I am the Rain King

They always say, be careful what you wish for . . .

Here on the Trail, after a good long week of near hysterics about how dry it was and how high the fire danger was, we've now apparently entered monsoon season. Since Thursday, we've gotten close to 4 inches of rain, plenty of moisture to keep the fire danger down for a good long while. While some are currently bemoaning the all too successful rain dancers, I rather like the rain.

That's not to say I don't feel the inconvenience of near constant rainfall. I'd hoped to have all of the seedlings in the ground by this date, but since there's currently standing water in the raised bed, it's not exactly prime planting weather. The little seedlings especially seem to be struggling with all the moisture. They could really use a nice sunny day so they could dry out a bit instead of tipping over the side of their peat pots with the look of death in their little leaves.

 

In the last couple day, I've managed to get all of the flowers and tomatoes in their permanent homes for the summer. As I bide my time, waiting to get the rest of the vegetables and herbs planted in the raised bed, what better activity to keep myself busy than a batch of Magnolia Bakery brownies? (Granted, I didn't have the cake flour or unsweetened chocolate the recipe called for, so these are made with a slightly lower amount of all-purpose flour, less sugar, and bittersweet chocolate.) Last night I made a batch of rhubarb sauce and am now scheming up a batch homemade vanilla rhubarb swirl ice cream.

Made in two 9x9" pans, because my 9x13"s are all occupied with seedlings

Of course, it hasn't all been fun, games and rhubarb ice cream. I wrote out my time card yesterday and realized that I haven't had a full day off since the 13th. Suddenly my burnout felt a little less wimpy and a little more acceptable. (To be clear, I only worked 80 hours this past pay period, the hours were just spread out in funny, funky ways.)  Opening day (Saturday) has come and gone and after the 175 visitors we had through the museum yesterday, I'm very much looking forward to the day off that tomorrow brings.   

This is the start of my third season at this place and much of the initial glamor and allure has worn away and it's likely time for me to start plotting what comes next. But I have to admit that a gift shop all stocked and ready for opening day is truly a thing of beauty.

Happy Memorial Day all. Enjoy your day off (if you have one) and celebrate the rain (if you have some). 
 

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Book Club Friday: Comfort Reads

I've posted about comfort food before. (Mmmm, oatmeal.) But today, I'm thinking about comfort reads.

Yesterday, we had an entire day of rain. Although the inch + of rain we got was much needed right down to the very last drop, the grey, chilly weather signaled a decided turn in the weather. Good-bye sunshine and balmy highs in the lower 70s; hello autumn's windy gusts, chilly rain and highs in the low 40s.

Drizzly weather always makes me think one thought: time to make some warm beverage (preferably mint tea, cocoa or cocoa and Baileys) and cuddle up with a good book.

Granted, when I say "good book," let us not get that term confused with "great literature." Rainy days are good days for books I like to refer to as "fluffy puppies." Kind of like how whenever I was sick when I was little, the only books I could muster the strength to read during my ailment were The Boxcar Children, when the weather's grey and chilly, I don't want to really have to think about anything while I read, I just want to be transported to whole different place through the turning of pages.

On the way home from the wedding last month, we swung by my parents' house and I loaded up my tote with a bunch of what I call comfort reads.

The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants quartet. By Ann Brashares 
Technically I'm far too old to still enjoy these books. While I didn't much care for the movie renditions of these, (I love you Alexis Bledel but you don't even look Greek let alone like Lena.) I will always have a soft spot for these teenage novels. Through the eyes of Tibby, Lena, Carmen and Bridget, you get an honest look at confusion we feel about a myriad of topics our entire lives: love, family, friends, work, death. Without falling victim to being a solely romance driven novel, I give Brashares big props for talking about the full spectrum of life experiences and taking these novels well beyond the "there's this boy . . ."  cliche.  Besides, at times these are snort through your nose funny. And I still like to remind people at work of Duncan Howes rules for customer service: "Rule #1: the customer is always right. Rule #2: if the customer is not right, please refer back to rule #1."



