Husband and I both work for separate Human Service Centers right now. His agency is in Bismarck. Mine is in our town. The magic of technology means that he only needs to go to Bismarck one day a week, and all the other days he can work out of my office building. The State calls it “Hoteling” when you set up like a squatter at another State agency building. He works in an office I occasionally use for testing, just across the hall. We spent part of yesterday scoring Rorschach Inkblot Tests together. How romatic, right?
This isn’t the first time we worked in the same building. We worked together in the same department at my current agency for 15 years before he retired the first time. I suppose it is fortunate we get along. We have spent a lot of time together over the decades. At least neither of us had to supervise the other at any time.
The people at my work tell me they think it is so “cute” when they see us at work together. I don’t quite know what they mean by that. We aren’t lovey-dovey or anything like that. I suppose it is sort of unusual to have a married couple at the same agency. I can only imagine the drama had we been at odds or openly hostile with each other.
How do you think it would have turned out if you had to work with your partner or spouse? Any stories about couples working together at the same place?Were you a Turtles fan in the 60’s?
There was supposed to be a hard freeze Thursday night. Only got to 35°. We’re down in a valley so whatever the TV says the low will be, we’re going to be about 10° colder. It’s coming. Sooner or later. Minor cold spells, I unhook the hoses and put the pressure washer in the barn. Once it gets seriously cold, I’ll have to get more things picked up and put somewhere warm.
Driving to Plainview for parts last week showed a lot of farmers harvesting soybeans. Sounds like they might get to mine in the next few days. Good to hear. It was fun to see all the different combines. Some John Deere’s, some Case IH, even one Claas. You don’t see many of them in this area. I’m not even sure who the dealer is for Claas. That’s a big thing when buying equipment; who’s going to support it when needed. I really liked the Deutz tractor I bought back in 1986. But eventually it was hard to find mechanics or parts locally. There was a shop over in Wells MN that did good work on Deutz tractors, but 86 miles is a long ways to go for parts or service.
I’m bummed all the sweetcorn froze last week so that’s done for the season. What a shame; one cold night and that’s it. Glad we got some froze a month ago. It felt early when we did it, but this is why I guess.
We drove to Plainview so I could pick up some oil filters for the lawn mower and gator. My local dealer has most of my equipment in their records, but they didn’t have the gator for some reason, and I have a hard time remembering all the equipment model numbers. I knew it was an 835, but was it an “E”, “M” or “R”? And there’s a serial number break that uses different oil filters… shucks. I don’t remember. Eventually I found an email on my phone from the insurance company that had the VIN number so we got the right one. I wrote it down. In my phone where I have a file of oil changes on equipment.
All the tractors and machinery have model numbers. I know a lot of them but sometimes I forget. Is the soil finisher a 714 or 716? Wait, it’s a 724. The chisel plow is a 714. Or 716… Know there’s a 7 in there. Maybe this weekend I can get the oil and fuel filters changed in the truck too.
We quit filling the bird feeders this summer when the avian flu was going around. I filled them again this week, but so far nothing has come back.
Rosie and Guildy are still fine. The chickens seem to think those two have better food than they do. It’s all the same food, but it’s inside a pen so it must be better. One of those ‘grass is greener’ things. Right up until this happens.
See what happens when you do things you shouldn’t be doing? You get hung up and need to be rescued. She wasn’t there long. Kelly and I were out picking pears and then having a gator date when we spotted her. Once rescued she ran off to the pen and didn’t even appear too dizzy.
I haven’t seen anyone harvesting corn yet. The kernels are probably a little too wet yet and it’s early enough no one wants to pay for drying the corn yet if they don’t have too. Shelled corn (really, any crop) must be 15% or less moisture to store without spoiling. I’m guessing most corn is still upper 20’s. The ears are mostly still standing upright. The old timers used to wait until the ear had tipped down, then it was ready to harvest. I was just reading that corn on the stalk loses about .5% moisture / day. Course that depends on the weather. It dries a lot more at 70° than it does at 40° of course.
This is a good looking ear because of how it’s filled all the way to the tip. If the plant had any stress it would abort the kernels at the upper end. And there are some ears in the field that are not filled. But it’s neat to see this ear and know the crop had everything it needed to make good ears. Enough rain, the right nutrients, and no stresses. Think about how we could all do if we had no stresses and everything we needed to prosper?
We try to limit our trips to Walmart to once a month, and I hit the jackpot there last weekend.
The Redken company ceased production of a certain hair product called Thickening Lotion. I have used it for decades to lend body to my hair so it doesn’t hang in my eyes. Well, this has reportedly been a rather unpopular move nation-wide, and I am quite unhappy about it. My hair dresser is beside herself about it.
