Mother's Day in Esko

Once the garden clean-up was finished, we piled into Jeanne Goessling's van and our car and headed up to Esko for the Mother's Day week-end. Jeanne didn't notice when we loaded the mystery boxes into my car so our big secret was safe.

When we got to Cloquet I pulled off to buy a hanging basket for Maura, who always gets to feed and pick-up after us when we come to visit. At the garden center I noticed a bunch of Zone 5 perennials that they had received by mistake that they were selling for $1 each and couldn't resist picking up some pinkish Cinquefoil, some deep blue/purple Butterfly Bush and some Campanula. I'll put some in the flower beds at home and the rest in the border I'm establishing along the alley at the Garden. Hooray!

Ted and his siblings decided that they were going to buy Jeanne a new PC this year for Mother's Day, in part because her PC is fairly old but mostly because...drumroll please...DSL is coming to Esko! This will be such a great thing for Jeanne because she will now be able to upload photos much faster and get email with attachments that she can open before she gets disconnected.

It was a nearly paperless transaction as, in this modern world, Ted went out and bought the PC and sent an email message to his siblings containing the link to his PayPal account. Nearly everyone had a PayPal account and zapped the money to him immediately. The family Luddites sent checks and that was that. How simple.

Jeanne is used to Ted tweaking her computer when he visits, so she didn't seem to notice that he was down in her office. He copied her files and installed them on the new PC and that was that. The DSL connection wasn't live yet so he couldn't do everything he wanted to do to customize the new machine for Jeanne, but he installed some remote control software that allows him to tinker on her machine from afar, so that will be handy.

We had a wonderful time with the cousins, catching up on their recent exploits. Parker, whose birthday was Saturday (12!) was freshly mobile with his wireless amp having just been repaired. He spent the day window shopping all of the music stores in the area with Steve and returned ready to play!

Raleigh (16!) showed us the photos from his trip to the Biathlon Junior World Cup in Germany in December and filled us in on the social life of Eskovian teens.

Audrey (5)played me in BattleShip, which she has recently learned and was an excellent cousin to Thành, who is often left in the dust by the older kids. Audrey let him play with her toys (he really liked the baby carriage and the baby dolls) and they did a lot of jumping on the living room ottoman.

The next day the PC was revealed to Jeanne and she was completely surprised, absolutely thrilled and relatively troubled by the expense. I told her not to worry about it, that when you had nine kids, nothing was too expensive for any one of them alone! She sat down for a lesson, and I think she will be fine (she is now using Vista) once she gets going.

Thanks to all those Goesslings for making their Mom so happy.

Maura and I took a long walk while Raleigh went out and ran fifteen miles. I got the first wood tick of the year and also scored some nice Pheasant tail feathers from a spot where a guy has been dumping his butchered game offal, much to Steve and Maura's chagrin. The guy isn't too bright, because Steve found the deer tag with the guy's name right on it among the deer carcass.

On Sunday afternoon Steve took Ted and I, Parker, Louis, Audrey and Thành to Cirrus Aviation, where I hadn't been in years. I certainly had never been to the facility that they are using to build the new Cirrus jet in. It is a cavernous building, 400,000 sq. ft. or more and was built by the City of Duluth for Northwest Airlines as a maintenance facility.

Northwest didn't stay there long, however, and the building sat empty for a few years before Cirrus moved in. We got to see a number of really interesting things and it was fascinating to listen to Steve, as what he does for a living is so far-removed from anything that I encounter.

There was a 1970s Yugoslavian trainer jet that Cirrus had just purchased to use as a chase plane for the Cirrus jet. There was a Cessna from the 1940s and a lot of recently finished Cirrus planes that were being sent to all ends of the Earth. We got to walk on the gigantic mobile scaffolding (sorry Steve, I don't remember what it's really called!) that was used to maintain the jumbo jets, we got to walk through lots of still-empty areas and make echoes and we got to see a lot of propellers in their shipping boxes, whereupon we noticed that they were manufactured in Piqua, OH.

Why is this interesting, you ask? Because Piqua, OH is the home of Jerome Horowitz Elementary School, the alma materof none other than George and Harold of Captain Underpants fame! Hooray!

One of the other really interesting things that Steve showed us was a couple of large ponds located not far from the building with a pumphouse located between them. I thought they were simply water retention ponds for the run-off from the runways, but no. If there were to be a fire in this enormous hanger, the pump would suck the ponds dry, mixing the water with chemicals and fill the hangar with fire suppression foam! That's a lot of foam!

Thành fell asleep on the way home, late in the afternoon, and then slept for a while on the couch until we ate dinner and so he was awake all the way home. Unlike Louis, who talked incessantly even at the age of three, Thành sits quietly watching the world go by or softly singing. As we drove along in the darkness (Louis had read until the sun went down and then fell asleep) we heard him singing, "Happy, happy, happy, happy..." How sweet.