My home town of Luverne, MN got some press many years ago as one of the communities featured in the Ken Burns documentary The War. There is a Veteran’s nursing home, as well as a really nice military museum in the courthouse. I believe my paternal grandfather’s First World War gas mask is displayed there. He served in with the US Army Engineering Corps in France. When my cousins and I were young we would play with that gas mask and take turns wearing it. It was pretty weird and fascinating. Luverne loves its veterans.
Today I will mail an application as well as a 8 x10 photo of my father in his Second World War Army Air Corps uniform to the Luverne Chamber of Commerce so that his photo and rank can be displayed on a banner on Main Street. The Chamber is putting up 82 banners of veterans on all the lamp posts. They also do this every year for the graduating high school seniors. I think this is swell.
Any veterans in your families? Whose faces would you want to see on banners on the lampposts in your town?
Man, this week. Or this month. Or this year. Or maybe this Spring. Whoosh. There it goes…
I had that equipment up at the online auction that ended on Tuesday. But the corn head for the chopper (the part used when chopping up corn. Just like it sounds I guess) was in a part of the old shed that I never try to get into until June. It was quite the deal getting the corn head out on Sunday evening. (Saw Hamilton Sunday afternoon. Yes, it was as fantastic as I expected).
There was still ice and snow back on Sunday. Remember that? I chopped and dug and eventually cut 6” off the bottom of one door before I got them open. Then moved the hay rake, and thank goodness the swather started, and I had to chop out more ice because the swather has no traction. Then moved some other junk, THEN was able to get to the corn head out and load it on the trailer. It was kind of a process.
Hauled that to the auction lot on Monday, went to the vet’s office across the street and spent too much money on tick prevention and heartworm pills for the dogs. Talked to the agronomist about getting fertilizer spread for the oats, ordered diesel fuel, and picked up oats seed. Had a township ‘Board of Appeals’ meeting regarding property taxes in the afternoon.
After the meeting, Daughter and I picked up driveway markers, I moved the snowblower out of the shed, and Kelly and I cut some brush behind the shed. It was a good day.
The auction. My stuff didn’t sell as good as I wanted it too. But the chopper was 40 years old and been in the shed unused for the last 20 years, so at least it’s gone. The rear blade sold pretty well. And the old tools of dads went for a couple bucks.
The ‘vintage’ item I had were old cultivator shields. Sold for $2. Scrap price might have been $3 or $4…I thought someone might have a unique use for them. No one would use them as cultivator shields anymore. And I bought a rock “grapple” bucket for my loader. It’s like ‘fingers’ to grab trees and rocks and “stuff”. Always wanted one. I’ll need to add some more hydraulics line to run it… you remember how the last hydraulic project went. I will pay more attention to this one.
The killdeer have returned. The Sandhill Cranes are back (Hi Steve!) and Kelly has been listening to them call during the day since she has the windows open in this warm weather. The chives are coming and Kelly found a deer shed on one of her walks.
I haven’t seen the female duck lately, and there’s two males here. I’m hoping she’s sitting on a nest. I saw eggs in the pond and when I googled “Why are there duck eggs in my pond”, the thought is ducks are lousy moms. Eggs just sort of ‘pop out’ where-ever they are. Like the pond apparently. Google also said not to eat them.
When the diesel fuel was delivered, I was talking with the driver that the gauge has been broken since I got this tank and I couldn’t get the old one out. He said it shouldn’t be that hard; “get a hammer and chisel.” And those, along with an 18” pipe wrench and a pipe extension handle, we did get the old one out. The new gauge is nice.
Been hanging lights and started programming lights for the musical ‘Spring Awakening’ at the Rep theater, and finishing up set stuff for ‘Boy Gets Girl’ at the college. Both open next Thursday and luckily college rehearsals are afternoon and the Rep’s are evening.
And I farm between things.
Started planting oats Thursday night! Hope to finish on Friday. It’s even a little dusty. I keep forgetting the thermometer to check the soil temperature, but I know it’s warmed up.
Husband came home Wednesday from his work day in Bismarck to find his right big toe was swollen from gout. He drives to Bismarck on Tuesday nights, stays at a hotel, and works at the Human Service Center all day on Wednesday. Sometimes he takes lunch with him from home in a cooler, but he often just scrambles for lunch on the fly from the grocery stores. Wednesday it was hummus.
