Tuesday Husband and I took the dog to the groomer in a little town about 10 miles west of us. I drove, and on the way back I had to swerve to avoid running over a very long rattlesnake that was slithering across the highway. We estimated it to be about four feet long. We have Prairie Rattlesnakes out here. Their markings are unmistakable. We have seen them all lengths, from tiny ones no thicker than a pencil to the long one on Tuesday. The weather has been so warm here I suppose it was a good time for the snake to check out the available mice in the ditch. We have never seen any in town.
I had some clients years ago who had to move out of their rental home on the south side of town because there were dozens of garter snakes in the walls of the basement. The house was later condemned and torn down. We heard that the lot the house was built on was a noted breeding ground for garter snakes. No other structure has been built there.
The town of Narcisse in Manitoba interlake region is well known for the tens of thousands of garter snakes that emerge from their nests in the spring and return in the fall. I guess it is quite a tourist attraction. We never visited there when we lived there. Snakes aren’t my cup of tea. I have a second cousin who I love dearly who lives near St. Peter and who loves snakes. He has bred snakes for commercial sale in the past, and loves it when his cats find garter snakes in the basement and bring them upstairs.
What are your experiences with snakes? Do you have any friends or relatives with interests you find odd?
Sure has been a good year for walnuts based on how many are falling onto our deck and deck table. We have to be careful walking out there or they will bonk us on the head. We have one Horse Chestnut tree back there, too. I planted it from a seed I picked up at our church when I was a kid. Mom says I dug it up every couple days to see if it was growing and it’s a wonder it ever grew. It has a lot of chestnuts on it this year. I like how smooth they are and the rich dark brown of the nuts. (I glued a bunch onto a chair to look like barnacles when we did ‘The Little Mermaid’ at the college).
The other day I picked up daughter and we went home. Two hours later I was going to take her back into town, so I didn’t want to get myself into too much trouble. Don’t get your clothes dirty, I told myself. I backed the hay rack into the shed in case it rained (which it didn’t) but If I had left it out, the 8 bales on it for the next PossAbilities hayride would have gotten rained on for sure.
And then I thought to myself, don’t go dig a hole for the new concrete because if it rains, you’ll have a hole full of water. And then I went and dug a hole. I didn’t mean to, I meant to just clean up the edges using the tractor loader but I kind of got carried away. I took the excavated dirt back behind the machine shed as I’m building up that area for the lean-to, which is next summer’s project. There was that tree branch hanging down in my way. Course it was coming from 20’ up in a box elder tree and the loader bucket only reaches up 18’. So, I pushed the whole tree over. That’s the thing about box elder trees, they don’t have much of a root to them, and when the ground is wet like this, it’s pretty easy to push one over. A smart person will pay attention to the top of the tree so it doesn’t fall back onto the tractor. I’m grateful I have a cab that is designed to protect the occupant, but I’ve broken a lot of headlights and mirrors pretending I’m in a bulldozer rather than a farm tractor. I pushed that tree over, which leaned onto another tree, so pushed that one over too. None of this was the reason I went outside, but I was in the tractor and didn’t get my clothes dirty.
The third group from PossAbilites had a much warmer day for a hayride. I took a longer route, up on the hills. One kid didn’t want to get out of the van, and that’s alright. A staff member stayed back with them.
Last Saturday we hosted a “Combo Welcome & Movie/Pizza on the Farm Night” for Kelly’s work people, the staff and trainee’s in the Pathology division. It rained during the day and it took some effort to get the bonfire started, and we decided to have the movie in the machine shed because it was darn chilly outside. It was a good group, they ate a lot of pizza and popcorn, and they made a good dent in the 8 gallon rootbeer keg. The movie was our favorite, ‘Mr Magorium’s Wonder Emporium’.
You know, back when daughter graduated from high school we got a rootbeer keg. That was the first time I ever tapped a keg. My brother isn’t sure how we’re related if I had never tapped a keg before. So now I’ve tapped 2 kegs! Both rootbeer. My brother says I’ll be ready for actual beer next.