My hairdresser has tried to find an alternative for me, like this weird foam stuff that sort of works, and hairspray, which I really dislike. I looked on-line for it, and found they were selling it for $100 a bottle on ebay.
As Husband and I left Walmart Saturday I spied two bottles of my beloved hair goop on the shelves in the Walmart Beauty Salon. It was on sale for 20% off, and cost me $20.00 a bottle. I was elated! Now I am set for another 4 months of happy hair styling and clear vision.
Remember Dipity-do? What hair products have you used in the past that you would never use again?What is the most embarrassing hair style you ever had?
Husband had a dental filling on Monday. He came home, mouth and lips still numb from the anesthetic, and ate a slice of bread and laid down to take a nap.
I came home at 5:00 pm, and was shocked to see Husband’s lower lip. I exclaimed “You look like you were in a fight! What happened?” His lip was terribly swollen. He didn’t know what I was talking about at first, as his face was still numb from the dentist. Closer inspection revealed a gash on the inside of his lip, suggesting that he had bit his lip while eating the slice of his homemade sourdough loaf, and didn’t feel it because of the anesthesia. We iced it, and by yesterday it was much reduced although still red and sore looking.
One of my coworkers told the story of her husband the day before their wedding deciding to eliminate a hornets’ nest and getting stung on the eyelid, causing his eye to swell shut and turn all sorts of lurid colors.
Got any fat lip or black eye stories? Ever given anyone a black eye or a fat lip?
Our next door neighbors are a delightful pair of educators whose children we involve in our gardening. One of their extended families has a German tradition of eating cooked Swiss Chard doused with vinegar. That is certainly not our experience with German cuisine, but who am I to judge. We always grow chard so I can make an Italian pie of greens, but our harvests have been so plentiful we always have chard to spare. This year is no exception, and we have so much frozen chard from previous years that I shall not need much this year, except for a bit for a butternut squash and fresh chard phyllo pie recipe husband found. We always grow Argentata, a white chard variety.
The neighbors have happily harvested our chard on two occasions this summer, always looking sheepish and guilty, as though they were robbing us or doing something illegal. We are so happy to share chard with them, and would probably plant chard even if we didn’t need it, just because we believe family traditions are important. The neighbors consider it a real gift.
What family traditions do you think are important to keep? What traditions do you want to eliminate?What simple things do you consider a good gift? How do you prepare chard?
Sunday has never been a day of rest for us, Yesterday was particularly busy, and we ended up in very odd but very affirming encounters with other people.
We started out the morning at 7:30 with a run-through of our choir anthem “Hear me, Redeemer” which is written in a gospel style that has a soprano soloist belting out a solo/descant with the choir echoing her lyrics. The soloist was a terrific singer who is a member of the local LDS church but who sings with us on occasion. People in the congregation loved the song, and said it was “inspirational”, something we consider a real success given this is a pretty traditional Lutheran congregation. They even clapped.
We then spent a couple of hours doing a fall clean up the church garden with other congregation members, and it was during this that a woman drove up in a car with Florida plates, a missing driver side window, a grown daughter, and four chihuahuas. She asked Husband for help, as they were homeless. Husband found a hotel that would take dogs, gave her the number for the homeless coordinator at my agency, and our pastor found some funds for a night at the hotel and gave her a bag of leftover food from the church brunch we had earlier after our service.
We then went home and vacuumed and dusted the house, dropped some kohlrabi off at a friend’s house, and headed to the liquor store for a well deserved bottle of wine. It was there we encountered the clerk who had worked at the store several years ago, quit due to health problems, and started working again. She said she remembered us, and told us she had married, quit drinking, and was really happy in her sobriety. We congratulated her. I don’t know if working in a liquor store is the best work environment for her, but it was inspiring to hear her success. She teased us that if we stopped drinking, she would be our sponsor.
What or who inspires you? How do you spend your Sundays? What are your favorite choir songs?
It was 28° on Wednesday morning. We lost the other creamy colored duck. And the next morning a coyote was howling just 100 feet below the house. At first, the yipping noise they make sounds a little bit surreal and I ran outside to see what was going on. Even the dogs came running back to the house looking at me like “Did you hear that? What the heck is that??“ I yelled and the dogs remembered they’re supposed to deal with stuff like coyotes and they took off after it. Kelly was out the other door slapping her ‘bird away’ boards together. There’s too many leaves on the trees yet, and the corn and beans still out there and too much coverage for things to hide in and it’s tough to see much. And that’s why, a few days later, I was out in my pajamas hunting a coyote.