The Anne of Green Gables series. By L.M. Montgomery.
If ever there were books that were meant to be paired with a rainy day, some hot tea and maybe a buttery cookie or three, Montgomery's classic Anne books would be it. I've read the entire series of eight novels, not once, not twice, but three times.  A couple summers back, I decided to go through the whole series again, but only got through novel #1. (Damn you adulthood!) Anne's life on Prince Edward Island is by no means idyllic -- she comes from a place where you're expected to work for what you have and her life is punctuated by mishaps and tragedies, both big and small. And maybe that's why she's so likeable; because her world seems so very true. I'd like to think Anne and I are kindred spirits. (But apparently I share one love with Montgomery's other main heroine - Emily - that of italics.)

44 Scotland Street books. By Alexander McCall Smith
I've only read these books once and I've only read the first three, back in 2007, when there only were three. Set in Edinburgh, Scotland, the novel covers the antics of the varied inhabitants of 44 Scotland Street which include a University student, an anthropologist, and an overbearing mother.  This is fluff at its finest. The plots are never fully realized and the characters are missing that one final touch that would truly bring them to life. But there's good reason for the basicness of the books: although they reads like a novel, the books were first published in serial form in an Edinburgh newspaper.  And something about those Dickens-ish roots (or Anne of Green Gables-ish for that matter) makes it all the more appealing.

What's your favorite comfort read?

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Maybe I Don't Get It

We got rain today. A lot of rain. The good soaking kind that forces me to drive to work and which in turn drives people to a museum in droves. For most people the rain was a mild inconvenience. For others, the precipitation came as a relief. “We need the rain so badly,” the latter group said all day. “The fire danger was so high!”

Maybe I don’t get it. And knowing me, that’s probably the case, so let me preface this by saying that I don't mean to be insensitive. I just sometimes wonder what all the worry's about.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s been dry around here. The water level in the lake is worryingly low. And frankly the wildfires of 2007 just weren’t quite long enough ago for most people around here.

I didn’t experience the Ham Lake Fire of 2007 first hand. I wasn’t evacuated from my home for 12 days. Although I have plenty of fire memories, I haven’t had any personally traumatic fire experiences.

When it’s dry outside, I notice, kind of like noticing that it’s raining or that the sky is blue. But it’s rare that the dryness of the environment seems truly ominous to me. In fact, the last time the world seems poised for wildfire was the spring of 2007, when my walks through the woods behind my college campus seemed reminiscent of walking through a tinder box. Low and behold, less than a week after a rather creepily crackly and dry walk through woods, the Ham Lake Fire started 100 miles away from where I’d hiked.

When I was in college, I interviewed Senator Mark Dayton (yes, the very same Senator Dayton running for Minnesota Governor) for an article in weekly student newspaper. I asked him the typical college newspaper questions: what did he think about job prospects, health insurance, etc. To one my questions, he responded, “Plan for your future, but don’t worry about it.”

Up here in the woods, we all have sprinkler systems installed on our property and cabins. We try to be environmentally responsible. We hope people will heed the words of Smokey Bear and do their best to prevent wildfires.

And that’s pretty much all we can do. Worrying about the rain won’t make it rain. We simply have to be ready for what could happen, but we can’t devote all of today to worrying about what might happen.

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Like Ripping Off A Band-Aid

Today is the big day for the museum: it’s the grand opening. After weeks of penning how-to manuals and setting up gift shop inventory (that’s on my part) and years (five to be exact) of dreaming, planning, and doing on everyone else’s part, we’re all both shocked and thrilled that the big day is finally here. Today’s event is complete with door prizes, cake, ribbon cuttings, the whole shebang. Did I mention that we have a flash flood warning in affect for the area?

Although the sky is growing a deep, ominous shade of grey over the lake as I type, we’re hoping for a very happy day, come rain or shine. If you’re interested in this museum, I casually refer to on occasion, it actually is kind of a big deal in the area. The Duluth News-Tribune did a great article and the local radio station has given us some very nice coverage as well. Check out the links if you’d like more info.

Yesterday afternoon we had a social gathering in conjunction with all the festivities which required a certain amount of gussying up. My junior year of college, I bought a dress to wear to dressier summer occasions. Since the dress is a halter top and white (a no go for any weddings), I have worn the dress a whopping four times. Not only is the dress largely unsuitable for the Northwoods, I just don’t have that many occasions to wear it.

