I was listening to the Broadway channel in the car on my way home from work the other day when The Age of Aquarius came on, a recording from the most recent Broadway revival of Hair. The Broadway cast recording came out in 1969, and I remember buying it at the record store in Sioux Falls not long after. I was about 12, I think. I never saw a production of it until I saw the Milos Forman movie from 1979.
Our public library had a set of Broadway Yearbooks that I just loved to look through. It was so fun to read about these productions through the decades. I read all about Hair, and felt a sort of affinity to it, as my zodiac sign is Aquarius and it made me feel like I was part of the whole anti-war, hippie culture as a Middle School student from middle of nowhere Southwest Minnesota. My parents hated long hair on men and the anti-war protests, but they also hated the war, and never minded what books I read or what music I listened to. Oh, for the time when I could really believe in:
Harmony and understandingSympathy and trust abounding No more falsehoods or derisions Golden living dreams of visions Mystic crystal revelation And the mind’s true liberation
Things like this musical and the popular music and literature of the times fueled my youthful idealism that I try to maintain at least a bit of in these most trying times.
What fueled your youthful idealism? What were your favorite Broadway musicals in the 1960’s and 1970’s? What did your parents think about your choices in dress, music, and literature when you were a teenager?
Made it to February. I’ve been working on my farm bookwork and getting all the receipts entered. The farm expenses are the ones that matter. The household expenses don’t factor into taxes or anything (for the most part), it’s just keeping track. Gone through the report once to find all my finger slips and I still have to input all the electronic receipts and then I’ll double check it again. (I find it harder to keep track of, and record all the auto payments and things with electronic receipts.)
Ducks and chickens are good. I think we’ve almost made it through the worst of the cold for the winter. We sure have been filling the bird feeders a lot lately.
We have several angel figurines around the house. There is one I’m particular fond of. It’s just always given me comfort.
I’m not sure what it’s made of, I thought it was wood, until she got knocked over one day and her head broke into 3 pieces and it was almost like sand. But hollow too. I glued her back together and she was fine.
Recently, she got knocked over again and while her head pretty much shattered, the rest of the body and wings are fine. I still don’t get what she’s made of.
We were going to throw it out… but I hated seeing it in the garbage, so I retrieved her. I have justification for this: “The head is what gets us in trouble; it’s the heart we need”. “It is only with that heart that one can see rightly”* And it reminded me of Joseph and the headless snow man that got dumped on a roadside one winter.
How can you just throw them out?? The snowman, yeah, I understand. But Joseph? Heathens, I tell you. We couldn’t just dump Joseph in the garbage. Even if the lightbulb in his back was burned out, he deserves better. I even talked with a minister friend of ours asking what the proper disposal was for religious figurines. (We had a good laugh over ‘pyres of fire’ and his thought was as long as the intent was pure, it was OK.)
Still, we saved Joseph; he moves around the yard and gets sunglasses or hats for the holidays when we can, and we talk to him often. He had some really nice sunglasses that made him look super awesome. (Blue sky sunglasses photo) Until my nephew realized those were his fancy expensive sunglasses he had lost the summer before. Joseph hasn’t looked as cool since.
Any figurines giving you comfort?
*Thank you Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and ‘The Little Prince’.
Well, Husband and I are expecting-a new puppy! Husband decided it had been too long (7 years) since we had a terrier in our home, and it was time for another. He did the AKC “What is the best dog for me” quiz, which told him it was an Airdale. Well, we are just too old for an Airdale, and he looked at photos of various terriers and fell immediately in love with the Cesky Terrier, a recognized Czech breed bred for eradicating vermin, originally developed from crossing a Scottie with a Sealyham.
I contacted three breeders who are members of the American Cesky Terrier Fanciers Association, and found one in Oklahoma who has eight puppies who will be ready in early May. All these people are responsible breeders who show their dogs and are very particular who their puppies go to. I have to complete a very detailed application, and we will have phone conversations so they feel we are the right people for their pup. May is a good time for us, as we will have travels over and can devote time to puppy training all summer. It is also good at this point in our lives with Husband’s part-time work schedule.
Getting a puppy is pretty similar to having a new baby in the house. I will expect to be exhausted in May. I think our cat will be very disgusted. It is fortunate that the Cesky Terrier is a very short dog who can’t jump very high.
What are your experiences with new puppies, kittens, or newborn humans? What are your experiences with adoption? Any advice how to integrate a cat and a terrier puppy in the same home?
