The Baboon Congress, Words

Indie Bookstore Day

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Header photo by By Rcawsey – Own work, Public Domain,

Today’s post comes from Barbara in Robbinsdale.

For all you baboon readers who still read books with pages to turn, this weekend is your chance to celebrate your favorite independent bookstore. The Second Annual Indie Bookstore Day is happening on April 30 around the country.

Many folks are lamenting the trend that seems to be continuing – more people buying online from Amazon while even large chains like Borders go under, and Barnes and Noble closes, among others, its Mankato store (if I remember correctly a comment from Clyde).

This article from last spring’s first Indie Bookstore Day displays photos of indie bookstores all over Minnesota:

I’ve posted below some of the metro area’s independent bookstores, and a link to their IBD celebration info:

  • My personal favorite is Birchbark Books – 2002 23rd Av. S., Mpls. – because I used to work there.
  • But here’s an independent that I haven’t discovered yet:   Moon Palace Books – 2820 E. 33rd St., Mpls.
  • And there’s Boneshaker Books – 2002 23rd Av. S., Mpls. – “The shop specializes in progressive and radical literature & mdah; and children’s books. It also houses the Women’s Prison Book Project, which provides books to inmates across the country.”  I was not able to find anything on their website about IBD, but they celebrated last year.
  • And my favorite kids bookstore, Wild Rumpus, 2720 W. 43rd St., Mpls .
  • Magers & Quinn (new and used) Books – 3038 Hennepin Av. S., Mpls.
  • In St. Paul, there’s Garrison’s store, Common Good Books, 38 S. Snelling.
  • Subtext Books – 6 West Fifth Street6 West 5th Street, St. Paul.
  • The Red Balloon, 891 Grand Av., St. Paul.
  • Duluth has Fitger’s, which is as close as I can get to Mahtawa, Cynthia. It specializes in regional Northeastern Minnesota books.
  • A little farther afield, here’s an article about shops in Portland, OR, for Steve.

(Wes, I couldn’t remember which Ohio city you reside in.)

Of course, I’ve just scratched the surface, and I apologize ahead of time if I’ve left out your favorite independent bookstore. (Please add your favorites in your comments.) There are great used book stores all over, like Midway and 6th Chamber in St. Paul. Rochester and Mankato each have one.

What was the last book you purchased, whatever kind of book it was?

History, The Baboon Congress

Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?

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Header image by Tim Evanson , CC BY-SA 2.0

Today’s post comes from Steve Grooms

Well, you don’t really have to guess, for you get to choose any dinner guest in the world, living or dead. Which person would you enjoy meeting informally, entertaining them in your own home?

Maybe there is someone from history you always wanted to answer a question.  Invite William Shakespeare for dinner, serve him some ale and then ask, “Hey, Bill, I’ve always wanted to ask: who really wrote your stuff?”

But be careful. In 1963 I asked former president Harry Truman a question about his decision to drop the atomic bomb (specifically, the second bomb). He blew a gasket. After reflection, I would do that one differently.

I’ve been thinking about whom I would invite to dinner. In April of 1962 John F. Kennedy hosted a White House dinner for Nobel Prize winners. Kicking the evening off, Kennedy said: “I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered at the White House – with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.”

Since hearing that, I’ve fantasized about dining with Thomas Jefferson. Given my history, that might be a dangerous choice, for I’d be tempted to ask the author of the Declaration of Independence why he slept with his slave.

That’s okay. I have other choices. Sticking to presidents for the moment, I would pass on Theodore Roosevelt (who was too full of himself) but would love an evening with his nephew, Franklin. To make FDR feel at home I might add his chubby buddy Winston Churchill. (And since this is a fantasy I don’t have to worry about how I could afford Winston’s bar tab.)

My first choice among presidents would be Abraham Lincoln. They say that Lincoln was a terrific storyteller who often embarrassed his stuffy cabinet members with stories that were funny and occasionally a bit earthy. And if Lincoln was coming to dinner, I’d sure want to invite Martin Luther King. I’ll bet they would hit it off.

Maybe you fear you’d be intimidated by hosting a great person. Not to worry. Invite Pope Francis. He seems like a great guy, someone who is approachable. He wouldn’t gripe if you served him less than a gourmet meal. He’d love a tuna casserole. In fact, he’d probably try to wash your feet.

Or would you prefer to host a small group?

