Say What?

It's a breezy morning out on the deck but I'm mostly shielded from the west wind. Toby is chilling next to me. We've been getting in some nice walks with Charlie lately. We managed a total of 5.7 miles (9 km)  one day recently (split up between two separate walks). That's a lot for a boy of nearly 14 years but he moves right along and sets the pace for us. I received the results of my 23andMe DNA analysis. I'm half Finn! No surprise there, and also no surprise was the finding that I share 13.4% of my DNA with Emily in Montreal, Canada, which puts us at the higher end of 1st cousin/niece range. (There's a backstory to what I'm writing about and it can be found here .) Emily and I share 1001 cM of our DNA. If you enlarge the chart to the right (Thanks, Emily, for more fully sussing out these details.) you'll see that we again fall into the upper range for a half-niece relationship. Unless our findings are some sort of freakish occurrence I'd say th...

What a beautiful morning! I'm sitting out on the deck with the sun partially shining through our pergola. The air is full of birds singing and Coldplay, Parachutes, is on low so as not to drown them out.  Tammy and I have been in overdrive for the past several days checking off things on our to-do list both inside and outside. Our gardens and assorted flower beds are mostly planted so I'm giving myself permission to put my feet up and soak it in. I need to do this more often. Tammy is inside with the Sunday paper, a cup of coffee and a pen working on the sudoku puzzle. And it's Mother's Day. Rachel will be coming by in a couple of hours. We have plans to go out for sushi before visiting Tammy's mother in her nursing home in Farmington. I have a 3:04 tee time to golf with Bob later this afternoon so it's going to be another full day. I made it out on Tuesday for a longish ride up to Rogers and back. It's been at least a couple of years since I've done...

I put out one of our hummingbird feeders a few days ago in anticipation of the little flyers' return. I'm maybe a little early but not by much. It's my understanding that hummingbirds return to the same place each year so I want to be sure to not do anything to cause them to set up home elsewhere. For any former controllers visiting here not connected on Facebook, you'll be interested to know that 3 controllers from Minneapolis Center retired this past week: Brian Vance, Kris Henderson, and Scott Goerdt. Brian and Kris's retirements were expected but Scott's, not so much. He told me he woke up a couple of Mondays ago and decided then and there that he was done (I'm somewhat paraphrasing). There were lots of smiles on their faces at Celts Pub in Farmington Wednesday afternoon as a group of us gathered to congratulate them and tip back a beer or two. There's a new mountain bike trail coming to Lakeville between I-35W and Lake Marion. I showed up Saturd...

My 4-month-old MacBook Pro faltered on me a week ago. I noticed it was taking an unusually long time to boot-up and also the Touch ID was no longer working. I worked with Apple support and they determined it was likely a hardware issue. I brought it in to the Apple Store at Mall of America on Friday and got it back Tuesday afternoon. That was quick I thought. They replaced the motherboard and it's functioning fine now but for whatever reason, they reformatted the SSD (Solid State Drive). I spent most of yesterday getting it back up to speed. I still have a ways to go. We've been with Verizon since before the advent of flip-phones but our relationship with them has come to an end. We've switched cellphone providers and are now with Google's Project Fi . I'm especially liking my Pixel XL phone and its ability to stay connected to wifi—a problem that continued to plague my LG G4 for the nearly 18 months I had it. Rachel is traveling in South Dakota this week so I...

“God of mercy and compassion, you never neglect your children in need. So bless us with your healing presence that we might remain by your side on this road of sorrows. In Jesus’ holy name, Amen.” I was in church last Sunday morning and the above prayer was recited in unison. My mind immediately leaped from where I was standing next to Tammy to the photos I'd seen earlier in the week of starving people in South Sudan—horrific images, many of them children. It made no sense at all that we were saying this prayer with full knowledge of the suffering being endured by some. (And now the Trump* administration is intent on slashing funding to these desperate people so we can grow our already obscenely large military even larger. Trump* supporters—is this what you voted for?) I can't tell you anything about the rest of Sunday morning's service because I never got beyond the line about God never neglecting his children in need. As we walked out to our car I considered asking T...

I stumbled onto a kinda cool website recently where you can search out a myriad of streaming radio stations around the globe while brushing up on your knowledge of geography at the same time. Here's a link . There's a house a few blocks away that has a sign in the front yard that encourages people to "Love your neighbor". I first noticed it about the same time a Muslim family moved in a few doors down from the home with the sign. Someone vandalized the sign recently by wrecking the metal frame supporting it. I hesitate to read too much into that. I was walking Toby and Charlie Sunday morning when I noticed the homeowner out front—I commented to him that I liked his sign while expressing disappointment that someone apparently thought differently. He quickly went to his car's trunk and gave me an extra one he had, minus the metal support. He said a church in St Paul was giving them out. I've been taking the pups on some extra long walks lately—walks in exces...

I'm not vain and neither am I considering flying my Learjet to Nova Scotia to see a total eclipse of the sun but I'm pondering the question: how far would I drive to see a total solar eclipse? I may be about to find out. This very rare event  in a city near me is going to happen on August 21st, 2017 and it will put Lakeville in an area about 80% eclipsed. To get to where there will be a total eclipse I'd need to drive to Lincoln, NE., a little more than a 6 hour drive . I think I'm off that day, and I think I'm in! I checked this site for future total solar eclipses for the rest of my life and it appears the one in August will in all likelihood be my last (and first) chance to experience one. Missing out on it would be even more upsetting than not realizing The Paper Kites were in town last Saturday night at First Avenue! Our Google Pixel phones are on their way after a wait of a few weeks while they were sold out. Rachel dropped her LG G4 in the tub last month...