Family, home, pets, Uncategorized

Destructo Kitty

31 Comments

The younger of our kitties, Nimue, came into the household 9 years ago like a whirlwind. She was into everything and the number of items that she wrecked was legion.  Everyone told me that she would eventually settle down.  Can somebody tell me WHEN?

I like to display my birthday cards along the top of the built-in buffet in the dining room. The picture above is what it looks like.

The picture below is what I came home to this afternoon. Nimue has lots of nicknames, but now she has another – DESTRUCTO KITTY.

What do you think makes a grown-up?

Business, Food, Kids, Stories, Uncategorized

We Are Not a Cod Fish

29 Comments

In July I posted on facebook something similar to this simple little vignette.

Went into Culvers today. One of the under 16-year-old employees, a polite boy, took my order. He made full eye contact and spoke clearly.

I said, “I will have the fish sandwich.”

He replied, “I did not know we had a fish sandwich.”

I answered, reading from the board, “The Atlantic Cod Sandwich Meal.”

“Oh,” he answered. “Is that what cod is?”

Then he took my order.

Now, first ask yourself what conclusions or interpretations of that little vignette you want to make. Don’t make them, but think of what you might say. Silly me. I thought I was describing a fun little moment.

I have only 48 friends on facebook, about a third of whom do not ever communicate with me. Another third made a comment, which fell into four groups.

Most common was to say how impolite teenagers are today. Did you notice I said he was polite, made eye contact, and spoke clearly?

Another set of comments was about how stupid teenagers are today.

A third group commented on how teenagers are bad at learning. It seems to me his comment “Is that what cod is?” makes it clear he was willing to learn. But I could be wrong.

The third group lectured me on unhealthful eating habits, although they said unhealthy and not unhealthful.

The last group said that schools and teachers today are terrible.

So because one 14- or 15-year-old boy does not know what cod is forms grounds for attacking teenagers, teachers, and schools. Everything about the boy suggested an intelligent and inquisitive person, a subject on which I feel I can make a swift judgment. But I could be wrong. Two of the commenters were favorite students of mine in the early 1970s. I wondered to them that with the loss of the cod fisheries how common the word cod is in teenagers private lives, or how often teenagers in Mankato eat fish. They thought about that and agreed that perhaps the word cod has fallen from the daily or school lexicon. I have often wondered how people decide schools are a place to fill kids heads with tidbits of information.

I suppose I should have stated that I was noticing cultural change, enjoying the moment.

I am tempted to draw a few sweeping generalities about their responses. I leave that to you.

home, Nature, Technology, Uncategorized, work

Unidentified Object

33 Comments

Husband cleaned the garage and workbench yesterday and found this:

We don’t know what it is.  It must have belonged to my father, since neither if us remember buying it.  We inherited my father’s collection of tools and gadgets acquired over his very long life.  He loved picking up this and that,  just in case he might need them. We have several hundred drill bits, for example, not to mention many socket wrench sets.

I suppose it could be a tripod of some sort, but dad sold his camera decades ago.  I think it looks so funny. I half expect it to come to life and run across the garage. I am not even sure which end of it goes up.

Any idea what this unidentified object is? When have you found something in your house you couldn’t remember buying or couldn’t identify? What does your tool and gadget collection look like?

books, Family, Food, gardening, home, Kids, Nature, Uncategorized, work

Really Cookin’!

34 Comments

A couple of days ago LJB mentioned finding a recipe and sticking to it. I’ve been thinking about her comments a lot, since I am the exact opposite.

I had a lot of vacation days to use up, so have been off since the 22nd and I have been on a cooking jag.  There are two main reasons for this.  One of the reasons we’ve already discussed recently – TOMATOES!  The other reason is that I’m a morning person. As much as I love to cook, I am just not up for cooking after I get home from work.  Warmed up leftovers (or take out) in my jammies are pretty common fare for me at night.

So the combination of many mornings at home and my glut of tomatoes had me cooking up a storm. I started my vacation by dragging out about a dozen of my cookbooks; for some reason that I don’t even remember now, I pulled out a lot of vegan cookbooks.  Then I flipped through them and used little slips of paper to mark some of the recipes that looked good to me.  I marked about 16 recipes – only one of which I had ever made before.  Then YA looked through and vetoed a few.  I shopped for six recipes and then got going.  I did the last one today – vegan lasagna rolls (which ended up being not vegan).

