Zoos and animal parks are some YAs and my favorite places to visit. Minnesota Zoo, Como Zoo, Fawn-Doe-Rosa, Carlson Llama Farm – these are our local haunts. Zoos and animals parks are also, in my experience, the places with the highest percentage of child meltdowns around.
YA was a very easy child (we’re just talking child here, not teenager!) so I have zero experience with a melting down child. She abandoned the idea of the stroller by the time she was three and never looked back. She never ran around in a zoo restaurant. She never banged on the glass to get the attention of the spotted leopard on the other side. She never pushed another child out of the way to get a better look at a penguin. She never had a tantrum of any kind when we were out and about. Never.
Over the years, YA has heard me extol her virtues as a child a lot. Way too much from her experience. So I work hard to keep my lips zipped because these days any time I say something I get a massive eye roll and usually an exasperated “I know”. But it’s difficult because every visit guarantees some bad behavior on the part of children who are over-tired, over-stimulated and probably hungry to boot. The examples in the second paragraph all happened yesterday at the Zoo.
So I stroll along with YA, thinking to myself what a wonderful child she was and what a terrific young adult she had turned out to be, all the while saying NOTHING. NOTHING. I wonder if one of these days my head will just explode.
Occasionally she will let me take her picture, although sometimes bribery is involved. The above picture cost me a trip to Dairy Queen.
What summer treat would I need to bribe you with for a photo?
Lots of folks have asked me why I took the road trip by myself to see the eclipse in Indianapolis. Easy peasey – so I could do just what I wanted every single minute and not have to have anyone else’s agenda pushing up against mine. Same reason I go to Opening Day at the State Fair by myself.
So if that means I overestimate how many insane folks will want to park in the White River State Park ramp and go WAY too early to nab my spot, it’s OK. If I walk up and down the long row of food trucks (24 of them) twice before I decide what I want, it’s OK. And if I talk to strangers, it’s OK (this is something in particular that drives YA crazy.)
Here are just a few of the interesting folks I met on eclipse day:
A guy from Kentucky with a very cute corgi. He was sitting on a bench, apparently waiting for his wife – he wasn’t sure where she can gone off to. They had decided just a couple of weeks before to make the trip; they had managed to find a room but it was about an hour out of the city. He was also sporting an eclipse jacket and baseball cap. Like me, he got his online.
David was one of the first food truck owners to get his truck in place; he wanted a really good view of the river on each side of the bridge from his spot. He’s been running his food truck (assorted health food kinds of items including a vegetarian walking taco) for 20 years but he’s thinking about quitting because he want to focus more on his music and getting it published.
Two gals assembling a University of Indiana tent – turns out that the university has a new “global and local event planning” program and part of the semester was putting together the event in the park. When I told them I was a retired planner, we commiserated for a bit and laughed at what non-planners think is involved. Then one of the gals said “we’re not supposed to give this out until later, but I like you…” and gave me a cake pop with white and red icing (U of Indy colors). It was yummy.
Three cops on bikes. I’ve never seen police on bikes before and they were willing to take a few minutes to talk to me. The officers on bikes program has been around for almost 20 years now and has been called an unqualified success. The bikers patrol the downtown area (which includes White River Park) as well as a couple of suburbs that ring the downtown. The officers in the program like it a lot; they say they can get around more easily that in a car and have been able to establish better relations with the community. As the pedaled off, they all three went down a fairly long set of stairs – without a wobble!
Of course, I talked to many more people, especially folks with dogs. Since I parked early and set out my chair about six hours ahead of time, I had a lot of leisure to connect with others. Eclipse apparel was also a good discussion point and because of matching t-shirts I met a couple (their t-shirts matched mine) who had been in the same parking lot as me in St. Joseph, Missouri for the 2017 eclipse. Amazing how you can connect just by talking to people!
Do you talk to strangers when you’re out and about? Any favorite topics?
