Category Archives: 2026

2026, animals

Happy Thoughts

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This weeks Farming Update from Ben

We got a little bit of rain last week so the driveway and yard, being a little bit snow-covered, got pretty slippery. I went out with the tractor to try and rough up the ice and scrape some of it off. Using both the front loader and the rear blade I got 90% of it. At least we’re not sliding sideways across the yard.
And then we got a whole bunch of rain Thursday night. I know they were predicting over an inch, I don’t have any gauges out so I don’t know what amount it amounted too, but jeepers we don’t need rain in January.
Still a bit of an adventure getting down to the chicken coop and over to the feed room.

At the college I’ve had an outside rental this past week so that took up my evenings.


Out in the shop I enjoyed the time last weekend just putzing around out there. Stocked up the new fridge I got for Christmas, and finished assembling the pallet rack.

Frozen Little Debbie crunch bars are the best!
I am looking forward to storing stuff!

I moved the 630 out and brought the gator in. Swept the floors creating a cloud of dust. Something I should’ve thought of when I was building the shop was a fresh air intake and an exhaust fan. It sort of flitted through my mind once, but I wasn’t listening. I’m not running equipment inside very often but by the time I start up a tractor, open the door, bring in something else and close the door, the CO2 alarm is going off. And then when I sweep, a cloud of dust fills the air and then I wish I had a filter. I have a ventilation guy coming to the farm next week to give me some ideas. Whether I have them do it or whether I do it myself remains to be seen, I just need to figure out what to do.

I was cleaning up my desk at work. I threw out a bunch of magazines from 2007. It shouldn’t take that long to throw out a magazine, but you know, you put something down, and there it sits. 

But I’m saving the kazoo’s. The theater conference I attend every so often has a kazoo parade through the venue at some point. Organized by a group called the ‘Long Reach Long Riders’ LRLR.org. 

It’s a bunch of people who ride motorcycles and raise money for theater related causes. From their website:

Long Reach Long Riders are a collective of strangers, friends, and families alike; who share a common passion for the entertainment arts.

For over 20 years, we’ve come together once a year to ride motorcycles together and raise funds for the Behind-the-Scenes Charity, which provides essential support to entertainment technology professionals who are seriously ill, injured, or in need of mental health or substance use support.

Each year the ‘ride’ takes place in a different area of the United States, where good roads and good sights are to be discovered.”

It’s a fun bunch of people. So I’m keeping the kazoo’s.

Our big dog Humphrey turned 11 on January 5. He is such a good dog. Luna-tick, keeps him engaged and young and he has no qualms telling her when he’s done playing.

Humphrey enjoying his birthday treat. (Bacon strip)
Humphrey as a puppy

Bailey is still trying to prove she’s the number two dog.

Let’s take a pause here and I’m just gonna do some fun photos.

My folks.
My sister making a snowman for her granddaughter in South Carolina who wanted a snowman.
“Fred is up to his neck. Snowflake is trying to pull him out.”
T-shirt from Etsy
From the site: ‘Disappointing affirmations’ on Instagram or FB
Must be long lost relatives. Check out the tiny mom! Eleven kids from Tiny Mom! My mom had this picture, but we don’t know who it is. Nothing written on it.

WHO ARE THESE PEOPLE?

MAKE UP SOMETHING FUN.

2026, animals, Health, pets, Uncategorized

SAILing

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Well, I admit defeat. I am old. I am out of shape. I am stiff and sore. I need exercise.

I went to a SAIL class on Thursday at the American Reformed Church. (That is the less conservative Dutch Reformed Church in town, in contrast to the Christian Reformed Church, which is uber conservative.) SAIL stands for Stay Active and Independent for Life. It is operated by a community organization that provides services for senior citizens, and aims to prevent falls and keep older citizens in their homes.

I realized after my decision to attend that I had no work out clothes. I haven’t owned sneakers for 10 years. We made a trip to Sioux Falls earlier in the week to remedy that.

