Having YA living here makes me ruminate on almost a daily basis about how much the world has changed.
She’s in San Antonio now, at a conference. For once she is a participant, not a staff and she is enjoying that juxtaposition. One of the things that has changed significantly in the travel/meeting/conference world is the choice of activities. I organized a group in San Antonio once and the activity options were golf, tennis and the San Antonio city tour (with lengthy stop at the Alamo). Golf was the activity of choice on almost all trips except Hawaii, where the catamaran tour was always the big winner. As the years went by, people got more adventurous and wanted more options. Golf fell out of favor and “experiences” got more popular. Cooking classes, art encounters, biking, kayaking, horseback riding, ATV adventures. Zipline infrastructure grew and grew as did the number of folks wanting to try it.
The activities that YA had to choose from included morning walks, morning jogs, the traditional city tour, Seaworld and…. puppy yoga!
I’d never even heard of yoga until I was in college – heard a talk about transcendental meditation and Ram Das and yoga. That was it for probably over a decade. Once onboard a ship with a client, I did a session of yoga with her and promptly pulled a muscle in my back that took weeks to feel better.
Now there are multitudes of yoga types (Kundalini, Kharma, Buti, Tantra) but lots of stranger versions that I’ve seen. Hot yoga is done in an overheated environment that encourages sweating. Naked yoga – well, I don’t have to explain that. Goat yoga. And, of course, the popular puppy yoga. YA signed up for puppy yoga on both of her allotted activity days. She has sent quite a few photos and it doesn’t look like any yoga is getting done at all. That’s my girl!
Have you ever tried yoga? Do you have a favorite activity when you’re traveling?
If you noticed that I didn’t have a presence on the Trail on Saturday, it’s because it was stump removal day. The tree itself had all been cut down by Friday evening so Saturday was all about the stump.
We had a couple of offers to help us yank the stump out with a truck (thank you, tim and my neighbor Don) but with my front yard garden flourishing this year and some of the perennials starting to bloom, YA and I didn’t want to risk trashing those; hence the decision to utilize the “dig to China” method of stump removal.
You ever have one of those times when you’ve taken something on and as you’re working on it you start to question your sanity? The first couple of hours went fine – the beginning of the work and you’re still full of optimism and energy. By lunchtime, we were lagging a bit so we took a break and ate sandwiches on the front steps. I will admit that I did google “stump removal” before we got back to business.
By 2 p.m., I was seriously thinking about having myself committed. We’d been digging down around the stump for hours, cutting roots whenever we came upon them and even with both of us with our backs to the house and pushing vigorously, the stump wasn’t moving at all. At this point, my mantra was “We can do this because we’ve done it before” – a little like Harry Potter in Prisoner of Azkaban – since I had been part of the stump removal team when my wasband and I took down a tree when we first bought the house. See:
So YA and I just kept digging; by this point we were more excavating than digging as we were trying to get under as much of the root system as possible. I really did say to myself “we’ve done this before” repeatedly.
Suddenly at 3:15, when we shoved it, it moved. So we shoved a little harder, then there was a good sized “cracking” sound. At this point I shoved and YA got underneath with the chainsaw and finished off the last root holding it and voila! At 3:20 the stump was out. It was a little stunning since it seemed like we’d be digging forever and then suddenly we were done. We rolled the stump down to the boulevard and since we are both good at cleaning as we go, we only had to put all the various tools back on the porch. You can’t really tell from the photo but I was just about the dirtiest I’ve ever been from a yardwork project – maybe even dirtier than when tim and I sandblasted to porch. I had to take a scrub brush and the hose to myself in the backyard before I could even go in the house. Then it was a shower with another scrub brush and a LOT of body wash.
We finished up the work on Sunday – digging up the area and leveling it out. We did find the black edging that I put down decades ago as well as the various layers of black tarp that truly did not do anything about weeds. Now we have two pretty little Dwarf Globe Blue Spruce planted that will not grow above the window level and should fill the space nicely. To make it look a little prettier for now, we also put in a few hostas as a minimal border. I told YA as we were inspecting our handiwork yesterday that I was never, ever going to do that job again.
