reminisce – Page 5 – Life in the Cheese Drawer

keep on writing

September 25, 2014 kate Comments 0 Comment

the best thing i ever read written by a peer was a story in the annual csb/sju artist and writer publication, lower stumpf lake review. the last essay in the book of black and white art projects and senior creative writing poems was a long-ish essay about a 22-year-old and his car, which he affectionately named blue balls. i was so enamored by the story that i sent it to my dad to read, despite the questionable name of the car.
i have since striven to write to that level. the only thing i know that could possibly come close is my tale of a porta-potty, which i rank as one of my best pieces of writing.
the thing is, i haven’t read blue balls’ story in years. perhaps the level or writing is not as great as i remember, or maybe the content was what really grabbed me, as it revolved around roadtrips.
*****
i got a subscription to national geographic from liz for christmas last year, which i really enjoy. as such, i read a lot about climate change, which is freaking me out (we’re going to lose the loon in MN and the current drought in the southwest is a huge thing – huge), but what i really like to read are the stories about places i’d like to go. this latest issue had an essay and photo essay on chernobyl, one place that really intrigues me. i’d like to go to machuu picchu some day. europe fascinates me.
i’d love to go to these places, but the money issue is a huge factor. i can barely scrape enough cash together to go to the black hills this spring (which i am NOT complaining about! ha!).
so i sit here and think, what did i spend my money on that i could have saved instead to take me to ukraine to check out the radioactive ruins? stuff for my house. a garden in the back. hopefully a deck next spring.
i’m really a homebody, when it comes down to it. i love going places, visiting people, thinking about where to travel; but nothing beats walking in your red door at the end of it all and being in the place where you spend the majority of your time.
******
literally, just now, i tromped downstairs to my three boxes of yet unpacked books where i knew i would find the blue balls story. true enough, “blue balls, rambo, and the open road” by john steingraeber in 1998.
(i had done a prodigious search online to no avail. apparently searching “blue balls csb sju” will result in some weird, science-y faculty blogs.)
he speaks of his navy VW rabbit (“blue”), truck stops, wall drug, and the road. it’s lovely.
“and maybe, dear reader, maybe i’ll swing by your house, because the road never ends – you just have to figure out how to get around the place where it stops.”
may we all have a blue; better yet, may we all have a place to park blue.

sad face – a reunion lament

June 2, 2014 kate Comments 0 Comment

one of the highlights of my summers is going north to leech lake for my mom’s family’s reunion. we spend 3 nights up north, hanging out together, spending time on the lake. for a person like myself, who doesn’t normally have a lot of money to spend on travelling, this is my summer vacation – the only time of the summer i officially call vacation. i love it.
this year, two of my cousins are getting married within a month of each other (like my cousin matt and i did in 2005, and liz got married six months later; oh and charlie and karl graduated from high school in there, too). unfortunately, the reunion was called off this year due to some family members being committed to a lot of weddings.
with the warm weather, i always start to think about lake time, but every time i think about it this year, i get all sad and mopey because it’s not happening this year. sure, i’ll see my relatives at the weddings. i might see a lake at some point this summer (there sure aren’t a ton down here). but it just isn’t the same.
so, here’s a repost of something i wrote 7 years ago before the reunion, which makes me über sad.

So I’m looking forward to boat rides and swimming and eating Grandma’s donuts and hanging out by the fire and drinking beer with my cousins and the smell of sunscreen and getting sunburned and OFF and wearing sunglasses and swimming and seeing my siblings (minus Liz 🙁 ) and eating decent food and not wearing shoes and laughing and did I say swimming and the smell of lake and the sun and the breeze in the trees and riding in the boat and not working and hey, swimming and my toes in the sand and nummy drunken sandwiches and the anticipatory drive there and watching the trees turn from oaks and maples into birches and pines and swimming….

i turn 35

May 28, 2014 kate Comments 0 Comment

i was 20 when this song came out. i liked it then, but i feel its relevance now. oh man. 🙁

slowly but surely!

