For the third time in about 30 years, Husband had his favorite pair of brown Frye boots resoled and a new heel put on. He also had his new pair of black Frye boots streched in the toes, so now they fit perfectly. He admits he is both fussy and vain about his boots, and plans to wear them forever.
He is fortunate to live here, where it is easy to find a place for getting your boots fixed expeditiously, along with your saddle, harnesses, and any leather article associated with your horse. He only had to go without his boots for two days. I suppose the guy at Duke’s Saddlery is more of a harness maker than a cobbler. He is a Vietnam veteran and has been in business here for decades. He had a whole pile of cowboy boots to fix in his shop. Once you get a pair of boots to fit, you want to keep them as long as you can. They are essential work equipment out here. I don’t know where people get their lassos fixed. Husband thinks you have to go to Casper, WY for that sort of specialty work.
What are you fussy and vain about? Do you ever have footwear professionally repaired? What do your shoes say about you? What are some specialty shops that are only found in the region where you live?
Daughter’s BFF is in grad school in a southern state getting her MFA in vocal performance. I have known her since she was in Grade 1, and consider her a second daughter. She has a beautiful voice, and recently sang in a lead role in a production of The Bartered Bride. She is a cook and loves to bake. She didn’t get a Christmas box of goodies from us, but I baked some of her favorite cookies and sent her a Valentines box yesterday filled with the cookies as well as cocoa mix, interesting pasta, pasta seasoning, fancy pizza crust flour, and a Mr. Rogers figurine who speaks in his actual voice about being wonderful for who you are and asks about your neighbors if you push the button on the trolley.
Her street address is IOOF St. I think this is one of the oddest street addresses I have seen. The clerk at the UPS store sure thought it was odd. I am curious if Baboons know what IOOF stands for, and what other odd or interesting streets names they are aware of. I have my grandfather’s OF sword.
What are some interesting street names you have encountered? What street names would you like to invent? Know any OF’s? What are your memories of Mr. Rogers?
My coworker across the hall is a very impulsive, energetic, and passionate young woman. She is an accomplished therapist and administrator. I have known her since she was a little girl, and it is very fun to work with her as an adult. She had a small potted tropical tree that she had kept alive and thriving in her office under a light, as her office is on the inside of the building and has no outside window.
Last week she decided it needed a larger pot, so she, somewhat impulsively, carried it, uncovered, out to her car in subzero windchills, repotted it at home, and carried it, uncovered, in subzero windchills, back into the office.
It wasn’t looking so good yesterday, and she admitted that she doused it with a lot of water in a panic after seeing it start to fail. It used to have dark green leaves. This is what it looks like now.
With her permission, I moved it to my office by my window, and poured out the excess water. I think the leaves may have froze, but the roots and thick, twisted trunk are ok, so we just have to be patient and hope for the best.
What kind of plant do you think this is? Any suggestions how to revive it? What is your success record with house plants? What are your experiences with someone who has ADHD?
YA cares way more about her hair, her make-up and her clothing than I care about mine. I think I’ve said here before that I don’t even own make-up and I only take the blow dryer to my hair about once a year. And these days, wearing a pair of jeans instead of sweatpants is really dressing up. So it didn’t surprise me when she wanted a pair of really sharp “hair scissors” for her birthday recently. I assumed it would figure greatly into her quest to rid her world of split ends.
On Saturday we were watching the Olympics (the new mixed speed skate relay is fascinating) when she turned the scissors on me. She’d been hinting (rather aggressively) the last few weeks that my hair is getting too long and scraggly. Although I was a little worried she would chop off more than I wanted, which she has done before, when she brought it up again, I relented.
I should have known that wouldn’t be the end of it. Then she wanted me to blow dry it – I told her if she wanted my hair dry right away, she would need to do that herself. After she spent way too long (in my estimation) drying and fluffing my strands, she decided that she needed to bring the straightener into my room as well because my ends were “curling too much”.
All of this cutting and blowing and straightening took about 45 minutes and I will admit that I’m not the most patient. For some reason that I don’t understand, the commercials showing on the tv coverage of the Olympics were bothering me — and more than usual since I was already ramped up about the hair fuss. To combat my annoyance I grabbed a book off my bedstand and muted the tv.
So there we were, watching the Olympics, reading and running a hair salon in my bedroom all at once. Multi-tasking at it’s best!
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?
Trail Baboon 