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?
One of my colleagues was excited last week for the arrival of her mother for a visit from Washington State. She was flying from Spokane to Bismarck via Minneapolis, arriving in Bismarck on the midnight Delta flight.
There are very few commercial airports in ND, and very few commercial carriers that come into the State. I knew exactly what the midnight flight into Bismarck is like. The airport terminal is almost dark, nothing is open, and all the airline counters are closed. There are a couple of lighted offices, and one or two rental car desks whose occupants look exhausted. The long term parking kiosk is closed, so you better have exact change for your parking bill, or else a debit/credit card.
It is sort of comforting, sort of odd to live in such a remote place and know the details of these things so well. I wonder what it will be like to move back to Luverne when I retire, and what new things I will learn, and what old things are still there.
What communities are you the most familiar with? How have they changed for better or worse over the years? What are some of the more interesting airports you have been in?
I like to read the historical events that happened on particular days, and one of today’s I found very silly indeed.
On this day in 1889, the Second International Electrical Congress adopted the joule as a unit of energy, after James Joule, the watt as a unit of power, after James Watt, and the quadrant as a unit of electrical inductance. Inductance is the tendency of an electrical conductor to oppose a change in the electric current flowing through it. The flow of electric current creates a magnetic field around the conductor. What I found so silly is that the name “quadrant” was later changed to henry. The henry (symbolized H) is the Standard International unit of inductance . One henry is the equivalent of one kilogram meter squared per second squared per ampere squared (kg m 2 s -2 A -2 ).
Henry? Why not Flora or Sylvester? This got me started renaming things. “Yep, husband drove 90 Biancas to Bismarck last night. ” Or “I lost 10 Elliots with my new diet.”
Come up with some silly names for units of measurement.
Our puppy is a delightful little fellow who never misses an opportunity to teach us new things. These past couple of weeks he taught us to fetch. We didn’t even know it until recently.
Kyrill loves to play with balls. He rolls them around and chases them. They often roll under the sofa and love seat in the livingroom, and the space is too small for him to retrieve them, so he barks and we get them for him.
I became suspicious of the sheer volume. of balls that were going under the furniture. I draped blankets in front of the sofa and love seat to block balls from rolling under, and then I noticed him roll the balls under the unblocked ends of the furniture. He was doing this on purpose! This was a Terrier game!
The Cesky Facebook group told me this is typical of the breed, and they all have yardsticks close at hand to retrieve all the toys their dogs like to shove under the furniture. Who would have guessed?
What are you favorite and least favorite games to play. What have animals taught you? Who has been the most successful getting you to do what you don’t want to do?
Because our green beans were hailed out in June, we went to the local farmers market to get some. Green beans from the garden are so good.
It was a busy day at the farmers market, as the local tomatoes are just now coming in, and there is lots of other produce. The high school marimba band was playing as a fundraiser, so it was even more festive than usual. I can’t imagine the amount of work that these local gardeners have to do to get their crops to market.
I find a lot of peace and satisfaction gardening. I wondered what life would be like if I gardened full time and became a market gardener.
Hard work, but fun. I certainly wouldn’t want to have to make a living doing it. In my garden fantasy I see us putting in a couple of acres of butternut squash and cantaloupes, harvesting lovely, pest free crops and selling them to happy, grateful consumers. A dream, I know, but nice to have when life gets hectic.
If you were a farmer, what would you want to grow and produce? What is some of your favorite marimba, xylophone, or vibraphone music and musicians?
