Category Archives: Family

2024, Business, Family, Farming Update, Health, Weather

The Two P’s

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The weekend Farm Report comes to us from Ben!

As you can see from the header photo, we felt the need to add a flag to our flagpole recently. We’re liking it.

Hope you all had a Thanksgiving dinner that couldn’t be beat.

Our son and daughter-in-law were here and I ordered a 15 lb ham, and had it on the grill for 4 hours, topping with honey bourbon glaze and it was very good. And there are many leftovers. And we sure had a good time.

Near the end of the day I received word my cousin Marcie had died. In May of 2021, she fell down some steps at her home, hit her head, and suffered bleeding in her skull. She never fully recovered from that, and after having a stroke in October, died on Thursday morning.

Marcie, Grandma Lillie, and myself in 1972 as Ring Bearer and Flower Girl at my sister’s wedding.

She was the youngest of three siblings adopted by my Uncle Stanley and Aunt Judy. Her older brother Mark died a few years ago, and the oldest sister Marie is still with us. It seemed like a pretty tough childhood for them. Judy seemed awfully stern to me. My perception was that she was pretty strict. My siblings say she was fun. I was scared of her.

Marcie married a good guy, and she had some really good years in the middle.

I basically have a functional heated shop now. It’s not done, but I hooked up the thermostat complete with conduit and not just ‘temporary’ and I can monitor it from my phone app.

I need to finish the interior wall and get the electricians back so they can do their thing, and figure out where to put the tool boxes and shelving, and, well… I could keep myself busy in here all winter.

About 2 more weeks of classes left. I’ve still got an ‘A’ going for ‘Interpersonal Communication’. We have to write an online discussion post each week and respond to a classmate’s post. We can see how many views our posts get. Mine never get many. It could be they read a few at the start, never got my Seinfeld references and old jokes and they quit reading them. Or it could just be they only read their friends. Or maybe they pick the short ones, I don’t know. It doesn’t matter to me, It’s just interesting.

Hey, how do you know if your computer is musical?

If it’s a Dell.

“Adele”.

She’s a singer.

Found this photo when looking for the above wedding photo. That’s about 1965. Dad is working on the blade of the road grader. I’m helping. It’s pretty clear I liked being out there and helping at an early age. The patches on the knees make me laugh. Was I that busy? Or hand-me-downs? Probably both.

When Dad was still coming to the farm and helping, “helping”, I’d usually have ‘Dad stories’ by the time he went home. I wish I had written them down. I sure can’t remember any these days. It seems like there’s a long tradition of the dads coming to the farm and ‘helping’ until they break something, and then they go home. Once retired, it’s not their problem anymore. And dad knew that too. He said the same thing about his dad. And my dad had picked up some part time jobs, so often, it was conveniently time for him to go to his other job when he broke something here. He’d laugh, I’d roll my eyes and grumble, and off he’d go.

But… perspective. Time and perspective. I don’t blame him.

A lot of situations improve with time and perspective.

At the theater we often end up talking about ‘Perception’. Sometimes It’s still enough to make me roll my eyes. I did a little searching and there’s a lot of talk about perception and perspective.

Mom and dad at their 65th Wedding anniversary. Dad died in November the next year.

I have much to be thankful for.

PERSPECTIVE?

PERCEPTION?

2024, animals, Family, Food, Health

Good Cows

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One thing I am very thankful for is that we don’t have very many food allergies in our family. Our daughter-in-law was diagnosed with both lactose and gluten intolerance earlier this year, but those diagnoses were determined to be false, so she can eat what ever she wishes. Our daughter is allergic to capers, but that doesn’t impede her eating at all.

I was fascinated to read about a Minnesota dairy farm that has specially bred cows that produce milk that many people with lactose intolerance can drink. I was also glad to read that area schools are starting to use the milk for their students. Here is the Fargo Forum article.

https://www.inforum.com/news/minnesota/area-schools-buying-milk-from-ten-finns-creamery-milk-produced-by-a2-cows?__vfz=medium%3Dsharebar.

I guess this is one way genetic engineering can be quite helpful. I can’t imagine not being able to consume dairy. I also wonder why we hear so much more about food allergies now than we did years ago. Are people just more sensitive, or weren’t food allergies in the news back in the day?

Any food allergies in your family? When was the last time you ate capers? Make up some goofy conspiracy theories for the upswing in food allergies?

2024, Business, Family, Mysteries, Travel

True Blue

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Two COMPLETELY different people live in this house.

Me.
Cashier at a store:  Are you a member of our loyalty program.
Me:  No, is it free?
Cashier:  No, it’s ____ per year but you get ___ % of every purchase.
Me:  No thanks.
 

