Category Archives: The Baboon Congress

Those Wascally Wabbits

July 2, 2015 Jacque 98 Comments

Today’s guest post comes from Jacque.

As I child I loved the Beatrix Potter book Peter Rabbit. I loved the story; I loved Mama Rabbit’s warning to stay away from Farmer MacGregor’s garden; I loved adventurous, naughty Peter with his snow white tail; I loved the drawings; I loved sitting on Dad’s lap listening to his low voice recite the book one more time.

Farmer MacGregor, the anti-hero wearing overalls and carrying the fearsome pitchfork, was the recipient of all my fear and scorn.

He was mean.

He was Peter’s enemy.

He did not understand Peter at all.

Soon thereafter, Bunny Rabbit on Captain Kangaroo appeared, tormenting Mr. Moose with his rainstorm of ping pong balls. I thought that was so funny. Bunny Rabbit was my secret friend. Mr. Moose was a perfect foil who just never caught on to Bunny’s smart tricks.

Later in childhood Bugs Bunny arrived, carrot in hand, ready to torment Elmer Fudd. “What’s Up, Doc?” Elmer Fudd was just such a Fuddy-Duddy, never smart enough to out smart Bugs. I loved Bugs.

As a child I was on the side of the Rabbit, wherever the rabbit appeared.

Well, not anymore. I am now Mr. Moose, Farmer MacGregor, and Elmer Fudd all in one.

My vegetable/flower garden in fenced in, the flowers in the flower garden carefully protected, all to prevent rabbit carnage. Despite all this the rabbits chewed away a coneflower this spring. They almost destroyed a yellow button flower that came over the prairies on the covered wagons with my ancestors, as well as a coral bells. These are all hardy perennial plants which are nearly impossible to destroy, and these wascally wabbits nearly got them all.

Last year we witnessed a genius baby rabbit who learned how to traverse the rabbit fence around the vegetable garden. Lou and I stood there watching as the baby bunny scaled the rabbit fence straight up to a hole large enough to allow him/her through, then slithered into the garden. We then knew exactly who devoured the seedling radishes, beets, carrots, and kohrabi. After opening the gate, I charged into the garden, startling the bunny who then left the enclosure the same way he or she entered.

A tiny 5 pound critter reduced me to rage and blind frustration. My perspective shifted and the souls of Mr. Moose, Farmer MacGregor, and Elmer Fudd entered my being. I yelled “What’s Up Bunny?” at the departing tail.

What has caused you to experience a shift in your perspective on an issue?

The Baboon Congress

Strawberries!

July 1, 2015 verily sherrilee 76 Comments

Today’s guest post comes from Sherrilee

I’m not sure why I first started picking strawberries every year; now it’s a tradition that I don’t want to do without. The strawberry picking window is pretty small – usually a couple of weeks in mid-June. This year the weather has been perfect and berries are right on schedule.

Strawberry picking day starts out early; we always try to get to the fields by 6:30 a.m. Once the sun comes up, pickers descend on the fields… sometimes the fields can be picked out by 10 a.m. And the early morning is cooler for picking. Young Adult and I pick in rows next to each other – she is not a dedicated picker, but understands the concept of “as soon as the boxes are full we go home”. Of course, an integral part of strawberry picking is strawberry tasting. The berries were sweet and juicy this year.

Once home it’s time to process all the berries. This year we did 14 jars of freezer jam and froze about 16 pounds of smoothies over the winter. And it was a strawberry orgy for three days straight: strawberry cake, strawberry peach pie and lots of bowls of fresh berries with whipped cream. My mother was not a canner; I am entirely self-taught and I really enjoy it. So when I found this poem by Joyce Sutphen, it didn’t remind me of my mother, but maybe someday it will remind the Young Adult of me.

Canning

It’s what she does and what her mother did.

It’s what I’d do if I were anything

like her mother’s mother – or if the times

demanded that I work in my garden,

planting rows of beans and carrots, weeding

the pickles and potatoes, picking worms

off the cabbages.

