With YA out of town, I’m in my “eat what’s here and don’t shop” mode. I actually enjoy this part of YA traveling. (Not as crazy about being in charge of Guinevere’s early morning and late night trips outside, but I’ll live.)
This week there have been quite a few leftovers in the fridge – more than usual. Since I also worry about food going bad, I decided that I would have dinner for breakfast. I’ve done breakfast for dinner many times in my life but except for a handful of cold pizza starts to a day, I’ve never actually heated up what I think of as dinner food and had it as the first meal in the morning.
I heated up some rice with carrots and parsnips and had it alongside some brie and applesauce. It was very nice and now I’m thinking I should switch things up more often. The only hitch was the feeling that I needed dessert afterwards!
Do you have any foods that you wouldn’t normally eat for breakfast?
I’ve probably seen the first 10 minutes of the movie Laura 100 times. It’s one of my go-to bedtime movies. I can actually recite the first five minutes of the movie by heart. For fun, I had it on during the afternoon over the weekend and I just happened to look at the screen as Clifton Web and Dana Andrews had this discussion:
DA: Three years ago in your October 17 column you started out to write a book review but then at the bottom of the column you switched over to the Harrington murder case
CW: Are the processes of the creative mind now under the jurisdiction of the police?
DA: You said Harrington was rubbed out with a shotgun loaded with buckshot, the way Laura Hunt was murdered, the night before last.
CW: Did I?
DA: Yeah. But he was really killed with a sash weight.
CW: How ordinary. My version was obviously superior.
A sash weight? Despite how many times I’ve seen this scene, I would never in a gzillion years been able to tell you Harrington got clobbered by a sash weight
I’m not sure which is more amazing, that the line could get by me SO many times or that I actually know what a sash weight is. I live in a house that still has sash weights. I’ve even taken out a window with sash weights and then put it back!
My guess is that knowing about sash weights will become a fairly specialized bit of knowledge as the years go by.
Tell me about something that you know that seems a little rarer than it used to!
When I find something I really like at a restaurant, it’s really really hard for me to choose something else the next time. Even if it looks good. Black Coffee & Waffle in St. Paul has several waffle options that look wonderful to me. As I’m driving over there I’m thinking to myself that I should try something new (besides the almond butter, fresh fruit & granola waffle) and then I never do. Same with the olive pimento veggie burger at The Tipsy Steer. In what I consider a personal victory, on Sunday I actually got the crumb cake at Black Walnut Bakery. I’ve looked at it several times but always end up ordering the bear claw, which Black Walnut makes with puff pastry, pastry cream and raspberry jam. The crumb cake also had raspberry and was wonderful, but if I’m honest, I also bought a bear claw (just in case) and had it yesterday!
Quirk #2
Most of my adult life, I’ve done without a dishwasher. Either I just didn’t have one or for many many years in my current house, it just didn’t work. Now that we have a nice dishwasher that YA insisted on when we had the kitchen remodeled, I end up putting the clean dishes away about 80% of the time. It’s not a horrible job – only takes about 5 minutes, but I’m finding that afterwards, I resist putting any dirty dishes in for a bit. As if it needs to sit empty for a day or so before I start loading it up again. Like it needs to rest and recharge? Maybe it needs a spa day?
Stopped by the library Saturday morning to return one item and pick up another. At the return slot, I waited between two little blond girls, excitedly putting books onto the conveyer belt that takes them into the library.
As I entered the library, a little blond girl was leaving with her mom and a massive pile of books. Inside, there was another little blond toddler; she was helping her dad swipe books at the check-out station.
After I grabbed my book and was heading out, two families came toward the library, each from opposite directions. Each family had two little blond girls who seemed excited to be going to the library.
It was clearly a little blond party. I was going to feel out of place until I remembered that when I was that age, I was blond as well – a little towhead in fact.
What kind of party would you like to attend at your local library?
It was a busy week in the theater again. Shows the last two Saturday’s, but Spring Break next week, that will be a quiet week.
