Older Than Dirt But Not Compost Yet

It's always a challenge to think of new things to do with my Dad when he comes for his yearly visit.  After 30 plus trips out here, it's getting harder to find something he hasn't seen or done yet.  And even though it's hard to imagine anything more interesting and stimulating than just hanging out with me, I feel I should make the effort to give him an alternate choice.  Once again this year I amazed even myself with what I came up with.

It had been raining for days before he arrived, so the first day he was here we drove him out to see the rising river and allowed him to stand in the gentle rain (which softened his snowy white hair) and watch his breath form delicate clouds each time he breathed out.

As we were viewing the nearly flood-stage river, a train load of wind turbine blades went by.

Ever since they showed up on the horizon I’ve wanted to see the wind turbines up close and personal, so I took that trainload of blades as a sign that it was time to do it.  I figured my dad would want to also. I felt pretty proud that my Dad thought I was a good enough photographer to take all the pictures.

Or hmmm, maybe he just thought the rain had softened his hair enough by then.

I couldn't believe it when he mentioned to me that in his 79 years and 348 days of life, he had never been to a rodeo. 30 plus trips to WYOMING, the COWBOY state, and we’d never taken him to a rodeo?! How did that happen?  It just so happened that the College National Finals Rodeo was being held here...another sign. So the second day of his visit we picked up the grandkids, and make a beeline for the rodeo. I volunteered to stand in the ticket line, in the rain, but I think my dad felt his hair needed to be softened again because he said he would do it. So he waited, in the rain, at the end of a fifty foot line of wrangler jeans, cowboy hats, and pointy-toed cowboy boots while the kids and I huddled under an overhang, waiting. After ten minutes of watching the line go nowhere I figured his hair was soft enough so I called him over and told him we were going to do something even more fun than sit in seats with no leg room, peering over ten-gallon hats.

We went to the movies! Five bags of popcorn, four boxes of candy and four drinks later we were settled in. An hour and a half later we emerged with popcorn bits down our front and decreased hearing, but we were dry.

The one thing Dad is guaranteed to do when he visits is take a trip to the mall. Normally my dad likes to buy a coat. The only person I know who has more coats than my dad is Abby.  Hey...........wait a minute.........is coat-buying ... genetic?  But this time he surprised me and bought an iPod Touch.  Yes, even though he is older than dirt, he is rippin’ cds, surfin’ in a tiny window and his e-mails are "sent from my ipod."

His last day here we decided to attempt the rodeo again and this time there was no line. We got our tickets, found some good rodeo watchin’ seats and settled in. It wasn’t long til I realized Dad and I probably should have tried harder to fit into the cowboy crowd. I do have boots but they definitely don't look like these. 

And I didn't wear them anyway.

I don’t think I could make my hair do this even if I wanted to.

Dad did have a white hat but not like these.

















I guess these guys didn’t get the memo. "White after Memorial Day, guys."









The local newspaper had been interviewing rodeo participants and one of the questions they would ask was “what is your least favorite college class?” One cowgirl said her least favorite class was Geology because “rocks are boring.” (I ... am .... not .... laughing ...  trying not ..... to ........snort). One cowboy answered “English. I already speak it, so I shouldn’t have to learn it.” His future plan was to “own bulls, get married, and start a family.”

Seriously, cowboy? You don’t think you might need to be able to read the fine print in the sales agreement you’re going to sign when you buy those bulls…or write your own sales agreement if you want to sell the bulls you raised? Or gosh, maybe after you’ve done this



or this



one too many times, you might need to write a resume to get a job that doesn't require you to beat your body to a pulp.  You might have to sit at a desk and write memos and reports so you can feed that family you want to start. Think you’ll wish you would have learned it then?  I think it would be kinda funny if that cowboy and cowgirl got married and raised a child who learned to love geology and rock collecting through hours of practicing words for the spelling bee.

After the rodeo we took our inappropriately dressed bodies to Leslie and Ryan's and helped Pierce celebrate his third birthday.  This celebration involved some pool time, a treasure hunt for a present, cake and ice cream and kite flying.   For more birthday photos you can go here.

