Some people might feel better about the value of their artistic lives hearing this...
I feel like I'm doing battle with Mother Nature, and I'm not sure I'm even in the game.
First, there's the dog.
I used to brag about how I'd just open a bag of dogfood and leave it in the shop. Frances would feed herself and when the bag was empty, she'd bring it to the house and drop it on the front steps. That is exactly the kind of pet care I relish. Namely, none. It was the perfect relationship – zero work on my part and Frances got to feel better about herself for declaring her independence. If the cats or raccoons happen to score a little dog food, well, that's just me being a symbol of a benevolent universe.
Nothing good lasts forever.
In old age, Frances is becoming less generous. She seems to resent feeding the other animals from her dog food bag, so she started carrying the dog food bag with her everywhere she goes. I shouldn't be critical – I know a lot of people who’d do the same.
I bought bigger bags, but she's a strong dog.
You might say what the dog chooses to do with her own food isn't my problem, but this year it's been raining about every ten minutes and a bag of dog food left outside turns to inedible mush pretty quickly.
I've talked this over with Frances, several times, and she declined to take any positive steps in changing her behavior. I had to step in and do what I hate to do. Namely, work.
I don't really knock myself out. I just store the dog food in a tub with a lid and give Frances a bowl full every morning. Not a perfect solution, because now she carries her bowl with her everywhere she goes. On a positive note, she’s getting better at not spilling it. I'm thinking that for our next dinner party, I'll have her deliver the salads to all our guests. Imagine their surprise.
But enough about the dog. The real battle is between me, the ducks, and the raccoons.
And the ducks aren't much help.
We have a lot of wildlife. When you live on the edge of a 250-acre wetland, that's to be expected. Some people might eve
So, there we were, in Cabarete, Dominican Republic.
While it's still a resort area with an endless number of things to do and good food to eat, it's a little bit off the beaten path of the big, all-inclusive resorts.
That was my fault. I don't like people all that much, and when I was researching this trip, I started focusing on the descriptions of places as the perfect destination for events like bachelor parties, among others. I have nothing against bachelor parties, or bachelors for that matter, but I do have three beautiful teenage granddaughters and I was concerned that I'd be spending the whole trip trying to arrange fatal kite-surfing accidents for a bunch of fraternity bros.
That didn't seem relaxing. For anyone.
I spent way too much time on the internet, doing search after search, and kept coming up with a place called Palmas Doradas, a six-bedroom house with a full outdoor kitchen and small swimming pool, all in its own little compound, and roughly a one-minute walk from the beach.
To get there we had to fly into the third biggest airport in the country and fly out of the fourth biggest. That was no big tragedy, because the hour and a half drive through the mountains went through some gorgeous scenery, which half of our group missed, because they more or less fell unconscious as soon as they climbed into the van.
We left the airport on a good road filled edge to edge with people who followed a code of traffic regulations unknown to me but seemed to depend way too much on people surviving due to a Christmas miracle.
The traffic thinned out the higher we went, until I could look out the van window at a banana plantation about a half mile below us. For a short stretch it seemed like there was a massive drop off on BOTH sides of the road, but that was possibly a sleep-deprived hallucination.
Daylight was fading when we came down out of the mountains. The driver pulled up to a steel door, punched a code into a lockbox, handed out keys, and depa
I wish the world would understand that outside of Roadrunner cartoons, coyotes do not know how doorknobs work.
Okay, I don't actually care if the rest of the world understands that, but I sure wish my dog would get it.
We have several families of coyotes in our neighborhood. I have nothing against them – whatever they need to prosper, if it involves field mice and rabbits, I see as not my problem. I'm not overly fond of what they do to the pheasants, but there’s a school of thought that having a few coyotes around cuts down on the raccoon population, and raccoons are very hard on pheasant and duck nests. I don't know if that's true, but I'm just trying to make the point that I'm not carrying out a vendetta against coyotes. If the windows are shut, I can't even hear them howling.
But my dog can.
Frances’ core belief is that coyotes howling in the darkness are clearly plotting an invasion of our farmstead and it's her duty to alert EVERYONE.
