The Blog: Spellbound by our own imperfect lives...

What a very nice day we had yesterday. We picked Ella up at 2:30 so she could attend the wedding in Janesville with us. She had planned her outfit carefully and was attired in a gray sparkly dress, pink hat, and ruffly socks. Throughout the day, she would turn the hat's flower from front to back, or even the side. Regis always commented and she reminded him that he didn't know about girls' hats. Even in her fancy clothes, she gave me a volleyball lesson at the park. She had learned this from a friend of hers in first grade, and from watching volleyball on the Olympics. She was very interested in all aspects of the wedding and helped Regis get his stole on correctly. She wondered if he would have to speech and if he knew how to do that. I assured her he did and it would be fine. Hmm, she said. The wedding party arrived in fire department vehicles, the groom in his dress uniform. It was a nice touch. We went to Pappageorge for dinner after the we...

I came home from River Rock and the bank about 10:50 and saw the Oktoberfest parade lining up on Third Street. I tried to convince Regis to put on a funny hat and jump in the car so we could join the parade, windows rolled down, Gus hanging his furry head out the back, radio playing Whoopee John Wilfahrt. I'm not sure he thought I was serious but I was. I bought a loaf of Cranberry Walnut Bread, a raspberry scone, and a latte. I took all of it out to a table in the front where I watched the cars go by...and the monster trucks. The size of vehicles people drive around in is astonishing. The latte was wonderful, Helena! It's National Coffee Day so this was a good treat. A piece of advice. Never get a latte to go. It ruins the whole experience if you have to suck your drink through a little plastic hole and you can't see the latte art. The ceramic cup is so much better! Regis and I applied for absentee ballots this year, unsure of where we'll be in the maelstrom...

I've been sitting here since I woke up, drinking coffee, watching the leaves drift down in the garden, and thinking about my plan for the day. It's not too extensive, believe me. Regis took Gus to the dog park and I said I would get going and pick up my check at River Rock but I have postponed that briefly so spend some more time sitting. Regis had good news from the doctor the other day so we're going ahead with plans to replace the right knee. We had a laugh the other day over trying to remember if we were going to the urologist about a cataract or an orthopedic surgeon about a bladder issue. There were many hilarious permutations, as you can imagine. We crack ourselves up sometimes. I finished a book when I was awake in the middle of the night. Provenance is the title. It's non-fiction with enough drama and intrigue to make it a story of interesting people. We shifted our exercise routine to afternoons for the month of September. Rachel needed someone to be th...

Sitting at my computer doing my social media thing which can be a gigantic time suck if I won't watch it. I could sit here for a long time, mesmerized by numbers, making comments and liking, checking it all out. I was in the shop for the first few hours of the day, chatting with customers. I love that part of my job. A fellow came in who said he was from Southern California. I didn't get his name but the dog's name is Dewey. They're traveling together in a camper so I asked if he knew Travels with Charlie. He said the name of his blog is Travels with Dewey. Ha! Dewey waiting so patiently by the door while he visited with other customers and drank his tea. I've been loving the summer fruit but I must say that peach was a big disappointment. By the time it smelled like a peach, it was rotten in the middle. Nice. The pears were great. Regis and I are doing a programmer for the day spot on KMSU tomorrow morning. We're doing our favorites, Bob Dy...

The Only Way to Respond to Life Post written by Leo Babauta . I went for a run along the beach at sunset yesterday, foam kissing my bare feet, smooth sand caressing my soles, and the sky exploding with color. I paused for breath, mostly because the sky, and the Pacific, had borrowed my breath from me. I stopped and applauded. This is the only response that life deserves: overjoyed applause. This morning, wherever you are, whatever life has given you, take a moment to really appreciate this gift, and applaud. I mean, actually applaud. Then give back to life, something, anything, to show your gratitude for this miracle you’ve been given. Do anything: be kind to someone, create something, be gentle with your children, do something where your body feels full of life. We often not only take life for granted, but complain about it. Life isn’t perfect, work is boring, people are too rude, drivers are idiots, no one gets me, I have too many things to do. But goodness, look around you! What a ...

