Dog Sitting

A week in which I expect to be close to home a lot.  Here's why:

And here's why with a bit more detail:

We do try as a family to get together for fun stuff.  The 4th of July for instance.  Kids, their spouses, their kids, their dogs.  All the bipeds get along well.  But one of the dogs - a gangly puppy - decided to play really rough with my dog Hank.  It was WWF level of play, if by that you mean Woof, Woof, Lunge.

Well after a day or two of that Gangly Pup was limping.  Somehow she managed to fracture a toe.  I did not know dogs could do that, nor that the treatment involves a splint/cast for six plus weeks.

The problem is that most of the fam was getting ready to head off for a reunion of one of the northerly branches of the tribe.  Leaving me with the long suffering Hank, and his tormentor.  Now suitably chastened and in the Cone of Shame.

It's tough duty.  I'm wiping up floors more than once a day.  Can't really blame the puppy, although I do intone the dreaded words Bad Dog on occasion.  She's disoriented.  Her people have left her.  Hank don't wanna play.  Things look and smell wrong.  There has been thunder, road construction noise and a mailman that comes to the door instead of leaving things out at the mailbox.  Sigh.

Hank and I will manage.  Between feeding, cleaning up, walking and every two hours or so just getting out to the yard on spec, I won't do much more than that.

Mans Best Frenemy sometimes....

Den Four, Buddy.

 Oppressive summer weather kept me inside a bit in late July.  And put me onto some tasks only marginally nicer than sweating and breathing the horrid Canadian smoke that blew in for a while.  Closet cleaning and organizing.   Ugh.

But you find stuff.  Here's something I hauled home from the clean up of my parent's house.  It dates to my days as a Cub Scout.  Some of the photos have helpful date stamps and/or scribbled notes.  The cover is plywood, with the letters burnt in with a soldering iron or something similar.  Not exactly safety first back then.  Join me for a jump back in time some six decades.

Scouts were organized in a sort of military fashion.  A Pack of Cub Scouts would be like a Platoon in the Army.  A Den was a smaller group, like a Squad would be.  Oh, not in the cool sense of the word that Squad was used until fairly recently.  Here's Den Four.

Statistically speaking, a couple of those smiling lads are no longer with us.

Below is a moment in time.  February 1967 in the kitchen of my parent's old house.  Making paper Mache puppets.  I have a grandson about the age I am here.  His spelling and penmanship is better than mine. 

A guy in uniform.

This next one is an oddity.  Not the same paper or quality as the other photos, which were taken on an old Instamatic camera with 'flash cubes'.  

I think that's my older brother.  He appears to be just about to step on that model train car and fall on his butt.  These are the stairs going down to the basement.  My recollection is that we had a Scout activity that involved taking pictures with an old school camera - something like a Brownie - then developing them ourselves.  I can call up a memory of swishing moist paper around in stuff that smelled like vinegar.

Just random glimpses of an earlier time.  A time when most everyone had three or four kids.  Heck, the Catholic family across the alley had more.  And there was a solid culture of volunteerism.  My mom was a Den Mother.  Had a swell blue outfit and everything.  She was also president of the PTA and a bunch of other stuff.  This despite having four kids, one with special needs.

Now its much harder to rouse people to any volunteer efforts.  They wanna get paid.  Or they wanna just keep playin' with their phones.

The Siamese Twins of Chippewa Falls

In 1867 the population of Chippewa Falls was somewhere around 2000.  Given the nature of those times the ratio of men to women was quite high.  It's true that families were bigger then, but there would not have been that many babies born per year.  So what are the odds of twins?  (Supposedly 1% if you must know.)  How about Siamese twins?  Well those odds might be as extreme as 1 in 200,000 births.  But, odds or not, this could happen anywhere.  And in July of 1867 it happened at Chippewa Falls.

I ran across this story by accident, seeing it repeated in newspapers across the region.  Papers swiped from each other pretty regularly then.  My quick scan for the name of the parents involved found no mention in the local paper, which I found puzzling.

As it happens, there was a long, front page article, but it was sensitive enough to omit the name of the family involved.  You can read it in its entirety if so inclined, I present it for your perusal. 

