Category Archives: Family

2026, Family, Farming Update, Kids, Seasons

Second Summer

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This week’s farming update from Ben

Sure has been beautiful weather. I’ve seen just a couple fields of soybeans standing yet, a lot of corn has gone out. The dry weather has been perfect for the farmers with cattle on that make round bales out of the corn stalks. It’s been dry and they haven’t had a rain threat and it’s really been nice for that work. 

On Wednesday we had two groups from possibilities out for hayrides. It was much nicer weather than the previous week but some of the clients still expected hot chocolate and while I am out doing the ride, Kelly is making hot chocolate. Everyone really seemed to enjoy it. Tuesday morning daughter and I saw a bald eagle as we were headed in, and then Wednesday on the hayride, they got to see another bald eagle.

Friday morning we did another group, a little windy but certainly warmer than they would’ve had last Friday. It can’t last forever, but it sure is nice while it does. This group also had hot chocolate.

After the hayride, I loaded up some scrap metal on a trailer and hauled that in. Finally got one thing off my list. Then I picked up the fence scrap that I tore out last weekend, the cattle panels, and an old bulk tank that had been used as a water tank, loaded that on the trailer and will get that delivered at some point.

Going to the scrapyard, I followed a combine and a big tractor about 2 miles on a busy county road. It was quite a line going at 20 mph. Corn heads come in different widths, and a six row corn head, at 30 inch rows, is about 15 feet wide. That’s pretty much a full lane of traffic. Anything bigger than that and they take the head off before driving on the road. Many farmers have 12 row corn heads. There’s a few 16’s and 18’s. But that’s a lot of weight, and a lot of corn coming in, and you need a pretty big machine that can handle all that. The big thing now is folding corn heads. So on a 12 row head, three outside rows on each side fold up over the middle making it about as wide as the machine itself and then they don’t have to take it off to travel on the roads. They’re very popular for the convenience factor. Seems like they’re also very expensive. Google tells me a slightly used 16 row folding head is listed at $254,500. Honestly, when you think about the engineering involved to make it fold, it’s pretty impressive.

Photo courtesy John Deere
FB image. Head folded and traveling. They do seem to obstruct vision a bit.

After the Wednesday hayride, I needed to put the wagon back in the shed. Because of where other machinery was parked, I had to make an S curve backing into the shed. If you look at this photo, the purple line was my intended route. And the green line is how it really went. 

I do like to challenge myself…
There’s a big difference between backing a 2 wheel trailer vs a 4 wheel wagon. Two wheels are easier. 
When I was a kid, there was a tractor rodeo at the fair. It involved backing things up, two and four wheels. Around corners, and into spaces and Dad really wanted me to do it. I refused. Eventually I got pretty good at backing things up, but it takes practice and I didn’t have it at 14. I’ve never like competitions.
And judging by the green lines, I’m out of practice again. After Friday’s ride I put the wagon back in the shed. I did better. Practice makes perfect.

I’ve kinda run out of music in the theater shop lately. I just can’t find anything really interesting to me. Nothing turning my crank. 
I did some Latin Jazz, I did Rush, I tried Johnny Cash and nothing is really floating my boat this week. I’m saving the soundtrack of All That Jazz for next week. That will be tech week. “Nothing is personal during tech week.”

HOW ARE YOU AT BACKING UP?

WHAT SHOULD WE FOLD?

2026, Family, Food, home, pets

Who’s In Charge?

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Freya is extremely food motivated.  I’m pretty sure if I left a 40-pound bag of dog food open in the kitchen, she would eat until she popped.  She’s not eating me out of house and home, although I’m going to need a separate line on my budget for dog treats.  The good news is that combined with her smarts, it makes it very easy to work on training. 

Of course, I’m not sure who’s being trained.

Nimue is not all that food motivated.  If she feels like it, she’ll show up at meal time but sometimes she comes down later to partake.  She does have dry food out all the time so she’s certainly not going hungry.   She does have one exception; she loves her Friskies Party Treats.  If I shake the jar (I keep them on my bedstand), she comes right away. 

The treat parade started when Guinevere was young.  If her stomach went empty too long, she’d throw up bile – ick.  So I began giving her a couple of dog treats in the morning to tide her over an hour or so before breakfast.  This was when I started giving Nimue a couple of treats as well.  Took a few tries to find that she loves Friskies.  I’m not sure when the two of them convinced me that they should also get a few treats at bedtime.  7:30 p.m. to be specific. 