YA.
YA:  I need one more flight this calendar year to keep my Silver status.
Me:   And this is important?
YA:  Of course.
YA:  I think I’m going to book a flight to Dallas for the Jingle Bell concert in two weeks.   If I fly down on the day of the concert, I can stay overnight and come home the next day.
Me:  You can get the days off?
YA:  I can work on the plane and in the hotel.
Me:  And this is worth the expense to you?
YA:  Oh yeah.
 

I am enrolled in quite a few loyalty programs; all but one is free.  I can’t bear the idea of having to keep track whether I’m making my money back.  The one that I do pay for is Prime and I actually only pay half; YA pays the other half.  I did keep track for the first two years and with the movies, it was a landslide so I quit my spreadsheet after that.  Most of my programs only come up once a year on my birthday.  I get the birthday freebie and that’s all.  The program at my hardware store is probably my favorite – I get discounts and coupons for stuff that I’m purchasing anyway.   Couple of my bakery programs pay off occasionally as well.  But the idea that YA would fly to Dallas to keep her status is mind-blowing to me.  It’s like there’s an alien living in the house with me.

Do you have any loyalty programs that you like?

2024, Family, home, Uncategorized

Storage Wars

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Husband really came through on Saturday and got all the garden hoses rolled up and into the garage before the snow came on Tuesday. There were quite a few hoses.

Sunday he carried them downstairs and piled them in large plastic bins in the room where the freezers and canned goods are. They take up a lot of space. I suppose we could rig up a more space efficient method, but just getting them rolled up and out of the yard was a work enough.

I am the packer in the family. I am efficient, and I can get lots more things into boxes, freezers, and suitcases than Husband can. This also extends to the dishwasher. I am glad Husband isn’t offended when I tweak the placement of things in the dishwasher after he has gone to the trouble to load it in the first place. Packing is not the same thing as organization for daily use, and I must admit I am not the best at putting things away after I use them. I am grateful that Husband spent an entire day a couple of weeks ago vacuuming and reorganizing things in the garage for winter. We have too many tools, garden implements, fencing, stakes, and miscellaneous things. When my father lived with us he took great care in organizing all the tools and things that we brought with him from Luverne. I am afraid neither I nor Husband have kept Dad’s things as organized as he would have. Now we will be hauling most of it back to Luverne when we move.

I leave storage of Husband’s grilling/smoking equipment and supplies entirely to him. His usual solution to storage issues it to just buy another plastic storage bin for all his wood, smoking chips, and briquets whether or not the ones he has are full. The bins annoy me, but at least they are stackable. I hope that we can have a better organization and storage strategy for all our things after we move. Maybe it will be easier starting from scratch rather than obtaining things and storing them as they are acquired. People keep asking me what I am going to do with my free time after I retire. I tell them I am going to spend my time cleaning the house. It will be nice to have time to organize and not have things stored haphazardly as we do now.

What storage/organization strategies do you use? What sort of dishwasher loader are you? Ever rented a storage unit?

2024, Family, gardening, Mysteries, Nature, Seasons, Uncategorized

Leaf Me Be!

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My gardening juju goes away in September.  Gardening in May and June really gets me going but by fall, I’m so done.  I think it’s because the stuff that needs doing in the fall is just clean up – nothing is going to leaf out or flower or even green up due to my work and attention.  And I detest the leaf situation the most.

My house and yard are in the middle of a weird neighborhood vortex; for some reason, even though most of the neighbors have the same number of trees as I do, way more leaves end up in my yard than the others.  I’ve documented this over the years. So so many leaves.  I’m not rabid about cleaning up leaves; I understand about leaving some leaves and plants for pollinators.  However if I don’t clean up some of the leaves, then I end up with masses of wet and sometimes moldy mess in the spring. 

But I hate raking and bagging leaves.  I’ve always hated it.  In high school, I was part of a church group that did chores for seniors and even then, I told everybody I would do any odd job but raking.  Once YA was old enough I bought her a child-sized rake and I co-opted her into helping — some years I even paid her. 

Now at the ripe old age of 29 she has decided that dealing with leaves is something important to her.  She adores our electric lawn mower and she’s been out several times now, mowing, mulching and bagging.  After a session over the weekend, she informed me that she will probably do at least one more pass in the backyard and once more out front. I haven’t asked her even once to do any of this and she hasn’t even hinted at any money crossing her palm.  It’s just amazing.

And don’t worry, believe me when I say all this activity does not denude our yard of leaves.  Plenty left for the pollinators!

Do you have anything you like to do in fall (or NOT like to do) to get ready for winter?