The name was mentioned in reports from other newspapers.  John Clemens was a supervisor at the Mill.  His abilities were highly thought of.  Of his wife I can learn much less.

The article has the feel of a "silly season" bit of journalism, as far fetched tales seemed to be circulated widely in late summer.  But the poignancy of the tone, and the direct mention of the other people involved - the physicians in particular - give this credibility in my eyes.

Of the man who purchased the embalmed bodies of the twins to subsequently display for profit, I shall restrain my comments other than to say it's a famous name hereabouts.  He went on to become mayor. There's a street named after him. 

The Day the Storm Began

On this day in 1914 the Great War began.  Looking at the problems of our time its hard to avoid thinking of this as a hinge moment, the point when the modern world came crashing in on us.  Just consider the problems arising from maps drawn post war, especially in the Middle East and the Balkans.  Consider also the rise of poisonous weeds such as Communism and Fascism when the Established Order had proven its impotence.

Doing a bit of tidy up recently I came across something I don't think I've shown before.  When I was a volunteer at Hill 80, excavating a First World War battlefield site there were some strict rules.  Don't drop live ordinance.  Don't photograph human remains.  That sort of thing.  But regards artifacts it was way looser than how places like Vindolanda regard things.  There, every pottery shard is handed in for analysis.  At Hill 80, one of the archaeologists was collecting shrapnel and brass artillery shell bands with the intent of selling for scrap and putting one of his kids through Uni.  There was that much stuff....

So nobody objected when I put a few round lead balls into a pocket on my last day.  These were once packed into a shell and fired at the enemy.  A close up look shows dents and divots.  They hit something.

The Electrocuted Owl

OK, technically this both is and is not the right picture to go with the story that follows.  As I've documented previously the first actual dedicated movie theater in Chippewa Falls was purpose built as The Victor.  Later it was purchased by the Rex Brewing Company of Duluth and renamed, logically, The Rex.

It had a mix of movies, live vaudeville, community theater, boxing matches.  But for sheer oddity, how about this from 1923:

Alas, I scanned the newspapers for an image of the Electrocuted Owl and came up blank.

My Adventures as a Teen Aged Philosopher

Some of the stuff I retrieved from my parent's house last year just got tossed into a box. In some cases I looked briefly at an object, said "ugh" but felt it needed to be kept.  This is one such.  

I attended Minnehaha Academy for high school.  A private school, it likely gave me a better education than the public high school on our end of town.  It even had classes in religion, philosophy, etc.

I took a philosophy survey class as a junior or so.  It was a small group, maybe four or five of us students.  It was taught by a man named George Fisher, who had been a Catholic priest.  Here's the cover of the notebook from that class....

There was an awful lot of doodling and marginalia in this book.  Some of it related to philosophy, note the yin/yang.  Other stuff I'm not sure.  I might have been taking geometry at the same time to account for some of the shapes and formulae.  It starts out fairly coherent...

But towards the end I was clearly going off the rails.  I think Neo Platonism pushed me over the edge.

The class probably did me some good.  In this world sometimes you have to be philosophical and if you can't square it with Plato, maybe St. Thomas Aquinas will suffice.  The only student I remember, and the only one who seemed to understand this stuff, was named Winston Cavert.  I got to wondering where he ended up....turns out he also went to medical school but had a rather more impressive career than your humble scribe.  He went into infectious disease and became a Professor.  Cheers, Winston, if you stumble across this!

Aghast and Appalled.

I'm of fairly even temperament, so it is not common for me to be either Aghast or Appalled.  But I was wondering the other day, do these words have a common ancestor?  Or at least a common theme?

I guessed correctly that aghast had to do with ghosts.  It hearkens back to circa 1100.  It means "..terrified, suddenly filled with frightened amazement."  The "h" came along circa 1700, perhaps a bit of Dutch influence.  The original root word is very old, as indeed most basic and primal concept words are.  It comes from somewhere back in the origins of Germanic language and exists in various forms such as Geist in modern German.

You would probably gasp when you see a gast, but the words do not have a common ancestor.  Gasp and gape, well, that's another story.

A Pall is the cloth used to drape over a coffin.  So if you saw a figure covered in one you might reasonably assume it was a ghost and be aghast.  But pall has a gentler origin story.

