Yes, things have changed a bit since the day when all the parking they needed at the General Store was someplace to tie up the horses after a long day’s ride.
But maybe we’re headed back down that trail a piece.
Spotted on Silver Lake Road – a motorized scooter abandoned in a snowbank, connected by cable to an MTC bus stop sign.
I have a hunch, but what do you think is going on here?
today’s post comes from tim
the ripples are cosmic as they ripple around
the sound of those sound waves they start to rebound
bouncing and curving like einstein thought
the echos are echoey and they echo a lot
the sicentists found sound wave from those famous black holes
three billy goats gruff cant get by sonar trolls
its been there all along but we just discovered
what einstein said while his thoughts briefly hovered
its not markedly changing that now we all know
that while we are here playing in the cold winter snow
that in a universe 47,000 light years away
they make sound that reverberate almost every day
its a bit reminiscent of the time tested conundrum
when a trees fall in the forest do we need to witness and hear some
or is it enough to know the universe works
with ghosts of the past making noise as they lurk
scientists proved beyond the shadow of doubt
that the cosmic audiologist is at last ushered out
and we can all listen now to distant sound waves
and the path that it follows and the groundwork it lays
for the realization that we are not alone
even when light years and light years from home
we can all take solace and i think that its neat
that a sound cross the universe is like a heartbeat.
today’s post comes from tim.
hats are my love
i have even given it the true test and i still am a hat guy. i made it a business.
i buy and sell hats on ebay
when i was a kid i liked hats. then i grew up to be an adolescent and i liked hats still but i was lucky to grow up in hippy days so me and arlo guthrie got to wear hats together, then hair dryers came into vogue and hat hair was not cool. i had big hair and was wearing suits with creases on the pant legs and crisp white shirts and then as styles changed and casual fridays became casual lifestyle in general, my bald spot turned into a baloney ring as all my hair went away. my hair length went einstein to mr clean over this time frame and hats came back. about 15 years ago i started buying stuff on ebay and the end result was that i fell back in love with hats and i started in on a mission to become the hat guy and today i am the hat guy. i am primarily a fedora guy. a fedora is the humphrey bogart kind of hat, but there are variations in fedoras, pork pies is the jazz mans hat ala charlie parker, snap brim is the tom landry rob petrie kind of hat, homburg is the winston churchill, class act kind of hat, straw optima is charlie chan
then there are specialty hats… bowler from laurel and hardy and charlie chaplin,
boater from maurice chevalier or gene kelly, caps like a british racing guy, smokey the bear has a campaign hat just like teddy roosevelt, and then we go to western, lbj’s cattleman’s crease, hopalong cassidy and his gus style, roy rogers and the marlboro man offering that cowboys classic look…
today i see a movie and the hats are just there for most people. i am distracted by them. i go to a play at the guthrie or the musical at the different venues around town and i see hats that are not the right hats. they are close but this play took place in the fifties and the brim size on a hat in the 50’s was 2 ½ inch to 2 ⅝ inch and they are wearing a 2 ‘ that didn’t come into fashion until the 60’s. or why would a classy guy like that wear a cheesy hat to go with the nice suit?
i love the westerns where the hats are a dead giveaway as to the true identity of the character. every now and again they have a hat that doesn’t fit at all but usually the hat tells all.
do you have any in depth knowledge that goes unnoticed by the rest of the world?
Today’s post comes from Renee in North Dakota.
Some time ago I submitted a post about a large piece of carved Chinese jade in my possession that my maternal great grandfather hauled from Hamburg, Germany to New York to Minnesota in 1914. I thought it was an incense burner, and couldn’t figure out why it was so important that the family brought it with them when they immigrated to the United States.
My son did a little research this fall and discovered that it isn’t exclusively an incense burner. It is called a Scholar’s Mountain, Scholar’s Rock, or Spirit Stone (Gongshi), and it was used to encourage wisdom and deep thoughts as it was gazed upon. The holes, some natural and some that were carved in it, are for calligraphy or paint brush handles, and the round basin is either for incense or for water for rinsing the brushes. Who’d have thought?
