2024, animals, Family, Farming Update, Nature, pets, Uncategorized, work

Progress

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Today’s Farming Update comes from Ben.

I took a few days to work at home this week.

I got a lot of work done on my shop wall. It’s basically all framed up. I need a few more boards and a lot of finishing bits, but it’s getting there. I’ve purchased insulation to install myself, the LP tank has been installed, waiting on the heater and the big garage door to be installed, and the steel siding has been ordered. Going for gray on this wall. Might make it before winter yet.

I sure do appreciate my friend at Red’s Electric letting me use his lift. This would have all been much MUCH harder without.

I sure have been dropping things and knocking things over with working on this. Good thing I’m working alone; I wouldn’t want to be around me the way it’s been going. And there’s barely room for me in the lift. Cause you know, I need all the tools.

Saturday will be adoption day for Luna. And back in 2007, it was about the same time of year we acquired Allie.


Last weekend I burned a brush pile. I need to dig the metal out of it and then I’ll have the ash pile buried after that.

It was time for a new ‘everyday-in-town’ hat. Not so dirty to be a farm hat, and cleaner than the farming hat, but dirtier than my ‘going-to-church’ hat. This is a hat I got for free at the theater conference USITT. It’s a seating company that I won’t be able to afford anyway.

I lost half the ducks last week. Friday afternoon I counted 22 ducks. Saturday morning I saw something white laying down by the barn. It was a dead duck. And there was another. And another. I picked up 6 carcasses. Four outside and two in their pen. And we have 11 ducks remaining. We’re pretty sure it was a weasel as there was a bite mark on the back of their heads. I have found some piles of feathers out in the fields. The dogs never reacted, and I never heard a fuss, so I’m not sure what happen. But it’s very discouraging.

The mallard ducks have discovered they can fly. And if you think about it, how would you know you COULD fly, if no one told you or showed you? You’d have to figure it out by accident. Maybe instinct, but again, no examples… so… what will they do?

I often listen to a 1940’s station and one of the things I enjoy are the songs you don’t hear anywhere else. I heard Hogie Carmichael singing ‘Huggin’ and Chalkin’. It’s considered a novelty song.

“I gotta gal who’s mighty sweet

With blue eyes and tiny feet

Her name is Rosabelle Magee

And she tips the scale at three o three

Oh gee, but ain’t it grand to have a girl so big and fat that when you go to hug her

You don’t know where you’re at

You have to take a piece of chalk in your hand

And hug a way and chalk a mark to see where you began”

….

….

One day I was a huggin’ and a chalkin’ and a beggin’ her to be my bride

When I met another fella with some chalk in his hand

A comin’ around the other side of the mountain

A comin’ around the other side

Oh my gosh.

HOW DID YOU LEARN TO LIGHT PAPER MATCHS?

WHO WAS RESPONSILE FOR TEACHING YOU BAD HABITS?

23 thoughts on “Progress”

  1. Rise and Shine, Baboons,

    Happy Adoption Day, Luna!

    OT, I am off to the Eisenhower Community Center in Hopkins to set up for the Houseplant sale.

    Tomorrow at above location, 10 am-3pm. Fundraiser for Hennepin County Master Gardener Programs.

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  2. I have no idea where or even when I learned to light paper matches! Maybe watching my dad, who was a smoker at the time… I was pretty well behaved (read that “wanted to please the folks”), so I wouldn’t have been playing with matches much…

    Bad habits would probably have come from other college kids – smoking, drinking, carousing till all hours on the weekends…

    That song is pretty funny, Ben. I suppose we could also post other funny songs… here’s one of my favorites (that I’ve posted before, no doubt).

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  3. Matches? Probably my big brother. He also taught me how to play poker when I was five (maybe 6). Other bad habits? College, Renaissance Festival, theater… there have been a host of places to pick those up. Swearing – like the ducks, that probably came by instinct. 🙂

    My fun for the weekend (which I probably should have sent a note out about earlier – pinky swear I will be better next time): I’m off to dance Flamenco at the St Paul Art Crawl. 1-5pm today and Sunday at Northern Warehouse on Prince Street in Lowertown should you have some free time this weekend. I’m still a baby flamenca, so no castanets or anything fancy yet. Still just trying not to fall over or twist myself up.

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  4. I cannot remember first learning about paper matches but I had a large collection of matchbooks.
    My uncle taught me about the Three-On-A-Match superstition.
    He served with Third Army during World War Two and swore he’d witnessed it several times.
    I’m responsile [sic😉] for my bad habits.

