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 This Blog contains day-to-day thoughts and other nonsense.  {c} ![Merit Badge in Community
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I'm starting to see your name everywhere I go *^*Bigsmile*^*. Thank you so very much for all you do around WDC! It is people like you, who make WDC such the awesome place we call our second home *^*Heart*^*
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I wanted to give you a badge you didn't have yet, and this cheerleading badge suits you. You are such an encouragement to many members of this site, including me, and I wouldn't know what Writing.Com would do without you. *^*Smile*^* You're a gem, Barbs. Thank you for your friendship and everything that you do. Love, Me *^*Smile*^*](https://images.Writing.Com/imgs/writing.com/writers/badges/general-Cheerleading-210.gif) Thanks to pencilsoverpens  for the MB![Merit Badge in Funny
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I've never laughed more, thanks Barbs](https://images.Writing.Com/imgs/writing.com/writers/badges/general-Funny-200.gif) Thanks Wolfdale  for the MBThanks to pencilsoverpens  for the awardicon for this blogThanks to Equilibrium for the pretty green ribbon she pinned on my poetry folder. Thanks to Alfred Booth for the Awardicon for Happy Book and for my wonderful, vibrant sig. |
| Central Wisconsin is home to numerous Amish families. One such group lives and farms west of Marshfield. Recently I had business with one of them. Mrs Emma Miller is a lovely grandmother who lives in close proximity to her children and many grandchildren in that area. She is a delightful woman with a special talent for hand quilting coverlets. Twice I have sought her out to help me finish a pair of pieced quilt tops that had been made sixty to eighty years ago. Only the tops had been constructed and the assembly of these quilts had never been completed. Emma took both tops and, each in turn, hand-assembled, and hand-quilted them. Her work is impeccable to my eye. The design of the quilting is charming and every stitch uniform and perfect, so many to the inch. The finished quilts are "new heirlooms" and are now a part of the collection of coverlets that my grandmother Glissendorf made in her day. They are each works of art. |
| One of the perks of living in or near Wisconsin is the state radio station, Wisconsin Public Radio. There are two networks, one plays classical music 24/7, and the other is talk. Not just any talk, but interesting, informative talk. Many programs are produced in Madison and others are imported from other state networks. Often programming allows listener participation through call-in format. Guests from the University faculty, people in the news around the world, authors, and men and women with expertise in an endless variety of fields are interviewed and available for question and answer sessions. Topics covered range from computer problems, political issues, gardening and horticulture, health, Department of Natural Resources issues, pets, literature, and many more. Several of the programs produced locally that I seek out are Where on Earth, Whad' Ya Know, Zorba Pastor's On Your Health, Calling All Pets, and To the Best of Our Knowledge. Those imported that are favorites include: Car Talk, Prairie Home Companion, Science Friday, This American Life, Talk of the Nation, Says You, and The Splendid Table. |
| I have gone and done exactly that which I said I'd never do. I am drinking bottled water. Actually, for me that is an improvement. For a long time I drank Diet Coke. . . the kind that has a lime flavor. I love it and was drinking five or six bottles daily. If I ran out and missed a day, I got an unpleasant headache for lack of caffeine. Not good. We were on the road one day about two years ago and had stopped for gas. Tony went into the c-store to pay and while he was in there, he purchased two bottles of Fruit2O. I loved it. So much that I quit drinking Coke that day. This stuff satisfies my sweet tooth, but has no caffeine, no color, no carbonation, and no calories. Just my kind of water. I've been drinking it, or Walgreen's knock-off, Flavor2O, ever since. |
| We happen to live in the middle of nowhere, so to speak. Among other things, that means that we often drive thirty miles or more to run an errand or complete some task or another. We lived in Chicago for three years where the same was true, we just didn't leave the city limits in the process. Here, our behavior strikes some people as being odd. This was particularly true several years back when we entertained a cousin from Germany. He thought it hilarious that we drove thirty miles to the neighboring town to take him out for breakfast, one morning. I think it was the highlight of his trip. He could not stop talking about it. On the other hand, when he arrived, we asked what he would like to do while he was with us. We had a week together. He cheerfully listed Niagara Falls, the Grand Canyon, and Mount Rushmore as his preferred destinations. We happily struck out to the badlands and Mount Rushmore. He, of course, was duly impressed with the size of the place. We drove from central Wisconsin, west through Minnesota, and most of South Dakota in one day. If we did that in Europe, we would have landed in Moscow, figuratively speaking. Anyway, looking at a map of the US, it did make an impression on him just how far we managed to travel in one day compared to the whole. And the lesson in this story would be. . .we live in a huge country. |
| I started to make a list of my top ten favorite movies. When I was finished, I had narrowed the list down to twenty-five. Here they are in no particular order. Tootsie Groundhog Day Shawshank Redemption The Quiet Man The Man Who Knew Too Little Bagdad Cafe Finding Nemo Happy Texas Murphy's Romance Rainman Twins Shall We Dance-original with subtitles The Fabulous Baker Boys Return to Me Sabrina-remake with Harrison Ford The American President K Pax Kingpin Men in Black Silence of the Lamb One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest My Cousin Vinny Sea Biscuit The Incredibles The Green Mile |