Tuesday was my birthday. I had a great day. I got two lovely flower arrangements from my coworkers and from dear friends. I had lovely wishes from friends on Facebook and the Trail. It was a good day. I feel loved and blessed.
As I look on Internet sites concerned with happenings on my birthday, I see that I share a birthday with Clark Gable, G. Stanley Hall ( the first president of the American Psychological Association), Victor Herbert, SJ Perelman, Langston Hughes, John Napier, a Scots mathematician who invented logarithms in 1550, John Ford, the film director, and Boris Yeltsin. Queen Elizabeth I condemned her cousin, Mary Queen of Scots, to death on February 1. Lots of things happened the first day of February.
What important things happened on your birthday? What are your favorite or tragic birthday memories. With whom do you share a a birthday?
Our son was the Best Man in a wedding last September. Instead of renting tuxedos, the Groom and all the Groomsmen had matching suits sewn by a Vietnamese tailor company that specializes in doing precise measurements virtually. Son just happened to be going through Kansas City where the headquarters is, so he got measured in person. Everyone else was measured via Zoom or something. The suits were of such good quality and fit so well (as well as being affordable) that he ordered a sports coat, some dress shirts, and five pairs of chinos from the company. He got them last week and they all fit beautifully. They are of very good quality.
Whan Husband and I married in the early 1980’s, we opted for a tailor made suit for him, too, instead of renting a tuxedo. Winnipeg at the time had many tailor shops, most run by tailors who had immigrated from Italy in the 1960’s. All the conversations between the workers were in Italian. It was fun for Husband to meet the guys who made his suit. We still have it, although it doesn’t fit anymore and is sadly out of style.
What are your experiences with tailors or seamstresses? What clothing have you rented? What are your memories of wedding clothes?What are Baboon experiences as tailors?
As a farm and woods child I was struck by how animals know to look humans in the face. Or is it just the eyes? Not always easy to tell. Maybe it is obvious for animals to look at our face, but I have never been sure it is. Maybe they are looking at the source of our voice, but the few woods animals with which I had close contact looked at my face and I was being silent. It was the cultural norm in my family to talk to the animals. Many insist that our pets pick up our moods. I think they probably read us well. Not sure they respond to our moods as people believe. I think we anthropomorphize their behavior more than we realize.
The human brain is hard-wired about faces. We memorize them extremely well. When researchers make minute changes in the key landmarks in a photo of someone their subjects know, the subjects recognize something is incorrect. This is why portraiture is so difficult. Maybe all mammals are hard-wired about faces.
As if to throw mud in our faces about this, some eastern Europeans studied the behavior of the brains of our dogs as they encounter us, watching to see how much of the brain lights up on scanners when they interact with us. Their studies show that the dog brain is no more responsive to the owner’s face than to the back of the head. This so far is a one-off study, needed other studies to duplicate, or not, their results.
But it makes me wonder. How much of our truth about our pets is in our heads and not in theirs, so to speak. The great science writer Stephen Jay Gould wrote very often about how scientists’ protocols of study and analysis of results produce the results they want to discover. Objectivity is not really ever very true.
Consider these three faces.
We certainly read all sorts of things into these three faces. The tuxedo cat is my son’s Neon and the St. Bernard is his son’s Melvin. The cat with the fancy ruffled shirt is my daughter’s Bean. (If you are wondering why the dog lacks the usual jowliness of the breed, it is because he is only a year old. The jowliness, my son tells me, starts to develop at that point. And both his parents are small for the breed and are not very jowly. He is small at 120 pounds.) What are you reading in their faces? They are just sitting there looking at their owners, maybe wondering what that thing is they hold up in front of them so often.
Amazon Prime has three series of a competition to find in Great Britain the Portrait Painter of the Year. You watch several painters painting one of three famous people. At each of four rounds they pick one painter to go onto the next round, and then they pick a winner. The three judges are very biased against anything very literal. Yet somehow the best four can capture the face very well in less literal modes. I suspect however the failed literalists get the most commission work. Sandy, oddly, is fascinated by these shows. So we watch them together in the afternoon when I am over there. No matter how you look at it, portraits are a fascinating topic in art history.
All you pet lovers, go ahead and disagree with me about your pets responding to you.
How objective do you think you can be?
Do you have a favorite great portrait or portrait painter?
I am one of those folks who keeps all my passwords written down. I know lots of people use online password software these days, but it seems to me that if you need a separate password on almost every internet site that you visit in order to protect your data, that having all your passwords on the internet isn’t the smartest thing. Considering how good hackers are at what they do, why should I give them a helping hand?
