Michelle's Musings

I have been surrounded by toads and frogs lately. I know what some of you might be thinking: Well, we are in a wetland, so there will be frogs and toads.

Although this is true, it seems there have been an unusual number of amphibians near me of late. If all started out right before I went to Colorado in July. I was mowing our lawn and came across many toads, including one that sat and watched me mow the area in which it had been resting before the deafening whir of the ancient push mower rousted it from its otherwise cool and quiet spot. I figured the Lawn Boy would scare the bejeezus out of it, but instead it sat nearly motionless and watched me. 

I have seen a toad at my house before, typically burrowed in the cool, shaded soil next to my front door. On this occasion, there were six that I counted, and maybe more, that came out of the shadows as a worked the mower around the lawn.

I was driving past Burger King the other day when I saw a sign that read, “Try the Impossible Whopper.” For a second it didn’t register and I thought, “What is an Impossible Burger?” Then immediately remembered, “Oh a ‘bloody,’ veggie burger.”

I have not been eager to try one of these scientific marvels, a veggie burger that looks, and supposedly tastes, like the real thing, in spite of liking a real burger to be no more than pink in the middle. My friend, Olivia, however, has been obsessed with them since the moment they came out and was dying for her grocery store to offer the home version, Beyond Burgers.

She called me right after she first got a chance to consume one, and marveled at their likeness to real meat. The texture, the flavor and the look were melding together to make this the perfect veggie burger, according to Olivia.

I was about two and a half years old when the Apollo 11 first landed on the moon 50 years ago, and Neil Armstrong declared the event, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” I have no recollection of that specific event, but I do remember other early moon missions. I remember watching the massive rockets take off from Cape Canaveral in Florida. I remember the marketing items that followed, particularly, moon boots. 

When reading about all the stories surrounding the anniversary of the moon landing, I came across a YouTube video of the other day called, “Buzz Aldrin Punches a Guy.” Well, I had to know what that was about, so I pulled up the video.  

In it, a filmmaker is harassing Aldrin about the moon landing being a hoax. He was in his face with a Bible, calling him a liar and yelling at him to swear on the Bible that he landed on the moon. 

My best friend Heather and I, who is more like a sister to me (her kids call us aunt and uncle), have been cooking up a plan for the last couple of months. Back in May, my niece, Keyla, called me to ask me if Matt and I would sell her my Miata. She has been taking driver’s ed this summer and gets a school permit in August. 

At the time I wasn’t sure what we were going to do with the car. It is nearly 20 years old, and I have driven it for more than 10 of those years. I was concerned about how we would come to a price. Insurance is higher on a sports car, and Keya doesn’t know how to drive a stick. These were all of my arguments. 

Keyla is very responsible for an adult, let alone a teenager, but all of these things were concerns for all the actual adults, not just me. Heather and I spent many nights on the phone talking about whether she should have a car that my whole family calls “the Racer.”

I would like to propose that we just shut down the country for the 2 weeks surrounding the Fourth of July. I mean, really, no one was around last week, and many are off this week, too. I forget form year to year that this happens, and I am caught off guard by it. I am not prepared for the out of office responses, even though I subconsciously must know they are coming.

What would we do for food, you ask? 

Stock up.

Same with beer, soda lemonade, sunscreen, gas, charcoal, whatever you may need.

Just think of it…what if we all got a two-week break. The entire country could come back refreshed and ready to tackle the world.

Matt and I are typically on vacation during this time as well. Every year for several years, before I came back to work at News Publishing, my family would all converge on my aunt’s lake house, located on Wolf Lake in southern Michigan. 

Last week I came face to face with cold, harsh reality.

I was headed to Michigan for a few days for a family reunion, and just days before I left, our dog, Ruby, fell ill. The vet di­agnosed her with a slipped disc, something that is more com­mon in small dogs, much less so in a golden retriever. 

I don’t think that the vet at the emergency clinic conveyed the seriousness of a slipped disc in a dog, and the Internet pro­vided little information on the topic. Some dogs recovered, others didn’t. We did not know how quickly it would overcome her.

The first signs of this prob­lem came suddenly. On a Sat­urday she was fine. On Sunday, she couldn’t go down the stairs. On Monday we were at the clinic, which could only offer drugs for pain relief and re­duced inflammation. For the first two days she would not eat or drink, but after the trip to the clinic, I convinced her to have some water and canned food. 

I will be the first to admit that as a young girl, I really didn’t understand women’s suffrage very well. I never thought about it much, honestly, but I remember my great grandmother talking about the elation women felt when they were given the right to vote. So all my life the importance of women voting has stuck with me. 

Grandma Clark didn’t really provide many details of the Women’s Suffrage Movement, I knew the basics, but it wasn’t until I got older and started to see the sexism that women face first hand, and not allowing women to vote is plain and simple, sexism. 

I was telling my husband, Matt, that the 100^thanniversary of women’s suffrage, and his response was, “A hundred years? Is that all.” It made me realize the different impact women’s suffrage makes on girls and boys, men and women, in this country. I think men, much like my younger self, don’t really think about it too much at all. 

In the past couple of weeks, I have been thinking about the foster care program in the United States.

It really began while working on a story about Luke’s Closet at St. Luke’s Lutheran Church. (See story page 5) Luke’s Closet offers free clothes to foster families, and I know firsthand that many children come into foster care with nothing but the clothes on their back because my family was a foster family.

I have been a person who has had pets, mostly cats and dogs, for the better part of my life. Today I want to talk specifically about dogs. 

Dogs have cohabitated with man for thousands of years as companions, laborers and sometimes even babysitters for children. There is nothing more loyal to a human being than a dog.

Our dog Ruby (aka Ruby Chewbacca because of her thick brownish fur), whose tales have graced this page in the past, is a large (90 lb.) golden retriever, and by far the best dog I have ever had. Sorry Daphne, Sadie, Daisy, Amanda, Bowser and Lily, but Ruby is the most obedient and smartest dog I have ever known. In the five years we have had her, we have had to come up with new and unique way to convey the words “walk” and “ball” because she has learned all the variations of our spelling, abbreviating and making up fake words to mean ball and walk.