Chickpeas are really bad for gout. He knows this, but really loves hummus. He still eats it. He also is seriously allergic to cats, but we have had cats in our home for 35 years. A dripping nose and sneezing are more tolerable to him than the absence of purring. A swollen toe is worth some hummus. I know I could never give up down pillows or comforters if I became allergic to feathers.
My Uncle Alvie, the poker player, always broke out in hives when he ate fresh strawberries. He always feasted on his wife’s homegrown strawberries though, no matter how itchy he got. I know that allergic reactions can be serious. I had a graduate school friend who would go into anaphylaxis if she walked into a home with gerbils or guinea pigs. A work friend recently got a bunny for her son and after a few hours her eyes swelled shut and poor Coco had to go back to his breeder. They were heartbroken.
Do you have allergies? What would be hard for you to give up for allergies or health issues?
This blog over the past week has given me an opportunity to talk a bit about my family. Barbara in Rivertown commented that I had rather colorful relatives. Well, I think that we all have colorful relatives. I am just blessed to come from a family that likes to gossip and tell stories about themselves.
This was particularly true of my father’s family. My paternal grandfather had 12 siblings, all of them restless, energetic, and endowed with a wonderful sense of irony. They loved to talk and tell stories about each other.
I think it takes a lot of thought and humor to be a good storyteller. You need the right voice and the sense of what is important to communicate. You also need to have a grasp of the ridiculous.
Who are your more colorful relatives? Who are your favorite storytellers? What do you think makes a good storyteller? What were your favorite stories as a child?
I recently spent an hour observing a child in a Grade 4 classroom in one of our smaller local schools. The children were quite well behaved and engaged in their activity, which was Reading. The teacher was young and energetic, and the classroom itself was organized but colorful.
My Grade 4 teacher was my worst teacher ever. She spoke frequently about her deceased husband, and how a door to door salesman fooled her into buying a bible that he said her husband had ordered before he died. She found out later that it was a scam, and the salesman just read obituaries in the paper and showed up on the relatives’ doorsteps asking for payment.
My mother taught Grade 3 and loved every minute of it. She taught from the age of 19 to her retirement at age 55 due to MS. She would have kept teaching for years had her health not worsened. I think Grade 3 is a perfect age to teach, as they are not too close to their teen years or too immature. I could never teach Middle School students. They are the worst for drama. Some people just love them, though.
If you had to teach kids, what age would you teach, and why? Who were your best and worst teachers? Know any good traveling salesmen stories?
I saw in the news that the creator of the game, Settlers of Catan, Klaus Teuber, died a few days ago. If you don’t know of it, Settlers of Catan is a multi-player game; you settle and expand on the land using hexagonal tiles. I’ve always assumed it was similar in play to Risk, but I could be wrong. It was wildly popular right off the bat in the late 90s and while still played in boardgame fashion, it has also spun off into cyberspace so you can easily find Catan communities of players.
I have a friend, Laurie, who has played Dungeons and Dragons every Tuesday for decades. This is a serious commitment for her; I’ve known her to turn down other invitations if they fall on Tuesday. I’ve known her for 40 years and she’s never once invited me to join; non D&D folks just aren’t allowed. That’ fair – all I know about D&D is what I’ve seen on Big Bang Theory!
But seeing the news about Klaus Teuber made me think of our blog about jigsaw puzzles the other day which led me to thinking about the games I’ve played in my life. We didn’t have a lot of boardgames when I was a kid. The obligatory Candyland, which I never cared for much. My Nana had Chutes & Ladders at her house, which I adored. I begged for the game Operation and never received it. It was just as well; a friend got one for Christmas and it was BORING. Same with the Mousetrap game.
I played a lot of backgammon in college but hardly ever since. I like trivia games, although I’m not very good at the ones that have a lot of current/trendy questions. We played one at Thanksgiving that had a lot of current sports questions and even a category about stock exchange abbreviations – I stunk. When YA was little, we did Yahtzee and cribbage on vacation, but almost never at home. I do play mahjong online but just with myself which isn’t anything like real mahjong. I guess my favorite boardgame is still Aggravation, which I play exclusively with my mom. We each play three colors and we’re a little cut-throat. YA won’t play with me although when we were in St. Louis last summer she did play once, she and Nonny and I each fielding two colors. She complained later that Nonny and I are mean.
