Saugatuck

Every year I work in Saugatuck, Michigan for a weekend in June.
We stay in a little cottage.
It reminds me of my Grandma.
Sleeping there feels like a hug.

Random Postcards

Through a lovely stroke of fate that began with a sincere, handwritten apology for calling me Frankenchick when he signed my senior year book, my buddy Steve and I re-acquainted years after we'd left our high school halls. He's in town once a year, at Christmas. We always meet for a long lunch. And the rest of the months of the year, he sends me cards.

Birthday cards.
Christmas cards.
The best Valentines ever.
And lots of postcards from great places. Coney Island. Egypt. The Texas State Book Depository Building in Dallas. The Coliseum in Rome. Peoria, Illinois.


Every now and then I just open my mailbox and there it is, waiting ~ another great postcard from wandering Steve. They're the only thing that makes it to my refrigerator door other than pics of my family and my granddaughter's art work.

You've got to see this one.

It's my all-time favorite.
Dropped into the mailbox by Steve,
a United States Air Force Academy alumni:

I'm pretty sure they were thinking it, too.

Up High

At a time when I'm seriously looking into the possibility of visiting my local plasma center to subsidize the fuel I consume on daily trips to work, my first visit to Seattle set the tiny little wheels in my head to spinning.......if there was a monorail in Des Moines, I could ride it and not have to sell my blood to companies with funny space-age names like Biomedia and Virotech. Yes, it's pretty cool to be able to save someones life by contributing plasma that's used in the production of drugs and get paid for it too. On the other hand it's kinda creepy too and when they check me for track marks at the Blood Center where I regularly donate for free, are they going to see the signs and turn me away?????

Well anyway. Public transportation! What a GREAT idea.
I wish someone in my hometown of half a million people would give it some serious thought.



The Monorail in Seattle is a pretty cool little ride. It took us right to the Space Needle where we met with the first of many opportunities to be parted from copious amounts of hard-earned dollars while on a recent vacation.

Yes. They had a senior citizens discount.
And don't think I didn't try. I pretty much hate heights so the sixteen bucks was a great excuse to stay on the ground. Until someone else bought me a ticket. oh dear.

It looks pretty high up there.

Oh man. Man, ohhh man ohhhhhh man. Does this thing sway in the wind....I wonder....but up I went with the rest of our crew, against my better judgment, packed like little about-to-die sardines in a teensy, widdy biddy little elevator up, up and up. On the way to the top we had a fabulous view over the city.
That's what they tell me.
I was thinking happy thoughts with my eyes closed.

Thousands of miles into the air later, we arrived at the observation deck and stepped out to enjoy the panoramic view. Here is what it looked like:

Well, that's what it looked like from where I stood.
I had my back pressed against the wall, pleading with God not to let me die. I could just see me as a random ink spot buried in the headlines about a collapsing landmark with comments from governors and engineers and city managers that go something like, "This has never happened before, honest.......we really didn't think it would ever tip over."

I could have gone right back down.
That is, if I could have moved.
I was pretty much paralyzed for a while.

Once I got sort of used to the height, I white-knuckled the rail and allowed myself to pivot.....EVER so slightly........to get a better shot of the fine panoramic view.

Hey, you can call me chicken.
You can call me a lousy photographer.
I choose to think of these shots as.....
Artsy.
A presentation of views from a new perspective.
The fascinating juxtaposition of organic textures against the harsh backdrop of urban consumption.......er, uh........somethin' like that.


sigh.
You're right.

It's just a bunch of tourist butts immortalized on a scaredy-cats camera.
But y'know what? I'll bet all of THEIR pictures look pretty much alike. The usual views. Buildings, water, more buildings, water........boat!........buildings, water and more water.

Artsy.
Yup. I think.

Dear Mother Nature, that's enough rain. Thanks. Love, Iowa

Ever the insufferably cheerful sort that can always be
counted on to look for the bright spot, let me begin by saying....
it is a very good day to be a fish in Iowa.

Now that we've gotten that out of the way and honored my 2nd grade teacher who taught me that I should always try and say something nice, let's get to the down and dirty.

It is a very bad day to live in Iowa.
It's a bad day to try and get to work. It's a scary day if you live here in Des Moines and an officer knocked on your door this morning and invited you to immediately evacuate your home. It's worse to live in Cedar Rapids, where your home is under water all the way up to the roof. It's bad to be a farmer watching a zillion little corn plants float away. It's a bad day to be a worker whose employer is under water and may not ever reopen. It's a bad day to be a CNN reporter who thought you'd left misery in Iowa behind you when you busted camp after the caucuses held in our frigid January. (Welcome back. Hope you can stay for the mosquitoes.)

