2026, crops, Farming Update, Medicine

Two Right Feet

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It’s so hot—

It’s so hot that I renamed my pig “Bacon.”

It’s so hot that I’m using Celsius instead of Fahrenheit just to have a lower number.

It’s so hot I saw the Devil buying an air conditioner.

It’s so hot I almost called my ex so I could be around something shady.

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Another busy week just doing stuff. Meetings and stuff. I didn’t even have the padawans come out.

We had a hen hatch out 13 babies.

13! What was she thinking!!??

I cut grass one afternoon, I watered our new trees. Twice. I cut the grass around the trees.

I got the new steering hose back on the tractor and added 1.5 gallons of hydraulic oil that had leaked out, and I found and tightened a loose bracket underneath from when I ran over that stump earlier this spring, and we’re good to go again. 

The corn just keep growing. 

The height doesn’t equal better yield, (unless you’re chopping the whole plant for silage), but it doesn’t make the ear or grain any better. It just means the plant had good soil and good moisture. 

The oats is ready to be harvested anytime. The sooner the better as the quack grass is overtaking the oats in places. Early reports of harvest is fairly positive. We’ll see. 

I get an email every week showing the price of gasoline and diesel fuel.

It was going the right direction…I was starting to think about filling our farm barrel again.

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I have a problem. Well, more of an inconvieniece than a problem: I have a hard time making the peddles work on our lawn mowers. Or anything with a foot pedal operated by the right foot. 

Yellow is forward, teal is reverse, and red is brake.

Because that’s the leg I hurt when I was 14 years old. In fact it was July 17 of 1978 when I did that. Forty eight years it’s been broken / messed up. But that stuff never bothers us so much when we’re young does it. 

Anyway, my foot doesn’t move much. It’s sort of stuck out at a 45° angle to the right. And I wear a brace to support the ankle. I can’t twist the foot in, or move it up and down much. Meaning on the lawn mower, with the two peddles for forward and reverse next to each other, depending how exactly its built, I can’t twist my foot in to get ONLY the forward pedal, or I can’t push it down enough to move. I’ve made various modifications over the years including attaching a three inch block of wood on the pedal. If I take the brace off, I have more movement, but the foot hurts more too. I’ve tried scooching over and sitting sideways in the seat, but that’s not the best solution.

All this to say, I am working on modifications to the pedals on one of our lawn mowers to get my foot on there. 

We use this one for mowing between the trees because it’s a little smaller and fits between the rows better. 

This is modification version 3.3 and it’s almost there; I need a vertical block on the right end. That would provide both a stop for my foot, and room to push down without hitting the reverse pedal. 

Need a heel rest too.

In a perfect word I’d move the reverse pedal out to give me more room. But that’s a little more involved. 

WHAT INCONVIENCES HAVE YOU IN YOUR LIFE? Go ahead, complain for a day. You’re allowed.

32 thoughts on “Two Right Feet”

  1. It’s hot! There is only one window my apartment The air conditioner fits there in the kitchen. There’s an opening into the living room where I set up a fan to push cool air into that space. It’s not enough to cool the bedroom. To conserve energy, I’ve closed the bedroom door and the bathroom door. I minimize using the computer as the processor puts out a lot of heat. Now I have a mattress on the kitchen floor! And can keep the living room between 78 and 80 degrees. I’ve done this in prior years. I lack nothing and can read more. The Birds are unbothered.

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  2. After all this heat, it’s downright comfortable out there this morning so I have both doors open wide and took water out to the tomatoes. I see rain possible on Monday (oh please, oh please).

    The kitties just sleep the day away.

    Ben, that corn looks pretty spikey, so I hope you get rain soon too.

    Bring on the oats! I am still getting raspberries to throw in CC with them and a bunch of grainy, nutty stuff + berries and almond milk makes a good, cheap breakfast.

    I can move my right foot around just fine, but lack of feeling in that side is a real bother.

    I’m just glad the smoke has lifted for now.

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  3. The wild fire smoke is a real pain. It’s not bad at all this morning due to the wind blowing it to the east, but the wind is switching back around and the rest of the weekend is going to be very smoky. I’m really hoping for rain. Lots of it!

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  4. In a perfect world, Ben, you could get a lawn mower that used the left foot for those pedals… Or it came with an option for something hand-operated!

    One of the major inconveniences here is that this house came without a full time cook! We’ve been reading aloud a Kat Holloway (1880s)mystery series, where the protagonist is a cook in a large English house…

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  6. We just had our first ceiling light bulb burn out. They are large, recessed lights that are too high for us to change, so I have to phone the electrician to come and replace it.

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    1. they sell a Moop handle that extends quite high, and then there is a thing like an avocado picker that wraps around the bulb, and you squeeze it and turn it, counterclockwise to take it out and clockwise to put it back in versus an electrician at $100 an hour

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    1. That was 1975 in that skit. Chevy and Gilda look so young and beautiful. They are/were just several years older than me. Sigh. But there was a time I would have given anything to know I would be old, with all the challenges.

      I walked the puppy for the first time in three days because it was cool and clear enough. He needed it. Last night he would not leave me alone because he was so bored. This morning he found a locust in the front yard which entertained him for a long time. Aaaahhh.

