2026, animals, Art, Farming Update, Kids, Science, Theatre, Uncategorized

Lighting the Way

18 Comments

This weeks farming update from BEN.

Just got through another Tech week. That final week of adding costumes and lighting and sound and dress rehearsals before the show opens. It’s always exhausting and long days and late nights. I only yelled once and that was just to get the cast to be quiet. It wasn’t at anyone directly. I’m pretty good at staying calm around the cast. I tell them that sometimes I yell but it’s not at anyone directly, it’s just to get their attention so they don’t hurt themselves or break something. I make a specific point of telling them we don’t want anyone to get hurt. “Don’t bleed on my set.” You know, showing them that I care.

Then sometimes on opening night I go down and tell them the campus inspector said the building was settling and I had to shift everything two feet to the left and reverse it. So, nothing has really changed for them, they just have to do it in reverse. They stare at me. Finally, one person will call me on it and I just walk away. I love messing with them. They’re so young. I told one girl we’d turn on the AC but it doesn’t have a thermostat so it turns into a meat locker. She looked at me with her big eyes and said, “Meat lockers are cold, right?” …….. She’s a really nice young lady.

And they’re always busy and talking and wiggling and just being young.
All that energy wasted on the youth.

Last Friday Kelly took down the snow fence. On Saturday Padawan and I pulled out all the fence posts. I didn’t count, but 75 or 80 posts. There are various methods to removing old metal “T” fence posts: You can wiggle them back-and-forth side to side and front to back enough to make it loose and pull it out by hand. Sometimes you pull it out a couple inches, then wiggle it some more. Typically they’re in the ground about fourteen inches. The stubborn ones, we wrap a chain around it, hook the other end onto the tractor loader, and lift to pull it out. Some people use jacks or other means of mechanical leverage, it just depends. I had gotten maybe 30 loose by hand. Padawan got a good system going of wrapping the chain, pulling it taught, and I’d lift it out. He said he liked the work. I think he’s starting to see the feeling of accomplishment.

Pulling posts
Almost done!

I bought Padawan and me new shovels. Friday I picked up 100 seedlings. Next week I’ll pick up another 75. We are planting gray dogwood and Ninebark to create a natural wind break rather than the snow fence. Kelly is excited not to have to do snowfence anymore but there’s a lot of work that has to go into this before we get to that point. Using a string and a 100-foot tape measure and downward marking spray paint, we painted a dot every 6 feet apart in two rows 8 feet apart. Thankfully, the heavy rains did not wash off the dots. I also bought 500’ of plastic fencing and garden staples, and we’ll try to protect these tiny plants.

Laying it out

The show at the college is called ‘8 Minutes’ by E.B.Lee. It’s 9 different scenes of people with eight-minutes left until the world ends. It’s not as bad as it sounds. It’s really several nice scenes. One is a person who is trying to get home to his dog- from the dogs perspective. One person is taking care of his mother with dementia. Two people are stuck in a car- she wanted to see the cherry blossoms, he has allergies, and now they’re stuck in traffic and why did they wait until NOW to go?

Or the couple with a shelter, but he’s lost the key. So, it’s got funny scenes and touching scenes. My scenic design turned into ‘connections’, some made, some missed.

I am using four, 2000 watt Fresnel fixtures. One wasn’t as bright as the others.

Hmmm, this doesn’t look right.

I love these huge lamps.

I got these light for free from Mankato State when they swapped everything out for LED a few years ago.

It’s not supposed to look like that.

A new one. Ah. Thats better

I’m using two lights called ‘Parcan’s as side light. They take a lamp that looks like an old car headlight. A sealed beam round light. 500 watts. It’s old technology from the hot and heavy days of Rock and Roll before the days of moving color changing lights. One light, one color. They make an oval beam of light, and you reach in the back and spin the bulb to get the oval the way you want it. It used to be a whole big thing. I felt a little nostalgic when I reached in the back and spun that lamp. My gosh I’m old.

Par 64
Reach in and spin that white thingy
ROCK AND ROLL! Back in the old days with 300 parcans.

Thursday this week I got my Twenty Year award from the college. An engraved marble pencil / flower / thingy holder. It’s nice!

img_6012

At the farm, one recent day, I replaced shovel points on the digger, replaced a broken bolt, and found a broken bracket that supports the coil tines at the rear. Still haven’t gotten the bracket off. Started with a hammer, got a bigger hammer, got a torch, and a grinder. Back to the torch and grinder again the next day. Ordered new parts, went to John Deere and got them on Thursday. They’re still sitting in the shop. Between planting tree’s maybe I’ll work on that.

Fixing
New shovel vs old worn out shovel. Isn’t it interesting how abrasive dirt is??
Still trying to get that bolt out.