At the college I’ve been working on shirt sleeves. Swapped sleeves from some shirts to other shirts, and shortened them enough they still qualify as sleeves to keep admin happy, but not long enough to bug me. And this summer my nephew-in-law Justin gave me a Hawaiian shirt, with the sleeves cut off, because he had described me as “flowery”. In a good way! It didn’t have a pocket, but he dug one of the sleeves out of the garbage, and I added a pocket. All told, I swapped 4 sets of shirt sleeves. I’m not very good at sewing. I can manage, but it isn’t pretty. Good thing the seams are inside.
Sewing is sort of like construction. Just with other tools. When I was a kid, mom would let me fill the bobbin. I always loved threading the machine, and the bobbin on the little spindle that would “pop” over when full fascinated me for whatever mysterious reason. I didn’t bother changing thread on these sleeves. I picked a purple thread that matched some of the sleeves, and a teal colored bobbin thread and I just used them for everything because I like the colors. I tried using pins but I struggled more than one would expect with pins. It made me think of the strawberry pin cushion mom had. I wondered if I should get a pin cushion for the costume room, as opposed to the box of pins in there now. A magnetic one? Do I think it really matters?? I thought about thimbles too, and playing with them. And I had happy memories of mom. You never know do you; you let your kid do something, and 50 years later they’re swapping shirt sleeves.
Every mechanic knows you don’t tighten up all the bolts until everything is assembled and yet here I was struggling with getting the bolts lined up on the manifold for the 630. And there’s three gaskets in the middle of all of this and they shift and move while trying to get it all in place. There are six bolts that attach the intake and exhaust manifold to the tractor, and four bolt that hold the intake to the exhaust. I tightened the four bolts first, which is why I couldn’t get the other six all in place. I messed with it for an hour trying this that and some other things. Finally realized I had tightened those bolts. I loosened them, got all six bolts in place, THEN tightened everything up. Just like a professional.
Yeah, I should have put gloves on. Usually I do, this time I got ahead of my self. Between the black gasket maker goop, and the silver ‘Never-seez’ I put on the bolts, it took a while to clean my hands when I was done. all that fussing and I never got grumpy or mad about it. And that’s interesting. I have such a pleasant time working in the shop. Course working on the 630, part of that is, as I told Kelly, when I was milking cows usually I was fixing something because it was broke and I needed it and I didn’t have time to be messing around. I just needed the darn thing fixed ASAP to get on with whatever. But this is sort of a ‘just because’ repair so there’s no pressure– other than my mechanic for the carburetor asking me if I have the tractor running yet, so now I feel like he’s judging me. Other than that, no pressure. And I like that.
SEWING BY HAND AND THIMBLES AND PIN CUSHIONS. WHAT ABOUT THEM? WHAT PIN CUSHION SHOULD I GET?
Husband is allergic to most things airborne. Pollen in the Spring, grasses all Summer, deciduous and conifer trees, molds, dust, and cats. He has had shots, devours Sudafed multiple times daily, and uses nasal irrigation every day. Nothing really helps. He snots, drips, and gags. It is hard for me to hear. The only thing I am allergic to is oral contraceptives..
It has been particularly bad this last month as the Spring wheat harvest is in full swing and there is harvesting going on all around our community. Lots of dust and pollen are wafting around us.
Despite his cat allergies, Husband adores cats, and at one time we had four cats. He just ups his antihistamine doses and we vacuum the bedspread and brush the cat with the furminator brush. Due to his need for a cpap machine and his REM sleep disorder, I sleep in the guest room with the dog. The cat happily snuggles up with Husband.
I tell him it will be worse in Southern Minnesota, due to the increased humidity, but he is open to try living there. My best friend who will live with us has four cats, so we will have some challenges
What would you do if you found you were allergic to something you adored?I If you have allergies, how do you manage them?
Mothers’ warnings and bits of advice run through my head. I’m assuming (hoping?) I’m not the only one.
Don’t run with scissors. You sound like a cow chewing her cud (usually with gum). You two girls quit fighting – you sound like fishwives. Close the door – were you raised in a barn? Money doesn’t grow on trees. If your friends jumped off a bridge, would you? Your face with freeze that way. All of these were heard during my childhood.
You’d think that with all these tropes running through my head, that I would be more careful.
Between YA being out of the country and me having blown my knee out, the grass got out of control. YA was eager to get to it last Friday and I was happy she wanted to work on it. Since my knee was tender from going to State Fair the day before, I did the knee-friendly stuff. Moved the aidirondack chairs and little table, wound up the hose and then the exciting poop patrol. I headed out in my shorts and zorries. Easy peasy.
