It’s been a good spring. The cruciferous vegetable patch has been coming along nicely. If it continues, there should be plenty of home grown kale and collards for the coming year until next year’s crop comes in. Hopefully everything else in that plot will mature for harvest.
Cruciferous vegetable plot.
I’ve been able to exercise daily with a brisk walk on the state park trail. I’m moderating what I eat using an app to track calories. I shed 15 pounds of weight this spring. I am eating better food in appropriate quantities. Between the exercise and change in eating habits, I feel better.
The trail goes on forever.
Today I plan to catch up on work around the house and make a trip to the wholesale club. Tomorrow I re-start summer writing. Here’s hoping for a memorable summer.
Don’t forget. Today is Juneteenth! Happy Juneteenth to all who celenrate. That should be every American.
Swiss chard and collards donated to the North Liberty Food Pantry.
After an overnight trip to Chicago to visit family and friends, I’m ready to begin summer writing. Ideas have been percolating all spring. It’s time to get them down and make something of them.
I enjoy the Chicago suburbs of Oak Park, Skokie, and Forest Park where I have been spending more time the last couple of years. It is remarkable how from the ground it looks exactly like you’d expect after seeing it countless times while taking off from and landing at O’Hare and Midway. I stayed with someone who lived his whole life in close proximity to where he was raised in Oak Park.
The main summer writing challenge is determining a schedule. I want to get into the garden early in the day to weed and harvest. I don’t want to spend all my energy there. I plan to shake up my daily outline and routines. The re-engineering process should be fun, and easy to accomplish by Friday.
Tuesday morning I took excess chard and collards to the food pantry. The receiver told me, “Those will go fast.” I always feel good when I donate produce I grew for food insecure people.
There are a lot of positives in the waning days of spring. If we can only take the time to recognize them.
Johnson County Democrats at the 2022 Solon Beef Days parade.
On Monday, June 16, Christina Bohannan announced her third run to become the U.S. representative from Iowa’s First Congressional District. Let’s go!
Campaign 3.0 puts her way ahead in the primary race with two other Democrats. The fact she lost the 2024 general election by 799 votes is an indication she could win in 2026 regardless of which Republican advances from their primary.
The midterm election has been a challenge for Democratic voter turnout, yet in a time when opposition is growing to the Republicans in power, we might pull this one off. The recent No Kings rallies are an indication voters are increasingly engaged in our politics. I believe voters will turn out for Bohannan.
Here is the press release I received by email this morning:
Christina Bohannan announces campaign for Iowa’s First Congressional District
Bohannan: “It’s time someone put Iowa first”
Iowa City, IA – Today, Christina Bohannan announced her campaign for Iowa’s 1st Congressional District. Bohannan nearly defeated Mariannette Miller-Meeks in 2024 – and outworked, outraised, and outmatched her, outperforming the presidential margin more than any other Democratic challenger in a targeted race in the country. It was the most razor-thin margin of any Republican re-election of the 2024 cycle. This contest begins right where it ended – the biggest toss-up in the country.
Christina Bohannan said, “Mariannette Miller-Meeks has had three terms in Congress – three chances to do right by the people of Iowa. Instead, she has taken over $4 million from corporate special interests and done nothing but vote their way. And she has put partisan politics over Iowans again and again. From cutting Medicaid, to siding with DOGE’s devastating cuts to Social Security, to enabling unelected, unaccountable billionaires like Elon Musk – Miller-Meeks has forgotten about us. It’s time someone put Iowa first.”
Miller-Meeks must explain why she keeps putting Washington special interests first. In just the first six months of her current term, she has:
Cast the deciding vote for the extreme plan that will gut Medicaid and make health care unaffordable for more than 100,000 Iowans to pay for a massive tax giveaway to her billionaire donors;
Repeatedlyvoted for the cost-increasing tariffs that will force Iowa families to pay $4,400 more in higher costs per year while 700,000 Americans jobs are lost, and costs are increased for farmers, small businesses, and manufacturers;
Joined Elon Musk’s DOGE efforts to cut Social Security, veterans healthcare, education, and law enforcement resources as a proud member of the DOGE Caucus.
It’s time for Christina Bohannan.
Christina grew up in a mobile home, in a rural town of 700 people. When Christina was in high school, her dad got sick with emphysema, and his health insurance was cancelled, forcing her family to choose between paying for his medicine and paying for everything else. She worked her way through school by picking fruit, cleaning trailers, and waiting tables, becoming the first in her family to go to college. After working as an engineer and then teaching at the University of Iowa College of Law for two decades, she took on politics as usual and defeated a 20-year incumbent to represent District 85 in the Iowa House of Representatives. Now, Christina is running for Congress because she believes we need a government that works for the people, not political parties and Washington special interests.