The class lasted an hour. We marched around, worked on balance, and stretched. They supplied hand weights. Some exercises were done standing. We worked on upper body and shoulder strength and thigh muscles. For some exercises we sat. I was the youngest person in the class. Some of the folks knew my parents.

It amazes me how woefully weak and stiff I have become. I will attend these free classes twice a week. We want to get a Cesky puppy in the spring, and I need to get into shape.

How often do you exercise? What defines “old” for you? Getting any new animal companions soon?

2026, books, Media, Mysteries

A Good Thing After All…

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One Good Thing.  That’s the name of my journal – short and sweet – one good thing a day.  Every now and then if I just can’t whittle it down, then two.  Doesn’t have to be earth-shaking. 

Every now and then, like yesterday, I am just not feeling it.  Gray and cold.  No good news in the world. Found out my supplement program has stopped doing the $50 of pharmacy freebies.  My checks haven’t come in yet.  The mail didn’t arrive.  I started three different books and none of them lit any kind of spark.  Just a crumby day.  What in heaven’s name was going to be my one good thing?

Back in December I went to get my hearing aids checked before my 3-year warranty was up.  It was pretty cursory but when “Opal” (name changed to protect the innocent) asked me if I had downloaded the app, I remembered when Jacque was helping Lou with his hearing aid once at a Blevin’s meeting using his phone.  Opal and I discussed it for a bit, what it could do for me and if it would fit my needs.  And then she said the magic words…. “do you ever listen to audio books?”  You all know I perked up immediately.  Turns out that even without the app, I can have audiobooks (and also my phone) stream through my hearing aids!  Who knew.

My phone does have the Libby app on it already but it hasn’t too useful.  If I had it too loud, YA would comment.  During the summer, when windows were open, traffic made it hard to hear sometimes.  If I would get up and leave the room, I’d have to remember to grab the phone.  I didn’t use this feature often.  But through my hearing aids, it’s a whole `nother world!  No irritating YA, no traffic noise, no having to remember to take the phone.  I can walk all over each floor of my house before I get out of range.  It’s amazing.

This has been life-changing for me and I’m trying not to regret that I spent three years not knowing about this.  Oh well.  Even though Opal clued me into this in December, since one of my “meh” books today was listened to via my hearing aids, I’m gonna take it!

One good thing for anybody else yesterday?

2026, Fitness, Health, Mysteries

Biting Remarks….

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My dental exam was Friday.  Like most folks, I don’t spring out of bed on dentist day, singing with joy and sprinkling my path with rose petals.  Honestly, if I could take a pill and never have to worry about my teeth or go to the dentist again, I’d take that pill every darn day. 

My dental history isn’t all that happy.  I have a small mouth to start with, not really enough room for all my teeth and then when my adult teeth started coming in, we discovered that I had some duplicates.  That meant tarting at the age of 9, I got the first set pulled, then wore retainers.  Then when the second set descended, those got pulled as well.  More retainers.  Then, the eventual braces, followed by more retainers.  During that time, I had another adult tooth that wasn’t breaking through the gum so had to deal with that.  5 years total.

Before marriage to wasband #1, I had my last dental exam while still on my folks’ insurance.  Dentist said all four of my wisdom teeth were there but didn’t appear to be doing anything.  Since my mom’s wisdom teeth never came in, the decision was made to leave them be.  Literally six months later (after wedding and without any dental insurance) all four came in.  They had to come out (small mouth, no room) and three of the four were impacted.

I’ll stop there, but suffice it to say I’ve had plenty more drama – broken tooth, crowns, bridge, more gum issues.  And this is all for a person who brushes and flosses every single night.  For decades.  Did I mention that my dentist growing up was my uncle?  So there was no sloughing off where the teeth were concerned.

Anyway Friday was just a cleaning but as I was laying back, I had to “un-tense” constantly.  It didn’t hurt but every few minutes I would realize that I was tensing up and have to force myself to relax.  At one point the hygienist knocked the tray with her elbow and I just about jumped out of my skin.  She said “it’s OK, you can relax” and I laughed so suddenly that I snorted.  Luckily she didn’t have any implements of destruction in my mouth at the time.  During a little break in the action, I asked her if anyone ever relaxes in the chair, she said “about half”.  That surprised me, I would have thought that most folks can’t relax.  I prefer not to be the outlier in this area.  We’ll see if that desire helps me relax next time around!  Snort.