It's a deceptive day.
The sun is shining bright in a brilliant blue sky, there is a great breeze pushing random puffy clouds from West to East. It looks like a picnic kind of day. A great day to ride your bike.Unfortunately, just over that hill over there are flood waters that have lifted ducks up high enough that they are swimming in the treetops. We've been through floods here before so we know this is the dramatic part, the tense part. These are the nail-biting hours. The adrenalin days and the sleepless nights.

Later, it's just plain hard work.

If you want to know how things are going in general, go to our local news source www.kcci.com for great photos, video coverage and Army Corps of Engineer maps that will tell you more than you ever wanted to know about flood plains, sandbagging and earthen levies.

Me and my family?? We're high and dry.
My daughter volunteered sandbagging all day. My son had to haul carpet out of his basement because it's wet from water seeping in from the saturated ground. We're the lucky ones who suffer only inconvenience. Our friends and neighbors, notsomuch.

We've got trouble. Big trouble.
Thanks for your thoughts and your prayers.

Dancing Penguins Meet the Living Dead

They told my son that having your tonsils out at 29 years of age isn't quite the bounce-back sort of thing it is when you're in Kindergarten, that recovery is measured in weeks and if you skip even one of the every-four-hours pain doses in the first week, you'll wake screaming to regret it.

He agreed to stay at Mom's place for the first couple of days after surgery.
So Mom prepared.

Jello, of course.

And a fridge full ice cream, popsicles and lots of stuff to drink.
The docs said that staying hydrated helps minimize the pain but the patients tendency is to get dehydrated anyway because it just hurts so darn bad to swallow anything.

My son is a manager for Best Buy and owns every kind of electronic gadget you can imagine. His computer set-up looks like Mission Control at NASA. Mom, on the other hand, lives a more primitive lifestyle. No satellite, no cable.


I own one DVD. It's called Happy Feet and it stars a little dancing penguin.

The day of surgery, David arrived with a survival kit: a nice little book about zombies and a collection of DVD's about zombies and stuff like that. Flicks like Day of the Dead and Diary of the Dead, which I understand to be big favorites with fans of the living dead, it's just that I'm not a huge fan of the living dead.

So while I cooked up pans of Ramen noodles and chicken soup
a parade of zombies marched through the living room while he dozed in and out on the couch.

I really tried, but I'm just not much into the whole thing of watching zombies rip off peoples feet and chew on 'em. This was a real nice girl 'til she got zombied somehow and then she just turned real creepy, walking funny and doing bad stuff like biting peoples faces off.

I kept retreating to the kitchen, closing my eyes and thinking happy thoughts.

But they just kept on marching.

Forty-eight hours later my David went home to the comfort of his own bed, taking all of his living dead friends with him, mentioning on his way out that I'd become a bit of a "clear liquids Nazi".
He may have a point, but after all these years he's been out on his own, it was kind of nice for Mom to get to fuss over him for a couple of days.

I sent the ice cream and packets of noodle soup home with him, folded up the blankets and spent some quality time with my favorite penguin this afternoon.
All that remains...........

.......are the empties.
(Ok, so maybe he had a point....?????)

Cows and Bulls 101

I live in farm country.
But I don't live on a farm.
I can talk for a long while on the subject of seed corn, crop rotation and the price of hogs, having learned by osmosis. But there are plenty of things I don't know about life on the farm.


I took a nice drive out into the country Friday night and was sitting at Linda's kitchen table enjoying a beer and laughs with a few friends when she gets up and excuses herself from the group for a moment, explaining "I've got to go feed the bulls. I'll be right back."

Well shoot, that sounds like my kind of fun and I asked her if I could come with her. She looked at me kind of funny, sort of the way you'd look at someone if they asked you if it was ok if they came to your house every week to scrub your bathroom floor for you, just for the fun of it. But she indulged me and off we went to the bull pen.

As we got close to the barn, Linda told me "They're kind of skittish right now because we haven't turned them out yet."



Sure enough, they were staring us down and I wasn't sure what "turning them out" meant.


She explained this means they haven't been allowed into the pasture with all of the cows yet and that's their job.......to get into the pasture and service all the cows. (Yknow, make little baby cows.) And apparently, not unlike a group of college boys heading to the bars on a Friday night, there is significant enthusiasm for this responsibility. The bulls are pretty much interested in getting right to it.

I looked up and noticed that all of the cows in the adjoining pen were lined up, head to head, along the fence line looking toward the bull pen where we were standing. Obviously there was some enthusiasm building in the girls dorm, too.

"So is that why the cows are all lined up over here looking over at the bull pen?
Are they lined up because they know they are going to get laid?"

"No Deb," she said.
"They're lined up looking over here because I'm holding the feed bucket."

A matter of priorities, I guess.

