Driving the River Road

Last Sunday I drove back from La Crosse WI. It was a lovely, warm spring day and the agility trial was done early so we (the corgis and I) decided to take Highway 61 along the Mississippi.
There was all this to see:

At least 20 bald eagles. Some soared, some sat, on branches, on nests, some stood on the melting river ice.

A dozen soaring pelicans! They are so cool, first white, then gray-brown, as they change direction.

Maybe two immature bald eagles or two golden eagles--I wasn't stopping, and they were too far away to tell for sure. They were on Lake Pepin, again on the disappearing ice.

I also saw what turned out to be the FIRST barge on the Mississipi for the year! I wondered when I saw it, and the newspaper confirmed it on Monday.

This drive is filled with memories, as I drive through Lake City (where I learned to drive) and Frontenac (where Sheri Stephens and I bought a pack of cigarettes and smoked them on the walk back to Villa Maria) and Red Wing (home of the boys' reform school) and Miesville (home of the Mudhens) and Farmington (the fairgrounds where I showed my pony in 4-H) and the hills and farms between there and home.

The other night public tv aired a documentary about Highway 61, starting on the North Shore and driving the River Road to La Crescent. I realized then that I have been on the entire Highway 61 through Minnesota. Now I can't wait until August, when this road will take me along the North Shore and on up to Thunder Bay.

(Photo from StarTribune)

The brains in the family

I've been thinking about this ever since reading Jill Taylor's MY STROKE OF INSIGHT.
My brother Tim had a lemon-sized clot removed from his brain after a fall down a flight of stairs at a party in college.
My dad Lloyd died of a brain tumor.
My brother Rob had a stroke at the age of 44.

I don't know what it all means, but there has to be some kind of connection.
I remember the surgeon asking if Tim had been a musician. "No," I told him, "will he be one now?"
I think about "jumping the corpus callosum"
I think about the brains in the family.

Gretchen

Most of you never met her. When people hear that we have rottweilers they are almost always surprised, and yet, Allen and I have always had rotties, since we moved out to the country and could finally have a dog.
Gretchen was our third rottie. We were looking for a puppy after losing Della (Della Street and Perry Mason were our first) to cancer in 1999. We were still fairly ignorant about dogs generally but were lucky. We drove to a breeder in Wisconsin who was expecting puppies later that summer. As we chatted, a gorgeous four year old bitch met us and was immediately and earnestly committed to winning Allen over. I think it took about ten minutes. After an hour or so, the breeder said she’d let us purchase Gretchen if we’d consider an adult dog. We drove home, thought about, and drove back a week later to pick up Gretchen. We celebrated her 4th birthday on the fourth of July a few weeks later.
She was too heavily-built for agility and I didn’t know much about obedience at the time, which is a shame as she would have loved it, I think. They don’t come much smarter and more eager to please than she did. But she had never been socialized around cats, and was, we found later, a bit reactive (she and Maggie fought) so she didn’t get out much. After losing Mason, Stormy came to us as a re-homed dog from another breeder, and our two-pack continued. I’d certainly do things differently today, but at the time this was just more lessons about dogs.
“Pie” as Allen called her, was diagnosed with spondylosis in 2005 and that further curtailed her activities, but she enjoyed walking the trails on Mushtown for several years. One day she disappeared, then returned with an opossum in her mouth. I asked her to leave it and we finished our walk, then I went back to retrieve it so Allen could bury it. I carried it, by its tail, back to the barn and set the carcass down in the barn. Imagine Allen’s surprise when he opened the door to find it Very Much Alive and glaring at him.
We have coyotes in the woods and both Gretchen and Stormy howled right along with them. The “girls” alerted us to the UPS and FedEx trucks, and counted the agility students arriving here for class.
It was obvious this winter that Gretchen was starting to fail. She started to lose weight, regurgitated her meals, and was losing strength and balance.
Today, we made the decision to let her cross the bridge in search of Della, Mason, Precious (our foxhound), several cats, and that possum. Stormy said goodbye very somberly and I know she will be grieving with us. When I came back into the house, Maggie slowly flipped over for a belly rub as if to say goodbye in her own way, too. She and Winn have stuck close to me all afternoon.
We’ll miss her tons.
Praetor Gretchen V RCR, CGC
7/4/95-1/29/09

Funny, I couldn't find exactly what I saw but this will remind me.

Frosty morning

I drove to an appointment this morning--lucky me, since the trees were covered in frost and the scenery was breathtaking. On my drive home, the sun had come out but it wasn't yet melting the frost so it was even more beautiful, especially crossing the Minnesota River. I'm sure there will be photos somewhere so I'll try to grab one and post to help me remember......when the wind comes up tonight and the temperature drops below zero again...just in time for the weekend.

old posts that I could not figure out how to merge

Dew point

I was sitting in the van Sunday morning in the parking lot of the local gas/convenience store. Allen was inside and his errand ended up taking about ten minutes.
I started to notice what people were carrying as they returned to their cars, and I was amazed at the consistency of one purchase: Mountain Dew. Bottles. Big bottles. But mostly 12-packs.
The next most-purchased item was the Sunday paper, however purchasers of these two things did not overlap.
What did go with the Dew? Cigarettes.
Also in a regular parade--energy drinks: Red Bull, Monster, others I didn't recognize. Colored water enriched with god-knows-what
Unique purchase---a man emerged with a huge number of lottery tickets (later reported to be 75)
Most amusing purchase: A large box of Cap'n Crunch and a quart of milk.

Celebrating zero

Although I wasn't home this week, the weather here was awful. Below zero Monday morning until today (Friday) at noon, the horses stayed in the barn, the rottie girls stayed in their doghouse, and Allen and the corgis went outside as little as possible.
Today when the thermometer registered no degrees, everyone breathed a sigh of relief--without frozen nose hairs.
Once the thermometer went to 2.7 degrees of course, it started to snow. Just a few flurries which lasted no more than a few minutes, but still.

Happy New Year!

I am now on day #15 of a cold, and although I suspect I will survive, it's been enough to keep me from doing a lot of things I'd planned on getting done over the Christmas break. Finally to the point where I don't fall asleep on the couch, I sort of miss being able to do that.