There are two State Highways that intersect our town. One goes east/west. The other goes north/south. The east/west route, known as Highway 10 or Villard Street, runs through our business district. The railroad runs parallel to it. There are, at intervals on either side, extremely large, full-sized billboards. Most are for local insurance agencies, for local companies advertising for new employees, or are displays of pro-life messages from our local Roman Catholic organizations.
I was rather astonished the other day to see a new billboard by the Hardees fast food restaurant boldly declare “SAY ‘NO’ TO INCONTINENCE” in huge letters with very little other information on it. Husband got a better look at it, as I was driving, and said it was for some sort of women’s spa.
I have no difficulty rejecting incontinence. Who would? I just wonder if this would make a successful advertising slogan.
What are some of your favorite or least favorite advertising slogans? Any beloved or despised jingles?
It sure has been windy the last few days. No matter what the temperature is, a wind like this makes it colder. I’m lucky we haven’t had trees down over our road or any of the township roads… knocking on wood.
Ducks and chicken numbers are status quo. But I’ve noticed the black and white ducks are getting a green tint on their heads.
A little research shows they’re “Black Swedish” breed. Back this summer I ordered ‘Mixed Ducklings’ so really didn’t have any idea what I was getting. The cream colored ones are “Saxony” and the ones with the pouf are “White Crested” of course. And the ones that look like mallards but are a little heavier and don’t fly are “Rouen”. It seems odd to me they don’t lay nearly as many eggs as the chickens. Just seems like they should be laying more than they do… usually come spring I might get one or two ducks that lay eggs for a while. Usually out in the middle of the yard. Then it depends if me or Bailey finds them first.
And now that the weather is cooling the turkeys have started grouping up. It won’t be unusual to see a group of 30 or 40. Saw this bunch in the fields yesterday
Dumb turkeys… Once there is snow cover, they’ll be down in the yard eating under the bird feeders in the backyard and trying to get the corn I put out for the ducks and chickens. The dogs love chasing them away, but those stupid turkeys are smart too. They know Humphrey is in the house and Bailey is sleeping out front, so they sneak in the back. And when we do chase them away, they’re back in a few minutes… rotten turkeys. I haven’t even mentioned the herds of deer.
I think most of the redwing black birds have moved on now. Caught a cool picture of them on a trailcam the other day.
I get pretty excited when the birds return in the spring. The Red Wing Blackbirds, the Killdeer, and, of course, our favorite, the barn swallows. Even the turkey vultures returning is another sign of spring.
The Co-op called; they finished the grid sampling and said I could go ahead and chisel plow now. My plan is to spend much of Saturday out doing that. Due to crop rotation, every other year will be more soybean acres than corn acres and soybean ground doesn’t need to be plowed up in the fall. This was a soybean heavy year, which means I don’t have all that many acres to work up. In the old days (the “old days”) it was done with the moldboard plow and it made the ground all black because it turned over ALL the residue and buried it. That black surface is great come spring because it allows the soil to warm up sooner and that’s still important. Then we started doing ‘Conservation tillage’ and leaving more residue on the surface, which is important to prevent wind and water erosion plus it conserves moisture underneath. But too much trash on the surface keeps the soil cooler and wetter come spring. Conservation tillage doesn’t use the moldboard plow, it uses a 4” wide twisted ‘Shovel’ to throw up some dirt, but not necessarily bury it completely. The Chisel plow I use is like that. The last few years the hot new term is ‘Vertical Tillage’. I’m still not sure exactly what it is. But there’s a whole new line of shiny equipment to help me do it!
Photo credit: TractorHouse
It’s more about cutting up the residue and burying it a little bit to help decomposition over winter, but again, not turning the surface black. And again, we do want at least a strip of black soil to warm up and dry out for earlier planting in the spring. So there are ‘strip till’ machines that can make a strip a few inches wide while doing the tillage. And then in the spring the idea is to plant into that same strip. You’ll really want GPS and auto guidance to make that work reliably.
I read an article the other day that The Honeyford grain elevator, North Dakota’s oldest cooperative elevator, is the first elevator south of the U.S.-Canadian border to load an 8,500-foot, 1.6 miles-long train. I only cross one set of railroad tracks between the college and my house. About 9:45 PM there’s a train that occasionally keeps me waiting. Some seem long, but not 1.6 miles I guess. It was interesting to read about the elevator and the train. Imagine the parking lot needed to handle that sheer number of cars let alone getting them filled! It just reminds me there are so many things that I don’t know I don’t know. It does say Honeyford Elevator is in the middle of the prairie and the nearest town is 3.5 miles away. Here’s the article: https://tinyurl.com/uys4s7rx
What’s the longest straight road you’ve been on or know of? I know one that’s 13.6 miles.
