The Baboon Congress

Adventures in Poo

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Today’s post comes from Ben.

When we first had children Kelly and I made an agreement: She’d take care of the poop and I’d take care of the vomit.

Course that doesn’t always work, but when it does it was great. She didn’t like vomit and I didn’t like poop.

Driving to Plainview today I saw this:

Poo smiley face

If you can’t tell, it’s made with manure. And it’s harder than you think to make that. (The face, not the manure).

I think he had to make the mouth and eyes first and then go around the outside making the circle. Otherwise there’d be tracks back out.

So is this art? Yeah, I think so.

And it got me thinking about my dealings with manure.

Any time you work with large animals you are going to be splattered, smacked and smeared with poop at some point in time.

I’ve been hit in with face with poopy tails. I’ve had my hands in it to fix things.

In the winter with the cows in the barn most of the day, we had to clean the gutters every morning. Dad did it by hand using a wheelbarrow and running up a 2” x 12” ramp to dump it in the manure spreader. If it was raining, It was slippery and you had to be more careful. I wasn’t always.

I was just getting old enough to handle the wheelbarrow when he put a barn cleaner in. So now It was easy. As long as it worked.

In the winter we always checked to be sure the chain wasn’t frozen down before starting it up. Because fixing a broken link involved forking out a lot of manure to get the chain back together. And hopefully I HAD the replacement link.

Being cold, it was a good idea to check the apron of the manure spreader before

you loaded it up with manure. Because fixing that was a hassle too.

One of our family stories is the year my dad had bunions cut off both feet. He had this done in the middle of winter figuring it was the best time to do it. Yeah, for HIM. Not for us doing chores. We had arranged for a guy to do the milking and chores while Dad was recuperating in the wheel chair.

The guy didn’t last long however and his last day was a cold dark day and he broke the manure spreader apron chain with the spreader still half full and he simply parked the spreader back in the shed and went home.

Mom and I had to fork off the rest of the load and then we lay under the spreader trying to fix the chain while dad yelled instructions to us from the Living room window.

However many weeks into recovery dad was, he was back in the barn the next day with bread bags slipped over the casts on his feet.

Below zero days I had a few simple goals; no broken water pipes, the silo unloaders worked, the tractor started and I got the barn cleaned and the spreader unloaded without issues. If that all worked it was a good day.

As for home and kids and poop and vomit… I don’t remember so much about that. I know there were messy diapers. I know there was vomit. I remember trying to catch it in my hands once or twice…

I myself remember throwing up in 5th grade. Went to the teachers desk and said ‘I don’t feel good; can I go to the nurse?’ and puking into his wastebasket right there. He jumped up, the class recoiled and I recall him saying ‘Go! Just Go!’

Team Vomit or Team Poo.  Which side are you on? 

 

The Baboon Congress

The Dust Suckers

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My apologies, Renee and Baboons.  I was away from e-mail and the blog all day yesterday, and did not realize there was no comment box in spite of several polite attempts made by diligent readers to call my attention to that fact.  

I blame the dust.  In my brain. 

Comments are now open on this post, which will remain up through the weekend. 

Today’s post comes from Renee in North Dakota.

Husband has terrible airborne allergies, particularly to dust and pollen and cat dander. I had hoped that when we installed new siding and windows in the house last year he would find some relief, at least inside the house, but it didn’t happen. We have HEPA filters running all the time and have dust mite proof mattress and pillow covers, and new carpets, but he still downs Sudafed and Allegra like candy and is always sneezing and clearing his throat.

I noticed that even when our new windows were shut tight, there was always a thick layer of dust on furniture and other surfaces. I know that it is dustier out here than in other places because of the winds we have, but, honestly, a person shouldn’t  have to dust twice a week when the windows haven’t even been opened.