Still, I like dressing up, I do, and whether or not that means I’m yet another young girl claimed by the influence of Sex and the City and its pro-consumer message, I’m not sure. Because when you really examine what dressing up entails, it’s kind of odd: we put on uncomfortable shoes that limit our mobility, we wear dresses that run the risk of offering an unintended peep show, we subject ourselves to all sorts of bizarre beauty procedures.

I don’t know when people decided plucking eyebrows was a good idea and I’m not sure why I subscribed to this train of thought, but every time I’m intended to head off to a social gathering, I find myself in the bathroom, sneezing away as I pluck my eyebrows. (Pulling out these fine hairs seems to trigger a nerve that makes me sneeze.) I keep hoping I will wear out this nerve someday, but it keeps going strong, even after 12 years of tweezing. They say “pain is beauty” and “truth is beauty”: plucking eyebrows seems proof that the former is a more accurate description of the world we live in!

At the gathering, I attempted the well-intended advice spelled out in Bridget Jones for such social events: “Circulate, oozing intelligence. Introduce people with thoughtful details.”

Bridget and I had similar success following that advice. Unfortunately, it was about 90 degrees inside the museum with about 99% humidity. The only thing oozing last night were all the attendees. Intelligence, at least on my end, was limited to gasping at passersby: “It’s HOT!”

Today the (good) madness continues. And then tomorrow, we figure out what a normal day at work looks like. I told someone: “I just want to rip off the band-aid.” It’s time to be open, to offer ourselves up to the world and show everyone what we’re made of. And it’s time to run around in jeans and t-shirts and let our eyebrows enter into an unkempt state until the next time we pull out our party dresses.

Happy Independence Day to all!

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Baby Animal Photos and a Mighty Storm

It wasn’t exactly the most extreme weather we’ve ever seen in these parts, nor did we experience any of the tornados the rest of the state got yesterday, but last night we had a ton of lightning and got more than an inch of rain in just one hour. I’m hopeful that this means our humid spell has snapped. Now if we could have a stretch of 75 degree days with sunshine, the squash plants would be ever so grateful. . . .

Our loon family has moved on to another corner of the lake, but we sure got a kick out of this little guy who hung around most of Wednesday.

The parents weren’t too bad looking either.

The outdoor world is teeming with babies right now and if you’re opposed to heart-wrenching stories about baby bunnies, don’t read Tuscarora Lodge's blog. On my walk home from work yesterday, I found a newly hatched turtle nest along the side of the road. I hope all these little turtles made it safely to the pond right next to the road.

Andy reports that this year’s Mid-Trail fox kits have arrived in fluffy glory to mug for passersby on the side of the road. There are few things in life as cute as a line of baby foxes gamely watching you drive past. You get the distinct feeling that if they were human kids, they’d be making the signal for you to honk.

This fledgling flicker paused for a while on top of a birch tree at work. I’m so used to seeing flickers in flight that it took me a minute to determine what exactly it was!

No Bruno pictures. Of course I only run into large wildlife on the days I forget my camera at work.

I’m taking the day off and heading into town to work on another project. We’ve also reached the point with the grocery supply where we always seem to be missing some crucial ingredient to whatever I think I might want for supper, so it’s off the grocery store again, among other errands. One of the biggest problems is that we keep running out of bread. For some reason I’m convinced I’ll have time to bake, but other than little sweet after supper treats, the baking (especially yeast) just isn’t happening.

I’d be happy to stay home and tend to the garden and finish up Olive Kitteridge but since there’s a paycheck to deposit (and coincidentally, bills to pay) it’s jiggetty to town with me. Maybe I’ll see the baby foxes!

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Fluffy Duckies Like Rain

We’ve known for a while that things were going to get a little nutty this summer. The question was, when? But I’m happy to announce that we officially have an answer . . . now!

After a couple weeks of figuring out the whole new job thing (since it’s a brand new venture, we spend a good amount of time speculating on how things might work out) I’ve developed a somewhat rapid-fire to-do list that keeps me busy and my inbox full. On top of the new job, I have three (pretty low-key) article assignments to tackle and today I spent half the day in town piecing together the first radio commentary in a series of six.