I had to look back at the calendar to remember what we did this past week. The list is impressive: Gus was bathed and groomed on Monday. Regis and I both got haircuts on Monday. We worked at the Pulse M, T, and Th from 2:30-3:30. I worked Tuesday evening at River Rock for Business After Hours. We had a furnace tune-up on Wednesday. Jan came to clean the house on Wednesday. Regis and I had annual eye appointments on Wednesday. We worked at Pappageorge doing social media on Thursday night. I worked my 15 hours for River Rock this week. Regis had surgery Friday. What the hell. That was a long haul for a couple of old dudes. We've been gone so much and I know that someone has been coming into our house in our absence and leaving their shit around in random piles. Clothes, jackets, paper, bills, empty boxes. I'll be busy today making sense of the rubble. Regis came through the surgery with flying colors as they say, although I'm not sure what that means. T...

I was sitting over the keyboard this morning, in the dark, sipping my coffee and contemplating the title of this post. This is post #1709 and I wonder how I could have thought of all those titles and all that stuff I write about. I guess the words spellbound by our own imperfect lives , which I did not write, explain it. I worked at the Chamber Business After Hours yesterday afternoon. It's been fun the two times I have done it. River Rock makes a great spread of food, business people from the area come in to mingle and sample, and I get to chat with them. I guess you could call that work, right? It was late when I got home so Regis and I went to Whiskey River for dinner. It was a chilly evening, getting dark as we left the house, and we had a fine time sipping wine and talking about the day. I had a Reuben sandwich which was so big I could only eat a quarter of it. The French onion soup was delicious, too. I maintain two business Facebook pages now, River Rock and Pappageor...

Regis told me to go into the backyard when I woke up at 5 am. The stars were so pretty and so clear, with puffy clouds suspended between earth and...wherever. The grass was crunchy so apparently, fall is here, unofficially. It's 6:10 and dark as night outside. One thing I don't appreciate about fall...shorter days. I know what's coming. I dread the days when the sun goes down before 5 o'clock and doesn't come up again until almost 8 o'clock. I had to get up and put a sweater on last night. I have not dug out the heated mattress pad yet as it seems to early. But right now, I'm layered in t-shirt, sweater, sweatshirt, leggings, sox, and slippers. Ah, winter can come. I finished a book last night called The Light Between Oceans  by ML Stedman. It was hard to put down and I read it in just a couple of days. I'm fascinated by the book reviews on Amazon and B&N. Some people read a book and then spend a LOT of time writing summaries and their opinio...

Regis performed a wedding in Mankato yesterday afternoon. We were so dehydrated by the warm wind and I was traumatized by a bee sting so we stopped at Pappageorge, one of our very favorite places to have a cold beer and a bite to eat. One of the reasons I like to go there is that it's fairly easy to avoid a television, of which they have only two. Yesterday, we were the only patrons in attendance and I wasn't thinking so we sat within eye-shot of a football game. I don't know what this team is called, but seriously, the field is bright blue, their helmets are bright blue, and their uniforms are bright blue. Is this an attempt to be camouflaged? Most of the time it looked like only one team on the field. Whose idea was this? I know that isn't real grass, but shouldn't it be green? This is Regis waiting for the wedding party to come down the hill. He got to stand in this cool little arbor thing made by the groom. The wedding had an Iowa Hawkeye theme in ho...

I hate high winds. I also hate the critical fire alert they keep blabbing about in the paper. I think I'll spend the day in the basement. Oh, wait. I have to go to Gustavus this afternoon...the windiest spot in Nicollet County...and spend three hours standing on the mall outside the student union. I better load my pockets with rocks. A critical fire alert, for anyone other than a member of the fire department, seems meaningless. I will refrain from burning leaves (common sense?) but otherwise I'm not sure of the action to take. It seems to be like the time they had the sniper in Washington. They advised people to walk in a zig-zag pattern. I tried it a couple times but it was awkward. Or the government's color alert system for terrorism. Sometimes I think we get too much information. I set my alarm so I would get up and put the trash and recycling out this morning. Sometimes we wake up when we hear the truck rumbling down the street. Nothing like a mad dash in front of ...