Starting at least 10 years ago, I realized that my method of post-it notes wasn’t going to cut it any longer and I made a spreadsheet that I saved onto a thumbdrive after I printed it out. And since I often needed passwords at home as well, I printed two copies.. always on really bright paper (I kept my office copy in the middle of a binder, so the bright color helped me find it). Any changes got penciled in and then every year or so, I would update the file and print new copies.
About five years ago I was cleaning up in my room and ended up once again picking up my password printout off the floor. In fact, it was two versions… I don’t remember why. As I picked them up I thought to myself “I should put these someplace safer where I’ll remember where they are”. You know where this is going. The next time I needed those sheets, I couldn’t remember where I had put them. I spent A LOT of time looking for them, but clearly wherever I had put them, they were definitely safe.
Fast forward five years. I’m doing a massive cataloging project in my studio and a couple of days ago, I emptied out the drawer in which I keep my stencils. Now I open this drawer a lot to get to various stencils but I haven’t actually dug down to the bottom of the drawer for quite some time. As I was sorting through everything, I found the password sheets. What possessed me to put them in the stencil drawer? I have never ever put anything else in there for safekeeping.
This experience has made me realize a couple of things. #1 – I need to use my stencils more often. #2 – my password situation is still out of hand. #3 — every time I say to myself “I’ll put this someplace I’ll remember it”, I should just slap myself.
Today’s farm/township update comes to us from Ben.
Kelly and I saw “Come from Away” last Sunday. It was fantastic. In the lobby we heard a guy walk up to his wife and say, “My glasses fogged up and I was following the wrong lady in a red jacket.”
It was so cold! How cold was it? It was so cold I wore sleeves. It was so cold I saw a duck standing on one foot. It was so cold the handle on the water hydrant by the barn wouldn’t move. Then it warmed up for a day and the chickens came out, and the hydrant worked, and the ducks just looked at their corn.
In the winter, we get pheasants coming in to eat the corn I throw out for the ducks. Each year there’s a couple more and this year it’s 9 or 10. It’s pretty cool. The crows have learned there’s free food here too. Kelly doesn’t like the crows.
Here’s a picture of some dark colored blobs down there. Those are pheasants.
I’m on our local townboard. Been on there since 1998. We have one house on a major road that is city on both sides of this house, and there is 100’ of sidewalk in front of that house. I don’t know if it’s a ‘walking path’ or ‘bike path’ or ‘sidewalk’ but It’s the only sidewalk in the township. (because the rest of the township is rural or subdivisions that don’t have sidewalks). The city clears the walking path out in this area because there are no home frontages here, but they have been skipping that 100’ in front of this house. And the property owner has never plowed it. As it’s in the middle of this stretch of path, it’s a problem for people using the path. I learned all this last winter when I got an angry phone call from a city resident who lives out there and uses this path. I didn’t even know it was a township problem. I didn’t know the homeowner and I didn’t know if he had health issues or what reasons there might be for him not clearing the sidewalk. Took me a few days to connect with him, during which, the county snowplow just pushed all the snow back off the sidewalks and so the path was open. Turns out the guy just refuses to clear the walk on principle. Huh. He figures he didn’t ask for this sidewalk, so he’s not going to plow it. We, as the township, don’t have a sidewalk ordinance and we don’t want to make one for 100’ of sidewalk when we have 33 miles of roads to deal with, therefore we couldn’t force him to clear it. And the city says it’s not theirs, so they don’t want to clear it (even though they’re clearing a mile on both sides of it). Last winter the weather warmed up and the problem went away.
This winter I’ve been watching it as I drive by this area. I’ve seen the guy out there with his small tractor and blower doing his driveway, but he still isn’t doing the sidewalk. And I can’t decide if I admire him for sticking to his principles or if he’s being a jerk. And the city now is clearing it as they’re driving through there anyway. Which makes sense, but I could also see them leaving it… on principle.
Twenty-five years ago, just after I got on the Townboard, we repaved some roads in a subdivision. One resident never paid his share believing no one would come and tear out the road. Jokes on him; the company DID tear up 100’ of blacktop, leaving a section of gravel on this road. Didn’t take long for him to pay up and the road to get fixed. Maybe the neighbors convinced him.
We have a mystery going on at our townhall. It’s an old building, looks like a one room school. (Maybe it was the school that got blown across the road in the great tornado of 1883, or maybe it was always a townhall; depends who you ask and what maps you choose to believe).
