I read in a family history book recently that my paternal great grandmother was described by her sisters late in her life as having “lost her courage”. The book doesn’t go into detail of what her sisters meant, or what losing her courage looked like. This, after raising twelve children to adulthood and operating a large, successful farm after losing her husband years before. She died in the 1930’s after a long life.
I wrote this Tuesday sitting in the waiting area of the hospital where my best friend was having surgery. We drove here early in the morning from a smaller town about 30 miles away. On the drive to the hospital all the warning and hazard lights on my van dashboard came on, the low battery charge came on, the van lights automatically turned off, and the radio wouldn’t work. We barely had enough power to get to the hospital. I got my friend checked in, and the van and I limped to a nearby car dealership. My courage level was about as low as my battery charge. I got a call about an hour later saying it was the alternator, and they would replace it by the end of the day.
I am strangely anxious about any sort of travel these days. COVID and its isolation, the political climate, war, all seem to have sucked all the courage out of me. I am brave at home, but not so much in unfamiliar territory. I realize I have little to really complain about, and I know I will find the courage to solve what are quite minor problems in the grand scheme of things. Why can’t things just go smoothly?!!
Is courage just a decision we make? How is your courage level these days? Any automotive repair stories to share?
I took a look at my phone search history the other day, and it struck me that someone who didn’t know me and who read through the searches I had done on Google would think me an odd duck. Here is my most recent search history:
Ladbury Funeral Service
Marie Jaell
Yo Yo Ma, Emmanuel Ax, Leonidas Kavakis Beethoven Symphonies
Kay Aaenson obituary
Creamy scallops with tomatoes
Waconia, MN grocery stores
Red Star Yeast Conversion Table
Hartquist Funeral Home
The Book of Mormon musical
Brotchen recipe
ND wildfires
Einaudi: I Giorni
West Bend, IA
What on earth does this say about my interests? Husband often asks me to look things up for him, but most of these are a result of my own curiosity.
What are your recent on-line research topics? What do you like to research? What does your search history say about you?
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?
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?
I have been reading up on Cesky Terriers, the breed of puppy we are getting in May. They are considered temperamentally different than the majority of terriers due to their comfort in being part of a pack. Your basic terrier is an independent thinker, bred to work alone and make its own decisions on how to deal with vermin and prey. Cesky’s are more reserved and standoffish, but very dedicated to their people.
The Cesky was developed by a guy in the Czech Republic who wanted smaller terriers he could take in a group to hunt prey on river banks. He started out with Scotties, but they fought with one another more than they hunted. He decided to come up with a new breed, and interbred Scotties with Sealyhams, a Welsh breed known for its calmness and lack of territoriality . The new breed he came up with was very good at working with other dogs, yet really good at flushing vermin and working as part of a team. I hear from Cesky breeders that they are not door darters like our Welsh Terriers were, dogs who wanted nothing more than to rush out any open door so they could explore the countryside and make their own fun. Cesky’s want to stay with their people at all costs.
It is important at my work to be able to work as part of a team. I guess I am more like a Cesky than I am a Scottie or a Welshie. It doesn’t pay to be a lone wolf in my line of work. I know that isn’t the case for everyone, though.
Are you a Scottie or a Sealyham? How well do you work as part of a team. What is your favorite breed of dog, and why?
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?
Trail Baboon 