The next morning Dad headed home. I’m sure he was tired but his hair was soft.  Don't worry Dad.  I'm working on activities for your next visit.......that kite flying gave me an idea ... how are you with hot air balloons ... ?◦

Older Than Dirt But Not Compost Yet

A Snake, A Shower … Any More Surprises?

It’s been raining a lot here lately. It’s been raining so that much part of the river was sandbagged over the weekend. It’s been raining for so many days in a row that I started to think I was living in a rainforest. Well, a rainforest without the trees … oh, and it’s not exactly warm here considering we had the fireplace going four days ago … and we don’t have any tropical birds or monkeys or giant insects … but it HAS been raining a lot here lately.

During this rainy weather I took a couple of days off while my Dad was here visiting. This morning I went back to work. I walked into the office, headed toward my cubicle and saw this:

When I got to my cubicle I saw this:

You might think I was surprised, but I wasn’t. I have watched the wet spots on the ceiling tiles above me grow for many, many months. Every now and then some of us would pop our heads up out of our cubes and participate in a discussion about the wet spots.

“Do you think that spot is bigger? I think it’s bigger. I’m not sure if that one over there is bigger but I’m pretty sure that’s a new spot. We should draw a circle around them so we know if they’re growing. If we can prove they’re growing maybe somebody will believe us when we say the roof is still leaking and fix it.” I was pretty sure nothing was going to get fixed until the whole ceiling fell in. My only hope was that I wouldn’t be sitting at my computer when it happened. It didn’t completely fall in, but I wasn’t here when the bulging and cracking tiles reached the point of no return, so I guess I got my wish.

The motto for this office seems to be “Why Fix Something Before It’s An Emergency?” When people complained about dead bug body parts falling out of the ceiling vents a few years ago (I had so many on my counter one day I could write my name in them) nothing was done about it. I even started collecting those little bug bits and pieces.

I’d sit at my computer dreaming about having the nerve to sprinkle them all over the desk of WhoeverIsInChargeButWon’tDoAnythingAboutAnyBuildingProblems. It’s probably a good thing I never got up the nerve ... but boy……..what a rush of in-your-face-power that would have been ... even if I wasn't positive which desk I should pour them on.  I suppose we, the lowly worker bees, could have waited until the situation was dire and were all suffering from clogged-bug-lung. Maybe something would have been done then. But we were impatient. We “solved” the problem by stuffing the vents with furnace filter stuff. If that filter stuff is ever removed it’ll be a waterfall of bug parts and pieces. There will be bits up the nose, in your eyes, and floating through the air. I don’t want to be there that day either.

Anyway, since I neither saw nor heard any dripping water, my first action of the day (even before my first cup of coffee!) was to climb up on my countertop and pull off the plastic. Then I figured as long as everything had been moved I may as well clean the piles of dirt and surprise! bug parts that were on my window sill, so I climbed back up. After everything was nice and clean and had I started putting things back in their places, I noticed drips hit the counter so I was back up on the countertop to tape plastic over the hole.

After I had put all my belongings back in their places, I heard drops hitting the counter -- again. So I crawled back up once again to make sure all the edges of the plastic garbage bag were sealed with tape. By then I was an expert at climbing up and down from my counter so I figured I may as well grab a nice big black magic marker, climb up again and draw circles around the water stains (plus a few new ones) even though now we didn’t really need proof that they were expanding.

About an hour and a half later I finally poured my first cup of coffee and sat down to work.  Mid-morning, to my amazement and surprise, two guys actually showed up, climbed up onto the roof and walked around for a while.

All the walking around they did shifted the delicate water-dripping balance and it started again. I figured five times up on my countertop in one day was enough so I decided precisely placed garbage cans would just have to do. Then they left. Nobody ever came to tell me if they found the leak, fixed the leak, are coming back, or just gave up. To quote Gomer Pyle “sur-prise, sur-prise”. In the meantime, I spent my day listening to the slow plop … plop … plop of water hitting a plastic bag intermixed with the softer drip … drip … drip of water landing in a garbage can.

When I left at the end of the day I did this.

 Because in the skies there were these.

Maybe that furnace filter stuff up in the ceiling vent will let go tonight and it will be like a rainforest....insect parts all glued together into monster bugs, stuck to ceiling tiles ... floating down the hall ... into the warehouse ... picking up bull snakes along the way ...◦

A Snake, A Shower … Any More Surprises?

