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Going Nuts

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Never underestimate a squirrel. They like to hang out on the sides of the road where a walnut tree drops those big walnut bombs and wait for cars to roll over them and then they run out to gather the nuts. It’s also where they die, run over by a car. So whenever I ride by on my bike I) am careful not to hit a walnut bomb and topple over, my front wheel torqued by the impact and 2) I’m careful not to squish a squirrel, and 3) I remember once collecting walnuts as a kid. It might have been my Little House on the Prairie period, one that lasted over ten years, approx. age 8 – 18. This is when I experimented with natural dyes and woodland crafts. Anyway, I collected a paper sack of half-decomposed walnut balls. Somehow I thought that was the nut, or maybe I knew the nut was inside . Nevertheless, I picked up the whole thing and brought them home an put them under my bed. So that when I was doing sit-ups, a hundred every night before going to bed, I was accosted by worms crawling acro
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Early Podcasts

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In the 80s and 90s, when listening to late-night radio, I’d catch an episode of *Unshackled! * Unshackled! is a radio drama series produced by Pacific Garden Mission, in Chicago, Illinois, that first aired on September 23, 1950. It is one of the longest-running radio dramas in history and one of a very few still in production in the United States. Wikipedia Unshackled originated in Chicago—just down the street from our city mission, also in Chicago. I loved listening to the first-person testimonials of how people’s lives changed. Something about listening in the darkness to hope and light created a warm glow inside of me. Then we heard that Star was going to be on Unshackled!. Star was already a star at our place, but this elevated her even further: a mega-Star. Notes were posted about when her episode would air. Anyway, the other day I had a flash memory, thinking about Star going downtown to the Unshackled! studio to record her testimonial and wondered if the digital footprin
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Pulling Up the Garden

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Yesterday I pulled up most of the garden. Truthfully, I should have done this in August as the tomatoes were terrible this year. The stalks were limp and brown and could hardly hold the fruit. Something (a bug, worm, beast?) got to my kale and made lace out of the leaves. The beans refused to climb or grow until the last minute and put out a handful of fruit. Not a single cucumber, same as last year. I got about 4 or 5 squash, but have now decided I do not like squash. No matter what I do, they turn out wet and awful when prepping to eat. Also TOO MANY seeds inside, though soft and edible. The whole experience was like eating over ripe okra. I’ve been thinking about next year’s venture (always) and have decided I will move the garden to the side of the shed and do a raised bed. There is just not enough sun for the poor garden at the side of the house because of the big trees. It seems doable in the spring, but then they leaf out and it rains and the soil doesn’t dry out and moss grow
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That Sinking Feeling

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I know we all have highs and lows, but as I’m getting older there are periods when apprehension grips me. It hit me last weekend when I was out on my bike and the front gearing failed. You see, I’d just gotten the bike out of the shop where I’d had it in for a tune-up, so this seemed like weird timing. Then I came home and took a shower and did a load of laundry—laundry that took ALL day as the washing machine also failed.   This time, we all think, could be its last, but, nevertheless, we have called in a repairperson. One more thing to fix. Plus, Google keeps telling me I'm about to lose data or access to photos, emails, etc unless I pay a monthly subscription fee. Then there’s the election and the wildcard games for the baseball playoffs.   Just watching my co-workers’ tense faces as the Detroit Tigers played . . . I’m not even sure against whom (it’s a whole other league from the one the Cubs play in) was very stressful. It seems so much of our livelihood and happiness ride
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Re-Watching (Masterpiece Theater) Middlemarch

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This mini-series first aired in 1994—before streaming, so I HAD to make sure I was in front of the TV to catch all 7 episodes. I wasn’t familiar with the story, but loved dramas and literature and period pieces. Middlemarch by George Eliot was a wide-ranging novel following the lives of several residents and newcomers to a proverbial town somewhere in middle England right before the railroads came through and at the rise of Industrialization, which upended the 19 th century. Virtually everything was about to change. At the center of the novel is Dorothea Brooks, a woman you admire and at the same time want to slap silly. Her idealism is ambitious and totally lacking in common sense. She seems to stumble from good intention to good intention while sinking in a quagmire of her own making. She aims for an ideal of love by marrying a stodgy cleric given to vain academic pursuits, hoping that she might be able, by proxy, to expand her own knowledge, I get it. Women of that time period
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