Our 7 year old grandson has taken a keen interest in his mother’s Ibanez acoustic guitar, and spends up to an hour at a time trying to pick out chords and play tunes on it. His dad taught him the tune “Nothing Else Matters” by Metallica that he likes to pluck out.
Grandson isn’t big enough for a full size guitar, so yesterday we went to Sioux Falls and got him a three-quarter size Yamaha guitar. It fits him really well, and has just the right sized neck and fretboard. He is very excited! His parents have been in touch with a Brookings guitar teacher and are going to sign him up for lessons this week. His new sibling will arrive in August, and he will need something to keep him occupied when all the attention is on the new little one.
My first instrument after the piano was a B flat clarinet. Son had a trombone. Daughter was so excited to get her French Horn in Grade 5 that she marched around the block blasting on it. The first time she saw a violin that a friend had brought over to the house to jam with Husband, she almost wrestled him to the ground to get it away from him. She was 5. Husband set up violin lessons for her the next day. Husband had a cello, and still has one he loves to play. Daughter in law is a piano and flute player.
Grandson assures me that practicing won’t be a problem. We shall see. It is lovely, though, to have another musician in the family.
What was your first instrument? If you are an older sibling, how did you adjust to your younger siblings’ arrival. If you have older siblings, how did they react to your arrival?
If you noticed that I didn’t have a presence on the Trail on Saturday, it’s because it was stump removal day. The tree itself had all been cut down by Friday evening so Saturday was all about the stump.
We had a couple of offers to help us yank the stump out with a truck (thank you, tim and my neighbor Don) but with my front yard garden flourishing this year and some of the perennials starting to bloom, YA and I didn’t want to risk trashing those; hence the decision to utilize the “dig to China” method of stump removal.
You ever have one of those times when you’ve taken something on and as you’re working on it you start to question your sanity? The first couple of hours went fine – the beginning of the work and you’re still full of optimism and energy. By lunchtime, we were lagging a bit so we took a break and ate sandwiches on the front steps. I will admit that I did google “stump removal” before we got back to business.
By 2 p.m., I was seriously thinking about having myself committed. We’d been digging down around the stump for hours, cutting roots whenever we came upon them and even with both of us with our backs to the house and pushing vigorously, the stump wasn’t moving at all. At this point, my mantra was “We can do this because we’ve done it before” – a little like Harry Potter in Prisoner of Azkaban – since I had been part of the stump removal team when my wasband and I took down a tree when we first bought the house. See:
So YA and I just kept digging; by this point we were more excavating than digging as we were trying to get under as much of the root system as possible. I really did say to myself “we’ve done this before” repeatedly.
Suddenly at 3:15, when we shoved it, it moved. So we shoved a little harder, then there was a good sized “cracking” sound. At this point I shoved and YA got underneath with the chainsaw and finished off the last root holding it and voila! At 3:20 the stump was out. It was a little stunning since it seemed like we’d be digging forever and then suddenly we were done. We rolled the stump down to the boulevard and since we are both good at cleaning as we go, we only had to put all the various tools back on the porch. You can’t really tell from the photo but I was just about the dirtiest I’ve ever been from a yardwork project – maybe even dirtier than when tim and I sandblasted to porch. I had to take a scrub brush and the hose to myself in the backyard before I could even go in the house. Then it was a shower with another scrub brush and a LOT of body wash.
We finished up the work on Sunday – digging up the area and leveling it out. We did find the black edging that I put down decades ago as well as the various layers of black tarp that truly did not do anything about weeds. Now we have two pretty little Dwarf Globe Blue Spruce planted that will not grow above the window level and should fill the space nicely. To make it look a little prettier for now, we also put in a few hostas as a minimal border. I told YA as we were inspecting our handiwork yesterday that I was never, ever going to do that job again.
Ever.
Do you have any mantras that have been useful in your life?
I was at home yesterday morning making a peach crumble preparatory to going into work, when Husband phoned from the office asking if I wanted to go to Taylor, a little town about 15 miles east of us to get four cabbage plants. I said I would. They had set the plants aside for us.
I started some Alcosa savoy cabbage from seed several weeks ago. We have grown them in the past and they are a lovely cabbage. We usually start seeds under our grow lights in the basement. For a variety of reasons we had the pots in a sunny window upstairs instead. The seeds germinated beautifully, but didn’t get all the light they needed and got too leggy. Many of them got bent or broken off. I planned to grow six cabbages. I ended up with three barely viable tiny plants and planted them on Tuesday. I think they will make it. They look much better now that they are deeply planted. We even have some nifty chicken wire cloches to protect them from bunnies. We had some lovely rain in the afternoon that really helped.