It hearkens back to Latin.  Pallium was a cloak or covering.  Tertullian, an early Christian writer indicates that the faithful wore it as an alternative to the toga.  The word had various antecedents including pellis meaning "skin".  See also, one assumes, "pelt".  The creepier connotations to a pall did not turn up until the 15th century.

By the way, at the sight of a ghost you might run away. Perhaps so vigorously as to be "pelting".  Not related to the above, pelt in this form is one of those words of unknown origin that has come to mean hitting repeatedly as with feet pounding the ground in hasty retreat, or the rain that is scheduled to keep me indoors on the nice summer day....

AI is getting better by the way.  This is legitimately creepy.

Murder on the Old Eau Claire Road

Like most communities from the lumber era of Wisconsin, Eau Claire and Chippewa Falls were where they were because of the water.  Specifically the Chippewa River.  This was both the highway down which prosperity flowed - in the form of log drives - and the power source that turned timber into cash.

But the same things that make for a good lumber town also complicate other forms of transportation.  You'd imagine that commerce between the two places would be carried out with boats...until you remember that there water levels were extremely variable.  Despite the big dam at Chippewa being able to regulate things a bit, it would often be the case that the river was too low for practical boat transport....or at other times such as spring, too high.  To say nothing of full of tens of thousands of logs!  And in the winter everything froze.

So for reliable, year round transportation the two communities were linked very early on by road.   

Its course is a little hard to track.  It came out of the north side of Eau Claire and roughly followed the course of modern day Hwy 53.  That would of course be Old Hwy 53, now redubbed Business 53.  It certainly arrived at the National Presto Plant - once a maker of pressure cookers and earlier of artillery shells - the location of a hostelry known as Halfway House.  It then swung over to where Lake Hallie connects with the Chippewa River, as this was the site of an early lumber mill.  Then after being lost in what is now suburbia and gravel pits it reappears near modern day Casper Park and arrives at the former site of Frenchtown.  The ferry there took you across to Chippewa Falls.  Very little remains today.  

Here's a map showing the course of the road.  This map is probably circa 1878.  The railroad is shown - it came in '74, but Frenchtown is still standing before the floods of '80 and '84.

The road went through some lonesome places.  It still does today.  At one such place murder most foul occurred in 1872.

Rolfson was traveling from Minnesota.  Arriving in Eau Claire he inquired about the price of the stage to Chippewa Falls.  Feeling the price was a bit steep he decided to hike it.  Somebody knew he was carrying a large sum of money, and was waiting for him.  He tried to save a dollar.  It cost him his life.

Despite a very hefty reward I can find no evidence that the guilty parties were ever brought to justice.   

Note:  It is not clear that the 1870's stage service ran on the same road Rolfson took.  If you study the map you can see that a less direct route did run on the west side of the river.  This was a later addition, in the heyday of Frenchtown before the Civil War there was only what is now called The Old Eau Claire Road.

Anger Goose Does Not Approve

I've had four footed "grandkids" before.  Often young couples have a dog before they have kids.  I've gotten on well with these slightly spoiled canines.

But the youngest and his lady now have.....geese.  On one level they - the geese of course - can be rather cute.  They follow my son around making happy little honking noises.

Me on the other hand, they don't like at all.......

Darn things peck at my pants legs and shoes when they can get away with it.  This goose is actually named Rodan, after the Japanese rubber monster movie star of the same name.  I think the resemblance is eerie.

My Get Rich Quick Product Idea

Ah, getting older.  Well, it does beat the alternative.  But you do have to attend to more "maintenance" as the birthday cake candles glow a bit brighter.  

As a retired MD I'm a bad patient.  But there are things I believe in strongly enough that I even talk myself into them.  Like colonoscopy.  Turns out I have a bit of  family history, my grandfather dying of it at just a few years older than I am now.  So, there's nothing for it....

The procedure is not so bad.  I just insist on the good meds.  Much as Fentanyl has caused suffering and tragedy when used illicitly, it - in concert with its good pal Versed - makes for a dreamy, detached state. 

Now the prep, that's just not fun.  But necessary.

Suffice to say that you have to drink some stuff that gives you very kinetic, ate a bad burrito in Mexico level diarrhea.  Don't plan anything on that prep day.