2024, Family, Uncategorized, work

Well, That Explains It!

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Tuesday at work I had a giggle during a meeting with the crisis team for a case I was involved with. Two of the crisis team members are locals who grew up in a small community about 10 miles from here. A third crisis team member asked why the client’s family member involved in the case was acting in a particularly unhelpful way. This family member also was from the same community as the two crisis team members. The crisis team members replied “Well, you know, she was a Hapsburg before she got married!” (name changed to protect privacy) as though that explained everything about the family member’s behavior.

The funny thing about that exchange is that it did explain everything! One delightful thing about working in a sparsely populated rural area for 36 years has been getting to know all the quirks and peculiarities of local families. By local, I mean people who live in an 80 mile radius of where i work. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree out here. It isn’t even necessarily pathological. It’s just that if someone is a so and so from Belfield or a such and such from South Heart, they often act the same as the other members of their families, and you can predict how they might respond to you. “Oh, she was a Hapsburg” gives us all sorts of information to know how to proceed.

What is your family known for? Any interesting peculiarities or quirks? Where do you look to for answers?

2024, Family, Mysteries, Poems

Pilgrimage

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“Alexa please tell me the meaning of ‘pellegrinaggio’.”

I was reading a book of poetry by Barbara Kingsolver (How to Fly in Ten Thousand Easy Lessons) and came across “pellegrinaggio” as the title to the first poem in a section on a trip she made with family members to Italy.

Pellegrinaggio

At the end of the long-bowling alley lane
of a transatlantic flight, we crash and topple
like pins in the back of a Roman taxi.
split or spare, hard to say what we are but
family, piled across one another: husband
and wife, our two daughters, his mother
Giovanna who has waited eight years
to see what she’s made of.

Her parents, flung out from here like messages
in bottles, washed up on a new shore and grew
together. Grew celery for the Americans. Grew this
daughter who walked to school, sewed a new
cut of skirt, and became the small interpreter
for a family. They took her at her word but stamped
a map called home on a life she believed would end
before she could ever come here to find it.

What other gift could we give her? But now our taxi
crawls like a green bottlefly through the ear canals
of a city, it is half-past something I can’t stand
one more minute of, and I wonder what we were
thinking. We all might die before we find a place
to lie in this bed we’ve made for her. Beside me
she sits upright, mast of our log-pile ship in this bottle.
Made of everything that has brought us this far.

Alexa coughed up a very thorough definition (pilgrimage) and then surprisingly asked me if the information she had given me was useful.  I said “Yes, thank you.”  YA came into my doorway and asked me why I do that.  I wasn’t sure what she was referring to so she said “why do you always say please and thank you when you’re asking Alexa something?  You know it’s not actually a person?”

I DO know that Alexa isn’t a person. However she does represent the work of a lot of people and is certainly programmed to sound like a person.  I’m not sure when I started saying please, thank you and no thank you when interacting with Alexa.   In this world that seems increasingly abrasive and mean, it just feels nice to me to be polite, even if I’m the only one if affects.

And to my credit I actually rarely say thank you – only if she is waiting for an answer, such as her wishing to know how her definition of pellegrinaggio played out.

Do you have any little quirks/habits that others give you grief for?

2024, Business, Family, Farming Update, Seasons, Uncategorized

Hopping

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The weekend Farm Report comes to us from Ben.

Hasn’t been much farming happening at our place this week. It’s tech week at the theater. So, all day every day there.


We got almost an inch of rain Wednesday and Thursday so that was really nice. Haven’t got my corn out yet, even though they had thought maybe Sunday and then he said maybe Tuesday but they’ll get to it one of these days. The weather doesn’t really hurt it at this point, I mean as long as we’re not talking blizzards or anything, the corn can take some rain.

The header photo is a view we haven’t had in twenty years. Kelly has done such an impressive job cutting and clearing all the buckthorn on this hillside. Once she got done working from the top down, I cleared some of the bottom of the hill and she started from the bottom up. It’s a good workout for her and it’s so great to be able to see all the way through again!

I did get all the hydraulic hoses replaced on my chisel plow a couple weeks ago.

I opened the big, fancy, new, garage door and backed onto the concrete and replaced or turned over the shovels so they all have good sharp points on the bottom. Two bolts in each, and I was smart enough not to hold it with my thumb as I mentioned a few stories back where I sliced open both thumbs doing this job. You might have to tell me things twice, but you don’t have to tell me three times. A couple of shovels were broken off, so I replaced those. There’s a point on each end that will wear off. Sometimes you can just turn them over and use the other point. They’ve got a slight twist to them so they either throw the dirt to the left or the right.

