Last Thursday was Psychologist Day as well as Bastille Day. I advised my coworkers to not be alarmed if I and our psychology resident stormed the barricades because we weren’t getting the guillotine out until next week. Only a couple of my coworkers knew what Bastille Day was or what I was talking about.
In honor of Psychologist Day, a Ukrainian coworker gave me a china plate emblazoned with pysanki. It was a lovely gift and much appreciated. I can use it. I am perplexed, though, about the gift from our psychometrist.
My Human Service Center and the Center in Bismarck, where Husband works share the services of a go-getting and spunky young woman who administers and scores our psychological tests. She is very efficient and works quickly. She is also very impulsive, and professes to know nothing about plants. In honor of Psychologist Day she bought large, potted fig trees for each of the four psychologists she works with. She hoped we could keep the trees in our offices. These trees need bright light. I am the only one with a window in my office. Husband brought our two trees home from Bismarck on Wednesday and they are sitting on our kitchen counter for the time being until I can get them to my office. There they will sit on a table by my window along with a large potted rosemary plant. I can’t use the table for much of anything now. It is covered in plants. I don’t want to crush the exuberance of our psychometrist, so I will do my best to keep these trees going. I know that when she drives out to my Center she will want to see how they are doing, so I don’t feel that I can give them away, either.
What is the oddest or most awkward gift you ever received? Who is the most impulsive person you ever worked with? Any advice on how to grow Fiddle Leaf Fig Trees?
The Botanical Garden, which opened to visitors here in 1859, is the oldest public garden in the US and among the top three public gardens in the world.
The first US kindergarten was started here in 1873 by Susan Blow. (You can still see her original class room!)
The Eads Bridge, completed here in 1874, was the first arched steel truss bridge in the world. The bridge continues to carry automobiles, pedestrians, cyclists and light rail trains!
Several new foods were popularized here in 1904: the hot dog, the ice cream cone and iced tea.
Famous folks from here: Maya Angelou, Yogi Berra, Daniel Boone, William Burroughs, Vincent Price, Stan Musial, Marlin Perkins.
Two weeks plus post-surgery and putting socks on is still kind of a process. Picking black raspberries was harder than I expected, too. But I’m getting there.
Last Monday the two corners of CRP got planted to a ‘pheasant habitat’ blend of wildflowers and grasses. And we got three loads of crushed rock delivered for the farmyard. One dumped in a pile for use as needed and the other two spread on the road.
We have a brush pile of sticks collected from the yard since December, and we’ve been meaning to burn it all spring. Several times Kelly has said “This would be a good night to burn the brush pile” and then we fall asleep on the couch.
But the other night we were out there ready to do it! Aaaand there’s a duck nesting under it. Sigh.
A few years ago, we started a pile of sticks on fire and there was a good blaze going before a chicken came running out from under it. So, we look before we light it now. The duck only has three eggs… not sure they’re even fertilized. But the fire is still on hold.
I’m delivering straw this weekend with my friend Paul, and we’re going out in the middle of nowhere. It’s a Winona Address…and it’s a great drive on lonely gravel roads and hills and valleys and S-turns and I have a printed map because there is no cell phone reception down in there. I love going there.
Crops are looking good. Two weeks ago, I had a photo of Kelly on July 4 and the corn was up to her waist. In 10 days, it’s doubled in height.
Soybeans are up to her knees.
I’ve talked about 15” rows vs. 30” rows and how we like the crops to canopy to help prevent weeds growing. Compare these photos: first is the neighbors 30” rows and second is my 15” rows.
Growing degree units are 1384, 94 above normal for my area. The hot weather coming helps, but the plant actually shuts down above 86 degrees, so we don’t actually gain GDU’s after that.
See this corn plant growing in the middle of the soybeans.
That’s called ‘volunteer corn’ and it can be a problem in soybeans. Because we use crop rotation, usually a bean field this year was corn last year. If a storm or disease knocked down the stalk of corn, depending how much it’s fallen over, it can make picking it up at harvest that much harder. A lot of ears may fall to the ground and grow voluntarily in the field next year. Hence the term, volunteer corn. It doesn’t generally reach maturity with full ears, but depending on the amount, it’s competing with the soybean crop and it can be a problem at harvest.