Today she’s canning

tomatoes, which means there are baskets

of red Jubilees waiting on the porch

and she’s been in the cellar looking for jars…

There’s a box of lids and a heal of golf

rings on the counter. She gets the spices

out; she revs the engine of the old stove.

Now I declare her Master of Preserves!

I say that if there were degrees in canning

she would be summa cum laude—God knows

she’s spent as many hours at the sink peeling

the skins off hot tomatoes as I have

bent over a difficult text. I see

her at the window, filling up the jar,

packing a glass suitcase for the winter.

Joyce Sutphen

(from First Words: Poems, by Joyce Sutphen, Red Dragonfly Press, 2010)

Do you have a seasonal tradition?

The Baboon Congress

The Fix Is In

June 30, 2015 Linda 87 Comments

Today’s guest post is from Linda in St. Paul.

I’ve never gone to college, because I’ve never been sure what kind of degree I should work toward in this way-too-modern world we live in. If I could design my own course of study, I might choose to pursue a degree in The Almost-Lost Art of Fixing Things.

Over the past couple of years, I’ve been an avid fan of the Fix-It clinics in the Twin Cities metro area. Volunteers gather in a community meeting place and invite residents to bring in stuff that needs fixing. In a spirit of helpfulness, these volunteers bring an amazing array of tools and expertise to bear on the problems of our lives – the once-useful, now broken, torn, malfunctioning things that are one step away from becoming junk. Whatever you have that has one foot in the landfill, there is someone there with a sewing machine or soldering iron at the ready, just waiting for you.

As I write this, I have some rice simmering in a favorite saucepan that was salvaged not once, but twice. I fished it out of a “FREE” box at a garage sale years ago and mended its broken handle. Last month the handle gave way again, and this time the old bolt that had been holding it in place was so rusted I couldn’t remove it to replace it. The saucepan became a candidate for Fix-It attention.

At the Longfellow Park Rec Center, a volunteer named Gary supplied a center punch and a metal-cutting drill bit that dispatched the offending bolt. It was just a matter of replacing the hardware, and my saucepan was back in business. At the same clinic, volunteer Corey helped me take apart a moribund TV remote and clean the battery connections to bring it back to life. At past Fix-It events, I’ve had help reviving a recalcitrant smoothie mixer, a worn extension cord, a wobbly gazing ball stand, a noisy oscillating fan, and a non-responsive leaf vac. Not to mention the chainsaw that was adjusted and several wonky zippers put right.

No one makes any money off these repairs, but there is a satisfaction payoff that can’t be adequately quantified. A job well done doesn’t necessarily have a price tag.

What lost arts would you like to revive?

The Baboon Congress, Words

We’ve Got Your G.O.A.T.

June 29, 2015 Barbara in Rivertown 69 Comments

Today’s guest post comes from Barbara in Robbinsdale.

Ah, Babooners are a word-loving bunch, and if they don’t find the word they seek in the common lexicon, they will create their own. To keep track of these, we occasionally update our “Glossary of Accepted Terms” , or G.O.A.T.

This acronym was coined by our Alpha Baboon, Dale (he of the CAP – see ACRONYMS, below). For the uninitiated: when we started this “dictionary”, we had a couple of goat farmers among our personnel (welcome back, Cynthia), which explains a little. Jacque and I collaborated on the first one, and I’ve kept it going, sporadically. Here we are past Summer Solstice of 2015, two years since the last update in May of 2013.

Sometimes the newly created word is the result of a typo; others are just sheer cleaverness . The dates are left in, in case you have a lot of time on your hands and wish to find out what the HECK was going on at the time.

I now have a system – copy and paste the new word into a M’soft Word file with all the information I’ll need, and then edit like crazy when I’ve collected enough to make a post. It appeals to my love for making order out of chaos.

To visit the Glossary, go to top right, under The Trail Photo.