Most were naturally occurring rocks carved and perforated by water, sometimes embellished with carvings, sometimes placed in gardens as points for contemplation or else brought inside. They were chosen on how well they emulated the natural world of landscape, especally mountains and elevations. Ours is 10 inches by 7 inches. It is carved with a stag, a bat, a bear, two ravens, and a honey comb or coral shape. Now that I know this, the shape and design and purpose make sense. I wonder what scholars or deep thinkers might have used this for inspiration.
I used to worry what would happen to this after I am no longer here, and now that son has taken an interest and we know what it is, I think it will continue on its journey with him. He is a scholar and a deep thinker, after all.
Describe a sight or an object that encourages you to think deep thoughts.
Today’s post comes from Cynthia in Mahtowa
I don’t often talk about my paintings or my painting that stopped years ago. Recently, however, I mentioned on the blog of selling a couple water
colors to Robert and Ruth Bly.
Barbara in Robbinsdale and Plain Jane asked to see photos of them and suggested writing and posting photos here. So, here goes.
I painted often in the late seventies and early eighties, then stopped when my marriage ended and I had to get a day job full time. My time being with and inspired by my animals diminished, while other activities, needs, demands took its place.
I first painted in oils. Then in the early eighties I met a woman 
whose watercolors I admired, so I began taking lessons with her, then spent time painting with her, building a friendship and learning techniques from her.
Now that I am retired, will I return to drawing and painting? I think about it, but hesitate…fear, perhaps, that the skill is diminished or has atrophied with time? Yet to be answered.
What have you created … and kept?
Today’s post comes from Clyde of Mankato
The photo shows my sister Cleo at age 13 and and me at age 10.
Standard clothing and standard work for farm children in the mid 1950’s. I cannot imagine my ten-year-old and thirteen-year-old Minnesota grandchildren working like this, nor do I want to. But I do not regret this labor in my childhood. My father did not assign us this task lightly. He no doubt was off doing even harder work at the same time. My sister, I suspect, came out of her own free will to help me. We were close that way. My sister was not afraid of exercise. She became a physical education teacher. The work she and I did mattered; it contributed to the welfare of the family.
However, one of my many back issues is a disorder in my upper back which is associated with doing heavy lifting at a young age. Perhaps it is related; perhaps it is not. I promise that was heavy snow, having been pushed there by the county plow. We lived at the end of a road.
I am a bit confused about the issue of children working. I did not make my children do much work, but none of the supposed effects of not requiring children to work is evident in my mid-forties offspring. Quite the opposite in fact.
What’s your history and attitude on child labor?
Today’s post comes from Bill in Mpls
It’s not what you think. I don’t know what you’re thinking, but it’s not that.
When I was in high school, 15 or 16 years old and living in the suburbs, I would sometimes get on the city bus and go downtown by myself. Once there, I would visit art galleries. There was a gallery on Hennepin, up a narrow staircase to the second floor, called the Bottega Gallery. It was run by a guy named Tom Sewell and it had a reputation as avant-garde. In fact, when Marcel Duchamp was in town for his show at the Walker, curator Martin Friedman brought Duchamp to the Bottega Gallery. I didn’t know anything about the avant-garde or about abstract art of any kind, but I was drawn to the Bottega Gallery and returned whenever I came downtown. At that time, Hennepin Avenue was pretty scruffy. To my suburban sensibilities it had a tang of dangerous bohemianism and adventure.
After visiting the Bottega Gallery, I would walk down to the Walker Art Center to look around. This was the old Walker, with a grand staircase leading up to an open gallery looking out on a center atrium. It was the only Walker I’ve ever really loved. After the Walker, I would make a stop at the Kilbride-Bradley Gallery. As I recall it, K-B Gallery was part gallery, part art supply store. Bob Kilbride published a newsletter/“zine” called The Potboiler, which was always entertaining and free for the taking..