Kelly let the little chicks out to run at large. Padawan and I took down the fence and they’re enjoying all the room. Of course, a new pecking order will need to be established eventually between the old hens and the new ones.
A friend of mine in town had given me some chickens a few years ago and was ready for more, so I took two of the laying hens and one of the younger chicks to her. At her place, the two laying hens went to her outdoor run and settled right in. The younger one made a break for it. Out the coop door, through the garden (The entire backyard is garden) into her garage, out the big door, across the street, and under the neighbor’s car. Two adults and my young Padawan in pursuit. Padawan really does not have much interest in the chickens, so the last thing he wanted to do was chase this one up the street. Eventually, the young chick reversed its course: back into the garage, back into the garden, in and around all the plants, and eventually, got stuck in a narrow spot between a retaining wall and a fence. Was captured, and returned to its new home. I really wanted a photo of all this, but I had left my phone in the truck. Use your imagination. Remember, the backyard is all garden so they’re dodging all that too. It was as funny as you imagine.
USE YOUR IMAGINATION AND GO OFF THE BEATEN TRACK. SAY WHAT YOU WANT HERE.
With my front and back yards full of flowers, I do need to think about water during the summer months, especially if there are going to be so many 90+ degree days. I watch the weather forecasts like a hawk to try to determine if Mother Nature is going to gift me with any free precipitation. If it’s going to rain, I really don’t to pay the City of Minneapolis for extra water.
It seems that almost every forecast of rain the past month has been a chimera – it shows as 50% or 60% and the radar shows the dark green riding right over my location – then nothing! Or else it does a very insulting sprinkle for 3 minutes. Last night I had the sprinkler on in front and when I went to water my baskets in the back, YA gave me grief. She said “it’s going to rain… it’s 80%”. I continued along, watering all the baskets and the bales while she made fun of me. As I finished up, it started to lightly sprinkle. She smirked as I came in the back. Then 5 minutes later I smirked when it hadn’t even rained long enough to wet a tissue.
I know weather is capricious but I would have thought that by now, forecasters could get a better grasp on this. I’ve said many times that if I were to look for another job, it would be as a weather forecaster. Then I could get a big salary to be on tv and the fact that I was wrong half of the time wouldn’t count against me on my annual review!
I guess for the rest of the summer, I’ll just assume there will be no rain, unless I wake up to it in the morning!
Bill mentioned a few days ago that his first little tomatoes had been swiped right off the vine. Now I’m paranoid about my first ripening beauties. There are 3 cherry tomatoes and 2 romas that are in various blushing states; I hope they survive until I pick them.
My cherry tomato plant is now taller than I am. Granted, it has a 24” start since it is in a straw bales, but I’m thinking that even without the bale, it’s going to give me a run for the money.
You all know that I started gardening in straw bales after someone here talked about Tomatoland by Barry Estabrook. I hadn’t grown any veggies for years prior to that, but the book was horrifying enough that I started casting about for ways to raise my own tomatoes and that’s when I discovered straw bale gardening. The rest is history.
I have the book The $64 Tomato by William Alexander on hold at the library. Actually it’s “paused” and I keep pushing the pause date back. It’s subtitle is “How One Man Nearly Lost His Sanity, Spent a Fortune, and Endured an Existential Crisis in the Quest for the Perfect Garden”. But now I’m a little worried. What if it makes me re-think my straw bale protocol? What if it makes me do the math?
I’m hoping it’s just a fun read with some laughs. Fingers crossed.
As I’m counting down my last days at work, I’ve tackled a few projects that have to be put to bed before I’m gone.
One of these projects is, as I refer to it, “the old stuff”. At my company, we back up our systems every night but GETTING to that information, if you need it, is cumbersome at best and impossible at worst. You’d be surprised how often you might want to access information from an old program so about 25 years ago, we (or more accurately, I) started downloading our programs onto floppy disk. You remember those, right?
Then after a few years, as we were changing technology, as I did the annual download, I started downloading to diskette.
You know where this is going… we eventually moved to CDs. This annual download was accompanied by an updated spreadsheet of what programs were on which CD as well as name of client, location, date, etc. I was the keeper of the spreadsheet but we had paper copies sorted by either client or location, since those were the two most needed search criteria.