Yesterday, I'm working out with Rachel who must sometimes forget that I am almost sixty. She says, "Do the sidewinder down and back two times." I looked at her dumbly so she demonstrated. Plank position, cross hands, move down the floor. Who invents this stuff? This picture of Kermit doing the plank looks more like me than the other muscle-bound and scantily-clad women I saw in my google search. I had to do a frog jump, too, which must be easier if you are an actual frog. Getting my old bones to crouch down and move horizontally down the mat is not an easy thing to muster and might have been hilarious to watch. Similar to the ministry of silly walks. I'm here to tell the story, though, so I guess it didn't kill me. My goals for exercise are simply to be strong and active. I'm not looking to appear in public in a bikini anymore but would settle for being able to get out of my chair alone when I'm really old. Elliot came to spend the day with u...

This picture really amused me. The more I think about it, it's a good metaphor for life. In more situations than not, we're ill-equipped to deal with what comes down the road but we grab the handle bars and pedal anyway. What else can we do? I've been going to yoga classes periodically for a few years. It's been frustrating because I felt like I didn't know anything and it went too fast. It was like playing football when you don't know the rules. Not that I've ever done that. I couldn't watch the instructor and do the difficult poses at the same time, as hard as I tried. I ordered a DVD and tried it the other day. The instructor goes very slow with the directions and tells me to focus on breathing. I know a few simple things now and feel competent enough to keep practicing. Interesting how we think we will learn just by being around someone who knows how to do it. It's the bear on the tricycle metaphor again. It was my second fall with no fi...

I forgot to mention our other tie to royal lines. The names of the three sisters in Regis's mom's family were Anastasia, Alexandra, and ...now we can't remember the third one. Unlikely we will be able to claim that throne. What the hell. I rode my bike to work and stopped at the PO on the way home. I have liked to call it the PO ever since I read the story by Eudora Welty called Why I Live at the PO . It was hysterical. Still is. You should read it. Anyway, back to the PO. It was hotter than hell in there. Someone told me that one dude who works there thinks he pays the electric bill (I guess technically, he does.) and he turns the AC off when he leaves on Friday. After a blistering three-day weekend like we just had, that old brick building doesn't cool off very fast. There were old people in line behind me and I had a pile of things to mail, so fearing that they might expire from heat exhaustion, I kept letting them go ahead in line. It was a busy mail day, though...

I've been reading lots of historical fiction this summer, mostly about all the different kings named Henry, Edward, or John and wives named Elizabeth or Mary. I think they only had about fifteen names to choose from in those days. It makes it very hard to keep it all straight. Then there is the practice of people tagging their title onto their name, as in Grand Lord Duke Richard Waddlington of Buckingham. So, sometimes he is called the Duck of Buckingham, sometimes Richard, and sometimes another combination of any of his names. It's very confusing. They are all related, as well, which leads you to believe if someone did a family tree for the whole country they would go back to the same fifteen people of paragraph one. I think it's what leads to the bad teeth and weird hair. The monarchy has their own official website which is quite a hoot to peruse. There are official rules for this and that, and of course, official photographs, among which I did not find the nude bi...

We had a grand boardwalk party yesterday. The food was mostly of the carb-laden, junk variety but you can't be health conscious every day, now can you? When people were bending at the waist and exclaiming that they were stuffed at the end of the party, Regis said that's exactly the effect you want when you visit the shore. We did have fresh green beans as a concession to the vegetable world.Green beans with bacon. Testament to the different types of food and the labor involved in the preparation is that there was not one photo taken. Regis looked hot and sweaty when he came in from the grill after cooking onions and peppers, two dozen brats, and a batch of zippoles. As they say in the small town papers, a good time was had by all. Usually at the end of a party, I just go to bed and don't wash a dish or clean up any of the mess. Tiffany dug right in and helped with the dishes, bless her heart, so I didn't have to face a frightful kitchen disaster this morning. Af...

Aside from the temperatures, which are decidedly summer-like, it's September already. We feel like the summer flew by us and Regis is somewhat interested in a do-over. I'm not sure he'd like doing the surgery and post-surgery again, but whatever. That won't work anyway. We have to take what comes. Regis took Gus to the backyard last night and when he came in, he said "Get in the car!" I jumped out of my chair, thinking off all the bad things he might have discovered in the moonlit yard...zombies, a flash fire, a rabid skunk. No, it was the moon light that captivated him. It was the blue moon, the second full moon in a month and he wanted to get some pictures of it so we jumped in the car and drove to the highest point in town, First Lutheran's parking lot. I woke up at 5 and walked outside to see the moon again. It was clearer than it had been last night but I didn't think my photographer would be interested in waking up just then. The blue ...