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Well….

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This weeks farming update from BEN

So much going on in the world these days. Rob and Michele Reiner, the shootings in Stewartville Mn, and Brown University, and Australia. We all need to remember to “just be nice”. Sometimes it all feels overwhelming, but we can still choose to be nice. 

Daughter told me the other night that she was thinking about going to bed earlier. “I’ll just give it a try”. I told her that sounded like a good idea, and yes, to give it a try. Remember, she’s a teenager. 2AM is her usual bedtime.  We’ve been dealing with this bedtime for a few years and I was excited that perhaps there was a glimmer of realization that mom and dad do know what they’re talking about and maybe she finally is recognizing that she’s tired during the day. The next day she said “You know, with Santa coming  and all, I thought I should go to bed earlier.” Oh. This is just because of Santa. There is no acknowledgment of consequences. Yet. But evidently she does know she should be in bed before Santa shows up at the house. 

Classes at the college finished Friday and I finished my class in Forensic Chemistry. The Organic Chemistry section was hard. The DNA section was interesting, and I enjoyed looking at stuff through the microscope. The official final grades haven’t been posted but it looks like I got 93.5%. Whew. Still waiting for the note from the teacher saying “How did you get 100% on the final test??” Well, it was open book, and I finally realized the quizzes come from the book, so maybe I paid more attention on reviewing the quizzes? Believe me, I was as surprised as she was. And when I finished the test, I unceremoniously “plopped” the lecture notebook in the garbage can. 

I signed up for ‘music appreciation’ for spring. It’s all online. Three credits closer to actually getting a degree. I signed up for this right after telling Kelly I was glad to be done with this class and maybe I could spend my time on the computer doing bookwork now. Man… why do I do this?? 

The chickens were enjoying the warmer weather and the rain melted more snow and they were all out roaming again.  The pheasants have come around sharing in the chickens’ corn. I counted 14 one day. They’re skittish. Soon as we come out the door they fly away. And now I’m getting squirrels in the feedroom. They don’t want corn off the ground evidently, they want it from the bin. They’ve chewed ANOTHER hole in the bottom of the door.

The dogs always think there’s going to be a squirrel in there so if I head that direction the three of them are at the door barking and trembling. Watching all three dogs get through the door is like the Three Stooges: they all jam up in the door at the same time. Luna has taken to standing on the straw bale to the side so she can get a leap over the other two. One day the squirrel bounced off my chest and then out the door. This morning the squirrel went over my head and I was in the way so the dogs couldn’t get out.

Tuesday morning the weather warmed up so I turned off the heater in the well house. Here’s the interior. 

The well-house.

I talk about this a lot and some of you may not know exactly what I’m referring to. What freezes in the well-house is this little pipe to the pressure switch.

The blue tank is the pressure tank. The submersible pump fills the tank to 60 lbs of pressure, and when we use some water and the pressure drops to 40, the pump kicks back on. But if that little pipe freezes, the pump doesn’t know the pressure has dropped and it never kicks back on. And that’s a terrible feeling at 6AM when you realize there’s no water… a chill ran down my spine as I wrote that. I can’t describe the apprehension of going out there to look at what might be the problem. Is the whole thing in flames? Or just cold? Are we pulling the pump out, or getting a hair dryer? In the fall of 2013 we had the pump and tank replaced and I rebuilt the well-house. It might be time to replace the pump next summer. Better to do that when planned, than in January and unplanned. 

Pulling the pump. There’s a hole in the roof for the pipe and winch cable
The original pressure tank, from1949.
A new system
Building new walls

Luna’s newest favorite toy, after chasing a ball and before the frisbee, is an empty pizza box. (Actually I haven’t tried a full pizza box. That would probably just be a distraction). 

So excited!
Always running.

I have figured out how to get the grill screen bent and installed in the brackets and back on the tractor hood.

End of the semester. I sat in the dark in the theater and just absorbed it all. 

The ghost light, a few exit lights and aisle lights. 

I thank the room for all the energy we exchanged so far. And I ponder what might happen next. It’s been another good group of kids. I hope some of them are still around next semester.

HOW DOES SANTA GET IN THE HOUSE WITHOUT A FIREPLACE? DID YOU EVER HAVE TO EXPLAIN THAT TO ANYONE?

