I saw in the news that the creator of the game, Settlers of Catan, Klaus Teuber, died a few days ago. If you don’t know of it, Settlers of Catan is a multi-player game; you settle and expand on the land using hexagonal tiles. I’ve always assumed it was similar in play to Risk, but I could be wrong. It was wildly popular right off the bat in the late 90s and while still played in boardgame fashion, it has also spun off into cyberspace so you can easily find Catan communities of players.
I have a friend, Laurie, who has played Dungeons and Dragons every Tuesday for decades. This is a serious commitment for her; I’ve known her to turn down other invitations if they fall on Tuesday. I’ve known her for 40 years and she’s never once invited me to join; non D&D folks just aren’t allowed. That’ fair – all I know about D&D is what I’ve seen on Big Bang Theory!
But seeing the news about Klaus Teuber made me think of our blog about jigsaw puzzles the other day which led me to thinking about the games I’ve played in my life. We didn’t have a lot of boardgames when I was a kid. The obligatory Candyland, which I never cared for much. My Nana had Chutes & Ladders at her house, which I adored. I begged for the game Operation and never received it. It was just as well; a friend got one for Christmas and it was BORING. Same with the Mousetrap game.
I played a lot of backgammon in college but hardly ever since. I like trivia games, although I’m not very good at the ones that have a lot of current/trendy questions. We played one at Thanksgiving that had a lot of current sports questions and even a category about stock exchange abbreviations – I stunk. When YA was little, we did Yahtzee and cribbage on vacation, but almost never at home. I do play mahjong online but just with myself which isn’t anything like real mahjong. I guess my favorite boardgame is still Aggravation, which I play exclusively with my mom. We each play three colors and we’re a little cut-throat. YA won’t play with me although when we were in St. Louis last summer she did play once, she and Nonny and I each fielding two colors. She complained later that Nonny and I are mean.
I am waiting for a blizzard to hit while I write this. We are expecting up to 6 inches of snow to add the the 96 inches we have had thus far this winter. We are told that after this it will warm up, with highs possibly in the 70’s next week. I will believe it when I see it, but I will try to be hopeful.
If it warms up quickly it will be a muddy, mucky mess for a while. Our daughter in law sent a video of our grandson riding his bike gleefully through large puddles that had accumulated in their street. Kids on bikes in puddles are sure signs of spring. There are also dismal looking lawn and Christmas ornaments that are emerging from under the snow piles, which I suppose could also be signs of impending spring.
I have a third cousin who a couple of Baboons also know who is an expert about snakes and amphibians. He is excited about finding garter snakes coming out of hibernation already this year, signs of spring for him. I have yet to see robins or other migratory birds, but Husband saw hawks on his drive back from Bismarck on Monday, more signs that winter is losing its grip. Here is a favorite Canadian folk singer from Saskatchewan who understands about spring.
What signs of spring are you noticing? What are your favorite and least favorite aspects of April? Know any good poems or songs about spring?
I got a text from Daughter Sunday letting me know she talked her way out of a speeding ticket. She said she was only going 10 mph over the speed limit. I told her she needed to slow down.
I don’t know how she does it, but this is about the fifth or sixth ticket she has talked her way out of. I have only had one speeding ticket in my life, only going about 5 mph over the limit in town, and the police officer had no trouble citing me.
Husband got several speeding tickets from the Dunn County Sherriff and Tribal police driving back from the Reservation. The Tribal tickets were never reported to the State, so he didn’t get points on his license for them.
The Highway Patrol in western Minnesota often cite people who don’t notice that the speed limit changes when you cross the Dakota borders into Minnesota, and assume they can still drive Dakota speeds. Our governor just vetoed a bill that would have increased the speed limit to 80 in ND. People drive that speed here anyway, so it wouldn’t have made much of a difference for him to sign the bill.
Every talked your way out a ticket? What is the fastest you ever drove? Why were you going that fast?
Daughter’s visit last week was an opportunity for us to finally celebrate a very belated Christmas. She got her father a 1000 piece puzzle of Birds of the Backyard, which we have been working on daily since he unwrapped it. We haven’t worked on a jigsaw puzzle since the kids were young.
The puzzle It is set up on the dining room table, and we will just eat and work around it until it is completed. The dog got a couple of pieces but only did minor damage to them.