Now, I don't know what the coyotes are talking about, and if they’d just learn to text like the rest of the civilized world, we wouldn't be having this conversation. But the coyotes howl, Frances hears them and plants herself with her back to our front door like Davy Crockett at the Alamo. Her ferocious barking wakes up the little dog who has no idea what's going on but begins barking in solidarity, and then I'm lying on my back staring at the ceiling, thinking that it would be more restful if I'd just pitch a tent in the middle of I-94. I do this for about 13 or 14 minutes before I get up, stumble through the dark house to the porch and invite the big goof inside. She paces back and forth between the two doors, looking for vulnerable spots that invading coyotes could exploit, then settles down on a rug, warily watching for any incursion and ready to launch an ambush. Then I go back to bed and spend another couple of hours trying to remember how to go to sleep.
Here's the point I wish Frances would understand.
The roof of my shack, August 17th, courtesy of my wife...
Just a little summertime art from Robin.
My wife needed air in her bicycle tires. I told her it would take a bit; I’d have to plug in the air compressor.
“Isn’t there any air in the tank?” she asked.
“No, it leaks out,” I said, talking over the rhythmic thump, thump, thump of the compressor. “It’s really to be expected, this thing is pretty old.”
“How old?”
I paused for thought, then paused again. “Wow,” I said. “I bought it on Weinman’s sale. It’s the air compressor they used to fill their truck tires when they had a trucking company.”
“I don’t remember them having a trucking business,” she said.
“I don’t either. It was before we were born.” I did a little more math in my head. “That thing is at least 80 years old, maybe 100.”
The air compressor chugged, and the pressure gauge slowly rose. As we waited, my mind did a quick loop down memory lane. The Weinman boys, as they were known to neighbors, were a passel of brothers who farmed and had a trucking firm that ran cattle and other commodities around the state, back when a truck with a 14-foot box was state of the art and no one had dreamed of air ride seats and sleeper compartments. They were honest and hardworking, good neighbors and good farmers. Yet despite all their virtues, they were the kind of guys that conjured up a lot of stories from a lot of people. Perhaps it was the consistent gleam in their eyes, making you feel like there was always a little something extra going on.
A common destination for their truck was South Saint Paul, then home to one of the largest stockyards in the word. When my father was a young boy, he once rode along, captivated by the idea of a free ride to the big city during State Fair time. Even better, for a young man short of funds, there was a chance of an affordable night’s lodging at a place called the Drover’s Inn.
The few of you who know what I’m talking about are probably smiling. For the rest of you, the Drover’s Inn charged $1.00 for eight
I don't know if chickens can smell watermelon rinds, but at our house this is a great way to start a chicken stampede,.
It could have been a little easier.
But it could have been a lot harder.
A few months ago, when plane fares were incredibly cheap, we bought two tickets to Amsterdam.
It wasn’t so much that we wanted to go to Amsterdam in particular. More, we were holding out hope that someday we’d be able to go where we’d be surrounded by human beings we didn’t know and see things we’d never seen.
The plan was shaping up nicely, until my wife got hurt playing tennis with our granddaughters. She stepped into a small defect on the court and pulled her hamstring. It wasn’t a serious injury, but she couldn’t walk.
Seriously. We pretty much carried her to the car on the way to the hospital.
This could be a much longer, sadder story, but, thanks to the tireless efforts and friendly competence of Big Stone Therapies and the Graceville Health Center, ten days later we were on a plane. I’d gone from mild despair at canceling the trip, to grim determination in needing to push a wheelchair all over Holland, to amazement as she walked everywhere, with the help of three elastic bandages from her hip to her ankle and an occasional muscle relaxer.
Just for the sake of honesty in journalism, I was willing to push her all over Amsterdam in a wheelchair, but I wasn’t eager.
We’d never spent time to Amsterdam before. It’s listed as one of the safest cities in the world, but the first thing you need to know is it’s incredibly dangerous. The trams, trains, buses, cars, and an estimated 600,000 bicycles all operated within their own lanes and rules. Remember how your mother told you to look both ways before crossing a street? Mom would have died young in Amsterdam, what with the need to look at least six ways before crossing a street. And once the light turned, you had better hurry your butt across, because at any moment a gang of 20-year-olds on 89-year-old Schwinn bikes could blow past with murder on their minds.