Husband has been worried and fussing over the possibility that we might not have our own garden savoy cabbage. None of the grocery stores here sell it, and none of the greenhouses sell the plants. He says we have a minestrone garden, as opposed to a salsa garden, and need savoy cabbage. I told him I found a place that will send us savoy cabbages in the fall, but he continued with the anxiety about the cabbage plants. When he phoned to say that Taylor Nursery had set aside a red cabbage and three regular green cabbage plants he would be content with, I agreed to go to ease his cabbage anxiety. He is excited to make coleslaw and borscht from these very vigorous plants. I just want the fussing to stop. I just hope he doesn’t get all fussed up about the collard green seeds he plans to plant. I am so happy he isn’t planting kohlrabi.
What is your favorite veggie in the cabbage family? Would you rather have a minestrone garden, a borscht garden, or a salsa garden?
We hardly ever buy potato chips or corn chips. I like snacking on fresh fruit and cheese. Husband prefers to have olives, figs, and dried apricots for an afternoon nosh. He also loves saltine crackers and nuts, though, the crunchier the better. I can’t stand hearing his crunching. To be fair it really is my issue, since I can’t stand hearing anyone crunch on things.
I occasionally need some graham crackers for pie and cheesecake crusts. I have to hide them after I buy them, as Husband will eat them all before I bake. Most crackers I can take or leave, but I recently got some extremely thin sea salt and herb crackers from this Italian import place we like to order from. They are called Pane Carasu, and are from Sardinia. You can see them in the header photo. They are really quite delicious. I can even tolerate Husband’s crunching on them.
The new crackers have inspired Husband to get out our Nordic Baking Book and choose some crisp bread recipes to try. He also plans to make crackers from his sourdough discard. I am sure they all will be noisier to eat than the Sardinian crackers. I will just go into another room when he eats them.
What are your favorite snacks? What noises irritate you? What do you imagine it is like in Sardinia?
YA has lots of opinions about the house and yard. Granted, she does do quite a bit of work on both, but the bottom line is that I’m still doing a good 80%. So when she gets a bee in her bonnet, I don’t always jump to attention.
She’s been nagging me for about three years to get rid of the tree in the front of house. To her credit, it’s in awful shape, and has gotten tall enough that it pretty much blocks all the sunlight to the front porch and some of my room as well. But I don’t want to have a whole bunch of projects going at once (actually, this drives me to distraction) so I’ve been putting her off. For two years I was able to use the “not until the front porch is done” knowing full well that the last couple of steps were hers. Unfortunately she did finally finish her little bits and now I can no longer use the excuse.
Smart people would have hired a tree guy, but I think the last 20 years have shown that we don’t always have smart people at our house. So we purchased a new chainsaw (the old one died last summer) and got to work yesterday. For the most part, it went well but as always happens with a big job, it’s much bigger than we thought. As you can see from the photo below, we still have a chunk to go but after 7 hours, both of us were really running out of steam so we decided to call it a day and go to Dairy Queen.
The good news is that YA and I are truly aligned when it comes to how we like to get things done. We like to clean up as we go – neither of us likes a big mess at the end. So each big branch that came down, we chopped it up, filling yard bags and making bundles of little logs and branches. So as we were getting worn out, we didn’t have a massive amount of clean up to do. The header photo is what’s on the boulevard for yesterday’s work.
The biggest issue now is finding time to tackle the rest of the job, since the weekend is over and YA has to work this week. I can work on the ground level and maybe even do a bit of cutting back from the roof outside my bedroom, but the actual cutting of that last two branches will take both of us. And probably some ropes and rakes to try to get the branches to fall where we want them to. I’ve had experience with this part going wrong in the past, so I don’t want to attempt it alone. YA thinks she can get an afternoon off in a couple of days. Fingers crossed.
What was the last project that really took it out of you?
We’ve had about 2 inches of rain between Tuesday and Wednesday. It was a nice easy rain and much needed. The first of the corn that I planted is up, Oats is filling in nicely, other than one field that looks terrible. I’m not sure what’s going on there. Other than it was corn last year and the other fields were soybeans last year. So, they worked up different, or I don’t know what. But I think I’m gonna replant part of this one. It’s just a terrible looking stand and it’s right along the road so it embarres me to think the neighbors will judge me.
The rows that end up in the track of the tractor tire never come up quite as fast as the other rows. I think because the soil gets packed down by the tire, and I’ve always thought I need some kind of tiny digger teeth behind the tractor to refresh that dirt. Mounting something is the easy part, trying to figure out how to make it raise and lower is harder, But I really need to figure out something.
