I don't care what you people say. This kid doesn't look a damn thing like me.

~ driving home from town ~

Yesterday I went for a walk, and within five minutes of leaving the house, the dog had caught and killed two muskrats. She runs ahead of me and by the time I realize she's shaking the shit out of something and call her off, it's dying. She lets it go when I holler at her, but by then it's too late. I feel bad. There is so much shallow water laying in the ditches and fields that the muskrats are having a heyday. They're everywhere.

Soon it will be that time again when I have to try to sneak off without the dog so she isn't scaring up and chewing on baby birds in the tall grasses along the road.

The croaking of the frogs is SO LOUD!
Behind them, the GEESE!
I swear I am taking the digital camera out to see if I can capture some of the noise and upload it to Youtube or something. It's incredible and I love it.

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If you're wondering why you don't receive notifies like you used to, it's because -- well, don't make me explain, just sign up again:

Monday 23 April 2007
11:17 p.m.

Last night we had to go to Kelvington and decided to go out for supper while we were there. We'd never been to this little place on the main street before but had heard that everything was homemade, and there was a smorgasbord on.

(Joan, Cara works there sometimes in exchange for babysitting, and told Karen that when she takes Baby Kade along she makes great tips, otherwise hardly any. Hee!).

(Guess you're not as cute as you used to be, Cara.)

We went in and had a delicious meal, hands-down the best restaurant meal we've had anywhere in a long time. Several kinds of salads, meatballs in gravy, scallopped potatoes, sausage and sauerkraut, steamed carrots, green beans, a variety of pies with whipped cream for dessert; I've probably forgotten a thing or two, but nevertheless it was completely satisfying. Vee vill bee bok.

Getting there, though, was the hard part. We had to take quite a few detours, as there are roads washed out all around us and between here and Kelvington. And they're saying the water is not expected to peak for two more weeks. Oh oh.

Karen and I met up in town today, as she had to come in and run some errands. She turns 46 tomorrow, so I took a couple gifts along.

NP: Emil giggling in bed behind his closed door

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If you're wondering why you don't receive notifies like you used to, it's because -- well, don't make me explain, just sign up again:

By Robert Moss

"Harriet Tubman woke up with more than a jolt to the gift of dreaming true. She was a black girl, known as Minty, on a slave plantation in Tidewater, Maryland. She may have been 11 years old in 1831 when the gift hit her like a cannonball.

An angry overseer, going after a black man who was running away, grabbed a two-pound metal weight and hurled it after the man. It struck Minty full in the forehead, opening a crater through which blood poured out. Somehow she survived, with a huge dent in her forehead that marked this tiny but stocky and powerfully muscled woman more clearly than any slave brand.

Marked though she was, she succeeded not only in escaping her own slave master but in returning to Maryland from the North again and again to help other slaves make their escape. Harriet started by bringing out family members in small, careful groups. As the situation in the South grew more desperate and the Civil War loomed, she became bolder, bringing out larger parties of complete strangers.

Traveling without maps or compass, she found her way from the Maryland shore to Pennsylvania and New York and later--when the Fugitive Slave Law made it necessary to seek safety beyond U.S. territory--all the way to Canada. She conducted more than 300 slaves to freedom, never losing a single "package." On the Underground Railroad, they called her "Moses," the one who gets you to the Promised Land.

By her own account, Harriet Tubman's astonishing achievement was the gift of her dreams. She had been a dreamer before, but that terrible bump on the head kicked her experience of dreaming to a new level of clarity and power. She would experience an urgent need to go to sleep for an hour or two. If she failed to obey this urge at once, she might fall where she stood. It could happen at any time--when she was tilling the field, holding the master's baby, or later when she was exposed and vulnerable, leading a group of frightened runaways along a back road. But she did not simply "black out." She dreamed, and the dreams gave her specific guidance and directions.

We can use our dreams to navigate through the obstacles of everyday life, opening paths to creative fulfillment for ourselves and our communities.

Harriet's biographies contain many detailed and convincing stories of how she used dreams to get slaves to freedom as a conductor. There is one episode, from November 1856, that is especially revealing.

Harriet had returned to Maryland's Eastern Shore to bring out a group of four slaves that included Joe Bailey, a strong, handsome man who had been brutally flogged the day before, and was still bleeding profusely from his wounds. Bailey's master was out to get him back.

As she marched her party down a country road, Harriet's head started to ache violently. She crumpled to her knees, and collapsed there, in plain view, into one of her involuntary "sleeps." Bailey had trouble convincing the other frightened slaves not to abandon her.

