A bridge too far

I don't know why but when life is too hard to figure out, I've always headed for the shore, whether it's the camp in Vermont, or Plum Island, or Hampton Beach or -- as befits my land-locked locale -- the Mississippi River. (Click on the image to see full sizes)

Reports from back East have not been good. Carolie's dad is not doing well and there's a fair amount of sighing going on at my house. And I walk to the river.

The Wakota Wabasha Bridge is the best bridge in a city of bridges, especially if you're walking.



It doesn't look like much, perhaps, but the designers of this bridge knew what they were doing. The stairs that take you from the bridge deck down to Raspberry Island, leave you out over the river.



Never been scared of heights? Try these stairs.







Raspberry Island is a lovely little spot below the city, along the river, which is low right now and is only this high because of high rainfall out in the western part of the state. The water made its way to the Minnesota River and eventually to here.



I can sit in the sun and ponder chucking it all and living on a boat on the river:



Or whether the guy in this little house atop the railroad bridge has the best job in the world ...



... or the worst.



I can consider the merits of swimming in this river, which I still consider America's sewer...



Or I can just sit and try to prove the existence of a loving God with his plan to make a good man -- and a good man's daughter -- suffer.

I always find myself heading for water to make a question like that make sense. Two-thirds of the planet is covered with water.

I don't think that's going to be enough.

The great deck rebuilding project

My mother has said she feels as though summer is over on July 4th (this year might be the exception since she lives in New England and they haven't had anything resembling summer weather yet), and being genetically linked and all, I could hear the tick, tick, tick of another summer slipping away without completing one of my long-standing projects. I'll bet it's been six year since I started rebuilding the deck.

Of course, when I started I didn't intend to rebuild the deck. I was replacing some rotted stairs at the bottom of the deck, but that led me to notice the railings were wobbly, which led me to noticing some planks were rotted which led me to just rebuild the darn thing (except for the joists which were fine).

So this holiday weekend, I finished the bottom deck and then removed the top, added a new footing and beam and just before work Monday morning, I screwed down the last plank and cut the overhang.



Now I need to make stringers for the stairs (they'll be much wider than the old ones) connecting the upper and lower deck, then add posts and railings.

Where did summer go?

The Senate race ends

My family and friends from out of town can stop asking me if we have a senator yet.

Here was my on-air analysis of the end of the Minnesota Senate race.

Outed

The talented people at work have designed a new Web site, upon which my daily offerings appear.

As with any new endeavor, there's a few kinks to be worked out.

Spiderwort in the morning

This is the most interesting thing in the garden these days. I bought the Spiderwort plant and put it in a container on the deck. The flowers only unfurl in the morning, along the lines of a Morning Glory.



I like the fact a bumblebee was at the Spiderwort this morning. Click the images for the full effect.

The afternoon walk

One great thing about working in St. Paul, is the Mississippi River is just a short walk away from the downtown headquarters of Minnesota Public Radio.

My new favorite activity at midafternoon is to walk over to Rasberry Island and sit on the benches and watch the world go by.

Garden therapy

I have always said -- only to myself -- that the more I'm enjoying work, the worse my gardens are. This year, my gardening is going very well, despite a drought that doesn't seem to want to quit anytime soon. We're getting a few showers in the Twin Cities today, but only enough to ruin some people's plans, not enough to do any good.

Here it is June 6, and some of the perennials that should be out in mid-May are just unfolding. It's been that kind of year.

Here's the spring tour.

I had hoped to expand the perennial bed in the front yard, but money being tight and the economy being what it is, a kid in college, a deck project to finish, and an airplane engine loan to pay, it doesn't seem like the right time.



It's going to be a big year for the delphinium.



The Japanese lilac is the last to bloom. Unfortunately, it's season is just about done.



I've got a lot more flowers on these cool-colored iris that my mother sent me a few years ago.



And the peony are just starting to bloom. This was my grandmother's bush. She would've been 113 on Thursday.



OK, hummingbirds, where are you?



These peonies -- one white and one pink -- aren't quite ready to show themselves.



You can't see it very well, but Carolie bought me two hydrangea bushes for my birthday. I'm branching out, as it were, from gardens on the edges of things and starting to try to develop one in the middle of the backyard. It seems silly to have a big patch of grass back there now that the kids are gone. Better to have a nice "nature walk."



The original garden, back by edge of the estate, isn't much to look at anymore. Trees have grown so much that it's shady most of the time. Still, I planted some beans and radishes and corn, all of which sprouted. The rabbits have pretty much eaten everything except the radishes, however.