It took Freya about a day to realize that there were treats to be had when the kitty was getting her Yums.  It took her about another day to figure out that 7:30 was the magic hour each night.  So now, they are both presenting themselves at 7:30 for treats.  See the header photo for the “Gimme treats” eyes.  And they will both lie to me if necessary.  Last night I got home late with Freya from dog class and Nimue blatantly lied to me about getting her treats.  When I asked YA, she confirmed that she had given Nimue treats at 7:30 in my absence!

Clearly where treats are involved, I’m not in charge.  And I’m not highly motivated to change that.  Maybe I should get a treat at 7:30!

Do you have any nightly rituals (with or without pets)?

2026, Family, gardening, History, home, Nature, Uncategorized

Raking Leaves

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Where is it written that people have to rake the leaves off of their lawns every fall, so that no leaves remain? We have neighbors here in MN and had neighbors in ND who worked daily in the fall to remove any traces of leaves. We are not raking people.

In our ND town the City was of no help to people who needed leaves hauled away. People had to haul them away to the landfill themselves. Of course, this was the City that wouldn’t remove snow from residential streets unless 4 or more inches had fallen. (It’s going to melt eventually anyway, and we don’t have it in our budget to plow anything but major arteries.)

Luverne has a much different attitude about this. I attribute it to the proximity to Northwest Iowa and a Dutch influence regarding neatness. The other day while it was raining we saw several street sweeping machines washing streets. The City sends out leaf suckeruppers several days in October and November to remove leaves that residents have swept into the gutter. Snow of any amount is also plowed up.

We like to leave the leaves for ground cover and pollinators. We sweep up leaves that collect on the sidewalk or deck, though. I remember the smell of burning leaves in the fall when I was a child, and loved it when my mom and dad would make leaf piles for me to jump in. Leaf burning is illegal now, I think. I am glad we have better things to do now than rake.

What are your leaf raking, leaf jumping memories? Are you a raker?

2026, Family, Kids, Music, Theatre, Uncategorized

12 Incompetent Jurors

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Boommate and I were driving past the high school yesterday on our way back home from exercise class when we noticed an ad for the upcoming high school fall play 12 Incompetent Jurors.

We both thought it would be a fun play to see. I looked it up when we got home. It is a parody of 12 Angry Men and is about the jury deliberations in a case in which a man has confessed to stealing a number of cats. One of the Jurors doubts the facts in the case and holds out on a guilty verdict. Chaos apparently ensues.

I never was in plays in musicals in high school, although I was on the speech team and gave dramatic interpretations of Anna Christie and Long Days Journey Into Night. As a musician I was in the pit orchestra for Li’l Abner, The Music Man, and Bye Bye Birdie. I was too introverted to try out for a role in the non-musical productions. Looking back, I regret that. Our children were braver. Our son was a dancing/ singing cowboy in Oklahoma and our daughter was one of the wives in The King and I in high school.

Were you in plays or musicals in high school or college? Do you attend productions at your local high school? If you could go back in time, what role would you want in a play or musical?

2026, Family, History, Radio, Uncategorized

A Matter Of Grave Importance

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Today’s post comes from Occasional Caroline.

My great grandfather, Oscar Elmer, was sent as a missionary to start a Presbyterian church in Moorhead, MN in 1871. In May of 1874 his brother, John, came to visit from New York. Unfortunately, John Edger Elmer fell into the Red River and drowned. The normal procedure would have been to have his body returned to New York to be buried in the family plot in a cemetery in their home town, but John’s body was not recovered from the river until nearly a week after he disappeared and had deteriorated past the point where it could be shipped East. The town did not have a cemetery and the typical burial in Moorhead at the time would be on the property of the deceased’s family. Since Oscar did not own property he recruited some men from the town to help him bury his brother in a temporary location between two trees, with a rope tied to the trees to mark the grave.

The lack of a proper burial site prompted Reverend Elmer to organize a committee of residents to establish Moorhead ‘s first cemetery. In 1875, a railroad company was persuaded to sell a 5-acre parcel of land to the city for $1 and the cemetery came to be. John Elmer’s body was moved from the tree-marked grave and re-buried in the new cemetery.

Fast forward to 1971 when a 29-year-old man from St. Paul was giving a poetry reading at Moorhead State University. While walking through the town the next morning he happened upon Moorhead ‘s Prairie Home Cemetery. He had been trying to come up with a title for the radio program he was planning, and Prairie Home caught his attention. He changed Cemetery to Companion and the rest is history.