Whizbang Chicken Plucker

My city-girl-moved-to-the-country sister tells me the great part about having a little pen full of baby chicks is that they grow and you end up with some nice, fat, frozen chickies in your freezer. Mmm. Mmmmm.

Gettin' them birdies from pen to freezer is a bit of a project.
Do you think the birds just spontaneously die and slide themselves into freezer bags? No indeed and as a matter of fact, they do not.

And once expired ( necessary but not necessarily fun part of the projects) do you think they just spontaneously shed all three zillion of their feathers so they don't get stuck in your teeth when you fry them up for a proper Sunday dinner?
No, in fact, they do not.

But help is on the way. Thanks to some brilliant fellow with a great mind for making life for weekend chicken-farmers simpler, there is now a device that can be built for less than $50 bucks (instructions available on the internet) that makes the proper plucking of a chicken quick and easy.

Just watch.
If you have a soft spot in your heart for all things furry and/or feathered, take a moment and think about a nice, warm plate of Chicken Alfredo. Yummy. Tastes sooo good. Yup, you're thinking about chunks of chicken meat now, not your little fun, feathered friend the neighborhood chicken.

Ok. You're ready. You can watch these boys prove there is more than one way to pluck a chicken:

Yeah, looks pretty plucked to me. Now mix up some cornbread stuffin' mama, I smell dinner.

Dirtin' Day

Love playin' in the dirt. Cool, fresh, black black black dirt.
Mmmmm Mmmmm Mmmmm.
My favorite rite of spring.

I lose more steak knives this way.
There's a proper garden trowel around here somewhere.
Dang if I'm gonna waste time looking for it.


Geraniums. Marigolds.
Some of that...........uhhhm....some of that purple stuff.



Peppers.
I don't even like them, really.
But they are so cute to plant.
(Remember -- it's all about the dirt, anyway)
And the little peppers are sooo cute when they're ready to pick.
A couple of months from now, I'll show you.

Yup. 'Taters.
They grow the coolest vines.
The greenhouse sells the little vines in pots, already started, nice and green, for a coupla bucks a piece. It's a lot easier (and cheaper) to just tuck a potato into the dirt and wait. I plant carrots and onions, too. Lettuce. All of it in pots since I don't have a yard. And eggplant. I have no idea if eggplant grows in pots very well. But I love how shiny and purple they are. So I'm giving them a try.

Now THIS little fella was the zit on the complexion of my perfectly appointed day. It's the hose hook-up in my garage.

The hose easily (yeahh. WHATEVER) screws into this little thing and when the handy little handle is turned, water comes out. That's the idea anyway. I couldn't get the hose to thread on to this thing, no way. I tried and tried and tried. All morning long it was me vs. brass connector. I lost.

Dear Kids - is one of you going to be in the neighborhood tomorrow?
Help. My little plants are thirsty. Could you come over and help me hook up this thing???

Mom is tired from all the playing in the dirt.

Derby Day

I was born in Louisville, Kentucky.
Perhaps that explains my fondness for the liberal use of freshly grown mint.
You don't have to put on a foo-foo hat and drive all the way
to Churchill Downs to get into the Derby fun today.
Just stir up a traditional Julep and flick on the tv.
A couple of these and you'll be standing on the back
of the sofa, cheering on your favorite pony.....

(Be careful! More than a couple of these and you'll be riding the back of the couch like a horse, whipping the pillows and screaming,
"Run, Flicka, run! One more furlong and we got 'em beat!!!")




Traditional Mint Julep

INGREDIENTS:

• 1/4 cup fresh mint leaves
• 2 cups water, heated
• 2 cups sugar
• cracked ice
• bourbon (Kentucky, of course...duh!)

PREPARATION:

First, make syrup:

Heat water. Whisk in sugar. Remove from heat.

Add mint & allow to steep for at least 20 minutes.

For each Mint Julep:

Add cracked ice to Julep tumbler or glass. Add 1 1/2 oz Bourbon.

Add 2 1/2 teaspoons syrup. Stir lightly. Garnish with fresh mint leaf.

Mint Juleps are traditionally served with two short straws.

Mmmmmmm.

They tell you not to worry.

The doctor called a couple of weeks ago.
You need more tests , we don't like the way this looks.
(But don't worry.)
An ultrasound. Then a biopsy.
I lost lots of sleep.
(Worried.)
Finally my tests came back : Negative. Whew.
And life got back to normal.

Not so much for my buddy Bucky.
Why haven't we talked in months?
I've been thinking about all the emails we could have written, phone calls we could have made, laughs we could have had over an occasional cup of coffee.
Why do friends lose touch.
Hmm. I wonder.

These are called hairy cells.
Bucky has them, I guess.

Leave it to him to choose such a testosteronishly masculine-sounding cancer.
He's going through chemo.
Damn.