Category Archives: Automotive

2024, Automotive, Music, Travel

Volare

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Yesterday morning I drove my next-door neighbors to the airport for a spring break trip to California.  When we were about half way to the airport, the youngest daughter (she’s five) wailed that she hadn’t downloaded any music to her pad.  The older daughter started to chime in as well.  Dad quickly let them know that he had downloaded good playlists to their pads. 

I wouldn’t even have known what most of the previous paragraph meant when I was the girls’ ages.  Both their Mom and Dad are music teachers, so I suppose it’s not too surprising that everybody has to have a playlist for a 4-hour flight.  When they get back, maybe I’ll ask the girls about what Dad had downloaded for them.

I like music but I can’t call myself an aficionada – I rarely know the names of songs and even if I recognize the music, I’m usually stumped about the composer.  Or the band.   So while I know that my phone could play music if I wanted, I don’t have anything set up and I don’t have any ear buds or headphones.  When I’m on the plane, it’s either sleeping or reading for me.   In fact, I almost always take too much reading material on the plane – except for the one time I had a big hard cover from the library in my carry on bag (All the Light You Cannot See) and I plowed through the entire book in between London and Minneapolis!  Luckily by the time I finished the book, we were just about to land so I wasn’t tortured by too much “non-reading” time.

How do you keep yourself entertained when you fly/drive/train/covered wagon?

2024, Automotive, Business, Seasons

Mailbox Euphoria

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I’m guessing that I care more about mailboxes than your average Joe.  I’ve done the math and on average, I send out a card every day.  Most days when I send something, I just leave it at my mailbox for the mail carrier to take.  But quite often, if I have three or more cards to send in one day, I like to drop them at the post office.  Seems safer and easier on the mail carrier. 

Drive-up mailboxes are my preference, since it’s meant to be a quick errand (usually in the midst of a list of errands) and that means Richfield or Nicollet.  But I’m fussy (I know, you’re shocked, right?)  The Nicollet box is curbside but on the right side of the street, so I have to get out of the car to put the envelopes in.  That leaves Richfield as my drop-off point of choice.

To my shock and horror, early last spring, they removed the three drive up boxes!  There was a note on the post office door explaining that they were taken out due to the road repair that was taking place.  The note did ensure that the boxes would be replaced when the roads were finished.  Considering all the problems in the world, this wasn’t the biggest deal, but it was a pain in my patoot.  The road near the post office seemed finished up to me in early fall but the mailboxes didn’t come back AND the note about the boxes was gone as well. 

I’d pretty much resigned myself to always having to get out of the car to put something in the mailbox until two weeks ago, when I turned the corner into the Richfield lot… AND THERE THEY WERE… all three of them in the same spot they were before.  You would have thought I’d won the lottery – it made my day!

Any small happinesses in your world to report?

2023, Automotive, Business, Family, Food

Mixing Your …. Metaphors

50 Comments

YA and I don’t do much fast food but we do like Taco Bell.  I’m probably in the drive-through at the Edina location every couple of weeks. 

Two weeks ago our fridge was filled with ingredients for party food so I stopped by Taco Bell on the way home for lunch.  We almost always get the same thing so it wasn’t a very eventful  stop until I came around the back of the building.  Right in front of me was a Papa John’s delivery car, complete with the sign on top.

I thought it was pretty funny and understandable.  Even if you get all the pizza you want to eat for free when you work at Papa John’s, every now and then you probably need something else to tease your tastebuds.

Hopefully his management thinks it’s funny too and not poor advertising!

Do you ever do the drive-through for anything?

Automotive, holidays, Kids, Mysteries, Uncategorized

Driving Me Crazy

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When YA was first driving, I asked a good friend of mine, who had two daughters older than YA, “when will I be able to get in a car with her while she’s driving, and not fear for my life.”   Without even a blink, Lori said “when you stop getting a car with her.”  I laughed at the time but 13 years later, I realize she was absolutely right.

YA wanted to drive on Thanksgiving.  She said it was to see if she could get better mileage on her new car (she bought it in July) but I think it was really to show it off to the Thanksgiving crowd.  She drives closer to other cars than I do and it makes me nervous.  I put my foot out a couple of times as if I could brake.  YA thought this was pretty funny.

She did NOT think it was funny on the way home.  It was dark and a couple of times she pulled into a lane with very little space between us and the car in front.  I tell myself that she actually drives more these days than I do and she hasn’t had an accident yet.  But I’ll admit that at one point I gasped and threw my hands out in front of me.  It was involuntary.  She gave me a stern warning and I sat on my hands the rest of the way home.