The photo of John Edger Elmer’s gravestone was taken by my cousin’s daughter on recent visit to Moorhead. She is a genealogist and John Elmer’s great great grandniece and Oscar Elmer’s great great granddaughter.

Any family cemetery stories? Where do you want your final resting place to be?

2026, Automotive, Business, Family, Mysteries

Forwards / Backwards

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When YA and I out together, I drive 99.9% of the time.  She likes to keep her car pristine which means driving it as little as possible; I get nervous being in the passenger seat when she drives.   So, me doing the driving is better for both of us.

Of course YA doesn’t think that being the passenger relieves her of the duty to backseat drive.  She wants to me move to another lane is the traffic is too slow for her.  She wants me to move back to the right lane sooner if our exit is coming up.  She wants to make sure I’m going at least the speed limit at all times.  She thinks I leave too much space between us and the car in front of us.  For those of you who have met YA, you know she is not shy about sharing my “failings” with me.  Ignoring her or “I am aware” are my usual modi operandi.

Parking is often an issue for her.  She is forever instructing me to back into parking spots so we can pull straight out when we leave.  Since I detest backing into parking spots (can’t even remember the last time I did), I always decline.  I’m pretty sure that the time it takes for me to back in is longer than the time to back out into the parking lot.  YA is adamant that it would save time.  I told her once that I didn’t want to stress myself out to do something would only save a nano-second.  She quickly replied that all those nano-seconds over a lifetime might add up.  Pretty fast thinking on her part but how would I ever know if it had added up?  I doubt on my deathbed and I’ll get a sign that I had 25 more minutes because of the times I backed in.

I was thinking of this last week when I was at the Dunkin drive-though very early.  The only three cars in the lot were parked in the very farthest corner from the building and all were backed in.  My first thought was that you must really be glad to be done with work if you need to roar out of your parking spot head-first at the end of your shift.  Made me laugh a little.  Second thought was that management “suggested” it to employees so that it would be clear that employees weren’t hogging the good customer spots.  This was the case in a few malls that I’ve worked at over the years.  Third thought was that it was a coincidence; you all know I’m not that great about coincidence.   But I’m not going to ask.

What about you?  Pull in or back in?  Any good parking stories? 

2026, Family, Government, Uncategorized, work

Unlicensed

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As always happens the first week of October, the email from the ND Board 0f Psychologist Examiners arrived reminding us that it is time to renew our licenses. Husband has been licensed since 1991. I have been licensed since 1994.

This year is different for us, since neither of us is renewing our licenses. We are retired. We no longer live in ND, and we haven’t accrued the 40 hours of continuing education over the past two years necessary to maintain our licenses., which formally expire January 1, 2027. We plan to email the Board office this week to let them know we aren’t renewing. Husband will also step down as the Board Investgator of ethical complaints against licensees on January 1.

I have mixed feelings about all this; happy to be retired and not having to pay for relicensure, wistful about letting go of a huge part of my identity. Husband notes with great irony that the Board is trying to enlist two licensees to do the complaint investigations that he did all by himself.

I was the Board president for 8 years, and I remember hearing from the Board office about people who initially decided to let their licenses expire when they retired, who then decided at the last minute to renew, and needed an extension from the Board to complete their continuing education hours. That will NOT happen for us. Done is done, but my, I will miss it.

Did your employment or some other aspect of your life form your identity? How has your identity changed over the years? Ever file a complaint against a licensed. service provider?

2026, books, Family, Gatherings, Uncategorized, Words

Reading Aloud

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Husband and I read aloud to our children countess hours when they were little. We were both really good at expressive character voices.

I was a little disappointed realizing that our new church here in Luverne had a much reduced music ministry compared to our ND church. The choir sings only perhaps once every couple of months instead of every Sunday. We have found a new and fun niche, however, in being readers of the scriptures, Psalms, and prayers during services. The pastor reads the Gospel passages.

Our fellow church members really like the way we read. Husband says I speak very clearly and read expressively as though there are children listening (which there are). Some people who had my mother as a Grade 3 teacher or knew her well tell me my voice is just like hers. They seem to find it comforting. When Husband reads you can tell he understands everything he is reading and imparts that meaning. Last Sunday I had to read a selection from Isaiah in which the writer had God speak in a really pissed off voice. I used that sort of voice as I read. People were very appreciative and complimentary.

We have choir rehearsal twice in the next two weeks for the Reformation Day service later in October. We only read in church about once a month. Now if we can only figure out how to get more reading time in with our grandchildren.