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  5. I caught son when he was about 6 trying to light small wooden matches in his closet. I took him outside, gave him 4 big boxes of wooden matches and had him light every single one and then clean them up. It took him a good hour, and he never tried to play with matches again

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  6. When I was in Middle School and we went out to a steak house to eat, my dad would order a Tom Collins, purportedly for himself, but let me drink it.

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  7. No one here is lighting fires. The winds are gusting up to 70 mph just northwest of us and there are at least 3 range fires northwest of us by Watford City. There are lots of acres burned, and one was started when the wind blew down an electric line.

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  9. The plant sale is all set up now. Great plants for sale this year!

    Re: Matches. After my dad lost coordination and strength in his hands and fingers from MS, we kids took on filling, lighting and cleaning his pipe, as well as making his coffee. Therefore we always had books of matches near his pipe area. But Dad was a tease. So he would insist that his pipe was not yet lit despite the fact that it was. So the match would burn down and singe our fingers. We learned to disregard his insistance and blow out the match, but other kids and cousins in the house would get the business from him and burn their fingers. One cousin never caught on, though.

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  10. my folks smoked and we watched tv together and sat at the kitchen when my mom talked on the phone. people would come over and we would put our silver cigarette boxes out for the to take a cigarette and use the little silver lighters that sat on the coffee table ash trays abound so when i first tried cigarettes at 6 or 7 it was no sweat to learn how to light the matches. i had seen it many times.
    bad habbits? the gang shared all accumulated knowledge.

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  12. My grandpa on my dad’s side was blind due to a gun accident. (Ostensibly.) He was a heavy smoker by the time I was old enough to pay any attention to what he was actually like. He would put a cigarette in his mouth, light his match, and, cupping the cigarette with one hand so that he could feel the tip, light it with the other. I noticed that his fingers were dark brown, almost black. As a curious child, I had to ask why his fingers were so black. I trusted my mom more than anyone when I was young, so I asked her. She gave a slightly disgusted sigh, and said because of the way he lit his cigarettes. This was horrifying to me. I was concerned, but he wasn’t really very friendly to us as children. I was a little terrified of him. Watching him with his matches and cigarettes is likely where I learned to light matches though. I never played with them (until I got older).

    I was an angel as a young child. I was terrified of getting into trouble or coming to some kind of harm. As I grew older and began to notice the way other families interacted, I grew rebellious – like all kids. I got myself into my own bad habits. And I got myself out of them too. Lately, I find that I’m more like I was as a child. I don’t want to get into trouble or come to harm. I’m way more careful now.

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    2. It doesn’t work for me at the college very often. It doesn’t let me like things either and when I post them, they just disappear… not in spam, just lost in the ether. I.T. has the system locked down pretty tight for security reasons and I’m sure that has soemthing to do with it.

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  14. As far back as I can remember, we’ve burned out trash, so taking out the garbage and starting it on fire was one of our chores. I never thought that it was teaching me a skill. If I wanted to play with matches, I just had to take out the garbage.

    Like Anna said, theater taught me about drinking, smoking, and sex. There was cousin David, three years older than me, who taught me a lot of things, like Drinking and sex, but I was too young to believe the stuff he told me about sex. I was out with his friends one night, went to a drive-in movie. One of the guys got ‘passed out’ drunk, and we hauled him home and snuck him into the house, where, it’s possible I turned on a light, which scared the other guys so bad they dropped him and we ran for the door. The parents were calling the other parents the next morning. I was the innocent by-stander. 🙂

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  15. Well again, I don’t know if it’s a city girl thing or a growing up in Missouri thing, but I had to look up paper matches. Where I’m from we called them book matches. I’ve never even heard the phrase paper matches until today. And I haven’t the slightest idea who taught me to light a match. Both of my folks were smokers when I was little, so my guess is just observation. Really my worst bad habit was smoking and I picked it up in college. But parenthood whooped it out of me. I had my last cigarette the night before I left for China. (Of course, at that point I was only having a cigarette every couple of months in a social setting, so it was easier to quit.)

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  18. your workspace looks fantastic. That header is very impressive. Is that two by 12s pounded onto two by tens I assume it’s not a solid piece of wood it’s just there to handle the garage door but it looks great. I can’t believe you’re able to do all that by yourself, you gotta be pretty good with the lift in order to be able to get those boards in place and pound it in looks like it’ll be a good space. I wonder if you could apply for aid on solar for the roof of the shed to heat it and cut back on your LP costs , it can be a little pricey
    Sorry to hear about the ducks. I have a friend who raises pheasants who has a problem with weasels getting in and killing them for no reason in particular and then just leaving them he always says that’s nature, but I don’t get it.

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