When I say I didn’t know anything about abstract art, I mean I had no basis for knowing anything. Art appreciation and art history were not taught in my high school. Art was not part of my home life. I doubt that either of my parents ever visited a gallery or art museum in their lifetimes. That wasn’t in their world. My impulse to seek out art galleries feels a little like a rogue mutation of the family genetics. Nothing foreshadowed it, but there it was.
Looking down from the altitude of more than half a decade, I have enough distance to see my teen-aged self dispassionately and wonder where the motivation for those ventures came from. It certainly wasn’t peer pressure– none of my friends or schoolmates knew about my excursions. I never talked about it. I always went alone.
My secret life was innocent enough, but private. It makes me wonder how unusual that is. Did everyone have a secret life like mine? Did anyone?
Did you? Tell.
Today’s post is by Renee in North Dakota
The Saturday after New Year’s Day, our churlish next door neighbor stormed over to our house and told my husband that we had to keep our dog quiet. Did we know how many times she had barked that day? Husband just said “Ok”. and shut the door. We were pretty puzzled about this, since she really hadn’t barked at all that day.
Our dog is 14 years old. She is a terrier. Terriers bark. We have tried our hardest to minimize her vocalizations over the years. We don’t let her out in the yard unsupervised, and she does her business on the deck in the back. Our neighbor has complained about her for years, and it seems that nothing we do is good enough.
There are plenty of other dogs in the neighborhood that we hear barking, but he seems to be obsessed with our little Maggie. He spends a lot of time in his family room, the closest room in his house to our deck, which is the only place she barks. He has even installed white noise machines. There was a dog in the garage of the house on the other side of neighbor’s house that barked continuously for 5 hours the day he came over to complain. We think that he assumed the noise was coming from our dog.
Now, to put Maggie’s barking into perspective, her barking never lasts more than 10 seconds at any one time before we bring her in, and she doesn’t bark in the house. After this last visit from neighbor, we started collecting data on the times she went out, whether she barked, and the duration of her utterances, if any. We stand by the patio door until she is finished with her business so that we can leap out and quell any barking that might occur. Her barking, which wasn’t much to begin with, has been reduced even further. Now we have actual data to use in the event neighbor complains to the police. The longest string of barks she has produced outside since we started data collection is 5 woofs long and lasted less than 5 seconds. She barks less than 3 percent of the times she goes outside. Ooh, I love being a behavioral scientist!
Our dog is getting frail and I think this is her last winter. I have a secret plan for when she passes that would be satisfying to implement, particularly if she dies before next Christmas. I plan to tell the neighbor that she has died. I want to lull him into a false sense of relief, and then I want to start broadcasting from our deck this musical selection that husband found on the internet.
One of my friends tells me that someone has to be the bigger person here. I suppose she is right. There is an entire album of Barking Dogs’ Christmas music, though! It is pretty tempting to do, especially since neighbor hasn’t thanked us for the nearly silent neighborhood in which he now lives. Of course, he never thanks us for anything. Sigh.
When have you used data to win an argument?
today’s post comes from tim
life forms habits. when these habits are disrupted for whatever reason it can be traumatic. it can be annoying it can be revealing.
my habit back to the mid 70’s when i first bought my own house and didnt have to be worrying about others i the bathroom in the morning has been to take a long soaking bath with music tv cigarettes and a pot of french roast. reading the news paper and getting my day in order. an hour, 5 cigarettes and 4 cups of coffee was the usual agenda. newspaper could be finished in that time with the tv blasting out david hartman or diane sawyer in the background.
