Catching Up

Let's begin with the idea that a short blog post is better than no blog post at all. There's been quite a bit going on, but you only get to hear about part of it right now...



I spent last week in beautiful scenic Sturgeon Bay at the annual gathering of the Clan. I rested, read, conversed, hiked, kayaked, golfed and drank my way though the week. It's a dirty job, but somebody's got to do it.





Marie is doing okay. Connie starts her job training next week, but it looks like Janet and Aaron can pick up the slack pretty easily.



da Woods looks a lot like a rain forest this year, what with all the rain and all. Check out da flowers.

Faces

This is my sister-in-law's dad John.  He comes to the family birthday bash.  He's farmed and raised sons and smoked and had some beers and now he mostly holds court.  I like his face, so he let me take his picture.   It takes a lot of years and living to build a face like this.

This is John's wife Leila.  She is a little fireball.   Here she's on her own picture safari at the Colony Inn, stalking Walker, who is questioning the wisdom of me bringing the camera to the party.  He is old enough now to appreciate this tradition for the exercise in prolonged irony that it is.  We like Leila.  It's not her fault.

I have seen a wedding picture of John and Leila when they were married.  They were HOT!  Nice looking couple.  He was dark and craggy and she was young and clear eyed and beautiful. 

This is my nephew Noah.  He is taking his shirt off because he got worked up throwing spitballs and then spilled chocolate milk.  Several of us encouraged the spitball fight by re-initiating it when it died down.  We have several cousins whose mother is so nervous they can't go outside or relax or be kids or anything.  Noah's parents are cool and so we let Noah spill his milk on himself.  He's grief stricken.

Okay, this is not a face.  It's Queen Anne's lace photographed as it blew around.

Peace be with you this Thursday night.

Another Transition

I started my day shifts this week. Getting up at 4:30 AM is a bit of a shock to the system, and I'm still trying to figure out when I need to eat to get through the day. But it feels good to be able to drive home from work and not worry about falling asleep behind the wheel! And on the days I don't work I have the whole day to accomplish whatever my goals are, instead of having to sleep all morning or try to nap in the afternoon. I feel much more productive and sane!

The picture is from my trip back from Iowa last month. I took a side trip when I saw a sign for the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve in Kansas. I was expecting fields of virgin prairie, which were there, but there is also a wonderful old ranch with huge limestone buildings. The limestone was quarried locally in the 1870's and the rancher recognized the fact that the best use if the land was to leave the native vegetation and use it wisely for grazing cattle. This building, believe it or not, was the chicken coop! Notice the sod roof. Classic prairie style. (The second picture is the inside with a roost and a bit of straw for effect.)

The last picture is the most impressive three story barn. Notice the ramps up to the hay lofts. They are wide enough to drive a hay wagon up there to move the hay in or out. The whole barn is the size of a small city block. It's enough to make this small ranchette owner very envious....

Safari in the woods

It was kind of tense at the perennial annual multiple birthday family cluster fest this morning.  JD brought April, the girl he reunited with in order to dump Lena, who came after Tina.  The story here is reunited young love after all these years of missed connections and longing.  The betting is on jumping into another relationship.

Turns out April lives with twelve cats.  JD used to make dead cat jokes.  I have not asked him how he feels about cats currently.

I went out into the woods on a safari once I got to Le Roy's house.  There is a nice oak woods between his place and the reservoir.

It was quiet in the woods.  There were fewer Republicans, and the small talk was much better.  I went for close ups of small things.

Little bugs and stuff.  On stuff.

Purple yarrow.

I don't know what these little ones are.

Or this, but I like it.

These little bastards have  been eating our cherries.  Cool looking, though.

What safari would be complete without a toe frog.  This one jumped right on without an invitation.

Pretty nice toes, too.  After a while I headed back toward the house and rested in the deck by the fish pond.  I had had some good personal space and enjoyed my new toy, as well as the fine day.  And I was only a little koi.

Sorry.

Eye Contact

This week's lesson: Helmets are okay, but they're no substitute for eye contact.

I've been doing the bike commuter thing. My trusty JCPenney 27" 'racer' now has fenders, a rack with bag, new brakes, new thumb-shifters, and as of this week, a new chain. (And yes, a new helmet.) It's 15 minutes each way, and I'm making two trips a day, so that's a whole hour of cardio.

