• Tag Archives Ruth

  • A Day at the Stock Show

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Winter                     New Moon (Cold Moon)

    One day at the stock show under my belt.  Jon and Jen, Ruth and Gabe and I boarded a shuttle at the Doubletree Hotel.  The first guy I talked to was from Detroit Lakes.  He used to bring cattle down here, but stopped in 2004.

    At the stock show we went into a building filled with all manner of farm and ranch implements, metal implements to hold cattle and harrows.  There were also the usual beer halls and Cattlemen’s Grill.  There were, too, rope makers, Colorado Rice Inc., a place that crafted brands, a man who blocked and reshaped cowboy hats while you waited.

    It was like Minnesota’s State Fair in some respects though the number of cowboy hats, boots and large belt buckles per square inch greatly exceed the Great Minnesota Get Together.  I’d like to know where this big belt buckle thing got started.  It requires a lot of room right around the stomach area.  This leads to displays of prize bellies in both men and women.

    We went to a junior showmanship event for young lamb handlers.  While we were there watching, Ruth said, “Granpop, I like coming to the stock show.”

    At the pony ride, Ruth, who told me she was too shy to ride them last year, let Luis put her up on a Shetland pony and proceeded to ride with her hand on the pommel, beaming and waving at Jen and Jon while I walked beside her, as she asked me to do.  She was no longer too shy.

    Tomorrow night all of us go again. This time to the rodeo.  The next day Ruth and I go by ourselves to see the  Super Dogs.

    I’d forgotten how many BTU’s little bodies put out.  Ruth wanted me to carry her.  A lot.  I like it, but she’s no longer small and the stock show buildings were hot.  The combination made me hot.

    The Vikes and Cowboys tomorrow. New Orleans beat the Cardinals so if we win, we have to go the SuperDome.  Nobody said it would be easy.


    📂This entry was posted in Family 📎and tagged

  • The Horse

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Winter                   New Moon (cold M00n)

    At breakfast this morning I sat two tables away from Miss Rodeo Wisconsin.  I know this because she had a big sash on that said so.  She looked like a wholesome gal and a good choice.

    I’m not at the Doubletree.  Instead, I learned my reservation was for the Courtyard Marriot.  I did this back in August of aught 9 so the details had become fuzzy.  Oh, well.  I gotta get on the road more.

    The love of small children is a gift freely given, honoring this gift may be the prime directive of adulthood.  Ruthie, after an initial hesitance, was glad Granpop had come.  She spent a good bit of time running, then jumping on me, sometimes asking me to close my eyes.  Then she jumped as a surprise.

    She also showed a me a move she learned at dance class.  This consists of a left hand on hip, the right raised in the air and loping around the house like that.  When asked what it was called, she said, “Horse.”

    It’s always fun to catch up on grandkids and their parents.

    Gabe has a few words now, one of which sounds a lot like granpop.  or, maybe, blastoff.  or, maybe bad dog.  something like that.

    The stone porch Jon and Jen created looks spiffy, too.  I hadn’t seen it.

    Stock show later today.


    📂This entry was posted in Family 📎and tagged

  • With the Grandkids

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Winter                  New Moon (cold moon)

    Ruth hid under a blanket when I came in the door.  Gabe smiled.  Jon and Jen were busy making empanadas.

    While they cooked, Ruth and I played picnic.  Picnic involves Ruth bringing increasingly larger numbers of blankets, toys, books to a central area, then throwing a pillow or two in the pile.

    Ruth loved the purse her Minnesota Grandma made for her and Gabe seemed excited by his wall hanging of the planets.

    Jon and Jen got some good news about Gabe’s health.  A potential problem, an inhibitor to the clotting factor he takes by injection every other day, proved a lab error.

    Two young kids.  Lots of energy. Lots.  We’ve made plans for the stock show tomorrow, Sunday and Monday.  Chuck-e-Cheese on Wednesday.

    Lots of together time.  Good.


    📂This entry was posted in Family 📎and tagged

  • The Year We Make Contact

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Winter                                     Full Moon of Long Nights

    Hmmm.  You know you’re getting old when the sequels to movies, one’s you saw when they came out, are now getting passed by the actual dates.

    The year we make contact.  Indeed.

    What will the next 10 years be like?  On an equally geezerly note the end of this new decade, Lord willin’ and the creek don’t rise, will find me 72 years old.  I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve known people that were 72 but I wouldn’t let my daughter marry one.  Of course, I don’t have a daughter, so that makes that easy.

    My sense, my hope is, that in this coming decade, the teen years of this century, we will come to grips with climate change and in a way that will have a lasting, positive impact.  We won’t have completed the Great Work, the movement to a benign human presence on the earth, but we will have made substantial strides.