| I zipped into town this morning at 7:30 thinking that I'd have the place to myself. HA! Everyone and his brother from a fifty-mile radius was in Marshfield. Today is the start of June Dairyfest, a little fact I had overlooked. The carnival is set up on the north end of Main Street and the craft show on the south end of town. The auxiliary police had the main drag barricaded off for the parade that was to start at 11am. I should have guessed when I had to wait for the high school marching tigers on my way to the grocery store. They were lookin' pretty snappy in their navy blue wool uniforms. That has to be hot work on a sunny day like today. When I got downtown, the entire length of Main Street was already lined with lawn chairs, two deep in some places. The early bird gets the worm, I guess. On my way out of town, I saw teams of eight and sixteen sleek horses being harnessed in the Co-op parking lot. Empty school busses were filing into the high school area. I assume that they had unloaded marching bands from other area communities at the head of the parade route. Floats, animals, and clowns were staging down every side street. This looked to be a big deal. I avoid crowds, so I'll read all about it in the paper tomorrow. |
| With June come flowerbeds. Most are the traditional plots along the foundation or in an urn. Other things have crept into the landscape scheme. Some use various assorted castoffs to beautify the petunias. Things like weathervanes, pitchforks, old bicycles, hand plows, and even the odd old chair are used. Still others have taken things even further. I have seen several old iron bed frames sunk into the lawn up to the side rails and planted. . .flowerbeds. Get it? Someone else had an old wooden boat sitting on the lawn tied up to a tree. It was filled with dirt and planted with petunias. Old laundry tubs on a stand and old wringer washers pop up here and there. Someone else had hauled an old toilet onto their front lawn and planted it full. Folks with plenty of room plant old buckboards, grain drills, and the like. Old wooden buckets are tipped on their side and planted as tho water is spilling out onto the lawn. If one has an imagination, there is no end to the creative ways to display summer flowers. |
| I have been watching as farmers in our area have been doing their spring planting. This process has changed over the last twenty years. In times past, land was plowed to prepare it. This turned over the top six or so inches, then it was disked and dragged to create a nice smooth bed for planting. Unfortunately, this process resulted in the permanent loss of topsoil from erosion. As concern mounted, agriculture schools tried and tested alternative methods of soil preparation. Two in common use today are no-till and low-till. These consist of using a chisel plow to break up and loosen the top layers of dirt on a field sufficiently to allow corn to be planted in it. This piece of gear is pulled through a field where it cuts into the soil and loosens it somewhat but doesn't disturb it to the depth and degree that a conventional plow did. This requires less labor and exposes less topsoil to erosion and loss. It is far less common to see a farmer plowing a field nowadays. I miss seeing the fresh, clean black dirt turned upside-down by the blade of the plow, ironed shiny smooth and gleaming. Another development that permits this minimalist disturbance of the soil prior to planting are the modern herbicides which are applied with the corn seeds. Weeds just cannot compete with the growing corn. Most often, the cultivation of young corn plants is not even needed which saves yet another step in the process. These changes have taken place within the last twenty years or so. |
| This is not going to voice a popular opinion but I'll say it anyway. Regarding K-12 sports, I would like to see expensive programs like football and basketball chucked and replaced with "lifetime sports" that would benefit all children. I feel that schools can do far more to help kids develop a fitness mindset by funneling available assets into activities that will promote and establish lifelong good habits. Activities that fall into this category are things like swimming, walking, running, golfing, bicycling, ping-pong, bowling, tennis, and the like. These kinds of programs promote good habits of moving energetically. Moreover, they are accessible to adults in the community after school. Football programs are expensive to run, benefit a small number of students, cause knee, and back injuries, and who plays football once they are out of high school. Nobody. If you see the merit in this concept, write to your local school board members and lobby for such a change. Our children will be better off for it. Thanks for listening. |
| I have been slaving over my next entry for the Poetry SLAM, Preliminary Round 3. The prompt: write about a personal event in my life. Do it in four or eight stanzas with the rhyming scheme ABCABC ABCABCD ABCABC ABCABCD. Update for Prelim. Round two, The Tribute to Chicago was given Honorable Mention! Maybe this time. . . Coming of Age In the year nineteen hundred and sixty-two, I took a trip to San Francisco To attend a student nurse convention there. My first evening in town I met you. There, at the Blue Onion, a fellow And I struck up a conversation. We were a pair. We were polar opposites. You were taboo, Worldly and older. Even more so, A merchant seaman, a hippy longhair. I was a naive, innocent ewe, Ripe for the picking. We hit it off presto And from then on, I did not care About the meetings scheduled for the week. We were inseparable, completely into Each other. You showed me the Golden Gate tableau, The Turning Basin and the Castro Street affair. At Haight and Ashbury we strew Flowers and we saw the Janice Joplin show Live with the Jefferson Airplane fanfare. Over the ensuing years, our friendship grew. You were my long-distance hero. You never married and came to Missouri to declare Your love to me. We talked and cried beaucoup Painful tears together and we came to know, Although a friendship we would always share, Our separate ways we'd seek. |
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Thanks for these Barbs, we really miss you around here! Update us on everything some time alright! 