Really. Because they have their own traffic s
I was standing at the edge of a cliff, looking at one of the most beautiful sights I’d ever seen. A waterfall tumbled off the edge of a grassy meadow and splashed into a turbulent sea. In the background, a picturesque village was framed by looming mountains. Taking in this spectacular scenery, I couldn’t help but feel...irritated.
https://brentolson.substack.com/p/what-works/comments
Chicken Frolic
Everyone likes to watch a chicken frolic. I know that. That’s not the problem.
The problem is, in order for the chickens to frolic, I have to surrender my life and free time.
Here’s the thing. We have 17 chickens in a coop inside a fenced orchard.
We also have coyotes and we used to have 18 chickens. Those two facts are related.
When I was a kid, my mom raised chickens, hundreds of them, and they spent their lives locked in a building my dad made from rough sawn lumber he picked up at a sawmill in northern Minnesota. I’m not an expert on chicken psychology, but my guess is they didn’t lead very fulfilling lives. On the plus side, no coyote worries.
Our chickens, on the other hand, spend their days wandering through the orchard, eating bugs and fallen apples, and fertilizing the apple and pear trees. They chase each other around, playing games of chicken tag amongst the wildflowers and hazelnut bushes, and occasionally launch into lumbering flight. In other words, frolicking.
I don’t mind letting them out in the morning, but the chickens don’t go in to roost until dark. That means until the chickens stop frolicking, my day’s work isn’t over.
This is a big deal, people. You know how Mr. Rogers always put on his cardigan and sneakers? Changing his clothes is what made him a nice guy. Leave him in a suit coat and brown shoes and he’d have been a grump. I think my family deserves the sweater version of Mr. Olson as opposed to the work version. My usual outfit is a paint-stained flannel shirt and jeans, with a plier’s holster on one hip and a Leatherman on the other. Functional, but not relaxing. Plus, there’s a finite limit to how many times I want to put on and take off my work boots in a day. As a general rule, if I still have my boots on at 10:00 p.m., no one is going to see much resemblance to Mr. Rogers.
I’ve talked to the chickens about this issue. I left them out one night and the next morning we had one less chicken and a few st
Death From Above
If you should see in the news that I’ve fallen from a roof and been crushed under 100 pounds of dog hair and drool, just take comfort in knowing I went out fulfilling a dream.
I’m a little tired of the squirrel.
I don’t hate all squirrels - that would be the act of a prejudiced person. I try not to dislike any specific group, just individuals whose actions I find reprehensible.
Except elitist rich people. My dislike of them is my own personal cross to bear. In my defense, I think they could try harder not to be so unlikeable.
Back to squirrels. I do admire their work ethic. In the rodent family, they come in second only to beavers for their work ethic. It always makes me smile to see squirrels lurching across a road, carrying an ear of corn bigger than they are, especially if it’s not my corn. And if I didn’t have squirrels to clean up the black walnuts in my yard, everyone within fifty yards would end up with bloody shins from walnut debris flung by the mower blades.
I hope I’ve established that I don’t have an issue with squirrels as a species and only certain individuals get on my nerves. For instance, I have one window in my office, and from that window I can see one thing – a black walnut tree. Mr. Fluffy Tail the Annoying Squirrel likes to hang on the trunk upside down and flick that tail up and down.
It drives my wife’s little dog nuts.
She’s barely bigger than a squirrel, with a gnarly little tail. That’s why I think the bushy tail flips drive her crazy – she just can’t compete. When she goes out of her mind with a shrill, “woofwoofwoofwoofwoof,” it’s irritating, but I just get up and let her out. It’s a little like being in an earthquake - you have to ride it out.
What’s worse is when she stands on the windowsill, getting tiny-dog slobber all over the glass and just lets out a “WHOOF” every thirty seconds or so. It reminds me of having a sore tooth that doesn’t hurt all the time, so when you go for a whil