May 21, 2014 kate Comments 0 Comment

excerpt from DS writing because i’m lazy tonight.
My family lived on the farm my dad’s father had purchased in 1944, where we lived from 1979 to 1993. (The farm did stay in the family – we sold it to my cousins.) The house was the original house, falling apart at the seams as well as everywhere else. The kitchen tiles were so old, that a quarter of them were broken and missing from the floor. It was easy to sit on the floor and pick at pieces of tile. The kitchen was large, a real farmhouse kitchen with space for a hutch, woodstove, big kitchen table, fridge, and after a while a gas stove. It also was the place we did most of our living. After suppertime, my dad would quiz my siblings and me on geography, referencing the large, laminated map of the United States that hung on the wall. While our living quarters had definitely seen better days, I took pride in the fact that we were the only family I knew who had a complete encyclopedia.
In addition to the evergreens, we had acres and acres of wooded land full of oaks and maples, as well as a few apple trees. There was a large crabapple tree right outside the kitchen window that bloomed white, frilly flowers in the springtime that I would cut slips of to take to my teacher. It smelled delicious. There were also a couple baking apple trees as well as a few eating apple trees. When I was eight or nine years old, I went out to the baking apple tree, picked them, peeled them, and made a pie using the crust recipe on the back of my mom’s pumpkin pie recipe card. My dad was home, so there was no fear of me starting the house on fire, but when my mom walked in the door that evening, she was completely flabbergasted. So started a love affair with baking.
When we moved in (I was a newborn), the farm had the house, a barn, and a garage on the property. The house was yellow, but early in my life I remember a platoon of painters (all friends, family, and acquaintances, I’m sure) setting up shop on scaffolding surrounding the house, and the house went from the flaking yellow to a barn red color that would define the house for years to come. Whenever my brother, eight years my younger, references that home, he calls it the red house.
We spent many hours playing in the barn, charging up its stairs to the hayloft that didn’t have any hay in it, and playing house. I remember gathering nuts, grass, old vegetables from the garden, and sometimes dirt to pretend to cook – no doubt concocting something brilliant. The big white barn was built by my dad and grandfather, and it was a shock when I woke up one morning and saw the barn was on fire – a raging, huge fire. Firetrucks rolled in the yard and started spraying our house down so the fire wouldn’t spread. The barn and everything inside was lost, as well as a chunk of the large oak tree that defined our playtimes many days toasted. I was devastated when I saw the barn burning, not because it was burning, but because I realized it was probably my fault; we always had candles lit in the hayloft because it was dark in there. I imagined that candle I had burning down to its stub, then the flame licking along the old wooden dresser we sat them on, finally catching and causing complete disaster. I held onto this for years and years, and it was only in the last couple years that my sister and I (she felt as equally guilty) learned from our parents that the fire started in a completely different area than where we had our candles, and that it was most likely the cause of faulty wiring.

why i will never add you as my facebook friend

May 11, 2014 kate Comments 2 comments

the other day i got a facebook friend request from my arch-nemesis from gradeschool. let’s call him bob. i had pictured this moment many times, wondering how long it would take for him to finally send the request; i have quite a few fb friends from gradeschool. in all scenarios, the moment ended with me laughing and ignoring the request.
bob might be a perfectly nice person now, but in kindergarten to fourth grade, he was the bane of my existence. unfortunately, bob was next to me alphabetically, which meant that most of the time, bob and i stood next to each other in line, waited for lunch next to each other, sat next together in class, etc. etc. (i was last for everything. this means i was more often than not in the back of the room, last person in the row of desks. curse you W last name!)
i remember one instance in first grade when i was doing my addition or words or something, and bob started throwing stuff at me, or making stupid faces at me, or something equally annoying. after ignoring him as best i could, i finally turned and waved my hands at him, hopefully getting him to shut up. it just so happened that the teacher decided to face the class at this moment, and there went my name on the chalkboard. (as consolation, bob already had his name on the board, so he got a checkmark. he also got his name on the board quite a bit, whereas my name up there was a rare occurrence.)
what else just made me irate as a 7-year-old was the fact that he couldn’t finish his book-it books EVER. if everyone in a class finished their required book-it books in a month, the class would get a pizza party. everyone’s class got at least one pizza party, but bob never finished the five books in a month required to get the party. meanwhile, the teachers are ADDING dots after my books because i’m reading 5 times the requirements. how aggravating!
my mom tells the story that in third grade or so, i finally went up to the teacher and requested not to sit next to bob anymore. after fourth grade, he was gone from our class and placed in public school.
looking back, i realize that he was just an average little boy who probably had some degree of ADD, but to my gradeschool self, he was the antithesis of everything i stood for in school.
so when i finally got the request and laughed it, i had to tell my mom, who heard about bob every single day i was in school, i’m sure. she said it’s possible bob had a completely different experience than i did and thinks that being fb friends is more than reasonable. furthermore, i had taken a look at his profile (as much as i could), and it looks like he’s a web designer/developer so we would have something in common. this made me reflect for a moment and wonder if maybe i should give him a chance.
nah.
*delete*

central mn: a love story

May 4, 2014 kate Comments 0 Comment

this june marks 2 years that i’ll have been living down in southeastern minnesota again. i grew up here and have now returned. in the 15 years between, i lived in west-central and central minnesota.