And there's not much to the yellow iris garden around the apple tree. I spent an hour or so last week weeding this. There's also some bee balm in there... somewhere.



Now that part of the deck has been rebuilt, I'm trying a little container gardening this year.



I even threw some extra radishes, beans, and corn in this one. I realize it's too much for one container, but what the heck. By the way, my corn is now -- technically -- knee high.



We'll check in a few months and see how they all did.

When you say 'Cleveland', you say 'pathetic'

The Cleveland Indians have a habit of coming to Minnesota when it's Patrick's birthday. Yesterday was that day and Patrick and Sean enjoyed -- presumably -- a 10-1 Indian win. Today was my day to take Patrick and, of course, the Indians lost 11-3.



I got to buy Patrick a beer for the first time, hoping he will not realize -- any time soon, anyway -- that the best way to enjoy the Indians anymore... is fully inebriated.



It was a gorgeous day for baseball, except in Minnesota where we take our baseball (at least until next season) indoors. Afterwards, a stop for the entertainment on the plaza.



And then home for the traditional presentation of the toolbox.

Happy birthday to me

It's birthday #55. I headed outside shortly after sun-up to thin out the radishes and the next thing I know, I was hand trimming (with shears) the lawn, weeding the iris garden, cleaning the laundry room, weeding the gardens around the deck, planting two new hydrangea bushes that Carolie bought me, and washing windows. I like accomplishing things on the list. Oh, and eventually I thinned out the radishes.

It was a great birthday. Sean and Patrick both stopped by. They're unbelievably funny kids men.

I got all I wanted for presents when we went over to the park and hit the ball around. I like catching a ball in the outfield once every 20 years or so.

Patrick turns 21 on Wednesday. I had one beer left (Hey, Tim Pawlenty! How about getting government out of our lives and letting me buy beer in Minnesota on Sundays?). I gave it to Patrick.



Somehow we got into a discussion about testosterone. Carolie had some test with fingers to determine who's got more. She does. She says the less testosterone you have, the most anxiety and worry you have. So that explains that.



Sean arrived, we grabbed some Famous Dave's BBQ and had a great lunch. Why yes, that is the famous 'bench' that I just sanded and refinished.



This photo I took by hanging the camera on a twig by its wrist strap...

Biking

Yet another video of me doing something I used to do when I was younger. I'm sensing a theme here.

Naturalizing with daffodils

I'm back in Minnesota but wanted to share a tip from my gardening mother. She has dandelions daffodils and narcissus sprouting up in remote locations. It looks quite nice.





Here's how she does it: She cuts the dandelions daffodils for bouquets, and then when they wilt and die, she just tosses 'em in spots where she wants them to sprout later. Simple, eh?



"How long will it take before they come up?" I asked.

"I don't know," she said.

The field trip

Where I grew up, my grandmother -- and then my mother -- owned several acres of field abutting a forest owned by, well, we don't really know. The paper companies owned a lot of land around here so maybe they owned it. Nobody seems to know for sure who owns it now, although there are a few survey stakes and ribbons about. But it was a great place to play when I was a kid. We had a couple of horses and cows.

So I went back into the field today to evaluate some of the damage from the December ice storm. My oldest brother planted small evergreens about 40 years ago as part of a 4-H project. The ice storm did them in (photo above).

The field has changed a lot. It's overgrown in many places. Back at the far end, I looked for the rock and tree where our two horses used to stand in the shade on a hot day. It was the only shade in the field.

It took me awhile, but I found it.


But some things never change. The river that runs along the edge of the property -- where we'd go swimming on hot days -- is as beautiful in the spring as I remember, although the fiddleheads and the ladyslippers haven't fully sprouted yet.


Here. Experience it for yourself.

Thank you, global warming

Near 80 degrees in April. A good time to sit outside in New England without fear of a mosquito attack. Here's my sister, Cheryl; my brother-in-law, Willie; and my mother.

Maine: The way life really is

My sister, Cheryl, just showed me this picture she took up in Maine:

Return to Fitchburg - Part two

For people who don't know New England milltowns of the 1900s, they have -- or had -- three faces. The bottom rung was the first- or second-generation immigrant who worked the mills, the middle rung was the small business owners and factory bosses, and also the farmers, and the top rung was the mill owner and city entrepreneur.

It's easy, I think, to look at New England's cities and see only one face these days, but that would be wrong. I happen to like the industrial age, so I'm still taken with the architecture and history of the mills. This one used to be a toy manufacturer.