Last weekend our local Opera group held a gala evening of a lovely meal and selections from various operas.
We have a surprisingly active opera group here, and they host a summer youth musical camp, as well as operas and recitals during the rest of the year. Our church choir director and her husband are very active in the group.
We didn’t attend the Gala, but heard plenty of comments about it the next day. An acquaintance of ours and her husband attended the Gala. She is a former piano instructor at the college. She and her husband also attend our church. Just before the end of the evening, our acquaintance’s husband collapsed and had to be resuscitated with CPR. He was taken to the hospital. There were several medical professionals in the audience who saved his life.
The final selection to be performed at the Gala was from one of the last acts of Carmen, in which Carmen is stabbed to death by Jose’. Our church choir director was to sing the part of Carmen. They decided that Carmen being stabbed to death just after Larry, the piano teacher’s husband, was hauled out on a stretcher would be in pretty poor taste, so they quickly ended the show.
I am happy to report that Larry survived and the Carmen selection will be performed at the next recital in the fall. This is just too much drama for our small community!
What are your favorite and least favorite endings to operas and musicals
Husband and I are back from Boston, he at home and I in Brookings helping out son and daughter in law as they need an extra hand with home and grandson due to work demands.
We flew out of Boston yesterday to Minneapolis first, then to Bismarck and Sioux Falls respectively. While we waited for our plane in Boston we were delighted to watch the antics of a Minnesotan Special Olympics mixed gender hockey team heading back home. One of the members, a young man named John, held a rather large trophy his team had won at a hockey tournament in Boston, They took multiple photos with their coaches and parents, all so happy with what they had accomplished. It was so nice to see such joy and happiness. They looked so proud of themselves.
What joyous things have you noticed lately? What gives you joy in your day to day life?
It’s been another crazy busy week and all the farmers have been pushing hard planting corn in the neighborhood, trying to stay ahead of the weather. Not me, but everybody else. I have finished planting oats and I picked up corn seed. Considering last week I hadn’t even gotten out in the fields yet, things picked up fast and went pretty well.
I got the old tractor, the 630 running. That’s the one I rebuilt the carburetor on last fall, and while it’s not perfect yet, it does run, and I used it to re-arrange machinery to get the grain drill out.
I started planting with 48, 50lb bags of oats
I can tell I’m getting older as my fingers are getting stiffer as I lift them up to dump in the drill.
Meyer Seeds, where I’ve been getting seed for years, and where my dad even got seed, didn’t have oat seed this year, so they got it from another local place. There are not many places selling seed oats around here. The Albert Lea Seed House is a good source, but they’re an hour away from me and much more expensive that Meyers. Meyers have done such a good job cleaning seed over the years, on the rare occasion they don’t have any, other seed is dirty and dusty, and I even found a shriveled up, desiccated mouse carcass in a bag this year. I mean, what the heck?? Do better other people.
I had planned to finish planting oats late Wednesday night, and wouldn’t you know I ran out of seed with about half an hour left at 9:30 PM. Every year I tell myself, “order extra seed”. It’s not a problem to return it and it’s better to have extra than to run out with half an hour left, and I don’t know, next year comes and I forget. Thursday morning I picked up 8 more bags of oat seed, and got the corn seed, too.
I use the “Boating” app to track myself in the fields. I helps to find that corner I need to get back too, especially at night.
Everything in yellow is what I planted on Wednesday. I covered 12.9 miles, averaging 4.5 mph, and was out just over 4 hours. The time also includes stops and refilling.
The closer photo show every pass. Compare that to the actual tracks in the field.
It has been fun to be back in the tractors again. My brother usually helps do fieldwork, but he’s on vacation this year. My young helper is still in school, and the other helper has become gainfully employed. I don’t mind doing it myself, it just takes a little longer. My left arm gets tired because I run all the controls with my right arm, so the left arm is constantly steering. Building up my endurance I guess. I have acquired a second tractor buddy.