It occurred to me that we must be recirculating dust whenever we ran the furnace or the central air conditioning. I replace the furnace filter at the approved intervals, but that didn’t help, either. We decided to call in the dust suckers, or, more professionally, Peterson’s Furnace and Air Duct Cleaners. They arrived today and spent 7 hours removing more dirt and objects from our furnace and furnace ducts than I thought possible. They have a 600 lb vacuum that gets connected to the furnace and cleans out everything. The hose is more than a foot in diameter.  They also go from the vents back to the furnace to make sure nothing is in the ducts, and then sterilize the whole duct system. Some of the more interesting things they removed included:

    • Pieces of lumber, presumably left by the construction workers who built the house in 1978
    • Chunks of drywall-ditto
    • Cassette tapes
    • Cat toys
    • Spoons (not soup spoons but spoons for feeding babies)
    • gargantuan dust bunnies

Mr. Peterson is a local, and his able assistant is from New Jersey and has the most delightful accent. They tell us that this procedure should be done about every 10 years. It evidently hasn’t ever been done here in the 37 years since the house was built.  It remains to be seen if husband’s allergies will remit somewhat, but getting rid of the dust certainly can’t hurt. I need to ask my children which of them stuffed cassette number 4 of Harry Potter and The Goblet of FIre down the heat vent, and why. Alas, though, now I know that none of my missing soup spoons are in the duct work.

What long-missing item might be hiding in your air ducts? 

 

The Baboon Congress

Finding the Sacred

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Today’s post comes from Renee in North Dakota.

One thing I appreciate about the Baboons is our tolerance for one another’s opinions and beliefs. Oh, sure, we have our occasional tiff, with brief howling and hurling of poo, but after a bit we regroup and run happily together down the Trail to the next topic.

I have long wanted to post this, but hesitated, with the hesitation that many people have when discussing their religious beliefs. I know most Baboons are quite spiritual, some in less traditional ways, but spiritual and thoughtful. I have trust that the Baboon community will consider this in the spirit in which it is intended (which is to elicit comment and discussion).

I am privileged to be a member of a committee of the western ND Evangelical Lutheran Church in America that approves people who wish to become rostered leaders in the church. This means that if you want to be an ELCA pastor in western ND, you have to jump through a whole lot of hoops and have the qualities that we need for our clergy leaders. Anyone can go to seminary, but if you want to be called and ordained, you need our blessing. This means that we walk with  applicants for several years, attending to and encouraging their growth and maturation, even those who start the process later in life. Some start very later in life, but the process is still the same.

It always fascinates and moves me the first time we meet with an applicant. They are frequently teary. They have incredible faith stories and are so relieved to take the first step to answer what sometimes has been an internal urging that they have tried to ignore for years, but find that they cannot. Some have had incredible heartbreak and trauma, but persevere to answer what they hear as a direct call from God to serve the Church. After one particularly moving interview, a fellow member of the committee said to me “The Holy Spirit was in the room with us tonight”. That statement made the hair stand up on my neck, for I knew that she was right, and let me tell you, the thought of kind of makes me stop and feel humble.

After our June meeting last summer, I left Bismarck and travelled to the Twin Buttes Pow wow in Twin Buttes, ND. We have dear friends from Twin Buttes who are tribal members, and the Pow wow is always so much fun with them. I love watching the Grand Entrance and all the dancers in their gorgeous costumes and intricate dance steps. In the center of the Pow wow grounds is a pole that the dancers circle around, counter-clockwise. Our friend’s mom, now passed, had brain cancer for years, and her only request each year was to see the pole and get pushed up to the pole in her wheelchair so she could touch it. She was also a devout Christian, but that pole was also sacred to her.

It is fun to walk around the pow wow grounds to see the vendors, and the people. I notice children and adults tapping their feet to the rhythms of the drum circles, hearing the traditional songs, also sacred, and I am reminded that the sacred is all around us, in meeting rooms and on pow wow grounds, in churches and in our everyday encounters.

Where do you find the sacred in your life?

History, The Baboon Congress

Remembering Them

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Today’s post comes from Barbara in Robbinsdale.

November 11 has been called Veterans Day since 1954 – before that it was called Armistice Day in honor of the end of the hostilities of World War I. My story grew out of an event from World War II.