Here’s what got made on my vacation: Fried Bread Panzanella, Roasted Carrots w/ Parmesan & Garlic, Pico de Gallo, Pasta w/ Tomatoes & Olives, Roasted Tomato & Garlic Sauce, Smash Potatoes w/ Pesto & Parmesan, Apple Honey & Arugula Pizza and today’s Lasagna Rolls. Now we have enough leftovers to last another week or so.

When is repetition good for you? Or not?

Family, Food, Kids, Stories, Uncategorized

We All Scream For Ice Cream

58 Comments

We went to a wedding reception last night at a local brewery in Northeast Minneapolis – Able Seedhouse & Brewery. It was a lot of fun, with indoor and outdoor seating and an excellent food truck dinner.  The most fascinating thing however was watching the continuous stream of folks going to the ice cream shop across the way and the amazing ice cream concoctions that were coming out with them!

YA is not normally a sweets gal, but if she is interested in a dessert, ice cream is the top of the list, far surpassing cake and cookies. So after not finishing the reception cupcake dessert, she convinced me that we should head over to the ice cream shop before we went home.

At 8 p.m. on a Sunday night, the line was out the door of the shop on the second floor and down the stairs. There were four employees scooping and the line did move faster than I expected – about 15 minutes before we were at the counter to order.  As we made our way out, the line had almost doubled in size and was outside the door of the building and out onto the sidewalk!

I had a pretty traditional chocolate/vanilla swirl with some butterfinger crunchies; YA had a huge cone with a combination called the Berry Nice. We sat outside until I was done (since I was driving) – a beautiful night with our unexpected treats.

What are you willing to stand in a long line for?

Business, Science, Stories

If It Ain’t Broke…..

66 Comments

I’m not sure how long ago Park `n Ride was instituted by the State Fair, but YA and I have been utilizing it for years. No driving around trying to find a close spot, attempting to parallel park on a busy residential street, having to remember where you parked and best of all, no trekking for what always seems like an interminable amount of time back to the car after all day at the fair.  Our favorite Park `n Ride lot is the Wilder Foundation at Lexington; we’ve parked there for years.  Everything always runs smoothly.

On Wednesday (my 3rd trip to the fair this year), imagine our surprise when things didn’t run smoothly.  First, even though the lot was almost completely empty when we arrived at 7:30 a.m., there was a line up and the staff were flagging some folks away.  Turns out that they were making everyone back into the parking spots, so it was taking three to four times longer to park.  A few of us balked at this requirement and we were allowed to just pull into a parking spot.

Then they tried to manage the line of folks waiting for the bus. Normally we just line up along the west fence, the bus pulls up and we get on. Instead of this, they split the line in two and made the back half come up and stand parallel to the folks in the front half of the line.  Then they tried to get the line to go along the north side of the fence.  This was accompanied by a lot of “make a single file straight line” exhortations.  This all went nowhere fast and was accompanied by a lot of “what are they thinking” comments from the crowd.

The initial consensus of those of us waiting was that they were thinking it would be easier/faster for people to pull straight out of the parking spaces when they got back to the lot. No one really thought this was needed but we couldn’t think of any other reason for being told to back in.  As for the line management, we thought maybe they wanted to park cars along the west end, since a couple of spots on the lot were really muddy.  But they never did park anybody there while we waited and nobody was parked there when we came back at the end of the day.

The cynical among us figured that one of the staff had probably been to “parking lot management” training the day before and was showing off their new knowledge.  I’m going back tomorrow and am curious to see how it goes.

Have you ever tried to fix something that ain’t broke? Or been subjected to someone trying to fix something that ain’t broke?

books, Family, Kids, Travel, Uncategorized

Read!

43 Comments

My daughter has been quite concerned about me because I have not been reading very much for the past several years.  She thinks  I have been depressed since my parents died. She is probably correct.

Daughter insisted that I buy at least one book on our trip to Washington. We stopped at a lovely independent bookstore in Kirkland, WA, where I purchased a murder mystery set in southwest France. Daughter chose David Sedaris’ most recent book of essays, along with four other books that I am sure she has finished by now. She insisted I take the Sedaris book home with me to read. It was very funny and poignant. He is one of her favorite authors.  (Her Grade 5 teacher was rather concerned why we allowed her to read such material after she took one of his books to school to have for free reading time.)  I like the murder mystery.  Husband is reading VS Pritchett.

It is a long weekend and I feel like reading this weekend. I wonder what the Baboons are reading now.  What will be next on your “To Read” list?

