The legend of King Arthur has always appealed to me. From an early age I loved the Prince Valiant comic strip (and Robert Wagner in the movie) and when Camelot came out in 1967 I managed to get my folks to take me a couple of times. I’ve read Mary Stewart’s Crystal Cave series more than once and while the 2011 series isn’t quite to my taste, I have watched it – Joseph Fiennes playing Merlin was fascinating.
Had I lived in the legend, I could not have been a good Guinevere or lady-in-waiting. Although I’m not crazy about the violence part, I would have loved to be a knight. Fancy armor, horses, swords, cool knight friends and quests.
I am all about quests. Set me a quest and I am all in. So when the Hennepin County Library debuted their passport this summer, I had to play. The passport is free for all who want to participate, with a page for each of the 41 libraries in the system. There is a photo of the library and short description and each library has their own passport stamp. There is also a few blank lines if you want to add any notes.
You know I had to make a spreadsheet of the libraries that I can sort by how far they from my house and their hours. Don’t want to show up at a library that isn’t open yet! And of course once I’ve visited a particular library, I can highlight it! Quests and spreadsheets – I’m in heaven.
It’s been a joy to visit the various libraries (I’m about half way through). They are each unique, with so many different programs. Language classes, Lego Labs, chess tournaments, jigsaw puzzles (yes, every time I found one in progress, I had to find a piece or two), even community seed libraries. And the artwork is wonderful. There must certainly at some kind of art curator on the library staff. Whoever it is has done a masterful job.
Wall in Children’s section of Champlin Library
There isn’t a timetable on my library quest, although I’d like to be done some time in September. Once it’s cooler, I have lots of indoor projects. Also, I like stretching it out a bit!
Any quests that you’ve enjoyed? Any you’re looking forward to?
Like many musical artists, Tom Lehrer was introduced to me on the LGMS. I loved his funny songs and they way he crafted them with language and great satire. This is probably my favorite:
Sadly, Tom passed away four days ago at the age of 97. He was born in New York City and began his musical studies when he was seven. He entered Harvard at the age of 15, studying mathematics as well as entertaining his fellow students with his comic songs. His mathematics career and his music career existed together for many years. His last performance was in 1972 and he taught until 2003.
Another of his most popular songs puts the table of elements to a Gilbert & Sullivan tune:
There haven’t been too many artists who can skewer the world quite the way he could. His voice will be missed.
Do you have a favorite Tom Lehrer song? Or another satirist?
As bunch of errands had me on the freeway yesterday. A little congestion slowed everybody down in time for me to look up and see this on the highway signage:
Keep your speed down
Wear your safety gear
Get home in one piece
It was more interesting than the usual signage and as it was three lines, I automatically starting counting the syllables, wondering if it was MNDots idea of highway haiku. Not haiku.
When I got home, I wondered if I could find any information online about the signage. I was surprised to find out that there is actually a program called “Message Monday” that encourages safe driving. You can even submit your own idea for a message on the website. Some of the messages are actually quite funny:
Fly under
The radar by
Obeying speed limit
Give blood
The right way
Not on the highway
Don we now our
Fastened seatbelt
Fa la la la la la
I’m not sure I want to increase my highway time on Mondays to see more of these messages, but I do find it intriguing that this program exists. Of course, if I submit something it will have to be
Speedy Gonzalez
You’re not. Please keep the pedal
Off of the metal
Imagine my surprise as I was heading out to run some errands and discovered the little robot vacuum at the back porch door.
As I carried it back into the house and hit the “dock” button so it would return home, I felt a little bad. Was I keeping it from its freedom? Had it been trying to escape from the onerous duty of trying to keep the fur and dust at bay in our house? Did it hear the clarion call of others of its kind? Was it a quashed robot uprising?
What do you think? Should I have given it its freedom?
According to the weather channel email I received on Thursday, an acre of corn releases 3000 gallons of water into the air every day. It’s “evapotranspiration”. A quick google search shows multiple newspaper articles blaming corn for the humid weather. I am tempted to call it misleading. I mean I don’t like the humidity either, but is it really all the corn’s fault? Data from the Ohio State University Extension office in 2024 says corn sweat is not contributing MEANINGFUL levels of humidity. More humidity is brought in by weather systems with southerly winds and bringing humidity from the Gulf of Mexico. The greatest amount of water usage by a corn plant is during tasseling and flowering, which is where we are at in SE MN. My corn just started tasseling this week. (And again, I am so amazed at how it all works! The silks emerge at the same time!) After tasseling, water usage in the corn decreases. All plants have some form of transpiration and evaporation. Don’t blame it all on the farmer and my corn.