You would think they might still be mourning the French people they lost in World War II 70-odd years ago (and I’m sure they are). But in spring of this year, the French villagers of St. Père en Retz, on the western edge of the Loire region of France, wanted to honor the Americans who died there on May 1, 1943. A crew of ten from the US Air Force flew a B17 (the Black Swan) out of Britain, one of 59 bombers on a mission to take out a submarine bunker at coastal St. Nazaire that had been taken over by the Germans. Six lost their lives, including the pilot, who was my mom’s older brother Bobby (Jay Robert Sterling). (Another time I’ll tell more of what we now know of the story.)

The people of this region are still so grateful for every attempt by American and British forces to aid them, that between 2013 and 2015 five different villages along the Retz River have  commemorated the soldiers, with several more installations planned in the next few years.

The organizing Committee from St. Père en Retz searched via the internet for crewmen’s family members, then invited us to come to France for the occasion. They were fairly successful – eleven travelers representing four of the crew were able to gather the first weekend of May. (A fifth crewman’s family was able to come later on.) Since my mother wasn’t well enough to make this trip, my sister and I went in her place, along with her son and Husband.

Other family members of the crew had visited St. Père en Retz individually in previous decades, and had each been honored in some way. But this time they wanted as many people as possible as they accomplished several things:  installation of a new History Panel (Panneau Historique); upgrading a Monument listing the names of the crew;  and commemorating this with a church service, and ceremonies at the crash site, to which the entire village was invited.

Six of us were put up at a country manor house of one of the Committee, five more at nearby B & Bs. The villagers were impressed that we would travel all this way – we were impressed by all the work the Committee undertook to organize this, how they welcomed us, and the turnout of the community for the ceremonies.

So it was a weekend full of receptions, ceremonies, speeches, poems, banquets, unveiling of monuments, viewing of the crash site (the most emotional time of the weekend), and touring related sites like the submarine bunker. There was also consulting my LaRousse at every turn as I tried reviving my college French, attempting to remember all the new French names, and getting used to being full of food and wine all the time…  We were exhausted by Monday morning, but I wouldn’t give it up for anything. It was quite something to be celebrated like this.

All over this corner of France, these Panneau Historique are being created and installed, telling the stories they don’t want their people to forget.

Have you ever been moved by a patriotic event?
Is there anyone you want to remember this Veteran’s Day?

Uncategorized

Up On Our Feet

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Today’s post is a message from perennial sophomore Bubby Spamden, forever enrolled at Wendell Willkie High School.

Hey, Mr. C!

Sorry I only write to you when I want you to do something for me or I have a complaint, but what do you expect?  You’re an old guy and I’m still in high school, so for us to be just-hanging-out friends would be weird.

But I saw this article and it really got me riled up.

Well, actually, Mr. Boozenporn made us read this article in social studies class, and it got me thinking about how so much of life winds up being about your expectations.

Really!  Because you know I’m super focused on what I’ll do for a living if I ever get out of Willkie.  On account of they keep threatening to graduate me, since I’m older than the janitor now.

Anyway, Mr. B. showed us this article about how a bunch of elementary schools are getting rid of sit-down desks and making their students stand instead!

For example, nearly every classroom in the Vallecito Elementary School, in San Rafael California, now has standing desks!

I found out there’s been a bunch of news coverage of this, and all the students, teachers and parents they quoted go on and on about how great it is for helping kids stay focused and keeping them healthy.

Blah Blah Blah.

Nobody spoke up for the best part of desk-sitting in school, which is the way being crouched down behind a piece of furniture all day makes it easy to hide stuff in your desk, write secret notes, make spitballs, and etc, etc, etc.

This looks like a secret plan by education bosses and trend-followers to get rid of the school experience that I loved so much – where you’re in a constant battle with the teacher over winning the attention of the other students and the sit-down desk is your foxhole!

Some say the stand-up desk helps prep the little kids for the workplace of their future because it’s a big trendy deal in corporate offices now.  But the difference is in corporations it’s the higher-ups (literally) that get to have a stand up work space, and it’s always their choice if they want to do it!

