Busy week

Posted on 2011/07/21 by Liz

With family get-togethers and photo taking, things have been a little hectic here. I’m about a quarter of the way through Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order, now, and still enjoying it. Never having had much exposure to Asian history beyond Will and Ariel Durant’s The Story of Civilization, it’s pretty much new territory for me aside from what I’ve picked up through reading novels.

There are some photos at Postcard Art of this week’s flooding Red River and views of Fargo from the Moorhead side of the river. Captured fortuitously on the way back from a family gathering in Moorhead, Sunday evening.

Friday night, Al and I went to the discount theater to see Thor. Enjoyed it very much, and am trying to not think of the ending of the movie as the end of the story. It’s sad enough that I shan’t buy the DVD, however.

The heat has been quite bad up until today. With the temperature in the 80s and a cooling breeze, I ventured out for 15 minutes to pull thistles out of the lawn. Al had found my gardening gloves for me, so I didn’t get any new puncture wounds in my hands.

Monday marked my second-week weigh-in day since my switch back to the strict Atkins diet. My energy level is back up, I’m needing much less sleep, and I had dropped 12 pounds.

Must to the grocery store, now.

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The Squirrels Ate It

Posted on 2011/07/14 by Liz

Evidently a group of squirrels ate away a part of the telephone cable, a pole south of us, leaving us with no phone service. Back up, again, as of just a bit ago. Hope to get mail read and responded to, tomorrow morning.

Sorry for any inconvenience!

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Temporarily without Internet access

Posted on 2011/07/13 by Liz

Qwest sent out a truck early this morning because someone in our neighborhood lost phone service. Realized, then, when I checked, that we also had no phone or Internet. Reported that to the Qwest personage as he walked back to his truck from the neighbors’ back yard.

A bit before lunch came back up for a few hours, and then disappeared totally. Like there’s nothing at all connected to our telephone wire.

My cell  phone still works. That’s the one listed on my Facebook Page (facebook.com/thewrittenword).  Home phone and Internet are out until further notice. (When called, they said something about sending a technician out again on Friday, sometime.)

Ah, well! As long as I have my cell phone and my computer, I can still work.

This post has come to you compliments of the free WiFi access at the West Acres Shopping Mall. The Cajun Café bourbon chicken is delicious!

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Another Week of Storms: Cloudy Sky

Posted on 2011/07/11 by Liz

I took this photograph at 4:26 p.m. on Sunday afternoon. The sky looked quite black for a while. Our ham radio club had storm spotters out, working with the NWS in Grand Forks via 2 meters. Al drove out to the location of one of our repeater links that was having problems; he turned it off for a while, and then back on, and it was running okay, again, last time I heard. There was lots of lightning all around us and rolling thunder for a while after Al got back home. We were lucky.

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Another Week of Storms

Posted on 2011/07/11 by Liz

The only time we lost the Qwest line (home phone and Internet), this week was after Midnight, Monday night, and it came up a bit after eight o’clock Tuesday morning. Tonight’s storms were mostly west and south of us and terrifyingly strong, as I understand it. Power out and much damage.  We got a bit of rain out of it, but not a lot. I am hoping that the rain water will encourage growth of the wildflower seeds I put down in the north side-garden. I took the watering can out soon after sowing the seeds, just to help them stick to the ground if the wind came up ahead of the rain storm. Also watered the summer squash plants…seven out of the eight seeds that I planted have come up and are sporting nice lots of leaves. There may be squash!

As far as the vegetable garden is concerned, I must get out there and do some weeding very soon. Supposed to be cooler, tomorrow, with a breeze, and so I may get out there and weed. Dig up the quack grass and thistles, too, perhaps, and put down some more of the wildflower seeds from American Meadows.

That leaves me one trouble spot to go: the south side-garden. I took out most of the thistle plants, but still have to bag them. I also dragged a lot of the broken branches out of the flower bed and stacked them with the branches I had trimmed from the shrubs. Tomorrow or the next day I need to bag the thistles, and then cut down and bag the hollyhock plants. I am not sure how well I will do at digging out the roots, but I expect that I will have better luck with the remaining wildflowers if I can manage to get them out, as well as the remnants of the thistles.

I think I will put the photo of the sky in a separate post.

 

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Supper Salad

Posted on 2011/07/10 by Liz

There would have been photos, but … I couldn’t wait that long.

  • Organic “Baby Herb Salad” greens
  • 3 oz cold roasted chicken breast, chopped
  • 4 green onions, chopped
  • 1 hardboiled egg, sliced
  • 1/2 Granny Smith (green) apple, sliced
  • to taste, Newman’s Own Lighten Up Sun Dried Tomato Dressing

accompanied by:

  • milk
  • mozzarella (or cheddar) cheese

I wanted sharp cheddar, but had none.

 

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Sometimes, the problems are . . .

Posted on 2011/07/02 by Liz

Sometimes the problems are difficult to pin down. I realize, now, after responding to Rose’s post, that I am in need of “quiet spaces” in which to relax and be myself.  The Internet is perhaps too public a place in which to expect that sort of freedom, and yet I have spent many months at a stretch feeling not threatened because of who I am or what I think and feel. Differences in thought patterns, experiences, who we are and how we’ve arrived where we have—the factors that make each of us unique—are rather like feelings. They are ours.  How we feel, our instinctive emotional responses to situations, are out of bounds to others. My feelings are my own, and deeply personal. Or, more often, frivolous…but they’re still my own.

