2025, animals, Automotive, Family, Farming Update, Uncategorized, Weather

A Decent Week for Weather

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The weekend Farm Report comes to us from Ben.

On Sunday, Kelly and I did our usual gator farm tour. This week we went down in the pasture and down to the creek, which was still frozen over, walked around down there for a bit.

The next day I took the truck to Plainview, which meant I have the dogs with me, and after we picked up daughter, they all walked home.

Dealing with mud again, which is never my favorite. And it’s gonna get cold, and it’s gonna snow, and then it’s gonna get muddy again, so we’ll have to do this cycle a few times. Just something else to get through.

I took the anhydrous applicator up to an auction in Plainview. It’s an implement I use in the spring to apply nitrogen to the corn ground. Nitrogen in the form of anhydrous ammonia. I pull those white tanks behind it. The last year that I used it was 2021, and since 2022 I’ve had the co-op applying nitrogen in the form of urea, which is a granular product.

When I was working with my dad, the story was he had gotten a heavy whiff of the ammonia quite a few years ago and he never liked it and couldn’t stand being around it anymore. So I’ve been applying the anhydrous probably since I was 18 years old. We used to rent a smaller machine to do it, and then as the tractor‘s got bigger I could rent a little bit bigger applicator bar. And when the co-op stopped renting that equipment and they sold them off, I bought this one. I don’t remember the price anymore, it was probably 10 or 15 years ago.

This is also the machine that I had a little incident with back in 2018.

Anhydrous can be really nasty stuff; it can kill you, it can burn you, it’s gotta be treated with respect and handled carefully. And I have always been careful, making sure I’m parking into the wind, working up wind, wearing heavy gloves, and a face shield.

So this one day the hose was dragging on the ground between the wagon and the applicator.

I stopped, I closed the valves, I started to disconnect the hose, and the valve did not seal properly. I remember that it was very difficult to open, it had been really cranked shut. So it made sense that it was leaking a bit now. There was very little breeze that day, next to nothing, so I couldn’t get up wind of it. I debated what to do. I debated just holding my breath and rushing in there to crank it shut. And finally thought, I just need somebody with a respirator, it’s not an emergency, I just need somebody that can get this closed. So I called the nonemergency number for the fire department and explained the situation. Well, when the first of three firetrucks showed up, and I was still sitting in the tractor waiting for them, they parked a half mile up the road and suited up and a guy in full gear walked down to me. I’m sure they were all bent out of shape that I was still hanging out down there. All they were told was that there was an anhydrous leak.

It turned into a whole big thing. Ambulance, incident command vehicle, and a sheriff deputy, all out on the highway, and the three firetrucks were on our road.

I had to call a chemical spill hotline who thought I had lost the entire tank of 5000 gallons. No, it’s just a few drips and a very minor vapor leak. But, it was good training for the fire department: they went down with a wet towel, sampled the air, wrapped a towel around the valve and was able to get it turned off tight using a pipe wrench so that I could then disconnect the hose. Always glad to help them out, I said. They even gave me a bottle of Gatorade.

I had to attend a safety workshop, and I had to replace the hoses that are only good for 10 years and of course mine were out of date by a few years because it’s expensive and nobody pays any attention to the replacement date. I think it cost me $1500 for new hoses and a valve.

And now it’s 2025, stamped on the hose it says ‘replace before 2025’, and I took it to the auction and it’s not my problem anymore. When I pulled it out of storage, one of the tires was low. Not flat, just low so I pumped it back up. Pulled it the 20 miles to Plainview, and as I walked into the office I could hear a hiss and air leaking from this tire. Well, not my circus, not my monkey anymore.

The dogs all got pup cups at the Dairy Queen and I had a blizzard.

WHATS YOUR FAVORITE CLEANING PRODUCT?  ANY MONKEY STORIES?