Here are the latest additions:

Accidentalics – i.e. “Ooops… unintended italics. Do we have a word for that?” December 16, 2013 at 11:12 pm

Achedemic – Learning something the hard way, as in “she seems to be heading off in more achedemic directions…” September 3, 2014 at 8:17 am

Binoculookers – a device that helps you see farther than you usually can. For instance “Then she asked her dad if she could ‘use his binoculookersto view the bear in the night sky’ ”. February 23, 2015 at 12:10 pm

Crimea River – a river in Crimea, OR a sad song. “If you’re aim is to turn this geopolitical episode into a musical, don’t forget to include Crimea River as one of the numbers.” (unfortunately, I lost track of the date for this one.) .March 24, 2014 at 7:40 pm

Disphasia – the condition of being out of synch with others of your generation (did I get this right, Clyde?), as in “The gap has created some interesting disphasia in our life.” June 23, 2015

Distraughtitude – The condition of being distraught, as in: “I’m sure that the distraughtitude of the usual suspects will probably be more pronounced.” June 3, 2015 at 8:09 am

Experience Loyal – An alternative to being brand loyal: “I am experience-loyal Give me a good experience, and I’m bound to come back.” November 25, 2013 at 11:58 am

fauxtimming November 25, 2013 at 3:34 pm – “a disorder having to do with the inability to remember to capitalize and or punctuate. on occasion there may be a hand held device that intercedes and give the impression of english etiquette but it is an illusion. it is called fauxtimming. [timism] * and fauxtimming are not taught but can be easily implemented with any standard keyboard and a computer that has a disarm feature on its spell checker.” October 6, 2014 at 11:16 am

Hygge, hyggelig – A Danish word that doesn’t have an English counterpart: “Hygge” is part state of mind, part physical coziness that includes comfort and warmth, and good smells. As we get close to Christmas, a batch of gløg, a few Christmas cookies, soothing music and, again, a lot of lit candles help make things hyggelig …” December 21, 2013 at 8:03 am

Mingy, minginginess – “Being skimpy, paring everything just inside of “enough”. Rhymes with stingy, and means about the same but not quite, as there is also an implication of deception-pretended generosity. (This is actually in the dictionary, folks.)” October 22, 2014 at 11:36 am

Mushroomisticism – slow cooking a mushroomy dish for hours at low heat. “im tackling suaces as my next challenge, that and mushroomisticism.” February 5, 2015 at 7:49 am

Multi-nontasking – looking around and seeing all the things one hasn’t managed to get done. August 1, 2013 at 7:15 pm i.e. “I can sit with a cat on my lap while listening to a ball game.” August 2, 2013 at 12:03 am

Procrasti-tasks – “things you don’t want to do, but you do them to avoid something you want to do less. For example, if you have laundry to fold which has been sitting for days but you also have a grant request to write, suddenly the laundry is folded.” January 12, 2015 at 10:37 am

timism – (from G.O.A.T.) – An ambiguity in which you are not sure whether there was a typo, or an intentional misspelling, as in “My favorite timism of the week is ‘Talk snout dysfunctional’…” (See Dec. 23, 2010 TBB for rich, complete discussion.)

To-do-plegia – Wikipedia uses “plegia” to describe paralysis in which all voluntary movement is lost.” To-do-plegia involves a to-do list, as in “I need lots of good energy sent my way this week. … [to accomplish] the to-do list…” September 8, 2014 at 10:31 am

Turbo-mouse – A rodent capable of monumental achievement, say, climbing with a malted milk ball to a place 12’ off the ground. “My apologies to the turbo-mouse if I am not giving credit where it is due.” November 25, 2014 at 6:23 am

Unfronding – In response to Dale’s hand-weeding description: I need to confront the weeds personally, face to frond”, there was this comment: “These days we call what you do unfronding the weeds.” August 5, 2013 at 7:06 am DC: “Hah! Just think, I could have wasted all those hours on Facebook instead!”

