I like to stay connected to people from my home town through the local newspaper and social media. I had to giggle the other day after seeing a Facebook post about a guy I went to high-school with. Jono was a couple of years older than I, but we were in band together and he lived just down the street from me. He was always a lively and fun loving person in high school. I was sad to learn he had died, but had left a lasting memorial to himself with a very interesting headstone on his grave.
I gather Jono was very proud of that recipe. Jono was from a pretty devout Roman Catholic family and is buried in the Catholic cemetery in Luverne. I can’t imagine what the local priest thinks about that headstone. I have yet to try the marinade, but the ingredients look good. Most of my favorite recipes would be too long to carve into a headstone. Maybe I could have the titles of my favorite books of all time carved there instead. That would mean, though, that I would have to do some funeral planning, something I have yet to do.
What would you want people to remember most about you? Have you done any funeral preplanning? What is your favorite kind of whiskey?
Yesterday was the first day of fall, and it was cool and cloudy, I noticed this week that the leaves were just starting to change color. The garden is finally slowing down. I am done canning tomatoes.
Fall has always been my favorite season. Not too hot, not too cold. (We won’t talk about the Ocober 5, 2005 snowstorm that shut the area down for three days and broke off hundreds of tree limbs.) I like the cooler nights.
Things at work always pick up in the fall, especially for those of us who work with children. Bad news at parent-teacher conferences means the phones start ringing at my agency from calls from frantic parents wanting help for their ornery children. Fall is a time of truth and reckoning for some of us.
What are your favorite things about fall? Any favorite fall songs or poems? Did your parents ever get bad news at parent-teacher conferences?
I read with interest last week the news story of a company that wants to resurrect the wooly mammoth, perhaps in ND. A fairly intact wooly mammoth tusk with all sorts of usable DNA was found in a coal mine here in the state. The company wants to use it to recreate the mammoth.
What is quite surprising to me is that the ND government is paying this company $3,000,000 to consider locating the company to ND. This a pretty fiscally conservative state, and the public reaction to the Department of Commerce spending money on this venture hasn’t been exactly supportive.
The local climate is more conducive to mammoth well-being than Texas, where the company is located. I wonder what you do with a wooly mammoth once you have de-extincted it? Let it wander around the Badlands here? Can it be fenced in at all? Raise it for meat? Have mammoth rodeos? The company thinks they can have a viable mammoth by 2028. I am glad that I will be living in Minnesota by then. I would hate waking up to find a mammoth in my yard eating the tomatoes.
What would you do with a woolly mammoth ? What would you like to see de-extincted?
We stopped in to see our son and his family in Brookings, SD on Saturday on our way back from Wisconsin. Son loves to cook, and had a great meal planned for Sunday night, but asked me to make mashed potatoes. I obliged, and after I got the potatoes peeled and on the stove I started to clean up after myself.
No one told me that the garbage disposal doesn’t work very well, and that son never puts potato peelings down it. It clogged up, and the grinders seemed stuck and wouldn’t turn, either. Son said that he put a bunch of coffee grounds and egg shells down the disposal earlier that morning, and blamed himself, not me, for the problem. He said he knew that he shouldn’t have put those down the disposal.
Son and I tried our best to fix things. Son tried using the plunger to loosen whatever was jammed in the grinders. We also used a shop vac to suck any debris out. I figured out we needed a 1/4 inch Allen wrench to stick in the bottom of the disposal under the sink to loosen the internal grinder blades, After multiple treatments, we actually got it to loosen up and keep running. Then, for some odd reason, the dishwasher automatically started and began discharging water in the disposal and filling the sink twice with water full of potato peels and coffee grounds.
The dishwasher is programmed to turn on if it senses water collecting in the bottom. Our efforts to get the disposal running had apparently caused the water we poured into the disposal to back up into the dishwasher. A special code kept appearing on the dishwasher electronic display indicating that it was trying to rid itself of excess water. We couldn’t see any excess water in the dishwasher. The dishwasher was our of commission. At least the sinkswere cleared and the disposal worked.
