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Welcome to echsdoc. In this blog, written for former students and old friends, I mask the actual name of the school I work at by the name of Salt Mine High School. Welcome all SMHS grads and other visitors of good will.

By the way, my username refers to my own high school in Wisconsin, Eau Claire Memorial High School, known in my day still as ECHS, naturally.
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Jul. 10th, 2009 @ 11:38 am 7-10 Second missed animal: a skunk
Driving has been interesting out here. The other day I barely missed that deer that jumped in front of the car. Yesterday I saw something moving on the lane stripe. It was a pretty black and white skunk! I swerved to the right and missed it, leaving it for someone else to flatten. I do NOT want skunk smell on the car. Is it true that you use tomato juice to diminish the skunk odor?

Clouds came on last night, and about 12:30 the rumbling began, then more rumbling, pretty loud. Then the rain, pretty heavy. I lay in bed and just listened to the patter on the roof until I fell asleep. Rain falling on the cabin is different from a house. The cabin is bare rafters, so the rain is not muted at all. If there is a fire dying in the fireplace (not the case last night) I can watched the flickering above and listen to the rain. If there is someone sleeping at my head in the other bedroom (no ceilings in the rooms), I can chat or talk quietly in the sort of magical atmosphere. Last night, no flickering, no talking, but very nice feeling all the same.

Nice weather today. I am reading quite a bit.
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Jul. 10th, 2009 @ 11:36 am Interesting words
"American women expect to find in their husbands the perfection that English women only hope to find in their butlers."
W. Somerset Maugham
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Jul. 9th, 2009 @ 08:50 am Newsless days
At the lake there are literally days wherein no actual news occurs. I read most of the day, shifting from the beautiful weather and the dock to the rocker in the cabin. When I first took my chair down to the shore, I startled my mother duck. She was out of sight, so when I got there, she zoomed her seven ducklings to a safe distance. At exactly that moment the great blue heron flew low out of the pond and headed over the lake. So I got two more of my resident count of inhabitants at the same time.

Perfect sleeping weather so far.

My new little tv gets one channel: PBS. That is sort of cosmic humor, don't you think?
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Jul. 9th, 2009 @ 08:31 am Interesting words
"Fleas can be taught nearly anything that a Congressman can."
Mark Twain
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Jul. 8th, 2009 @ 09:17 am 7-8
This feels like the first real morning at the lake. I woke early to the brouhaha of the birds singing away, then went back to sleep. When I did get up I puttered around the cabin and made breakfast with WHWC on the radio in the cabin and a piercingly beautiful songbird just outside the cabin. This is one of those perfect sunny days in which the sun is warm on the skin and the breeze is cool on the skin. Now having breakfasted, I am at Jitters, the village coffee shop, where I was greeted like an old friend as I discovered that I was buying my last mocha on my card. Tomorrow's is free!

Yesterday's adventure was a drive to Rice Lake, where I bought a small digital tv, hoping that it would bring something in from the air waves. When I got it put together, I found two digital stations. Only one, the PBS station was passable. They both broke up frequently, but the picture, when it stabilized was crystal clear (Clear video up here has never happened before).

Last night for the second night I found myself driving towards an amazing moon. Large, yellow red (like one of those cheeses with wine in it). It just floated on the horizon above the trees of the forest. I had nobody to say "look at the moon" to. I am going to move slowly today.
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Jul. 8th, 2009 @ 09:15 am Interesting words
"I like him and his wife. He is so ladylike, and she is such a perfect gentleman."
Mark Twain
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Jul. 8th, 2009 @ 08:30 am ancesters
Yesterday was my Little Gram's birthday, Dad's mother. She was born in Hyssna, Sweden on July 7th, 1878. She helped raise us kids after Mom died. She herself died on April 7th, 1971, after a long life. She would be 131. Can I understand that?

Today is her father's birthday, John Bowman, born July 8, 1844. She said when she was little she would kid her father that she was one day older than he was. She was not one for kidding, generally. What would that make him today? 165.

I write this so as not to forget it.
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Jul. 7th, 2009 @ 12:10 pm July 7
I am at a table in the village library, where there is excellent wi-fi. The drive was fine, except for the inertia that goes on for three days. The cabin was in excellent shape when I got in last night. Beautiful day today, so I am doing first day stuff, including my bid trip to the grocery, where I try to buy enough to last me for most of the stay. Pretty tired, though.

In Seattle I heard on the electric radio that a spray bottle with rubbing alcohol in it can be used to handle pesky mosquitoes. If they get near you, just spray them as they fly. If this is true, then I have wasted most of my life, mosquito-wise. I got the bottle this morning. I will let you know how it works.
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Jul. 7th, 2009 @ 12:09 pm Interesting words
"Bernard Shaw is an excellent man; he has not an enemy in the world, and none of his friends like him."
Oscar Wilde
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Jul. 6th, 2009 @ 12:06 pm Interesting words
"I readily see in Emerson...a gaping flaw. It was the insinuation that had he lived in those days when the world was made, he might have offered some valuable suggestions."
Herman Melville.
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Jul. 5th, 2009 @ 07:52 pm Don't say I didn't warn you...
...but when you spend time in Dickinson, North Dakota, DON'T eat at an ethnic restaurant. Really. I have tried the Chinese and the Mexican, and they are the worst examples I have ever encountered, though bad in a kind of naive and innocent way. Today I tried the Mexican one, and I swear the enchiladas were simple ground beef wrapped in lefse and covered with bright red Heinz ketchup. It was so unbelievable that I ate it with pleasure. Moreover, the place was full of people enjoying their "Mexican" meals.