Tomato Haters Salsa

I think there's some unwritten law that states everybody should love tomatoes, mushrooms and fish.  Restaurants think they need to put one of those three ingredients in everything they serve.  People look at you in horror if you say you don't like any one of those items.  And if you're me, and you don't like any of them, you may as well say you're an alien from the planet AntiTomMushFish because people's mouths will hang open, their eyes will bug out and they'll look at you like you just landed in a spaceship and have antennae growing out of your head.  

You may have surmised from my tomfishmush adversion that I'm not a very adventuresome eater.  I used to feel guilty about that but now I just figure I'm old enough to have earned the right to be picky.  The other day I saw a recipe on the kitchen counter that Dean had clipped from the paper.  It was for Strawberry Salsa.  There were strawberries in the refrigerator.  "What a waste of strawberries" I thought.  "Why can't we just have them on our pancakes?"  A few days later he placed a bowl of this strawberry salsa on the table with a bag of chips.  I don't eat salsa.  It has tomatoes in it.  Every now and then I'll dip a chip in a bowl of salsa just for a bit of sauce--no chunks.  And sometimes I'll put half a teaspoonful in my softshell taco.  But I never load up a chip with salsa.  Never.  Ever.  I wish I could tell you I tried this tomato-free strawberry salsa because I decided to be brave and adventuresome.  But I think I was just starving and that's what was in front of me.   I am here to tell you it was a fine use of strawberries.  I loaded up chip after chip after chip with this stuff.  I liked it so much I am going to share the recipe with you.

Strawberry Salsa

2 1/2 cups finely chopped fresh strawberries

1 cup chopped green peppers

2 tablespoons chopped green onions

2 tablespoons minced fresh parlsey

1/3 cup prepared Catalina salad dressing

Dash hot pepper sauce

Pepper to taste

Tortilla chips

In a large bowl, combine the strawberries, green pepper, onions and parslsey.  Stir in the salad dressing, hot pepper sauce and pepper.  Cover and refrigerate 2 hours.  Serve with tortilla chips.

Yield:  3 cups

It's even better the next day.  Apetito bueno!

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Tomato Haters Salsa

How To Get Out Of Planting Seeds

My dad’s coming for a visit this next weekend and I thought he would prefer not to hear crunching every time he took a step, so yesterday, house cleaning was my number one priority. I knew something was up when I walked in the kitchen first thing in the morning to make coffee and saw all the rugs in the house in a pile out on the deck. I knew immediately what was happening. There were no words said between us. After nearly 38 years, Dean and I are experts at nonverbal communication. It was seed planting time and Dean thought if he helped me clean, I would help him plant seeds. His eyes shown with hope, mine reflected back mops and brooms. Seven ½ hours of house cleaning later there just wasn’t any time for me to plant seeds.

Today I had to get more creative. I am going to share with you not only how to get out of planting seeds, but I also have an eco-friendly, non-toxic gardening tip for you. This first step isn’t required, but I recommend it. Take a trip to England and fall in love with the electric teakettles which seem to be standard in English B&Bs. Then come home and buy one. Heat up electric teakettles of water and pour that boiling water on the weeds in garden pathways, rock pathways and the beneath-the-deck rocks.

Here’s how you do it. You can hook up an extension cord and place your teakettle near the garden hose and the area you want to clean up. Or, if you missed hot yoga because you were cleaning your house for seven and ½ hours, you can place the teakettle at the top of a set of stairs so you can kill weeds and get in a cardio workout and strengthen your legs all at the same time. Not that you need to do that after you’ve cleaned your house for seven and ½ hours the day before.  Or if you are really crazy, leave the teakettle in the house so you get the optimum workout AND have some spilled water to clean up so you can get in some squats.

The only problem that I have run across in this nifty eco-friendly weed-killing process, is that the water is so cold coming out of the hose that it takes about five or six minutes to heat up the water to boiling, weed-killing temperatures. Staring at a teakettle while you wait for it to boil is almost more annoying and boring than watching the hour glass spin around while you wait for something to happen on your computer, and I get enough of that at work.  You may want to fill your wait time with other activities.  If you are a woman, this multi-tasking will be easy.  If you are a man, don't despair.  You will improve with practice.  But here’s a tip. Don’t get so involved in your “fill activities” that you get back to the teakettle after it's already boiled. You’ll feel you need to wait for it to heat up because it’s already hot, but waiting for a teakettle to boil….after you missed the first boil … is very annoying.

