The Baboon Congress, Travel

North American Rail Pass

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Today’s post comes from Barbara in Robbinsdale.

Once upon a time, I had a very good idea. It was 1998, and my 50th birthday was coming up. I wanted to do something special for this birthday… not a party, something more unusual and exciting. I love traveling by train, and a friend had alerted me to a fantastic deal provided by a North American Rail Pass. An article in the Mpls. Star Tribune read: “The 30-day pass, providing unlimited travel and unlimited stopovers, will cost…. $645… for travel between June 1 and Oct. 15…”

After getting the OK from Husband – “May I have the month of July off, Dear?” (son Joel was 17)  –  I started planning. I knew from previous experience that I could sleep in coach, sort of, for a night or two at most. I decided to travel the perimeter of the country, as friends/sister lived at several points thereon.  Turned out I could schedule myself for a couple of days/nights on the train to get to the next destination, and then stay X # of days with someone. It allowed me to see almost everyone I wanted to, within the 31 days. (Because I stayed eight days in the SF Bay Area, I unfortunately had to skip NYC.)

The Rail Pass required travel in both the US (Amtrak), and Canada (Via); although it felt silly, I flew to Winnipeg to launch on July 1 (Canada Day!), then traveled on Via across the plains and Canadian Rockies, arriving in Vancouver at 8:55 a.m. on July 3. At the time, this was the one link where no train was available, and I took the motor coach, Greyhound, from Vancouver to Seattle, where I found a hotel for one night and a nice Japanese restaurant (it being the one stop where I knew no one nearby).

The rest of the itinerary looked like this:

      • Seattle –> Oakland:  One night on southbound Coast Starlight.  Spent eight days with sister et al.
      • Oakland –> Los Angeles:   One day on southbound Coast Starlight.  Transferred to …
      • LA –> Deming, NM: One night on eastbound Eagle.  Spent four days with high school friend.
      • Deming –>Jacksonville, FL:  Two nights on eastbound Sunset Limited.  Transferred to …
      • Jacksonville –> Charleston SC:  One half day on northbound Silver Meteor:  – spend 3 days with childhood friend.   (Note: In 1998, there were still trains between New Orleans and Jacksonville, not shown on the current map.)
      • Charleston –> Washington DC:  One night on northbound Silver Meteor.  Transferred to …
      • DC –> Indianapolis:  One night on westbound Cardinal: spend two days with grad school friend.
      • Indy –> Chicago:  One half day motor coach: (better timing than Amtrak’s Cardinal for last leg of trip):
      • Chicago –> St. Paul:  One half day on westbound Empire Builder:

I got to see breathtaking, sometimes close-up views of:  the Canadian Rockies, chartreuse canola fields in bloom, a Seattle suburb full of blue hydrangeas, cliffs along the California coast, Arizona desert cacti, southern live oaks and Spanish moss in Florida, a sweet little streams with a footbridge in West Virginia, a duck on moss covered pilings in the Chicago River, cattle facing a classic red barn with a sign posted: “Prepare to Meet Thy God”.

Train stations, some outstanding like the ones in Jasper, Alberta, Canada, El Paso, Texas and Union Station in Chicago.

Union Station, Chicago
El Paso Station
Jasper Station

Then I boarded the Empire Builder for the last few hours to St. Paul. Husband met me at 10:59 p.m., at the St. Paul station on, appropriately enough, Transfer Road – I was ready to be home.

Imagine you have an entire month to be spirited away somewhere. Everything for which you are responsible will be taken care of, and money is no object. Where would you go?

The Baboon Congress, Uncategorized

Prell & Ralston

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Today’s post is from Verily Sherrilee

I’m not much of a shopper and I’m pretty sure if there is a shopping gene, then mine is either deficient or non-existent. My favorite places to shop are either strip malls (park in front of store, go in store, buy item, leave store, drive away) or a place like Target, where you can park once and purchase an umbrella, a tank top, vegetarian sausages and aspirin all in the same place. I’m also “frugal” and a lower price point almost always appeals to me.

So I think it’s interesting that there are a few products that I am loyal to, going out of my way to find them or spending more to have them (or both).