I did finish planting corn last Saturday. Had a couple minor repairs I was able to fix in the field. One loose bolt, and one broken chain link. Good thing I had a spare chain link. There was a pheasant pair running around in this field.
I spent Monday riding in a big truck, being the navigator as a company applied calcium chloride as dust control on our Township gravel roads. It’s a thing we do annually. We finished that about 3:00 PM and I went to Plainview John Deere and picked up a new rear wiper arm for a tractor. Would you believe 120 bucks for that! And then to Meyer seed’s and picked up soybean seed.
Tuesday and Wednesday were meetings at the college.
Thursday was the visitation for mom, and Friday was her memorial service.
Saturday I have a set up meeting at one theater, an event at the college, and the ‘cousins Reunion’ at my sisters house. The kids are the cousins, Kelly and I are the fun, cool Aunt and Uncle. Even a couple Grand Neices we’re excited to see again – or for the first time.
It’s been fun to have all the nieces and nephews in town. They’re all pretty cool people.
Back in April I ordered a ton of egg layer ration from the co-op. Forty, fifty-pound bags on a pallet. They put it in the truck with a fork lift, I use the loader and forks to take it out of the truck and put it in the feed room. Works great.
Got the first bag out the other day, and it’s meal, rather than pellets. Hmm, not sure about that. Turns out the chickens are not fans… I didn’t know I needed to specify pellets; it’s just always been pellets.
I called the co-op to see about exchanging this. Due to bio-security, they don’t usually return feeds. Plus they’re going to stop making pellets. Hmm. But she was going to check into this. Haven’t heard back yet. Plan B will be to buy bags of pellets from Fleet Farm and mix into it I guess. A ton of layer rations last me 11 months. This could take a while…
Wrapped up another academic year by celebrating commencement this past Wednesday. I will be employed at the college until June 2 as I have some rentals coming through. I’ll be going to half time to allow myself a little more time farming while I still finish up odds and ends at the college before starting back this fall.
The oats are up! And I see the neighbor’s corn is coming up. Mine will be coming out any day now.
We’re at 452 GDU’s – ‘Growing Degree Units’ for our area for 2025. About double what normal is considered. I did get some corn planted last weekend and the co-op spread the last of the corn fertilizer and I’ve gotten all the fields dug up at least once. Mechanical tillage helps with weed control, and I was afraid if we got too much rain the next few days the weed population would explode. There was a few late nights with me and Bailey in the tractor.
I planted oats and grass in the waterway that was built last fall. A little rain would be nice and helpful, and it would be especially helpful if we didn’t get any heavy rain for, well really, the whole summer, but at least the next couple of months until it is established and gets some good root structure down. Before I could get the waterway planted there was a couple of logs out there that needed to be picked up. I had told Kelly “We’re only doing the ones as big as my head and 4 feet long.“ But, of course then it’s hard to pass up the ones as big as my arm and 2 feet long. And if you’re gonna pick up those, you may as well pick up the ones as big as my wrist and a foot-long.
Kelly picked up a lot more sticks than I did just because I was in the tractor dealing with other stuff. She did several loads like this.
Kelly and I celebrated our 35th wedding anniversary on Monday. It was a pretty low-key celebration as I spent the day at the college getting ready for commencement and she was working. Back in 1999 I wrote a card for her, wrote on the front not to open until 2025 and tucked it in my dresser. I kind of forgot about it over the years and every now and then I’d find it again. I know I looked at it just a few months ago, and then I put it… “somewhere safe”. It took me a good half an hour to find it on Monday. Life was sure different for us 25 years ago. I kind of wish I had written more about just what was going on in our lives. I’ve wondered if I should do the same thing again? Do I dare do I make it for another 25 years? I realize no one is guaranteed tomorrow, and as we are both in our 60’s now, 25 years might be pushing our luck.
I planted corn Saturday and Sunday.
The load in for commencement was pretty uneventful this year, both for me and the IT guys hanging a large projector, screen, and setting up multiple cameras, and the sound system. Monday was the biggest part of that job for me as I picked up the rental lights, got them hung and cabled, and set up the laptop and lightboard to control them.