Here are a few suggested ways to fill those five-minute snippts of time. You can “get tough” and dig out the rose bush that has only bloomed about three times in the past 16 years.

I didn't mean to break the shovel handle.....  and okay, I had to ask for help.  I wanted to keep my toes.

You can give your ground cover a haircut so the parsley (which your husband said wouldn’t spread) from the two-years-ago herb bed (this years strawberry bed) will not seed and spread next year.

You can run up and down the deck and basement stairs washing and drying clothes (just in case you need a little more cardio). And then, of course, you can blog about it  (in five minute snippets) because who in their right mind isn’t dying to know how you spend your weekends.

Please heed this warning. Pouring boiling water on weeds may become addictive. You may find yourself still heating and pouring boiling water while the seed planter in your family has hung up his coveralls and is admiring his newly planted seeds. There is no known cure.

Excuse me now while I go pour out teakettle number 31. No, I am not exaggerating.  And no, I'm not finished.

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How To Get Out Of Planting Seeds

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I’m a LOST fan. Are you a LOST fan? I’m lost without LOST. Are you lost without LOST? Abby missed the final four episodes of LOST while she was in Quito, and has been lost without those final episodes. I offered to download them from iTunes and bring them when I take her wedding dress to her in 28 days. She could do it herself but even if she started now they might still be downloading when she came to pick me up at the airport.

It seemed a simple enough process. Little did I know that for six days I would be fighting with others, lost in the land of technology. I admit I get lost easily. I get lost in the mall. Once I got lost driving to the same dentist I’d been going to for ten years. I can get lost backing out of my driveway. But I refuse to be beaten down and wander lost in the techno-world. I just refuse.

Ten days ago I purchased the last four LOST episodes from iTunes. That was the easy part. Several times a day, for six days, I watched as the download process began, only to see a message pop up after two minutes saying my internet had timed out. The download not only stopped but my internet connection was lost for about three minutes until the modem reset itself. It was very annoying. I tried so hard to fix things on my own that I screwed up my internet and had to have my modem reconfigured. Note to self: never push the reset button on your modem.

During those six days of download attempts, I fired off multiple e-mails to Qwest and iTunes trying to get them to fix my download problem. And just in case those e-mails got lost in the shuffle, I also spent hours (really, hours) on the phone with iTunes tech support and Qwest tech support. I tried everything they suggested. Nothing worked. Nobody would take responsibility. They each blamed it on the other. iTunes told me it must be a Qwest/internet problem. Qwest told me it must be an iTunes problem. I finally decided it was time to take things into my own hands. I searched the internet for solutions.

One link led to another and I finally found a Qwest forum with posts from people experiencing the exact same problem I had. They said “get a new modem from Qwest and get rid of the 2wire and your problems will be solved.” I needed to test their theory. On Saturday I carried my laptop over to Leslie & Ryan’s. They have the same Qwest internet service and the exact same 2wire modem as me. I tried downloading the LOST episode. It still didn’t work. Ryan bought the same episode and when he couldn’t download it to his computer either, I knew the forum people were correct and the modem had to be replaced. I was lost no longer. I’d found the solution.

I carried my laptop home, e-mailed the Qwest support site, told them (again) about my problem, cited the information from the forum, and politely asked for a new modem. Later that day I received an e-mail response which said, in a nutshell, “you need xxx speed to download HD and you only have xxx speed. I checked your line and you cannot reach the required xxx speed. Sorry.”

I replied, in a nutshell, “have you LOST your mind? Are you telling me the only way I can reach xxx speed so I can download HD is to cancel my service with Qwest and sign up with Bresnan?”

A very nice man from Qwest called me the next day. Three days later there was a new modem waiting outside my front door. Last night I downloaded the LOST episodes. I still can’t find my way out of a box but I am no longer lost in the jungle of technology. I battled the others and won.

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