The Sandcastle

I have a bag I carry stuff in. It converts from a shoulder bag to a back pack but I wear it on my back most of the time to keep my hands free. It is big enough to carry my iPad inside. It doubles as my bug-out bag so it has a lot of emergency supplies in it like three days worth of medicine, some emergency food, a poncho, a whistle, a flashlight, copies of important papers, etc.

I had my annual physical today. Dave said I should put the bag on the scale.  Today in additional to its normal stuff it had a full water bottle in it (I normally don’t carry my beverage IN my bag) along with a few things like my phone that normally reside in my pockets. It weighed 6.4 pounds. It doubles as my weightlifting program. 🙂

TTYL,

Linda

“Once in a while it really hits people that they don’t have to experience the world in the way they have been told.” —Alan Keightley

As a child my parents had very specific ideas as to how I should be including the ever so popular “seen but not heard.” I was a girl growing up in the fifties. I wore hats and gloves to church on Easter Sunday. I learned to cross my legs only at the ankles and to keep my knees together. Girls were expected to take home ec while boys took shop. Boys were expected to pay for everything which girls were to appreciate only by saying, “Thank you.” What the neighbors thought was more important than how you felt. Only shift workers did not sleep the same hours as everyone else. Even in the early sixties girls were not allowed to wear slacks to school except under their dresses on Friday IF there was a football game right after school–and NO ONE wore blue jeans to school and we dressed up to travel if we were going in anything other than the family car.

Now?

I write a blog and other things that strangers read.

The only hats I own are a knit for winter and a rain hat for summer. The only gloves I own are for winter although they are nice leather ones lined with Thinsulate.

I no longer cross my legs at all because my artificial knees make it uncomfortable.

I never did learn to cook or sew but I know even less about mechanical/electrical things.

Dave still pays for everything and I still say, “Thank you.”

It’s still hard for me to identify my feelings, let alone express them.

On a typical night I go to bed somewhere between midnight and 2 am and get up somewhere between 9 am and noon.

I wear blue jeans to everything except weddings and funerals and I wore white jeans to the last wedding I attended. I own one culotte-style skirt–everything else is jeans or sweat pants.

And I go off for the winter in my RV and leave Dave at home.

That last one would drive my mother nuts if she knew about it. After all, what would the neighbors think?!!!

TTYL,

Linda

The first hint was about 3 am Friday morning. As a storm went through the power went out for a couple of minutes then blinked for a couple more minutes but then was fine all day.

So when we went off for the evening everything was fine. However, coming back home, when we turned onto Rockford Road we found this:

What color is our traffic light?

No color at all, right? Even less last night because the street lights were out, too. So you couldn’t even see there was a traffic light at that corner. Only the people who already knew it was there stopped to check for other traffic. Not a good sign.

We passed several of these wondering what the situation would be when we reached home. Again, not good.

No power in our entire neighborhood. Everything beyond our headlights dark.

But, our apartment management was on the ball. They propped open just a titch every door into the complex. Because, of course, none of our electronic keys worked.

So I dug into my carryall for my flashlight. And Dave set his iPhone to flashlight mode. And we climbed the two flights of steps up to our apartment where I lit our two huge emergency candles.

The stove clock said the power went out about 8:45 pm. It was now about midnight. I ate my midnight meal by candlelight but it didn’t feel particularly romantic.

When I went to bed I plugged in my electronics hoping the power would be back on before I got up and things would be recharging.

No such luck. So I plugged my iPad into my laptop and used the laptop’s power to recharge the iPad. With no power our DSL modem didn’t work so my iPad was the best way to get online while I waited for Dave to get up.

Yes, I was up and he was sleeping. Turns out he’d been up during the night so was back in bed making up for lost time.

Once he got up we started talking about what to do about no power. An article in the Star Tribune said the power company hoped to have power restored to everyone by noon Monday. MONDAY?!!!

