Our city has a Walmart, a Menards, a Runnings, and a Tractor Supply. We also have two grocery stores. For the fancier shopping experiences at places like Target, Sam’s Club, and Costco we have to drive 100 miles to Bismarck. Macy’s is 300 miles away in Fargo.
For some reason, our Walmart store has done a complete redo of their building, with aisles in places where there were none and super polished floors. There are different, somewhat more “upscale” products, and more self checkouts. They also moved things from where we were accustomed to find them to new and strange places. The pet supplies are where the infant section was, just across from the frozen food. Shampoos and toiletries are where the pet supplies used to be. Office supplies are where the craft section was. Even in aisles that still have the same products, the products have been rearranged differently, so if we go to, say, where the distilled water used to be, we find it has been moved to the other end of the aisle from where it had been.
It has become a community joke that shopping at Walmart now takes twice as long because people can’t find what they need since it has all been moved. People laugh as they pass each other for the third or fourth time unsuccessfully finding what they are looking for. One problem is that the signs telling what are in the aisles haven’t been changed yet and the old signs are still there.
We don’t go to Walmart all that much. I go more often than Husband. He can’t stand the store as the noise is hard for him to take because of his hearing aids. I had seen some of the renovations, so when we both went to Walmart yesterday, I was somewhat prepared for the changes. Husband wasn’t at all prepared, and was bewildered by the rearrangement of items. We laughed and waved at people as we passed them multiple times as we searched. Husband says he will never go there without me, as he is afraid he will get lost and we will have to send a search party to find him.
Any bewildering changes in your big box stores? Where do you like to shop and where do you loathe to shop?
I find it ironic that today is both National Relaxation Day and National Rollercoaster Day. Neither of those things go together!
The last time I was on a rollercoaster or similar ride was almost 41 years ago on our honeymoon. We spent a week in Minneapolis-St. Paul after the wedding, which coincided with the Minnesota State Fair. Husband was insistent that we go on a ride on the midway. He chose a rather adventurous one, and, wanting to please, I agreed reluctantly to go on the ride. I hated it, I refused to scream like the others, and was pale and almost ill when the ride ended. He has never insisted that we go on any more rides together. I think the only other rides he went on were with our children.
I don’t know when I stopped liking carnival rides. I loved them as a child. I was 25 when I married, so it sure didn’t last long. As for relaxation, I am a constant worrier and pretty anxious most of the time. I can teach other people to relax, as I have done that for a living for almost as long as I have been married. People seem to like deep breathing exercises. In a pinch, holding a bag of frozen veggies also works for intense anxiety. My children both frequently thank me for passing down the Generalized Anxiety Disorder gene to them. I just smile and grab a bag of frozen corn.
What was the last carnival ride you went on? How do you relax? Who is the least anxious person you know?
We typically have pretty good luck with orders and deliveries here, that is, until recently. On July 30 I ordered six, 2 oz packages of fresh yeast on Amazon. Husband has a Nordic baking book that uses fresh yeast in the recipes. Since I had thrown out the remainder of a huge shipment of fresh yeast that I had ordered about a year ago (it got too old in the freezer) it was time to order a more manageable amount.
The order was supposed to arrive on August 5. I tried to track it on Amazon as soon as I got notification that it had shipped, but had no luck. The 5th arrived, and still no yeast. I knew it had to be kept cold or it would start to do its yeasty thing and start growing and expanding. I received a notice that it would arrive on the 9th. It didn’t. By this time, I knew something had gone amiss, and finally Amazon said that it was lost and I could have a refund. It was a bit of an ordeal, but I got the refund and ordered more. This time around I have been able to actually track where it is. It is to arrive today or tomorrow.
The most unreliable delivery service seems to be the US Postal Service. UPS, FEDEX, and Speedee Delivery all do a good job. The latter always makes me think of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood. Husband is excited that the yeast will arrive soon. I worry that it hasn’t been kept cold. We shall see.
What delivery disasters have you encountered? What are your favorite memories of Mr. Rogers or other children’s programming? What are you worrying about these days?
I grew up with a dad who had a small business and a mom who, when she wasn’t teaching, was helping my dad at his coffee shop. That left me at home to fend for myself for meals. If my mom cooked, it was usually on Sunday. During the week and after school I lived on toast, bologna sandwiches, and cereal until I was about 10 when I started to cook real food for myself. Husband grew up in a more traditional family that had three set meals a day, as his mom was a homemaker who had the time to plan and prepare meals. It was easier for me to adjust to his expectations for daily meals than it was for him to scrounge without planning. That made him anxious.