80s brought a new era where smoking had to move outdoors and the day started with one cigarette on the front porch and up to the tub with the paper coffee and switch form tv to radio in the morning. it was still tub based but the activities were becoming the driver.
the 90’s brought mpr and swimming pool i quit smoking and started raising kids and dealing with the rat race but still the bath in the morning was the respite to start the process.
i moved into a house in the 2000’s with a big old whirlpool tub in the bedroom and i found a late night soak at midnight or an early morning bath at 5 were wonderful ways to find a little peace and quiet and a time to work out the trials and tribulations of life. my kids picked up the tradition and there was a steady stream of soakings clocked on the hot tub.
our new house is a nice house with a main bath for the upstairs bedrooms a master bath with a shower off our bedroom and a bath with a shower downstairs for the bedrooms the boys use down there. so there is one tub. it has the typical set up and when you fill it up the drain lever up by your toes it drains o the bottom of that thing the lever sticks out of. did i get bigger or was it always set up so your torso sticks out of the bath water about 1/2 way. the tub was a morning hot spot with people getting ready for school and by the time it cleared out i was looking at a later start to the day than was ok.
my wife suggested that we look at a hot tub and i jumped at the thought. i found one and enlisted my boys to help me move it. no way… it weighs way too much and is way to difficult to move so i hired tub movers and when they dropped it off i took their cards for an electrician to wire it up and found it was a thousand dollars to wire it up. so plan be went into play. got a buddy who has a brain for electrician kind of stuff an away we went. 3 nights of pulling wires through pvc piping and gluing corners and lengths of pipe to the side of the house with circuit breakers and breaker boxes being placed where they needed to go and zip zap there was a tub in the back yard. its my new respite and gets used a time or two a day for a highlight of my day at 5 in the morning at midnight when its 10 below or 20 above i haven gotten to do it in the heat of summer yet but i bet it will be ok with lemonade
i find silence and reflection are the current mode. i need time to think and reflect and found a way to get er done.
rub a dub dub
the day starts in a tub
and life is a place to be
no butcher no baker
no candlestick maker
just the moon and the stars and me
what makes life work for you?
Today’s post comes from Barbara in Robbinsdale
Winona Ho!
When Husband and I moved up to Minneapolis from Winona in 1985, it was with mixed feelings. We thought we had found “Home” in Winona, and we knew how much we were leaving behind in the small town. Minneapolis is where Husband had landed a good programming job, and we had his family and several friends in the Twin Cities. But we were pretty sure it wasn’t going to be permanent – we would return some day to Winona.
There are many reasons why this is finally going to happen, probably in mid-summer:
– For Husband, he’s realized that Winona is where his Tribe resides – people he’d met as he helped to start up the food co-op and the farmers’ market, from his apple-picking days at an orchard on the river, from living on the Hippie Farm above East Burns Valley… there were many colorful characters, several of whom are still around.
– My roots there are not as deep, but I formed a bond with local folk dancers, and parents in the preschool play group that Joel and I had joined. I fell in love with the beauty and the – movement is almost the right word – of the river. (…“you rolling old river, you changing old river…” Bill Stains) Our house was just a couple of blocks from the Mississippi, so we would often pull the wagon up on the levee to see it. I also love the fact that this town, slightly larger than Marshalltown IA (a little over 25,000 when I was growing up), had such a vibrant Alternative Community. Then there was the Culture available with three (now two) colleges, a boat house community…
– It turns out that my Tribe, I have come to realize, is mostly our Babooner “collective”, plus a few others. I am hoping this is a portable connection, though I imagine it will feel somewhat different not being right “in the center of things”. I figure I’ll be traveling up to the Cities at least monthly – will try to schedule it around Baboon events.
– I am also aware that, for both Michael and me, we are not as moored to this place as we once were, before our son Joel died in 2007. And Husband has lost several family members in recent years, either literally or figuratively – freeing us up even more. I am hoping that my mom will be amenable to moving there when the time is right, and we have done some research to that end.
– We have recently seen the power of the network of Winona people, since our best Winona friend Walken (who is experiencing the early stages of Parkinson’s) lost his wife Bernadette in December to pancreatic cancer. There is a food network that brought daily meals for weeks, and several people who provided rooms for his visiting in-laws. (Reminds me of how we Babooners have gathered to help each other at times.)
I have never said “No” to a move, and I have never been sorry. But as I think about leaving Mpls, it is with mixed feelings. No doubt I will miss a lot of things about this city – this is worthy of its own blog at some point.
But the bluffs are calling.
Have you ever had to leave a place before you felt you were ready to leave?
Trail Baboon 