Ever.
Do you have any mantras that have been useful in your life?
I heard on the radio the band ‘The Who’ is beginning their farewell tour. I thought back in 2016 they were on their farewell tour. Which isn’t anything new, the Rolling Stones are still out there and how many farewell tours have they had. Anyone seen the Stones?
I saw The Who in 1982. I think it was my second big rock concert and as an 18-year-old, driving with a State Farm atlas in my lap from Rochester up to the big city of St Paul and the St Paul Civic Center, it was a pretty big deal. I’m sure my folks were concerned sending me out into the world like that, even if it was just two hours away. I know I’ve told the story before but I like to brag about it so I’m gonna say it again: My first rock concert was Queen 1982, when Freddie Mercury was still strutting around the stage. My brother says Queen was the warm-up act when he saw the band Chicago right after Bohemian Rhapsody had come out.
So I set the bar quite high to have Queen and The Who as my first rock concerts. I know I have programs from them both, might even have tickets stubs in a drawer somewhere. And that’s when you had to go to a ticket office on the second floor of Dayton‘s department store. I feel like I found out about both of these fairly late so it’s not like I was waiting at the doors the first day tickets went on sale and a bunch of us rushed to the window. And then I found out you could call in to get tickets, so you called, getting the busy signal, hung up, and called again. In 1986 when tickets for Pink Floyd went on sale at the old Metrodome, I was home sick in bed and Kelly, while at work, was able to call and get tickets for us.
I digress.
The Who on a farewell tour.
They were well past their prime in 2016 and I decided I was not gonna remember that concert, I was gonna remember the 1982 concert.
You probably all remember the rock opera Tommy, and a really bad movie that was made after that. I always liked the Quadrophenia album better. Pete Townshend, the arm-windmilling guitarist, is married to Rachel Fuller. A singer-songwriter, musician, and composer. Together they created an orchestral version of Quadrophenia and I recently saw it’s a ballet in England. I enjoy the sound of an orchestra behind a rock band. And the climactic final song of Quadrophenia called “Love Reign O’er Me“ sung by a full throated, powerful opera singer like Alfie Boe, is really something.
How long should you keep doing something?
I am sure they don’t need the money, and if you love it, and you are able to do it, I guess you should keep doing it, right? I mean should I quit farming because I’m “too old“? But I’m not farming in front of tens of thousands and charging an obscene amount of money for people to come see me struggle to climb up into the tractor and make crooked rows across the field.
But I’ll be skipping this tour.
Farming.
I’ve finished all my spring work. Although I am remembering now I’m supposed to plow up a couple fields and plant some corn as deer food plots for a neighbor. I kind of forgot about that. But the important fields, the ones that I’m trying to make money and survive on, they’re done.
I was hoping to finish soybeans last Tuesday, which is still two weeks later than all the neighbors, but… life.
It rained just enough on Tuesday that I had to quit. Once the dirt starts getting sticky, which only takes a couple of hundreds, it sticks to the gauge wheels on the planter. The gauge wheels control the depth of the seed, and sticking an extra half inch of dirt on the wheels changes the planting depth, and you’ve heard me say before, the depth is pretty critical. I quit for a little while.
I spent most of Monday out working up all the ground, me and Bailey, and was a little bit sad to be done. Only because I enjoy my time in the tractor. The next morning I realized I had forgotten a field. So while it was a little bit too sticky to plant, it wasn’t too muddy to do fieldwork. Bailey and I got another hour of tractor time.
And then later on Tuesday I was able to go out again and I planted until 9:30 PM when it was again raining lightly and I was out of seed. I finished planting Friday afternoon. I started going over the fields with the drag, just like I did with the Oats, but the point of this is to smooth it out so that the combine header, when harvesting the soybeans, can ride as low as possible. Because soybeans pods will grow very low to the ground.