A late Friday update: Padawan and I planted 50 tree’s before we got rained out Friday afternoon. It went well. We had a good rhythm going. The tornado sirens were going off and we just kept working. It all looked fine out there. There was some small hail. We took the dogs and the gator and went up to the highest point on the road and everything looked fine. Then my neighbor texted and asked if we were OK and said, “I saw the trees!”. Uh… what trees?? Oh, you mean the 6 tree’s across the township road? And a few evergreens that tipped over across the road. Power was out, power poles leaning, broken, a couple sheds blown over. Just a narrow swath in our area, maybe some straight line winds. Once again, Thankful for our sheltered little valley. We had several people helping cut up and clean up and a few neighbors stop to check if we needed help.

A good community is invaluable.

As of 11:45PM, power still out and the generator still running.

ANYTHING MAKING YOU FEEL NOSTALGIC LATELY?

WHAT’S ABRASIVE IN YOUR LIFE LATELY?

18 thoughts on “Lighting the Way”

  4. It doesn’t take much to make me feel nostalgic or sentimental. That’s part of who I am. A photo will do it, or an afternoon drive out around Cannon Lake.

    Abrasiveness? Same answer as given above. Add the vote on removing the moratorium on mining near the BWCAW, and I’m certainly feeling abraded.

    Liked by 5 people

    Reply

  5. congrats on 20 years Ben that’s fantastic
    so do you do some LED lights also or are you 100% old-school is that a choice because old school is better or because you don’t wanna spend $500 times 100 lights?
    I see your torch and it always reminds me of the one that I had and sold way too cheaply. It was a complete set up that wood hook up to the tanks and allow me to do the cement cutting. I loved doing it, but it didn’t come up often enough that it justified my keeping the tool but in the 15 years since I sold it I bet I have wished I had it back 20 times
    I get nostalgic for lots of stuff these days. I think that’s part of realizing that when you were at whatever age, it would’ve been great to appreciate it because now you look back and realize how much times have changed and how much you enjoyed so many of the simple things that you took for granted.
    The stuff that I tell my grandkids about is a mixture of stuff that they don’t believe is true and stuff that they can’t believe I’m bothering to tell them about.
    I am a little bit nostalgic for being able to start over so many times with new companies and new ambitions when I was a young sales guy today I go to start things as an old sales guy and the technique is 180° different than it was as a young punk
    The abrasive stuff in my life today is the level of difficulty that’s involved in doing stuff that is easy when you know the technology I justified my hand off of all the technological stuff to my right hand man for many years and now it’s coming back to whack me
    but im getting there

    how long will it take before your wind break of trees allows you to stop putting in the tea posts and putting up the snow fence. It looks to me like it will be 10 years or more.

    Liked by 4 people

    Reply

    2. tim, I’ve a good start to LED lighting. The theater needs a major upgrade to the power infrastructure to move to entirely LED. And I’m not sure I see that happening anytime soon. But sometimes I still want to use the old 2000 watt incandescent and I need dimmers big enough to use them.

      The windbreak will need a few years. I’m hoping two or three years will be good enough to work.

      Liked by 3 people

      Reply

      1. Haven’t thought of this in ages, but the s&h’s dad was a lighting TA when I was in grad school and told me the story one day of a student who thought he was surely exaggerating about the heat put out by an instrument-so he demonstrated using a not meaningless paper belonging to the student.

        Sometimes, things maybe work out for the best.

        Liked by 3 people

        Reply

        1. Those old lamps put out a lot of heat. I’ve burned holes in curtains (by accident) and the days of colored gel in the front. Dark colors might melt or burn out all the color in a couple hours. It wasn’t unusal to need to replace them every show.
          We’s use ‘pattern tracers’ to try and make ‘heat relieve’ holes. It didn’t work too well, just made a nice perforated line when they fell apart.

          Liked by 2 people

  6. Yesterday, Renee’s post asking about our childhoods made me really nostalgic for that simpler time. We’ve said before how lucky we feel to have had our childhoods back then.

    Yes, the news is definitely an abrasive. And then there are my reactions to certain people or situations that I deal with. I do believe that one about what you have control over is how you respond to these things, but it’s often hard to control that response. Will try to think of a concrete example later…

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

  7. Congratulations, Ben! (And hope your power is back on.)

    What’s abrasive right now are my eyelids; they feel like they’re lined with sandpaper (spring allergies).

    Politics have always been abrasive, going back to Goldwater (I was a kid, but my staunch-Democrat relatives had me terrified of him). After that, Nixon, Reagan, the Bushes, it just keeps getting worse.

    I get nostalgic listening to old music, especially from my teens and early 20s. Looking through photo albums makes me nostalgic for when my kids were young.

    Liked by 4 people

    Reply

  8. Power still out, but I know they’ve made progress. The lines are fixed up by our place. Bless the people doing that work. Amazing. Lots of neighbors are offering help. Been a lot of phone calls and texts with the township guys. We have a tree service coming Monday to pick up the stuff along the roads. Some private wood may end up there. That’s not really the point, but as a township (speaking only for myself), I’m not going to make a fuss over it in this kind of situation.

    Liked by 2 people

    Reply

Leave a comment