What do dentists call the x-rays they take of your teeth?

2026, animals, crops, Family, Farming Update, holidays, Nature, Seasons, Technology, Weather, work

BY THE NUMBERS

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This weeks Farming Update from BEN

On Thursday I collected the mileage and hours from vehicles and tractors then put it all in my ‘Yearly Mileage’ spreadsheet. Everything was about average. We used the lawn mower 31 hours, put 43 hours on the big tractor, and 127 hours on the other tractor. Drove the 4-wheeler 22 miles, and put 306 miles on the gator using it 48 hours.

Egg count for 2025 was 419 dozen. 5028 eggs. Plus a few dozen that froze or got broken.

On Tuesday daughter and I took a road trip to Potsdam and Meyer’s Seed, then John Deere in Plainview. And got sundaes at DQ and then back to Rochester for a stop at Barnes and Noble. She thanked me for the adventure. 

At Meyer’s the oat seed for 2026 is ordered and paid for, and corn and soybean seed has been ordered and financed, at 0% interest with a 4% savings. (6% savings would have given me prime -2%). $11,700. A bag of seed corn now is over $300. I ordered 25 bags. That’s a separate loan from the $43,000 for fertilizer and spraying. I got TWO free seed corn hats!

You know how you’re supposed to save receipts for seven years? I brought up a box from 2002 and sorted through that. Oh my goodness. We’d been married 12 years. Kelly was making $17 / hour. We had 2 kids in daycare, and $36 in our savings account. I’d get a milk check twice a month. It totaled maybe $2200. I owed the vet $1000, the breeder $500, the feed co-op $500, plus there was always other bills and expenses. I got anxious just looking back through this stuff. Once I saved the important stuff, I took the unneeded stuff out in the snow and burned it. 

It was a small fire; not much stuff. And I just used my gloved hand to ‘swish’ it around to get all the papers to burn. Evidently the cheap nylon mechanics glove I was wearing have a lower melting point than the flame of even a small fire. I didn’t get hurt or anything, it just melted the sides of the fingers of the glove. Daughter came over to see what I was doing. I pointed out that she shouldn’t use her hand to stir up a fire. She looked at me like I was a complete idiot. And she basically said, “Well duh!”. Oh good. A win on the parenting front! She knows enough not to stick her hand in a fire. 

The wedding we attended on New Years Eve was really very nice! The bride was stunning, the groom looked sharp in his black tuxedo. They were both relaxed (or at least looked that way) and the ceremony was low-key and they wrote and read their own vows and had fun. We had a full three course meal, and there was a live band. I got a lot of compliments on the fact I was wearing sleeves. I did have to dig to the back of my closet for this shirt, and one cuff was a slightly different color than the other. Solved that problem by rolling them up a bit. 

For Christmas Kelly gave me this hat:

I picked up oil filters and grease tubes at John Deere. I changed the engine oil and filter in the 630. I was looking in the operators manual for the tractor and realized I’ve never checked the oil level for the transmission. On modern tractors there’s the engine oil dipstick, and then a dipstick, or sometimes a site tube, showing transmission and hydraulic oil level. On the 630, there’s a dipstick for the engine oil, and one for the hydraulics and I remember always checking that as a kid. I don’t know what fascinated me about that dipstick, but I checked it often. And then there’s a check “LEVEL” plug for the power take off. And on the side, according to the book, another check “LEVEL” plug for the transmission.

HUH!

Never seen that before.

I had to scrap some dirt off to find this.

You take the plug out and add oil until it starts to run out the plug, then it’s full. I don’t remember Dad checking that. I’m sure he did, I just didn’t know about it. Now the tractor is good to go come spring.

And the 1940’s music station is back on my car radio.

Life is good.

WHAT DO YOU DO WITH YOUR RECIPTS?