This was a cardboard box plant...

If you had a key on a chain, it probably came through Fitchburg. One of my college summer jobs was working at Independent Lock (Ilco), helping them move stuff out of the plant, on its way to its new home in North Carolina. When John Edwards was running for president and bemoaned the loss of jobs in North Carolina to Mexico, I didn't care much. Whatever Mexico did to North Carolina, North Carolina did to Massachusetts first.

But if you turn your focus from the industrial city, you can drive for 3 minutes out of town, and be in the "country" part of the city, and be reminded about New England's common rural beauty, marred though it presently is from last December's massive ice storm.


Dairy farming was big here, much of it by Finnish immigrants, much of it by a few centuries of colonists. But all of it was on land in which you still can't stick a shovel in the ground without hitting a rock, a fact which led to thousands of miles of stone walls.


The fields are woods now, which makes Fitchburg a great place for people with money looking for their homes on a hill in the woods. You can have a backyard with a view of Mt. Wachusett, the second-largest mountain in Massachusetts. From the top, you can see Boston, just 50 miles away.


If I were in a plane now, and we got up another couple of thousand feet, you'd see the ocean thataway...


On my drive around, I also took note of this:




This is known as "the rock" on Rollstone Hill. For generations, it was tradition for the senior class at Fitchburg High School (that long brick building with the white spire at the center top of the picture at the top of the page was my high school; it's closed now) to paint it with FHS and then the class year underneath -- in my case 1972.

It was a source of great pride and it was a pain in the neck to paint it because that rockface is a sheer drop and it's slick from decades of paint. There were holes for stakes at the bottom along which we'd tie a rope. On the lone time I went up to help paint in my senior year, that rope saved one classmate. He started skidding down the face and grabbed the rope shortly before he would've fallen off.

As loyal Red Raiders, we would defend "the rock" at all costs against the heathens from Leominster High School, who -- around the time of the annual Thanksgiving football game between the two schools -- would try to deface it with gallons of blue paint.

Now, however, it is just another giant hunk of graffiti. When did that change? I'll tell you when. 1972. In that year, not only did we have to defend it against Leominster High School, but also against the Fitchburg High School Class of 1973, who often painted over the "72" and made it a "73." The pricks.

So today, I notice there were a couple of kids up on "the rock."


I'll bet they have no idea of the history upon which they stood.

Return to Fitchburg

After 1,390.5 miles of driving over two days, I arrived in the ancestral homeland -- Massachusetts -- on Tuesday night.

And how do I know I was back in Fitchburg? I could buy a cup of Dunkin' Donuts coffee.


... and a copy of the Boston Globe. It might be going broke, but it's still a hell of a paper. Today's editorial page was miles better than the Minneapolis Star Tribune. It actually took a stand on important issues.

Every stop in Fitchburg has a good memory. The Dunkin' is on the site of the old MaryAnn Donuts, where the family would stop for a treat after Friday night swim at the Y. It's right across the street from Crocker Field, where we used to watch the Fitchburg High School Red Raiders football team, from the spot just in front of the WEIM location in the pressbox, the better to have our obscenities broadcast to the world.

Every view is like that. This one. My old elementary school -- the brick building -- and the paper mills that made the city hum back in the day when this country not only had a manufacturing base, but a thriving one. I could tell you, I think, what every building in this city used to be. That yellow one use to be Godroy Wholesalers.


It's a city chiseled into the granite hills, and a welcome antidote to two days of driving across the flatland of the nation's midsection.

Fitchburg has its problems. I could barely see as I drove in last night -- being rainy and all -- because the city has turned off most of its street lights to save money.

It got hit -- bad -- by an ice storm this winter. Residents have cleaned up the debris and put it out by the road where they've been told the city will pick it up. But nobody has picked it up and it's almost May.



I haven't had a chance to look at the damage around my mother's house yet. Yes, this is the roof I fell off of last year (from the peak).


Most of my work today was spent indoors, rewiring a nursery light system for my mother's flowers and vegetable seedlings in the basement. I got to see the route from Ashburnham St., to Home Depot several times, however. And she's good to go and should be in good shape to get a head start on growing other crops if Massachusetts ever legalizes marijuana.

The workout

I'm driving back to Massachusetts from Minnesota starting tomorrow but my currency for renting at Thunderbird Aviation runs out at the end of the month. So today was my last chance to get in the air.

Unfortunately, the atmosphere was extremely unstable, as befits flyover country in the spring. There was rain showers, lows clouds (1400 above ground level --AGL, I'd guess) and wind. Lots of wind. About 19 miles per hour gusting to 30.

