Sometimes I think I’m living in the Twilight Zone. A few nights back, as I was sitting my room, I got a text from YA. Getting a text from YA isn’t all the bizarre, although getting a text from her when she is in the next room strikes me as a bit on the weird side.
However, this was the text:
“Will you get some kitty treats and put them under the bathroom door?”
If you want to get my attention, that’s the way to do it.
Turns out she had decided that Nimue needed a bath and it was the point in the process in which Nimue was indicating that her patience had been worn out. In addition to trying to open the bathroom door from the inside, she wasn’t cooperating with the blow drying part of the evening.
As you can see from the picture above, kitty treats weren’t her highest priority right then. She was not a happy wet kitty.
And it got worse from there because then there needed to be brushing. Nimue can tolerate brushing on her head and her face and even down her back but she draws the line (and occasionally blood) if you get near her back haunches. Those are strictly her territory. I didn’t hear any actual howling or hissing, but I did hear some grumbling and growling. Luckily all her bad humor was for YA and as soon as she escaped the bathroom torture chamber, she was very glad to sit on my lap and get petted and cosseted.
Are you a bath or shower person? Or just a quick dunk under the hose?
At this time of year when you wake up to ice and snow, you have to work hard to find the fun in it. I’ve been very crabby the last week (due to work) and boy, did the crummy weather not help. All morning I was kind of fuming about it.
YA goes into the office on Wednesdays (although starting next week, we both have to go in on Tuesday/Wednesday/Thursday). When she drives, she turns her car around near the garage so that she goes headfirst down the driveway. When I went out over lunch to do a couple of errands, the tracks that her car made in the ice were kind of pretty, like the work of a modern artist working in an unusual lmedium. It was just the lift that my spirits needed.
Have you seen anything that struck you as “artsy” recently?
I’m reading a quaint little memoir called “Sunwise Turn: A Human Comedy of Bookselling”. Two women, with no bookselling experience decide to open a bookstore in New York in 1916. The book was written in 1925. It’s a fascinating story of how they got started and how they survived. The book downplays the fame of the store, but online you can easily find a history of the store which was also a salon for up and coming writers as well as an exhibition and performance space.
Early on in the book, the author describes how they came to name their shop:
The name was one of the crises through which we had somehow to get. There is sin and virtue in a name. We wanted a name that would mean something. Everything was to be significant. All kinds of titles of the thumb-mail variety were offered. My partner telephoned me one day that Amy Murray had drawn up in the net of her Gallic wisdom the name ‘The Sunwise Turn”.
They do everything daesal (sunwise) here” – Father Allen had told her of the people of Eriskay – “for they believe that to follow the course of the sun is propitious. The sunwise turn is the lucky one.”
The key goes sunwise; the screw goes sunwise; the clock goes sunwise. Cards are dealt with the sun. The Gael handed the loving cup around the banqueting table sunwise; he handed the wedding ring and loaned money sunwise An old sea captain who once came into the shop told me that wind and weather go sunwise, and once when I called in our Swedish contractor, Behrens, to confer with him about the furnace, eh said: “It out to be in the other corner of the house, maam. I always put my furnaces in the north end. Heat goes with the sun.”
I’m pretty sure naming your bookstore “Sunwise Turn” breaks every rule you can find about picking a name for your business. It doesn’t say anything about what the shop sells and it’s unbelievable obscure, but I really fell in love with the name and the thought and meaning behind it. Makes me want to open up a shop of some kind, just to use the name again.
Let’s say you are opening a shop of your own next week. What would you sell? And what would you name it?
Girl Scout Cookies came up in conversation yesterday. I sold GS cookie as a kid and was the Cookie Mom for several years when YA was in scouting. I am aware that as cookies go, they are extraordinarily expensive, but I’ve always thought of them as more of a charity than a fair purchase. Any time I see Girl Scouts selling cookies, I buy a box or two. The grocery store, the hardware store, at my office and from the grand-daughter of a friend of mine.
This year that habit netted us well over 12 boxes of cookies. We tried all the new ones (none of them passed the “we’ll buy them again next year” test). YA’s favorites are Thin Mints and PB Patties. Mine are Samoas and Shortbreads. But clearly neither of us are as enamored of the cookies this year as we have been in the past. I still have 2 boxes of the Shortbread sitting on the counter and have googled what I could do with them (I did get a good idea for something to put in spring baskets this year – I’ll take a picture in April when it happens). YA has a box of PB that has been opened but clearly not touched for at least a week and there is a half a package of the Lemonades in a ziplock that no one has touched for quite some time. (Don’t get me started on the packaging for the Lemonades and the French Toast – it’s criminal!) I’m pretty sure the Lemonades are going to get tossed.