    Terrorism will decline as a front-burner issue, though it will remain with us, if for no other reason than the continuing disparity between rich and poor countries, disparities exacerbated over the next ten years by the continued growth of India and China.

    The Millennium generation will push us further toward a race neutral or race positive world.  It may be that we will develop the strength to see difference as a possibility for enrichment.  Or, maybe not.  I hope the tension begins to move in such a way that the fulcrum tips toward embracing pluralism.

    At the end of this decade the grandkids will be ten years older:  Ruthie 13 and Gabe 11.  Yikes.

    By the end of this decade I hope Kate and I have got this gardening thing well integrated into our lives.

    I hope for, I want a move toward, as one foundation puts, “a more just, verdant and peaceful world.”


    📂This entry was posted in Aging Great Work Health Politics 📎and tagged

  • The Day So Far

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Fall                                       Waning Blood Moon

    Over to Joann Fabrics this morning to pick up some butterfly brocade for a dress Kate will make for Ruth.  As the only guy in line to have fabric cut, I had a chance to observe the female of the species in one of her traditional habitats.  The woman in front of me had on a pink fleece and nice pink bow in her hair.  She also stood about thirty feet behind the cutting counter, making those of us behind her stand right smack in the aisle where people pushed their carts.  I see this same behavior sometimes at traffic lights where someone (gender not at issue) chooses to wait three car lengths behind the next car.  What’s up with that?

    When I got home, I plucked the decorative squash from the vine, then went over to the black beans still on the vine and gathered them into one of our large woven harvest baskets.  That’s the end of the harvest.  As the WCCO weather guy put it in the  paper this morning, the growing season is over.

    After this I made a sugar cream pie, a Hoosier recipe I learned.  It’s a childhood favorite and it pops up in my need to have box once in a while. It has four ingredients:  flour, sugar, butter and cream.  Easy to make and no nutritional value at all.  But boy is it tasty.

    Spent a couple of hours watching the Vikes beat the Rams.  They looked pretty good.  Won 38-10.  Tavaris Jackson passed for a touchdown late in the 4th quarter.  That’s a hopeful sign.


    📂This entry was posted in Family Garden Memories Sport 📎and tagged

  • Understanding the Anxious Mind

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Fall                                     Waning Blood Moon

    Finally, a city criteria list worth paying attention to:  The Daily Beast has ranked America’s Smartest Cities.  The Twin Cities come in 4th after, in order, Raleigh-Durham, San Francisco and Boston.  Denver is 5th.  Las Vegas and Fresno, California bring up the rear at 54th and 55th.  It’s an interesting read.

    Kate’s surgery happens on October 19th and the surgeon requires that she stop taking her nsaid.  That means she has less pain control on board so her pain level has begun to ramp up.  This is only the first day without it.  Ouch.  We’ve also begun to reconnoiter what changes we’ll have to make in the house for her recovery period.  Move a comfy chair in front of the TV in place of the couch.  Things like that.thedress625

    Kate’s sewing a lot.  She’s finished a butterfly costume complete with antennas and wings as well as a purple jumper for granddaughter Ruth.  She wants to get all this stuff done before she’s post-op.

    If you have an anxious bone in your body, well, better, if you have an anxiety prone amygdala, then reading this article might interest you:  The Anxious Mind.  It recounts the work of Jerome Kagan who established the genetic imprint on reactivity.  His work undergirded the notion of a fixed temperament.

    As a high reactive myself, I found the notion of a genetic imprint for anxiety strangely liberating.  It made me feel that my state was not a character flaw, but part of the package.  The article makes all the nuancing you might want related to nurture, triggers and coping skills, but the clear fact remains that people like me are the way we are because we have a hypervigilant amygdala.

    When I finish sermons a week ahead of time,  investigate the costs of medicare drug and health care plans now, a year or two early, and plan my tours at least a week in advance, I display a learned strategy for managing my anxiety.  That’s why I’m not good in a crisis or under a crushing deadline.  I need time to prepare, to think things through.  I bring sufficient pressure to bear on myself.  I don’t need external stimuli.

    After I got done reading this article and realizing that I was on one end of the bell curve–again, I began to wonder–again–what it must be like to have a normal, stable reaction to the work, a calm feeling in the pit of your stomach instead of a roiling mess.

    It also became clear to me that I had a trigger that moved my anxiety from genetic inheritance to personality dilemma.  When my mother died, I was 17 years old.  My brain had not finished maturing.  It took years for me to integrate the confusion and insecurity that her sudden death created.

    Even though previous analysis has surfaced some of this before, this particular slant, a genetic proclivity, is new to me.  It helps.