Fitness, Uncategorized, work

Enforced Activity

49 Comments

Here are the facts:

I work in a six story, former men’s dormitory on the campus of a small North Dakota college.  The building was constructed in 1965. For some reason, there were a large number of men enrolling in college then.

There are two stairwells on the east and west sides of the building, and one elevator on the south side of the building.  It is an Otis elevator.

My office is on the fourth floor. My play therapy room is on the fifth floor. Our agency occupies the basement and the first five floors of the building. There is an educational training cooperative on the sixth floor.

The Otis corporation decided recently that the elevator, the 1965 original, must be completely replaced. This includes the elevator car and all the workings that pull the elevator up and down.  Doing this will take eight weeks. The educational cooperative has moved to other digs until November 1. My agency has no choice but to stay where we are and walk the stairs.

I am out of shape.  I always take the elevator. We must accompany all our clients from the first floor to our offices.

Well, we have no elevator now, and I am doing stairs like crazy. I am exhausted. We have made arrangements that the halt and the lame will receive services on first floor.  Everyone else must trudge up the stairs to where they need to go. I anticipate that my blood sugar and cholesterol  will decrease through the elevator revamp.

How do you keep in shape?

Food, gardening, Nature, Science, Travel, Uncategorized

Verisimilitude

41 Comments

The 9 course meal we ate on Saturday night  was completely sourced from a 100 mile radius of the restaurant.  Given its location just east of Seattle, it was no surprise that salmon,  geoduck, mussels, and oysters were on the menu. We also ate local lamb and pork. All the veggies like turnips, carrots, greens, cabbage, potatoes, beets, and cucumber came from the restaurant farm, as did all the herbs and flowers used in the dishes.  (Day lilies, Marigolds, and Bachelor Buttons are surprisingly tasty.)  There were lovely local mushrooms. All the wines had been commissioned from local vintners by the restaurant owners last year for the meal.  Cooking fat was either butter, grape seed oil, or hazelnut oil. They grow quinoa locally, and we had that, too.

The restaurant owners went to the extreme, though, to make sure that everything we ate was from within 100 miles.  That meant that they churned their own butter from milk from local cows, and planted a couple of acres of rye and wheat to mill their own flour for the bread. They collected clean local sea water to make their own salt. We had no pepper, but there were so many farm herbs in the food that we didn’t miss it at all. Lemon verbena provided all the citrus we needed. The biggest dilemma was what to use for locally sourced leavening for the hazelnut cakes we had for dessert.

They started out last year collecting mule deer antlers from within a 100 mile radius of the farm  and grinding them to a powder. Horn is apparently a good leavening agent and made some pretty good cakes. It takes a lot of laborious, time consuming grinding, though, and they found an even better leavening agent  in wood ash from the fire place. Who knew?

Plan a meal completely sourced from a 100 mile radius of your house. What would you serve?

 

Food, Stories, Travel, Uncategorized, work

Please Flip Your Wig

37 Comments

Last Saturday we met a delightful young woman who was visiting the West Coast for the first time. She was a barrister from London, England, someone who argues cases in British courts, either for the prosecution or the defense.

We were  dining at a lovely restaurant and herb farm in Woodinville, WA. The arrangements were such that we were seated with total strangers and were expected to converse with each other for the duration of our 4 hour, 9 course meal. We had a very congenial bunch at our table, and the conversation turned particularly lively when I asked the barrister if she wore a wig to court. “Oh, yes indeed!” she replied, and went on to describe the process of finding just the right wig for her work.

There are apparently several places in London where one can purchase court dress and wigs, all ancient and venerable establishments. The wigs are made from horse hair. She said the first question she was asked was whether she wanted a wig made from the mane or the tail. I gather the mane hair would be finer and more expensive. I don’t know which she chose. Next, they  measured the circumference of her head, and then took her into a rather dark cellar full of cardboard boxes where they found the boxes with wigs in her size.

The next procedure sounds quite similar to purchasing a magic wand in the Harry Potter books.  Clothed in her court robes, complete with her white collar and tie, she tried on one wig at a time. I don’t know how concerned she was with the particular look or style.  It seemed that the distinguishing characteristic of the right wig was that it had to be one that did not slip or fall off when she bowed as low as she could bow. She said she got quite dizzy bowing repeatedly. She assured us that there were sparks and lightning flashes when she found just the right wig. She said hers was a short advocate’s wig with a  slight widows peak.

What are  the distinguishing characteristics of your work clothes?  What costumes would you like to wear to work?