Ralston

I grew up in St. Louis where Ralston Purina products proliferate. As a child Ralston Hot Cereal, which is a whole wheat cereal, was a cold weather staple at my house. My mother served it with butter and brown sugar, which is how I still like it.  When I moved to the Twin Cities you could still find Ralston in the cereal aisle, but eventually it faded out of the market.  For several years my mother would buy it at her local grocery store and ship it to me. When her grocery stopped carrying it, I called Ralston and they sent me to a couple of online sources, which is where I still buy it today, even though it’s more expensive than picking up something at the store. It’s not significantly different from a few other whole wheat hot cereals, but there’s just something about it that makes it special to me.

Screen Shot 2016-02-17 at 8.32.56 PM

The other product I stubbornly cling to is Prell Shampoo. I can still remember the old Prell commercials with the pearl sinking slowly through the green shampoo. Prell smells great to me and even though I know in my brain that more suds don’t actually make my hair cleaner, I LOVE the suds. Not too many places carry Prell anymore so I find myself making a separate trip to Walgreens to buy my shampoo.

I’m guessing that some of my loyalty to these brands is the positive memories that they invoke from my childhood. Or we could go with the simpler “I just like what I like”.

What product are you loyal to, no matter what?

The Baboon Congress

A Seedy Guy

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Header photo courtesy of Seed Savers Exchange

Today’s post comes from Jim Tjepkema

Robert Lobitz passed away before I got a chance to meet him in person.  I knew about him from seeing his seed listings in the Seed Savers Exchange Yearbook and from exchanging seeds with him by mail.   He didn’t come to any of meetings of seed savers that I attended and apparently stayed close to his home near Paynesville, MN.

As a member of SSE, Robert exchanged seeds with other SSE members.  He also obtained samples of seeds from Federal seed collections which he grew in variety trials to learn about their characteristics.  In one of those trials he discovered a pea that had yellow pods and shared seed from that pea with other seed savers.  Several seed companies are now offering this pea for sale under the name, Golden Sweet, which is the name given to it by Robert.

Red Swan snap bean, developed by Robert, is also available in commercial seed catalogs.  This bean is a product of Robert’s work on creating new bean varieties.   Snap beans and some other beans are self-pollinating.  However, bees will sometimes carry pollen from one variety to another by getting into the bean flowers before they have self-pollinated.   Robert looked for beans produced from flowers cross-pollinated by bees and saved these seeds to serve as starting points for his work on developing new varieties.

All of Robert’s work with seeds was done in his own gardens as a hobby.   Peas and beans were not the only vegetable seeds that he collected and studied.  He also collected many kinds of potatoes and soybeans.   Among the members of SSE he stood out as one the best seed savers sharing hundreds of kinds of rare seeds from his collection with other seed savers.

For me, Robert was an outstanding example of how a person who is not a paid professional can make significant contributions in a field where most of the workers are highly trained specialists.

In what area are you a significantly talented amateur?

Music, Songs

Top Billing

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Today is the birthday of Wayne King, otherwise known as “America’s Waltz King”.   I hadn’t realized until reading it that our nation has been blessed with Waltz Royalty.  Unfortunately for Wayne, American waltzing takes place in a very tiny kingdom.

King’s band is known for a number of old tunes, including this one.

King himself is the pride of Savanna, Illinois, a river town crammed so tightly into the northwestern corner of the state there was no room for an H at the end of its name.  Savanna’s wikipedia page gives Wayne King top billing on its list of noteworthy residents.

  1. “America’s Waltz King” Wayne King
  2. Professional wrestler Tommy Treichel
  3.  Billy Zoom (Tyson Kindell) founding member of the punk band X
  4. Major League Baseball player Pete Lister
  5. Former NASA astronaut Dale Gardner.

Of course we all have our specific areas of interest and personal preferences that we bring to the creation of any pecking order.  Which is why I’m baffled that the astronaut is last on the list.   Don’t get me wrong, waltzing is lovely and professional wrestling is fun, but Gardner wrestled satellites while weightless, and weightless is how the best waltzers look when they’re doing it right, so I figure he should get extra points for combining skills.

Who should get top billing as the most noteworthy resident of your town? 

 

 

 

The Future, Travel

Hitching Post, 2016

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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.

IMG_1319

I have a hunch, but what do you think is going on here?

The Baboon Congress

hello out there

62 Comments

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.

 

 

The Baboon Congress

hats

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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?

Family, The Baboon Congress

Scholar’s Mountain

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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.

 

 

The Baboon Congress

Paintings From The Past

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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 waterRed Roostercolors 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 Minute Goat plus1whose 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?

 

History, The Baboon Congress

I Don’t Snow About That

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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?