HOW ARE YOU AT RECORD KEEPING?

2026, Automotive, Mysteries, Stories

The Early Bird… is just early.

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Guesstimating how long a task will take is not one of my long suits. 

Bad estimates happen often when I’m trying to give myself enough time to get somewhere.  Don’t get me wrong – when I’m going from one place straight to another, then I’m pretty accurate.  I like to arrive with a few minutes to spare and this usually works out.  It’s when I add errands to a trip; the more errands, the worse I guess.  Two weeks ago, I had a knee therapy appointment at 7:30 a.m.  At that time of day I know it takes about 15 minutes to go straight there.  I added stopping for gas and estimated 10 minutes for that, then 5 minutes to swing by the post office, 10 minutes for Dunkin Donuts.  Figuring 10 minutes to check in and cough up my co-pay, I decided I should leave the house at 6:30.

Got all my errands done and showed up at my therapy place at 6:50.  My car was warmed up at that point so I sat in the parking lot for 20 minutes listening to my book on CD.  That still left me 20 minutes (of which the check-in/co-pay took 3 minutes…sigh). Good thing I’m a morning person.

The other time this problem rears its ugly head is when I have some chore that I’m not too excited about.  A 10-minute job becomes an hour in my mind, a 20-minute chore becomes an afternoon.  Then the procrastination kicks in.  I found this meme last year on Facebook; I even printed it out and pasted it in my journal.  Whenever I’m putting something off, I TRY to remind myself of this silliness in my nature.  Occasionally it helps

I’m hoping that showing up 40 minutes early for my therapy will be a learning experience but I’m not exactly holding my breath.  You know – that old dog/new tricks problem.

Do you have a good relationship with time-keeping?  Any procrastination problems?

2026, Food, Gatherings, holidays, Uncategorized

Bottoms Up!

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Most of my friends and acquaintances know me well enough to know that New Year’s Eve does not find me out drinking and partying wildly.  The only time I’m up at midnight these days is if I need to make a trip down the hall in the middle of the night. 

I have only been drunk twice in my life.  The first time was when I was living in Northfield during the summer between what would have been my junior and senior year.  I was working at Ole Piper Inn and went to a party with my co-workers.  I hadn’t really had drunk much prior to that and there was a lot of mixing of different kinds of alcohol.  I woke up in my bed but don’t remember how I got there.  Keys were in my jacket pocket and the car was in the driveway – luckily nothing amiss. Thank goodness the party was only about 10 blocks from my apartment.

The second time was at a work party at the bakery in Milwaukee.   No memory loss this time (I remember the bus ride home from the bakery QUITE clearly) but I felt so awful the next day that I wished for memory loss.  It was after this horrible hangover that I decided that overdrinking was just not something I wanted to do. 

I’m not a teetotaler but I rarely have more than a glass of wine or one mixed drink.  It’s not hard as the taste of alcohol isn’t my favorite anyway.  Not imbibing much was a little challenging with clients over the years but nothing too awful.  The pressure that many people experience for not drinking in social settings hasn’t happened much to me; I’ve found that if I don’t call attention to my beverage in a party setting, most folks don’t even notice that I’m nursing one glass of wine for an hour or that I’ve switched to a non-alcoholic option.

All this is coming to mind because in addition to the New Year, I finally gave in and let the Medicare/BCBS home wellness visit happen last week. It was easy enough, no invasive stuff and only took about 30 minutes. The nurse practitioner asked me all the same questions that the doctor asks every year at my usual wellness checkup.  When he got to the “how often to you drink alcohol” question I hesitated after saying “one or two” and he immediately filled in with “a day?”.  I laughed and said “no, probably one or two every two or three months”.  I had hesitated because I was trying to decide between two to three months and three to four months.  He clearly didn’t believe me.  I reported that I had just had a glass of wine the Saturday before at my party but that I couldn’t even remember the last time I’d had any alcohol.  Maybe Blevins back in September? 

He did write down 2-3 months, although I’m not sure he really thought that was the truth.  Oh well.

Did you party last night?  What makes for a good celebration in your opinion?