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THEN THIS HAPPENED

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This weeks Farming Update from Ben.

When I started the rough draft of this blog Thursday, I didn’t have much farm stuff to talk about. Now Friday afternoon and I’ve got a few farm related things. 

I needed some straw bales for Friday. First of the 2025 crop to be used and climbing up into the straw pile and trying to hit the truck bed was a challenge. 

Trying to aim under the rafter and get the bales in the truck bed.

We hosted daughters group, PossAbilities, and gave them a wagon ride through the fields. Kinda cold and windy, but they had blankets, Kelly made hot chocolate for them when they returned, and they enjoyed it. 

I hauled in the scrap iron on Thursday. The wagons I pulled out of the trees and scrapped last week. 

The net weight of the scrap was 3200 lbs. 

The cranes are always fun to watch. My goodness, the amount of scrap is overwhelming. Juxtaposed with such a pretty blue sky!

I took secondary roads there, and I took gravel back roads most of the way home. I saw two Bald Eagles eating something that left a pretty good sized red spot in the field. I saw more of those ‘Bigfoot’ silhouettes. A few farmers are starting to chop some corn, and lots of guys are doing 3rd or 4th crop hay. 

A couple months ago when our fridge died, we purged a lot, and moved a lot to the basement chest freezer and spare fridge downstairs. I still haven’t figured out why the new freezer section upstairs is so empty. What happened to all that stuff?? I thought we needed it? Isn’t that a story for our times…”But, I need that!” No, evidently, no you don’t.

One of the things missing from the upstairs freezer was the last loaf of chocolate chip Amish friendship bread I had made back in March. Most of us freeze and savor those summer time flavors in January. Here in September I’m remembering last winter. I didn’t think I’d have thrown it out as I know the chocolate is bad for dogs. The chickens would have loved it, but I just didn’t remember doing that. Took a month, but I found it in a bag in the chest freezer and I’ve been enjoying it. It’s not as dried out as I thought it might be, and I look forward to baking more this winter.

When I was researching how to remove those old tires last week, I saw one video where the guy talked about using  diamond tipped cutting blades. The cheap abrasive cut-off blades I can buy at big box stores wear away quick. They’re about $3 each, but as the name implies, ‘abrasive cut off’, meaning they wear out as fast as they’re cutting. Cutting off the 16 tires I used 4 small, 4” wheels, and one 7” wheel. So I went shopping online for diamond tipped wheels. An “Indestructible” wheel comes in a 5 pack. Well, Huh. You see where I’m going with this? If… then why…?

I ordered a 3 pack of diamond tipped cut off wheels. We’ll see what happens when I get to the next set of old tires. 

(There might be a photo here if I remember to go out to the shed and take a photo)

I REMEMBERED!

Abrasive disc on the top, diamond disc on the bottom

Kelly and I have a joke that I can’t find anything if you’re going to put it under my nose. This morning it was my cell phone. It was 6” away from where I was looking. No wonder I couldn’t find it. I had to borrow daughters phone to call mine and track it down. I was the kid with my mittens attached to my sleeves…Why is that getting worse instead of better?

We’ve talked before about that magic ten minutes in the morning. Every. Morning. It was later than usual one morning. Daughter and I got in the car to leave and she says “I was pretty fast this morning, wasn’t I.” Uh. Not really. But I don’t know why. Maybe it was petting the dogs longer than we should have. Which seems like a pretty good excuse. One night she was mad at me for not letting her do something. She begged and pleaded and then stormed off yelling “YOU’RE NOT MY REAL DAD!” I replied, “Actually, biology has nothing to do with this.” and then I got the giggles. She didn’t think it was so funny but a few minutes later we talked it over. She gets over stuff quick. I like that. 

Last weekend Kelly and I attended a wedding in St. Paul. It was at a relatively new wedding venue called Le VENERÉ. A pretty nice place. Newly remodeled. The Groom told me when they toured it in February it was full of scaffolding. It is an old building with a really cool stone foundation. They had a 1920’s ‘Speakeasy’ theme and encouraged people to dress the part. I wore sleeves. And after looking up 1920’s styles, just decided to order a cheap 1970’s style ruffled shirt like I had in high school. It came with a bow tie that wouldn’t fit around my fat neck, so I just wore it on my sleeve. Kelly and I drove up Friday and had a weekend vacation. We had a great time at the wedding with friends.

Who is this captivating woman!
The groom and I. He is a former college student.
The hats were complimentery

OXYMORONS? 

56 thoughts on “THEN THIS HAPPENED”

  2. Rise and Shine, Baboons,

    Xfben in ruffles and sleeves is not an oxymoron, but it is cognitive dissonance. My mind is struggling so hard with that detail, that I cannot do an oxymoron, unless Formal Ben counts.

    What?

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  10. It is somewhat odd, certainly moronic, for Husband and I to have made 8 jars of pesto this morning. It was threatening to freeze here last night, so I picked all the basil. It only got to 33° and nothing froze, but there we were with a huge bucket of basil. We have 10 jars in the freezer already from last year. We are freezing the new pesto and taking it to Luverne in early October along with a van load of as much of the foods in our freezers we can fit in along with the cat, who is being boarded at the vet clinic in Luverne until we move into the new house.