It’s making me re-think my strategy where GS cookies are concerned. Maybe if I run across Girl Scouts who are selling, I should just buy one box. And buy fewer from my friend’s grand-daughter. And maybe pass on signs I see up at the office. Because even if I just think of them as a charity, it bugs me to throw out cookies or to finish a box just because we have too many of them. At least I have a year to refine how I’m going to handle this next time.
Do you have too many of anything in your house because it’s a good cause?
On an average day I drink one can of pop. Every now and then two. But caffeine makes me crazy and my stomach doesn’t like most of the white pops and, of course, I’m so used to the taste of diet pop that I don’t want the sugared ones. That cuts down the field of possibilities quite a bit.
Unfortunately a pop that I really like is Cherry Diet Pepsi. A couple of years ago, I tried to wean myself off because of the caffeine and it was really hard. Caffeine Free Diet Pepsi is OK but without that cherry, I just wasn’t won over. Then I realized I could make my own CCFDP with just a little splash of grenadine. Little bottle of grenadine in the cabinet, pop in boxes under the microwave and I’m set.
Then pandemic hit and those dreaded words “supply chain issues”. Within a year, I was having to hunt around for my beloved CFDP. Then I couldn’t find it at all, unless I wanted to pay five times the usual price online. No thanks. I even emailed PepsiCo to get their take and, as I should have expected, they gave me a non-answer and a link that didn’t work. SIGH. I saw stories online about aluminum shortages and figured that CFDP was probably at the bottom of the pop totem pole when it came to handing out the aluminum.
I kept one box of CFDP in the back corner (for emergencies?) and then I resorted to Caffeine Free Diet Coke. It’s OK, but not quite what I like best. For awhile every time I was in a grocery store (not as often as you would think, thanks to drive up delivery), I would wander down the pop aisle… nothing. So imagine my surprise last week when I was actually in the Cub near my house and VOILA…. a little stock of CFDP. I bought 4! I don’t know if this will be the end of my pop woes, but this will keep me going for at least a month!
Cold again this week. The farmers’ spring excitement has tempered a bit this week. Next week it will be back.
Tuesday was such a nice day, Kelly and I went out and took down the snow fence we so carefully put up last November. The mid- December storms shredded up 80% of it and the weather turned too cold to fix. We had more snow in the road this year because of it, and it made me realize how useful the snow fence is and why we put it up every year. I was tired of looking at the remains of it and we got it picked up. The dogs helped.
The ducks have split into their summer groups; Mostly the fliers and the non-fliers, but there might be some other sort of grouping that I haven’t figure out yet. It makes it hard to get a good count on them. But I did see 6 mallards take off and then 7 more took off. And still got 2 poufs, 3 cream, 4 black… and some others.
The chickens are enjoying the grass again. And leftovers. And they like when I fill the bird feeders.
Kelly and I saw ‘Hadestown’ last week at the Orpheum. Boy, was that good. And my friend Jerry and I saw Colin Hay at the Pantages. Colin Hay was the lead singer for ‘Men at Work’ way back when. I saw them in concert way back when.
I should have found this picture of the barn for Wednesday’s article about selling the cows.
Dinner at Olive Garden Wednesday night was yummy
I know some of you read ‘Independently Speaking’ by Brent Olson. His latest article is in the same vein as I’ve written about lately. Getting machinery ready and being in town before the stores are open. We’re both still farmers at heart. www.brentolson.online He’s also on FB as ‘Independently Speaking’. He’s got great stories. Colin Hay told some stories too.
Pies, donuts, chairs, cows, dogs. We’ve had it all this week.
What’s in your fridge and what are you making for supper? What do you WANT for supper?
My company is still on “work from home” protocol. For another week and a half. You can work in the office if you want or you can work from home. Most of us have been given an additional big monitor so that we can have one at the office and one at home so working at home is a pretty sweet deal.
There are people going in but not many. I had to check on a mailing yesterday in Building 5 and it was quite deserted. Echo-y even. In cutting through the back hallway to get to the mailing center, I turned a corner and found a little nook with a printer on a table, a rug and five chairs. There are no offices nearby. And with hardly anyone in the building, the nook had an eerie, otherworldly feel. Kinda like a surreal set in a Man Ray movie.