    📂This entry was posted in Aging Family GeekWorld 📎and tagged

  • Kate the Earth Mother

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Fall                                         Waxing Blood Moon

    Kate made pasta sauce(s) from our tomatoes.  She also made an eggplant (ours) parmesan that we had with one of her sauces along with a toss salad of our tomatoes, basil and mozzarella.  Pretty tasty.  Kate has preserved, conserved, cooked and sewed on her two days off.  In this environment where her movement does not have to (literally) bend to her work her back and neck don’t flare as much.

    After the 40 mph wind gusts I went out and walked the perimeter again, checking for downed limbs.  Just a few stray branches, none big.  I did find an insulator where the rope had pulled away.   I used the insulator itself and plastic case to nudge the  hot wire back into place.  The fence does its job, but it requires constant surveillance.  Fortunately, the energizer has an led that flashes while the fence is hot.  That makes checking on the juice much easier.

    Friend and Woolly Bill Schmidt said he enjoyed the fence saga from his apartment.  He said he spent many nights, often at 2 am, shooing cows back in the field.  Electric fences are part of farming and he had many helpful hints.  He didn’t seem nostalgic for installing or maintaining a fence.

    Both grandkids are sick.  Jon and Jen face the dilemma of all working parents, how to handle sick kids and work.  This is never easy and can create unpleasant situations.

    I’m grateful for the rain and the cool down.  Cooler weather means plants ratchet down their metabolism so they need less water and food.  It’s time for that.  The rain helps our new shrubs and trees.   They’ve got the rest of the fall to settle in and get their roots spread out in their new homes.


    📂This entry was posted in Cooking Family Garden Great Wheel 📎and tagged

  • Waving As They Left

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Summer                        Waning  Summer Moon

    Duffel bags and cloth grocery bags went into the plastic Yakima carrier on top of the Colorado state car, the Subaru.  Ruth got in her car seat with the two spongy plastic balls Grandma bought her.  Gabe crawled through the morning grass and got some cutting on his Gap jeans and his pale blue shirt the color of his eyes.  Herschel came out, bounded up in the front with Ruth, then went, reluctantly to his place in the rear where he has a small fan to keep him cool.  Finally, Mom and Dad got in the front seat and the Olson family headed out for points west.

    Grandma and I stood, waving as they left.  We were sad to see them go.    Jon will have surgery on his shoulder on August 12th, surgery made necessary by his joint crushing fall now over two years ago.  Jen starts her work in a new school at the end of this month and she’s excited about that.  Ruth and Gabe will continue to head across to Marcella’s, or Humphrey’s as Ruth calls her long time day care provider.

    We’ll seem them again sometime in the fall; I may go out for a visit after Jon’s surgery to help out for a bit.  It still feels a bit odd to be the Grandparent, the one visited by the kids after a long drive away from home.  Odd, but good.

    Last night I scored a minor geek triumph.  My photoshop elements ceased functioning a good while ago, over three weeks.  This is a program I use a lot.  I got so frustrated with it that I took it to the Geek Squad.  They fixed my disappearing optical drives, sold me two more gigs of RAM but said pass on a photoshop fix.

    The guy suggested a repair install or a remove and reinstall.  I did both.  No joy.  I went through all the diagnostics I know the machine has available.  None there either.  Finally, late last night I went back to the chat rooms and found, on an Adobe forum, a possible fix.  I tried it.  Damn.  It worked!  Satisfaction.  Felt pretty damned good.

    Installing the two gigs of RAM was the first time in my long experience using computers that I had cracked the shell and done any work inside.  It took a bit of time and care, but, by god, I got them in and now this computer has three gigs of RAM.   More satisfaction.


    📂This entry was posted in Aging Family GeekWorld 📎and tagged

  • You And Grandpop Are In My Heart.

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Summer                         Full Summer Moon

    Jon finished building and insulating a wall dividing our furnace room.  Behind this wall will go the produce which can keep over the winter:  potatoes, squash, onions, garlic, carrots, turnips and parsnips.  It will be our green grocer when the weather tips away from the summer solstice toward the winter one and beyond it.  In addition we will have canned tomatoes and greens, pickles, canned gazpacho, dried beans and canned beans, grape jelly and maybe currant.

    Jon has done a lot of construction for us, utilizing skills he learned while working for a remodeler after he finished Augsburg.  He built the garden shed near the house, put together the playhouse for grandkids, built the platform I work on in the computer room (where I am right now), a five stall dog enclosure in the garage as well as shelving on the walls.  He’s a talented guy, an artist, a teacher, a father and an expert extreme skier.

    The visit has been filled with sweet moments, but tonight at the dinner table there was this exchange between Kate and Ruth (3):  I love you Ruthie, you are in my heart.  I love you, too, Grandma. You and Grandpop are in my heart.  That stopped the conversation for a minute.

    They leave tomorrow morning for a drive across the Great Plains, one I’ve made many times since Jon first moved to Colorado.  It is a long drive, but a good one.  We’ll miss them.


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