It kind of turns into a free-for-all on Monday and as I parked, I thought ‘Well if this doesn’t completely sum me up”:
Tuesday was stage decorations, curtains, banners, flowers, my floor lighting for all those things, and finalizing cues, and making sure everything worked. Wednesday morning was a walk-through, a nurse pinning ceremony, the main event at 6 PM, and it all came back down and packed up in about two hours and I was home by 10 PM
The obligatory ‘Head in the clouds’ photo:
I’ve got a lot of stuff to put away back at the theater, and I’m still checking my budgets and verifying expenses the Business office has compared to my Excel spreadsheets and catching up on things that I’ve let slide the last couple weeks. Depending on the weather, I may get out and do some more fieldwork this weekend. I might be able to finish planting corn if everything goes smoothly.
Chicks are growing and doing well.
Found a couple deer antlers while doing fieldwork.
And that one field that always ALWAYS grows big rocks came through yet again. Kelly and I dragged it home behind the gator. It took a long bar, two shovels, a chain, a 20’ long ratchet strap, and Kelly’s ingenuity, but we got it home and added it to her collection. “What are you going to do with it?” asks my one sister. We’re gonna admire it! …what a question… like everything needs to be practical.
You can tell it was a busy week because I needed a pen, pencil, red sharpie, and chrome ‘dress’ sharpie.
SIGNS WITH RED AROUND THEM ARE OPTIONAL. TRUE OR FALSE?
In the past Renee has mentioned that she has post-it notes stuck around with ideas for the Trail. This doesn’t work for me because if I’m out and about, by the time I get home to the post-it notes (of which I have many….), I’ve forgotten what I wanted to note. Yep – seriously sad. I remember that I thought of something but for the life of me, I can’t conjure it up when it’s time to write.
To make up for this I use a post-it note app on my phone. I have a bunch of separate notes and one of them is my Trail note. You’d think this would solve my problem but….
Looked at the app three days ago and one of the entries is “first fire”. That’s it. Nothing else. It took me the last three days to figure out it must have to do with YA making the first fire of the season in our fire pit last week. Of course, it doesn’t explain WHY I put this note in the app. There really wasn’t anything different about this fire except that it was the first one this year. YA is still in charge of the fire. She has a stash of newspaper and different piles of wood in the back corners of the yard – one for kindling sticks, one for larger sticks and one for logs. She makes the fire, feeds the fire, pokes the fire with her special fire-poking stick.
I’ve searched my memory and I can’t think of one single reason why you all have to read about our first fire. So maybe it was something else? A metaphor for our current world situation?
What do you think I should be writing about with the theme of “first fire”? How do you remind yourself of stuff?
Last week YA and I headed off to Bachmans for our veggies and flowers for hanging baskets. This is an annual ritual and this year we needed flowers for 15 baskets and six bales (although I was pretty sure I would need a trip to Gertens for my favorite dragon wing begonias.
YA was ready sooner than I expected so I had to rush to get ready. I grabbed a pair of khaki shorts that were sitting on my dresser and then my Pi Day shirt, which was at the top of the drawer.
I hadn’t thought about this combination until a Bachman’s employee stopped me almost immediately upon entering the store, commenting that I looked like a staff person. For those of you who weren’t there (or more likely just don’t remember), my Pi Day shirt is purple. I laughed it off, but she wasn’t kidding. Person after person tried to ask me a staff question.
It wasn’t a big deal until the end of our trip. As we were checking out, it turned out that my bright white petunias didn’t have a code to scan. Telling the cashier they were bright white petunias didn’t help. She didn’t have a binder full of codes, she didn’t ask anyone else, she certainly didn’t believe YA and I when we said it was the same price as the royal purple petunias. No – she sent me back to the flower barn to find one with a tag and code. This week is NOT a good time to hold u p the line at Bachmans, so I was almost running when I headed back to the barn. Two more people stopped me. One woman realized immediately that it wasn’t a Bachman’s shirt and backed off. The second woman felt the need to talk about my purple shirt and how she had mistaken me for staff. It took me much longer than you would think to extricate myself from her and get back to the cashier. The lines were pretty long and it was clear some folks weren’t happy.
So my lesson for the week? Don’t wear purple to Bachmans!
Any businesses where you could make a credible staff person?
We will travel to Brookings, SD early next month for a Baby Sprinkle, a smaller sized Baby Shower that is being put on by friends of our son and dil who are expecting their second child in August.
I never heard the term Baby Sprinkle before, but I gather it is now the term for used when someone already has had a child and doesn’t need as many things as first time parents do. Son and dil are pretty well stocked with equipment from the birth of their first child seven years ago. We are so happy for them.
I have some baby afghans crocheted by my maternal grandmother from when our children were born and I plan to bring them, as well some other things I have in a cedar chest like family christening outfits. It will be fun.
What are some new terms or phrases you have encountered lately? What would you bring as a gift to a baby shower or sprinkle?
Trail Baboon 