Still In Love After All These Years

Love you Mom and Dad!

The Goats at Young's Jersey Dairy

The goats are a huge draw at Young's. Young's is an operational farm near Yellow Springs, Ohio. They serve ice cream, made on site with the dairy products produced by their cows. There is also a homestyle restaurant, putt-putt golf course, driving range, wagon rides, tractor pulled cart rides, tractors to play on, and lots of other activities for the whole family. My favorite part is their "tator babies" with melted cheese dipping sauce and chocolate milk shakes. Their ice cream is to die for!

Kickin' back. Chillin'. This goat seems to walk to the beat of his own drum. Not to mention, he's flexible. Yoga anyone?

Eccentric Photos

This one's for you Calvin! A snack shop named just for you!

This is what the cows do when the people aren't looking in Ohio. Dang, they've got a few things to teach those Colorado cows!

Artistic Pictures at Young's Jersey Dairy

A symbol of middle America

A lone cat wanders over the roofs of the barns looking for mice.

Kimberly, Calvin, and Beverly at Young's

Beverly just turned 4 and was such a sweet little girl. She fed the goats, ate a bubble gum ice cream, road a train ride, ate lunch, and posed in these great little cut outs. I didn't have as much time to talk to her as Calvin, but will still seemed to get along really well. What a sweetheart!

Calvin is such a great little boy. Loves Rocks, loves running, loves bugs. He too enjoyed feeding the goats and was very impressed that the goat he was feeding was willing to "share" with others. Great job, Kimberly, instilling those values!

Here's Kimberly with her two children, Calvin (5) and Beverly (4). I was so happy we could get together at Young's Jersey Dairy near Yellowsprings, Ohio to catch up. Kimberly was my Statistics professor at Wright State University when I was a student there. While I was in college we would occasionally meet for lunch, where she was a great encouragement to me. When I graduated, we became good friends and corresponded mainly through e-mail and the occasional visit when I was back in Ohio. For a time, she was even my spiritual mentor. Despite up and down times in my life, she has always done her best to be a good friend.

Storm Damage

Last Wednesday evening, a strong thunderstorm moved through the area in the middle of the night. It wrenched the branch off of this tree. Dad was kind of bummed, because he was almost finished cleaning up the yard from several other trees he'd taken down due to disease. On Thursday he began working on the removal of this branch. Trinity accompanied him. This tree had it in for him. When he was working on the tree on Thursday, removing one of the smaller limbs another branch smacked him in the face and whacked Trinity a good one too. She decided working so closely with Dad on this one was too risky. On Friday when he went to remove the main branch, Trinity hung back. Probably a good thing. While chain sawing the main branch off, it flipped around and smacked Dad in the face again, as well as the shoulder and his arm. He had a nasty cut on his face, but really his main concern was his arm. We took him to urgent care to make sure it wasn't broken. Thankfully it wasn't, and thankfully nothing worse happened.

"Home" in Ohio

Considering the length of the drive (20 some hours), Trinity really did quite well. She has bonded with my Dad (shown together in the house picture), her "Pappaw". She follows him everywhere. I think she likes his industrious nature and feels some primordial connection with him.

Trinity running around with her new favorite toy, the big orange ball, that she popped in less than 5 seconds. That's okay, that's the way she likes the ball. Makes it easier to carry around, and we can still throw it for her and it rolls (kind of).

Dad and Trinity in the morning sitting on the back patio of my childhood home. Believe it or not, my grandfather built this house! My Dad and his family grew up on this same property that I grew up on. Dad has finished a lot of projects that Pappaw started, such as a new family room, adding a 3/4 bath, remodeling a bathroom, Adding several garages...but it's still cool to say that I grew up in the house my "Pappaw" built.

More pictures of Trinity with the beloved ball. She loves my parents huge fenced and wooded back yard. She chases the squirrels up the trees, sniffs around in the bushes, helps Dad carry firewood. The list could go on for miles. She's such a happy puppy here:)

i am no one you know

The title of this collection of short stories is fitting. If others knew what went on in the inner recesses of our brains as we struggle with moral choices, our own imagations, we would probably all be someone that they didn't know.

I've read several Joyce Carol Oates novels, and a few short stories in college, but this collection left me a new respect for Ms. Oates as an author. These stories were different from anything I've ever read. And I like to consider myself fairly well read. Many of the stories are cliff-hangers. Many leave the reader with the task of evaluating the truth of what happened for themselves. The characters and plot lines are as complicated as real life. No clear cut answers. The author's ability to delve into the human psyche, especially the areas that we all want to deny exist, spellbinding. Human beings are complicated. For the most part, we know what is right from wrong. But often, in the inner mind, a struggle takes place concerning our ability to do the right thing, or the the reality of what exactly is the right thing. Ms. Oates is an artist of multiple dimensions, and as a writer this collection of short stories has left me with a profound respect for her.

More Great Quotes

Finished reading this book yesterday evening. Norman Maclean has a rare gift for not only telling a story but extracting larger life meaning from that story. Here are a few of the quotes that I appreciated in the last 100 pages or so.

"Maybe when you almost die before you live there
is a mechanism in you that makes you reduce your memories of death so most of life will not be based on death."

"...I recognized that, in the wide world anywhere, 'Now we know, now we know' is one of its most beautiful poems"

Yes...this I do know. After all the pain and suffering of struggling to learn a lesson, finally knowing can be both a relief and an agony. There are things that I have learned that others will not be able to understand unless they walk in my shoes, and the same is true for their life circumstances. But we can all learn compassion from the fruit of our suffering, which leads to a better understanding of love.

"...a storyteller should never look at a day as lost if he has learned something about how to tell stories, especially about how to make them shorter."

I guess this is part of what I took from my 5 years of working at NOAA. Some really interesting stories...

"This feeling, when generalized, is a feeling that you will be ready to write if first you can find the right friend to listen to your opening paragraph."

This has been part of my own writing struggle. I need the right friend to feed that creative passion and urge me along. Who knows, maybe it's not just one, but several.

Lisa's Rough Drafts is NOT Dead!

I recently received a comment from a fellow named "Walt" mourning the fact that he had arrived at the blog too late. Alas, he incorrectly surmised that this blog was dead. In fact, I was in the midst of a move and dealing with other life changing events that prevented me from posting for the last several months.

When I moved from my apartment in Lafayette to a condo in Lakewood, I waited nearly 2 weeks to re-estasblish high speed internet access at my new place. The my new place was built in the early 80's when the internet was merely a twinkle in Al Gore's eye (just kidding:). I ended up going wireless, because it was really the only option available short of ripping up the newly installed carpet and running a cable underneath or dealing with the unsightly cord snaking across the living room, hall way, and second bedroom.

So there...that's my excuse for now.