We don’t all fit into the cab so well.
Luna doesn’t look happy to be left home and she doesn’t look happy to be in the tractor. I don’t know what she wants. Bailey just lays on the floor, rests her head on the door, and sleeps. Luna moves back-and-forth and is in the way of either the clutch or the brake. And if I stop in the field and we all get out, she barks and barks to get back in. I think it’s still anxiety about being left behind. I saw bald eagles, pheasants, turkey vultures, lots of deer, turkeys, and we’ve been hearing the sandhill cranes, I just haven’t seen them yet. Waiting on the first barn swallows. Should be a scout around any day now. They usually arrive about May 6.
Soil temperatures are in the 50s and GDU (Growing Degree Units) are at 177; 123 above normal at this point. The cereal rye that I planted as a cover crop last fall greened up but never got very tall. I had it sprayed this week to terminate it. It needed to be 12 inches high to get paid for planting it. However, because those fields are gonna be corn, having 12 inches of grass there was going to be a problem with residue, and I wanted it sprayed and terminated before it started to rain and I lost control of it. So it goes. It will still add organic matter to the soil.
Late next week I’ll start dealing with lighting for commencement on May 8th, so I’ll be busy with that for a few days. The experts says 100% of potential corn yield (in our area) comes from corn planted between April 22 and May 6th. I still got time!
We are in Boston until Sunday, and are having a lovely time. I feel pretty spoiled to be on both US coasts in less than a month to sample great seafood in both places. The only thing better would be to eat homemade pasta in Bologna, Italy.
We had a wonderful encounter with the cab driver who drove us to the hotel from the airport on Wednesday. He was an East Indian man in his 30’s who has lived in the US for 14 years. He loved telling about the city and things we were driving past. He also was a great fund of information about good restaurants to try. Husband mentioned that I had made a good biryani recently, and I chimed in that I had made twenty chapati and almost all of them puffed up like footballs when I fried them. Our driver got really excited hearing that, and that we appreciated good Indian food, and he invited us to his Sikh religious community gathering on Sunday evening to try the food there. Were we not leaving early Sunday, we would probably have taken him up on his offer.
One story our driver told us was about the banning of Happy Hour in Massachusetts in 1984. Too many people were drinking and driving after work, resulting in several fatal accidents. The law is still on the books despite challenges from the hospitality industry. There are pretty strict rules about the size of individual drinks served between 5:00 and 7:00 pm, and how many people need to be at table per pitcher of beer during those times. It is not a problem for us, as I don’t think either of us have been to a Happy Hour in decades. Opponents of the law say it just reinforces the Puritanical stereotype of the State’s residents. The people we have met thus far have been helpful and friendly in the extreme, and not Puritanical at all.
Who have been interesting people you have met on your travels? What are your favorite foods you would like to eat in the places they originated? Do you still attend Happy Hour?
There are a handful of ads that come into my Inbox (instead of Junk) – Einstein Brothers and Brueggers are two of those because they offer occasional coupons that I like, particularly my birthday freebies every year. A couple of weeks ago, not only did an ad for each show up on the same day, they arrived one after the other in my Inbox. If they hadn’t, I probably wouldn’t have noticed that they have both launched the same sandwich on the same day. See the photo above – I won’t even tell you which is which.
My first, very fleeting, thought was that it was a coincidence. Then I thought it must be an amazing corporate espionage situation. But the pictures are almost identical so I ventured the thought to YA that perhaps Brueggers and Einstein Brothers were somehow related. YA snorted and said “of course, they’re related – they’re owned by the same company.”
In the travel industry, hotels are always changing hands and my company had a actual department to keep track of this kind of thing (Industry Relations). Who owns what was never interesting to me. I had it suggested to me once that I could boost my career by keeping up with the industry better than I did. Cue the laughter. Despite both my sisters thinking of me as “a successful career woman” (cue more laughter), I never considered myself as such. I had a job, a job that I liked, a job that I was very good at. I didn’t want to be a team leader, a manager, a director… just wanted to do my job. I did get every promotion along the way (apparently in record time according to my old boss) but it never changed the job that I did…. Only changed my title and added a bit more to my paycheck.