Son called a real plumber who came out the next day and who cleared out any peels and grounds clogging the dishwasher. It still flashed the special code. The plumber said it was an electrical programing issue, and to call the appliance store to send out a technician. That person will arrive next Monday. I told our son to order a better garbage disposal, and that I will pay for it.
What activities did you like doing with your parents?Ever considered being a plumber or electrician?
Wednesday was the most frustrating day. I drove from St. Cloud to near Oshkosh, WI to visit husband’s sister and BIL. I have never encountered such road construction for so many miles. The trip took about six hours. The day before our trip to St. Cloud took seven hours. I haven’t encountered such traffic for a long while. Where are all these people going?
One of the detours near Watoma, WI took us past several huge fields of cabbage. That was lovely to see. When we arrived at the family house, I found that they didn’t have wifi, so I couldn’t use my computer to show them the Ancestry info I had promised them. They have a computer and pay for wifi but have it all unplugged and turned of. This is a low tech household. We will go to the local library to access the wifi there. Whatever works, I guess. One problem is that I couldn’t figure out how to insert a header photo on my phone. Maybe I will add it tomorrow at the library.
Tell about your most memorable trip? How do you deal with being off-line?
The breed standard for our Cesky Terrier calls for a rather long skirt and long fur on the legs, with long bangs that go all the way to the tip of his nose. The fur on his skirt and legs is very fine and feathery, and attracts weeds and sticks. He really dislikes being brushed, but he would be a tangled mess if we didn’t attend to him. Here he is sitting on the bench in the front looking for bunnies in the garden. He is a rather pretty boy by Cesky standards. It takes a lot to maintain that beauty.
Husband always wanted to grow his hair long when he was in college in the early 70’s but his hair is so curly he could only get it a little above his shoulders before he started looking like Bozo the Clown. My boy cousins in Pipestone were mortified that their dad insisted they keep getting crew cuts when everyone else had longer hair and bangs. Uncle Harvey thought that a crew cut was all a boy needed to look good. I had the standard long, straight hair popular in the 70’s. My mother had a wash and set every week at the beauty parlor. I read the other day that a North Dakota man holds the record for the world’s longest beard, at 17.5 feet. Oh, the things we do for looks!
Who did you want to look like when you were a teenager? When have you been the happiest with your hair?
Last Wednesday was our grandson’s first day of Kindergarten. He was happy, proud and confident. He is, after all, 5 years old, and in his mind, he can do anything! His parents were dewy eyed, and our DIL had to redo her eye makeup when she got to work after dropping grandson off. I reminded son that I missed his first day of school since I had moved to Iowa to do my psychology internship, leaving him for the year with his father.
My first day of school was in Mrs. Helling’s room. I teased my mother in the weeks before school as she, a Grade 3 teacher, was getting her room ready and I would go with her to the school , warning her that I would slip into Mrs. Cooney’s room next door. Wouldn’t you know, my teasing got me all confused and I actually went into Mrs. Cooney’s classroom and was told to go next door. I was mortified!
What are some of your memories of first days of school?
It was hot. How hot was it? It was so hot Wednesday, I stayed at the college until 8:30 PM. The air conditioning units for the Theatre were recently repaired, so except for the fact there is no thermostat, (it’s either on or off), at least there’s air conditioning here as opposed to home where there’s only fans. Well, there’s not AC in the shop at the college, but I open the doors to the stage and turn on some fans and it’s very comfortable.
The chickens hang out under some bushes or somewhere in the shade from mid-morning until mid-afternoon. You can tell they’re hot when they lift their wings a bit. I’ve had their fan running all summer and the back door open for more ventilation the past week.
The cattle hang out in the shade too. By evening, everyone is moving again and having a drink.
Humphrey is really in a conundrum; he wants to be with us, but it’s cooler outside than inside. Decisions, decisions.
Back this spring as I was getting machinery ready for planting, I used my favorite wrench in one of the tractors, and I kind of remember setting it above the steering wheel and telling myself, “Don’t put that there“ and then, of course I couldn’t find it again all summer. I was delighted to find it in the toolbox of that same tractor recently. Putting a wrench in the toolbox? That was pretty good thinking at some point.