For the last 3 years we’ve been picking up Phillips vodka bottles in the gravel parking lot. I wish LJB was still around; we need a good story for this! We have our suspicions… once a week, there will be 1, 2, or sometimes even 3 vodka bottles. Very few are empty. Some have never been opened! Most will be between ½ and 2/3’s full. We’ve got a collection in the hall now of 14 bottles, and there are a lot that have been picked up and thrown out and don’t make it to the hall collection. The hall is at the intersection of two major roads. People park there in summer and ride bikes or jog. A school bus stops there. Sheriff deputies park there to do reports.
Why are you not finishing the vodka? And why are you leaving them there? Bonus points if you can tie in the glasses fogged up guy.
And I wave my magic crane . . . and, poof, it is gone.
A few years ago I wrote a blog about this sculpture which sat on the MSU-M campus, including my ambivalence to it. It is carved in the same Kasota limestone from just north of Mankato which is used at Target Field. Someone, I think maybe Jacque, did some digging and told me it is called the Pillars. And objected to my critique. All is fair in art criticism. My picture then did not show it settled in as does the header photo. It looks better in that photo surrounded by the vegetation. I even like it in that photo.
I had not driven past it in years, out of my way for everywhere I was going. Then Sandy went into memory care. As a result, I drive by it twice a day. After a few trips with my brain overloaded with the transition in my life, I looked that way, hard not to really when waiting at the stop light at a major pedestrian crossing on campus, and saw it is all gone.
My son got taken up by the question and did some digging. The MSU-M website says it is still there and makes no other comment. I drove around campus, which has quite a few sculptures strewn around, but did not see it anywhere else.
So it is a mystery. I can imagine a few reasons it is gone, such as various departments upset about being upside down or absent. One statue inside the student union is a hot topic right now with students and others. (See below.)
Mankato itself has many sculptures in it these days. It has a sculpture walk through downtown with some of them permanent and some changed out periodically. My own favorite is near the sculpture walk but has a different purpose.
This is the memorial to those Sioux/Lacota people who were hanged here after the Lacota Uprising. (It used to be called the Sioux Uprising but its name has been changed. But one tribal group near here still call themselves Sioux.) Behind the buffalo is a scroll, not shown in my photo, listing the names of those executed. It is a touchy issue how to memorialize that event, an event once portrayed on such things as a beer platter. The site is now part industrial and part library. It is a tiny little park almost under an overpass and next to a busy railroad track. It was carved by a native artist. It was once vandalized with paint but was easily cleaned and remains untouched, surprisingly. I find it perfect for the space and the purpose.
In the student union is a very nice sculpture of Abraham Lincoln, a little larger than life-size in a busy student traffic area, which is the hot topic issue. I am sure I do not need to explain. Without making any comment on that topic, I suggest maybe all sculptures of real people should be shown with feet of clay.
History is about changing points of view, changing taste, changing truth. How have your truths changed and your taste in art changed?
Last week I made Joanne’s Southwest Salad, a corn, black bean, sweet red pepper, jalapeño, and quinoa mélange that tastes like health and purity. The recipe is in our Kitchen Congress folder.
I usually add the whole jalapeño, seeds and all, but this time I scraped the seeds out of one half of it with my fingers, and added some powdered Chimayo to the mix. It was nicely warm, but not too hot. The Chimayo powder is hot.
I am a life long nail biter, and I was surprised how the jalapeño oils got under most of my fingernails on both hands and made my typical daily nail biting an unpleasant experience the whole rest of the day. I had a choice of being a nervous wreck or having an unpleasantly hot tongue. I opted for the hot tongue.
Our son and Dil love spicy food, and put Sriracha in much of what they eat. Son toyed with Ghost peppers for a while, but decided habaneros are just the right amount of heat for him, and they are easy for him to grow in pots and freeze so that he can throw them into dishes all winter.
We are rather enthusiastic pepper growers and will grow a variety of hot peppers (Chimayo and New Mexico Joe Parker mild red Anaheims), as well as four kinds of sweet red peppers this summer. I am a medium weight for heat. The hottest food I ever ate was my first introduction to East Indian cooking at a Pakistani restaurant in London. I was 21, and the food was so good but so hot I cried all the while I ate it, but I couldn’t stop eating as it tasted so wonderful.
What is the hottest food you can tolerate? What are your favorite curries? Are you a nail chewer?
Trail Baboon 