Think about an evening spent in the company of Groucho Marx, Paul Wellstone, Pete Seeger and Walt Whitman. Or how about Eleanor Roosevelt, Abigail Adams and Molly Ivins? I don’t think the conversation would drag!

So . . . who’s coming to dinner?

The Baboon Congress, Travel

The Day of the Wild Dogs

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Today’s post comes from Verily Sherrilee

The safari experience in South Africa is amazing. At most camps there are two “runs” a day, one right at dawn and one as night falls. They pile you into large stadium seating jeeps and head off into the bush, complete with blankets and sometimes hot bricks for your feet. The drivers and guides know a tremendous amount about the animals in each of their reserves, including where the “cut line” is – the seemingly invisible boundary of each park.  They constantly radio back and forth with other jeep drivers about what animals they’ve seen and where they are.  It’s quite a ride.

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On the last day of my trip back in 2007, the client wasn’t feeling well and decided she didn’t want to get up for the last run before we had to pack up and head back to Johannesburg. That left just me and the program Account Executive on the jeep. As we were heading out, our driver Million said that he had heard some chatter the day before from another reserve just to the north of our reserve that they had seen wild dogs. Solee Wild dogs hadn’t been seen for a couple of months on “our side” of the cut line but did we want to take a chance?  Million was very clear that #1, we’d have to hightail it up to the cut line in order to make it back in time for breakfast and #2, we absolutely could not cross the cut line so if the wild dogs were in the next park then we’d be out of luck. Account Exec and I both agreed we should go for it.

WildDog12

Luck was with us. We actually saw some animals on the way and then the whole pack of wild dogs was on our side of the cut line. As this wasn’t enough luck, the pack had quite a few pups. Million parked the jeep about 20 feet away and we sat still and quiet for over an hour, watching the dogs come and go from the clearing.  Some of the pups were very curious and advanced pretty closely on the jeep. All of my pictures were taken without a view finder as I’d dropped the camera the night before and damaged it; I just kept holding it out and clicking away.  My luck continued to hold as I managed to get several fairly decent shots that morning.

We practically flew back to the lodge and tried SO hard not to gloat to the client about our morning’s experience. I don’t know how successful we were.

When has luck been on your side?

The Baboon Congress

Time to Play

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Today’s post comes from Renee in North Dakota

  • Play is repeated, incompletely functional behavior differing from more serious versions structurally, contextually, or ontogenetically, and initiated voluntarily when the animal is in a relaxed or low stress setting. VanFleet, et al., 2010 p. 7

It has been a discouraging winter here, especially for State employees, what with the oil bust, lowered revenue, and budget cuts. My next door neighbor in the office is an extremely funny woman and we manage to lighten the atmosphere when we can.  We have fun playfully harassing the construction workers who have been our companions for three months. My coworker is pretty impulsive, and I have stopped her just in the nick of time from putting her footprint in wet cement patches the construction guys had put down to plug some holes in the floor. I also convinced her to not draw hearts and smarmy messages on the foreman’s truck windows in red lipstick, after he let us know his wife was a really jealous type. Everyone else at work has been sort of gloomy, until this week.

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Throughout the year, the five floors of our agency take turns having fundraisers in aid of the Agency Social Committee.The money helps pay for our annual Christmas party as well as funeral flowers for deceased  relatives. This week, 2nd floor staff raised money (I guess extorting would be a better word) by raiding offices and filling them with a flock of five foot tall, inflatable flamingos. You have to pay $5.00 to have them removed. You can recommend others to get “flocked” once you have been flocked. I had to ride in the elevator a couple of times this week with a flamingo remover, four fully inflated flamingos, and a couple of child clients who believe that our agency is a pretty magical place.

I observe play most days in my work as a play therapist, and much of the time it is pretty grim business. I know it is therapeutic for children to run over abusive parental doll figures with the toy police cars,  but I am exposed to this stuff all the time and it can be dispiriting  to watch on a daily basis.  It was gratifying to see my coworkers start to get out of the doldrums and really play with the flamingos. We know there is only so much levity you can display at an agency that provides addiction and mental health services, but the clients seem to enjoy seeing the flamingos get moved around. By Wednesday my coworkers were giving the flock costumes. My office neighbor and I gave one a head scarf and reading glasses and named her Lena. Another one was dressed in surgical masks and christened “Dr. Who”. Yet another was dressed up like a Ninja Turtle, the purple one whose name I forget.

