Our daughter is a social worker. Yesterday, as part of her job, she went fishing and caught a three foot long shark in Puget Sound. I don’t usually associate social work with shark fishing. How wacky!
What is the wackiest thing you had to do as part of a job?
Today’s post comes from Barbara in Rivertown.
[I figured we should have a little astronomy before Monday.]
Just a few blocks from our house in Winona, there is a spit of land beyond the levee that juts out into the Mississippi. Boat trailers can be driven down to put in (and pull out) their boats. Even farther out are chunks of concrete that you can climb over, and once you get all the way out there, you feel like you’re right in the river. It’s a great place to watch ducks and other water birds, and the barges being pushed by the (ironically-named) tugboats.
During the warmer months, on the evenings of the full moon, we go there at sunset, climb out and look West until the sun goes down behind (in this case) the hills in an island in the river. Then we turn ourselves 180 degrees to the East, and wait for the moon to come up. It’s tricky to predict exactly where it will rise * – and the orb is hard to see because it’s still quite light out. But finally it appears: a big golden- orange roundness edging up into the sky, and it’s thrilling each time we do this.
Before I met Husband, he lived in the country up on the ridge, where he was able to see lots of sunsets. Because of the tilt of Earth’s axis and its rotation, each night the sun goes down (* and the moon comes up) at a little different spot on the horizon. These photos were taken on the July 9 full moon by my friend Angela. In August the sun went down considerably to the left of that hill you see, and the moon also came up left of what’s pictured.
Tell about a memorable solar, lunar, or stellar event in your past.
Any baboons traveling to see the solar eclipse?
Today’s post comes from Occasional Caroline.
My mother lives in South St. Paul, but goes to church about 25 miles away, in Hudson Wisconsin. The church has formed the “Driving Miss Daisy” ministry to take my mom and her friend, Dorothy (both in their 90s) to and from church on Sunday mornings. I have the “bring them home” shift every first and third week. This past Sunday, a new volunteer had been drafted to bring them home because the regularly scheduled driver has left the church; so this was Jane’s first time. She dropped Dorothy off and took Mom home. She helped her to the door, but when they opened it, a strong gas smell wafted out. Mom hurried in to find her husband and get him outside. He has completely lost his sense of smell, so resisted leaving the house, thinking she was over reacting. Jane discovered that one of the stove burner knobs was on with no flame. She turned it off, got everyone outside and called 911 (I’m not positive that was the exact order of events). Anyway, the fire fighters arrived, checked the house for any other gas sources, opened all the windows and allowed them to go back in. And all is well. Thank goodness for Jane; what a dramatic start to a volunteer gig! Note: Mom’s husband, still unable to smell anything, starts closing windows to keep Sunday’s cool, fresh air from coming in! 
Have you ever had to call 911?
It is a slow time of year right now. Clients are waiting until school begins to resume therapy The garden is in a “wait and watch” stage, with beans developing, the third crop of spinach growing, and tomatoes slowly reddening. Who knows what is happening beneath the potato plants. They just keep flowering.
This is the first time since 1991 that we haven’t had a child in school or college. I feel as though I am in the doldrums, just waiting for something to happen. The wait isn’t necessarily refreshing or pleasant. Husband’s father goes to a Memory Care Center this week. We are sort of waiting for things to happen with him, too. Who knows how he will adjust. This time of year is usually busy and forward looking. Not this year. Send in the clowns!
How do you handle the doldrums?
It is hard to know in a drought how much supplemental water for the vegetable garden is too much, and how much is too little. We err on the side of overindulgence. Our recent water bill is testimony to our generosity. I worry that our pole beans, full and tall on their poles, have yet to produce flowers due to our over watering and not allowing them to feel stress. I worry our peppers are responding the same way, with very few fruits as yet. Here is a photo of the pole beans with potato plants in the foreground.
Babies born to diabetic mothers often have underdeveloped lungs due to the glucose-rich uterine environment which lacks the normal “stress” of less sweet amniotic fluid. Children who have few expectations don’t fare as well as their peers who have expectations.
It has been stressful at my work due to difficulty hiring staff. I can’t believe that the stress is doing me any good.
I think that a little bit of stress is necessary for all good development, be it for plants or people. The trick is discerning the right balance. Oh that we could thrive without stress!
What do you consider the good stress in your life? The not so good stress? How do you find a balance?
One of my favorite sections of the newspaper (besides the section in the Sunday edition that lists District Court proceedings for who got convicted of what and what their sentences were) is the Public Notices. I don’t know if the big papers like the Strib or the New York Times print public notices, but our paper does. We have to vote every general election if we want the notices published in the local paper. It always passes. As a local district judge told me, it is the best place to find out what your friends and neighbors are up to.
By public notices I mean foreclosure announcements, city and county commission proceedings, school board minutes, bids for government contracts, summonses for parents to attend juvenile hearings, divorce related interim property rulings, and name changes.
One of my friends was surprised to read that her sister’s house was in foreclosure. “I’ve been sending her money for the mortgage for months! What has she been spending it on instead?”
Public notices provide access to unanswered community questions. ” How can they keep that new restaurant open when hardly anyone goes there and the prices are so high?” That is answered by seeing the notice that So and So construction company is placing a lien on the restaurant in question for not paying the construction bill.
Our local paper prints the following:
WHAT IF AMERICA DIDN’T NOTICE?
Public notices help expose:
Fraud in Government!