One of the types of programs that I have are called Warehouse Runs. Winners come here to Minneapolis and run through our extensive merchandise warehouse. There is a lot of energy around these programs and I love the participants who are all very excited and appreciative.
I always like to get donuts for the warehouse crew the morning of a run. Having their work schedule and plans disrupted by all the festivities can’t be fun for the warehouse workers so I like to reward them a little bit for their hard work. Yesterday morning was the first in two years that I’ve been down to the donut bakery I like in Bloomington; it’s an old-fashioned kind of shop with all the old favorites and nothing pretentious. After I picked up the donut order and was leaving the little shop, I noticed that the back of the “Open” sign didn’t say “Closed” – it now says “Sold Out – See You Tomorrow!”
It was a nice change to see that a little local business is not only surviving but apparently thriving. It must be quite satisfying to be selling out so often that they can rely on a sold out sign. I’m having to find a new lunch caterer for my warehouse programs since the previous caterer (who was excellent) wasn’t able to hold on through pandemic. Along with too many others. So while I was happy to be supporting them again and that they are doing well, it was tinged with a little sadness for the other businesses that have suffered.
You can have your favorite donut or pastry this morning. No cost, no travel and no calories. What will you have?
The big news around here is all the airline disruption the last couple of weeks. As if there aren’t enough problems with travel right now, getting stuck for hours (or days!) when you’re just trying to get home to your own bed is no fun at all. One of my co-workers was on the way home and got stuck in Dallas. And because so many other folks were likewise waylaid, he couldn’t find a hotel near the airport; getting too far from the airport wasn’t a good idea, as flights and flight times were changing minute by minute. Two nights sleeping in DFW. He wasn’t the only one, judging by the news.
I’ve had my fair share. On my trip to Kenya, the flight from Minneapolis to New York was late; I ran and made the flight to Nairobi, but my bag didn’t. It didn’t catch up with me until four days later so I was washing clothes out in the sink every night. I slept in Chicago’s O’Hare once – similar to my co-worker, too far to get to an available hotel and then get back. Once a flight I was on out of Madrid turned back because the door of the landing gear wouldn’t shut. (Apparently the drag caused by that open door would have meant we didn’t have enough fuel to get to the U.S.) The airline eventually put us up in a hotel near the airport. It was the smallest hotel room I’ve ever been in – not much bigger than a shoebox. I also got stuck overnight in Costa Rica when a flight cancelled. That one was actually fun as I was traveling with my client, her husband and the account exec on the program. We got hotel rooms, ordered pizza, watched some football; the only downside was the horrendous lines at the airport in the morning because the computer system didn’t want to have two flights with the same number on one day.
Whenever I have issues traveling I think back to Hawaii by James Michener. He describes in quite a bit of detail the ship that they sailed from Massachusetts, down around South America and on to Hawaii. If I’m ever tempted to complain, I just compare what I’m going through to spending 2 months onboard a rolling ship with personal space smaller than that small hotel room in Madrid!
“First came the billionaires, then the movie stars — now ketchup is making its mark on the space race.” (CNN November 8, 2021)
At first glance, this seemed like a silly story – Heinz had made “Marz Edition” of their ketchup using tomatoes that were produced in a controlled environment similar to what plants could expect if they were growing up on the Red Planet.
But turns out this was a serious experiment by 14 astrobiologists as part of long-term food harvesting strategy for NASA. I guess astronauts and Mars pioneers need a little more than freeze-dried ice cream (which is awful, by the way) to get by.
The ketchup will not be available to the public but there will be a big taste test tomorrow – if you are Twittered or Instagramed, you can watch it at 10 a.m. ET. For the rest of us, we’ll just have to dream.
If you have a couple of Martian acres, what would you want to grow (and would you want to garden in person or from a distance)?
I knew a young woman who was an indifferent student through high school, the kind of girl who gets lectured endlessly by school counselors who knew she could do better. Her early employment history after college was more of the same. She did what people told her to do, but not much more.
At some point she began working in the office of a company that tried to match temporary workers with jobs offered by companies who didn’t want the trouble of finding, compensating and training temp workers. Like so many companies, it was badly run. Upper management was clumsy, rewarding the wrong workers and failing to produce sound policies. And yet, like many badly run companies, this one did well enough to keep making a modest profit and thus could continue functioning as a business.