I thought about this funny little scene all afternoon. Why a printer there? Why a rug? And for heaven sake, why all the chairs? Does someone really think there will be enough paper shooting out of this printer that there needs to be a waiting area?
Do you have a favorite chair? To snuggle up in to read? Or to watch tv?
I wrote this story 18 years ago when I sold the milk cows. Been a lot of changes since then. I don’t regret any of them. I notice I wrote my knees and shoulders hurt back then. Can’t imagine what they’d be like today if I was still milking. I just couldn’t; I’d have never physically been able to do it this long.
Nevermore
Today I’m not a dairy farmer anymore. Sold the milk cows. The cows were my friends and I was sad to see them loaded into the truck and leave… but it was just time. And I have to say that now that it’s over and done, I feel a million pounds lighter; a giant weight off my shoulders.
The cows were a big part of my life–and had been since, like, forever; I was always down in the barn growing up. Started helping Dad with milking when I was 10 years old. I was the fourth generation to be milking cows here. My Great Grandfather came to this farm in 1896. Built the old barn we call the granary in 1899. The first part of the dairy barn was built in 1924. Dad added onto it a couple times in the 1940’s and 50’s.
Mom and Dad built a silo in 1968, built another in 1976, built the pole barn, tore off part of the granary, built a couple machine sheds, and knocked down an old smaller silo. Mom and Dad also tore down the old house and built a new one.
You all know I gave my cows some rather… esoteric names… The auctioneer has a list of the cows coming in and sometimes he could read the ear tag and know who’s selling and other times I’m calling out names as they’re coming in: Erica, Louise, Lynnette, Kaylannii (auctioneer shakes his head), Comet, Antigone — which, of course he pronounced ‘Annti – gone’ and I had to say (phonetically here), “An-tig-o-knee; daughter of Oedipus from Greek mythology.”………. silence in the ring………. auctioneer says, “Ohh-kay…” Guy in front of me turns around and says “I don’t think they got that…” And Lynne Cow. The cow I named after Lynne Warfel-Holt, classical music host at Minnesota Public Radio. I told who she was named for and asked whoever bought her to please contact MPR and let Lynne know they were the new owner. They worked pretty hard at selling her. Kept saying she’s the only radio cow in there today. Ya know, I may not have had the best cows, but they sure had personality! And the auction people had more fun selling my cows then they did the rest of the cows!!
It was just time to do it. Kelly and I had been talking about selling, and weighing the pros and cons; definitely more pros to selling them than cons. (But the little voice way in the back of my head keeps saying “I sure hope you know what you’re doing.”) Hey, supper at 6:00, vacations, maybe my knees will still function in a few years, doing more things with the kids, maybe my shoulders will feel better, VACATIONS, etc.
Primarily it was a financial decision. Milk prices have been in the toilet the last two years. I was low on cow numbers the last 6 months and the price of replacement heifers is — and has been for the last couple years — just insanely high and getting higher. Supply and demand principles for cattle I guess. I have bought some cows, and got some bargains, but there’s no guarantee that a $1700 heifer will milk any better than an $800 heifer. I bought 3 cows and 1 heifer last spring; paid between $600 and $825 for the cows, $1150 for the heifer. All three cows turned out to be duds and two were gone by fall. I still had one of the cows, but she had to have a C-section and would not be bred back. The fancy heifer I still had but she had been bred back 4 times and I don’t think she was pregnant yet. And in the milking world it all comes down to getting pregnant and producing milk. Last week was a new high price for heifers in Zumbrota; $2260.00 for one pregnant cow. The previous high price was set just the week before. [2004 pricing]
I went to Zumbrota last week to see how cows were selling and to let them know I was interested in selling mine this week. I met with the sales manager and he escorted me into the front office, shut the office door and took my information (how many, herd averages, stanchion cows (as opposed to parlor cows)) and then he made several comments about how this is what they were expecting now and my name wouldn’t be on any of the presale publicity lest we trigger any ‘radio bandits’; people that would try to buy them before the sale to avoid the sales barn commissions. I got the distinct impression that he was trying to emphasis how confidential all this was. I went out and talked with a trucker I know about bringing my cows in and he acted the same way. It was very surreal how he kept scanning the parking lot, talking very quietly; even surreptitiously gave me papers behind his back. … very strange.