I had my last event at the college on Thursday evening. Tuesday will be my last day and I can haul out the garbage, and lock up cabinets, and take the rest of the summer off. So to speak.
The question was asked why my eggs are different colors. It’s different breeds. Some breeds of chickens lay white eggs, some brown eggs, and then there’s a couple breeds that lay the green eggs. I have Araucana’s.
The house next door has sold and my neighbors are moving out this weekend. Just by chance, I was out front gardening on both the days that there was an open house, so I actually got to talk to quite a few folks who had walked through. The question that almost everyone asked was how it was to live on my street, which is a busy thoroughfare – in fact, it’s a county road as opposed to a city street.
Everybody got the same answer. I love living on my busy street – it’s easy to get to, easy to get out and around. During the winter, my street is always clear; the plows start early and are consistent. Even when side streets are still snowed in, we can always get out.
The other great thing is that you can get rid of anything by just putting it down on the boulevard. You don’t even have to put a “free” sign on it – if it’s on the boulevard, it’s fair game. Two summers ago, the house across the street was almost gutted and their boulevard was like a second-hand store for three or four weeks. I thought maybe there might be a traffic accident one day because so many people were pulling over to look and grab. Over the years I’ve put out a lot of items and the only thing that never got taken was a mattress (which makes sense) – but the city took it on trash day anyway.
The surprise this week is that someone stopped during the day yesterday and took all the little logs and all but two of the bundles of sticks that YA and I had put on the boulevard after the first day of our “tree adventure”. We didn’t put them out because we thought anybody would want them, but because that’s where they need to be for the city pick-up. But, what the heck – if these little logs and bundles will make somebody’s life better – whoopee.
Of course, I wonder why they didn’t take ALL the bundles. Maybe they didn’t have room in the car? Maybe they have just so much room back home to store the bundles? Maybe there were two of them and they weren’t aligned on whether to take any of them? Hopefully it didn’t start a fight. I also wonder if they’ll come back at some point for the last two. Or will somebody else take them? Maybe I should just put out a table instead of schlepping things to Value Village and GoodWill? I could call it Boulevard Freecycle?
Do you live on a busy or quiet street? Have you ever had a great garage sale?
When I went to bed Monday night, after uploading yesterday’s post, I was doing a mental run-through of things to get done on Tuesday.
The biggie was the tree so I was thinking about what I would need to bring up to my bedroom: extension cord for the trimmer, the trimmer, a rake to shake loose any bits that get stuck.
Then, because it was dark and I was very tired, my brain went a little sideways. I thought maybe I should be sure to wear shorts with pockets so I could have my phone on me, in case I somehow fell off the roof. If my phone were in my pocket I could call for help right away, rather than try to drag my broken body into the house.
As if that weren’t enough then I started thinking about the chewed up tree that I would be falling onto. If I skewered myself, the phone probably wouldn’t do much good. Or what if I hit my head on the way down and bled out while unconscious. All my neighbors work during the day, so they couldn’t come to my aid either.
It was at this point, around 11 p.m., that I made the decision to forego climbing out on the roof to trim the tree from above. Sleep, which had been eluding me while I imagined my gruesome end, came fast at that point. My decision was solidified when it rained at 5:30 a.m. and then again around noon, and the roof was wet. If only Mother Nature had informed me sooner I would have had a better night’s sleep!
YA has lots of opinions about the house and yard. Granted, she does do quite a bit of work on both, but the bottom line is that I’m still doing a good 80%. So when she gets a bee in her bonnet, I don’t always jump to attention.
She’s been nagging me for about three years to get rid of the tree in the front of house. To her credit, it’s in awful shape, and has gotten tall enough that it pretty much blocks all the sunlight to the front porch and some of my room as well. But I don’t want to have a whole bunch of projects going at once (actually, this drives me to distraction) so I’ve been putting her off. For two years I was able to use the “not until the front porch is done” knowing full well that the last couple of steps were hers. Unfortunately she did finally finish her little bits and now I can no longer use the excuse.