Not much happening on the farm. We survived the “blizzard” on Wednesday. Maybe two inches of snow, and I got a snow day meaning I had time to work in the shop and organize bolts. I did pull some wagons out last week. See the header photo. The seed wagon has a good flatbed top that I built 25 or 30 years ago. But the wheels and frame under it, technically, that’s the “running gear” are pretty wore out. I have a much newer running gear, with better tires that I reclaimed after disposing of an old chopper box that was junk when dad bought it new in 1980. So here’s a long boring story about that!
When he first bought the chopper, blower, and wagons, in order to fill the silo’s by ourselves, it was probably the mid 1970’s. My brother helped Dad at first. When I got older, the best job for me, at 15 years old, was to run the chopper, leaving it to Dad to run the smaller tractor and pull the wagons home to unload. You’ll just have to trust me on that. It was actually safer in the big tractor just going around and around the fields, than it was pulling them home, hooking up the power take off (the PTO), unloading by the blower (the machine that blows the crop up the pipe into the silo) and running back out to the field. So, I did that. Dad had two chopper boxes: one being filled in the field, and one home being unloaded. Or on the path somewhere in between.
One box was 14’ long and was a used ‘Kasten’ brand box. The other was 16’ long, and old John Deere box. But it sat taller, and it wobbled more. And I guess I was afraid it was going to tip over, so I’d slow down in the chopper, and then the shear pins would snap off because the machine plugged up. Shear pins are a safety thing to prevent overloading the chopper, but evidently you can break them by driving too slow. I’m sure dad yelled at me to speed up, but I was nervous. Finally, in the interest of his sanity, he traded off the 16’ JD box for a 14’ Papec box. Doing a little internet research, the Papec company started in 1900 and looks like it had a pretty good product at first. But the chopper box they made in 1975 was cheaply made crap. I feel like it was always broken. I bought another used Kasten box in the mid 90’s. And eventually junked the Papec box, and now I have this running gear that was under it.
Chopping was a tough time. Chopping hay needed to be done in a timely manner and the the pipe going up the silo would sometimes plug up (on the hottest, most humid day of summer) and I remember being very angry while trying to get it unplugged. I remember telling Kelly one day there was 18 tires that could go flat while trying to chop. Kelly suggested that might be the wrong attitude. But it was true.
Which brings us back to the seed wagon top, which should be moved to the better running gear, and it will all be a much better ‘wagon’.
I remember dad swapping boxes and running gear. You jack up the box, put a 55-gallon barrel under the corners, pull out one set of wheels, and slip the other set underneath. Nothing too it.
I’m thinking I can lift the back end with the loader and chains, some blocks under the front corners, and Bob’s your uncle! There are two brackets on the front axle, and two on the back that secure the top from sliding around. Typically, we don’t bolt it tight, because it needs to be able to flex a bit, so we wrap a chain around it leaving it a little slack. That way it can flex a bit but not fall off.
I’ve been working on a show, opened this past Friday, called ‘She Kills Monsters’ by Qui Nguyen. It’s a show about the relationship between two sisters. One sister played ‘Dungeons and Dragons’ and the other sister is learning about the game as a way to get closer to her sister. It’s been a lot of fun to work on. It’s a great director, a great cast, an amazing stage manager who can figure out my light cues, and I have lots of smoke and haze and wiggling lights. I think I ended up with 155 light cues. That’s a pretty good number of cues for a 2-hour show. This isn’t even a musical. Many straight shows end up with 40 – 60 cues.
That last photo was me trying to get the smoke machine level adjusted right. This is clearly too much smoke. But isn’t it fun to see all the light beams!!
The bathroom is finally finished!
Almost!
It’s working, just waiting on shower glass yet, but the rest is done. It looks really nice.
Next week I’ll post the pre and post photos.
REMEMBER ROLLING DOWN HILLS AS A KID? WHEN IS THE LAST TIME YOU ROLLED ANYWHERE?
The first car that I owned was a 1968 Datsun 510. I bought it used when I lived in Northfield – in 1977 – for a whooping $400. It had some rust but ran pretty well. The owner wouldn’t sell it to me until we test drove it; I don’t think he believed I could drive a stick.