Our meals lately have been planned on the spur of the moment, as we never know what fresh veggies we may find in the garden or the Farmers Market. We can’t bear to let anything go to waste, so we are always planning how to cook up the surplus veggies that weren’t used in any dish we just cooked. So, if I cook too many white beans or chickpeas, we have to find another recipe that will use up the surplus, which usually means yet another trip to the grocery store to get what we don’t have for the new recipe to use the leftovers in.
I blame Bill, the Hutterites at the Farmers market, and the New York Times for the unusual dishes we made recently. I mentioned the other day on the Trail that we had 8 eggplant plants, and Bill commented that was a lot of Baba Ghanoush. Well, that forced me to buy a large jar of tahini, and Husband decided we should make a tahini-yoghurt sauce for some lamb burgers he cooked on the grill, and then I suggested that if we just bought one more pint of cherry tomatoes to go with the leftover pint we had from an earlier white bean caprese salad, and got some curly pasta, we could make this tahini-parmesan pasta salad recipe from the NYT. We did, and it was delicious.
The Hutterites were selling sweet corn on Saturday at the Farmers Market, and wouldn’t you know, the NYT featured a charred corn and chickpea salad with lime crema. We had limes we needed to use up. I cooked a pound of dry chickpeas and we ate that salad Saturday night. I only needed half of the chickpeas I cooked, so we had the other half last night in an Indian curry. You see how this goes.
I feel fortunate to have a love for cooking, a partner who also loves to cook, and a budget that allows us to eat the way we do. I will probably need to get another jar of tahini sometime next week, though. The eggplants have set fruit and are getting bigger.
What is your strategy for meal planning? What was your family’s pattern for meals? Favorite pasta salads?
What a week it’s been. So much going on and I pretty much hit the wall on Wednesday, but I powered through until Thursday when, after Wednesday night’s rain (2.06 then another .2″) I could stay home and have a lazy day. I may have drifted off a couple times.
We are REALLY excited about the hot and cold water faucets installed in our garage.
No more cold water dog baths! It’s kinda dumb how excited we are about this!
Plus got ‘SpongeBob, the Musical’ ready to open and that became a really fun, silly show with more witty one liners and dialogue than I realized. (When lighting a show, I’m not fully listening for the first few rehearsals; my mind is in other places. Yeah, I’m supposed to read the script first, but you, it’s only ‘Spongebob’…) The show opened last night.
Last week, I did finally finish cutting oats. I started Thursday, the swather ran for an hour and a half and died. An hour later it ran for half an hour and died. The next morning it ran for 45 minutes and died. (The generator isn’t working either, so I’d drive the gator up there and take the battery jump pack along and jump start it every time). I made some phone calls and googled symptoms for a while. This thing has a Chyrsler Slant 6 engine in it. If you know anything about cars, you know about the Slant 6. It was ubiquitous in Chrysler cars for quite a few years in the 1960’s and ’70’s. It might be the fuel pump, might be the ignition coil, hard to say. John Deere doesn’t stock any of those parts anymore, but I called a local auto parts place. The young man there– key words being ‘young man’, I knew he was too young. And when he said to me, “Is the coil that round cylinder thing?” I knew I had the wrong guy.
I called NAPA and I asked first, “Do you know what a Slant 6 is?” The guy scoffed. “Do I know what a slant 6 is!” OK, good. I can talk to this guy. He told me when he first started working for NAPA he was in a small farming town, and being a city boy, he didn’t know what a ‘swather’ was. He learned fast. THIS was the right guy to talk with. I replaced the ignition coil and a resistor, and it ran for 45 minutes and quit. But an hour later, it ran for 3 hours. And I was THIS CLOSE to finishing all the oats. It was 9:15 at night and dark and while there are two headlights on the swather, they don’t really light enough to see anything. And then, feeling optimistic and picturing being done, like the MN Vikings, it let me down. (Sorry for the dig. Courtesy of my brother in law, on Friday Kelly got to spend some time at the Vikings Training Camp with our daughter in law, Michelle.) The next morning, I finished cutting the last of the oats in about 15 minutes and drove it home. I guess I’ll replace the points, condenser, and fuel pump, and get the generator repaired, and maybe next year it will run better.
In places, it looks like the deer wrapped their tongues around the plant and stripped the grain right off; it was just stalks. In places it was broken off or down. And in some places it looked OK.
I’ll talk more about the harvest next week. But it wasn’t good.