When Harriet came round, she ordered the group to follow her along a completely unexpected course that seemed to be taking them deeper into the slave dominions. They came to a river that looked far too deep to wade, and nobody could swim. Harriet insisted they must all go into the river; she was sure there was a place where the water was shallow enough to wade across. Joe Bailey asked if she had crossed the river before. She told him she had crossed it in a dream, the dream she had just had when she fell asleep at the side of the road.

Her dream had shown her that they could get across, and that crossing the river would mask their trail from the patrollers and bloodhounds who were homing in on them. She had seen a cabin on the other side where they would be given food and shelter.

Only Bailey followed her when she stepped into the icy river. The water was up above Harriet's chin before the stream got shallower, but she found her ford. The others followed her, and they were greeted on the other side by a black family who sheltered them in their cabin. When Harriet led her group back the way they had come the next day, they found evidence that hunting parties had tracked them all the way down that country road; if they had followed their original route they would have been taken.

Harriet dreamed that President Lincoln freed the slaves three years before he issued the Emancipation Proclamation. She was staying in the home of a New York minister at the time. She came down to breakfast in high excitement, singing "My people are free! My people are free!" Her host, the Reverend Henry Garnet, tried to calm her, cautioning her that emancipation would never come in their lifetimes.

Harriet trusted her dream. "I tell you sir, you'll see it, and you'll see it soon."

When Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, Harriet declined an invitation from her abolitionist friends to join a grand celebration, telling them, "I had my jubilee three years ago. I can't rejoice no more."

Harriet Tubman's story is a remarkable example of how we can dream our dream in the most literal sense. Whatever life throws at us, we can all draw courage and practical guidance for the journey from Harriet's story. We can learn to dream the way she did, and use our dreams to navigate through the trials and obstacles of everyday life, opening paths to a better life and creative fulfillment for ourselves and our communities. Harriet Tubman was an extraordinary woman, but her gift of dreaming true is a gift that is the natural birthright of all of us, if we are only willing to claim it."

Excerpted from "Dreaming True" by Robert Moss, (Pocket Books, a Division of Simon and Schuster, Inc.)

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If you're wondering why you don't receive notifies like you used to, it's because -- well, don't make me explain, just sign up again:

Is this a large hawk, or a small eagle?

We see hawks more often around here, but you never know. This bird was a pretty good size.

The Canada geese are back, in huge flocks mixed with geese that are partially white.

Oh, and today when I stopped for the picture of this big fella in the treetop alongside the road, we heard frogs — lots and lots of frogs! I guess the rainy weather brought them out. The ditches being full of water, and all.

Yes, it rained today. You do not want to see the basement. But I'll show you anyway:

This was the sight that met my sore eyes when I got back from town after being gone for just over two hours. I had to vacuum for over an hour to get all the water up. Then I abandoned the job to come upstairs and make supper, and haven't been back down to the saltless ocean since.

At our local resort lake, people are being evacuated. Their cabins —year-round homes, for some—are swamped. A couple hours north of here, an entire community has been evacuated. So as I vacuum, and slosh through water, and vacuum some more, and curse a little, I remind myself that we have actually lost very few of our belongings, if any, and at least we are still in our own home.

In town I picked up a new submersible pump, since the one outside has been working sporadically (thus the water you see laying about on the cement), and then went to visit Grandma. Supper is served at 5 o'clock sharp, so at five or ten to, she heads down the hallway toward the dining room. She leaves us in the dust when it's mealtime, as well she should. It smelled damn good, whatever the kitchen was serving up tonight. That's Grandma on the right, and with her is Pearl, who lives in the room next door.

They've been good friends in our home town forever, and then they ended up side-by-side in the seniors' lodge here. Anyway, here you see Pearl stopping to check for her room key, which she worries that she's forgotten.

When Emil saw Pearl today, he exclaimed "That's a nice shirt you have on!" and Grandma said "Hmph! You didn't say that about mine!"

***

We've made the national news today:

FLOOD WATERS FORCING FISHING LAKE RESIDENTS OUT
Flood-threatened cottagers and campers at Fishing Lake near Wadena, Sask., have been told by the government to get out.
FULL STORY

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If you're wondering why you don't receive notifies like you used to, it's because -- well, don't make me explain, just sign up again:

Yann Martel, one of Canada's distinguished writers (who happens to love the province of Saskatchewan and may even live here now, I'm not sure, since his stint as writer-in-residence at Saskatoon Public Library a few years back after his book Life of Pi won the Man Booker Prize), has decided to send a book to Prime Minister Stephen Harper every two weeks for as long as Harper is in office. He accompanies it by a letter telling Harper why he should read the book.

The first book he sent is The Death of Ivan Ilych, by Leo Tolstoy, which I don't recall ever reading, myself. I've put a call in to my library to order it for me. Why not read along?