So it doesn’t surprise me that I didn’t know that Brueggers and Einstein Brothers were siblings. It does surprise me that they launched the same sandwich on the same day and from the looks of it, probably used photos from the same photo shoot. It doesn’t seem a good way to differentiate the two chains. Of course, my idea of what corporate America should do and what corporate America does are clearly not in sync. At all!
Greetings from somewhere that I hope is not North Dakota. Despite all of us, including the dog, being under the weather, we got the dog to the boarding kennel yesterday and managed to get ourselves and our bad colds to Bismarck last night. If everything works out, we will be in the air winging our way to a somewhat far off destination when this posts.
I have to attend the world’s most boring psychology conference again, (all about licensure and professional regulation) and Husband tagged along to take in the sights.
We will be in the home town of an actor noted for the portrayal of an iconic alien. The first chocolate factory in this country was here, as was the first subway. A city park is famous for its role in a beloved children’s book about ducks, and the city is noted for its legumes. The header photo is a clue regarding the main ingredient of a famous confection named after a nearby suburb.
This should give you all some research to do.
Have you ever had to travel when you were ill?Who are your favorite Sci-Fi alien characters? Chocolate?
I was home on Monday due to catching Husband’s cold. The Postie came and delivered a package of kosher salt I had ordered from Amazon. If laughter is the best medicine, I should be cured by now.
I think I wrote a while back about ordering more fresh yeast than I intended, getting one case of 24 lbs instead of the 1 lb block I thought I was ordering. I am happy to report that the yeast is holding up well in the freezer. On the down side, I seem to have made a similar mistake with the salt.
Many of the recipes I see on-line or on the NYT cooking app call for Diamond Crystal kosher salt. We read up on it, and found that it is preferred by professional cooks and food writers because it has 53% less sodium than other kosher salt due to the manufacturing process. We can’t get it here, so I ordered what I thought was two boxes with 1.5 lbs of salt in each box. Instead, I ordered four boxes, each containing 3 lbs of salt. We now have 12 lbs of kosher salt.
In my defense, I think that some of the ordering information on Amazon is hard to decipher. As I looked back at the page I ordered the salt from I saw where my mistake was, but it is really not clear at first glance. I think our son and daughter will be receiving some salt in the mail soon.
What have you laughed at yourself about lately? Any creative ideas for using up all this salt?
Well, our bell choir played for the PEO sisterhood on Saturday. It all went fine, although dragging the tables, bell cases, and all the equipment we need from church was a lot of work. We played in a huge facility the public school district purchased from the Haliburton Oil company for middle school and high school technical education. Culinary arts students prepared the meal. They also teach building trades, health sciences, all sorts of practical technology training, large equipment operating, business methods and marketing, and agriculture training. The complex is almost brand new and is enormous, with multiple buildings. The facility and the training are amazing. It is located on the outskirts of town on the major road north to the oil fields.
We played in the lunchroom. Everyone was very appreciative, and we played well. I couldn’t help thinking, though, how silly Puff The Magic Dragon is. I thought it was silly when I was a child, too. To make the situation even sillier, Saturday was 4/20, National Marijuana day. Here we were, middle aged and older people playing a song long associated with marijuana use for a bunch of very prim and proper middle aged and older women. No one else in the bell choir realized the symbolism or association of the song with the day, and we all got a good laugh out of it when I reminded them after the performance. There is a push to legalize recreational cannabis use in our state. Who knows, maybe they will add training at the technical institute on how to grow and market recreational pot!
What was technical training like when you were in high school? What is the most ludicrous performance or presentation you ever were involved in?
Trail Baboon 