Smart people would have hired a tree guy, but I think the last 20 years have shown that we don’t always have smart people at our house. So we purchased a new chainsaw (the old one died last summer) and got to work yesterday. For the most part, it went well but as always happens with a big job, it’s much bigger than we thought. As you can see from the photo below, we still have a chunk to go but after 7 hours, both of us were really running out of steam so we decided to call it a day and go to Dairy Queen.
The good news is that YA and I are truly aligned when it comes to how we like to get things done. We like to clean up as we go – neither of us likes a big mess at the end. So each big branch that came down, we chopped it up, filling yard bags and making bundles of little logs and branches. So as we were getting worn out, we didn’t have a massive amount of clean up to do. The header photo is what’s on the boulevard for yesterday’s work.
The biggest issue now is finding time to tackle the rest of the job, since the weekend is over and YA has to work this week. I can work on the ground level and maybe even do a bit of cutting back from the roof outside my bedroom, but the actual cutting of that last two branches will take both of us. And probably some ropes and rakes to try to get the branches to fall where we want them to. I’ve had experience with this part going wrong in the past, so I don’t want to attempt it alone. YA thinks she can get an afternoon off in a couple of days. Fingers crossed.
What was the last project that really took it out of you?
We’re coming up on the 10th anniversary of the baboons taking over the Trail. The math is pretty straightforward. 6 posts a week times 52 weeks a year times 10 years. 3120. That’s not exact but close enough for horseshoes.
I think Renee and Ben would agree with me that the QUESTION is the hardest part of writing so many posts. What question relates to what you just wrote? How many times have we asked a similar question. Will the question lead to some good discussion during the day? Will it be too hard to answer? Too personal to answer? Too inane to answer?
Richard Feynman once said “I would rather have questions that can’t be answered than answers that can’t be questioned.” That’s all fine and good for a world-renown physicist but he never had to come up with a good question every day!
So here’s your chance to beat Richard Feynman at his own game.
We’ve had about 2 inches of rain between Tuesday and Wednesday. It was a nice easy rain and much needed. The first of the corn that I planted is up, Oats is filling in nicely, other than one field that looks terrible. I’m not sure what’s going on there. Other than it was corn last year and the other fields were soybeans last year. So, they worked up different, or I don’t know what. But I think I’m gonna replant part of this one. It’s just a terrible looking stand and it’s right along the road so it embarres me to think the neighbors will judge me.
The rows that end up in the track of the tractor tire never come up quite as fast as the other rows. I think because the soil gets packed down by the tire, and I’ve always thought I need some kind of tiny digger teeth behind the tractor to refresh that dirt. Mounting something is the easy part, trying to figure out how to make it raise and lower is harder, But I really need to figure out something.
I did finish planting corn last Saturday. Had a couple minor repairs I was able to fix in the field. One loose bolt, and one broken chain link. Good thing I had a spare chain link. There was a pheasant pair running around in this field.
I spent Monday riding in a big truck, being the navigator as a company applied calcium chloride as dust control on our Township gravel roads. It’s a thing we do annually. We finished that about 3:00 PM and I went to Plainview John Deere and picked up a new rear wiper arm for a tractor. Would you believe 120 bucks for that! And then to Meyer seed’s and picked up soybean seed.
Tuesday and Wednesday were meetings at the college.
Thursday was the visitation for mom, and Friday was her memorial service.
Saturday I have a set up meeting at one theater, an event at the college, and the ‘cousins Reunion’ at my sisters house. The kids are the cousins, Kelly and I are the fun, cool Aunt and Uncle. Even a couple Grand Neices we’re excited to see again – or for the first time.
It’s been fun to have all the nieces and nephews in town. They’re all pretty cool people.