Back then inexpensive cars didn’t do anything special for you. No pings to tell you that you haven’t turned off the lights, no messages that your oil life is down to 15%, no back-up cameras, no seat warmers, and certainly no notifications that your tire air pressure is getting low.
Even though my current car is 11 years old, I bought it new from a dealership so I can still take it in when the air pressure light goes on, usually after the first cold snap of each fall/winter. They check the tires and fill any that are low. No charge for this. A couple of years ago, a new warning blinked at me, on a cold cold morning in January – a TPMS warning. I looked it up in the manual and online – Tire Pressure Monitoring System. Didn’t I already have that?
When I had the car’s check-up in April (right before I drove to Indy for the eclipse), I asked the mechanics to look at it – they said they took care of it. Unfortunately, when the got cold in December, the light came back on. I ignored it for a couple of weeks, it warmed up and the light turned off. When I had the oil changed in January, I asked them to look at it again. Turns out there are FOUR of these sensors and they not only go wonky fairly often but they run on batteries, so eventually the batteries run down. They had fixed one of these sensors in April, but now there were two more sensors acting up. The reality is that they are actually a built-in redundancy, a back-up to the main system, which works just fine. If the light was bothering me, I could cough up $120 each to have them adjusted and get new batteries for them. If I wait until the next time I need new tires, it will be a lot less. So, since the warning isn’t even accurate, I decided to ignore it. Then when it warmed up… the light went off again. Sigh.
Hopefully it won’t come on again until it gets really cold again.
It was bound to happen. The postal tide has turned.
As a working young adult, YA now gets a chunk of mail. Lots of credit card offers, lots of requests from charities. Stuff from her healthcare folks, catalogs for trendy clothes. Very little useful stuff at all and almost all of it ends up in the trash. But it occurred to me today when I was sorting our letters, all of which went into one pile for her, that she gets more mail than I do these days.
Unfortunately the mail I do get is mostly the bills.
You get anything interesting in the mail these days?
These days I rarely stop at coffee shops. Mostly I’m just too cheap when I can make my own coffee or tea at home for a fraction of the cost. But every couple of months, YA and I will make a stop at a Caribou if we are out and about.
In early days, when there was a Caribou two blocks from house, I will admit I was more of a regular. But in keeping with my “like it cheaper” gene, I purchased myself a mug that I could use whenever I stopped by. Saved a bit of money and saved yet another coffee cup in the trash. Even though this mug is close to 25 years old, it’s in pristine shape – it doesn’t get used that often and I wash it by hand instead of throwing it in the dishwasher. When we lost our little Caribou (first the big Lyndale closing and then the Minnehaha Creek bridge re-build), my use of my mug plummeted.
When I dragged it out to the car with me yesterday, it was probably the first time in a year that it had gotten any use. The young man behind the counter was astonished to see it. He picked it up, turned it around, looked at the bottom then called over co-workers to look at it. The big draw turned out to be the logo, which apparently was “updated” back in 2010. If you had asked me, I would not have been able to tell you what the new logo looks like:
Guess I’m just oblivious. But it turned out OK… they were all so enamored of my antique mug that they gave me my decaf for free!
Do you have a favorite cup/mug for your coffee or tea?
I’m reading a memoir right now (Thirty Rooms to Hide In by Luke Sullivan). In the early pages, the author paints a picture of his life growing up with his five brothers in Rochester in the fifties. Here is an interesting passage on bedtime:
“Bedtime was indeed death. Even the rituals were the same: the preparing of the body (the solemn washing of teeth, the funereal donning of pajamas), the readings, the occasional prayer, and finally the inevitable darkness. All that was missing were Hallmark sympathy cards arriving in the mail.”