We may have a lot of opportunity to work on the puzzle this week, as a snow storm is coming that the National Weather Service says could be a blizzard of historic proportions. Their models are showing wind speeds that are the strongest they have seen in 20 years.
Husband is traveling to Bismarck for work Sunday and Monday, and will return Monday before the storm hits on Tuesday. We are rarely bored, but a puzzle will be just the thing to help us pass the time if we are snowed in.
How do you like to pass the time when you can’t leave the house? What is your most memorable jigsaw puzzle?
The snow has been melting slow enough we haven’t had the big spring rush of water coming down our valley. And that’s OK. Not that we have damaging floods, but most years we have the usual snowmelt rush. This year it’s just a nice little stream. Plus still got piles of snow in the shadows and on the north sides.
Ground is still cold, in fact, I Just ordered some soil thermometers, mostly because this new oat venture I’m trying, they want oats in the ground as soon as it’s possible. Oats can survive down to 20-degree air temps. And guys using ‘no-till’ equipment can get in sooner than I can. Using traditional equipment I need the ground to warm up and dry enough I can work it, then get it planted. But I do want to try and push it a little more this year than I have other years. Pending two shows I’m lighting and college commencement. (I usually try not to do a show outside of the college in April, but… life happens). Commencement is May 10th. Oats should be in for 3 or 4 weeks by then. By the way, soil temps yesterday were about 35-degrees.
This week on the farm I hauled scrap iron to the scrap iron recycling place. Forgot to take a picture of the first load, which was some junk from a theater in town, plus my scrap metal tote at home. The tote is a 4’x 4’x 4’ box and I throw all the misc. scrap iron in there. Old, worn out disc blades, pieces of pipe, or broken bits of things. Old ceiling fans, old electrical conduit… just… junk. Bolts, empty propane bottles, I don’t know… just … stuff. But it does accumulate over time.
I also had the front of an old chopper box I had cut up several years ago. I use the tractor loader and put it on the trailer. That load of scrap was 2200 lbs.
There’s a pile of scrap machinery behind the shed I need to get hauled in. Accumulation of many years.
The next load was two old rotary hoes, an old snowmobile I last rode in about 1987. (Took Kelly for a ride. It was a John Deere 400. Dad bought it back in the late 1970’s. My high school friend Pete and I rode a lot. But then I got interested in theater. And Girls. And there wasn’t time for the snowmobile anymore.) It sat outside behind the shed for a lot of years. Weeds and trees grew around it and through it and I ran into it with a tractor once or twice. Finally added it to the junk pile when I was cleaning up back there.
Also in the junk pile was a mower I didn’t even remember. Dad must have bought it and I don’t even recall it, so it must not have worked very well. Before I started buying the rear mounted ‘Brush Hog’ type mowers, Dad had a side mounted sickle mower. It was good for mowing because it was off to the side in front of you and easy to watch. Dad cut a lot of hay with this back in the day. (When he also pulled a ‘crimper’ behind him. Clyde knows what I’m talking about. Nowadays those jobs are combined into one machine called a ‘mower-conditioner and can be pull type ((like mine)) or self-propelled. Or the big guys mount three units to the tractor: one on the front and two on the back and cut 30 feet at a time.)
When that side mower wore out, Dad found some other old, used, sickle mowers. I even bought one too. They all sucked. Brush mowers work great, but behind me, it’s more cumbersome to operate.
The mower had been back there so long I had to cut a 12’ tree out of it before I put it on the trailer.
(The spikey things are the rotary hoe.)
This load was 3300lbs. Back in December I talked about hauling some scrap in and it was $50 / ton, a low low price. Tuesday it was up significantly to $195 / ton.
You know, it’s interesting how many things used to mount right onto the tractor, rather than hooking on behind as we do now. I have a lot of memories of helping Dad mount the brackets on the side of the tractor, and some pieces under the axle, and then hooking the mower to those. Or the corn picker that had a real heavy frame that bolted to the sides, and more heavy frames over the wheels, and then the elevator mounted to the back, and we’d drive the tractor into the picker to mount it. Or the cultivator; that had two small brackets bolted to the front of the tractor, then drive into it and muscle the two sides over into place and bolt it on, and a couple rods connected to the ‘rocker arms’ to raise it.