Play is observable all around us. My terrier is always ready to play, even if it is not the way I would want her to play, as you can see from the photo. How fun! She steals a roll of toilet paper and then mom chases her all over the house!  A flock of crows in the neighborhood starts playing at 5:30 am, chasing and careening and cawing. It serves some purpose, like all play does. I just wish they were quieter. 5th floor denizens at my workplace were giggling over their fundraiser for next month. I wonder how they can top the flamingos. I hope it allows for continued play.

 

What can top a flamingo?

The Baboon Congress

Dreaming in Small Dimension

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Today’s post comes from Clyde of Mankato.

I was born too late. Just too late. Too late for the “Tiny House” craze. It all starts with my childhood and ends with my daughter.

My childhood had two tiny houses in it, more like cabins, but they could have been homes. Even then I dreamed that one day I would live in a small one-room house. I did not think that I would meet a wonderful big city girl who had no such dream.

The first of the cabins in my childhood was along the otherwise uninhabited road to our farm. It belonged to an old man who lived in town. His outhouse did not bother me; our house, at that time, had only an outhouse. What happened to it, you ask? His grandson tore it down and built a large 1970’s era split-level house. I cannot blame him. It has a view of Lake Superior from its higher floors. (The header drawing is of that cabin.)

The second of the cabins had only one twelve-by-fifteen room. “The Shack” we called it, built by my brother and a friend on the edge of our fields 600 yards from our house. My brother and his friend went off to the Navy, thus ceding use of the cabin to me and my best friend, the younger brother of the man who helped my brother build The Shack. Dennis and I often slept there, after peddling into town to buy a load of sugar for our night’s pleasure. It had no outhouse, simply lots of nearby brush. What happened to it, you ask? In reality nothing, by which I mean it has melted itself into the ground. In my imagination it is the primary setting of my second novel. However, for the demands of the fiction, I tore it down and replaced it with a modern small home, but not a tiny house.

Our house on the North Shore was small, barely 1400 square feet. We did not find it lacking, in part because of our view over Lake Superior. Today we live in an apartment of 650 square feet, which we find cozy and perfect. When Sandy and I watch the TV shows on tiny houses, she always exclaims how small they are and how she could not live in one. I always dream the tiny house is mine. My daughter and her husband have plans to build a tiny house as their only home when they retire.

The tiny house fad, it seems to me, says something about our culture. We rush to the extremes: 4000 square feet or 400 square feet. Why not something of 900 to 1200 square feet, for example?

Could you live in a tiny house, say 400-500 square feet?

The Baboon Congress, The Future, Travel

Show Me the Money

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Today’s post comes from Verily Sherrilee

(Part 2 in a Baboon Fantasy Series)

I’ve heard many people say “I know money doesn’t buy happiness but I’d like to be part of the test group.” Everyone can point to lots of examples of money being the root of all evil but still think they could handle extreme wealth better than others.

In my fantasy dog-free world, I do not want to win a billion-dollar lottery and have to hire an entourage the first week. Give me just enough cash so that I can #1: not have to work, #2: travel to an exotic place at last once a year and #3: write some nice-sized checks to a variety of my favorite causes.

I love my job but if I didn’t have to sit in a cube and arrange things for others, I don’t think I would miss it. Having no job would give me more time for gardening, reading, volunteering and maybe my house might get clean.  I already volunteer at a few places, but I’d love to volunteer at the library and maybe an animal shelter.

Although I’ve traveled quite a bit and been to some fun and exotic places, it’s always been on the client’s agenda; I’d love to do my own thing and take Young Adult along with me sometimes. Australian Outback, Great Wall of China, Machu Picchu, Alaska, Rio de Janiero, Prague…. this could go on for a bit.

One of the reasons that I volunteer a lot is that I don’t have much cash to spread around to some of my favorite causes. But I know that in addition to volunteers, organizations need money to keep them going. I’d like to be able to write a nice check each year to both of our zoos, Planned Parenthood, Feed My Starving Children, UNICEF, Haiti Mission, malaria prevention, Cantus, my daughter’s education.

I could probably add on to all these lists easily but I don’t want so much money that I have to spend a boatload of time managing it and I certainly don’t want to have to hire someone to manage it. So add a bit more for some meals out and a bit for my stamps/glitter/ribbon and I should be good to go!

What would you use a little extra cash for?

The Baboon Congress

Well, I’ll be Dog-Gone

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Today’s post comes from Verily Sherrilee

(Part 1 in a Baboon Fantasy Series)

At Blevins Book Club yesterday, tim said if I couldn’t think of anything interesting in my life to write about, I could just make up an interesting life. So here goes.