I don’t have these kind of issues when I’m riding with other folks.  I went all over Nashville two weeks ago with my friend Pat driving and never flinched once!

Do prefer to be the driver or the passenger?

2023, Automotive, Family, Farming Update, Nature, Seasons, Uncategorized

Brevity? None Here!

70 Comments

The weekend Farm Report comes to us from Ben.

I hope everyone was able to have the kind of Thanksgiving they wanted.

My friend Jia, teaching English over in South Korea, didn’t get a Thanksgiving this year and she missed it a lot.

Someday I need to learn brevity. But not today!

I figured out how to get 10 pounds in a 5 pound bag (from last week), you just get rid of 5 pounds. That happen when my truck had a dead battery. Or two. (because it’s a diesel, it uses two batteries to start) so the whole trip to Northfield and then John Deere got postponed and instead, I went out and finished chisel plowing.

This picture is the last bit of ground to be worked up. And that was a ‘mic drop’ moment. Whew. If you notice the line on the hood of the tractor, I scrubbed the left side to remove the grime, but not the right side. It DOES look nicer, and make a difference and I’d like to get the rest scrubbed off. Depends on the weather. I used the hose and washed off the chisel plow and some of the tractor, since the pressure washer is already tucked away for winter and too much trouble to get back out. (Boy, next year, with my new heated shop, it won’t be such an issue! Maybe!)

A highlight for this last day of fieldwork was adding a steering wheel spinner. Dad had them on all the tractors. Back in the 1990’s, my hand would cramp up (already had carpel tunnel, evidently) and I took them all off. Now, making all the turns on the ends of the fields, with my fingers tucked around a steering wheel spoke, makes my fingers sore. And since I had carpel tunnel surgery several years ago, I put spinners back on. It worked well.

When you look at this photo, you’ll see two fields planted to rye:

on the left and right of the tractor. It’s hard to tell how much of that is oats regrowing or the rye I planted late. The oats will not over-winter; it will die off. The rye will survive and grow again. Meaning come spring, and these fields will be planted to corn, I’ll need to have the rye “terminated”. Plowing it up won’t stop it. And if it’s a warm wet spring and it’s late spraying, it will be really tall, meaning there ends up being a lot of trash (plant material) to move through the equipment and it makes a tough seed bed. So, we’ll see. I look at this photo and I see a potentially difficult spring, and a leaking hydraulic hose on the chisel plow, and how I should replace all the hydraulic hoses on it, and the chisel shovels I need to replace. But the sky is pretty.

Doing the fieldwork really is meditative. I had my tractor buddy with me and I saw bald eagles. Boy, there was a lot of ears of corn on the ground this year, in some fields more than others. Damn deer, they tear off a lot of ears and nibble on it a bit. And it was a mixed bag this year because of the drought. The stalks were shorter than normal, and more brittle than normal, and then because the stalks and corn dried out sooner, it was easy for the deer to reach them, easier to pull off, easier for all the kernels to pop off the ear.

Driving around, I would see ‘combine loss’ in the fields, kernels that didn’t get into the combine. Kernels on the ground is not helpful and it means money lost. There are a lot of extra attachments to help corn or soybeans get into the combine. Air systems to blow kernels in, brushes to help feed the kernels in, extra brushes so they don’t pop out. But I don’t own the combine, so… not much I can do about that. Kernels might pop off because the soybean pods are so dry, they split open just from being ‘jostled’ before the combine header gets to them. Or the corn ear might break off the stalk, hit the header, and fall on the ground, or hit hard enough the kernels fly off. Harvesting is kind of a cataclysmic process, yet it needs to be somewhat gentle not to damage the kernel. There’s a lot happening in the moment in the combine, and it’s not surprising to see kernels on the ground. But there was a lot this year, and it means money lost and it’s kinda frustrating because there’s nothing I can do about it. I’ll try calling it the angels share.

We got some mail order pork delivered In a box with dry ice. I got some hot water and we had some fun.

You wouldn’t think the most dangerous part of farming would be trying to adjust the right-hand mirror on the tractor. It’s 8 feet up, out in the middle of nothing. When at home, I use a step ladder to adjust it. Then out in the field, I hit a tree branch and it gets knocked out of place. And there I am climbing up over the three-point hitch and onto the tire trying to get this back out in place and focused right. And trying to get back down, I think about all the hard, sharp edges, and pointy things I can snag myself on, or fall on to, and sometimes I leave the mirror where it is. Newer tractors have steps to reach allow cleaning the windows and reaching the mirror. And the ‘delux’ cab, has remote mirrors. Someday.