The prep meds usually come in small - but deadly as it happens - colored glass bottles.  Now, on to my make a million bucks idea.

I used to be a fair home brewer.  And I'm pretty sure you could concoct a beer flavored prep solution.  Great beer?  Oh, no way.  But better than the horrid sensation of glugging down what tastes like concentrated Dead Sea water?  I think so.

But you'd have to market it well.

I've tried asking AI to show me some example "brands".  In some cases it was unwilling.  I mean, the obvious is BUTT LITE.  But that stuff can hardly be considered beer.....  So, how about:

This is actually almost spot on for the little green bottles of Affliction.  They are perhaps half the size but just that color.   

I actually enjoy the occasional Heineken, and once had a very memorable tour of their flagship brewery in Amsterdam.  For a variety of technical reasons there were some parts of the tour we could not take that morning, and each time we were promised "Well, that will give you more time in the tap room".

Apologies for the satire Heineken, I actually  think highly of your product.

Now, there are a number of US beer brands, current and historic, that would not need any alteration at all to be good colonoscopy prep names.  If, and this is a gigantic if, their copyright lawyers looked the other way and whistled, I could see several names being quite compelling just as they are.

Schlitz, Blatz, any others you'd like to suggest?

But perhaps your tastes do not run to European or US beers.  I've enjoyed some Mexican lagers as well.  Modello and Dos Equis do not sound immediately promising, but what about:

Should of course have a crown on the label, and actual Corona comes in clear bottles.

I've always felt that the silly times we live in make satire darn near impossible.  So who knows, perhaps somebody has already tried this concept....

Cache as Cache Can

With a bit of free time on my hands I've been paying attention to the string of geocaches that I have out in the world.  I mostly enjoy making and placing custom caches.  Finding them, eh, not so much.

Over time they tend to need maintenance.  Water gets into everything.  Put something inside a hollow tree and the tree blows over.  On occasion people who find the caches have their own eccentric ideas of how they should be rehidden.  

One cache I had near a ball field was called Brown Bat.  It was hidden inside a little plastic souvenir baseball bat.  I think it was something you could buy full of beer at the local minor league ball park.  Alas, it vanished, so I decided to replace it with something a bit more Lugosi themed...

That was a "one off", but I also have geocache series going.  Local History is rather unofficial.  Strange Fish is a long running series where I put a geocache - usually a custom container made to look like the species - where I caught some weird bottom feeding critter.  That's getting harder to do btw.  I'm up to 15 in this series.  HERE is an example.

Recently I started a new series that I'm calling Crossroads.  All at intersections of county roads.  For some reason these are designated with letters, and when they ran through the alphabet they started using double letters.   The juxtaposition of signs at such places provides, shall we say, opportunities.....

For instance......The House at Pooh Corner  What creative things could you do with semi random arrangements of two or three letters?

Robot Christmas in July!

Robotics involves lots of supplies.  Electronics, motors, aluminum and plastic stock.  Lots of it we now have in stock, but there are always things that are needful.  Because shipping costs extra we try to merge shopping lists into larger deliveries.  And I have always considered the day that big boxes of coolness turn up on the porch to be "Robot Christmas".  I of course need to open a few....just to make sure everything has arrived in good shape.

Our latest undertaking is a new spin on Robot School, our farm club at the middle school level.  And with a new venture we of course need new toys.  Lots of new toys.  FIRST Tech Challenge robots are about 15% of the size of the high school program machines, but they have lots and lots of small fiddly parts.  We are talking about hundreds of items showing up in a half dozen boxes....

Some of this stash came from a recent workshop where students had put some of the parts together in a basic frame...

Merry Robot Christmas!  I thought it would be fun to stack the hoard up into something resembling a Christmas tree.

01000111 01101111 01100100 00100000 01000010 01101100 01100101 01110011 01110011 00100000 01110101 01110011 00101100 00100000 01100101 01110110 01100101 01110010 01111001 00100000 01101111 01101110 01100101 00100001

The above is conversion to binary code of Tiny Tim's "God Bless us, every one!"

The Mystery of Wardell's Ginger Ale

Here is our starting point.  It is a "hutchinson" style soda bottle.  These were pretty much the standard pop bottle in the 1880's and 1890's.  