I couldn’t find the ducks one morning. They have found the pond. They will do a good job cleaning up the algae. And we lost one. There was a carcass down there one morning. Shucks.
We’ve decided to have the barn painted. And I don’t want to do it, nor do I want to be climbing the ladder to the peak, nor should I be climbing up there. Twenty some years ago when I painted it last, I put the extension ladder in the loader bucket and put that up on the roof of this lean-to. And I still couldn’t reach the peak. I’ve done some dumb stuff, but not usually the same thing twice.
I happen to see a guy painting the building where daughter attends, and we’ve hired them to paint the barn. They’re out power washing the old paint off this week.
I had some good volunteers helping with theater stuff again.
One teenage padawan, Max, is back, so he and a volunteer met me at Menards and they loaded up 35 sheets of 1/4″ plywood (we call it ‘lauan’ which is kind of a general term) while I paid for it, and then I met them outside to load it.
The three of us carried it into the theater. Then two more helpers arrived and the lumber yard truck showed up with two guys and the 7 of us hauled 25 sheets of 3/4″ plywood inside. It was too dang hot to work much harder than that. Plus the sprinkler repair guys were there and they moved a sprinkler pipe that was in a sightline from the booth.
One of my high school friends is a rather successful composer and music teacher who studied composition in Paris with Nadia Boulanger. I wasn’t too surprised to hear that my friend has decided to move permanently to France.
I can’t imagine what is involved in such a move. It is complicated enough planning a 500 mile move to Luverne in the next year or so. I don’t imagine it is at all financially possible to move one’s entire household to another continent. I marvel at how my ancestors left Europe, leaving what they had and starting over in a new place thousands of miles from home. There were a few precious items that were packed and transported, but everything else was left behind.
The last time we made a long distance move was when we moved to ND from Indiana in 1987. We didn’t have much then, and the move wasn’t too hard. We have a lot more stuff now. Husband has agreed that he has way too many books and is bravely starting to cull them. They will go to the local library’s used book store. He has agreed that his old college philosophy books will go to the landfill. He insists that we are moving the piano to Minnesota.
Every time I go in the basement or garage, I cast a critical eye on our possessions there. Do we move dozens of empty canning jars? What about the book cases if we are getting rid of the books? Do we move the bean poles, soaker hoses, and tomato cages, or buy new after we move? How about the snow shovels and rakes? In some respects, getting rid of it all and just starting over from scratch seems more simple, but I know it isn’t possible.
What is the longest distance you have moved households? What did your ancestors bring with them to the US when they immigrated? What country would you move to if you decided to immigrate?
But it’s related to Ben’s Farm Reports – since he’s not providing me with my periodic poofy duck fix, I had to go out an do it myself!
YA took a Road Day (days off that she is allotted whenever she has a program that runs over a weekend) and decided that we needed to head off into the wilds of Wisconsin to pet and feed deer and other assorted animals.
It was a lovely day at Fawn-Doe-Rosa. They’re a little overloaded with deer this year.. mild winter made for some increase along with a duo of surprise triplets. The obligatory baby goats, two beautiful baby gray foxes were the new additions this year. I spent a fair amount of time feeding the llamas, alpacas, baby horses and donkeys. The adorable Highland steer from the past two years has moved to a nearby farm because he doubled in size from last year so not safe to have little kids trying to feed and pet him.
We had packed a picnic lunch and found a shady spot overlooking the lake. (I made pasta salad this morning using green beans, tomatoes, pepper and basil from my garden.) Overall incredibly relaxing and fun. And I was glad to see more improvements this year – a new baby animal area along a large “interactive” building that is under construction. Can’t wait til next year to see how it turns out!
Husband and I were contemplating the possibility that we would have a bumper crop of eggplants, and sat down together in the living room to search the New York Times Food app and other on-line sites for eggplant recipes in the event our fears came true. Husband commented that it was such a nice thing to be able to sit down with one’s partner of many years and do something as simple and as satisfying as hunt for recipes, and that this was a wonderful example of senior romance. He then told me that he ran across a You Tube video of a song by Holly Williams, and that it reminded him of my parents. He played the video for me. It was quite sweet. She wrote it about her grandparents.
This brought to mind the Nanci Griffith number that I have always loved:
Both my sets of grandparents were married for more than 50 years, and were pretty devoted, but also pretty crabby with each other at times. I remember taking care of my paternal grandfather while my grandmother was having gall bladder surgery, I was about 17, and he needed care as he had a stroke and was paralyzed on his left side and had his left leg amputated due to diabetes. He was always pretty stoic, but told me out of the blue while I was helping him get his prosthesis on that “She’s a pretty good grandma, you know”, which was his way of telling me that he was worried about her and he wanted her to come home.
