of cold milk, coffee, cakes & pies, cookies & donuts, hard boiled eggs, sometimes even fried chicken. Women of all ages are serving, and the youngest ones are carrying baskets of cigarettes and candies out on the railway platform. One inside table has complimentary magazines (“Free to Service Men”) – Life, Look, Liberty, Saturday Evening Post, Readers Digest, comics, movie magazines.
You eat as much as you can in the allotted ten minutes – you are allowed take your coffee or milk on the train, as the cups and bottles will be collected by the conductor and returned to the Canteen. Before you leave, though, one of the ladies gives you a hug, and wishes you well on wherever your journey may take you.
What was the motivation of the North Platte population? (Of the hundreds of small towns along the troop trains’ route, this was the only one we know of to perform this service.) Shortly after Pearl Harbor, as Uncle Sam was entering the war, folks in North Platte heard a rumor that Nebraska National Guard’s Company D would be coming through North Platte on a west-headed troop train. Friends and family of the men, to the tune of 500 citizens, had come to the station with gifts for “the boys.”
As it turned out, it was the Kansas National Guard’s Company D, not Nebraska’s. After an uncomfortable minute or so, one young woman, Rae Wilson, said essentially – “Well, I’m not taking my cookies home,” and offered them through the window to the Kansas boys. This same woman then wrote a moving letter to the editor of the The Daily Bulletin, which included these lines:
“We who met this troop train… were expecting Nebraska boys. Naturally we had candy, cigarettes, etc., but we very willingly gave those things to the Kansas boys… Smiles, tears and laughter followed. Appreciation showed on over 300 faces. An officer told me it was the first time anyone had met their train and that North Platte had helped the boys keep up their spirits.
I say get back of our sons and other mothers’ sons 100 per cent. Let’s do something and do it in a hurry! We can help this way when we can’t help any other way. “
Rae Wilson (who became the Founder of the Canteen)
Bob Greene writes in his book Once Upon a Town, “Most of the older women who worked in the Canteen had sons in the war. It was like a healing thing for them to work there.” (This book is also the source of Rae Wilson’s letter above.)
So it started as a small endeavor: fruit and sandwiches, cookies and cakes. Ultimately, 125 surrounding communities participated, and a total of 55,000 (mostly) women. They met every train for more than four years, sometimes as many as 32 trains a day. On, i.e., a hospital train where the men could not disembark, the women boarded the train with baskets of sandwiches, apples, milk. The Canteen was staffed by volunteers who gave their own rations for the baking ingredients. It probably helped that these were rural farming communities, where things like eggs, flour, even pheasant (in season, mostly) for sandwiches were sometimes readily available.
For more details, see this link for a fascinating six-minute recap . In the end, it is estimated that six million service men and women came through that Canteen.
When have you been the recipient of unexpected hospitality?
Most of my friends don’t like weeding; all they see is a big chore ahead of them and how long it will take. Of course, if I never had to weed again, I probably wouldn’t be heartbroken, but I like to think of it as “zen weeding”. I’m outside, it’s usually a lovely summer day with sunny skies and hopefully a nice breeze. I let my brain wander off where it wants.
Today I was working on my creeping Charlie problem and trying not to think of all ground cover as evil. After all, it’s only doing what Mother Nature intends it to do. As I pulled up a tendril I wondered if the creeping Charlies on the other side of the boulevard knew what was happening on this side. And that’s when I got to Godzilla. What if the creeping Charlie is a Japanese city and I am the monster Godzilla?
No stopping my brain at this point! A long over ground tendril became an elevated train, underground tendrils were subway lines. Tall bits that were reaching up – high rises. Clumps of little root systems – office buildings. Particularly thick clumps – city hall. Bits that clung and clung and clung – Senate. This kept me occupied for the better part of an hour. I’m thinking Godzilla and I will be bonding again on the boulevard!
What monster would YOU like to be?
Today’s post comes from Barbara in Rivertown
We were in the cities this past weekend for a family gathering, and managed to squeeze in the season’s last “Singing in the Light” event Sunday afternoon. This is led by my friend Barbara McAfee, a local singer/songwriter and voice coach. (She has given a couple of fun concerts with Claudia Schmidt, which a few baboons have attended.) It takes place in the Art Gallery (huge room) of the Hennepin Avenue United Methodist Church in Minneapolis, on maybe seven Sunday afternoons out of the school year.
I’ve written here before about singing in song circles or community sings, which have been around in Minnesota in one form or another since WWI. The kind I am most familiar with involve song sheets or books, and requires a couple of people on guitar. While that’s very enjoyable, I’ve noticed that much of the time is spent looking at the lyrics we’re singing – we interact with people mainly at snack break.
The Oral Tradition, on the other hand, is singing without written music or lyrics to look at, and is done “a capella” – without accompanying instruments (Italian: “in chapel style”). The music is described as “songs, rounds, and chants from around the world — from the sublime to the ridiculous.” All ages, all abilities (don’t have to read music!), are invited.
It works like this: someone (in this case Barbara) teaches us the parts via “call and response”, which we repeat, sampling them till we know it well enough to choose one. We move to that part of the room, then practice till we sort of know our part, and give it a whirl. After we get going we are invited to walk over to where they’re singing another part – heck, on some songs I was able to try out several – and move around the room. This goes on till everyone gets their part down well, and it sort of organically winds down or gets softer, and then that song’s done.
Meanwhile, all of a sudden there is this beautiful music, and we are making it. We are also looking at each other as we sing and walk around. It is the most satisfying kind of singing I have ever done, and sometimes brings me to tears. I wish everyone who loves to sing could get a chance to try it. I’ve never felt more alive while singing.
What is a regular activity of yours where there is eye contact with other people?
I’m not sure when I first realized there was a phrase “binge-watching”, and knowing me the phrase was probably around well before I came across it. I didn’t have Netflix at the time so never thought binge-watching applied to me. Then I started to think about it.
When I was in high-school, I inherited the small black and white family tv when my parents upgraded their set. Back then there was no cable, no Netflix – just channels 2,4,5,9 and 11, with only a couple of the stations broadcasting around the clock. During my junior year, the Bijou Theatre (beginning at 1 a.m.) showed all the Johnny Weismueller Tarzan movies in order, three a night for a week or so. Every night that week, I set my alarm for 1 a.m. and watched them all.
Several years ago, after resisting Downton Abbey for a while, Steve (in Happy Valley) lent me Season 1 on DVD. Since other folks were waiting to borrow it as well, I watched the whole season over a weekend. I have followed this by watching every succeeding season over a weekend, once the DVD comes to the library.
And if Hallmark Channel is showing Columbo or Perry Mason or Matlock back to back to back and I’m around, I’ll turn it on. So I suppose the seed was always there.
But I have to say that Netflix has brought a whole new meaning to the phrase binge-watch. I have noticed that I’m pretty obsessive about watching shows in order, and only one series at a time until I’m done, then on to the next. Murdoch Mysteries, The Crown, Doc Martin, Raiders of the Lost Art, Midsomer Murders (why do all those folks go wandering around in the middle of the night in the dark?) and, of course, every series about castles, country homes and British villages. I don’t think I don’t actually watch any more tv than I used to, but now I spend a lot less time looking through the tv guide to see what’s palatable!
What will you admit to binge-watching?
Trail Baboon 