First and foremost I would like to be dog-free. Not dog-free as in “I never want to see another dog on the planet” but as in “I don’t want to be responsible for a dog in the house”. I adore dogs; I always have. My first dog was a mutt named “Mister” that my family acquired when I was four years old. Unfortunately when I was five we moved to an apartment and Mister moved to another family. When I was six and we were back in a house, Princess the Wonder Dog joined our family. (She wasn’t actually a wonder dog until after her death, when my father’s stories of her exploits became increasingly more epic.)

CIMG2525I talked my family into an Irish Setter in junior high and I’ve had Irish Setters ever since then. I even traveled to California once to get “Tristan” after searching over hill and dale for an Irish Setter locally! My current Irish Setter is 11 and my plan was to not get another dog after she was gone. I have friends in lots of places and I’d like the freedom to be able to visit more often.  I’m not joyfully anticipating her demise, just looking forward to a time when the house is quieter and cleaner.

59Of course, this plan has taken a detour with the arrival of Young Adult’s puppy last year, so now my “plan” seems more like a fantasy. In my fantasy world, I’d wake up hearing the birds singing out the windows, not the barking of a dog that sees another dog out the window. I’d be able to walk to the bathroom without having to avoid stepping on dog toys.  I’d go down the stairs without reminding any four-legged beasts that “I got first” so they don’t barrel into the back of me.

I could let the pizza delivery guy onto the front porch without fear of them jumping all over him. I set out a muffin on the kitchen counter, leave the room and have the muffin still sitting there when I return.  I wouldn’t have big muddy paw prints all over the place when it rains.

Since Young Adult (and her dog, Krakatoa 2) will most likely be living at home a few more years while she finishes school, I don’t see my dog-gone fantasy coming to pass any time soon. But I can keep dreaming!

What would be your perfect pet?

 

 

 

 

 

The Baboon Congress

Freebies

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Today’s post comes from Barbara in Robbinsdale

When I lived in Brooklyn, NY, we always looked forward to trash pick-up day, because the night before, people would put out on the sidewalk all manner of items they were ready to discard. These items rarely sat there long enough for the trash people to take them – something reasonably nice was gone within an hour. I don’t remember being lucky enough to score anything, but someone certainly did.

Well, our area has a bi-annual “curbside clean-up day” for unwanted items, and today was the day.

They take:

  • unusable furniture (i.e. couches, chairs, mattresses)
  • general household junk (up to 100 #s per item)
  • scrap metal
  • appliances (!)

All you have to do is get your stuff out to the curb, and voilà! it will all disappear. It is of course necessary to take a walk some time during the day (before the truck comes) to see if anyone on your block has put out anything you might want. I saw a rather nice tea cart with glass shelves that – I’m telling you, if I weren’t moving in a coupla months… (Next time I looked, though, it was gone.) It was amazing how many people in pick-ups cruised slowly down our usually quiet street.

What timing! We are, of course, in clearing out mode because of the upcoming move to Winona, so we were racing through the house to find what all we could get rid of. Put out an old TV table, plastic shelving, a former rolling desk chair, a plow sort of thing that had a bicycle tire as its fulcrum… gems, as you can see. But our little pile didn’t hold a candle to the pictured one at the top of this post. Granted, that is two yards’ worth.

I’m just happy I managed to not bring anything home.

What would you put out on the curb, if someone would come and pick it up?

The Baboon Congress

The Troupe

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Header photo by Tambako the Jaguar via Flickr
Today’s post comes from Sherrilee

As the emails fly back and forth this week about straw bales and manure, I’m reminded again about what a wonderful community has sprung up here. When we first started hitting the trail, some of us were immigrants from the Trial Balloon blog; we were fans of Radio Heartland and before that the LGMS (Late Great Morning Show).

As the months and years have gone by, we’ve lost some and gained some. We’ve written more as Dale has amped up his activity in other areas. We’ve developed some verbiage of our own and the days we talk about food, books and music are usually run-aways.