Next week, did we make any money?

ANY QUESTIONS ABOUT ANY OF THIS?  YOUR LAST ‘MIC DROP’ MOMENT?

2023, Automotive, education, Family, Technology

Turning….

48 Comments

Over the weekend I was driving in the left lane on 66th when a white car pulled in front of me.  I was started to grumble my usual sarcastic “Thanks for signaling” when I noticed the driver had his left arm sticking straight out of his window.  After a bit I thought maybe he was signaling his turn but that seemed so ancient of a gesture that I was sure I was wrong.  Then he signaled again with his arm when he moved over into the left-turn lane. 

His brake lights were working fine so I don’t know if his turn lights don’t or if he just likes the breeze on his arm on a lovely day.  What I do know is that using your arm for a turn signal, while it was taught routinely when I was a kid, is not taught now.  YA had no idea what I was talking about when I asked her.

Do you have air-conditioning in your car?  Or do you prefer opening the windows to get the breeze?

2023, animals, Automotive, Family, Farming Update, Travel

Road Trip

41 Comments

The weekend Farm Report comes to us from Ben.

I took tires down to Millville MN last Saturday morning, then over to Plainview for parts.

A few days later, went back to Millville to pick up the tires.  Millville is the location of Appel Tire; they’ve been fixing our farm tires, and replacing car or truck tires, since I was a kid. I’m not sure why or when dad started using them, it’s one of those family-owned business we like to support, and we have always used them.

If you’re in a hurry, it’s a bit of a drive; about 25 minutes from our place. But all country roads and usually not much traffic. And there’s about 3 ways to get there so it satisfies my desire for a different route each way. 

One of the routes is a bit out of my way, but when it works, it’s worth the trip. Wabasha County Rd 11 goes off Hiway 63, through the village of Hammond,

where it picks up the Zumbro River,

and follows that to Millville.  I go in the shop doors of Appel Service, (the doors are always open unless it’s winter), I talk to the guys working on cars, and then into the office. Joe is working today. It’s his grandfather that started the business in 1948. 

Around the corner is Whiskey Dicks, and further on, the Stumble In, but that’s only open for breakfast and it used to be owned by a guy named Jim, who helped on the farm when my folks went to Europe for a three week vacation when I was 16 years old. They’d never been out of the country before–especially not for three weeks– and I’d never run the farm alone for 3 weeks!  Whisky Dicks used to be the Lucky 7 and they had grape pop, but not anymore. 

If you’re in a hurry, Appel’s will fix your tires while you wait. At least some of the of the lunch crowd have vehicles at Appel’s and the rest are locals. I was gonna just do a cheeseburger and fries, but the special was a chicken sandwich. Millville is way down in a valley along the river; looks like an offshoot of the driftless area. Cell service is non-existent, so that’s nice over lunch. A slice of butter toffee cake for the road and to share with Kelly. The sandwich and the fries were fresh out of the fryer and so hot I had to let them sit a while before eating. I admired the flour sacks and burlap seed bags stapled to the ceiling. A pool table took up the middle of the main room. I didn’t get over to the bar area. And the bathroom mirror made me look real good.

I made a loop around the cemetery on my way out of town, said Hello to some of the dead relatives and thought about them. Millville also has a gun shop that I’ve only been in once when I bought a shotgun at an auction. 

Forty years ago, when I was measuring grain bins and fields for the ASCS Office, I’d drive a few of these roads. Driving to Millville that day I went past Larry’s place. He sold Pioneer seed and he had the first Cellular phone I had seen. Hooked to his truck and the lights flashed and horn honked when it rang, and he’d run back to the truck to answer. He was a lot of fun to work with. I drove past another place where I measured the grain in some bins, mixed up the numbers on a measurement, and the boss had to go back out there and verify. That’s just up the road from the place dad bought a lousy snow blower, and across the road from the guy everyone knew was a lousy farmer and how junky his place was and still is. Not too far from the place where the ladder fell over after I got inside the grain bin. I was able to get out and jump down. Forty years younger remember.

Closer to home is Norms, where I watched him pull a tractor stuck in 18” of mud with his pickup truck. Norm taught me how to drive a grain truck, too. “Drive this to Viola, kid.”