So we went out for breakfast then started moving into the RV where we could, at least, use my solar power to recharge our electronics. While sitting here doing this, our power came back on. Saturday about 5:45 pm. Guess we can go back home now.

In the meantime here’s some pictures I took of damage we saw while out driving. These are mostly the results of high winds. One gust was measured at 69 mph.

Our street covered by debris:

Uprooted tree across the street from us:

Tree down across the sidewalk on our street:

Tree broken off part way up its trunk:

One of many vehicles hauling away some of the mess:

But, we have power again. And we were so glad to have my RV to retreat to in the meantime. LIfe is still good.

TTYL,

Linda

 

In Europe our 50 states would each be its own country. You would need a passport to travel from one state to another. At some borders instead of stopping at the Welcome Center to pick up a new highway map you would stop to exchange currency. At others you would have to learn a new language before you could ask for directions to the bathroom–or understand the answer.

If each of our states was a separate country we would likely have border wars. Just like in other countries our wars have mostly been with other nations: native tribes, England, France, and Spain. We did have one big War Between the States but it was a political war not a boundary war. We mostly think of ourselves as one big country. Thus our wars are now held on sports fields. And while they do result in wounded they very rarely result in death.

We are fortunate indeed to live in this country where we can travel for many days without ever dealing with a border crossing or people who hate us for our birthplace. I am grateful for that.

TTYL,

Linda

Some of you know our daughter left the farm on which she was working and started traveling again. Now she has found a way to travel and get paid for it. She has become an over-the-road trucker. Yes, that means she drives semi-trucks around this great country.

Here’s “her” truck. (OK it belongs to the company she works for but it is assigned to her for now.)

 

That silver step you can see is the second step up and it is at my waist height. So when we met up in Benson, Arizona, and she invited me in, I couldn’t climb up there.

This holiday weekend she managed to get routed to Minneapolis so she could spend time with us. Dave hauled out our step ladder so I could climb up and see inside her truck.

She lives in her cab just as if it was an RV. She has a good size bed:

 

And several storage compartments:

 

She removed the mattress from the top bunk and now calls that her attic:

 

She has a 12 volt cooler and a 12 volt oven and a butane burner so she can cook but not a lot.

Just like me when I came home this spring she wanted to use our kitchen to experiment with cooking.

So we made mayonnaise which she decided wasn’t worth her effort in the truck. She doesn’t have running water so her cooking needs to be things that cleanup easily or that make cleanup worth the effort.

The she used my food processor to chop an onion and an apple. She dumped that into a zip-top bag with a pound of ground beef  and massaged the bag to mix them together. Then turned the bag inside out dumping the ingredient into a loaf pan that fits in her oven and used the bag as a glove to shape the meat into the pan. That worked amazingly well. So now she knows she can make meatloaf and only have to wash the pan. That was worth doing. Now she just has to decide whether or not to buy a small food processor or just use a knife and cutting board.

We did lots of other things while she was here.

She exercised with me while watching two of my T-Tapp videos and has already begun doing some of those exercises in her truck.

We played cards. She’s been playing gin rummy on her phone just her against the computer. She discovered it is different when three people play but she still won.

We went to White Castle for lunch. Those of you not from the Upper Midwest might not be familiar with these tiny burgers. They are not like any made anywhere else so she wanted to eat some while here. They were, of course, as good as ever.

She cleaned some excess stuff out of her truck and added it to our pile for donation.

Dave helped her learn how to better use her computer but they did not get one software application to work even with Dave’s expertise.

We took her to Camping World where she bought stuff for her truck.

We demonstrated how our GPS works and she played with it a bit. She’s not very happy with her truck’s GPS so she’s looking for something better and liked the fact that ours lets you define your rig’s size so it won’t route you under low bridges or across light ones.

She took advantage of the opportunity to wash her blankets and stuff she doesn’t like to do at commercial laundries.

And we talked. And talked. And talked.

It was a great visit. And I’m exhausted just writing about it. No wonder it took me a couple days after she left to be ready to write this. 🙂

TTYL,

Linda