Still, despite the everlasting work week that threatens to eat up summer in one big, blurred bite, we’re attempting to tuck little summer moments into our schedules. On Wednesday evening, we went to the end of the dock for a little laissez-faire fishing. Andy actually caught a couple small bass, although we didn’t keep them. I’m not catching anything: I’m still working to perfect my cast. Considering the fact that the highlight of my childhood fishing career was dropping my brother’s rod off a cliff (oh, the screams!), keeping the rod in my hands at all times remains my biggest priority. So far, so good.

After a nice soaking rain on Tuesday, we got another rainy day today. The garden’s very happy for the natural watering. The ducks are happy too. This family swam by this afternoon. They didn’t seem too interested in the bread I threw down the deck to them, but since they’d been making the rounds along the bay’s shore, I suspect they might have been rather full from other bay residents’ bread crumbs. I don't think I'll ever get over just how fluffy and cute little ducklings are. It probably behooves all of us to "make way from ducklings," in the spirit of Robert McCloskey's children's book classic.

These ducklings look rather big for the first week in June, but then everything seems about a month ahead of schedule. Maybe even this waterlily.

In truth, things always ahead of schedule in the summer. But it’s just the name of the game in this busy, warm season. If we don’t savor it as it flies by, it’ll be autumn before we know it.

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You hear that?!? BEARS!!

The other night, the neighboring dog treed a bear. It was just a little bear, only about two years old and probably the same one Andy and I spotted wandering around near the road about a month ago. Last night when I went for a walk after supper, I carefully picked my way around two fairly fresh piles of bear poo. It seems everyone's seen a bear this season.

“I think it’s going to be a bad night,” Andy whispered, just as I was about to fall asleep last night. “I think the bear’s going to get into something tonight.”

"Don't be so creepy," I grumbled.

But I knew he was right to worry. There was garbage in the back of his truck and it seems inevitable that a bear will find its way to the grill on the porch before too long. We've been lackadaisical when it comes to keeping our backyard free of bear smorgasbord.

Still, we found an undisturbed backyard and porch this morning. But we did find a message waiting on the local community website though:

The unseasonable weather may have something to do with the abundance of bears in people territory this spring. Our early, early spring roused the bears at an ungodly hour and with the decided lack of rain, the forest probably hasn’t been offering bears the best eating. I know I get a little bolder when I’ve gotten up too early and can’t find anything decent to eat!

Now, when the dogs around the bay start to bark, I start wondering if there’s a bear afoot. I don’t have a fear of bears, but I’m not exactly seeking out encounters with them either. When it comes to mammals on my porch, I’d rather have something like chipmunks scampering around. But if I expect bears to “stay in the woods” and then I go right ahead and move into the woods, well, it’s not the bears’ fault if my place is the first place they come knocking when food’s scarce.

The bears may be less than thrilled with our spring, but the garden’s so pleased with the warm weather that you can almost watch it grow before your very eyes. In no time at all, there'll be lettuce and arugula to eat.

I’d been worried about putting the little seedlings I’d started inside, thinking they might need a little more coddling before I placed them out in the volatile outdoors. As the plants in the garden have grown and grown this week, the seedlings inside did next to nothing. It seemed apparent that it was time to get the majority of plants into the ground.

Currently, it’s 78 degrees and muggy, making it at least the seventh day in a row with a high in the 70s, if not 80s. It’s hard to feel terribly bothered with “frosts” when the highs are so very high.

Still, if frost isn’t a worry, drought is, for both me and the bears. Another good soaking rain is probably the best way to get the bears back to playing in their gardens and me playing in mine. In a perfect world,

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The Morel Mystery or Marooned by Mushrooms in Minnesota?

In the early part of last summer, Andy and I spent a bit of time poking around in the woods, searching for the elusive morel mushrooms. I was researching an article about fire regeneration, so it made sense to take a gander for the mushrooms while I was out snapping pictures of forest regrowth. Morels are reportedly known to pop up in burnt areas in the two – three year window after a forest fire.

Today marks the three-year anniversary of the Ham Lake Wildfire’s start, which burnt approximately 75,000 acres. In some ways, it hard to believe the traumatic spring of 2007 is three years past. But the forest itself has rebounded beautifully and that means that magical window for morels may be closing. If there were ever morels out there to begin with . . . .

That’s where the debate comes in.