Who are the most devoted older couples you know?Other examples of sweet senior romance in songs or stories?
Every eight weeks we get a call from the Memorial Blood Center. I assume it’s because her name is before mine in the alphabet; YA gets the first call and usually before I even get my call, she has come to me to pick out a good date for us.
We went down to our local center as usual but unlike usual, YA got light-headed afterwards and instead of grabbing a snack, put her head down on the table where we were sitting. This was like an alarm bell going off in the center. Suddenly there were five folks around us, one bringing a cool cloth, one bringing a wheelchair, two helping to get YA into the wheelchair and one poor gal, who was just hovering but didn’t seem to have a specific job. YA actually lost consciousness for a second in the wheelchair.
The phlebotomist (what a great word) who had done my draw was the one who appointed himself as YA’s guardian while she recovered. He was very knowledgeable and answered all our questions. OK, all of my questions. He was very clear about what he was doing and how long before the next “check-in”. It was very comforting for the anxious mother. YA stayed reclined for about 45 minutes before we took off. She wanted Taco Bell on the way home and then she spent the rest of the afternoon in bed, watching tv.
I asked if this has soured her on giving blood. She said she doesn’t think so. Guess we’ll know in another six weeks or so!
The weather is changing. The rain has stopped and the temps and humidity are up. I’ve turned on the chickens fan, and got the ducks in their outside pen. The ducks are at that awkward stage where a gallon of water last them half a day, everything‘s wet, and they chewed off the string on the bottom of a brand new sack of feed so then I had an open tube that used to have 50 pounds of feed in it. It was time to get them outside.
This was a mixed assortment of ducklings so I don’t really know what I’ve got yet, although six of them are all black, a couple are twice the size of a couple others, and like most teenagers, we just gotta get through this phase.
It takes a while for the ducks to learn how to get back in again at night, which means for now, Kelly and I have to wrangle them back inside. Everything is still wet down there, and it is stinky mud, and they’re not the smartest animal on the farm, so it’s kind of a whole big thing, but this too shall pass. Eventually.
I went out with the tractor and loader and moved the downed trees off the edge of the fields. The soybeans were sprayed with fungicide and broadleaf preventer on Thursday. I wanted the tree in the bean field out of the way for that. I’ll be mowing weeds in a week or two, and oats will be ready in 3 weeks or so. I moved two trees out of the oats field. I saw the neighbors cornfield just starting to tassel Friday afternoon
I’ve been spending a lot of time rebuilding the stage at the Rochester Repertory Theater. The old stage had been there since we moved there in 2007, and it was built of used lumber then, so it was squeaky and kinda wonky and wore out. Last year’s ‘Give to the Max’ campaign raised money for this new stage. I had a good group of volunteers come in to cut up and haul out the old one. We loaded it on a trailer and I hauled it to the recycling center. I didn’t expect it to cost $450 for disposal. Ouch. There went my budget.
Of course, what’s a project without a few extra items thrown into the mix? We are creating a tool room out of the former elevator room, we are insulating some windows, and we are making the control booth window larger too. All good stuff!
Except that I’m not getting much done on my machine shed shop project. I get a little done, it’s just slow going. I got steel wrap and the window trim done on one window, so I can get back to the steel siding. I did change the windshield washer pump on my truck and I need to replace one nozzle. And I cut off a tree root and reset some rocks interferring with the wellhouse door. And I got to use a pickax and a grub hoe.
I’m just not getting the shop work done.
Thursday, Kelly and I took a road trip to Golden Valley to ‘Monkey Wrench Productions’ and picked up some lighting stuff.
A new lighting console for the Rep theater (thanks to a very nice grant from the Carl and Verna Schmidt Foundation) and with all the construction on Hwy 52 that we ran into, we decided to take a different way home. Came back through Hastings, and had lunch at the ‘Lock and Dam Eatery’. Walked down to the river, and had a nice talk with a photographer.
A few days ago we took the four wheeler down through the woods. There’s a trail that a neighbor keeps mowed and I had been on part of it, but not all of it before. Although there were places I remembered checking fence 35 years ago when I still had beef cows down there. Like this gate; people would open it in the winter and if not closed again, cows ended up in their yards and they didn’t like that. Guess they never learned the rule to leave the gate like you found it. But that only works for the first person.
You gotta take your adventures where you can get them.
What’s the most money you’ve paid to get rid of something?
Trail Baboon 