I made my annual pilgrimage out to the farm for raspberries last week. Beautiful day for picking – sunny and not too warm. A little muggy from the big rain the two days before but after our dry summer, I am NOT complaining about rain.
Since I was the first one out in the field, they stationed me at the far southeast corner of the biggest patch of canes. Pretty shortly after, they started to put someone opposite me (on the other side of the line of cane I was working on) and she protested that she didn’t want “to be near anybody else”. I told her I didn’t take it personally and that I had a mask in pocket if needed. She moved on to another line.
An older couple were then placed opposite of me. They didn’t even look toward me and so I knew there wasn’t going to be any chatting. (This turned out to be OK because pretty soon a VERY chatty woman started picking two lines away and even thought she was speaking to the folks near her, I could hear her clearly!)
I expected that the couple across from me would move ahead of me fairly quickly. Two people picking together are always faster than just one. Except this time! The gentleman stayed pretty even with me and the woman lagged behind. This was so different from what I usually experience that I started to pay a little more attention to them. The woman was digging thoroughly through the canes, clearly searching for every single viable berry she could find. The gentleman was not as thorough. I soon realized that another reason they were slow was the amount of time spent moving their hands from the canes to their mouths. The farm does encourage folks to taste while they pick, but this couple was taking it to new heights. They quit picking before I did with less than a flat of picked berries and I’m sure it’s because they were full!
So far I’ve made my freezer jam, added raspberries to pancake batter and, of course, enjoyed fresh raspberry shortcake!
Last week I was the recipient of the fabulous Baboon support that others in our little community have experienced over the years. After hearing me talk (whine?) about my front porch project, tim sent me a message. If I rented the sandblaster that he linked me to, would I like it if he came over to help? I didn’t have to think about that very hard. After two+ years of scraping layers of paint off by hand, making some real headway seemed like a good choice.
The first hiccup was when I went to pick up the equipment. While the sandblaster and the hoses fit into my little car, the air compressor that makes the sandblaster go did not. I called tim from the rental lot and he volunteered to pick it up before coming to my house that day. And, of course, this meant that at the end of the project, he got to return all the equipment as well.
The second hiccup was finding out that we couldn’t just scrape up the sand on the floor and re-use it. Paint chips clogged the nozzle. We ended up straining the sand through my metal sieve into a big bucket, then re-using it. I’m sure the manufacturer didn’t want to hear that.
We pretty quickly settled into a routine. I swept and sieved while tim blasted. We had to improvise a few times; we used the kitty tower to get the sandblaster high enough to reach to top parts of the walls and we used my Mickey Mouse cake tester to unclog the nozzle a few times. The cake tester and the sieve survived the ordeal, the kitty tower did not. (The new one arrives next week).
Let me tell you that sandblasting in a small, enclosed porch (even with the windows and front door open) is like working in h-e-double hockey sticks. We didn’t get finished the first afternoon and on the second afternoon, we both had upgraded our headgear and eyewear. In fact, we both had shiny goggles the second day and I’m sure we looked like large bugs. Both days, we hosed off in the backyard. I can’t speak for tim, but the showers after each day for me were epic. The first day I wasn’t sure I would ever get the sand and grit out of my scalp.
We also re-visited our personality differences. While working, tim, being a big picture person, could not stop thinking of the next steps after the sandblasting was done. Some new plaster/mud, plywood on the floor. I could see his point but I, being a non-big picture person, didn’t want to think about it right then. I just wanted the h-e-double hockey sticks to be finished. And, of course, tim is correct – there is plenty more to do. In fact YA has added to the chore list by doing some wood fill on the window panes. And I broke two windows doing some clean up so now there will be some new glass and glazing. And most of the other windows need re-glazing as well.
But even with all the work left, I feel completely renewed by how much we got done in two afternoons with a sandblaster. And even if you don’t think I need to tell you, I will anyway. There is no way on the planet that I could have accomplished this by myself.
So my hat is off to tim. He is a miracle-worker and a life-saver.
Last week, someone at work referred to me as a “glass half-empty” kind of person. I was a little surprised, as I don’t think of myself as a gloomy Gus. I do work hard to keep my expectations low sometimes – especially for events or big occasions. That way, if something tanks, I’m not terribly disappointed. But if it goes well, then I am very happy – probably happier than if I had high expectations. So maybe I am “glass half-empty”.
Next week is the opening of the State Fair. I don’t need to bore you all (again) with my love of the State Fair but I am telling you, it is HARD to keep my expectations in line. YA and I did the mini (pretend) fair experience over Memorial Day and it was a good idea to not go into it with a lot of excitement. But even with that very blah experience under our belts, we’ve spent a lot of time in the last week figuring out which days, how many tickets, what new foods, when will the golden retrievers be there, where parking is this year. We bought our tickets and have even combed through the coupon booklets already. I have taken opening day off of work as well as a few other days. YA has also requested a couple of days off.