Crops are maturing. Been raining most of the week it seems. Rye is growing. We got 9 guineas, which is a surprise because we’ve only had 7 for a long time. Two must have been on nests. No word on the other chicks this week. One of the June pullets we ordered turned out to be a rooster. I’ve said sexing male or female chicks isn’t a perfect science. And they all look the same for 4 months. And now they’re in puberty and his voice is changing and he’s still learning how to crow. Imagine trying to figure out HOW to crow and your voice cracking at the same time. That’s what he sounds like.

Kelly thinks she’s spotted him. I haven’t yet.

Whats the worst sound you’ve heard?  Best?

2023, animals, Automotive, Farming Update, gardening, Nature

The Path Less Traveled

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The weekend Farm Report comes to us from Ben.

Going home the other day and I was thinking about the grassy strip down the middle of our driveway. I don’t remember that happening when I was a kid. And maybe it’s because back then several tractors had narrow front tires. Meaning the front wheels were right under the hood and ran down the middle of the road, so maybe that kept the grass down.

Dad bought a ‘wide’ front end for the 730 tractor at some point. It had to do with mowing hay and how you didn’t want to run over what you had just cut. It also gives the tractor more stability, but that wasn’t such a big deal back then. There were even some tractors that had single front tires. (Dad used to talk about getting new rear tires on the 630 tractor, then mowing in the calf pen where there is a pretty good hill and the tractor slid sideways down the hill because the lugs on the new tires were too straight.) After he arrived at the bottom, unscathed, after he got off and kissed the ground and thanked the Lord, he ordered different tires to be put on the tractor. Not that wide front tires would have helped that. All tractors have wide front ends now. And we have a grassy strip down the middle of the road.

Along the lines of ‘remember when’, I miss grocery stores loading your groceries. I know there are a few that will still. Was that a convenience or not? Seems like it would have been. The store employees wouldn’t have to go get carts and there wouldn’t be cart corrals taking up parking spaces. Let alone checking ourselves out in the store. Barlows, which was the ‘fancy’ grocery store when I was growing up, had an underground grocery delivery system. They had two lines of cars picking up groceries; the groceries were put in totes, which came up in an island between two lanes. Faster service, I guess. We never went there. It just sounds like a cool idea. Only once in my life do I remember going to a full-service gas station. It was prom night, and I was in a tux. I got full service that night. No inuendo intended.

I talked about all the acorns a couple weeks ago. Mixed in with the acorns is goose poop. Rochester is known for the Giant Canadian Goose. There are mixed opinions about those gooses. They used to be bragged about and families would travel from all over to see and feed the 5000+ geese at Silver Lake. The power plant discharged warm water into the lake, so it never froze over, which is why the geese liked it so well. As you can imagine, that is a lot of goose poop. I remember the city buying a ‘Mean Green Poop Machine’. The local Post Bulletin had a snipped about it.

“The Green Machine’s days were less bright. Ballyhooed on its arrival as the same equipment put to work around Buckingham Palace (a certain park department leader was heard to exclaim that if it was good enough for the queen of England, it was good enough for the city of Rochester), in the end all the machine delivered was a big, filthy smear to rival that of any political mudfight.”

The machine arrived in May of 1999. It sat in storage for a long time and was ultimately traded in on something else in roughly 2015. They tried hard to market them; there was goose poop art, and the goose is on the Rochester city flag.

There was talk of an updated city flag. I don’t know what became of that since the new design finalists in 2018.

Mother Clucker was down to 9 chicks last time we saw them. They’ve pretty much decided they don’t have to listen to Mom anymore and they spread out all over on their own. She seems to have abandoned them; or at least given up shepherding them. The last few days we just haven’t been down there or around enough to see them. Last night when they were all in the pen, I only found 5 MC Chicks. Four were on one side, one was all alone in mama’s old nesting spot, and all the spring chicks were jammed in behind the screen door. It’s possible there’s more chicks in there somewhere.

My soybeans have begun to turn yellow. You can see from the header photo, they’re not even Humphrey tall. Once they start turning yellow, within a few days the entire field will be yellow, then the leaves all off. Harvest could be a month out yet for me. Some guys will be going any day now.

Had my young friend Josh out last week to climb on the roof and do all those things I *shouldn’t* do anymore.

He made it look so easy! He made it look like I should be able to do that. And I’d climb to the top of the ladder…but that last step from ladder to roof, I just don’t feel comfortable, nor trust myself, doing it. And I didn’t. And he got it all taken care of. Over the new shop area, he replaced the old poly skylights with steel, and replaced a missing skylight down in the pole barn. I checked a couple more things off the list.