The embossing reads R.T. WARDELL EAU CLAIRE WIS.  That little gizmo in the bottom of the bottle is the stopper.  Replacing earlier corked bottles this allowed you to open up a bottle, drink some of it, and reseal it.   

So, what's the story here?  Well, its complicated.

The earliest local clue is from the summer of 1884.  Summertime is generally when pop bottlers started a venture, or advertised an existing one.  From an Eau Claire paper of June 21st we read:

"R.T. Wardell, of Michigan, is opening up an establishment on the West side for the manufacture and sale of ginger ales, etc."

There is a bit of confusion in early reports.  At one point it was said to be an F. Wardell starting the business.  And embarrassingly, on the July 3rd, the paper described ginger ale as an alcoholic beverage.  A hasty 4th of July retraction was published:

The reference to three million bottles being sold in the previous year is rather audacious.  Where?  And by whom?

Wardell bottles from Eau Claire are pretty scarce.  R.T. gets mentioned briefly among citizens signing a petition in 1885.  After that there is but one enigmatic and somewhat jokey reference from 1886...and this from a Minneapolis newspaper.

It sounds like somebody the editor knew well, perhaps on a drinking buddy sort of level?

As it happens there was another branch of the Wardell family over in St. Paul, Minnesota.

John G. Wardell is said to have moved from Battle Creek Michigan to the Twin Cities in 1882.  After briefly being in Minneapolis he set up shop in St. Paul, doing business as The Spa Bottling Company.  He was quite successful, both at the original Spa Bottling company and later, in 1900, when he left that firm and started his own venture.  The Consolidated Bottling Company became Highland Spring Water company later in 1900, actually lasting until the mid 1960's.  For more on this branch of the Wardell clan I found THIS quite helpful. 

When Spa got started in 1882 it had Minneapolis and St. Paul branches, and was variously described as having relocated from Grand Rapids Michigan or being an offshoot of an earlier company there.  John G. Wardell is described as being "....long connected with the Grand Rapids house..." I'm not sure how that fits with the report of him being from Battle Creek, but they are not far apart. 

John G. was born in 1857.  R.T. is described as a young man in 1886.  They must have been related.  Same last name, both came from Michigan, both in the soda business.  The presumed difference in ages does not fit for father and son, but perhaps brothers?  Maybe he was a sort of black sheep of the family.  The claim of three million bottles sold in 1883 is hard to believe.  Maybe if the output of the Minnesota and Michigan branches was combined.  Interestingly there also was a Diamond Ginger Ale sold out of Connecticut starting in 1865.  Maybe that three million figure suggested an early franchise set up?

John G. lived a long and productive life.  He died in 1935, his son and grandson carrying on the business.  Heck, I might have had a swig or two of Highland Spring Water when I was a kid.

Eventually I tracked down an on line City Directory of Grand Rapids from 1880.  John G. Wardell is listed as a "clerk" for Mills and Lacey.  No listing of them in the beverage business.  Robert T. Wardell was, if I am reading the abbreviation corrctly, a cradle maker!   There is one soda bottler and one ginger beer manufacturer listed,  but oddly the Wardells do not seem to have been associated with either.  

4th of July - America at 250

Fourth of July is usually a surprisingly personal holiday for most Americans.  We  get the three day weekend off - ER docs being the exception - and are expected to go do summer things that please us.  If you have a lake cabin, go there.  If there are jobs to do, keep them at a minimum.  Grill stuff.  Have a cold beer.  That's the Midwest paradigm at least.  As for other parts of the country, well, YMMV.

250 years seems like a less impressive feat than the Bicentennial was.  It's kind of like one's 40th anniversary.  A big number but less substantive than say 25 or 50.  That's not really fair of course.  With longer life spans lots of people reach their 50th anniversary.  Very few countries on earth last for centuries.  I mean, obviously the land does, the form of government not so much.  

There is a tendency of late to be very downcast about America and the future.  I don't share this pessimism.  

1976.  The bicentennial.  I was in college.  My waistline was thin.  My hair was not.  We'd just waded through the apparent defeat of Vietnam and the difficulty of Watergate.  Gas for our horrid 1970's cars was expensive.  Interest rates were ridiculously high.  Current home seekers despair over 6.3% mortgage rates.  Hey, try 18% on for size.  (ok, that was a couple of years earlier, but still....).