The header photo by Kelly is soybean flowers. Soybeans are looking good and coming along.
This week I have been either finishing the projects at the Rep, or down in Chatfield lighting ‘Shrek’, the musical for Wits End Theater. Lots of road time. And with the main route to Chatfield, Highway 52 South closed at I90, I’ve been taking other routes. Sometimes Highway 7 through Eyota to 52, sometimes Highway 10 through Dover to the East side of Chatfield. Usually County Rd 19 through Marion to 52, or my favorite, County Road 1 through Simpson, past the Root River County Park, down in the valley over the North branch of the Root River and Fugles Mill, through Pleasant Grove, and into the west side of Chatfield. I try not to take the same road home as there.
I still haven’t gotten the oats harvested. It got mostly ripe but still had some green in it and that’s where it’s been sitting for 2 weeks. Rain and thunderstorms the last few days have caused more of it to go down. A lot of oats has been taken out. The Oat Mafia FB page says a lot of guys are finding it wetter than preferred. And there are some photos that show a stark reminder of the benefits of applying the fungicides. Fields without are broken and flat, while the fields with it are standing well.
No fungicide on left, fungicIde on right. PHOTO COUTESY OF THE OAT MAFIA FB PAGE
Oh, then our refrigerator died on Wednesday. I had noticed the freezer temp was 33 degree’s in the morning, and I thought maybe it was just defrosting. That afternoon it was at 39. We took everything to the basement chest freezer and I put a thermometer in the fridge. I laid on the floor and vacuumed off the coils and used the long narrow cleaning brush to dig out as much dust and gunk as I could. A repair guy was consulted and it was not given much hope. By that night, Kelly emptied the fridge, taking it to the downstairs smaller fridge. That little basement fridge was originally purchased as the “egg fridge”, but it has since become the pop fridge. Thanks goodness we have it. It’s a little no-name fridge that just keeps chugging along. Daughter is very put out that we don’t have the regular fridge upstairs. She insists it is still working and I’ve had to rescue her food and take it to the basement fridge a couple times. Thursday morning I went fridge scouting. The salesguy, Randy, his first question was counter depth or regular? “Uh….” Then he asked me what color? “Uh….” Did we want ice and water in the door? “Uh….” I didn’t have any of that information. My only question to him was ‘”Which ones have the better interior lighting like our old one?” That local store is where we’ve purchased appliances since we got married. They had a delivery slot open for Friday afternoon. I’ll take that one! And I sent Kelly some photos. We met there in the afternoon and agreed on a fridge for Friday.
Priorities, you know? When I checked with Kelly, her only priority was double doors. Yep, that was all I looked at. And freezer at the bottom. And good lighting. Beyond that, I didn’t know.
I hate having too many choices, so thankfully that only left us three choices, and if you remove the $12,000 model, well, I sent Kelly photos of those two.
By Friday evening daughter should be back in her happy place and we’ll have a new fridge with nice interior lighting.
I can’t remember a more rainy July than the one we are having this year. In addition to keeping the house interior spotless, we are intent on getting rid of garden weeds. The weeds have been horrendous because of the rain.
Weeding for us entails crawling through the garden beds on our hands and knees with dangerous looking implements to remove the weeds, and large buckets to put the removed weeds into. We rarely use herbacides. Husband is currently limping around with a walking stick due to a strained knee muscle from weeding. With apologies to Bob Dylan, this song keeps going through my head every time I pull weeds.
Buckets of weeds,
Buckets of shears.
Got all these buckets coming
Out of my ears.
Buckets of bind weeds in the yard.
Why does weeding always have to be so hard?
I have not seen the new Bob Dylan movie. Husband reminds me we saw him in concert at the Bismarck Civic Center about 30 years ago. He only had a bass player and a drummer with him. I don’t remember the concert very well. I never was a big Dylan fan, but some tunes just stay with you.
Did you ever see Bob Dylan live? What Dylan tunes stick with you? What is your weeding strategy? At what age is a person too old to weed?
There has always been a vision in my mind for the backyard. Over the years we’ve added a patio, then a little bigger patio. A table and chairs for the patio. An umbrella for the table. A friend of mine gave YA a fire pit years ago. Another friend gave me a swing when they moved to an apartment. Of course, there are all the flowers and the bales. About 15 years ago I had enough credits at work to purchase a hammock, which I installed toward the back of the yard. Over the years I’ve had to replace the fabric several times as well as having to MacGyver the suspension a couple of times when the fabric wasn’t exactly the right size.