ANY EXPERIENCES WITH A LACK OF WATER?

47 thoughts on “Well….”

  1. YA never asked about the fireplace but she was VERY suspicious of the whole “stranger comes into your house at night” concept. She asked more than once if Santa ever came upstairs. I told her that Santa’s magic only lets him come to the living room – it doesn’t let him come upstairs. That seemed to work for her. She never did warm to Santa as a child. I have a couple of pictures of her stretching her arm out to get the candy cane, but sitting on his lap? Not in the picture. I’m not quite sure when she moved from suspicious to non-believer; it wasn’t anything big and traumatic.

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  3. We always had a fireplace when I was a kid, but I knew that some people didn’t have one, so I asked about it and I was told he came down through the furnace chimney pipe and jumped out before he got to the furnace.

    I lived in a very small trailer house near Nerstrand Woods right after my first year of college. The next winter was my first with a wood-burning stove as the only heat in a trailer house. The pipes were frozen there about half the time. It was a constant battle. I’m grateful that I won’t have to live that way again. I did have a baby raccoon there though, which was fun.

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  5. Our farmstead was serviced by an ancient cistern system.
    In the well house, water was pumped out of the ground to the cistern and from there to the houses. The water level was monitored by sight. The pump’s capacity was little better than what a hand pump would have accomplished. We kids had the assignment to check on the level. Too low meant no bath water or toilet water. In winter, the heater needed to run constantly. With so many components, human and mechanical, failures were frequent.

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  6. I had a big-time water event back in the 70s in my first house. I had invited this woman over who was Mari appealing and it turned out very willing and we had sex in the afternoon and afterwards took a shower together and we’re all soaked up when the shower stopped with us still fully soaked up. She wondered what the heck was going on and I wasn’t able to answer her it turned out that my well had dried up at that moment, and I had to figure out how to get enough water out of the water heater to be able to basically sponge bath it off. I asked the next-door neighbor for some water, but his wife was very strange and refused to give me any. He brought me over a couple 5 gallon buckets and I had to make that last on a continual basis until I was able to get the plumber out to hook up to the new city water in the streets my recallers that we had to wait two weeks for them to finish installing the city water and then when the guy started doing the excavation in the front yard to hook up to the city water, he discovered I had the worst case scenario both in terms of clay and in terms of basketball size stones in the yard the neighbors wanted to have him hook them up too, and he told him that he discovered at my house at $1500 was not enough and he needed more like 7000 they all backed off and I was elated that I had him get me done at the agreed on price after he hooked up the shitty water. It was so much more pressure than I had before that it blew all of the solder joints on all of the copper pipes in the house and he had to go back in and re-solder them all he was a friend of a friend, and I took full advantage of him. I get to switch from my limestone based sulfur water that turned my scotch green into chlorinated city water that took some getting used to, but didn’t smell like sulfur so it was appreciated.
    I signed up for architecture class at Hennepin Tech last semester and had a teacher who wasn’t able to help me figure out how to get plugged into the CAD system required to do the blueprint drawings so I signed up this semester for that CAD class so that I can go back and do the architecture class that I wanted later. I also signed up for a music class to brush up on different styles of guitar. I’m playing guitar every week now and it’s the highlight of my week so I thought plugging in new additional styles would be kind of fun. I was motivated by Paul Simon’s new book on his writing career that I am listening to for the fourth or fifth time I find it just fascinating. I’ll think of who the author narrator was and get back to you. Usually, the guy with the big hair that did blink.

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  7. The Rock County Soil Conservation Office just won an award for its work reducing nitrates in local ground water. It involved getting farmers to plant differently near waterways and paying them to do so.

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    1. Well done Rock County. I know that water quality is a serious issue in nearby Iowa, so it is a safe assumption that farm country in MN struggles with this as well. For several generations engaged in modern farming technology, cancer in humans is a side affect of fertilizers and pesticides.

      A newspaper editor in Storm Lake, Iowa, Art Cullen, has written about this, as well as farm country politics and economics. He won a Pulizter Prize for his writing and publishing. His work is worth exploring. Barb in Winona may be familiar with this as well.