These days, everything hooks on behind. It’s easier to hook up or unhook, but not so easy to watch what we’re doing. I wonder why that changed. Convenience? Tractor size? (probably size; and cabs made all that stuff impossible to attach, which means it was comfort), and just the size of farms and efficiency. Farming was a lot more manual labor back then. Over in Europe there are more front mounted implements. Which is becoming more of a thing here, again. More tractors have front mounted hitches in addition to the rear.
We’ll try to avoid the Thunderstorms and blizzard this weekend. Still double checking my bookwork from 2022 and meet the accountant mid-April for taxes. And busy with the show at the college. It’s called ‘Boy Gets Girl’ by Rebecca Gilman, and it’s about a stalker. Well written… hard to ‘enjoy’ but it’s a good show. We’re doing it ‘in-the-round’ with the stage in the middle and the audience sitting right around the actors.
The critters are good, although I hadn’t seen the ducks in a few days, but they showed up yesterday. They must hang out back in the swamp or maybe they just need to ‘get away’ occasionally. Got one black hen that has gotten ‘broody’, meaning she’s trying to sit on some eggs. Course I gather the eggs every night, but that doesn’t dissuade her.
One of Renee’s questions yesterday struck a chord with me. I am definitely a “bite off too much” kind of person. And before everybody says “you need to learn to say no” – all of my biting off too much is self-imposed. I’m actually pretty good at saying no to someone other than myself!
Case in point. With Easter just a week away, I have a lot of plans. The big event is on next Saturday, the World’s Most Over-Engineered Egg Hunt. For that we are taking taco tortilla roll-ups (or pinwheels) and blondies w/ M&M eggs for the buffet. Then I’m also making pastel eggs filled with jelly beans and marshmallows for the kids. Did I mention there are 13 of them? And then a couple of dozen plastic eggs filled w/ candy to add to the hunt.
For my co-workers I’m doing dipped Oreos w/ spring-y sprinkles (1 chocolate and 1 golden per co-worker). These will be packaged in little cello bags and delivered with miniature Happy Spring notes. I figure as long as I’m still officially part of the team, no matter how part-time or temporary, it’s still a nice thing to do.
For the neighbor kids I’m doing lemon bunny cakes. I have a wonderful bunny pan that I bought a few years ago and I just love it. And it’s easy. Batter into pan. Bake. Bunnies into cello bags with pretty ribbon. Voila!
Of course, I will also do a basket for YA – this will be a challenge because YA has said she only wants chocolate/pb items in the basket. I normally can’t hold myself to these kind of requests. We’ll see. I have extra eggs for dying. Again this is something that YA says we don’t need to do but she always joins in when I have the eggs and dye and glitter out. She always happily eats the devilled eggs that eventually come out of this project.
AND, I am making sugar cookies for a friend – I always do this for her and this gives me an excuse to make a few spring cookies for YA and myself.
This is enough projects that I’ve put the various things on my to-do list for next week. When I think about the fact that I’m only working 3-4 hours a day, it doesn’t seem that daunting.
Any special plans you’re prepping for in the next week?
We are planning a trip the end of May to visit Husband’s sister and brother-in-law in eastern Wisconsin. We will drive, and will spend about three days there. It is 700 miles one-way from us, so that means one night on the road there and back. I don’t like driving more than 500 miles in a day. We also plan to visit Son and Daughter-in- Law in Brookings on the return trip. We will leave the Tuesday after Memorial Day and return the following Monday.
Husband is a hopeful traveler who likes to make elaborate but unrealistic plans of what we can do while on the road. When we were moving to North Dakota from Indiana after Husband finished his psychology internship, he insisted that we meet up with some Canadian friends of ours who were driving east from Manitoba to Ontario the same days we were driving west. We met up in a campground somewhere in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. It really wasn’t a very direct route, and our visit was extremely short, perhaps an hour or so, but it was really important to Husband that we see our friends.
I don’t know why I was surprised last Monday as we were finalizing our travel plans to Wisconsin that Husband was trying to figure out how we could find a way to visit Baboons in the Twin Cities as well as my third cousin TJ in St. Peter without lengthening our trip. While I would love to visit everyone, the logistics as well as the limited time we have made such plans pretty impossible. I appreciate Husband’s sweet consideration for me and my friends, but sometimes he wants to do too much.