Back in April I ordered a ton of egg layer ration from the co-op. Forty, fifty-pound bags on a pallet. They put it in the truck with a fork lift, I use the loader and forks to take it out of the truck and put it in the feed room. Works great.
Got the first bag out the other day, and it’s meal, rather than pellets. Hmm, not sure about that. Turns out the chickens are not fans… I didn’t know I needed to specify pellets; it’s just always been pellets.
I called the co-op to see about exchanging this. Due to bio-security, they don’t usually return feeds. Plus they’re going to stop making pellets. Hmm. But she was going to check into this. Haven’t heard back yet. Plan B will be to buy bags of pellets from Fleet Farm and mix into it I guess. A ton of layer rations last me 11 months. This could take a while…
Yesterday I had to send off a package to my friend in Nashville. She broke her ankle in two places while traveling in Italy and had surgery today (she came home for this). Post-surgery she’s staying with her son who lives just a few miles from her.
I, of course, sent off a card immediately but wanted to do a bit more. My friend has a soft spot for the Little Debbie Swiss Rolls and I’m sure her son won’t think to toss them into the shopping cart when he gets groceries. So I got a couple of boxes, boxed them up and headed for the post office.
It was a little busy when I was there and it was surprising that there was a supervisor who kept coming out to say “thanks for your patience, we’ll be with you….” I’ve never experienced that before. Then I heard the postal worker next to mine say that they didn’t have any stamps. I was sure I had heard that wrong, but my postal worker confirmed… no stamps. She said that the manager who “unlocks” the stamps hadn’t come in yet. I couldn’t help laughing, although I did try to suppress my giggles in case anybody else in line needed stamps.
I couldn’t stop thinking about it and it reminded me of the gas shortage in the 1973 with the long lines. And of course, it made me remember the toilet paper “crisis” at the beginning of covid. But for some reason, the post office not having stamps strikes me as the weirdest. Why does only one manager have the key? Why hadn’t that manager come in; if not able, why hasn’t someone driven to his/her place to get the key? I suppose I’ll never know.
What other shortages have you survived? What strategies did you use? Did snack cakes help?
Today is an aviation milestone day. In 1927 Charles Lindbergh landed his Spirit of St. Louis plane in Paris after his 33½ hour solo flight across the Atlantic. Then five years later on this day, Amelia Earhart landed near Londonderry, Northern Ireland after the first trans-Atlantic solo flight by a woman. The combination of a little shorter route and five years of advancing technology, it only took her 17 hours.
My first thought when I saw these two feats on the same day was that it was a concidence, but it was only a fleeting thought. I’d bet money that Amelia planned her flight very carefully to arrive in Europe on May 21.
It does make me think about explorers and adventurers who put their lives on the line because I don’t care how talented Lindbergh and Earhart were, they were absolutely taking their lives in their hands when they took off. Aviation was still a relatively young science, machines broke down at an alarming rate and then there’s the whole “across the ocean” thing.
Personally I’m not a daredevil. The scariest things I’ve ever done were hot-air ballooning in Africa and zip lining in Costa Rica. The balloon experience came available on a Fam trip (which is a trip that hotels/suppliers pay for in the hopes that travel industry folks will then sell their products); I just had a feeling that this would be a once-in-a-lifetime thing and I should get over my fears and do it. It was fabulous. The zipline was another matter. It was done with a client, more or less under duress and I was terrified the whole time. When we got to the part of the course where you didn’t zip, but swung on a rope from one platform to the next, the two guides had to come back for me and basically force me to swing by reminding me that there was no other way to get down than to finish the course. Bungee jumping is not on my list, nor is sky-diving. I simply cannot imagine myself stepping out into nothing. Nope.
So congratulations today to the memories of Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart for heading out across the Atlantic and taking that big step for aeronautics!
What’s the scariest thing you’ve ever done? And did you do it on purpose?
Trail Baboon 