YA has always detested the hammock. First is that it is a collection spot for leaves and twigs that come off the trees. Then there is the issue of having to mow around it, requiring moving it about. YA thinks it makes the backyard look “cluttered”. When I suggested we get right of her Adirondack chairs and little table, she didn’t respond well. She has a point. We use the Adirondacks quite a bit and truth be told, I probably only lay in the hammock once or twice a summer. It’s not actually all that comfortable and I get impatient really fast.
As I’m pursuing my pre-downsizing project, I decided that I really needed to pay attention to the reality of the hammock instead of my emotional attachment to the idea of a hammock. To that end, YA and I carried it down to the boulevard. When we got down to the boulevard with it, YA had to shore up my determination. The miracle of my street worked as usual – within an hour someone was taking it apart to shove in their truck.
I thought I might be unhappy in the first few days after the hammock was gone but that hasn’t happened. That says to me that I made the right decision.
Tell me about something you have an emotional attachment to.
You all know I’m a little obsessed with a certain event each August. I like to be organized but normally don’t start getting going until a couple of weeks before (athough before retirement I used to request the days off several months in advance).
YA and the State Fair, on the other hand, are rarin’ to go now. In the past couple of weeks there has been a barrage of emails. Grandstand announcements and ticket offers. Highlighted fair beverages (of which there seem to be A LOT). New vendors and new foods.
YA has definitely inherited some of my love of lists; over the weekend she came into my room with a pad of paper and announced that it was time to make our food list. She started doing this a few years ago so that we remember what we want to get while we are at the fair. This list includes our favorites as well as items from the new foods email that look interesting to us. It looks like a long list but it’s spread out over several days and we don’t always get to everything. I did notice that nothing from last year’s new items have jumped to our “old favorites” list.
The floodgates are open now. I printed off all our tickets as well as my fair packing list. Can’t go off to the fair without all we need in the turtle bag. We even started a little pool of cash for the big event.
Anything you’re preparing for (or obsessing over) this summer?
On Friday YA made our annual trek to pet deer and goats and llamas at Fawn-Doe-Rosa. The route to get there is straight through Lindstrom, which is a pretty little town with deep Swedish roots and one of the cutest water towers ever (see photo above). But it turns out that it’s not actually a water tower any longer.
Back in 1992, the city built a new water tower because the original was no longer able to meet the demand. At that time, the older water tower was “repurposed” as the world’s largest coffee pot. A local business owner funded the conversion – adding the spout, handle and knob along with repainting it. Initially there was a steam function but it hasn’t been working for years.
Several months ago the city council approved an initiative to spruce up the paint job and also to restore the steam function. This time around, much of the cost was raised by the said of small water tower replicas. Four weeks ago, the steam poured out of the pot again for the first time in years.
Just by luck, we were driving through Lindstrom at exactly 10 a.m., which is one of the two times per day that the steam functions. YA was telling me about all this so I did a quick u-turn so we could circle back and get a good look. There were folks hanging out on the street corners to watch as well. It was cloudy, so while we could see the steam, I think on a clear day it would be more impressive.
A fun tangent, I recently read Off Main Street by Michael Perry and one of the essays is called “You Are Here” which is about water towers in the Midwest. It was entertaining and I learned there’s more to a water tower than meets the eye. Highly recommended reading. Fun confabulation of reading and traveling!
Have you seen any fun water towers? Ever climbed up one?
I had a fun surprise yesterday morning. As I stood in my kitchen, thinking about breakfast, I got a text from one of my donut haunts, telling me that I had a reward coming – a free donut or a free coffee. So much more exciting than eggs and toast. Since I was going out for a couple of errands anyway, I decided to go the donut route for breakfast.
In order access this reward, I had to use my phone but since I didn’t have a younger person with me, I sat in my car until I got onto the right screen, or so I thought. The young man waiting on me was very patient when holding the phone to the “register” didn’t seem to work. He said he’s do it the “long way” and put my phone number in. He then said I had a $5 off, free donut or 5% discount. Which did I want? And then he said “or all three?” You all know what I said. He started punching in stuff; on my side, the screen was showing 3₵. I kept waiting for it to get to a higher number and it never did. When he confirmed the 3₵, I told him I’d have to go to the car to get a quarter since I didn’t have any cash on me. He smiled and said “let’s take it out of the penny jar” which was on the counter.
So I had my donuts and diet pop for free. And it was a gorgeous morning to boot. What could be better?
Trail Baboon 