So telling kids the stand-up desk gets them an early start on their career sends the wrong message, because the only kind of stand-up job that’s available when you get into the workforce today is fast food worker, cashier, barista, waiter, stock clerk, and road work  signal man!

Not to put down those jobs, but if I ever get to college,  I definitely want to graduate with a degree in Sitting Down and Telling People What To Do.

Sit-down jobs are still the best, because that’s where the money is. And I’m pretty sure all those corporate CEO’s are hiding cool stuff in their desks!

Your pal,
Bubby

What did you hide in your elementary school desk?

Science, The Baboon Congress, Travel

Celestial Contact

109 Comments

Today’s post comes from Anna.

I have touched the moon.

No really. I touched the moon. Well, part of the moon. Okay, fine, a rock from the moon. A little piece of rock from the moon. For the record, it was very smooth and shiny, not at all like I expected a piece of the moon to be.

My lunar adventure began with a trip to Houston for work. The co-worker I traveled with is a huge NASA fan and has been to a couple other NASA sites. I will not pretend that a trip to Johnson Space Center was not part of the motivation to fly in early to our conference. With a little work from our hotel’s concierge, we were set up with a rental car for the day and off we went, into Houston traffic, after being warned by the clerk at the rental car agency that something like 1 in 4 drivers in Texas does not have a license. Did I mention that Houston traffic is crazy and there were traffic jams by my hotel well into the evening? Yeah. This wasn’t like driving to Duluth.

In the never-never land between Houston and Johnson Space Center (and Not-Quite-Galveston) there isn’t much. Several purveyors of boots. Various and sundry “adult” businesses. More boots. The previously mentioned crazy traffic. Another place to buy boots.

spacesuit

And then, the Space Center. We got there too late in the afternoon to take the tram out to see the building that houses “mission control,” but we did get to climb into the cockpit of a shuttle (decommissioned, sliced off, and all the fun buttons behind plexiglass…so no button pushing for me, dang it). shuttleinteriorA piece of the control console from the Apollo era is also on display with an explanation of the work necessary to change a single button to do task B instead of task A (makes you appreciate how much computing power you likely have in your pocket or purse…computing power you use to play games and check blogs, perhaps more power than was used to get us to and from the moon). There was a progression of space suits and re-creations of the International Space Station – all sorts of good stuff to make a space nerd happy.

And then, yes, tucked back in a corner of the visitor center is the tiny bit of the moon that you can touch, shiny from all the fingers that have grazed it. touchingthemoonI met the man who brought that piece of the moon and he was about as unassuming as the rock he brought back. Harrison Schmitt – the only professional scientist to have gone to the moon and one of the last to stand on its surface (he was on the last Apollo mission). He was in the Twin Cities a couple years ago for an event and apparently didn’t have the patience to wait for his official autograph time at a table, so wandered the floor of the event chatting with folks. I am sure his politics and mine are not at all similar, but he brought back a part of the moon. And I have touched it. And that is a pretty cool thing.

When have you had a brush with the stars?

Food, The Baboon Congress

Scandinavian Treasure

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Today’s post comes from Barbara in Robbinsdale.

When we moved my mom from one assisted living place to her current one exactly two years ago this week, Husband and I were the sorters, packers, and movers. I remember putting three special items from her kitchen in a small box and labeling it because this was important stuff: her recipe box and dad’s, and the Bergen Lutheran Church Cookbook. Somehow in the shuffle of the next few weeks, the box got lost. I’ve been pining for, particularly, the Cookbook ever since.

But today I FOUND THE BOX. It was tucked in a corner of the laundry area. Happily, everything is there intact – the Lefse recipe, my dad’s Kumla and other Norwegian recipes, the Peanut Brittle he would make at Christmas… Mom’s Perfection Salad and Chicken Fricassee. The cream sauce for the Fish Balls. And most important, the Bergan Church Cookbook, from 1963. Here’s a sample:

Cookies

I see from the index there are 32 pages of Cookies; 28 pages of Cakes and Icings; 30 of Desserts, Pastry and Pies; 10 of Meat Dishes; 2 of vegetables, 18 of Breads, and 14 of “Salads”, exemplified here:

Salads, so to speak

They just don’t make cookbooks like this anymore. Where else can you find a recipe for Zweiback Pudding?