But what I love most about this group is its spirit of community. Here just SOME of the things that we’ve done over the years:

  • When a baboon needed help around the house, a couple of us showed up to do some chores.
  • When another baboon was in a car accident, a dozen of the troupe showed up to do spring gardening at her house.
  • When a HUGE tree fell over during a storm at someone’s house, we had chain saw party and got the tree chopped up and hauled away.
  • When one of our own was in an ice cream development contest, we all voted and when she won, we had an ice cream social to toast her victory.
  • When a baboon’s child was needing some help with math, another of us tutored her.
  • When a baboon’s husband was traveling west for a project, another baboon offered her home for part of his stay.
  • A kitten became part of another baboon’s family after being found on the farm of another baboon.
  • We started a book club. Meets every 2 months and still going strong.
  • When a founding member decided to move to the West Coast, several baboons helped get everything sorted for the estate sale and then helped pack up what needed to go to Portland.
  • We’ve had more than one “plant” transfer – plants from one baboon home being transplanted to another baboon home.
  • One baboon has given heirloom seeds to others in the troupe (and also provided multiple gardening tips over the years).
  • Carpooling to various baboon fetes has been arranged

I’m absolutely sure that I’m missing quite a few interactions between baboons over the years and I’m not even including all the various social engagements and field trips that we’ve organized.

Although we are a social group most often convened in virtual space, we may still be a worthy subject for study by some enterprising anthropologist. Just as Jane Goodall observed chimpanzees in the wild, someone with a grant to document the behavior of Internet baboons would find plenty to write about here.

Goodall’s groundbreaking book carried the rather dry title “The Chimpanzees of Gombe – Patterns of Behavior.”

What title would you give a scholarly study of the Trail Baboons?

The Baboon Congress

My Gum Problem

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Today’s post comes from Steve Grooms.

I was a weird sort of kid. I wasn’t comfortable with other kids my age. If I saw someone walking toward me on the sidewalk, I’d cross the street, pretending to be on an urgent errand. You could call me “shy.” “Weird” might be more accurate.

One reason for avoiding other kids was that I talked to myself as I walked. I told stories,
improbable fantasies in which a kid who looked like me did heroic acts. I engaged in conversations and arguments. And I brooded about various issues.

An issue that troubled me especially in the 1950s was chewing gum.

If there is data to show how many kids chewed gum back then, I haven’t found it, but far more kids chewed than now. Almost everyone chewed. In some schools at the start of the day the teachers ran a gum patrol, walking around with tissues and ordering kids to get rid of their gum. Some kids bluffed by claiming they weren’t chewing. If they later got caught, the consequences were not pretty.

I looked down on kids addicted to gum. The act of chewing gave them a vacant, bovine expression. I wasn’t alone in this. In Hollywood films from that time, if the audience was meant to see a character as shallow and stupid that character would chew gum.

My real problem, however, was with used gum, discarded used gum. Nobody had a good way to dispose of stale gum after the flavor was gone. Some kids just spat it out wherever they were. If you walked the sidewalks of my home town you inevitably would step on a sticky, icky lump of old gum. It would adhere to the sole of your shoe, a repulsive gluey blog that you didn’t dare touch.

Kids spat out their gum because we all knew how dangerous it was to swallow gum. It was common knowledge that gum had magical powers to defeat our bodies from digesting it. Lumps of swallowed gum wouldn’t break down but would drift in our bodies, inevitably lodging in the worst possible place: the appendix. There the swallowed gum would join all the other gum you had swallowed in your lifetime, stretching the appendix until one day—kablooie—the appendix would blow.

Death by Dentyne!

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A horrifying discovery!

And even that wasn’t the worst of my chewing gum problem. What I hated most of all was the way kids parked used gum on the underside of restaurant tables, school desks or the counters of soda grills. If you ran your hands along the under side of a table you would discover a densely packed minefield of discarded gum, all dry and hard, stuck there forever. To my mind, this was more disgusting than picking your nose in public.

And the under surfaces of virtually allrestaurant tables were covered with these nasty little gum boogers.

This depressed me. If young people were going to be so gross and lazy, I reasoned, how could anyone believe they would solve really difficult issues? I wanted to believe that my generation would get some things right that previous generations had screwed up. But all those wads of dried gum mocked my idealism. Modern kids were obviously disgusting slobs.

Now let’s move ahead about sixty years in time.

About a month ago I tested my sense that things were better. I cautiously slid my fingers under a table top in a restaurant, feeling for lumps of old gum. No gum. None! I tried it again at a different restaurant. And another. No gum. None at all!

I have proved—to my own satisfaction—that teenagers no longer defile tables and counters as they once did. Mankind has made a giant stride forward. That leaves some challenges still needing to be worked out—issues like world peace, economic justice and global warming—but I have high hopes.

When have you worried about something that turned out to be no problem?