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  8. Rise and Explain Away, Baboons,

    I spent my mid childhood trying to get my younger siblings to believe in Santa Claus. This was entirely self-serving. Christmas presents were measly and sparse, and the Santa present was the only way to actually get a nice, extra gift. Given that, I probably told my brother all kinds of BS about how Santa entered the house. As my sister got older she engaged in this conspiracy with me for the same reason.

    Water? Not really. Except for the notable issue of water in Arizona which is a huge problem that many there ignore.

    Project for today–somewhere I have a CD player for Christmas CDs. Today I will find it!

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  9. When I was a child, women having formal coffee parties would get their water for coffee at the Adrian Spring, a free flowing spring between Luverne and Worthington with really good water. Luverne had awful water at the time. Eventually the Spring water was declared undrinkable due to nitrate runoff.

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  10. Wish we could see a video of the dogs/squirrels/corn scenerio, Ben! What a bunch of fun images.

    We had no fireplace, so were lucky that Santa always managed to come while we were out on our Christmas Eve drive to see the lights around town. And one year the neighbors were having a party, and a guy dressed as Santa showed up as we were waiting for Mom to get out to the car (it always took her so long..!). I may have had suspicions by then, but my little sister about went into orbit!

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  11. Once we plumbed to the barn and the house, in NE MN when temps were routinely much colder, we often dealt with frozen pipes from the well house, where the pump was, to the barn. The pipe into the house was more deeply buried and the pump itself sat five feet below ground in a heavily insulated space. Only one winter did the line to the house freeze, which my father thawed with a welder, not really recommended. But the line to the barn was not that well buried. It slopped rather steeply. We would drain it at 4 pm, but there was still enough water in it to freeze on -40 nights. Plus driving over the line, unavoidable, would drive the cold Down. My father built a bridge over the line, which helped. But in the end there many mornings and days we carried heavy pails up the basement steps, out the back door, and down to the in-barn water trough. How much did that contribute to my messed up lumbar?. But you did what you had to, right, Ben?
    Before the lines were plumbed I am not even going to mention.
    Clyde

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    2. Yep, we do what we have to.
      Dad talks about using dynamite to dig the water line to the barn. I wonder what kind of trench that made?? It’s never frozen anyway. And part of it is under the road.

      I’ve heard of using a welder to thaw water pipes…never had to do it.
      Our old milk house, when we were still using buckets, must not have been that well insulated. If there was a south wind, and it was cold, Dad would put a board over the sink and put a heater on the water pipes over night. (Northwind wasn’t a problem because the barn was on the north side of the milk house).
      After we rebuilt it in 1980 something and put in the milking pipeline, it wasn’t a problem after that.

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  19. My son just reminded me there is a very large estate home in Germany called Gutshaus Birkholz. ( yes, Gutshaus, not Gusthaus.) it has countless fireplaces.what would Santa do there?

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  21. I’m always reminded of the time a guy had his septic system fixed: instead of draining out behind his house, he connected to city sewer. And after that, his well dried up.…

    Possibly coincidence, possibly his shallow well was being refilled from his septic system.

    This is why there are rules wink wink

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  22. OT–I just finished listening to Martin Sheen’s podcast. He was reading classical poetry this episode. Yeats, Dickenson, Frost, etc. It was a satisfying listen.

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  23. OT: Here is Susan Cooper’s Winter Solstice poem, which was read as part of the Christmas Revels that MPR used to broadcast annually…

    The Shortest Day

    And so the Shortest Day came and the year died
    And everywhere down the centuries of the snow-white world
    Came people singing, dancing,
    To drive the dark away.
    They lighted candles in the winter trees;
    They hung their homes with evergreen;
    They burned beseeching fires all night long
    To keep the year alive.
    And when the new year’s sunshine blazed awake
    They shouted, reveling.
    Through all the frosty ages you can hear them
    Echoing behind us—listen!
    All the long echoes, sing the same delight,
    This Shortest Day,
    As promise wakens in the sleeping land:
    They carol, feast, give thanks,
    And dearly love their friends,
    And hope for peace.
    And now so do we, here, now,
    This year and every year.
    Welcome, Yule!

    by Susan Cooper

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