Morels are definitely to be found in the southern reaches of Minnesota. Andy and I talked to some fellow morel mushroom hunters yesterday and they said morels were popping up all over the place in Indiana last week. The old timers swear they used to find morels up here. I believe “trash bags” was used as a unit of measurement. But the old timers are also stingy on details and they’re not saying where exactly they found enough morels to fill trash bags.

Last year Andy and I searched and searched. We looked in places where people had hinted at finding morels in the past. We look on high ground, we look on low ground. We look under burnt logs, around tree trunks. All we ever came across were false morels.

These brain-resembling mushrooms are fun to come across (and as amateur mushroom hunters, whenever we stumbled upon some we would assure each other that “we must be on the right track”) but the mushrooms aren’t good eating. I don’t think they’re poisonous, per se, but I also don’t think you’d feel really great if you sautéed them up in garlic butter and tossed them in pasta. Andy maintains that the only place he’s ever seen morels was at Pike’s Place Market in Seattle, where they sold for about $40 per pound.

So the hunt continues.

We set out on Sunday afternoon and found some bitty false morels.

We also found a ton of flowering blueberry bushes. That’s the beautiful of searching for something elusive: you never know what extraordinary thing you might find instead.

We did some good news on the morel front over the last 24 hours though.

Rain!

Mushrooms are known to spring up after a rainfall so there could be some morels lurking out in the newly hydrated forest right now.

Now the trick is to find time to hunt for them. I spent the better part of the day in the car, driving around to interviews. The upside is that I got some great material for a couple projects I’m working on. However, I’m far too road weary for any great mushroom quest. Perhaps I’ll settle for a nice cup of tea.

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Who Wants to Transcribe an Interview?!

We finally got some form of April showers! Fire danger in the area is currently considered “extreme.” We just need another week of showers (no wind) and maybe there will be moss in the forest that actually squelches when you step on it instead of making an ominous “snap, crackle, pop” noise.

I went into the studio yesterday to record a commentary and to get some work done on the radio documentary I’m producing. After about six hours of work (I had expected to work for about four hours) I had one 45 minute interview about ¾ transcribed and I had conducted and recorded another hour-long interview for the project. I should mention that I have another hour-long interview that needs to be transcribed and on Tuesday, I will conduct another lengthy interview. I’m accumulating long interviews for the project at a frightful pace, so frightful that I’m not sure how I’m going to transcribe them all (someone told me Wednesday that transcription takes abut 5x the length of the actual interview, and I believe them!) and produce the first documentary for June broadcast.

I might just become the schmuck who makes the summer intern do the majority of my transcribing. As a former intern of the organization, I would have jumped at the chance to take on this tedious and time consuming task. Okay, so that’s a lie.

But . . . I also know, that as an intern, people often overestimated the amount of time it takes for assigned tasks to be completed and that a large portion of time is always spent nervously twiddling thumbs in your work space while you pray that someone will remember you and give you something to do. It was always nice to have to have “something to do” to fill the times when you ran out of actual interesting tasks.

At least, that’s how I’m justifying it.

When you spend as much time as I did yesterday in a teeny production studio which really just a glorified way of saying “ill-ventilated closet,” you start to get a little twitchy. Yesterday, as I typed away, stopping and starting recording over and over again, I kept feeling something: a twitch, a tickling on my upper thigh. The sensation came from near my pocket where I kept my keys and chapstick. Probably just those objects shifting around, I told myself.

But, although it had been several months since I’d had a feeling like this, I had my suspicions about what it really was. Finally, I pinched a bit of my jeans fabric together. I felt something small and hard trapped between my thumb and forefinger. I reached into my pants and pulled out a wood tick.

Turns out transcribing does give you ticks!

And yes, ladies and gentlemen, it’s tick season. Those hateful, awful little insects are out there lurking in the tall, dead grass, waiting for you to pass through so they can jump on your pant leg and subsequently, suck your blood. I apologize for the gross imagery, but I have long harbored a deep dislike of ticks, so much so that I once wrote a little ditty called “Ode to a Tick.” It went something like: Ode to a tick. You are an ‘ick.’ Probably not my best effort, but I never claimed to be a poet.

Years ago, this region of the world was free ticks, but it seems the warmer, dryer summer we’ve been having seem to have brought them in droves. They’re one of the most disgusting harbingers of spring, but there’s also not a whole lot you can do about them.

Now that I've grossed you all out, here’s this month’s travel, in album form.

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