Considering the current state of affairs, it seems dangerous to get my hopes up. The Fair could just be a disaster this year.
But with all this activity and still a few days before opening, how do I keep my expectations low? Are you a half-full or half-empty type?
Last weekend when I was in Madison, my girlfriend and I got a huge cinnamon roll to take back to her place to share. She cut it in half and put each half on a plate. Admittedly I don’t think I’ve ever cut a cinnamon roll in half – I’m not much on sharing when it comes to cinnamon rolls. But since we’d already shared a big doughnut at the market, I was acquiescent.
When I looked at my half, I saw Stonehenge. Well, not exactly Stonehenge as it looks now, but the stones that make up the henge. I mentioned it to my friend, who said she could “kind of” see it. She thought it looked more like Legos. Since I’m the traveler and she’s the grandmother, I suppose that makes sense. We see the world through our own filters.
It started out so well– no rain in the forecast and, while the swather always makes me nervous because I know I am on borrowed time, we were making good progress.
Me, and the dragonflies, and the barn swallows, and the butterflies, just being out in the fields. It wasn’t that hot Saturday morning and I got three fields, or about 9 1/2 acres cut out of my 25 acres of oats. Back out on Sunday afternoon and a good breeze and cut another field of about 5 acres and moved into the last field, about 10 acres. I made one round, and there was a clunk and forward momentum stopped. It stopped on the right wheel anyway, the left wheel kept going. The machine makes a lot of noises and most of them make me nervous. This machine, a John Deere model 800 swather is from the 70s. They’re built like a tank, have a Chrysler ‘Slant 6’ engine (with a reputation of being bullet-proof), and they run forever except when they don’t.
It’s a machine I use only for cutting oats. It cuts the standing oats and lays it in a row; a ‘Windrow’. It gets used a day or two per year. But there’s no one in the area with a swather, so I had to find my own about 6 years ago.
Took a while to diagnose what was going wrong and it turned out to be just a chain off. Well I’ve fixed that before and it’s kind of a process but it’s not bad. Except this one was jammed in there and it was bad. Kelly came to help when I called her for a ride home. I was hoping to be all done cutting by 8:00PM, it was 8 o’clock when we gave up and went home. A few things to do the next day so it was about 4 o’clock when I went back out to work on it again.
I was down to plan “G” or “H” by this point. And that also revealed a wheel bearing going bad. Well, that would explain why the chain had come off. We did finally get the chain out and installed again and we felt pretty good about ourselves.
I had to decide: can I finish cutting on this bad bearing or do I need to attempt another major repair out in the field and replace the bearing. I decided to take my chances, because that’s what farmers do. Except this time, I only went about 10 feet and the chain was off again. And again, it was 8 o’clock at night. We went home and I was back the next day with some more tools. I don’t know how many trips I made back home to get ‘Yet One More Tool’ for this repair. I even took the Oxy-acetylene torch up there to heat up the wheel hub. I’m a little nervous using a torch in the middle of a dry field of oats, but I wasn’t really cutting anything or making sparks, I was just heating up the wheel hub to try to get that off the axle so that the bearing can come off the axle. Nothing has been apart for 50 years I presume. I worked for a few hours and gave up and called the John Deere dealer. It felt as though a huge weight was lifted off my chest because now this isn’t my problem anymore.
The plan was to start combining that oats that was already cut on Tuesday afternoon, however, the guy with the truck needed his trucks to haul corn so he couldn’t make it. He said he would have a truck out here Wednesday morning. With no rain in the forecast for weeks, it didn’t seem like a problem. And then it sprinkled Monday morning, not enough to hurt anything, and it sprinkle Tuesday morning but not really enough to hurt anything and then we had a thunderstorm warning Tuesday night– where the heck did that come from? And I got about 2/10 of an inch of rain. So now we’re not combining on Wednesday either. Could have been worse, it was a pretty bad storm with some pretty gusty winds and heavy rains, but we just got the edge of it and then it built up south of us and I saw some hail damage and some corn flat on the ground from that.
It’s not ideal for oats to get rained on when it’s cut, but it’s not the end of the world, depending. I leave 4 to 6 inches of stubble for the oats to lay on so that it gets some air underneath. And that works pretty well. Light rains like this followed by some sunny days with a breeze and it will dry out again and can be combined with minimal loss. The heavier the rain, the more grain is shelled out on the ground. There have been a few years I had to go out with the hay rake and tip the windrows over. That knocks off a lot of grain. However, the people who take the straw like it because there’s less grain left in the straw if I have to handle it before they get it. Everyone has their own silver lining, don’t they?
So that’s where we are at the moment, hoping the mechanic will get the swather fixed, hoping it holds together for another 10 acres, well really, I want it to hold together for the next number of years.