I counted more than 350 people lining Highway One near the intersection of First Street in Mount Vernon in support of the No Kings rallies taking place across the United States and in some foreign countries. The event was straight forward. People brought home made signs, held American flags, and waved at people in vehicles passing through the intersection. There were a lot of horns honked, waving back, and even a crank with a Trump 2024 sticker in his rear window who repeatedly drove through our demonstration. It was all good.
The crowd chanted, “Love, not hate, will make America great.”
The best part of the rally was it was just regular people coming together to say we won’t stand for the authoritarian direction our country is going. No speeches, just a simple, personalized statement about who we are.
Northeast Corner of Highway One and First Street.Southeast corner of Highway One and First Street.Southwest corner of Highway One and First Street.Northwest corner of Highway One and First Street.The crowd stretched for several blocks both North and South of First Street.Small group with home made signs.
There are five different No Kings Mass Protest rallies close to me on Saturday. I plan to attend one of them, likely the one in Mount Vernon. It’s close and I want to see who else I know in that community. It is 60 minutes, so, long enough to find value, and not so long as to find it tedious. I understand there are day jobs available in Washington D.C. on Saturday where a person can wear a red hat and fill a chair for the big military parade for $1,000 in cryptocurrency. I’m not sure there will be chairs where I’m going.
When I was a teenager, Father took the three kids to the Municipal Stadium to see an “All Star Wrestling Caged Match” with two professional wrestlers. I am researching this for a later post that will argue the world in which we find ourselves today — in our media bubbles — is such a construct. We miss a lot of nuance by focusing on the cage match and can do better. I hope to explain that.
That’s all for now. My posting schedule is dicey the next few days. Maybe it’s time to take the last days of spring away from the computer interface. It may be the refreshing break I need.
It was 90 degrees Fahrenheit when I finished putting in hot peppers yesterday. With that, the main garden planting is finished. Ahead is maintenance, weeding, and replanting: normal stuff, part of what makes gardening enjoyable.
The next major event is expected to be the appearance of garlic scapes. In the meanwhile, the leafy green vegetable plot has been producing an abundance. I enjoy my afternoon trips to the garden to pick greens for the kitchen.
The portable greenhouse will come down soon. The only things left are a tray of seedlings for the covered row (lettuce, Pak Choi, arugula, herbs), a tray of Milkweed starts, and an experiment in using old onions and leek seeds. It is best to take it down to reduce exposure to high winds in the neighborhood.
I have multiple days of tree maintenance next. The chainsaw service center is relocating due to the City of North Liberty wanting their land. My chainsaw was the next mechanical device to go into the shop, although I am not driving 45 minutes four times to take it there. I may see if Stihl has a reliable electric chainsaw. The home, farm , and auto supply store where I used to work is a Stihl dealer, and remains in the orbit of retailers I visit in person.
Low humidity makes the high temperatures tolerable. From here on out, I expect to spend early morning daylight in the garden and then move to other work. For those who have been following along, I expect to start a daily writing regimen when summer begins next week.
It’s been two weeks since I opened my draft autobiography. With the end of garden planting in sight, it’s time to turn back to that work. When I read what I’ve already written it seems like magic. Who wrote all of that? Me. It was me, as unlikely as that sounds.
There are a few kinds of writing on this blog and I’ll be considering them as I go about another day in the garden. The last few weeks have been what I would call “moment capture writing”: I write about a significant event that happened in a few, brief paragraphs and move on. In many ways, these are my favorite posts to read because they tell of moments in my life that might otherwise be forgotten.
Hannah Ritchie wrote a Substack post called “Under-the-hood of writing on Substack.” In it she opines about the type of writing that’s needed on Substack (or blogs). She wrote:
If you do have some tolerance for criticism and have ideas to share, I’d tell you to consider doing longer-form writing. By “longer-form” I just mean more than social media posts or comments; 1,000 to 2,000 words that lets you craft a narrative and explain your thoughts with nuance.
This reflects my blog-writing approach. I’m almost always working through some intellectual puzzle. More on that later. For the moment I must use the last remnants of a very warm night to take care of indoor chores so I can get out to the garden after sunrise.
This week I grew more lettuce, Pak Choi and greens than we needed to use fresh in our kitchen. I took the excess to a local food pantry where they don’t get many fresh, leafy green vegetables. We growers and donors are asked to arrive on Monday mornings.