If you can’t beat them, join them. Discussion?

2023, animals, Automotive, Family, Farming Update, gardening, Nature, Seasons

Summer “Farming”

51 Comments

The weekend Farm Report comes to us from Ben.

Thankfully theaters are equipped with AC these days.  This week was all about theater.  

I was at the Rochester Repertory Theater Monday and Tuesday evenings finishing lighting and dress rehearsals for ‘I and You’ by Lauren Gunderson. That opened on Thursday with a preview audience on Wednesday so that Wednesday night I was headed to the town of Chatfield, 20 miles South of Rochester to begin lighting ‘Hello Dolly’. I drove down on Monday with my friend Paul to scope out the place since I didn’t work there last summer, and the building had a lot of renovations done. Potter Auditorium, built in 1936, is attached to an elementary school built in 1916. 

The theater was renovated in 2016. The renovation done to the school revealed the original skylights and main beams in a ‘great room’. It removed a lot of steps and ramps and various levels and added more bathrooms and elevators. It’s pretty nice.

I started working in Potter Auditorium in 1986, building the set for ‘Annie’ for $500. My dad and brother helped me carry 40 sheets of 4×8 particle board up from the basement to cover the gym floor (because of course it was a ‘gymnatorium’) and we couldn’t mess up the basketball floor.  

The next year I built the set for ‘Barnum’, and the next year, some kind of original talent show.  

Working in Chatfield always feels like going home. Lots of good memories there. There wasn’t AC until the 2016 renovation. Back in the 80’s, hornets would come in and buzz around on their backs on the floor. I’d walk over and step on them. Good times.  

I recently heard someone mention how, when they were a young kid, their dad talked about hunting and outdoor sports so that’s why they hunt now. And I thought, I got mail order books, and Disney records of Musicals. Mary Poppins, Robin Hood, Bedknobs and Broomsticks. Hmmm.    

I mentioned we had hail last Saturday. I notified crop insurance, and they assigned an adjuster. Haven’t met with him yet.

It knocked some oats out and beat up the corn and soybeans a bit. Left some marks on our cars too.  

The ceiling insulation for the shop was blown in on Wednesday. The ball is back in my court to start working again.  

I started cutting oats on Tuesday. It was so hot the swather wouldn’t run right and it left me walking home twice. And then we got an inch of rain Tuesday night. Because of course now it would rain.

Also Tuesday the electrician buried the new electric line to the shop. He cut the phone line, which I didn’t need to the shop anymore. He also found the phone line from 1968 when we lived in the machine shed while the house was being built.  

And then he found the current electric line to the old shop. The one my dad buried in the 1950’s and the one being replaced. It was 30 feet from where I thought it was. So, he changed course. Oops; found it again. Thinking back; there was a ravine and a tree there, so I guess Dad had to go around the tree. Maybe that’s why it was way over where it shouldn’t have been.  

But this guy is an electrician, and he was able to fix it; no harm, no foul.

Here is Kelly posing with her new Gator.

We like it better than the old one already.  

WHAT’S YOUR FAVORITE DISNEY MOVIE OR SONG?   PLEASE RESPOND BY SINGING IT.  

2023, Automotive, books, Fantasy, Food, Kids, Travel

Road Trip

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When I was packing for a long weekend in Madison, I noticed Henrietta watching me from her spot on my little dresser.  Since Henrietta was a gift from my Madison friend, I thought I would take her along.  She seemed excited to be on the move.

It was overall a very lazy and relaxing weekend – we spent a lot of time sitting and reading but we did have a few outings so Henrietta could get some fresh air!

We did the farmer’s market at the capital.  Henrietta enjoyed meeting some of the vendors and smelling all the good smells.  We stopped at the library to pick up a couple of books and then had to have ice cream from Sassy Cow, a great creamery close to my friend’s house.  Henrietta met two little girls there who petted and hugged her.

My friend is seriously considering buying a Tesla so we had a loaner for the weekend.  Henrietta enjoyed the view but didn’t get to drive because she couldn’t reach the pedals.  We drove up to Lake Merrimac and took the ferry across and back.  Henrietta appointed herself “authorized personnel” but since the ferry ride is only four minutes, she didn’t get to flex that authority!

All in all a great trip although Henrietta is not a great conversationalist so the drive to and from Madison was a little quiet!

Who do you like to travel with?