Weasel words – Product description lingo that disguises some aspect of the contents of a food, as in “If a product is described as chocolatey, that’s an almost certain indicator that there’s no actual chocolate in it.” February 28, 2014 at 11:29 am

Worm wigs – a very creative typo that created this mental image: “I wonder if I wore a worm wig if that could solve my winter composting problems – I could have compost-eating worms right on top of my head.” March 27, 2014 at 1:12 pm

Yikes meter – a measure of… take your pick: outrageousness, offensiveness, or unbelievability that causes a Baboon to say “Well, that’s way up there on the yikes meter.” March 22, 2015 at 9:58 pm

ACRONYMS:

CAT – I admit to having Compulsive Acronym Tendencies February 21, 2015

CRAPO – Calendar Reactive Anniversary Pile On November 22, 2013

When you feel compelled to make a list, what’s on it?

The Baboon Congress

The Wrinkled in Time

June 27, 2015 cbirkholz 65 Comments

Today’s guest post comes from Clyde.

A warning: do not ever give me wife any of your prized canned goods. She will turn them into a decoration.

Several people over the last thirty years have given her canned jellies, pickles, vegetables, salsa, and mixed concoctions of uncertain origin and purpose—not one of which we ever opened, even the mystery jars. They held a prized place long past their rot-by-date. Surely it is the effect of reading too many Country Living magazines, and its fifty clones. In the perfectly-circular orbit of these magazines and their TV equivalents, old things are decorations, if not in their natural state, then in some re-purposed form.

For all those thirty years I have shook my head in puzzled bemusement at this, an internal shake of the head only, being the wisely silent partner in our interior decorating. Over those same thirty years, and a few years before that, we collected a variety of household objects de fonction which were the working elements of my childhood. They were not collected to give me the warm glow of nostalgia, which some have, but to be objets d’art, to provide ambiance and grace, or color or poise or form or whatever are the components of interior design.

It is hard to imagine any objects of current manufacture being used in interior design in 2053 or on the The Antiques Roadshow, 2113. What will the magazine of 2053 be called? What word will hold the charm that the word country does today? I suppose by then suburban will hold a certain cachet, depending on where people will be living, assuming that they are, living that is.

But why is: if old things are perceived as prized decorations of beauty and interest, why aren’t old people?

The Baboon Congress, Words

Summer Reading!

June 26, 2015 verily sherrilee 82 Comments

Today’s guest post comes from Sherrilee.

It’s that time of year when everyone across America trots out their summer reading list.

Newspapers, online `zines, libraries – they are all hawking their ideas for filling up our lazy summer days with reading. When do they think we’ll get all this reading done? I don’t know about anybody else, but my summer is pretty full – yardwork, graduation parties, out-of-town visitors and vacations. And in my world vacations are pretty jam-packed with not much reading time.

But who am I to go against tradition? In the spirit of the Summer Reading List, here are a few of the books that are on my list this summer.

Death by Rhubarb by Lou Jane Temple. This title was unearthed by Clyde last month in a discussion on the trail of toxic rhubarb.

The Creation of Anne Boleyn by Susan Bordo. If you are interested in Henry VIII’s second wife, for whom he upended the country, this book challenges what you think you know and why you think you know it!

The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches by Alan Bradley. #6 in the Flavia de Luce mystery series, featuring the very precocious 11-year old, Flavia.

Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee. A nostalgic look at growing up in another time. I have the Illustrated volume and it’s charming!

As You Wish by Cary Elwes. This title takes a look behind the scenes of one of my favorite movies of all time, Princess Bride.

Uprooted by Naomi Novik. I haven’t a clue what this is about but it’s by Naomi Novik, so it’s on my list!

Some Luck by Jane Smiley. The first in the Hundred Years Family Saga – promises some emotional ups and downs.

Sophia: Princess, Suffragette, Revolutionary by Anita Anand. Biography of Sophia Duleep Singh.