I put a followup on my calendar to time my harvests so excess can go directly to the pantry each week.
Our food pantry is located in the basement of the Methodist Church. Each Monday afternoon, the shelves are open for anyone to come and take what they need. The pantry serves a clientele of about 35 food-insecure people. If fresh goods are left at the end of the day, a local food rescue driver arrives and takes them to another food pantry open the next day. It is an efficient system.
From what I hear, my fresh greens are usually popular. I don’t know the clients, and don’t really need to know them to do what I do.
The needs are similar everywhere there are food pantries. Here is the current want list from ours:
Mandarin oranges
Canned tuna and chicken
Pasta sauces
Ramen noodles
Chunky Soups
Peanut Butter
Canned fruit
Kids cereal
Toilet paper
If readers have the means, I encourage you to help your local food pantry. It is something easy to do whether you are a gardener or not.
Thomas Jefferson, Writing the Declaration of Independence by Henry Wolf. Photo Credit – Smithsonian Institution.
In defending her vote for the reconciliation bill working its way through the Congress, Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks wrote in her congressional newsletter, “(the bill) delivers real relief, starting with a new $4,000 tax deduction for Americans over the age of 65 who make less than $75,000.”
No senior I know asked for a tax break, especially one for which the federal government will have to borrow some $2.4 Trillion according to the Congressional Budget Office. Miller-Meeks does not understand the needs of constituents.
Most seniors living solely on Social Security, pensions, and savings don’t pay federal income taxes. Especially when we hardly take home enough money to get by.
It is basic household finance to know a person shouldn’t borrow money to pay ongoing expenses. That’s exactly what this reconciliation bill does.
She wrote, “(The tax deduction) leaves more financial breathing room for… helping raise grandkids in tough times.” Helping raise grandkids? She must mean helping train them to be compliant worker bees to repay the loans their forebears took to live on.
There is nothing wrong with Washington, D.C. that removing Miller-Meeks and those like her from office won’t fix. She should not be re-elected.
As summer arrives on June 20th, I think about beverages I seek at least once each year. I hope to change all that and pick something as my standard beverage. That’s what I say at the beginning of each summer.
Diet Coke When I’m at the convenience store playing Powerball, once a summer I pick up a Coke or Diet Coke and drink it. This year it was Diet Coke because I am watching my caloric intake. It will be a cold day in hell when I try another of those. It has no flavor. Coke is not it. If Diet Coke was invented “just for the taste of it,” I don’t know what taste they are marketing. I won’t be yearning for another one of these.
Yoo-hoo A couple times a year I pick up a Yoo-Hoo chocolate flavored beverage at the convenience store. I probably should not. The beverage is made mostly from water, high-fructose corn syrup, and whey. I associate drinking Yoo-hoo with living in the south, yet that makes no sense. It was invented in Garfield, New Jersey in 1928 and has been owned by multiple international conglomerates. In a moment of weakness, I’ll likely have another. It fills a certain niche.
Iced Tea I buy the cheapest black pekoe tea bags and brew a pot of tea in an old Brown Betty. The first glass is poured hot, directly from the pot over ice. By far, this is the most refreshing beverage of summer. I make it a couple of times per summer for the refreshment and the remembrance of summers past.
Lemonade When I volunteered with the home owners association I bought a large container of lemonade mix for our annual meeting and potluck. I never used much of the container and from time to time I make some for myself. It is basically a sugar fix, something I need to watch. I may try making lemonade with Italian Volcano lemon juice. The flavor is great and I can control the amount of sugar.
Jack Daniel’s Old No. 7 Tennessee Whiskey I had a finger of this whiskey in a bottle I bought maybe ten years ago. I finished it off and decided it’s time to eschew distilled spirits unless I am celebrating with friends. It’s intoxicating effect is too much for this aging frame. The other thing is distilled spirits can be very expensive, even at the wholesale club.
Mass Produced Beer I used to buy a case of beer from the wholesale club each summer. I iced the bottles down in a cooler we got for a wedding present, and enjoyed one or two after a hot sweaty day of working outside. They are wanting $30 or more for the brands I like, so that one is getting sanded off in the woodshed. If I have a beer this summer, it will likely be with friends at the site in town where it was brewed.
Iced Water There is still nothing like a glass of water poured over ice. After all the trips down memory lane with the other beverages, I expect this will be the standby. It should be. Filtered water straight from the refrigerator is simply the best.
Editor’s Note: This post is one in a series of quick, short, fill-in posts while I spend most of my time and energy planting the garden. Things are looking good, yet I’m not there yet.
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