Dishonest businesses!
Unfair competitive practices!
PARTICIPATE IN DEMOCRACY. READ YOUR PUBLIC NOTICES.
How do you participate in Democracy?
I received an unexpected request for family tree information last week from a woman in Canada. According to Ancestry. com, she and I are DNA matches and are likely 5th to 8th cousins. Her great grandmother and my Great Grandfather Lunzmann were siblings. I never knew he had siblings, but there he was on her tree, the youngest of about six children. I had never really ever looked for his siblings, and searched instead for earlier ancestors.
I am very happy that my long lost relative contacted me, since I know very little about the Lunzmann family. I know about my great grandfather’s life after 1900, but not in the 30 years before that and not his family life in the small village he came from in Mecklenburg , Germany.
This is one time that I welcome the intrusion of new technology in my life . I don’t always feel that way about it.
What about the latest technology do you find charming? What do you find alarming?
Today’s post comes from Barbara in Rivertown
Last week after our t’ai chi class, one intrepid soul brought out her garden bag, to see if anyone would like some… what else?… ZUCCHINI. She was able to shed a couple of them, and proceeded to tell us that August 8 is “sneak some zucchini onto your neighbor’s porch” day. I thought perhaps she’d made that up, but a little research shows that, indeed, Tuesday August 8 is National Zucchini Day, known in some circles as Sneak Some Zucchini Onto Your Neighbor’s Porch Day. This site states that “Desperate times call for desperate measures. It’s time to sneak over, under the cover of darkness, to your neighbor’s porch, and unload some zucchini…”
Those of you with veggie gardens know what I’m talking about. This year I have given zukes to half a dozen people so far; I think I’m caught up with our four plants at the moment, but more are on the way. I thought I was doing well when I discovered, on the ground back by the fence, a real “baseball bat”. I decided to leave it on the neighbor’s back stoop, with a note saying “Just kidding, I’ll come back for it”, because they have their own plants, and I want to keep them as friends.
Here are some fun facts about zucchini for the curious, found at
I just checked the garden, and found a good sized green torpedo hiding on the ground… next year I’m campaigning for yellow squash – tastes the same in my book, and you can actually see them!
When have you sneaked around after dark, for any reason?
I heard Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition last night, and a convoluted trail of thoughts led me to Baba Yaga, Jack and Jill magazine, Lloyd Alexander, and the first time I tried to buy a book by myself.
My mother subscribed to Jack and Jill magazine for me when I was a child in the 1960’s. I was fascinated by the stories in the magazine about Baba Yaga, the Russian witch who flew around in a mortar and pestle, and who lived in a hut on chicken legs. Mussorgsky portrays the witch sailing fiendishly through the air in her mortar, and the hut walking around just like I imagine such a hut to walk.
There was no book store in my home town, and Sioux Falls didn’t get one until I was a teenager. My mom always let me buy books at school from Scholastic, Services and I took out as many books as I was allowed from the public and school libraries. I discovered a wonderful book series by Lloyd Alexander called The Prydain Chronicles one summer in the public library when I was in Grade 4. The stories are based on Welsh myth, and I was disappointed to find that the library was missing one book in the series. The librarian told me that she had no intention purchasing it, either. Without telling my mom, I found the name and address of the publisher (Holt, Rinehart, and Winston) from inside one of the books in the series that the library had, hand wrote a letter in my horrible handwriting asking about the price of the book, addressed and stamped the envelope, and mailed it off. A couple of weeks later I received a very nice reply kindly letting me know the price, which was more money than I had at the time, and thanking me for my inquiry. I dropped my search, and finally found the missing book a couple of years later in the book store that opened up in the first mall in Sioux Falls.
My love for Jack and Jill magazine prompted me to subscribe to it as well as Cricket magazine for my son and daughter. We found Baba Yaga stories in Cricket, too. Imagine my delight when I saw that Lloyd Alexander was one of the editors of Cricket. Both children loved The Prydain Chronicles, as well as other stories by Lloyd Alexander. Funny where listening to Mussorgsky will take you.
What magazines did your family subscribe to?
Today’s post comes from littlejailbird.
A couple weeks ago my friend from Vermont stayed a few days with me. The first full day she was here, she took the light rail over to the Minnesota History Center in St. Paul to do some research for a book she is writing, but the rest of the time (Tuesday mid-morning to Friday evening), we spent most of our time together.
Those of you who know me at all know that I have a strong tendency toward introversion, which means that I get tired out by spending lots of time with other people, even people I like. So you may not be surprised to learn that, after planning our activity for Friday, I went upstairs to bed and moaned to myself, “I really don’t feel like going anywhere tomorrow.”
But, because she is my friend and because one of the things we’ve always liked doing together is take walks, in the morning off we went to Wood Lake Nature Center. We saw some egrets and either two great blue herons or the same one twice, a turtle, a muskrat, and some egg masses that my friend got very excited about (one of the books she has written is about salamanders). So I ended up being glad I went, especially since one of the egrets was close enough that, even with my not-very-long telephoto lens, I was able to get a couple decent shots.
Also, the great blue heron flew in close enough that we got a good view of it in flight. I snapped some shots of it, not expecting to get anything very good, because I’ve never been able to catch birds in flight, but I just couldn’t not try and sometimes it’s fun to try even if you’re pretty sure you won’t succeed.
When have you been glad you went somewhere or did something when you didn’t really feel like it?
Trail Baboon 