Fast forward through another technology change (which meant you had to use a portable CD reader to use the CDs), a fire in our building (which destroyed the paper files), pandemic (during which nobody was in the building to get to the CDs), data migration to a cloud based system during my furlough (which despite assurances to the contrary, caused the loss of about half my desktop files, including the spreadsheet).
Bottom line is that for the past 18 months, I’ve had two boxes full of unusable CDs under my desk. Nobody has asked about them since I got back from furlough. Even if they did, without the spreadsheet, finding any data would be nie on impossible. And nobody knows where the portable reader is anyway. Rather than asking any more about it, I just informed my boss last week that I was dumping them. Luckily we have CD/DVD recycling at my company AND I personally have a use for the plastic cases that many of them were stored in. Took me about an hour to separate the CDs from the cases and/or sleeves (header photo). Broke two fingernails. And all the while I was thinking about how the technology changed to the point where the data was lost to us.
And it’s changing fast; YA doesn’t even know what a floppy disk is!
What bit of technology would you not like to do without?
It was this week three years ago that we lost our Little Jail Bird, Edith. In her memory, I’m running her most iconic posting on the Trail.
Until last fall, I had never been to Banning State Park. I had driven by it dozens of time, because when I head up to my sister’s house, I always turn off 35W and take Highway 23 into town. I didn’t know much about Banning, but when I was looking for a day trip, it seemed to fit my needs perfectly.
First, I wanted a park where I could drive there and back in one day without getting too tired. Second, I wanted a park that didn’t involve driving several back roads, because I knew that I would be driving in the dark due to the shorter fall days and my night vision and sense of direction is bad enough that I would get lost unless I kind of knew where I was going. And third, I wanted a state park because I had a state park sticker and wanted to use it as much as possible to get my money’s worth out of it. Banning fit all of those qualifications. Plus it has a waterfall, which is a big plus in my book.
So, off I went, one sunny morning in October. When I arrived, I stopped at the visitor center to get maps and ask where the best spots were. I was so excited. It seems that often when I go north, I am early for the fall colors and often find myself driving home just a few days before “peak” and this time I was not too early! I said something about that to the woman at the desk (while trying to not jump and down in excitement) and she shook her head woefully and told me in a discouraging tone, “You’re going to see LOTS of brown out there.” Gee thanks, way to burst my bubble.
Of course, since I drove all the way up there, I figured I better go on the hike anyway even if I would see mostly brown. I drove to the parking area and when I stepped out of the car and looked up, I knew it was going to be a good day (see header photo).
I hiked all the way to the falls and back and shot lots of photos. It was an incredibly beautiful day: that clear, deep blue sky that you only seem to see on autumn days and – surprise! – lots of colorful leaves on the trees. It can be a challenge shooting in bright sunlight, but I was so overcome by the beauty of it all that I just took that in my stride. There was that wonderful northwoods smell in the air – pine trees and dead leaves. Nothing like it! and nothing else invigorates me like that does.
It was getting pretty cool and the sun was going down quickly by the time I was heading back on the trail but the golden evening light only made things more beautiful and the colors more intense. I went home pleasantly tired and very happy and glad that the woman’s prediction of “lots of brown” wasn’t true.
Boris Johnson resigned? When the heck did that happen?
I know I’m not thrilled reading the news these days but I do check in every few days. Yesterday I saw a couple of things on Facebook that drove me to CNN. Lots of news about the Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s assassination but nothing about Boris. So I thought I’d check out BBC.com. Absolutely nothing. Thinking it was a fool’s errand, I just typed “Boris Johnson” into Google and finally found the news. Seems as if four days later, it isn’t a headline any longer. Like you shouldn’t blink or you’ll miss big chunks of what’s happening in the world.
The year after I graduated from high school, I spent 8 weeks living with a family in Mexico (their 2 daughters had spent the summer with us the year before). Back then – yes, when dinosaurs roamed the planet – no BBC.com, no CNN.com, no streaming. Just the daily newspaper, which in that corner of Mexico really did not carry any international news at all. I felt a little cut off from the rest of the world while I was there – I’m assuming it’s how those bio-dome folks must have felt.
I came home from Mexico on a bus through Nogales to Albuquerque – stayed in a hotel one night and then flew home the next day. That morning in Albuquerque I took a long walk and before returning to the hotel, I stopped at the corner drugstore and bought copies of several news magazines (Time, US News & World Report, Newsweek, even the Atlantic Monthly).