I got a text from Daughter Sunday letting me know she talked her way out of a speeding ticket. She said she was only going 10 mph over the speed limit. I told her she needed to slow down.
I don’t know how she does it, but this is about the fifth or sixth ticket she has talked her way out of. I have only had one speeding ticket in my life, only going about 5 mph over the limit in town, and the police officer had no trouble citing me.
Husband got several speeding tickets from the Dunn County Sherriff and Tribal police driving back from the Reservation. The Tribal tickets were never reported to the State, so he didn’t get points on his license for them.
The Highway Patrol in western Minnesota often cite people who don’t notice that the speed limit changes when you cross the Dakota borders into Minnesota, and assume they can still drive Dakota speeds. Our governor just vetoed a bill that would have increased the speed limit to 80 in ND. People drive that speed here anyway, so it wouldn’t have made much of a difference for him to sign the bill.
Every talked your way out a ticket? What is the fastest you ever drove? Why were you going that fast?
Daughter’s visit last week was an opportunity for us to finally celebrate a very belated Christmas. She got her father a 1000 piece puzzle of Birds of the Backyard, which we have been working on daily since he unwrapped it. We haven’t worked on a jigsaw puzzle since the kids were young.
The puzzle It is set up on the dining room table, and we will just eat and work around it until it is completed. The dog got a couple of pieces but only did minor damage to them.
We may have a lot of opportunity to work on the puzzle this week, as a snow storm is coming that the National Weather Service says could be a blizzard of historic proportions. Their models are showing wind speeds that are the strongest they have seen in 20 years.
Husband is traveling to Bismarck for work Sunday and Monday, and will return Monday before the storm hits on Tuesday. We are rarely bored, but a puzzle will be just the thing to help us pass the time if we are snowed in.
How do you like to pass the time when you can’t leave the house? What is your most memorable jigsaw puzzle?
The snow has been melting slow enough we haven’t had the big spring rush of water coming down our valley. And that’s OK. Not that we have damaging floods, but most years we have the usual snowmelt rush. This year it’s just a nice little stream. Plus still got piles of snow in the shadows and on the north sides.
Ground is still cold, in fact, I Just ordered some soil thermometers, mostly because this new oat venture I’m trying, they want oats in the ground as soon as it’s possible. Oats can survive down to 20-degree air temps. And guys using ‘no-till’ equipment can get in sooner than I can. Using traditional equipment I need the ground to warm up and dry enough I can work it, then get it planted. But I do want to try and push it a little more this year than I have other years. Pending two shows I’m lighting and college commencement. (I usually try not to do a show outside of the college in April, but… life happens). Commencement is May 10th. Oats should be in for 3 or 4 weeks by then. By the way, soil temps yesterday were about 35-degrees.
This week on the farm I hauled scrap iron to the scrap iron recycling place. Forgot to take a picture of the first load, which was some junk from a theater in town, plus my scrap metal tote at home. The tote is a 4’x 4’x 4’ box and I throw all the misc. scrap iron in there. Old, worn out disc blades, pieces of pipe, or broken bits of things. Old ceiling fans, old electrical conduit… just… junk. Bolts, empty propane bottles, I don’t know… just … stuff. But it does accumulate over time.
I also had the front of an old chopper box I had cut up several years ago. I use the tractor loader and put it on the trailer. That load of scrap was 2200 lbs.
There’s a pile of scrap machinery behind the shed I need to get hauled in. Accumulation of many years.
The next load was two old rotary hoes, an old snowmobile I last rode in about 1987. (Took Kelly for a ride. It was a John Deere 400. Dad bought it back in the late 1970’s. My high school friend Pete and I rode a lot. But then I got interested in theater. And Girls. And there wasn’t time for the snowmobile anymore.) It sat outside behind the shed for a lot of years. Weeds and trees grew around it and through it and I ran into it with a tractor once or twice. Finally added it to the junk pile when I was cleaning up back there.
Also in the junk pile was a mower I didn’t even remember. Dad must have bought it and I don’t even recall it, so it must not have worked very well. Before I started buying the rear mounted ‘Brush Hog’ type mowers, Dad had a side mounted sickle mower. It was good for mowing because it was off to the side in front of you and easy to watch. Dad cut a lot of hay with this back in the day. (When he also pulled a ‘crimper’ behind him. Clyde knows what I’m talking about. Nowadays those jobs are combined into one machine called a ‘mower-conditioner and can be pull type ((like mine)) or self-propelled. Or the big guys mount three units to the tractor: one on the front and two on the back and cut 30 feet at a time.)