How would describe your reading voice? What might you like to read aloud in public if you got the chance? Who read to you when you were a child and what were your favorite things to hear?

2026, Family, Gatherings, History, Uncategorized

Men In Kilts

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We are just back from our family gathering in Colorado. We stayed at a hotel in the Highlands Ranch area of Denver, close to Littleton, where Husband’s stepmother lives. As we were getting out of our taxi when we arrived at the hotel I saw an older man in full Scots regalia in the parking lot, including a kilt and bagpipes.

The Colorado Highland Games were held September 26th -27th here, and our hotel was the center of activity for a meeting of the Clan Hay Society. There was a load of older guys in kilts walking around the hotel lobby and eating in the dining room. The dining room had to be closed early on Saturday as the cook became overwhelmed by all the Clan Hay members dining there. We had to order out. We also saw several women in long dresses, fancy bodices, and animal skins around their shoulders.

Sunday and Monday saw the kilted guys again. Many were eating breakfast or just socializing. We even saw Lord Larry Hay, son of the current Scottish chief the Earl of Erroll, in the lobby. He was dressed in a suit. Husband’s sister in law is a Campbell with grandparents who were born in Scotland, and she was quick to introduce herself to Clan Hay members. She acknowledges the Campbells were simply awful people, but none of the Clan Hay members shied away or denounced her as a traitor. (She once had a Scots store clerk in Portland do that. )

The Clan Society members all appeared to be in their 60’s and 70’s. Many had long hair in ponytails. They looked so proud in their kilts and I got the impression they wore those kilts as often as they could. I imagined them going through airport security in their kilts on their way home from the meeting, and wondered what the TSA agents would make of them.

If I were to dress in traditional ethnic costume I suppose it would be Dutch, with Klompen and a pointy lace cap, and full skirt with a close fitting top. I certainly wouldn’t want to walk around all day in the wooden shoes, though.

How did your ancestors dress? What ethnic costume would you wear in public? Ever had to wear a uniform?

2026, Family, home, Mysteries, pets

Foamy Mystery

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Every rescue dog comes with its own set of baggage to sort through.  Freya loves to chew – probably some from anxiety but more likely from being caged most of her life and now finding a whole new world of tactile sensations.

Even though I pick up the toys most nights, by 9 a.m. she has most of them out of the bin and every one is missing something – an ear, a fin, a flipper.  Once she finds a way in, then she goes all in looking for the squeaker so the white toy stuffing goes all over.  Our living room right now looks like a stuffy toy abattoir.  Even the hard rubber toys are no match for her little shark teeth.

Unfortunately, it’s not just toys.  We realized right away that pretty much anything is fair game.  It took YA a bit longer to come to terms with this – she’s lost a shoe, a slipper and a pair of shorts.  We’ve taken to limiting her smorgasbord a bit right now by putting up gates to keep her in a smaller area and by keeping a very close eye on her.

She is however quite stealthy and if your attention is elsewhere, she can get around you quite nicely.  On Saturday I spent some time on the phone with one of my BFFs from Madison.  I had been upstairs before the call and when I came down, I neglected to put up the gate at the bottom of the stairs.  A few minutes into my call, I looked up and saw Freya chewing what looked like a big chunk of yellow foam.  At first I figured she had gutted a stuffy but most toys these days are white fiber fill; I also didn’t see any stuffy carcasses nearby.  When I took it from her and headed toward the trash, I noticed more yellow foam on the landing.  I had reconfigured the dog bed situation upstairs so I thought that maybe Freya didn’t like my renovation. 

When I got off the phone, I went to check it out.  No trail of yellow foam to the landing. No cover to whatever the item had been.  Both upstairs dog beds were intact.  In fact, everything upstairs was intact.  I even checked rooms with closed doors.  I moved the gate to YA’s room and looked around in there.  Bupkiss.  I even did a slow-pan video of her room and sent it to her (she’s out of town for work) and she says it looks fine.  We haven’t replaced bathroom rug yet.  All my pillows are fine.  Downstairs everything in order.  Piano bench fine, dining room chairs fine, breakfast room dog kennel fine (I checked this twice).  Not one bit of yellow foam anywhere else.

At this point I have given up looking for whatever it was in its past life.  I’m figuring that in three months or so I’ll be looking for something, won’t be able to find it and a lightbulb will go off.  Maybe.

Have you lost anything lately that you think you might find… eventually?  Any mysteries in your life this week?