Archive for the ‘Chronicle’ Category
Tuesday Before
‘Twas the Tuesday before Thanksgiving and all through the house
all the creatures were stirring because they knew something weird was up!
No one is coming and we’re going to stay home
the pandemic is raging so we’ll feast all alone.
A pandemic Thanksgiving is a very strange thing. It does feel like a holiday week, except for the part where it doesn’t feel like a holiday at all. So far, our family has been lucky. Every time I have started to think I might be getting sick, it turned out to be a false alarm. To the best of my knowledge, neither of Cyndie’s nor my family members have needed to be hospitalized.
The reports getting more and more exposure on the news from doctors and nurses who are burdened with caring for the rapidly growing number of patients who need intensive care are heartbreaking. I can imagine how frustrating it must be to head home from a long shift of being over-worked and driving past locations where people can be seen gathering together and/or not wearing masks in behavior that comes across as disrespectful of the perils and subsequent burdens that fall squarely on the front line healthcare workers.
There is such a disconnect among people with varying levels of concern.
One nurse said they have to eat like snakes. With no time to take breaks, they grab food when they can and swallow it in one bite so they can get back to tending to someone struggling to breathe.
Meanwhile, retail industries are advertising holiday sales like nothing is amiss, hoping to avoid financial collapse of their own businesses by propping up a facade that everything is just fine. Keep shopping!
Just don’t hoard paper products or cleaning supplies.
Who would have guessed that toilet paper would become a treasured stocking stuffer for Christmas?
I’m still commuting to the day job, where stress is high, but looking forward to staying away from people for the coming long weekend. Cyndie has stocked our shelves with ingredients to entertain us both with her culinary arts.
The entertainment of watching spectator sports played in empty stadiums hasn’t hooked me as a desired distraction so I expect I will lose myself in more books and movies or take some deep dives in my music library this weekend.
Think of all the gas we are saving by staying home.
Let’s all offer a toast to the doctors and nurses who are working harder than ever in conditions that are riskier than ever this Thanksgiving.
Maintain safe social distances in their honor and remember to give thanks for every blessing that can still be found, even in an otherwise difficult year.
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Weekend Escape
With the Wisconsin deer hunting season getting underway on Saturday, I spent the weekend laying low, ensconced in the comfort of our couch and chairs around the fireplace reading about people who were anything but. I had been loaned a copy of Anatoli Boukreev‘s book, “The Climb: Tragic Ambitions on Everest” detailing his account of the fateful events on Everest back in May of 1996.
It was revealing to finally read Anatoli’s version after previously only having been exposed to Jon Krakauer’s descriptions from his book, “Into Thin Air.”
As happens every time I read about what people endure in the death zone of high altitudes, I am dumbfounded that anyone would subject themselves to the insanity.
Reading about the prolonged deprivation they suffered in the high altitude storm while I am comfortably lounging by the fire is mind-bending.
As precious as it was for me to spend time in the Himalayan mountains in Nepal, none of the “death zone” expeditions hold any appeal.
I am satisfied to read the accounts of others while escaping from the realities of being shut in by hunting neighbors and a coronavirus pandemic.
Unfortunately, the outcome for those who lost lives that day back in 1996 always comes out the same, no matter who’s account of the events I’m reading.
My heart breaks for them every time.
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New Oven
It’s not hard to imagine that sometimes it is hard to imagine. We all have the ability to simply make things up, creating stories that never actually happened. It’s a thought exercise. Like all exercise, the more you do it, the easier it gets.
I find I am more inclined to take the easy route and rely on describing what I actually experience. Turns out, it is often less believable than what I could conjure up in invented tall tales.
Case in point, this actually happened… The low-battery warning chirp started on our main smoke detector on the very day we first used a newly installed gas stove/oven in the kitchen. How’s that for timing?
Added context will help to deepen the intrigue.
As Cyndie has amped up her baking in the last few months, the shortcomings of our aging oven were becoming a growing annoyance. We don’t know whether it was one of the original appliances in our 30-year-old home, but the advancing rust and warped door that wouldn’t entirely close helped justify taking the leap of purchasing a replacement.
An added incentive, having tolerated the dissatisfaction of cooking on an electric range in the 8-years since we moved in, we could finally change back to gas burners that we have both always favored.
I needed to change out the 240 VAC, 50 Amp circuit for a 120V/15A, and we needed to hire a professional to add a new gas line from the furnace room up to the kitchen. That was all rather straight forward to accomplish. Timing and doing the purchases online were the harder parts of the project.