I’ll miss that big glass jar in the milkhouse called the receiver jar. It’s what the milk would come into from the pipes in the barn, before being pumped over to the bulk tank. When I was growing up and Dad and I would go to other farms, it was that glass jar that I was just fascinated with; watching the milk rush into that jar, I knew I had to be a dairy farmer so I could have that big glass jar. When we installed a different pipeline system about 12 years ago [1992] the dealer wanted me to put in a stainless steel can. I said no way; I want that glass jar! If you haven’t seen it, it’s a tempered glass globe about 18 inches in diameter. There are four glass inlets molded into it about 6 inches long; one at the bottom that the milk is pumped out through, the one at the top is the vacuum inlet and one on each side connects to the milk pipeline that runs into the barn. The deal is you don’t mess with the connections between the glass jar and the other pipe; don’t want to break that outlet off the glass jar. Dealers were supposed to have an extra jar, but I never wanted to find out. Bad enough when a motor would quite at milking time and you had to call the dealer to make a ‘barn call’. Like a plumber in the middle of the night; it wasn’t cheap.
The night the cows sold we all went to Olive Garden for supper; that in and of itself no big deal. But we went at 6:00PM; ate like normal people. Got home it was only 7:30 and the kids still had time to shower and do homework. I took the kids to daycare before school this morning. Then went to Barnes and Noble (closed until 9:00) so got license tabs for the car, went to the chiropractor who was very pleased to hear I had sold the cows, filled the car with gas, went to Best Buy (closed until 10:00).
Finishing up here with aphorism’s that seemed appropriate for the time:
—One door never closes without another opening.
From the Tom Petty song ‘Into the Great Wide Open’ these two phrases:
—The future is wide open. —The skies the limit.
3/23/2004
What were you fascinated by as a kid that influenced you in your adult years?
At Cub last week, in the wee hours, I decided to go through the regular check-out instead of the self-serve. I didn’t have a lot of items but I had several non-baggable items and those always make the self-checkout problematic. As I was unloading the last of my stuff onto the conveyor belt, a guy started a line behind me. He only had a couple of things including a big box of assorted donuts. I smiled (although he probably couldn’t see it since I was masked) and said “Oh, you’re the donut guy this morning!” He laughed and said yes. Then he said “You know, I tried that Kato diet (that’s how he pronounced it) and I just can’t take it anymore. I didn’t realize until now how much I love bread.” I laughed too because when I tried keto, I didn’t make it long either for exactly the same reason. I asked him if he wanted to go ahead of me since he just had two items and he answered no, since I already had all my items out of the cart. We both left Cub at the same time and he said “have a great day.” It was such a nice encounter in the pre-dawn hours.
Do you talk to strangers when you’re out and about?
Even though I didn’t celebrate Pi Day the way I would have preferred (lots of pies, lots of party), I did pull some pie dough out of the freezer and picked up some frozen blueberries last weekend. My plan was to make a blueberry pie – YA’s favorite – on Monday over my lunch. Blueberry is about the easiest pie out there – no slicing of anything, no fancy ingredients, nothing that needs to marinate or rise. If you cheat, like I often do w/ pre-made pie dough, it’s about a 10-minute project before you’re slipping the pie plate into the oven.
Unfortunately last week was a little stressful to say the least and my lunch “hour” on Monday ended up being an 8-minute cheese sandwich (that includes the making and eating of said sandwich). So pie didn’t happen. And you all know that when I’m busy at this time of year I don’t have much energy at the end of the day. Daylight savings helps a little but not enough. YA asked about the pie a couple of times the next few days and finally on Friday I told her I’d work on it over the weekend.
Friday night I was wallowing after a 10-hour work day, in my jammies at 7 with a book in hand when I smelled the aroma of baking wafting up from the downstairs. YA likes to do her cooking and baking in the evening and it smelled good but I didn’t wander down to see what she was doing. I was actually a little surprised when she came upstairs later and announced she had made a blueberry pie. I don’t remember her ever making a pie on her own; actually I don’t remember her ever even being involved in pie making. Of course, I can’t trust my memory on this – heck I can’t even remember the Wordle word an hour later!
I asked her if it tasted good and she said she had put it in the fridge to cool down. When I got up on Saturday I was surprised to see a whole pie in the fridge; I assumed she would have a piece before she went to bed (which is always later than me). But it was still whole and gorgeous. Not only did she weave the lattice crust, the lattice pieces were really even; she had clearly used one of my pastry cutters. Sure enough there is was in the sink (waiting to be washed).
She knew I had a pastry cutter for lattice work? I had a quick thought that maybe aliens came down and helped her, but I do actually know better. So may surprises with YA. And among all this fun news – the pie tastes great as well!
If an alien came to help you, what project would you like assistance on?
Trail Baboon 