i still miss central minnesota.
i miss the trees. i miss the lakes. i miss the cries of loons at night. i miss the sense that we’re all in this together. i miss the notion that 20 miles is not that far, and neither is 80, in all reality. i miss 4-year colleges. i miss the ‘burbs (waite park, sauk rapids, sartell, st. joe, st. augusta). i miss cruising D through st cloud on a friday night. i miss the community. i miss the st. john’s woods. i miss the forested valleys between the hwy. 23 and st. john’s exits on I-94. i miss I-94. i even miss I-94 traffic. i miss the U-turns because it meant there were actually places in st. cloud i wanted to get to. i miss tgifridays and granite city and kay’s kitchen.i miss munsinger garden. weirdly enough, i even miss coborn’s. i miss the awesomely creepy albany cemetery. i miss the trees (did i mention that?). i miss the roads (you really have no idea how wondrous the st. cloud intersections are). i miss the backroads around avon, albany, and holdingford. i miss the trees. i miss the st. cloud library. i miss the DQ in albany. i sorta miss st. cloud superman. i miss how just north of sartell you start to see hints of “up north” with pines and birch trees lining the roads. i miss miss miss it.

now don’t get me wrong – i DO like st. charles. it reminds me a lot of st. joe in a way. i like my house. i like looking out my backyard at the stand of trees. i even like looking out my front yard. i like the fact that the ace in town will sharpen my knives AND cut me a piece of glass.
i have been trying to pin down what it is that is rubbing me wrong about rochester (sorry to my roch readers…), and i may have pinpointed part of what bugs me – it seems like rochester is just a collection of neighborhoods instead of one big city/town that everyone cares about. nate also has said that the income disparity is pretty black and white here, whereas at least in cloud town it sort of gradually increased from one income bracket to the next (and i think STC has a more working-class base).
if st. cloud state, st. ben’s, or st. john’s called me up tomorrow and offered me the same job i’m doing now for the same pay rate, i would seriously consider taking one of them up on their offer. if they offered me more money? absolutely.
maybe i’ll be back someday.

happy 10-year blogiversary!

March 12, 2014 kate Comments 1 comment

ten years ago. 2004. i had just moved out from a bad living situation and was renting a one-bedroom from a nice lady landlord. branden had a livejournal account, and even though i’d been bugging him to refer me so i could get an account, he declined. “yeah, i don’t want to give it to you if you’re not going to use it.”
10 years later, who’s still blogging? huh branden?
fortunately livejournal opened up for general consumption, and i grabbed an account and started typing 10 years ago today.
10 years ago:

i was in grad school after moving from one bad job to another bad job
had just started seeing a guy i’d eventually marry
was going through a mild quarter-life crisis
still had the same old cat (chasey!)
had only been using the internet for 7 (7!) years
had a two-DVDs/month plan with netflix

my blog has gone through a couple transformations in the past 10 years. i went from a livejournal-hosted blog to a personal website-hosted blog in 2008. i lost a year and a half’s worth of entries in the great blog migration of 2012. my livejournal (house of kate) is still alive, but i’ve deleted everything from it and put it here. and believe it or not, i actually opened up a blogspot blog a year or two before my livejournal, but who knows what the web address is or the date i started it (it was pretty short-lived), so even though i’ve “technically” been blogging for more than 10 years, this is the easily recorded anniversary.
i have two consistent readers i know of for sure: my sisters. thanks to them for at least showing me some traffic. i know there are more of you, but my sisters for sure have read my blog over the past 10 years.
and to celebrate my blogiversary, instead of getting myself a cake, i will give my readers a list of my top ten blogs.

undeniable proof
a bathroom review
the best kind of books
goodwill toward all
it’s hard, jane
christmastime
it was the best of times…
shhh
whenever
home
bonus: TMI Tuesday: 90s edition (read at your own risk)

life in the cheese drawer, it turns out, is cheesy and can keep you stopped up for days.

snow days

February 22, 2014 kate Comments 1 comment

side street in st. charles on saturday afternoon.

i could get used to this 3-day weekend schtick pretty quick here. this past friday was the 3rd snow/cold day RCTC has had this semester. that’s all within 2 months. word in the office is that a whole day off for weather is virtually unheard of, so this is how we know this winter has been gross.
in my whole four years at st. ben’s, we didn’t have one single snow day. if i was lucky, we might’ve had a late start, but probably not since i can’t remember anything like that. while i was in high school, the governor himself closed public schools 3 times, so we had that going for us.
so what is up with the weather anyway? after the first cold snap, the weather dude on mpr was saying that would be the last of the cold weather we’d see this year. then we had a couple more. after the last one, my coworker, who owns a dairy farm, said the long-term forecast showed no more cold snaps. guess what? it’s supposed to get down to -15 this next week on an overnight.
they (the ubiquitous they) say that this is the coldest winter in thirty years. i am one of those people who is in the mindset of, “oh, it’s below 40 degrees? it’s cold.” cold is cold. doesn’t matter if it’s 32 or -32 – it’s all the same to me. my gas bill says otherwise, and i thank the gods above and below that i bought a new-construction with new insulation.
speaking of cold and snow, i’m off to watch late-night olympics, which are taking place in not-cold sochi. what a joke.