Has anyone else noticed all the dragonflies around lately? They were swarming all around the yard earlier this week and out in the fields. And my brother commented on seeing them at his place. I did some reading and they peak in July and August, they sure are fun to watch. And all the barn swallows are sweeping around; there’s a couple nests here that are working on the third batch of babies. That’s really impressive and these poor kids are hardly gonna learn to fly before they head south.
Was up to John Deere last week getting some parts and there is a new parts lady behind the counter. It was interesting that while she was still learning the system, and she didn’t know some common parts like a cotter pin, she seemed to know a lot of the customers and they would call her by name, and someone made a comment about her staying in the industry. Later, as we were trying to find some of my parts, (they were right here, and then they were put somewhere by somebody who wasn’t there now, and nobody else knew where they were) she and I had some time to talk. She ran the auto parts store in Plainview with her dad for 20 years. So, she kind of knew the business, just not this particular system, and some of these parts. I don’t recall, in all the years I’ve farmed, I’ve ever seen a woman behind any of the parts counters that I frequent. There was a female in a welding place several years ago, and she knew what she was doing. And I know this lady will figure it out too. Even the guys, when they start, they don’t know much. It takes a long time to get into the swing of things.
I’ve been listening to a jazz station a lot lately. I have a membership to Jazz Radio and primarily I listen to modern big band, but lately I’ve done Latin jazz too. It’s a fun change. I’ve learned that I don’t like hearing the same music over and over. And while that rarely happens on Radio Heartland, it happens even less frequently on Latin jazz. I get some Maynard Ferguson on the modern big band station and I like that.
Last week at faculty duty day at the college, I saw this shirt and it made me laugh. I hope you get the joke.
That momma hen still has 13 chicks. She’s a good momma and she’s smart. There’s been a hawk trying to grab the chicks. Bailey actually chased it away a few times. We made a straw bale shelter for them to hide under, but she figured it out on her own and moved them down to the trees and taller grass during the day, and at night takes them back into the pen. I take corn down to them. Keep your fingers crossed.
One night Kelly and I burned up a bunch of brush we had accumulated. A bonfire on the second hottest day of the year? Why not.
Over the past couple of weeks I have received emails purportedly from our internet and landline provider warning me over a variety of false circumstances like having too many emails in storage, and our automated payment not going through. Yesterday I got one warning me that our internet would be disconnected if I didn’t pay our over due bill of $689. I knew in my head that this was a scam, but just to make sure I contacted our provider and found that we owed no money at all.
I also received voice mail messages recently from a law firm in Minnesota and a Disability advocate firm in Minnesota for “Charlotte” asking me to phone them back regarding my disability claim. I looked the numbers up on Google and they are definite scams. Husband has been getting messages on his phone from some bogus dentist office about a missed appointment. I know that they hope we phone them to tell them they have mead a mistake so that they can further ensnare us and get our SS numbers and bank account numbers. We just delete them and block the numbers. Their attempts seem to be getting more sophisticated, though. I wonder how less tech savvy folks manage to not get fooled.
Have you ever been scammed or know of anyone who has? What do you think a fitting punishment would be for these people?
My best friend from Howard Lake texted me on Tuesday to say that the heat index there was 114 degrees. She had never experienced such heat in Minnesota before. It is hot here, too, but not like that.
I wonder how we would cope if there was no air conditioning. I remember as a child we spent a lot of time in the basement on really hot days before my parents had an air conditioner installed in the living room. It was one of those that sat in a hole especially cut in the side of the house. Most of my relatives on farms never had air conditioning in their homes. They just hung out on their porches and tried to keep cool. There was no air conditioning in the school in Luverne. The nights were the worst, as it never really cooled down because of the humidity.
When we moved here in 1987, our house didn’t have air conditioning, and we really didn’t need it because it always cooled down at night. The humidity here is low. After about five years, things changed, the nights didn’t cool down, and we decided to put in Central air. I think that was my first direct knowledge of climate change. I don’t know what we would do without it now.
When did you first live in a home with air conditioning? How did your family cope without it? Share some weather songs.
Trail Baboon 