76 thoughts on “A Decent Week for Weather”

  1. One evening, a few years back, we caught a strong whiff of anhydrous from the direction of the railroad tracks. The wife and I thought a rail car was leaking, and we called the fire department. It turns out our concerns were unfounded. It was just some guys cooking meth.

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      2. My neighbor in Moorhead was a cook. Sad.
        His son of 12 or 14 was autistic. A delightful kid. I moved away but not because of the family. I hope the kids did well.

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  2. Dawn Ultra.
    You can have a sink full of water from last night’s washing yet still stir up bubbles so as to finish off the pan you allowed to soak overnight.
    And, yes, I’m looking at the bubbles at this very instant.

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  3. Sorry the post was late this morning. I had it all set up, ready to go and then forgot to hit the “schedule” button last night.

    Liked by 4 people

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    2. My brother-in-law claims that when he joined the family, it felt to him like the bridesmaid scene in the Greek Wedding movie. He was from a family of 3 boys and no relatives anywhere near by.

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  7. My mom always mixed a largish spray bottle with vinegar, a small dash of Dawn dish soap, and about a half cup of rubbing alcohol. I use this mixture daily as an all-purpose cleaner. I use vinegar and baking soda for burned-on stuff in a pan, or anything really rusty or grungy. I’ve used that to clean the oven.

    Do sock monkeys count? I have a sock monkey that my paternal grandmother made. I must have gotten my love of crafty fiber arts from her. Her monkey inspired me to make several of my own. I’m going to make more one of these days.

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      1. I don’t measure. I bought one of those empty spray bottles at Menards. I fill it up pretty full, leaving room for about 1/2 cup of rubbing alcohol. I shoot in a dash of Dawn, then fill to the top with rubbing alcohol. Mom never gave me a recipe for it. She did it the same way I do it.

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  9. I made sure I had a toy anhydrous tank for the farm set in my play therapy room since I treated so many children whose parents manufactured meth.

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  10. I mostly use home concoctions like diluted vinegar, as others have mentioned. I do have a favorite dish soap I get at the Co-op, but I got something different the last time (inferior, doesn’t cut the grease well, not enough suds…) so I don’t have that package. Will let you know if I come up with it.

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        1. You use a QR code which pulls up a picture of a newspaper. Go to “Crumple” action, then virtually rub the windows. Easy Peasy.

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      2. We have vinyl window frames and when I tried that the news print would come off on the white vinyl and smear on that. Suggestions?

        I don’t remember if we were using Windex or Water and vinegar

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  11. Rise and Shine, Baboons,

    It is hard for me to claim a favorite cleaning product because I dislike cleaning so much. I suppose it would be vinegar and Dawn. You cannot replace the grease-cutting properties of Dawn. I like some of the more earth-friendly products, but none of them cut grease.

    Wednesday evening my cleaning lady and i took down the light fixture globes in the living room/kitchen area and washed them in Dawn, then polished them with Windex. They were covered in a wintertime of dust and oil. We have done this many times over the 5 years of having the lights, and we cracked one for the first time, so I will buy a new one from the place I bought them. I could not finish the process yesterday because I had committed to honoring the economic blackout. But I hope today to finish the purchase.

    Ben, Good Riddance to the anhydrous spreader and those leaky hoses! What an experience you had with that. I am so glad to hear the dogs had their puppy cups.

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      1. True, but between the tanks getting stolen for meth, it is a menace. And all those equipment issues! Maybe you can find another task to replace it.

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        3. A few years ago we used to worry more about the tanks being stolen. Lately it doesn’t seem like it’s been such an issue in our area. And I would never leave the tanks out in the field so it was never a problem.

          There’s always something broken. The rule is you have to leave one thing broken at all times. As soon as you fix everything something else is gonna go anyway.