Where’s your favorite summer reading spot?

The Baboon Congress

The Chainsaw Massacre

June 25, 2015 verily sherrilee 63 Comments

Today’s guest post is by Sherrilee

Two Sundays ago I finally pruned my big lilac bush. It’s been 20+ years so it was definitely a job that needed the chainsaw. It took a while to get all the branches small enough for the City of Minneapolis to take away so I had plenty of time to think about my chainsaw skills and history.

I moved into my current house a couple of decades ago, when I was still with my wasband. Among other things that we inherited with the house was a sick tree in the front yard. We had a couple of tree folks out to look at it and both had the same opinion; the tree had to go. While we paid for the tree professionals for their opinions, the wasband was not going to pay for someone to remove the old tree (his middle name should have been UberFrugal). And I’ll admit, the do-it-yourself of the job appealed to me.

The new tree was delivered on a Saturday morning and we tromped down to Home Depot and purchased a chainsaw to do the job. Wasband had it “all worked out”; I would guide where the tree fell with a rope around the tree and he would do the sawing. Knowing what I know now about physics, I can’t believe this was the plan.

Just like a sit-com, the tree started to fall the wrong way. Of course, it was much too heavy for me to guide and the rope went with the tree. Wasband dropped the chain saw on the ground to try to help me. He did manage to shove the tree in another direction from the house; instead it fell right on the chainsaw, splintering it into hundreds of plastic yellow pieces. It was almost as if the tree was saying “if I’m going, you’re going with me!”

So now the tree was down, but we still needed to cut it into smaller logs. Back to Home Depot. I’m sure that these days, after 9-1-1, someone would call Homeland Security about the couple buying a second chainsaw on the same day!

Have you ever had a DIY project go wrong?

The Baboon Congress

Tootie Goes To School

June 24, 2015 Jacque 80 Comments

Today’s guest post is by Jacque.

Since 2008, the year my mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease and gave up housekeeping, I have edited and illustrated a story book for my mother as a Christmas gift from me each Holiday Season. (Some of you in BBC have seen these).

The stories that comprise each book are memoirs that she wrote in 1984 as part of an Iowa Writer’s Workshop Project that travelled through out Iowa. The purpose of the project was to have citizens of Iowa write about their own stories. The second purpose was to give teachers CEU credits.

My sister, brother, and I knew about these stories because Mom told us about attending the class. When we were children, she told us these stories.

As we transitioned Mom out of her house, the task of cleaning out her house and disposing of many family antiques fell to me. The stories, antiques of a different type, were tucked away in an old file. I confiscated them and began storybook project. There are now six books and I have started on the one for this year: “Potty Talk.” It is about all the functions of a modern day bathroom and laundry, spread throughout the farmstead.

The year 2014 was one of big family events. Both Mom and Lou’s dad started to deteriorate in health. We experienced nine months of parents’ needing assistance, many trips back and forth to Iowa where they each lived, hosting mom here and the family drama that arrives with all that.

Lou’s dad died in October at age 94. Mom moved to a Memory Care facility in January 2015.

During all that the 2014 book barely got written and I never did post the link to this story on this. So I thought I would use this as a blog topic. The name of a the book was Tootie Goes to School regarding Mom’s first day of school, which was not much fun for her.

A website called www.Bookemon.com is where I publish and copyright each book so no one can take the stories from her. You can browse the site and find them there.

I also posted the link to one or two of these on the blog in the past.

Here is the link.
Enjoy.

Do you remember your first day of school? Tell us more!

The Baboon Congress

Spring Went Sproing in 1965, Part 3

June 23, 2015 cbirkholz 55 Comments

Today’s post comes from Clyde of Mankato

In the spring of 1965 my world went as topsy-turvy as did the politics and weather of Minnesota. Do you think the picture is a scene from the The Graduate? My world did not go quite that tupsy-turvy in the spring and summer of 1965..