Everything ordered seems to take longer than expected during a pandemic and getting all the specs right with clicks on browsers is not a given. Cyndie originally thought she was getting a dual-fuel double electric oven with a gas range. She succeeded on the double oven, but not the electric part. The difference was not a show-stopper, so all gas it is.
The oven arrived before the gas line had been installed, so the gas plumbers were the ones to install the LP kit on the oven when they arrived. Here is how that all went:
- They cut an electric wire while drilling through the kitchen floor.
- At their expense, an electrician would arrive the next day to repair.
- Cyndie ran the double ovens for an hour or two per manual instructions to burn off and season the surfaces.
- Owner of plumbing company showed up following day to fix wiring.
- Cyndie demonstrated for him how the bottom oven sounded like a jet engine and he freaked out and turned it off in near-panic.
- By that afternoon, first guy returned to discover he missed installing the LP reducer in the second oven.
- We all envisioned the several catastrophic calamities that had just been narrowly averted.
The day when everything was finally correct and Cyndie used the range for the first time to boil potatoes, the smoke detector beeped. The occasional beeping seemed inconsistent to me, leading us both to suspect it had something to do with the new gas range. Maybe there was some problem with the adjustment of the burning flame that needed to occur?
There wasn’t smoke, but could it be carbon monoxide?
Well, no. It was the low battery beep. Installed new batteries and have used the stove and ovens without mishap since.
How’s that for timing?
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Virus Mania
It’s as if there is some sort of pandemic or something. The coronavirus is everywhere. That invisible little bug that half the people think is being way over-hyped while over a million others are dead from and hospitals are being stretched beyond capacity is not magically disappearing in the way some hoped.
Ignoring it doesn’t make it go away.
Radio on-the-street interviews capture a scary number of people who complain they are tired of the pandemic and frustrated with officials who are struggling to mandate protocols that can limit the spread. Not the proudest moment for the human race.
Staying home all the time is too hard. Really? How hard is it?
What if we had to practice avoiding others for a whole year? I don’t know. Maybe try imagining how hostages who are held for four times that long muster the ability to cope.
We have the promise of vaccines to look forward to, so the beginning of the resolution of the pandemic is within sight. It would be nice if people could rise to the occasion of not making things any worse than they already are while we work through the process of vaccine distribution on the way to achieving herd immunity.
Try pretending that it isn’t a hoax. Play along with us for a little while, for the good of the rest of the world population.
After it’s all over, maybe all the people who have lost jobs and businesses can be retrained to become firefighters or search and rescue EMTs to deal with the increasing wildfires and flooding hurricanes that global warming has continued to exacerbate while we have been distracted.
Just call me little miss sunshine this morning.
Forgive me. I’m just reacting sideways to the unending reports of GOP and White House lunacy stinking up the remnants of our democratic election here in the U.S.
I trust there is hope for a better day hiding out there somewhere. [Insert joke about expecting to find a pony in here someplace.]
I’ll keep digging. And staying home as much as possible.
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Flashing Back
I was looking for an image last night and found myself exploring a folder of photos from five years ago this month. Brings back memories.
My, those horses kept that pasture well-manicured.
It is interesting how we adjust our lives to the changing circumstances swirling around us in each given moment or situation. I’ve already forgotten the daily routine of caring for our horses. It’s been 20 months since we returned them to their previous home and herds. They are dearly missed, but I certainly appreciated the freedom from managing concerns about hay and wild weather and daily manure scooping under the overhang.
We still nurture dreams of finding a way to make our pastures available to nearby rescue organizations during summer months in the future.
There is a big void here without the presence of horse energy vibrations.
Now we allow the chickens a greater amount of our attention and this year of 2020, with its protests, pandemics, and politics, combined with the final months of Cyndie’s dad’s life, have commanded a bulk of our limited mental resources.
It’s invigorating to think back to better times and remember how different life was only a half-decade ago.
With the pandemic spreading unchecked we are in for a strange couple of holidays this season. Home alone is taking on a whole new meaning.
I think I’ll be diving into multiple flashbacks of Thanksgivings and Christmases throughout my life in order to distract from how odd this year has turned out.
Do you wonder if all the U.S. Thanksgiving Day Zoom gatherings will bog down the internet next week? If ever there was a time to have “smell-o-vision” built into the app, the aroma of the turkey feasts wafting from kitchens around the country would be a particularly valuable addition to the virtual family visits.
Trust me, if I could share the incredible smells when Cyndie bakes my mom’s sweet bread bun recipe (Gramma Betty’s Buns), I certainly would. It’s too much for one man to consume. I’ll be on aroma overload.