Apparently while I was in Mexico, there was a problem between Greece, Turkey and Cyprus. Despite having the top news magazines of the day in my hands, I couldn’t really figure out what had happened. If you don’t read the first news stories, it’s hard to “catch up”. To this day, I’m not really 100% sure exactly how it all played out although I know that Cyprus is divided by a Green Line with the Greeks in the south and the Turkish in the north.
I’m a little worried that this is how it will be for me and Boris Johnson. I’ve found a few op eds and I THINK I’ve got it down, but am still a little surprised at how fast the story came and then went!
Summer on the farm (GDU’s are 80 above normal giving us 1282 currently) and we’re just watching everything grow. Had my young padawan out mowing the lawn and doing a few projects by himself.
Which is good for me; I’m 10 days post surgery, feeling better every day, and just not doing much but sitting and recovering. A friend of mine said “Healing is SUCH a process”. And I told somebody “recovering is hard work.”
The other day I walked out to the machine shed and then rode in the gator up for the mail. That night I really hurt. Holding myself upright so my back doesn’t rub on the seat might be part of the problem, but the walk was the most exercise I’ve had in a week too.
The next day I took my car for a drive. With the lack of control of my legs, I haven’t driven my car since early May. Daughter asked me if I should be doing that, the driving. I told her that’s why I practice on the driveway. First, I went from the house to the machine shed, just to make sure I could stop. Then I went down to the barn, then I went up the driveway. That’s another bonus to having a mile long driveway, lots of room to practice your driving skills.
The oats is all headed out, it goes from such a nice green color to more of a pale green once headed out, and then as it dries up, it will turn yellow. Compare this photo to the header photo.
The corn was almost waist high by the Fourth of July,
and the beans are looking good. Everything has been sprayed for weeds, and using the 15 inch rows on soybeans, they’ve started to canopy enough that there really shouldn’t be any more weed pressure. We will continue to monitor for bugs, around here that is soybean aphids. But those can vary from year to year and then you still need enough bugs to cause enough damage to justify the cost of spraying: the ‘economic threshold’. We don’t spray for just a few bugs. Sometimes soybeans get weather related funguses that can cause issues. So we keep an eye on all the crops.
We put out the hummingbird and oriole feeder last week, we’ve seen some hummingbirds around on flowers, and one morning I saw an oriole on the feeder and that made me happy.
The black raspberries are just getting ripe, picked a few of those. I enjoy them on ice cream very much. And they will be really good in yogurt.
Rooster number three had a wound on his leg last week, kind of upper thigh area. Enough that he was dripping blood. Don’t know what he was into or up against, but he’s recovered and still chasing off rooster number one. Of our three guineas, two must’ve been on nests as one was by itself for several days. Now there’s two again. It would be nice if they could hatch out a batch. They make their nests in tall weeds somewhere and I generally only find them by accident. And they’re terrible mothers as a rule. The one Guinea we have has done real well the last couple years. As with the ducks this spring, it will be Kelly chasing them down and trying to catch them if we get that far. But it would sure be nice to have a dozen guineas around. May have to order babies next year.
When I went off to college, my mom helped me set up a checking account. (Up until then, although I did have a savings account at the bank, most of my financial dealings involved a jar of cash in my underwear drawer.)
She dutifully showed me how to balance my checkbook which I did EVERY MONTH for decades. Then when the bank card came into play, I wrote every transaction into my check register and continued to balance the checkbook.
Then at some point in YA’s young life, I only got to balancing every few months and by the time she was seven or eight, with the advent of online banking, I gave up putting any bank card transactions in the register and shortly thereafter gave up balancing the checkbook.
I only write about five or six checks a month these days – one each week to the milkman and during the summer, one a month to Bachmans. Very few others – even the Girl Scouts will take your money electronically in 2022.
Yesterday when I wrote out the weekly check for the milkman, I realized I was getting really close to the end of the register. In looking back through it, I noticed that it is almost six years old. Hard to imagine I’ve used the same check register for that long. I expect that when I quit having weekly dairy delivery, my check register will last at least a decade!
Do you still balance your checkbook? Do you even still HAVE a checkbook?
Trail Baboon 