You too can read the letters and find out what books Mr. Martel is recommending to Canada's prime minister, by clicking here.

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Wed 18 April 2007

Yesterday morning Scott got the carpet out of our bedroom, and last night we went to bed with the dehumidifier running next to our heads and the sump pump in the storage room emptying a five-gallon pail of water every two minutes into the floor drain in the bathroom next to our bedroom. All night long. I could sleep through that, but had to get up and shut the dehumidifier off during the night; it was too noisy.

He'd also dug a deep hole at a corner of the house, like he did last year when we had this problem, and inserted a pump into a pail in the hole so that water could be diverted away from the basement. But this morning we awoke to water laying on the cement and when he went out to see why the pump had apparently stopped working, he discovered a muskrat sitting on the float. The dog was asleep a few feet away, but surprisingly neither of us had heard any barking.

Sadly, Scott didn't think of getting a photo. Instead he stuck a two-by-four plank into the hole for the muskrat to make its exit, and it was gone by the time I got out there at 8 o'clock.

Last night he came up for supper carrying a four-inch earthworm he'd found making its way across the cement floor. How that got in, he doesn't know, but says it doesn't look good for the condition of the walls.

I think we should turn that entire lower level into a deluxe shelf-lined storage room, cold room, and furnace room, complete with in-floor heating, and build a new living room and bedrooms above-ground, and expand the existing kitchen. But I'm not the carpenter around here. Maybe a carpenter would think it wiser to build a new house from scratch, and somewhere else — perhaps not in a swamp, which is apparently what the yard is becoming. There is water laying in the bush on every side of it. The photo above was taken just after supper tonight, when I headed down the road for a walk. That water running in the ditch has come through the yard, past our house, and is not slowing down any.

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Yes indeedy. While we were in the city, the groundwater apparently thawed. A pump quit working. And when we got home, the basement carpet was soaking wet.

Fart-a.

After we hauled up everything we could find a place for, and Scott used the shop vac to suck up water till 3 a.m., and rolled up the wet carpet and tore up the soaked underlay ... well, what can I say. I went to sleep sometime after midnight, having left my shoes beside the bed so my feet wouldn't land in cold wet carpet in the morning. It's pretty ugly.

Gorgeous spring day outside though. We went to a funeral this afternoon for Tyrone, a guy Scott went to school with. When the family first walked to the front of the chapel and the usual lump came into my throat, I thought "Maybe I should wait a while longer before attending funerals; since Mom's passing, I find them more painful." Before long we were all smiling and laughing at stories about Tyrone and I was thinking Lord, if only all funerals could be like this, they'd be so uplifting.

Apparently Tyrone used to take his mother to funerals but wait outside. He'd have enjoyed this one.

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~ tea time ~

Hey -- the Christmas lights are still up!
By the way, I am not lefthanded. But when my right shoulder started acting up, I moved the mouse to the left, and there it has stayed.

My day? Working, and talking on the phone to dear friends. It's been snowing again. I should go to town for bean sprouts; I'm craving egg foo yung. Or someone else to cook my supper, that would be good too.

You know, Annette, I never once saw that mouse. I think I'd have had more trouble coping with it if I had. As it is, I am still looking first before putting my hand into a drawer or anything like that. Wuss!!

NP: Katell Keineg, "Smile," from CD Jet.
I really should get another one of hers.

If you click here, you can go listen to some of her stuff. Pay close attention to the words of the song "Leonor," which she wrote after reading the obituary of artist Leonor Fini. This was the song that introduced me to Ms. Keineg's unusual voice.

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~ another gourmet lunch chez Kate ~

Wed 11 April 2007

Sing with me to the tune of that Wizard of Oz song in celebration of the squishing of the Wicked Witch of the West:

“Hail hail, the mouse is dead
Dance around—
The mouse is dead
Hail, hail, the wicked mouse is dead!”

Scott was in the bathtub this morning when he heard the trap snap. Apparently the creature had big ears and a long tail; he thinks it was a deer mouse, the kind that spreads hantavirus. Goody.

Later he heard a big bang but couldn’t figure out, after looking around the house, what might have caused it. I was still in bed when he asked me if knew what it was. I said “Maybe the mousetrap!” and that’s when he gave me the good news of the beast’s demise.

As for the other noise, I had no idea what it might be, but told him that quite often when I am alone in this house I hear loud noises that have no discernable source. It’s not that unusual. I’ve given up trying to figure out what causes them. He looked at me like he wasn’t sure he should take me seriously.

NP: Freestyle, apparently the show's last week, on CBC Radio

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