Since it had been so long between mowings, the grass has overgrown the sidewalk so I decided that I would do some trimming. No knee bending for this. You’d think that getting an electric edger out of the garage would set off some of my mom’s advice in my head, but…. Nope. While YA was still mowing, I started on a few edges along the flower gardens. Almost immediately a piece of cedar mulch whipped up and took a chunk out of my ankle. I decided to move to the sidewalk at that point. After I did the sidewalk, I tackled the little patio. It was then that I twisted a bit and in reacting to the knee objecting to this move, I ran the edger over my toe. Ouch was an understatement. Luckily no nearby little children were out in their yards to hear me swearing. The cut wasn’t deep but was about two inches long, going from the tip of my big toe, diagonally down the length of the whole toe.
I have two pairs of gardening shoes that live on the back porch. If a smart person were living at my house, they would have grabbed a pair of those shoes before plugging in the weed whacker. And if my mother had been around she also would have admonished me to put on a pair of those shoes. But once again, no Nonny and no smart person either! I liberally applied antibiotic cream and bandages for the first day or so and both injuries are healing up nicely. But I feel a little sheepish admitting this.
Done anything silly/stupid lately that you should have know better about?
The anesthesiologist who gave me my cortisone injection Friday had very Middle Eastern first and last names. When I met him in person, I noticed that he looked very northern European and spoke just like a North Dakotan. and I knew then that he was from here. He is a graduate of the UND Medical School.
I don’t think it is very common knowledge that the first established mosque in the US was built in Ross, North Dakota in 1929. Ross is in northwest North Dakota south of Estevan, Saskatchewan. There were a lot of Lebanese and Syrian immigrants to the area in the early 1900’s, and they homesteaded and farmed there in harmony with their Norwegian neighbors. They fought in the US army in the First World War. They intermarried with their neighbors, and many became Lutheran or Catholic. Some remained Muslim, and there were Muslims with Norwegian last names. They all seemed to get along. I read a story by a woman in Ross with a very Norwegian last name who told of her father, a Muslim, who tried his best to maintain some rituals, and who prayed while butchering chickens on the farm. She said “Do you know how long it takes to butcher 50 chickens when you pray before each one?”
Many of the Middle Eastern settlers moved to larger communities during the Depression and Dust Bowl. By 1970 the Mosque had fallen into disrepair and was demolished. There is a small domed structure built on the site in commemoration.
Husband and I had several psychology colleagues who were ND natives with Lebanese/Syrian last names. Every so often you run across folks with Middle Eastern names whose families have been here for generations. What astounds me is how everyone seemed to get along back then, even those diverse groups up in Ross. If they could do it, I have hope we can, too.
How diverse was your community growing up? How about now?
My mother had a sign on the kitchen wall when I was growing up that said “My house is clean enough to be healthy and dirty enough to be happy”. That has always been my attitude, too, as we tried to find a balance between clean and clutter.
Since July 2, the day our house went on the market, our motto has been “My house is spotlessly clean to try to impress prospective buyers, and happiness is secondary”.
Boy, is it a pain to keep the house clean and uncluttered so that at a moment ‘s notice we can be out the door with the dog so an agent can show the house. I have become really insistent to make the bed pillows uniformly plumped and stacked, the bath towels evenly folded and hung, and the kitchen counters and floor spotless and gleaming. There are no newspapers, magazines, or mail left out. I dust twice a week. All the dog toys are put in the toy bin instead of lying about. I wash the panes in the bay window regularly to remove dog nose prints. Husband keeps all the waste baskets empty, keeps the kitchen sink clear of dishes, and keeps his bathroom clean and tidy. We both have been weeding the gardens and rolling up the hoses as needed. We are exhausted!
I hope this level of cleaning doesn’t become too ingrained, so that I feel as though I am being remiss if I don’t keep this standard of neatness once we move to our new house. This is one habit I want to break.
What habits have you tried to change? How long would it take you to prepare for a showing of your current abode?
Today is the first day of school here in our town’s public schools, the parochial schools, and all the schools in the neighboring smaller communities. It is, if course, one of the hottest days we will have all summer.