Oddly, this leads into thoughts that have been running through my head in response to totally unrelated people and events of the past few months. That is, making an ass of oneself. Rather, one’s response to one’s own screw-ups. Still, at times, I will wake up from a sound sleep, or really listen to what is going on around me, and recognize with shock  and embarrassment what was really happening at some point in time months (or decades) ago.

I think I have come at this particular phenomenon fairly frequently, lately, but this time, there’s a corrolary issue. It has to do with my (our?) need to be both omniscient and flawless. That’s false pride. The problem is not with being flawed or with doing the clueless thing at the inappropriate time, but with my response to the realization. In truth, we are none of us omniscient, flawless, totally aware and attentive, or farseeing enough not to say the wrong thing, make the wrong assumption, or take a totally off-the-mark action. Who am I, that I should expect to be that one perfect person on the face of this earth? Or to feel surprise or embarrassment at discovering that I am not Almighty God? Sometimes I do so well at taking that in my stride and moving on, and at other times, you’d think that the world was about to come to an end and it’s all my fault.

Anyway, my body chemistry over-reacts to adrenalin no matter how I come by it, and I must have my quiet spaces to retreat into, even if it means locking down my journal and blog and shutting out everything whenever I need to, for as long as I need to. The admonition to love my neighbor as myself is pretty meaningless, if I don’t love me.

I will be so happy when all the allergens are once more buried under a few feet of snow. I don’t really need the added stressors at the moment.

 

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Another death in the family

Posted on 2011/06/23 by Liz

I found out from my mother, Wednesday afternoon, that one of my uncles has died: Engel, who was married to Dad’s sister Marion. I didn’t know him that well, but he was comfortable to be around and talk with. I liked him. Our work schedules won’t allow attendance at his funeral, but perhaps we can attend the prayer service the day before.

I sometimes feel conflicted by the death of a friend or relative. While I know that we will be together again, and I’m happy for that, I can’t help but feel their physical absence. Whatever I wanted to tell them or talk about with them will have to wait…and may not–probably will not be relevant, next time we meet.

Oddly, it leads me to reflect on how little I know and to consider what myriad of things here might be that I am not enough aware of even to wonder about them.

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Later in the day…much later

Posted on 2011/06/22 by Liz

Al and I actually talked about ditching the Qwest DSL. Must find out if it is truth or rumor that we can get cable Internet not bundled with any other services. If so, we could add a home phone to our cell phone package and port our current number to it.

When we got back from the food court at West Acres Shopping Center, where we checked our email and filed a repair request with Qwest, (neither Al nor I had been able to get through the telephone route, and so we regained civility by not dealing with any company personnel) I found that our telephone service had recovered. But the Internet had not, and so I had to phone in a request to cancel the repair service. By the time I got through that and had taken photos of the crazy looking bird’s nest on our motion detector lights, Internet also had come up.

Al went to the amateur radio club meeting (which I can no longer attend because of fragrance sensitivities), and I finished making enough ammunition for both of us to go shooting at the Marksmanship Center, this week. Since Al is on vacation, and I’m on a light schedule on that account, we are not limited to evening hours.

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It never rains, but it . . . simplifies things?

Posted on 2011/06/21 by Liz

We are in the first half of the first day of our rainstorm, and already the telephone lines are damp. This means that we have lost our dial tone and DSL service. The Qwest customer service person does not know what “customer service” means (e.g., listening, instead of talking over the customer), and I am inclined to support Al’s decision to move our Internet service. At this point, though, I would go for wireless, which would allow us to port the house telephone number to a cell phone. That way we wouldn’t have to deal with Qwest at all.

For as long as I can remember, we have lost our landline service when the rain is heavy and sustained and the wind blows in from a particular direction. Intermittently, it was my business line that died, rather than our house phone line. I finally had my business number ported to a  Verizon cell phone, which gave me a good idea of how many potential clients I had missed, just because the calls never got through.

Without the Internet, though, today is an idle day, since I am waiting on work to come in via email. I got a note put up on my business and personal Facebook pages, and my cell phone is working just fine. I swapped batteries with Al, so he wouldn’t have to go to his June Birthday Bunch lunch without his cell phone. Mine is charged and working, again.

The “simpler” is that I now can sit in the gazebo, listening to the winds blowing and the rain beating against the windows. Since I hung up on the major aggravation, realizing that I am too short tempered to cope with anyone at this point, I’m feeling nicely relaxed. I don’t have a radio, and so I have no idea what the weather report is. I can’t log onto the Internet to check the radar or satellite maps. I could ride my exercise bike. [Indeed, I shall do that next!] It’s nicely isolated out here, though. Can’t hear the door bell. No idea when or if the telephone is back on. . . . Don’t know if we lost electricity, for that matter. [I wonder what that loud noise was. Not a transformer, I hope!]

Getting back into synch with myself.

 

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