Tuesday, on my way to work, I had to go around a crowd of people at the HyVee entrance. There was a guy off his bike lying fetal on the ground -- it looked to me like he got hit by a car coming out of the parking lot, but I suppose it depends on how much he bounced. The cops were coming up by the time I was a block away, and I heard the ambulance coming a block or two after that.


The next day, I was coming up the same stretch of sidewalk to the other HyVee entrance, and an older woman pulled up past the crosswalk, careening her head left and right, but never noticing me. I ended up stopping next to her door, waiting for eye contact before I'd go past her.

In other news, the gardens are looking good. It's amazing how low-maintenance a perennial garden can be. I took some pictures and pulled some weeds over the weekend. Deer seem to be chomping down on the hibiscus -- I don't think anything else could get up that high. Usually they eat the day lilies, but I guess I've got a gourmet deer...


Marie is no worse, but not much better. Her appetite is pretty sporadic, and the sores aren't healing like they have in the past. Connie and I met with a new in-home care agency, to discuss back-up care when somebody is sick. Connie will eventually be getting a new job at the VA, but they seem to be in no hurry to get her started.

I took my wedding ring to a jeweler yesterday. I'm getting it resized to fit on my right hand. It feels weird but right not having it there.

I guess I haven't posted since dd, Katie and Nancy came over to do the dispositon of dp's clothes and jewelry. Here's a picture of the pile shortly after they started on it. It was harder than I thought it would be, and I didn't even do that much. Have I mentioned that I really appreciated that they did that?


Tomorrow, I've got company -- the daughter of a friend of Carl's is coming to Iowa City for the UI's writer's workshop one-week summer program, and she's staying the da King room. I'm officially shutting the B&B down, though -- I've given it a lot of thought, and it's just not something I'm that interested in doing. If I'm going to work in my spare time, I'd rather be writing code.

Well done, family

My family gave me a very nice camera for my birthday.  (It is a digital SLR, a Nikon D60.)  It does a number of things I have not tried yet, but I took it out today and got some shots.  I don't get to "trim" pictures, but a friend at work seems to have an old edition of photoshop I can use.  In the meantime, just with a camera on "point and shoot", I had a little fun.  Here are some.  We'll see if they look any sharper to anyone but me.  Cheers, and thanks for the good wishes!

Happy Birthday to me.

I met a wonderful friend in high school.  Tom is an enthusiast.  He loves his art passionately and practically.  He's a metalsmith.  I lost track of him when after Robyn and I got together.  The last time I saw him, he and his wife Julie and our friend Mike came over to my folks house when we were visiting.  There had been a parade of folks coming to meet the new fiancee and Robyn was tired and bitchy.  She came down and said hello but made it plain that she was done visiting and was going to bed.

Robyn didn't really know that I would much rather she had done this with some of the other ninety folks who had trouped through, that these were some of my best people.  It was an awkward night and afterward nobody called anyone to talk about it, the way we grown ups would do now.

We lost track.

When Dad died, Mom circulated comparatively well and even dated a little.  One of the guys who came calling was Tom's dad, Norval.  He was always in pretty good shape, so I suppose he wasn't bad to look at.  It turns out Tom's mother died of ALS, so these two had some things to talk about.  Tom and I have never had the chance to talk about these things.

Yesterday, Tom found me, through the BWR website.  We exchanged numbers and emails quickly because we're both rushing around.

I think we're old enough now not to lose these numbers again.

the camera started working again. . .

. . . so I went back outside with it.  The sun was going down and I turned off the flash.  I have been weeding all evening and so I have had my face down by the flowers.

There is a lot to blog about.  There is the tree branch that fell on my father in law's head leaving a "Y" shaped gash that peeled back to reveal his skull.  There is my wife's light touch with the kids showing up my heavy hand.  There is Ginny's expression of relief that I have quit Four Oaks.  "I was really afraid you had lost your soul!  There is having a few drinks a few days in a row and re-experiencing why I haven't been doing that.  Yuck.  Three days and 700 glasses of water later I feel great.  It was such a wonderful night.  Iowa says "Sorry for the flood, old chum.  Here's a little slice of heaven between tornados."

Yes, Toto, we are in Kansas

I left DaWoods this afternoon for the drive back to New Mexico. The drive was uneventful and I even had good music on the radio most of the way. My planned stop at Emporia, Kansas was just the right distance and I arrived about 8 PM. My head was full of Dorothy and Toto jokes, so I turned on the TV just in time to seen the 1939 trailer for (what else) The Wizard of OZ. It wasn't even a local station!