I believe that all the school buildings in our public schools here have air conditioning. We certainly didn’t have it when I was in elementary school or high school. The public schools here didn’t have it until after our children started school in the 1990’s. I don’t remember being really hot in my unairconditioned classrooms. Perhaps we were just more accustomed to functioning in hot buildings.
What I do remember about the first day of school is the excitement I felt the night before and being unable to sleep. My favorite elementary teacher was Mrs. Remme, Grade 3, who was a really energetic woman who loved bringing exciting things like butterfly cocoons into the classroom and having us watch them hatch. She also could have cared less about neat handwriting, which was a good thing for me since no matter how hard I tried, I could never write neatly in cursive.
My least favorite elementary teacher was Mrs. Peterson, Grade 4, a bitter woman who complained how she was bilked by door to door bible salesmen after her husband died. She also talked a lot about cooking lentils, and how it was a sad thing that we didn’t have more lentils in our diets. She went on to be an elementary principal in Iowa somewhere.
Who were your favorite/least favorite elementary teachers? How is your handwriting these days? Memories of first days of school?
Welcome to the sick house. We all have colds. You should buy stock in tissues. My head is all fogged up so who knows what may come out in this…course that hasn’t stopped me running heavy machinery.
After last week and breaking things, I made some progress on repairing things this week. And I don’t think I’ve broken any more. Yet. (Never say never). I replaced the lift cable on the bale elevator and got that repaired. On the hay wagon I got the remaining pieces of the wheel bearings out of the hub, meaning I got both the inner and outer bearing race removed, which, thankfully, had identification numbers on them, and a local place could use that to find the correct bearings. We double checked dimensions and I got four bearings; a set for both back wheels and the plan is to have one of my padawans help me install on Saturday. It will be a good experience for him to ‘pack’ grease into a bearing. It’s not hard, but there is a process, and it is messy. It’s supposed to be hot on Saturday, so I’m planning a shop day. We’ll put the old John Deere 2 cylinder tractor, the 630, in the shop, drain the coolant and replace a radiator hose, take off the carburetor (for one of my friends to deep clean) and we’ll see what else we can get into. I’d like to replace the exhaust manifold, and those bolts will be difficult to remove as I’m not sure they’ve been out in 50 or 60 years, and through innumerable heating and cooling cycles. I’m told to heat the area red hot, let it cool for a few hours, then smack it with a hammer. That may work on some of the bolts, but on two of them, the heads are broken off, meaning the usual method is to weld a nut to the broken off bit. I’ve never tried that. I’ve seen it done successfully, just never tried it. We shall see.
Looks like we’ve lost 1 baby guinea. Still got 11.
Some of the baby guineas. They’re pigeon sized.
And they sure get around. Often when I leave in the morning, the three mom’s and them are half a mile up the road, hanging out on the edge of a corn field. By evening they’re all back home. Weird. And there’s been one pheasant hanging out around the barn. Now that the oats is out and straw baled, I’ve been mowing the edges of those fields. Cutting down weeds I couldn’t get to while the crop was growing. And I mowed the new waterway. The barn swallows sure loved me doing that. It was fun watching a couple dozen of them flirting around.
You can kinda see the barn swallows fliting around.
The new waterway.
The chickens like it when I mow, too.
On Wednesday this week I drove to the twin cities to pick up some lighting stuff for the college. I have mentioned before that my favorite Bob Dylan song is ‘Tangled up in Blue’. I don’t often listen to song words or meanings, but that one appeals to me. I love a good story, and one of love lost tugs at my heartstrings. I was aware of two versions of the song, Dylan’s and Joan Osborn’s. Then I heard of this guitar player who was recently in the cities by the name of Billy Strings, and he does a cover. So I started looking for his version. It’s on YouTube, but not Apple music yet. However I found several other versions.
I spent half the trip up, and the entire trip back listening to these different versions of the same song. The differences were really interesting to me. I really like the rhythm of the song, the tempo, the structure, and, depending on the version, the instrumentation or harmonies. A group called Grain Thief has a bluegrass version. The Indigo Girls have a section that drops into a solid blues verse. KT Tunstall’s gritty, throaty voice gives it a different vibe. Then there’s Mary Lee’s Corvette, who I hadn’t heard of before this, and she’s got a good rocking version. Jerry Garcia’s Band has a version complete with guitar jam. Bob Malone does a ROCKING bluesy version that I really liked (And a solo piano version available on YouTube). Robyn Hitchcock is just guitar and piano with a very folk / blues sound. A few are simply guitar, one starts as piano before adding the full band (and I really like a song that grows like that.) There was one version that seemed to be punk rock or something. I only got 20 seconds into it before deleting. Overall, the different guitar sounds, the slightly changed lyrics, the interpretation of each artist was fascinating to me and I still am not tired of this song after listening to it 58 times.
