Baker's heartbeat

My ballot before it was mailed. I looked up its status online.  This year was the year both Bakers voted in the Presidential Election by absentee ballot. We have a lot of company; the numbers are astonishing on both a state and national level (but understandable because of COVID-19). Now five days before the Nov. 3 election, roughly 70 million ballots have been cast nationwide and there were more than 700,000 absentee ballot requests in Iowa. The neat thing is that those of us who sent in ballots in Iowa can check the status of them: Simply click on sos.iowa.gov and fill in the appropriate blanks. In our case, we received our ballots in early October, took a while to find a perfect time to fill them out, and mailed them back in mid-month.  Subsequently I was VERY interested in seeing where the ballots ended up. I checked online at the Iowa Secretary of State's site and was delighted to see both ballots had landed in the care of the Scott County Auditor's Office, Davenport. Bef...

At top, my dad, Emery Cox, and me, in 1975 in Tipton, Iowa. We had several discussions on race in those days. Above, the baby is my father, born in 1916 and 14 days old, held by his nanny. George Floyd's death in Minneapolis appalled many Americans. It was of course recorded on cell phone video and was a clear, sickening example of police power gone awry. That incident hit home to this blogger in rural Scott County, Iowa. I was born in Minneapolis in 1957 and raised in the suburbs. My beloved grandfather, Eugene William Hebner, was born and raised in North Minneapolis, in the 1890s. Both parts of Minneapolis were sites of protests, mostly peaceful but also violent in some cases. I was among the Americans watching, aghast at times, and wondering, "What can I do?" "How can I help impact change?" One answer came last summer when the United Way of the Quad-Cities announced the 21-day Equity Challenge. So what is this Challenge, exactly? Find the link online: www.uni...

Steve and I at Grand Canyon; we are holding masks in our hands. Three of our masks: From a friend, from Costco, and from a local farmer. Wearing a mask during the COVID-19 pandemic -- or not -- is related to several factors.  Vanity is among them. That's what I've observed the last few months. In a recent trip out West, mask-wearing was required in all states as well as the Navajo Nation. We Bakers had them on almost constantly. The mask topic is also heating up as the presidential election nears and it's common sense to conclude that vanity does play a role.  According to a June 29 Wall Street Journal article, male vanity appears to be a factor in why men reject masks. Two studies -- by Middlesex University in London, and the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley, Calif. -- both found that "more men than women agreed that wearing a mask is 'shameful, not cool, a sign of weakness and a stigma.'" Yet masks are becoming more mainstream, and th...

We're on our way back up the Bright Angel Trail View from a stop on the Bright Angel Trail This was on the trail soon after we started. It got much warmer and more humid!      Hiking in the Grand Canyon had been on the Baker Bucket List for, oh, more than 15 years.     One of my sisters had ridden a donkey down to the bottom of the canyon, and then helicoptered out. A second sister had hiked to the bottom, camped, and hiked back up again.     I met a woman who had been in a group of runners up and down the canyon, or "rim to rim." I also interviewed an 84-year-old woman who hiked rim-to-rim in an organized tour group. (She had prepared for this grueling task by hiking up and down the back stairs at Genesis Medical Center, carrying a heavy backpack.)      When it came to the Bakers, we researched the trails. I decided it would be best to do the Bright Angel Trail because we were able, this year, to rent a cabin at the top of it. This way ...

     This a national park not far from the Navajo Nation; the Navajo area looks similar      While the leaders, and hope-to-be leaders of the United States discuss the current pandemic every day and show angst about finding a safe vaccine, there is a population in northern Arizona who is part of the vaccine testing process.     The people of the Navajo Nation are in Stage 3 tests for the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, according to a Sept. 12 Associated Press report.     We drove through the Navajo Nation in September and stopped once to take a break. I walked into a roadside store and glanced at the Navajo newspaper on display, gasping at the headline: Navajo volunteers would soon start testing for the COVID-19 vaccine.      The clerk look curiously at me, and I said, "Ohmigoodness! You folks are doing the testing?" I hoped the volunteers based their decision on science, I told the clerk, and not politicians who are outspok...

                                                       Here we are at the Grand Canyon!      The idea of a road trip was met with skepticism: "Drive? More than 3,000 miles? In September?"      That was Cautious Me talking to husband Steve, who was trying to share a daring idea: Travel during this worsening COVID-19 virus, as carefully as could be. The ultimate destination would be the Grand Canyon, long on my Bucket List.     I had a lengthy list of reservations, starting with the care of my many gardens. (See related blog: gardensirencall.blogspot.com).      In short, we had never, ever taken a long, driving vacation in September before. Not in the 33 years of  marriage and not before that, either. There had just been a long drought, and the dozens of annual blooms I carefully planted were...