Come to think of it, that just might be a way to overwhelm the coronavirus. I need to contact the vaccine research people and let ’em know I may have stumbled on to a solution that doesn’t require insanely cold freezers during distribution and storage.
With Cyndie’s tendency to bake enough for millions, we could be looking at a way out of this “stay at home” protocol much sooner than currently predicted. Although, one side effect to note, I think I gain weight by simply breathing in the scrumptious smell of these fresh-baked morsels of goodness.
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Gory Find
We have been living in rural farm country for eight years and seen some interesting things, but yesterday’s find was a new one for us. As I pulled into the driveway at the end of my long commute home and climbed the first incline, my eyes spotted something in the grass beside the pavement that stood out distinctly for its uncharacteristic color.
My brain quickly worked to make sense of it and toggled in a split second between thinking it could be something that had fallen or been tossed from a passing vehicle or possibly a cluster of brown oak leaves on a fallen branch. I stared toward the image as I slowly rolled past until it was out of view.
Then I stopped the car. My mind couldn’t make sense of what I’d just seen.
I needed another look. Putting the car into reverse, I rolled back slowly until the unidentified object reappeared out my window. It was not a cluster of brown leaves. It was redder in color. Honestly, it looked like a surprisingly large chunk of raw meat.
Logic suggested I might want to get out of the car to take a closer look, but I had no interest in getting any closer to that ghoulish specimen. I put the car back in gear and rolled up over the hill to find Cyndie walking toward me with an arm-length plastic veterinarian glove on and carrying a plastic bag.
Obviously, she had just discovered this spectacle moments earlier. She described walking Delilah back from the mailbox and catching sight of the oddity well before the dog did. Cyndie shortened Delilah’s leash as they neared and when the oblivious dog was almost past it, her nose picked up the scent and she lunged against the leash, hoping to do her own close inspection.
Cyndie walked her far enough ahead to secure the leash to a gate and walked back to see what it was. We are not schooled in such detail, but it was very obviously a large chunk of raw meat and included what looked like valves? She took Delilah back to the barn where she found the glove and bag to go remove the body part from beside our driveway, which is how we came upon each other.
Questions linger. What is it exactly? Where did it come from (wild or farm livestock)? Where’s the rest of the carcass? Who (what animal) dropped it on our property? Why did it get dropped (still plenty of good eatin’ there)? Where was the animal taking its prize? A lone wolf? Pack of coyotes? Mountain lion? Stray dog? A neighbor’s cat?
I agreed with Cyndie that we didn’t need to leave it out for critters to have a second chance at it. It occurred to me that, were I more motivated, I could quickly set up the trail cam to see who returns to the lingering scent in the darkness overnight, but I’m happy to live with the mystery.
For the sake of those who feel no need to see what it looked like, I’ll offer the image in the form of a link: Gory find. There is no size reference, but it was larger than any cut of roast I have ever seen in the grocery store meat departments.
Try counting the tooth mark punctures.
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Custom Masks
Way back in April, when Cyndie was down at her parent’s place in Florida, she started sewing face masks to share with others. When the state of Minnesota mandated wearing facemasks in the workplace, I began putting Cyndie’s designs to a full day’s test. I wear glasses almost the entire time I am at work, so a mask fit that minimized fogging became a priority for me.
The earliest version I wore became uncomfortable behind my ears so I lobbied for styles that didn’t wrap around the back of my tender lobes. I figured the neck gaiter would be super convenient and I already wear a lot of Buff® headgear, so I convinced Cyndie to sew added protection into one of mine. I have read that relying on the material in most conventional neck gaiters alone is actually worse than not wearing any face-covering at all because the porous fabric will shred exhaled breath into greater amounts of aerosolized particles that, because of the small size, float around longer.
We also cut up another old Buff® to experiment with adding strips sewn to the front covering which then wrap around the back of my neck, instead of around the ears.
To eliminate needing to pull it over my head, we tried cutting the gaiter and adding several kinds of hook & loop sewn into the fabric. That allows me to wrap it around the back of my neck to secure the mask.
Yesterday, Cyndie accommodated my desire to try another customization. I want to keep all the advancements she has made with extra filter fabric in front and removable inserts for washing, but give another try to a more relaxed loop around my ears.
Earloops, if they aren’t under too strong an elastic pull, are less confining than having the gaiter material all the way around my head. After weeks of the prior versions, I’m interested in returning to the simpler design.