      My main complaint–husband’s symptoms have worsened in the last 4 months. Hard to see.

      My secondary complaint–I see dust on and under the side table I am looking at.

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  8. I hope you find a solution for your foot pedals, Ben.

    The heat has given Charlotte, our one-year-old cat, cabin fever. She would usually be spending much of her summer days on the deck, watching birds, squirrels, rabbits, and everything else that passes by in the neighborhood. But it’s so hot she only stays out for a few minutes. And the heat is keeping all the critters away too, and there’s not much to watch. So she’s bored, bored, bored and looking for someone to play with (me or my son). When everyone is busy, she’s just looking for trouble.

    It’s temporary, and minor compared to all the other things going on in the world to complain about (which I won’t get into, or I’d be here all day).

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  9. It’s so hot they installed a fan in the debt ceiling.

    It’s so hot I actually escaped from the Twin Cities for a few days. I’m here in Madison visiting my friend and we went to the farmers market this morning around the capital. It was glorious and I now have five loaves of the chili cheese bread that I like so much to go into the freezer when I get home. And a bunch of corn!

    I started to feel a little guilty last night, leaving YA at home with the puppy wearing the cone of shame and having a bad reaction to being clipped for her IV last week. Then it occurred to me that she was gone all of last week and I had to deal with all of that stuff by myself so the guilt has evaporated.

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  10. It’s too bad that this isn’t a science fiction/ fantasy world or you could get a new cyber foot and be the “couple of million dollar man”!

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  12. My blindness increases. My right eye makes things worse. The world gets darker.
    I took a shower this morning but my thighs would not hold me standing through the showering and then the toweling off process.
    My mind seems good, but then I walk out of Cub without paying. My son-in-law caught me. He is wonderful.
    Struggling to get cardiac care, care of my pacemaker. I call and get blown off.
    I try to think of these as inconveniences.
    Lots of things are good.
    Clyde

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  17. Some of you know that I have been dealing with major health issues (deer tick bite in June that left me critically ill). Glad to report that I am on the upswing and will probably go to acute rehab in the next few days. This is a LONG journey but every one is positive. Will check in occasionally. Love this group!!

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  19. The air quality issue is an inconvenience that is a sort of inverse of COVID-19 at the beginning of the pandemic. Then, you could move about freely outdoors, avoiding close proximity with people, and the options for going anyplace indoors, outside your own home, were extremely limited. Now you can move about freely indoors, but options for going anywhere outdoors are downlight dangerous. I was better suited temperamentally to the pandemic than the Summer of Wildfires.

    I remind myself that the poor air quality gives me a nice excuse to just stay inside and spend the day reading.

    That brings up another inconvenience. I’ve no shortage of reading material, but I’m still on the waiting list for the Blevins books for next week. When I put myself on the waiting lists at the end of May, I was 6th in line for one and 10th in line for the other. The lines haven’t moved all that much – I’m now 2nd and 4th.

    I was expected to be able to get the Pluto Files, since it’s not very long, but I think the people who have it checked out are just reading other things and holding onto it.

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      1. I JUST got Pluto (I read it awhile back but don’t remember much). Should be getting the Benedict in the next couple of days. S marathon of reading but at least they’ll be fresh in my mind!!!

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  20. after getting blown off by Twin Cities orthopedics, I decided to switch all of my medical stuff to mail who is incredible in their detailed research and follow up on everything they do. I am very, very impressed when I first went in and sat down with the guy to talk about my health issues. He simply asked what was going on and I told him and before I left his desk, I had 14 appointments that marked into an additional 15 or 20 and they’re looking at five or six different areas when I stopped in there to deal with it was my broken leg, which makes me sound like a piker after realizing that ben has had to deal with this forever. Maybe he’s right it is a lot to deal with when you’re old and not so much when you’re younger but today I have a hard time getting up steps and cannot do a squat to save my soul, so I started talking with him about that that morphed into my occasional incontinence from my prostate cancer surgery. My hand from my cat bite my concern about dementia which runs in my family an issue with a wheezing cough that I have had for a long time that showed up on x-rays as a collapsed lung, but I’m not sure that’s correct either sleep apnea issues because I reported that maybe sleep is an issue what I didn’t make clear was that I am the problem with the sleep when you go to bed too late and get up too early you’re left in our sleep deficit and I probably have learned to cope with that over the last 50 years, but it started to catch up with me now my eyes are fading. My ears are fading. My dexterity is fading. The feeling in my feet is starting to go. My hips and glutes are definitely starting to go and I need to dedicate myself as a result of all this to at least an hour a day in the gym toning things up. I feel so much better when I do stretches and deal with the issues above then I read about Clyde‘s stuff and feel like I shouldn’t be bitching at all. I feel like that story of the guy who says I complained about my feet hurting until I saw the guy that had no legs. It’s all a matter of perspective, isn’t it but thank you Ben for the opportunity to bitch sorry I missed it over the weekend. It was very busy by the way Ben I was thinking like Barbara that Handt mechanisms used to push down pull up slide over whatever might be your answer kind of like the automotive modifications that allow you to work the break and the gas pedal with lever controls as opposed to foot pedals I would be happy to be involved in the design if you’re interested

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