And for all that I don't remember people being nearly as disturbed as some are today.  

Times are different.  We are different.  Which changes which?

Fifty years ago there were still certainties.  Our parents were of durable stock, having endured the Great Depression and the Second World War.  There were even plenty of "doughboys" around whose lives started in an agrarian, isolationist country.  These were not stupid people, they'd seen a great deal come to pass.  But they kept their focus on making their lives and that of their families better.

Odd times for America on its 250th.  We are now exposed to continuous outrage on our electronic marvels.  But at the same time we have as a culture been sleep walking.  So many important questions just kicked down the road like an old tin can...a can that contains the accumulated debt that our children and grandchildren will have to pay off. You can be supportive, neutral or antagonistic to this administration but at least difficult questions are being asked.  Hopefully the right answers will be forthcoming.  If not, we'll elect a different bunch.   

So Happy Birthday.  Life is not perfect.  It is in fact always going to be a mixture.  That phone that brings you Tiktok slop and panicky dispair...it also contains more information that we could have imagined 25 years ago.  We are smarter than we used to be: the percentage of Americans with college degrees is up markedly.  Wiser is another matter.....

Well enough of this.  Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness means, get out there and enjoy the day.  Burgers and beer optional.

Upstairs, Downstairs

Our house was built in 1908.  Not old from the standpoint of our community, which got going in the 1840's, but it does represent an interesting moment in time.  The Lumber Baron era was just over.  The modern age - indoor plumbing, electricity, telephone lines - had arrived.

It was also a time of class distinctions.  Oh, not so much as in England, but there was a definite expectation that people of quality lived on the top of the hill, while smaller houses full of working class folks were further down the slope.  

I should really know the story better, but evidently our house was built by a guy who worked in a bank during the lumbering era.  His daughter lived there after he passed.

It's a nice enough house.  But today's focus is on the Upstairs-Downstairs world of early 20th century servants.

They were mostly women, mostly recent immigrants.  Usually from Scandinavia or perhaps Germany.  They were probably some combination of maid, cook, nanny.  I don't know a lot about the woman who lived here as a servant.  I've seen her name on a census.  My "office" a small room where I am allowed to set up computer, files, random junk, used to be her bedroom.  When we were new in the house it still had a sink.  This was pretty handy when we made it the nursery for our three kids.

Downstairs there is one room that was a bit fancy.  A dining room with decent woodwork.  On the floor there is a metal plate that used to have a button.  When the Man of the House, or perhaps the Woman of same, pushed a button with a toe there'd be a buzzer or bell that would sound.  I think we found a few remnants of this system's wiring during an early remodel.

And going from the kitchen to the Dining Room there was a swinging door.  You certainly would not expect people of quality to see pots, pans and dishes!  The door swung on a hinge.  Specifically, here:

I did say it was not all that Grand.  But lets focus on a little area down at the bottom of the doorway.....

There is a little square of wood there that does not quite fit with the rest of the flooring.  There used to be something else there, something that could be removed. leaving a gap between first floor and basement.  Small people used to like to yell things and drop messages down from above.

What used to be there was a very fancy hinge, the sort of thing that would articulate a nice door.  I could see the Servant Girl gently pushing it open while carrying in platters full of whatever upper middle class folks dined on back in the day.

And as it happens, I still have that hinge.  It's more interesting than most bits of 126 year old hardware...

OK, that's only mildly interesting.  Let's flip it over to read:

BOMMER FLOOR HINGE  PAT. DEC 25 1900

I've seen other things patented on Christmas Day.  It must have been a thing back then.  Certainly the Patent Office would not have been open on December 25th, so they must have had some sort of paperwork gimmick to make this the patent date.*

The Bommer Company is, remarkably still around.  HERE'S their story.

Alas, on a closer read of their website it appears that in the summer of 2025 they decided to wrap up the business, no doubt in the face of overseas competition, and it looks as if they are selling off remaining stock.  😔

--------------------------------------------

* The most famous patent date of this sort is on the "Christmas Coke" bottles that are the classic shape for CocaCola when it came in glass.