I’m just about ready to open the one show in town and I’m just starting to work on another show. Remember the song about home improvement from the LGMS and at the end he says, “Now I can go out and mow the lawn!”? That’s kind of what I feel like.
But the beans are looking really good, they’re almost waist high, lots of flowers, lots of pods. 316 GDU’s above normal. The corn ears have already determined their length and girth and now they just need to fill out. If they’re stressed by weather, the tips won’t fill. Be interesting to see how it does this fall.
Often corn will have two ears on them, but only the one really develops completely.
The baby ducks arrived from California after a 2000 trip. These are some well-travelled ducks! I was worried about them making a trip but there were two little Dixie cups taped inside each box that presumably had some kind of food nutrient in it. Lost two of the 40. They were busy little ducks! The first day pretty much all they did was eat and drink.
What’s your most critical tool that you use the least?
Unlike my mother, whose best friend is someone she has known since kindergarten, I don’t have any friends from childhood. We moved many times before I was in high school, never in one place long enough to make any relationships last. I had friends in high school but going away to college in Minnesota and basically never coming back stretched and broke those ties.
I left college after two years and started my life (as I used to say) in Northfield, so I could be near my boyfriend. My second job in Northfield was at the brand new Ole Piper Inn and that’s where I met Dee (names changed to protect the innocent). Although the job only lasted about 10 months before the Inn closed down, it was long enough to cement our friendship. When Dee moved to the Ole Store, I went with her: she was the manager and short-order cook, I was the baker and occasional waitress.
Dee is originally from the southern part of the country and hates the cold weather. Most mornings I would pick her up on the way to the store (I had a car by then) and even with a short ride, she would come out of her house bundled up as if she was expecting to trek across Antarctica. She always said she was waiting for her youngest two kids (she has five) to graduate so she could flee the frozen tundra. Of course she is still here 45 years later.
We had a great time at the Ole Store. The Ole Store was part of a grocery store/butcher shop and sometimes we’d come in to find various chunks of meat in the restaurant fridge that needed to be used up. Once the owner left moose meat. We were joking around, trying to figure out what to do with it and I said (without thinking), “what about spaghetti and moose balls?” Dee laughed so hard that her side hurt and she had to sit down. Do this day, I can reduce her to a puddle just by saying “moose balls”.
When I married my wasband and moved to Milwaukee, Dee used to be startled into silence whenever he answered the phone, since he had never picked up the phone in my Northfield apartment. Once he answered the phone, said nothing for a minute and then handed me the phone…. “It’s Dee.” It was indeed, although she hadn’t identified herself. He told me later than whenever there was silence, he knew it was her. When we were first friends, she referred to wasband as the Greg-Person. Later she shortened that to GP.
For many years Dee and her youngest son worked at the Renaissance Festival every fall and it was always fun to see them. She did a wonderful costume for Child with lots of petticoats and ribbons. And or course, she knew everybody so we always got good food at a great discount. I made the wedding cake for this son when he got married.
Her family has a timeshare in Florida that they visit every summer and Dee’s favorite way to travel is to fill up the van with kids and grandkids and drive straight through. When YA was younger, she was included a couple of times.
Dee reminds me a lot of my mother. She is extraordinarily caring and she “collects” people. Once you fall into her orbit, her gravity holds you there. For example, one of her daughters was married for a few years and had a step-daughter. When the daughter split up with the husband, the step-daughter came to live with Dee. Now that step-daughter has kids of her own and they all happily refer to Dee as Grandma. Dee’s life is filled with stories like this. I am one of her collect-tees and she has always been there for me.
She’s going through a very rough time right now with a diagnosis that will most likely shorten her life so I’ve been thinking about our long friendship and how much I treasure her.
I love having “aha” moments and I’ve had three recently, all from reading.
#1. 99% Invisible City by Roman Mars details a lot of the infrastructure that surrounds us in the urban environment, much of which we don’t notice and definitely take for granted. In discussing wireless towers, he writes: “As commercial cellular towers began to sprout up in the 1970s, diagrams depicting their coverage areas looked like blobby plant or animal cells pressed up against one another – hence the name ‘cell phones’.” I had never stopped to think about why we say “cell phones” so this was an amazing discovery for me. I stopped reading for a moment and reveled in the fun of it.
#2. This is Your Mind on Plants by Michael Pollan. This is the second book of Pollan’s that features discussion of hallucinogenics. In writing about mescaline, he alludes to the song Mellow Yellow by Donavan and that the meaning of the song is about smoking banana skins, believed in the 60s to be hallucinogenic. I can sing along to Mellow Yellow but never ever thought about the lyrics and what they might mean. (Turns out Pollan was actually wrong – Donavan was writing about an electric vibrator that he had seen an ad for – the equipment was called the “mellow yellow”.)