When that side mower wore out, Dad found some other old, used, sickle mowers. I even bought one too. They all sucked. Brush mowers work great, but behind me, it’s more cumbersome to operate.
The mower had been back there so long I had to cut a 12’ tree out of it before I put it on the trailer.
(The spikey things are the rotary hoe.)
This load was 3300lbs. Back in December I talked about hauling some scrap in and it was $50 / ton, a low low price. Tuesday it was up significantly to $195 / ton.
You know, it’s interesting how many things used to mount right onto the tractor, rather than hooking on behind as we do now. I have a lot of memories of helping Dad mount the brackets on the side of the tractor, and some pieces under the axle, and then hooking the mower to those. Or the corn picker that had a real heavy frame that bolted to the sides, and more heavy frames over the wheels, and then the elevator mounted to the back, and we’d drive the tractor into the picker to mount it. Or the cultivator; that had two small brackets bolted to the front of the tractor, then drive into it and muscle the two sides over into place and bolt it on, and a couple rods connected to the ‘rocker arms’ to raise it.
These days, everything hooks on behind. It’s easier to hook up or unhook, but not so easy to watch what we’re doing. I wonder why that changed. Convenience? Tractor size? (probably size; and cabs made all that stuff impossible to attach, which means it was comfort), and just the size of farms and efficiency. Farming was a lot more manual labor back then. Over in Europe there are more front mounted implements. Which is becoming more of a thing here, again. More tractors have front mounted hitches in addition to the rear.
We’ll try to avoid the Thunderstorms and blizzard this weekend. Still double checking my bookwork from 2022 and meet the accountant mid-April for taxes. And busy with the show at the college. It’s called ‘Boy Gets Girl’ by Rebecca Gilman, and it’s about a stalker. Well written… hard to ‘enjoy’ but it’s a good show. We’re doing it ‘in-the-round’ with the stage in the middle and the audience sitting right around the actors.
The critters are good, although I hadn’t seen the ducks in a few days, but they showed up yesterday. They must hang out back in the swamp or maybe they just need to ‘get away’ occasionally. Got one black hen that has gotten ‘broody’, meaning she’s trying to sit on some eggs. Course I gather the eggs every night, but that doesn’t dissuade her.
One of Renee’s questions yesterday struck a chord with me. I am definitely a “bite off too much” kind of person. And before everybody says “you need to learn to say no” – all of my biting off too much is self-imposed. I’m actually pretty good at saying no to someone other than myself!
Case in point. With Easter just a week away, I have a lot of plans. The big event is on next Saturday, the World’s Most Over-Engineered Egg Hunt. For that we are taking taco tortilla roll-ups (or pinwheels) and blondies w/ M&M eggs for the buffet. Then I’m also making pastel eggs filled with jelly beans and marshmallows for the kids. Did I mention there are 13 of them? And then a couple of dozen plastic eggs filled w/ candy to add to the hunt.
For my co-workers I’m doing dipped Oreos w/ spring-y sprinkles (1 chocolate and 1 golden per co-worker). These will be packaged in little cello bags and delivered with miniature Happy Spring notes. I figure as long as I’m still officially part of the team, no matter how part-time or temporary, it’s still a nice thing to do.
For the neighbor kids I’m doing lemon bunny cakes. I have a wonderful bunny pan that I bought a few years ago and I just love it. And it’s easy. Batter into pan. Bake. Bunnies into cello bags with pretty ribbon. Voila!
Of course, I will also do a basket for YA – this will be a challenge because YA has said she only wants chocolate/pb items in the basket. I normally can’t hold myself to these kind of requests. We’ll see. I have extra eggs for dying. Again this is something that YA says we don’t need to do but she always joins in when I have the eggs and dye and glitter out. She always happily eats the devilled eggs that eventually come out of this project.
AND, I am making sugar cookies for a friend – I always do this for her and this gives me an excuse to make a few spring cookies for YA and myself.
This is enough projects that I’ve put the various things on my to-do list for next week. When I think about the fact that I’m only working 3-4 hours a day, it doesn’t seem that daunting.
Any special plans you’re prepping for in the next week?
Trail Baboon 