Lumberjacks (and Jills)

Timber Sports.  Now there's a phrase you probably have never heard.  It's basically modern people competing in lumberjack activities.  To some extent using modern tools like chain saws.  And there are Lumber Jills as well as Lumber Jacks.

Hayward Wisconsin, near where our up north cabin is, has quite the center of Timber Sportsdom.  In fact they have the Lumberjack World Championship competition there.  Really talented people chopping, sawing, log rolling, climbing poles, that sort of thing.  

There is also a regular "show" for entertaining tourists.  Not quite World Champs level stuff but with lots of banter, and still many amazing things to be seen.  We had some out of town visitors with us recently and they went to see the show.

Afterwards I got them to split a season's worth of kindling.  Happily with no mishaps.

Tree Shaped Tombstone - Between Luck and Frederick (Wisconsin)

Like the example the other day from McKinley Wisconsin, this tree shaped tombstone was encountered on a little road trip.  Baseball tournament destination.  Prior to setting out I usually go to Google Maps and scan for small town cemeteries.  Sometimes you see interesting things, sometimes not.  A few are not even "on the map".  This little place - St. Peter's Cemetery - did not look like much, but I pulled in anyway.  And found another "one off" tree.  It is also another late one, and has an unusual inscription.  Perhaps related in some way to the one in McKinley?

Some purists might not count these "rugged cross" variants, but I rather like them.  The horizontal elements often have interesting features.  Like this "dying dove".

And another cryptic inscription.  This time Google helped out.  It seems to be Norwegian and say "Dedicated to your Memory".  

Lolling About

It's summer time.  And my dog alternates manic energy and exhausted sloth.  In the latter state he is often "lolling around".  For some reason I've always associated this particular phrase with dogs.  And with dog's tongues.  Turns out I was mostly right...

Like many of the best descriptive words it has obscure origins.  Possible Middle Dutch in the form of "lollen" meaing to doze or mumble.  By the mid 1300's it had changed a bit and now meant to lounge idly or to hang loosely.  You can see how, by the early 1600's, it picked up the connotation of a tongue hanging out.  And a century later being a generic term for lazy inaction.

Lollypop turns up in the late 1700's.  Although they originally did not seem to have a stick, it was certainly something you would pop into your mouth.  Lollygag is a later word, well into the 19th century.  It implies a more deceptive inaction rather than just being worn out.  Lolly, as above, plus gag, meaning a joke.

Lounging about is by the way much different from lolling about.  At least by the complexity of its etymology it seems like much more work

Tree Shaped Tombstone - McKinley Wisconsin

Oh, my.  The tree shaped tombstone in this photo is really the less impressive part...

Welcome to McKinley Wisconsin.  It's just a wide spot in the road really.  But it has a cemetery.  And next to it a church.

As you can see, the church has taken a big hit.  A lightning strike in the summer of 2025 started a fire.

At this point the building had been repurposed into a home, and the family was just barely able to escape unharmed.

Almost a year later there do not appear to be ongoing repair efforts.  

Now, on to that tombstone.  It is unusual in several respects.  For one thing, it is the only one in the cemetery.  My rule of thumb is that when you see one you will almost always see another.  Not here.  And it has some other unusual features.  It is a really, really late example.

As is common, its a husband and wife.  He died in 1918.  She in 1937.  Monuments of this sort were becoming uncommon as the 1920's approached.  Perhaps they were the kind of people who really planned ahead and bought this earlier?

Something else odd here, and this one really bothers me.  The inscription at the bottom is in some language that I can't make out.  I've run what I can see through Google Translate and come up empty.  Of course my policy is that I never scrub at such things, I keep my hands off.  But what is this?   (Note, based on another example from a few miles away I'm thinking it is Norwegian)

June Wild Life

Seen on a morning walk.  Pretty lame camo, bro.

Seen hiding in the side yard bushes.  I guess this is the time of year when fledglings get ornery and hop out of the nest a few days before they are actually able to, you know, fly.  Momma bird seen in the days that followed.  Checking several days later, no adolescent punk bird.  No sad pile of feathers.  So probably OK.

Seen on a "butterfly weed" next to the compost bin.  Tubby little guy, with a slightly smaller sidekick 'piller.