I have related before on this blog the speed and folly of our rapid courtship. What I want to address is a few large changes in that period of history. First I will remind you that on our wedding day I was an infantile 20 years old; she was a mature 25, the adjectives expressing how people perceived our age difference. What strikes me now as I recall that spring and summer, is what a watershed were the years between Sandy’s gradation year, 1958, and mine, 1963.

In Sandy’s big-city high school graduation class going directly to college was uncommon. Few of her women classmates went to a four-year school. Sandy was in about twenty weddings of classmates between 1958 and 1960, with most of the brides pregnant, which was a large social sin at the time. Almost all of those marriages ended in divorce.

Sandy’s life choices were the big three: teacher, nurse, secretary. She chose the later, not conceiving how she could afford to attend college in that time of little support or encouragement for female students, or co-eds, as they were called then in that derogatory manner. The married women never expected to work outside the home, which almost all of them eventually did. Most of the husbands took unskilled jobs, which they had planned to do, or learned a trade from their fathers. At age 25 Sandy was on the brink of spinsterhood.

In my small-town class, despite being one of the least motivated classes in the school’s history, about one-half of my class went to college, about one-half of that one-half were women, several in nursing or teaching, but others choosing other career paths. Only three or four of my classmates, as near as I know, were pregnant for the wedding.

In weddings for her classmates and mine, the husband was zero to seven years older. A younger husband was very rare. Many assumed that our marriage was doomed, both for the speed of our marriage and for the age-difference. Sandy’s classmates did not know how to deal with me. I gather that the same age difference, 20 and 25, is still regarded as a peculiarity only if the man is the younger.

Larger cultural changes were occurring in that five-year gap, too, such as the Viet Nam War and the active objection to it. Civil rights arose. Sandy’s class had one African-American, in a school now dominated by non-white students. My class had one Native-American student. The decade of the 60’s scorned the values and styles the decade of the 50’s. The country turned hard left.

The gap has created some interesting disphasia (my coined word) in our life. When Sandy became pregnant at age 30, which she was not supposed to be capable of doing, the medical world was full of angst at her old age. Our children were born when most of her classmate friends had children starting junior high. Proceeding cultural changes have widened the gap. All but one of her classmate friends have great grandchildren; our grandchildren are age 2, 10, and 12. I know little about my classmates, but they seem to have grandchildren of an age similar to mine.

Her classmates have remained in a narrow world and remained staunch knee-jerk Eisenhower Republicans. Has there been a greater shift in presidents than between lethargic hands-off old Eisenhower and inspiring progressive youthful Kennedy?

All of this change seems to have impacted women more than men. I saw this directly when I was a U of M student. I had none of the interests of the other male students, such as drinking and pursuing co-eds. As a result, I had several friends, whom we called re-treads instead of co-eds. These were women who had married young, often one or two years into college. Now 10-15 years later, they were back in college or had started college. I suppose most of them have since died. They were a fun lot with which to share coffee at Coffman.

How are you disphasic?

History, Music, The Baboon Congress

A Late Great Morning Show Revival

June 20, 2015 verily sherrilee 166 Comments

Today’s guest post comes from Sherrilee

At Blevins Book Club last weekend, a small pocket of us were reminiscing about some of our crusty old favorites from The Late Great Morning Show. Most of us are still Radio Heartland devotees, but don’t hear the oldies but goodies as often as we’d like.

So it’s time for a LGMS revival! If we pull together a list of titles, Mike will get them organized and we’ll have a rousing couple of hours of songs that elicit some of our great memories from over the years. After we get the list to Mike, he’ll let us know the date and time. No guarantee that he’ll be able to find all our titles and I’m assuming we’ll come up with way more titles that can fit into a couple of hours, but I think we should give it a shot.

I’ll start us off with two: The Mary Ellen Carter by Stan Rogers and Canned Goods by Greg Brown.

What song do you miss from the LGMS?

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