When do you try to do too much? Do you prefer to mosey or get to your destination?
Had my annual check-up yesterday. Nothing momentous and I was only gone from the house for about an hour and a half. When I got home, bearing Taco Bell, YA informed me that she had taken the handles off the refrigerator to wash them. Apparently when she wiped the handles down, she felt there was dirt in crevices that she couldn’t get to without removing them.
I’m torn. It’s nice to know she’s handy and can figure things out (apparently there was some YouTube assistance) but there’s also bewilderment that she would be driven to this task. I’ve looked closely at the handles and honestly, they look the same to me as they did this morning.
It has been a busy week. Monday, I hauled some equipment to Plainview for an online auction, made two trips, the first hauling our old rear blade, a fertilizer auger, and some smaller stuff. And a second with the forage chopper, and other stuff that I think, if they market it as ‘vintage,’ it could do well. The auctioneer wasn’t even sure they had ever sold any before, but he finally agreed to put it on a pallet and see what happens. (Details after the auction in April). Tuesday I had one more clinic appointment: I have now been dismissed by the shoulder doctor, the knee doctor, the toe doctor, and the foot doctor. It’s a pretty good feeling.
I also had a meeting in the Cities on Tuesday. Plus the week was busy at the college working on a set.
I have the song, ‘Mercy, Mercy, Mercy’ by the Cannonball Adderley Quintet in my iTunes, and in the opening, Cannonball says, “You know, sometimes we are not prepared for adversity. When it happens, sometimes, we’re caught short; We don’t know exactly how to handle it when it comes up. Sometimes we don’t know just what to do when adversity takes over. And I have advice for all of us. I got it from my pianist, Joe Zawinul, who wrote this tune, and it sounds like what you’re supposed to say when you have that kinda problem. It’s called, “Mercy Mercy Mercy”.
I think that’s true. We talk a lot about how we don’t know how to deal with conflict and how it is hard to learn that a little conflict can be OK — when you know how to handle it. I started to learn that 40 years ago at one of the theaters, and the founders would get into some pretty big arguments behind the closed- but not soundproof door- And then they would come back out, and we are all shuffling our feet and looking at the floor. ‘Conflict is OK’, they would say, ‘You gotta learn to work things out’. I also have the Buddy Rich Big Band doing a version of ‘Mercy Mercy Mercy’. They are both good.
I have three versions of the song ‘Jessica’; The original, plus two bluegrass versions. I have two versions of ‘Layla’ (the original and the unplugged), ‘As Time Goes’ by Maynard Ferguson and Tony Bennett, ‘El Paso’ by the Grateful Dead and Marty Robbins. Again, so different and both so good. ‘Eli’s Coming’ by Three Dog Night and Maynard Ferguson, ‘The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly’ theme, the original and a version by The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain. ‘Limehouse Blues’ by Jerry Reed & Chet Atkins and also by The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain; they are strikingly different versions. ‘Mama Told Me Not To Come’ by Three Dog Night and Randy Newman. Two versions of ‘Sing, Sing, Sing’ by Benny Goodman, and James Horner & Orchestra. ‘Tangled Up In Blue’ by Joan Osborne and Bob Dylan (The Joan one is really good. Nothing against the Dylan version either!), a couple versions of ‘Stairway to Heaven’ by Led Zeppelin and Rodrigo y Gabriela. A song called ‘There’ll Be Some Changes Made’ from the movie, ‘All That Jazz’, which I thought was original to the movie, until I heard Gene Krupa doing it on the 40’s station. And then, as I googled it for this blog, realized I have Mark Knopfler and Chet Atkins doing a version that is SO different I didn’t even make the connection it was the same song. Prior to this revelation, I didn’t realize there were other versions of that song.
Chickens and ducks are still fine, but the coyotes are back. Kelly chased one away Wednesday morning. We’re keeping our eyes open. Bailey needs back up; she won’t engage when alone. She’s a lover, not a fighter.
I spread two bales of straw out for the chickens. They enjoy scratching in that, and it covers up some of the mud.
Trail Baboon 