Let me be clear, though, I like Dickinson very much. When here, you should stay with the tried and true franchises: Perkins, KFC, Macdonald's, Applebees, etc. Don't try anything LOCAL!
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Jul. 5th, 2009 @ 07:52 am Interesting words
"The Right Honorable Gentleman's smile is like the silver fittings on a coffin."
Benjamin Disraeli on Sir Robert Peel
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Jul. 4th, 2009 @ 08:57 am Interesting words
"CONFIDENTIAL to terribly hurt. Forget it. You've lived this long without Wedgwood dishes. Ben Franklin was right when he said, 'If you want to know the true character of people, watch them divide an inheritance.'"
Ann Landers
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Jul. 3rd, 2009 @ 08:40 pm Pretty ready
I have most of the packing done. Well, I have as usual the overpacking done. I just cannot stop myself from taking too much both ways on these drives. I know that anything left here can be bought there, but my brain won't act on that knowledge. I have to admit that I partly overpack so that I can utterly minimize trips to the laundromat, but the real impulse comes from my not wanting to be caught short. I even take two laptops, just in case. Ah, well, I should get used to being me, after all these years.

I do think I am better prepared this year than in others.
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Jul. 3rd, 2009 @ 09:41 am Interesting words
"I started out thinking of America as highways and state lines. As I got to know it better, I began to think of it as rivers. Most of what I love about the country is a gift of the rivers: birchbark canoes and cottonwood pirogues, steamboats and trading scows; Huckleberry Finn; blue herons and bald eagles and snowy egrets; the Grand Canyon and the Hudson palisades; the walnut-brown brick houses of the rich old merchants up on the bluffs, the tar paper shacks of the fishermen down on the flats; the sound of whistles, bells and foghorns in the night; jazz and crawfish and ferryboats and covered bridges. None of them would be there, in the country or in our memories, without the rivers."
Charles Kuralt
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Jul. 2nd, 2009 @ 10:44 am Theramin
I met two grads from 2002 and 2004 last night down at the brand new Starbucks in UVillage. We sat outside and talked for three hours, something that I can't recall doing for many years. These are two wonderful young adults. I have been in regular touch with her, but needed update on his daily life. His current personal interest is the theramin, an almost forgotten "musical" instrument. It made the eerie sound you remember from old sci-fi and horror movies. oooeeeeeoooooiiiiiiiooo, just when the monster was ready to leap from the dark and stick his fangs in you. Remember? The great thing about the theramin is that it is played without touching it. You wave your hands before it, and the movement controls the sound. Anyway, BO has made his own theramin, even made it polyphonic. It is all really interesting and very representative of his unique and independent intelligence.

Who would ever think of making his own theramin? BO would.
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Jul. 2nd, 2009 @ 09:55 am Interesting words
"The transition from journalism to fiction is always a precarious trip, for journalism foists dangerous illusions on the incipient fiction writer. The daily journalist is trained to forget about yesterday and focus on today...and so every new day becomes for him a tabula rasa. This is deadly. The fiction writer who puts little or no value on yesterday, or the even more distant past, might just as well have Alzheimer's disease. Serious fiction, especially the novel, has time as its essence and memory as its principal tool."
William Kennedy
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Jul. 1st, 2009 @ 10:23 am One bite of the apple
I am staying home until Saturday so I can go to my grandson's 4th birthday party. That keeps me here a week longer than usual, as my regular departure is around the 29th of June. I have enjoyed the beautiful weather but not taken much advantage of it. Instead I have tackled tackleable tasks around the house.

My wife and I have a different approach to the concept. She likes to imagine big jobs. "Clean out the garage." Do a thorough re-do of the den." They are goals that are sure to leave you depressed at your inability actually to do those things. My approach is to try to carve out a single doable task, one that can be done and cleaned up in pretty much a single effort. So I will go through a single pile of old bills, discard the envelopes and stuffers, keep the statements if needed, then toss the trash and put the reserved material away. When I am done, that little piece of the universe is better, and I feel as though I did something.

So yesterday my son and I took two old televisions over to the Ballard Goodwill and recycled them for free. I have two more that will go that way on another day (tossing tv's that go back to our Magnavox from the '70's.) I also went up to the den and pulled out of my huge library (not a joke) a bag of paperbacks. I put in it books that I knew I would never re-read, like Hanson's mysteries, and books that at one time I expected to read, like Dreiser's The Financier. (I don't like Dreiser's prose enough to spend time reading him when my life span is shortening. I will keep An American Tragedy, though, and Sister Carrie.) Then I took the bag up to the University Branch and gave them to the Friends of the Library Book Sale.

The day was a series of spits in the ocean, but they were my spits. Know what I mean?
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Jul. 1st, 2009 @ 10:09 am Interesting words
"For a time I was a true believer in journalism, lived it passionately, gained entry to worlds I had no right to enter, learned how to write reasonably well and rapidly, was never bored by what I was doing, found the work an enduring source of stimulation, met thousands of the crazy people who populate the profession... I loved the tension, the unexpected element of the news, the illusion of being at the center of things when you were really at what approximated the inner lining of the orange peel."
William Kennedy
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Jun. 30th, 2009 @ 09:39 am Interesting words
"The post-Modernists have broadened the definition of mystery fiction. The very notion of what serious fiction is has begun to break down. It's harder now for a serious writer to argue that the element of mystery in a well-written detective story is so different from the mystery in, say, a Donald Barthelme story. Both are engaged in using encoded language, both in communicating a lot more than they appear to be on the surface. Perhaps this will lead to a willingness to see that some writers of genre fiction are also serious writers -- that it's less a question of WHAT a writer is dealing with than of the literary skill he brings to it."
Robin Winks
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