growing up in the faux country

February 16, 2014 kate Comments 1 comment

inspired by a thoughtcatalog list on great things about growing up on a farm, i’d like to introduce my top ten things about growing up on a faux farm (a couple of which are duplicated from the article).

1. chasing fireflies

late summer months in southern minnesota means you get to see some fireflies. my sibs and dad and i spent more than our fair share of time capturing the little blinky guys.

2. horse troughs

oh, there is nothing like filling up one of these bad boys with cold water from the hose on a hot summer day. usually the water was so cold that we had to let it sit a day before climbing into the old horse trough we had. poor man’s swimming pool, is what it was. but it was glorious.

3. drinking from a hose in the summertime

yep, there is nothing that beats drinking from a hose in the summertime. or running through a sprinkler. or filling up horse troughs (see above).

4. the space

living on a farm means having a lot of space. we ran around like hooligans on the farm for most of the summer months, not giving two hoots about running on to anyone else’s property because guess what? we had enough space that we didn’t have to worry about anyone else’s property.

5. the smell of springtime

ah, this could be a bit controversial, but in the springtime when the snow begins to melt and things become a bit slushy, you know it’s truly spring when you can start to smell the cow manure melting from the surrounding fields and pastures.

6. privacy

(see space above.) one plus to having the space to run around like hooligans is that we didn’t have to worry about being decent or dressed all the time. ha!

7. bonfires

anytime i want to have a fire these days, i have to drag out my fire pit and set it up in my driveway. in the country, all you have to do is head out on the back forty where all the brush you’ve been throwing in a pile all year has collected and set the pile ablaze. we’d have bonfire parties!

8. the creek running through the pasture

there was a creek that ran through our pasture and also our aunt and uncle’s pasture a mile north of us. those creek times were some of the best times. in the winter, we headed down to the pasture, laced on our ice skates, and took a few turns around the creek. in the summertime, on more than one occasion we headed out to our relatives’ creek (bystepping the cows) and built little waterfalls that flowed down a silty hill and into a shallow area of the creek.

9. barn cats

not much to say here! one can’t have too many barn cats. (my uncle squire was a huge proponent of the barn cat. he got many “schmeichels” from a few of our so-called ferals.)

10. sunsets over the field

you can’t really expound upon perfection.

i would like to say that none of these images are mine EXCEPT the final sunset one.

my favorite olympic moment

February 15, 2014 kate Comments 0 Comment

so during this olympics, i like to wax eloquent about the olympics. i’ve already made a stink about human rights in russia, and i would like to look a little more into the IOC, but let me take a break from serious stuff and share my favoritest olympic moment.
[as an aside, if you want to see how i feel about primetime olympic events, i am a pretty vocal tweeter during events. you can follow me over @prairey on twitter. i mostly tweet through skating events, but i will also comment occasionally on snowboarding, skiing, skeleton, etc…]
back to the task at hand. i’ve seen some pretty intense skating upsets. michelle kwan never winning, the kerrigan/harding mess, oksana bayul winning over that whole mess, elvis stojko never winning. but my favorite moment came during the summer olympics.
the gymnastics team event is to the summer games as skating is to winter for me. and in the wallace household, you sat your butt in the living room and watched and cheered the olympians (i care about NO OTHER SPORTS).
in 1996 in atlanta, shannon miller was the big name, but there’s only one name you remembered after the team event. it was the final rotation for the US, the final athlete, and the points were so close that there was no room for error. kerri strug got ready for the vault. bela karolyi, former soviet coach, was the coach for the gymnastics team (and i think he should be EVERYONE’s coach, really). kerri did her first vault.
and didn’t stick her landing.
she got up and was limping. OMG.
we were so close to beating russia, and now our last hope was injured. aahhhhh.
she took her place for her second run, sucked it up and ran. vault, and wonder of wonders, she STUCK THE LANDING. you could not believe the uproar in our household. amazing! bela ended up carrying kerri off the mats.
this was brought up to me all over again because there is a commercial running during this olympics that shows this, and i get goosebumps all over again each time i see the commercial.