We have these fuel barrels for the farm: a 300 gallon barrel of gasoline that’s up on a stand so it’s gravity fed. And a 500 gallon for diesel fuel that’s electric and has a pump. The automatic nozzles like you use at the gas station don’t work on gravity feed, the only work with a pump, so it was a big deal when, however many years ago I got a used barrel from a neighbor and went from gravity to a pump on the diesel barrel. I rented a trencher and ran an electric line across the driveway from the shop to the barrel and then could buy one of those automatic shut off nozzles. When I needed to refill the tractor the other day, I started the fuel flowing, went to the house to grab a snack, and got back to the tractor two seconds before the fuel stopped. I remember a few times with the gravity system and we used a big square nut to hold the lever up and then I would go to the shop and get distracted and I spilled a few gallons… I appreciate not having to worry about that anymore.
The header photo and that hole in the ground? I dug up the cover of the septic tank. Bailey helped.
Those eyes!
We got the tank pumped out. It’s been on my ‘to-do’ list for a couple years. Also got a riser installed so the cover isn’t 2 feet underground anymore. Digging it up on Thursday I was thinking that is going to be a really good thing.
Our last day of working for the State will be sometime the first week of October. The administrators at both of our agencies are scrambling to figure out who can do all the things we do, and it is turning out to be a challenge.
Husband and I are somewhat unique in that we are actually in-person at our agencies and don’t work remotely. Most of our State psychology colleagues live out of state and only test people via telehealth with the help of psychometrists. Very few of them even test children. We also are unique in that we know how to give IQ tests to children about to turn 3, and that is a rare skill indeed. Children with developmental disabilities need IQ testing before the age of 3 to determine if their issues are severe enough and will be long term. If so, they qualify for a host of services, as well as Medicaid and excellent case management. In other more populous parts of the state, there are enough psychologists in the private sector to do the testing. Not so out here.
We also know how to do IQ testing using the Stanford Binet IQ test, which has norms down to age 2, and which none of the younger State or private sector psychologists know how to use. You can’t test a 2 year old via telehealth. They don’t make them like us anymore.
Husband says he wants to be like a 1964 Chevy Impala. You can see it in the header photo. I identify with my Great Grandmother’s early 1920’s Reo. My father had vivid memories of playing in the car when he was small. Here is a similar model
What out of production car model do you miss? What else have they stopped making that you regret?
One benefit of moving is the chance to go through things and decide what is good to keep and what is good to go. I spent part of Saturday going through a closet in the guest bedroom that has all our photo albums in it. That was a daunting task.
I am the photographer in the family. Over the years we have kept, organized in albums, most of the many photos I took during our early marriage and of the children as they grew up. We also acquired Husband’s family photos that included photos of his childhood as well as old family photos from early 20th century. We got a lot of those after Husband’s father died. I have my own old family photos organized in another part of the house.
I found I still have the scrapbooks my mother put together of a trip to Europe I took as a high school senior with America’s Youth In Concert in 1976, and my years at Concordia. I had forgotten we had those, since I shoved them in our closet after my parents died 11 years ago. I am glad I made an executive decision then to get rid of most of the volumes of my own baby pictures. I haven’t missed them at all.
The whole problem with the guest room closet is that we have been shoving things in there and forgetting about them. I got rid of empty photo albums and other useless things on Saturday. Why, I asked myself, do we have three pairs of binoculars? I didn’t have the energy to sort through the fifteen or so photo albums that remain. That will be done at our leisure after we move.
Snce the advent of smartphones I no longer use my camera. Those photos are in “the Cloud”. I will have to figure out how to digitize the photos in the albums I decide to keep. Our son assured me it is easily done. We shall see if that is so.
How do you store your pre-smartphone photos? Any Baboon scrapbookers?
Trail Baboon 