Sometimes there isn’t even a recipe, just the list of ingredients. See “Fruit Salad” on page 44:

1 no. 2 can chunk pineapple

1 c. white grapes (cut in two and remove seeds)

1 bag marshmallows

But it contains my grandma’s (Mrs. Arthur Britson’s) recipe for Sour Cream Cookies, and Aunt Clara’s (Mrs. J.E. Britson’s) Delicious Dessert. It’s full of names like Mrs. Ed Sandvold, Mrs. Nels Torgeson, lots of Anderson and Arneson, Knudtson, Larsen. All of these women are gone by now, but this book is one way their names will be remembered.

So, just in time for the Holidays, I have all my resources at my fingertips.

What’s your most cherished cookbook or recipe?

Food, The Baboon Congress

Pumpkin Wasteland

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Today’s post comes from Verily Sherrilee.

I’m not crazy about pumpkin.

My earliest career was in the bakery industry. I took several classes and then got my first job as a cake decorated at Shorewood Village Bakery in Milwaukee. It was a large bakery, as bakeries go, but there were times when I had to pitch in and help with other jobs in addition to making icing roses and piping out “Happy Anniversary Gramma and Gramps”.

One of those jobs was pumpkin pies. Beginning about a week before Thanksgiving and going until the New Year, we cranked out hundreds of pumpkin pies each week. In order to save time, the pies were filled while they were IN the oven, a big reel oven with rotating shelves. Each shelf held 24 pie crusts, par-baked for about 15 minutes.PumpkinPie1 Then one by one, we would stop the shelves and pour the pumpkin mixture into each shell. This took about 15 minutes per shelf. The fun part is that if you keep your arms in a very hot oven for 15 minutes times 5 shelves, you burn your arms off. So when it was your turn, you had to wrap bakery towels around your arms, secure them with bakery twine and then another employee would pour cold water over the towels. After you were about half way done with a full rotation, you’d get another douse of cold water. We took turns, so you usually only had to do this once a day, but it was every day from mid-November to January, including Sundays. Actually on Sundays the only baking that happened was pies, so you sometimes had to pour twice.

I’m sure it doesn’t surprise anybody that I don’t eat pumpkin pie. In fact, because the smell catapults me right back to those bakery days, I don’t really like anything with pumpkin in it. (I do make an exception for Breadsmith’s Pumpkin Muffins w/ Walnuts, but that’s about it.)

So this time of year is particularly hard for me. Everything has pumpkin in it. EVERYTHING. I follow several food blogs and nobody has made a thing for a few weeks now that doesn’t feature pumpkin. My coffee place has pumpkin lattes and pumpkin scones. My bagel place has pumpkin bagels. I’m sure if I could remember my dreams, they would be pumpkin dreams. I figure I have a good four weeks before we’re safely out of pumpkin season until next year. I can’t wait.

Mind you, I don’t have a problem with the other members of the squash family – just pumpkin.

What food has been spoiled for you?

The Baboon Congress

Singin’ at the Guthrie

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Today’s post comes from three members of the Baboon Congress, Barbara, Lisa and Sherrilee.

The Set-up (by Barbara in Robbinsdale)

My little Showtime Chorus is one of the many Twin Cities choruses that have been participating in the Guthrie’s production of The Events,   a rather heavy duty one-act play that follows the journey of a choir, and especially its leader Claire, as they seek understanding in the aftermath of a mass shooting in their own community.

According to the Guthrie, the play was written as “… a response to the 2011 Norway attacks in which the lives of 77 people were…[lost]… at a summer camp, this internationally acclaimed production delves into faith, politics and reason.”