In my younger flying days, I'd probably have canceled, but these days I want to be sure I'm up for challenging weather. This isn't a stupid decision, mind you. I remain a conservative pilot. But I also know that flying cross country -- as I hope to do in my RV-7A someday -- means being ready for short bursts of crappy weather, while I head for the safe harbor at a nearby airport.

So I launched from Flying Cloud in a Piper Warrior. They apparently didn't think anyone would be flying today because they were all in the hangar. On climb-out, I realized why. It was a rollercoaster of turbulent air and wind sheer.

With wind out of the northwest at 330, I headed for Airlake in Farmington, around the Minneapolis-St. Paul Class B airspace, with a thought to heading up to Fleming Field, with its runway oriented 340 for some mild crosswind practice on a relatively short field.

Approaching Airlake, I flew a midfield crosswind to check the windsock -- which I couldn't find -- saw a Sundowner in the runup area and considered turning a left downwind to try a more severe crosswind. But a KingAir announcing he was on the ILS approach (note to IFR pilots: This tells the VFR pilot NOTHING. Would it kill you to say how far you are from the airport?), so I decided to continue heading south, gain some altitude and then head northeast to South St. Paul.

As I headed in that direction, however, I saw a raincloud ahead and knew there was no going around it. I'd have to turn. Before I knew it, however, I was in the cloud with no reference outside. I knew what had to be done -- a 180 degree turn while I flew by instruments (no, I'm not instrument rated, but I'm well trained for these sorts of unintentional flights into instrument meteorological conditions). The attitude indicator indicated a right turn of about 30 degrees and when I emerged from the cloud, I was a little steeper than I would've liked. But I was in control, not panicked, and ready for a long straight-in to runway 30 at Airlake.

The problem with the Warrior is their rudders aren't big enough for serious crosswind, and it took all I had to stay lined up with the runway, with all of its lights blazing. The landing wasn't bad at all for someone who hasn't flown since January, so I returned to try another one around the pattern. This time the more stabilized approach yielded a better result. And the gusty conditions abated about a 1/2 mile short of the runway. My airspeed said about 70 knots, the GPS said my groundspeed was around 50. It took me forever to get to the threshold of the runway.

On the second-climb-out, I noticed a bird heading toward my window about 5 seconds before it quickly veered off to my left. He missed me -- or did I miss him -- by about 15 feet. Now I remember why I don't like flying in Minnesota in the spring -- unstable air and lots of birds.

The third takeoff was my mistake. I should've been making sure I was ready for takeoff while I waited for a State Police helicopter to depart. If I had, I would've noticed I hadn't set two notches of flaps for takeoff. And when I bounced off the runway and assumed my normal attitude, the stall horn went off. Again, I knew what to do: push the nose down and then figure out the problem., which made itself apparent pretty quickly.

The subsequent landing had a decent approach, but I bounced back into the air on landing. In gusty winds, getting the airspeed just right is a tricky proposition. Although it wasn't a good landing -- heck, it wasn't any landing at all -- I was proud of what I did next. I firewalled the throttle and retracted a notch of flaps , the tires touched the ground briefly and I was back in the air for a go-around. The decision-making was sound, the execution was good. We pilots tell ourselves we're not supposed to try to save a bounced landing, but we do and there are plenty of accident reports to prove it.

After an uneventful landing, I tried heading up to South St. Paul again. I had to snake between some rainstorms and heavy clouds, and I was right up against the Class B as I made my way to the Mississippi and then a long final for runway 34. I stayed high because there are neighborhoods all around KSGS, and the landing was relatively uneventful. With the headwind I had, flying the glideslope would be a disaster if the engine quit.

I considered stopping in at my hangar to mess with the RV-7A project a bit, but I didn't want to waste a lot of money taxiing around airports, so I headed back and took off for the trip back to Flying Cloud.

The tower said winds were 350 (NNW) for runway 36, but I think it was farther off the nose than that because I again needed quite a bit of rudder. If I hadn't carried extra speed to account for the gusty conditions, I wouldn't have floated quite so far down the runway, perhaps, but since Thunderbird is located off the departure end anyway.

And it's not like there was much traffic around any of theairports I visited today. It's Monday, and some pilots just don't like a good workout that leaves you tired.

Rain, clouds, winds, gusts, birds, stall horns, airspace: $196.

The things we don't know

I'm as cynical as they come, and this is a good test to determine if you are, too.