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  12. I’m slightly appalled that I can’t think of any on my own. Just looked some up though:

    clearly misunderstood
    alone together
    awfully good
    deafening silence
    deceptively honest
    definite maybe
    deliberate speed
    devout atheist
    dull roar
    eloquent silence
    even odds

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  13. And from the same site (https://www.thoughtco.com/awfully-good-examples-of-oxymorons-1691814) :

    “William Shakespeare was known to sprinkle them throughout his plays, poems, and sonnets. In Romeo and Juliet, Act 1, Scene 1, we have a full 13 of them!

    O brawling love! O loving hate!
    O anything of nothing first create!
    O heavy lightness, serious vanity!
    Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms!
    Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health!
    Still-waking sleep, that is not what it is!
    This love feel I, that feel no love in this.”

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  15. Ben, I was smelling the straw in the picture then later the twine. My bird feeder hung from a branch on a tree at least ten feet above ground. I use sisal rope. Two weeks the rope broke after being out there for 8-10 years. It is a challenging trick to get the rope back over that branch through the leaves and small bran he in the way. I bought some new sisal rope.
    I opened the package of rope and the feel of the oil imbedded in the rope but mostly the smell of the fibers took me back to haying season and logging with all its rope and to binding oats with the twine.
    I tied the end the end of rope to the hole at the end of a crescent wrench to have a weight to throw the rope. It took many tries to get it through the leaves and branches and over the main branch in the right place.

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  16. The mention of the smell of sisal produced a sharp memory, not of haying, of which I have no experience, but of newspaper collection drives when I was in elementary school. The school would have an annual collection drive wherein each of the students who intended to participate was given several lengths of sisal twine to be used to bundle papers.

    The collections were competitive in some way, though I can’t remember how the competition was set up—whether it was by grade or by some other division. At any rate, we would scour the neighborhood, asking at neighbor’s doors whether they had newspapers we could collect for the drive. It was commonplace in those days for people to collect past issues of the paper in stacks, sometimes already tied in bundles. We would collect these in our wagon and, back at home, tie them into bundles with our sisal twine. Then a parent would drive us and our bundles to the school, where several semi trailers were parked and where we would add our collection to our cohort’s pile.

    I don’t know what gives sisal its distinctive aroma. It’s a sharper scent than I associate with any other fiber, and the smell is evocative.

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    1. I read that it is the natural odor of the sisal plant.
      Clyde (Wi-Fi blinks on and off in Sandra’s room. At the moment it is not reaching here. So I am on my phone, which I cannot get to accept my identity.)

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    2. We had such annual newspaper collection drives in Danish schools in the mid-1950s as well. I don’t recall what they were for, but some cause or another I’m sure. And yes, smells are amazingly evocative.

      For me, an even more even more evocative smell than sisal’s is the smell of the large nets that were used in commercial fishing in Stubbekøbing during my childhood.. These nets were made of heavy cotton twine. To preserve them they were dipped in heated tar and hung in the sun to dry.

      One of our favorite beaches for swimming was a sheltered spot in the sand dunes on the outskirts of town. Adjacent to our beach spot was an area where local fishermen repaired and maintained their fishing nets. A whiff of the distinctive smell of those tarred nets brings me right back to that time and place. Unfortunately, it’s not often that I encounter that smell these days.

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      1. I grew up with the smell of fishing nets in one of the two harbors but they weren’t tarred. Lake Superior is fresh water. They just stank of fish.

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      2. Watching Maudie out of Canada starring brilliant Sallie Hawkins. Ethan Hawke, too. Margaret, Maybe you knew people somewhat like them. I knew some, often Finns.

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        1. I’m not familiar with that film or it’s characters, Clyde, so I am not sure what kind of people you’re referring to. I’m guessing that you may be alluding to rather awkward and/or taciturn people, and if I’m right about that, then yes, I’ve know some folks like that. People from the west coast of Jutland have a reputation for being like that. It doesn’t help matters that their dialect of Danish is virtually incomprehensible to Danes from other parts of the country.

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        2. Very rustic, somewhat unsocialized. But awkward, yes. This is a true story about a rustic crippled painter, naive painter, beloved in Labrador now, I think Labrador. Irish.

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  17. Donald Trump commander-in-chief and I was laughing Clyde at your memory of the sizzle. I was driving down the road one day and saw one of those round small bales of Cecil on the side of the road and I went back and picked it up. I probably still have it because I don’t use it often. My wife said what do you need that for? I said that will probably be all the system I will need for the rest of my life and it’s come in handy probably 20 times so far.

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  18. Ben, you are not alone when it comes to losing things that are right under your nose. Today I asked aloud, “I wonder where my phone is?” while holding it in my hand. At least it only took about a minute of searching before I figured it out.

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    2. I will have to admit to the same phone issue. I was talking to my mom but was getting ready to leave the house for some errands so I was collecting up stuff. I probably spent MORE than a minute looking for my phone before realizeing that I was talking on it to my mother. Sigh.

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