#3. A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor. This is an older travel book; the author walked from England to Constantinople in the days before WWII. After completely overdoing it in Munich at the Hofbrauhaus, he woke up with a “katzenjammer”. Now I remember the old comic the Katzenjammer Kids, but had no idea that katzenjammer actually means hangover. I’m not sure how “cat” and “distress” came to mean hangover, but it’s fascinating to know this tidbit!
You all know I am not a big sports fan. In fact, I think I’ve probably only been to 10 baseball games in my life. Maybe 15. I do enjoy the games when I’m there, but like Monday night, I come away with more questions than answers.
Why so many huddles? Visiting team did this six times. Six!
Why don’t the outfielders get to huddle? Don’t they feel left out?
Why is Hansel Robles called Caballo Blanco?
How many times can you actually hit a foul before you’re out? Seems like way more for some than others.
What’s with all the fidgeting on the pitcher’s mound and on the plate?
Why don’t relief pitchers get much of a chance? Four relief pitchers for home team, each only pitched 1 inning each. Visiting team sent in one relief – but at least he didn’t mess around on the pitcher’s mound and just threw the ball!
Why do much spitting?
Why do they need to replace the bases halfway through the game?
If the game is tied at the bottom of the 9th and the bases are full when you come to bat, why do you keep swinging? Why not just hunker down and let the pitcher walk you? Especially if you’re not all that tall?
Why do people go wild when they see themselves on the big screen?
Why, after paying so much to get in and then paying a boatload more for food, drink and merchandise galore, do so many people depart before the game is over?
Obviously none of these are burning, social-issue kinds of questions (well, maybe the spitting), but clearly not everything makes sense to me. However, questions aside YA and I had a great time even when it went into overtime.
Today’s post comes to us from Steve, who is at the extreme left above, petting the dog.
The pattern of sending kids off to summer camp is much stronger in the East than in the Midwest, but summer camps seem increasingly popular here. Kids from cities like New York or Boston might be shipped out to spend the whole summer in one or more camps. The Midwestern pattern is more likely to let kids live at home, perhaps attending one or more camps in the summer.
Camps used to be very traditional and outdoorsy, much like Boy Scout camps everywhere. Kids would play outdoors, swim, do crafts and have bonfire picnics. Modern summer camps are increasingly educational, perhaps teaching computer skills or a foreign language. My daughter has fond memories of Artward Bound, a camp that encouraged kids to engage with the visual arts. Alas, it no longer exists.
My first camp was Camp Matigwa, a Boy Scout operation. I was at an awkward age, shy and reclusive. They taught me to make a lanyard, which later made the Billy Collins poem all the funnier. We were supposed to swim once a day, but the water was cold and I was delighted to learn I could spend that hour at the camp’s “canteen” eating Baby Ruth bars instead.
I wore shorts on the day we took our first hike. I contacted some stinging nettle, which hurt like liquid fire until one of the counselors found some jewel weed, a plant whose sap canceled the nettle’s poison. The obvious lesson was that we should learn all about plants. I now suspect that our counselors staged the whole thing. They obviously knew where the nettle and the jewel weed grew, so I was the dupe they maneuvered to blunder into the nettles so they could showcase their expertise.
My favorite camp experience came in the summer of 1956 when I spent two delightful weeks riding horses at the Larry-Jo Dude Ranch near Boone, Iowa. We camped out, sang around a bonfire, groomed horses and took two trail rides each day. On my faithful horse, Margarita, I twice won the water relay event at our end-of-camp rodeo.
But the big event from that summer was when we played hide-and-seek on horseback. Pardon me for telling a story I’ve told before. We rode south of the ranch to a patch of woods. I had been assigned to ride Diablo, a large white mare that was the fastest horse in camp. But Diablo was lame that afternoon. When we divided up to go hide ourselves, I was stuck riding the largest, whitest, slowest horse in camp. I dismounted and led Diablo into a little gully where we could hide under some overhanging shrubs.
It was so exciting my heart still races when I remember it. Horses thundered all over the woods, kids screaming and tagging each other. I knew enough about psychology to know that time passes slowly when you are hiding like that, so I kept squelching the impulse to come out. Then the noises stopped. After what seemed an eternity, I ventured out of the gully. The woods were empty. Everyone had gone back to the ranch house, obviously unaware they were one buckaroo short.
As a courtesy to my lame horse, I held Diablo’s reins and walked her for half an hour back to the ranch. When I got to a hill overlooking camp, I saw three cop cars near the corral, their red and blue gumball lights madly spinning. And I understood: the town’s cops had been called in to find me.
The camp’s managers were delighted to find me perfectly alive and unharmed, but they infuriated me over and over. They kept calling me “the lost camper.” That was outlandish. I knew exactly where I was every minute of that day. They saw me as the lost camper although I saw myself as the hide-and-seek champion of all time.
Trail Baboon 