Then something strange happened. As that business grew, it assigned two young women, including my friend, to head up a new branch office. While neither of them had distinguished herself in earlier assignments, this was different. Both women had been paying attention to the shortcomings of their business and had thoughts about how they might do better. The two women threw themselves into an effort to run their office in an exemplary way. They did not expect their model to lift up the whole business, and in fact it did not. They didn’t expect their excellence to be identified and rewarded, and in fact it was not. And yet they experienced the rare joy of managing the only effective office in an organization that continued to limp along with shoddy practices.
Good things happen when people take pride in their work. We all have known workers who slacked off whenever possible, but we have also encountered workers who set a high personal standard for excellence. A persistent mystery in business management is exactly how some workers demand a high level of work from themselves. Studies show that the level of compensation is not the critical factor. What seems more important is pride, pride of workmanship.
When I edited a small magazine I worked with writers and photographers who were badly compensated. My magazine paid so little for articles that we couldn’t demand outstanding work from contributors. Some contributors, acknowledging that we paid poorly, sold us articles that were slick and poorly written. And yet some contributors gave us good articles in spite of our amateurish payment programs.
My own work became an example. I realized that I was the untrained editor of a very badly run publication. All of us on the magazine’s staff were ignorant about making magazines. Most of us tried to do our jobs well, but the business was a sort of clown show because had never been trained and now were badly led.
And yet I came to understand that, with all its obvious faults, this was my magazine. Whether it was wretched or entertaining, I was the single person ultimately responsible for the quality of each issue. I began rewriting bad articles, trying to turn sow’s ears into silk purses. Our readers never guessed how hard I had worked to salvage shoddy original copy. It didn’t matter to me whose name was on a story. What mattered was that each article should be as funny, interesting or educational as possible. We continued to print pictures upside down, print captions riddled with misspellings and make all sorts of factual errors. But more and more, almost in spite of ourselves, we began putting out a magazine that people really liked. Our readers were on our side, hoping desperately that a magazine like ours would triumph over the amateurism, disorganization and lack of resources that continued to plague us.
Later, when I became a freelance writer/photographer, I discovered how easy it was to write articles that were marginally better than average for that field of journalism. That is, I could knock off a slick article in two hours that looked pretty good, even if it was pretentious and lacking merit. That could have encouraged me to be lazy, and yet the opposite happened. I came to value the fact it was my name on an article. I took that to be a promise that I would do the very best work I was capable of, in spite of how meager my reward might be. The longer I worked as a freelancer, the higher my standards became. It became increasingly important to put out articles I was proud of.
How did you acquire the standards you hold yourself to in your work? Have they evolved over time? Did anyone serve as a model for you of doing the job well? What gives you pride in your work?
Good grief. Is it pumpkin spice season already? Is there no product that is not marketed at this time of year without pumpkin spice? Coffee creamer. Pancake mix. Syrup. Oreos. Cookie dough. Chocolates. Candles. And of course the ubiquitous muffins, lattes and breads. Even if I liked pumpkin, this is just an onslaught. Every year!
Tell me what you like about autumn. (Or don’t like.)
Had a good rainshower Monday afternoon. One of those downpours where traffic slows, and windshield wipers are on high. I could see it coming, I was several miles from home and the sky was dark and I was hitting Every. Red. Light. At one point there was some pea size hail, just a few stones, and I was considering my odds… can I make it home? Where should I park otherwise? But I thought I could make it. (Risk taker, remember?)
And then I could see the rain coming. Boy, just a few times in my life I’ve been in rain that heavy. Thankfully only lasted a mile or so. We ended up with .87”. Thankfully no hard winds with it in our area. I did hear reports of funnel clouds in other areas.
Rain like that in the fall is tough; the crops don’t really need it anymore, and the weather is cool enough it doesn’t dry as fast as it would mid-summer. The corn is tall enough the sun can’t hit the soil and it stays wet for a week. And it just makes harvest harder because now there’s mud to deal with. So, we’ll see how that goes.
I was out checking crops last evening and I noticed that fall smell in the air. The beans are coming along. I saw several farmers out harvesting soybeans in the area today. Soybean pods are fussy; they dry out in the late morning or afternoon, but they’ll pick up moisture after dark or with the dew. Plants along the edge of the field might still be soft and mushy, but the rest of the field is dry, and the pods crack open easy, which is what you need to harvest. The corn is still looking good, it’s roughly 30% moisture which means the ears haven’t tipped down yet. Too much rain and it gets down inside the husk and can cause mold issues on the kernels. Once the corn dries more and the ears tip down, rain won’t cause mold issues.
After the discussion last week on PTO shafts, I was thinking about how some other things have changed.
Hooking up wagons or implements is different these days. One of the greatest inventions is the extendable wagon hitch. LIFECHANGING! Back when tractors were smaller and didn’t have cabs, it was easy to just look over your shoulder and you were almost looking right down at the hitch (called a drawbar) so backing up to a wagon was easy and we got real good at getting lined up so the hitch pin would drop right in. And the tractor or wagon was small enough we could nudge it a little bit to make the connection.