          Liked by 4 people

  12. Favorite cleaner? Depends what I am cleaning. For the bathroom alone I have four or five. For mirrors and glass shelves in the shower and for porcelain that is mostly just dusty, like the top of the toilet tank, I use a vinegar-based glass cleaner (probably not Windex brand but similar). To scour out the sink and tub I use Soft Scrub cleanser, but I resent the fact that, a few years back they added more water to the product to increase their profits and now it’s less effective and less easy to conserve. I have a Clorox spray I sometimes use on the tile to whiten the grout but one has to be careful with that as it’s quite potent.
    For general cleaning I use a product called Bio-Green that we get in a concentrate and dilute. I use that around the toilet in combination with scouring pads and elbow grease.
    The floor and baseboards I clean with Murphy’s Oil Soap and hot water.
    We wash our clothes with Seventh Generation unscented detergent. We wash our dishes with citrus-scented dish soap from Trader Joes.

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  13. Today Husband is my favorite cleaner, as he is cleaning up the yard of dog doodoo with a shovel and a bucket. He gets a devil’s food cake for that.

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  14. I haven’t had much monkey interactions. Does the orange ribbon in the White House count?
    And now to lighten the mood…the “minky.”

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  15. I love all the great cleaning suggestions and will try some. We are longtime Dawn users, but recently there was no Dawn at Costco, just Costco’s private brand, so we tried it. It’s been terrible–the suds don’t last through a moderate-size wash and give up completely for larger, dirtier piles of dishes. Back to Dawn.

    My 7th-grade biology teacher kept a monkey in our classroom. At the time, I just hated the smell. Now I feel bad that it was stuck in that little cage in a room full of middle-schoolers.

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  17. I really like gojo, or many of the waterless hand cleaner items.
    And the ‘degreaser’ towels I get from John Deere are fantastic. I don’t know what’s in it; I’m sure it’s not organic, but it’s good stuff.

    We use a lot of ‘Simply Green’. That seems like good stuff too.

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  19. I once bought a product called Dawn Power Dissolver, which was very effective. It was discontinued. Maybe too toxic to be sold. I have a Dremel Versa, a small handheld device that you attach a scrubbie to, and it whirls around and scrubs away the baked on stuff.

    I once picked up a Corningware casserole at a garage sale, from the free box. Someone had used it on a campfire and it was pretty black. I rescued it, mostly because I thought they might toss it into the trash rather than try to clean it.n.

    I used the Power Dissolver on it, and the Versa, and it cleaned up quite nicely. I was delighted to find that it fit perfectly into my toaster oven, and had a larger capacity than anything else that fit into the toaster oven.

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  21. We have stainless steel cookware, and Bar Keepers Friend does such a good job on that. I’m always impressed.

    I remember mom having the little container of Comet under the sink. And we always had Lava soap for our hands.
    Seems like the Lever soap I use now does just as well.
    It’s amazing all the homemade soaps around these days!

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  22. today Dr. Seuss turns 101
    he’s been dead for a while, but he certainly not gone.
    One fish two fish the cat in the hat
    the Lorax, the Grinch and Lotts more like that.
    He was one of my favorites. His books were just great.
    They started when you’re one and go till you’re 98.
    He had a room full of hats and when he’d get stumped
    on writing material, he put one on to get pumped.
    His drawings are as good as his stories say I
    if you don’t agree, you can go sit on a pie.
    i love Dr. Seuss and I’m so glad he was there.
    Childhood isn’t easy but he made it feel fair.
    your books and your stories still hold up today
    thing one and thing two will live on forever
    and so will you Theodore with your poems also clever
    thank you thank you thank you so much
    for the love that you gave us with your gentle poet touch

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    1. I’m surprised no one has had any one on one stories of interactions with monkeys.

      I thought of Curious George, but missed the band. Good job Wes!

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    1. I had forgotten ever reading that post, but obviously I did since I contributed a story of my own one and only merchandising prowess.

      I love your sock monkey story, Linda, and I loved revisiting the comments from baboons – both past and current. What a great little community. Thanks for posting this.

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