I never really thought about bedtime in terms of rituals but in my world, it’s probably the most consistent rituals that I have. Teeth, pajamas, highlighting items done from my to-do list, making a list for the next day, med/vitamins, daily entry in my “good things” journal. Once I’m actually settling in, there is the arranging of Nimue’s blanket on my side of the bed; her ritual is to settle in for about ten minutes, knead a few biscuits, purr while getting some scritches and then heading to her favorite bed on top of the radiator.
Almost forgot the “bang” treat for Guinevere and the yummies for Nimue… this usually happens between teeth and jammies.
On Sunday, Kelly and I did our usual gator farm tour. This week we went down in the pasture and down to the creek, which was still frozen over, walked around down there for a bit.
The next day I took the truck to Plainview, which meant I have the dogs with me, and after we picked up daughter, they all walked home.
Dealing with mud again, which is never my favorite. And it’s gonna get cold, and it’s gonna snow, and then it’s gonna get muddy again, so we’ll have to do this cycle a few times. Just something else to get through.
I took the anhydrous applicator up to an auction in Plainview. It’s an implement I use in the spring to apply nitrogen to the corn ground. Nitrogen in the form of anhydrous ammonia. I pull those white tanks behind it. The last year that I used it was 2021, and since 2022 I’ve had the co-op applying nitrogen in the form of urea, which is a granular product.
When I was working with my dad, the story was he had gotten a heavy whiff of the ammonia quite a few years ago and he never liked it and couldn’t stand being around it anymore. So I’ve been applying the anhydrous probably since I was 18 years old. We used to rent a smaller machine to do it, and then as the tractor‘s got bigger I could rent a little bit bigger applicator bar. And when the co-op stopped renting that equipment and they sold them off, I bought this one. I don’t remember the price anymore, it was probably 10 or 15 years ago.
This is also the machine that I had a little incident with back in 2018.
Anhydrous can be really nasty stuff; it can kill you, it can burn you, it’s gotta be treated with respect and handled carefully. And I have always been careful, making sure I’m parking into the wind, working up wind, wearing heavy gloves, and a face shield.
So this one day the hose was dragging on the ground between the wagon and the applicator.
I stopped, I closed the valves, I started to disconnect the hose, and the valve did not seal properly. I remember that it was very difficult to open, it had been really cranked shut. So it made sense that it was leaking a bit now. There was very little breeze that day, next to nothing, so I couldn’t get up wind of it. I debated what to do. I debated just holding my breath and rushing in there to crank it shut. And finally thought, I just need somebody with a respirator, it’s not an emergency, I just need somebody that can get this closed. So I called the nonemergency number for the fire department and explained the situation. Well, when the first of three firetrucks showed up, and I was still sitting in the tractor waiting for them, they parked a half mile up the road and suited up and a guy in full gear walked down to me. I’m sure they were all bent out of shape that I was still hanging out down there. All they were told was that there was an anhydrous leak.
It turned into a whole big thing. Ambulance, incident command vehicle, and a sheriff deputy, all out on the highway, and the three firetrucks were on our road.
I had to call a chemical spill hotline who thought I had lost the entire tank of 5000 gallons. No, it’s just a few drips and a very minor vapor leak. But, it was good training for the fire department: they went down with a wet towel, sampled the air, wrapped a towel around the valve and was able to get it turned off tight using a pipe wrench so that I could then disconnect the hose. Always glad to help them out, I said. They even gave me a bottle of Gatorade.
I had to attend a safety workshop, and I had to replace the hoses that are only good for 10 years and of course mine were out of date by a few years because it’s expensive and nobody pays any attention to the replacement date. I think it cost me $1500 for new hoses and a valve.
And now it’s 2025, stamped on the hose it says ‘replace before 2025’, and I took it to the auction and it’s not my problem anymore. When I pulled it out of storage, one of the tires was low. Not flat, just low so I pumped it back up. Pulled it the 20 miles to Plainview, and as I walked into the office I could hear a hiss and air leaking from this tire. Well, not my circus, not my monkey anymore.
The dogs all got pup cups at the Dairy Queen and I had a blizzard.
WHATS YOUR FAVORITE CLEANING PRODUCT? ANY MONKEY STORIES?
Trail Baboon 