It was a cloudy, blustery November day outside, which made an indoor sewing project that much more inviting. I was able to contribute a tiny bit of my own labor by cutting out fabric using the patterns Cyndie made for the style I prefer.
Thanks to her ingenuity, I already had enough masks that I could wear a different one each day, and every mask is unique. I have a wonderful collection of prototypes.
Today, I have two more custom masks from which to choose.
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Keep Growing
We are blessed to have a home in which we can comfortably stay. There is a pandemic raging out there in the big wide world. Home alone is the best place to be.
There is also a political calamity raging in the U.S. with incredible numbers of people holding opposing views about what is real. It’s frustrating to witness. I hold a view that human development doesn’t naturally progress without some energy to urge forward momentum. If there is no outside influence, people will tend to settle for far less than their ultimate potential.
We see what we want to see and we hear what we want to hear. Change is unsettling for the majority of folks.
Physical human growth is outwardly obvious with age but intellectual enlightenment and emotional and spiritual maturity less so. Some people’s development seems to stop at an adolescent level. There is a phenomenon of like minds coalescing around their common level of development.
It is uncomfortable to find oneself surrounded by too many others who function in a distinctly different stage of growth. Picture yourself as a toddler playing comfortably with your dolls or trucks when a gang of college students suddenly takes over the room to practice a debate.
Yesterday, Cyndie read to me from Fr. Richard Rohr’s book, “Falling Upward” about stages and steps of human and spiritual maturation. This excerpt resonated:
…from your own level of development, you can only stretch yourself to comprehend people just a bit beyond yourself. Some theorists say you cannot stretch more than one step above your own level of consciousness, and that is on a good day! Because of this limitation, those at deeper (or “higher”) levels beyond you invariably appear wrong, sinful, heretical, dangerous, or even worthy of elimination.
I don’t have any idea how to bridge that inevitable discord in appearance between people of distant levels of development, but at the very least, this helps me to comprehend what has been so incomprehensible to me.
I feel as though I have grown significantly in my perspectives about how to love myself and others, but the last four years have tripped me up in my goal to maintain a healthy perspective about those who appear so wrong and dangerous to me.
We might all be adults, but some would rather play with their toys while others seek to debate difficult concepts. It is understandable that two groups of such different levels of consciousness would have difficulty understanding each other.
No wonder it is so hard to get everyone to simply wear a face mask in public during a global pandemic.
May we all pause to see those with whom we don’t agree with fresh compassion for whatever level of human growth they have achieved. Each of our paths are unique. Offer a hand to those who are willing and open to lifting us, or being lifted by us.
No matter where each one of us is, don’t ever stop growing.
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Painted Skies
One of many fond memories I have of home during my adolescence is the variety of magazines that showed up in our mailbox. I’m guessing I have my father to thank for this. Weekly, I paged through Time, Newsweek, and Sports Illustrated for exposure to the latest images and trends. I remember exploring Popular Mechanics, or was it Popular Science? Probably both. There was Reader’s Digest and a few along the lines of Good Housekeeping, likely for Mom’s benefit, to which I paid a little less attention.
For a spell, there was Arizona Highways with its glorious pictures of colorful western sunsets. I suppose that contributed to a perspective that Arizona was the place where that happened. Obviously, that perception has carried through to now because that magazine came to mind when Cyndie offered me photos she took of yesterday’s sunset and this morning’s sunrise.
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Beldenville, Wisconsin. Land of painted skies…
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Glazed Labyrinth
Our little mess of weather that couldn’t make up its mind about being rain, ice, or snow ended up being a little of all three earlier this week. It was a little intimidating at the time, but created some nice scenery.
At least I didn’t need to plow or shovel. It was a little crunchy walking the dog over frozen grass and leaves. I am reveling over the fact that for once we weren’t the zone that received the most snow.
Our chickens appear to have enough sense to stay under shelter in times of freezing rain. They hung out under the barn overhang for the most part. Looks like they’ll have at least one more break from full-time winter in the week ahead with daytime temperatures expected to rise above freezing.
So, in case you hadn’t noticed yet this morning, it’s Friday the 13th today. In the year 2020. That seems kind of redundant, doesn’t it?
Tolerating the reality of exponential numbers of spreading virus cases during a global pandemic makes Friday the 13th seem almost quaint.
It could be a good day to walk the crunchy labyrinth and focus our mental energy on positive possibilities. Peace, love, good health, absence of false accusations, full compliance to COVID safety practices by all people, and children able to learn in school full time.
Oooommmmmmmm.
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