A presentation of the Actors Touring Company of the UK, the troupe shares the stage with a different local choir each night.  In our “land of 10,000 choirs” I counted 22 different choirs on the Guthrie’s website, including not just my choir but also the First Universalist Church Choir that Lisa and Verily Sherrilee sing in.

Think of the logistics of getting all those people in the right place on the right day, knowing what they need to know! After rehearsing on our own, we attended a 3-hour music rehearsal at the Guthrie with other choirs who would be on deck that week. On the day of our performance, we attended a 2-hour rehearsal with “blocking” instructions – where to be when, who to watch for cues.

The Show (by Lisa)

We were well taken care of by Guthrie and ATC staff and the script, which outlined the scenes and cues (though without details so we could still be surprised as the tale unfolded). The intro to each song made our starting notes very clear (no having to pull them out of the air).

We were more involved than we might have first imagined. Two people were volunteered for somewhat lengthy speaking parts (but they could read them without shame – no memorization needed). A number of people were given lines of a few words.

Our only improvisation came when the character Claire decided to lead us in a Shamanic ritual to try to restore her lost soul. She instructed us to move off the risers and come to the front of the stage, and then to melt. I was near the front of the stage so I am not sure what other people did, but I did my best candle and ended up almost flat on the floor. We were then instructed to touch at least one other person and finally to vocalize and jump up as if struck by lightning, shouting, “Charge!!”

We have a blind choir member with a lovely yellow lab guide dog. I heard later that when J was on the floor, D thought it would be helpful to lick J’s face as it was at a convenient height. The improvising actress asked him, “How do you say “melt” in Dog?” The audience thought it all pretty hysterical.

It was good to have some lighter moments as the whole play was dealing with an extremely disturbing subject without any easy answers. The positive message, though, was that community (such as found in community choirs) is our greatest hope for responding to these tragedies.

The Songs (by Verily Sherrilee)

There were six songs assigned for The Event plus each choir started out their show with a prepared song of their choosing.

We started with the Norwegian Coffee Song as a warm up, each time through a little faster than the time before.  Hopefully there weren’t too many Norwegians in the audience to hear how bad the pronunciation gets when you sing that fast.  Soul was a very short piece that we did during the main actor’s monologue about losing her soul.  Ohm.  Soul.  Ohm.  That was all but it was amazing the amount of work put into hitting those four notes and growing the sound.

The third piece was Bonkers by Dizzee Rascal.  This was a big hit in the U.K. a few years ago although our version was slower and “more epic” according to the musical director.  The lyrics pointed to a life in chaos and depression but had a beautiful resolution at the end.  Then there was How Great Thou Art.  As part of the play, Claire was having trouble with the song, since she was struggling with her faith.  So she stopped us midstream, asked us to hum, asked just the altos/sopranos to hum and eventually let everybody sing but quite softly.

If there was a production hit, it was Gavrilo Principe, a high energy song about making your mark on the world.  We were encouraged to rock our air guitars, throw in a lot of movement and clap.  The final song was We’re All Here with a repeating chorus that the audience was encouraged to sing along. After 90 minutes of a tough subject, it was soothing and hopeful.

The songs were all really different and without the play to anchor them, they initially seemed a little bizarre.  But with the dialogue and movements of the actors, they made more sense and contributed to a powerful presentation.

Tell us about YOUR 15 minutes of fame?

Science, Travel

Big Hole Remains Vast

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I’m here to report that the world-famous Grand Canyon in northern Arizona lives up to its billing and is undiminished by time.

In fact, time, which gradually dismantles you and me and blunts the overall effect of abslutely everything else,  only increases the canyon’s grandness.

Such has been the case for either 6 or 70 million years, depending on which creation story you happen to believe.  In a remarkable double-reversal, the old theory is that the canyon is new, and the new theory is that the canyon is very much older, having formed as a by-product of an earlier river that flowed in the opposite direction – as a result of a powerful, rock-cutting  runoff from mountains that no longer exist.

And that mountain range existed in the basin where Las Vegas sits today.  What are the odds?

Name your favorite natural feature of the Earth’s surface.