I was short a couple of bolts so I picked them up one morning, and then while home for an hour one afternoon, I finished all the shovels and now it’s ready to go once the corn is out.

I really like having the concrete in the shed and outside, and what I’m learning about having concrete is that it’s always dirty. I’m beginning to realize why the farmers with these concrete shops all have floor sweepers. Trying to keep it clean is an ongoing battle. In the shop, at this point without the fourth wall and the dirt floor just outside that, I use a leaf blower and just blow all the dust back out on the dirt. Same thing outside, although sometimes I use the lawnmower and drive back-and-forth with that to funnel the dust off one edge. Soon I’ll be buying more tools to keep it clean. Power broom? I’ve got shop brooms, they’re boring and too much work. Industrial vacuum? Drivable floor sweepers?? Industrial vacuum!!

Hopefully once I finish the wall and keep the door shut more it won’t be as dusty in the shop, but you can see from the photo that when I’m working on something I might bring a lot of dirt.

Speaking of buying more tools, the soybean check is in the bank and I’ve been shopping. (Yeah, yeah, I’ll get to the bills too.) I bought a few more deep well, impact rated, metric sockets to finish off the rack. Twenty mm – 26mm

And I ordered the wifi bridge so I can send the wifi signal from the house to the shop, and then put my remote thermometer and camera in there, and get the wifi thermostat hooked up, and the wifi-garage door. 😊

Also, I always get a couple new pairs of work boots with the soybean check. My lousy feet, I wear out a pair of shoes in a year.

The first college show is Saturday at 2 o’clock. “Still Life with Iris”, by Steven Dietz.

Sunday is the final open house at our old Haverhill Township Hall before the Rochester Fire Department uses it for a training burn. More on that later.

Next week we have two shows per day at the college with the final show on Saturday the ninth. I hope to be home working on my shed in the afternoons. This weather isn’t going to hold forever.

WHAT DO YOU WANT TO CONTROL THROUGH YOUR PHONE?

2024, Family, History, Technology, Uncategorized

Gateway Arch

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When  I was nine, the St. Louis Arch was completed.  Not the whole she-bang (viewing room, elevator, greenway, museum) but the structure of The Arch.  It took 2½ years from breaking ground until October 28, 1965, when the last piece was put in place.

Although my family was actually living in Jefferson City at the time of the completion, we were St. Louis folks through and through.  The Arch was a big deal back then and we had been down to the site a couple of times during the build; it was exciting to see the two legs each inching up. 

As a child it seemed impossible to me that they could build each leg separately and actually have them meet in the middle.  The day that they put the last piece in place, joining up both legs, it was big news and as a family we watched it on television.  Here’s a short version:

At the time there were a lot of folks who thought once they put the last piece in place, The Arch would just fall down.  My father was not in that camp, asserting every time it came up in conversation that it would be an engineering marvel.  I guess he’s right – it’s been standing 59 years now.  Growing up mostly in St. Louis, I’ve actually been up in the Arch about a dozen times; it was always on the agenda when folks visited from out of town.  Since it’s my “home-town” monument, I’m pretty proud that it’s still standing!

Any monument you think is particularly impressive?  Or not?

2024, Family, gardening, home, Nature, Seasons, Uncategorized

Leaving The Leaves

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Monday afternoon I saw our neighbor across the street mowing his perfectly manicured lawn and removing every single leaf that had landed on the grass. When he was finished, there wasn’t a single leaf on the lawn. He loaded the leaves into the back of his pickup and hauled them to the city bins. He can’t tolerate anything that takes away from the green.

Most of our front yard is a vegetable garden, so we don’t rake there or in the back yard. I swept the leaves that landed on the front stoep and sidewalk into the garden so we could go out in our socks and not get them full of dried leaves. During the night we had a very strong wind, and in the morning there were as many if not more leaves on the stoep and sidewalk. Neighbor’s lawn looked like it did on Monday afternoon before he had mowed. It was covered with leaves! He was out there again on Tuesday repeating what he did on Monday. There are still lots of leaves on the trees around his property and the neighborhood. He’s going to have a busy time until the leaves are all fallen.

I suppose our neighbor thinks our yard is a mess because we leave the leaves in the flower beds and garden, we leave the perennials uncut to promote pollinator hatching, and only cut back the peonies, daylilies, and irises. Sometimes our next door neighbor comes over and rakes in the flower beds on the north side of our property because she feels guilty that our flower beds are full of the leaves from her ash trees. We tell her that the leaves will decompose and insulate the garden, but she can’t let leaves lie, either.

Rakers in your neighborhood? Did you jump in leaf piles as a kid? How do you prepare your lawn or garden for winter?