With a cab, sightlines changed and sometimes it’s harder to see the hole in the drawbar, so it was harder to get lined up right. Some people have added mirrors to the rear window so when the window is open, it allows one to see the hitch. (I need to do that on one of my tractors).
But now, with extendable hitches, as long as we get close, we can extend the wagon hitch to connect it, then we back up and it locks back into place. It’s wonderful! Especially when hooking a wagon to another implement, so I’m guessing where that hitch is way back there; the extendable tongues are life savers!
I remember the first wagon Dad bought with an extendable hitch. It was a remarkable thing.
Hitch pins too – at first, they were just pieces of straight rod with a washer welded on the top. Or even a large bolt if you were desperate. But again, machinery got bigger.
I made a couple hitch pins in high school welding class; that’s where I learned about hardening and how to temper them so they didn’t wear out so fast.
I had no idea I had so many hitch pins until I got them all together for this photo.
Then seed dealers started giving away hitch pins with an ACTUAL HANDLE on the top! That was another wonderful revelation! Course, on a hill it was easy for that hitch back there to drag on the ground and push the hitch pin right out. I ran one wagon through a fence and down into the calf pen when the pin came out… didn’t break anything or lose any bales, just the wagon. (And had to fix the fence). Lost the pin on the grain drill one day and didn’t notice until I got home and didn’t have a drill behind me anymore. One time the anhydrous tank came unhooked from the applicator. Knew that right away and thank goodness I was on flat ground and thanks goodness for the safety disconnect valve that separated. But getting it all hooked back up again was a struggle.
If you wanted to be safe, you put a clip in the hole at the bottom of the pin. If there WAS a hole for a clip. IF it stayed when going through cornstalks. Again, tractors and implements have gotten bigger Now I use locking pins that might be 5/8” or even 7/8” diameter. And the big tractor has something called a ‘Hammerstrap’ hitch that’s about 1 1/2” diameter. And it will actually drop itself in! (if I back up straight and hit the hitch of the implement just right. It works pretty well and it makes me laugh when It does).
In this photo the PTO shaft is the round thing above the hitch. Bigger tractors might have a pin as big as your wrist. If you imagine the pull on these machines when they’re in the ground, you can imagine why they might need a pin this big.
Duck Report. The three older ones and the younger ones are just starting to hang out together. And nobody goes in the pen anymore; they just hang out down here by the pond.
I saw a duck get a little air the other day… just a few feet, but I’ll bet it’s coming soon.
What do you remember changing your life? What’s coming soon for you?
Names are a big deal in my business. You have to have legal names for air ticketing, names for namebadges, nameplates for dinner seating, names on awards – sometimes one person can have four different names in these situations.
Over the years, I’ve seen some doozies. One couple asked for “Chief” and “Boots” on their badges – the client said no. I’ve had requests for Princess, Houdini, Sport, even the Big Lebowski. Several times participants have “exaggerated” their titles when they register for programs. It’s always pretty clear when someone’s title shows up a President of their company. I did have someone once type in “Grand Exalted Poombah” – guess he thought we didn’t really need the information and he could have some fun.
The best name I ever came across was Waightstill Scales. His nickname was Booger. And the company that he worked for had an award named after him since he was their top salesperson of all time. The Booger Scales award. And his namebadge? You guessed it, Booger Scales. I kid you not. I think you’d have to be really confident to carry that name your whole life and then to give it to your son, whose nickname was Waighty. Waighty Scales. I swear, I am not making this up.
What’s the funniest actual name you’ve heard of someone having?
My company takes the current situation very seriously. We all got a nice chunk of award points (worth merchandise and travel) for sending copies of our vaccine cards to Human Resources. There was a HUGE drawing in July for all the folks who had sent them in; a gal in the call center won the grand prize: $10,000. In addition there have been several parties (outside on our lawn) that have been specifically for folks who’ve gotten their shot. This puts us at 88% on campus.
Every Monday morning there is an email with the “rules” for coming to the physical office and listing out the most common symptoms. Among the rules is “if you’re not vaccinated you must wear a mask when you are in one of the buildings.”
An associate got fired two weeks ago. Her team had come into the office on four occasions for a day and none of them has masked. This gal eventually told someone on the team that she had not had her Fauci Ouchie. Took just a day for that tidbit to get up to HR and she was let go that Friday. While I never root for anybody to lose their job, I’m glad my company is standing behind what they say.
What’s the most epic way you’ve seen someone quit or be fired?
Trail Baboon 