design family home projects

Bringing Sunshine Into the Kitchen

The year is off to a rollicking start. I wrote one post at the beginning of January and here we are already, staring at the end of the month. I sense this year is going to fly by. I’ve had numerous ideas for blog posts, but no time to write them, so I’m going to see if I can write a couple of them today. First up, another home improvement project Hubby and I completed…

Continue reading

action challenge observations

Earth Is Sick of Our Sh!t

In Central Minnesota, we had been having an incredibly mild winter after a couple of serious fall blizzards, after which the temps got so warm that the snow quickly melted. Very little snow fell in December and January. I’d say we only have about a foot of snow on the ground today (February 22, 2021). Our mild winter became bitterly cold for about two weeks in February, with the temps being in the teens and…

Continue reading

history pragmatic historian

2019 Minnesota Historic Preservation Conference – Preserving Landscapes

On September 12 and 13 (Friday the 13th, with nothing untoward happening), 2019, the Minnesota Historic Preservation Conference was held in St. Cloud, Minnesota. This conference is held annually by the State Historic Preservation Office (SHPO) and is meant to bring together people who care about historic preservation in order to exchange ideas and learn new methods for encouraging preservation in our communities. To that end, the Preservation Conference changes location each year and is…

Continue reading

history pragmatic historian

Tree Planting for Planetary Preservation

Johnny Appleseed – The Mythic Tree-Planting Hero Remember learning about Johnny Appleseed as a kid in elementary school? I do. For my readers who may not have heard about Johnny Appleseed, he was a guy from the past who, we were told, wore a tin pot on his head and walked all over the place planting apple trees in America. It’s a pretty vague mythic sort of tale. Where did this guy walk? In my…

Continue reading

observations

Those People Who Always Know When Rain Is Needed

When you live in a place like Minnesota that gets four distinct seasons per year, you tend to be attuned to weather fluctuations, simply because it is always changing. Although, if you’ve lived here long enough, you can get all Buddhist about the weather because of the constant change. You stop paying attention to it and go with the flow. (Yeah, that’s not very mindful, is it? The Buddhist acceptance of constant change is cancelled…

Continue reading