I was standing at the kitchen window filling the tea pot and I saw something moving out in the pasture. It was too far away to tell clearly what it was, and by the time I got my crocs on, and found the shells for the rifle, (which were behind the toothpaste box), and got out there to a better vantage point, there wasn’t anything to see. But as long as I was out there already, I fed the chickens and let Rosencrantz and Guildenstern out of their pen. Rosie and and Guildy are doing good.
I realized all the chickens spend a lot of time hiding, so it’s not just them. (See the first paragraph.) Course hiding under a bush seems more helpful for attacks from above than from coyotes.
Bringing pears in the house was the solution to eating them. They soften up and taste really good.
I have seen a couple guys combining soybeans around here. The freeze kills the stem and they harvest better that way. A few more days now and everyone will be going full force.
I still get some dairy magazines in the mail and I spent a bit of time wondering what I would have changed if I still had cows. My whole calf raising situation would have been the first thing to improve. I’d have needed to get them out of the dairy barn pen and into individual stalls somewhere.
Adding more cows and getting out of the stanchion barn would be important, but where and how I’m still not sure. We’re on low ground and it’s wet and I don’t know where I could have built, or how, or if I even would have wanted too.
Kelly asks me sometimes if I ever wanted to be one of those big farmers with thousands of acres? Well, the machinery and toys are fun, but it also turns into more management and less actual work at some point. So I don’t know.
As I’ve always said, just add more zero’s to the bills and income.
I received several condolences from local people these last couple of weeks on the death of my mother. This was rather surprising, as my mother died in 2014.
There was a death notice in the local paper a couple of weeks ago for a Marilyn Boomgaarden. Well, the last name is correct, but the first name is not my mother’s, and I understand the confusion. Local folks thought she must be my mother because we have the same last name and there aren’t any other Boomgaardens in southwest ND. Marilyn was the wife of my dad’s cousin Irwin, and was briefly here in Dickinson to be close to her daughter, my third cousin. She moved here from Dell Rapids, SD.
My grandfather had eleven brothers and sisters, and if you encounter a Boomgaarden in Iowa, Minnesota, South Dakota, or North Dakota, chances are really good they are my kin, especially if their last name has two a’s in it. It is a pretty odd name, although in Ostfriesen/Dutch it means orchard. The family was fairly close knit, and cousins kept track of each other, so I heard all about all Dad’s cousins growing up. I have yet to write to the person who sent a sympathy card to me and donated three bibles to the Salvation Army in my mother’s memory. Oh, to live in a small community!
Have you everbeen mistaken for someone else? Do you have any close or distant relatives who live nearby you? What does your last name mean?
Our puppy needs a haircut, and is a very fuzzy boy. I noticed that he had two rather large dried on pieces of poop on his rear end, stuck to his fussy hair. I told husband that he had to help me with the “clinkers”, as we have called such things since we got our first dogs many years ago. I started thinking about the word and the euphemisms that we use. I am not talking about hurtful or derogatory ones, just interesting ones.
I suppose many euphemisms stem from talking about body parts or functions. Many of my child/adolescent clients are embarrassed to death to have to refer to body parts by their proper names. A good friend had a daughter who referred to boys’ parts as “hoses”, which I thought was a pretty good descriptor. I don’t know what she calls them now that she is a grown woman.
What are some euphemisms that you use? What words are hard for you to say in public?
Yesterday the Fargo Forum reported that bar patrons in Maddock, ND, who were in the Maddock Bar the night of September 6 needed to be aware that they may have been exposed to rabies. It seems a rather intoxicated woman came into the bar holding a racoon she had rescued days earlier from the side of the road. She was asked to leave the bar, but not before she walked all around the bar showing people her racoon. The racoon was reportedly injured when she found it, and she had nursed it back to health and was keeping it as a pet. It is illegal to keep racoons or skunks as pets here due to the threat of rabies. They are still looking for the woman and her racoon. The bar employees say they are going to dress up as racoons for Halloween,
When I was about 6 years old, I tried lifting a friend’s rather fat beagle into my father’s fishing boat that was stored along side the garage. The beagle was not amused, and bit me on my face. It was just a nip, but my mother was panicked about it. The beagle’s owners refused to lock the dog up the required number of days to see if it was rabid, so I had to have a series of rabies shots. I got the shots under my shoulder blades. It was painful. I wouldn’t want to go through that again. The beagle wasn’t rabid, by the way, and he and I remained friends.
Know any good bar jokes? What animals would you like to see in bars? What are your experiences with rabies or rabies shots?
Trail Baboon 