YA came home from work yesterday asking if I had watched the Golden Globe ceremonies. When I looked at her blankly she asked if I had “heard” about them.
I actually don’t really know what the Golden Globes are. I mean, I know it’s yet another way for the over-paid and over-glamorized folks in Hollywood to pump up their egos, but other than that I don’t know what differentiates it from the Oscars.
One of my friends always makes a point of seeing all the movies that are up for the best picture Oscar. I’m pretty much 0 for 5 every year for the past 10 years. I did see Shape of Water on Christmas Day 2018 – I didn’t know anything about it at the time, just that it was showing at a good time for us. I didn’t actually like it very much so was surprised to find out a few weeks later than it was an Oscar contender.
Apparently the Oscar nominations are due out on January 25 although there are lots of websites trying to predict who will be on the leaderboard. Since the only movie I’ve been to in the last year is “Migration” (an animated film), I’m pretty sure I’m continuing my streak.
I’m fairly certain that none of my favorite movies have ever even been nominated for a big award, much less won one: To Catch a Thief, Moonstruck, Princess Bride, People Will Talk, Sneakers, Murder on the Orient Express (1974 version only), American Dreamer, Dial M for Murder….
Do you follow the Globes/Oscars/Sundances/Cannes, etc??? Do you have a favorite movie?
Manitoba and southwest North Dakota have quite a few Ukrainian communities. We have several Ukrainian friends on both sides of the border. Some are members of the Ukrainian Orthdox Church, some the Ukrainian Catholic Church. Both denominations have married priests. I don’t quite understand that.
Both denominations also seem to celebrate Christmas on January 6th instead of December 25th. I personally don’t know if I could stand waiting until January 6th for Christmas to be over. I read with interest the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in the Ukraine militantly moved Christmas celebrations to December 25th this year in a punch in the eye to the Russian Orthodox Church.
Husband was doing some idle research and found that in Scotland, Ireland, and in Amish communities in the States, January 6th is called Little Christmas, and there are traditions of the men that day doing all the women’s work. How big of them! I certainly hope in those societies that Christmas isn’t just for women to arrange and orchestrate! It certainly isn’t in our house.
I regret that our basement is all in disarray and our TV and various media players are all packed up waiting for carpenters and carpet layers. One of my favorite recordings is the 1998 production of Twelfth Night from Live From Lincoln Center with Paul Rudd and Helen Hunt in the leads. Watching that is a nice way to end Christmas.
When is Christmas over for you? Any memories or good quotes from Twelfth Night, by The Bard?
Merry Christmas! All the Baboons have presumably opened their gifts by now. W e have always been Christmas Eve present openers. This year we are we are waiting until Thursday when we arrive in Brookings to open the family presents our daughter in Tacoma sent us to transport to South Dakota. We had to wrap them.
My mother was an expert wrapper, as is my best friend. I am a so-so wrapper. I find it annoying to wrap a gift that is only going to be ripped open in a fraction of the time it took to wrap it. I am just not meticulous in that way. Don’t even talk to me about gift tags, ribbons, or bows!
Husband is left handed and right eyed, and watching him try to wrap gifts is painful. He insisted wrapping my gift from our daughter, even though I offered to. He admits everyone will know he wrapped it. There are tears in the paper and an unusually large amount of tape. He is just happy he could do it.
When do you open Christmas gifts?What kind of a wrapper are you? How is your Christmas Day shaping up?
No snow this year. I’m kinda OK with that. I’m sure it’s coming yet…we got 2 or 3 months of winter to get through, so I’m hooking up the rear blade and I’ll keep watching the forecast and I’ll get the snow blower in the shed if I have too. We will need the moisture somehow, and the cold weather does help kill bugs, but these up and down temps are really hard on cattle. Pneumonia and respiratory issues are common with these temperature fluctuations.
The farm magazines are making predictions and they pretty much always say “stay the course”. Don’t make drastic changes in crop rotations or marketing plans. Yet. I’ve gotten pecuniary plans from the co-op for fertilizer and spraying for 2024 and things are actually down a little bit from 2023. A few thousand dollars here and a few thousand there and pretty soon I’m talking real money. But I’m not planning any more major projects for next year. Yet. I mean beyond getting the fourth wall in the shed. We may not do that next slab of concrete. Yet.
County property tax adjuster was here this week. The permit for my shed remodeling project came in and he was following up. I know the guy from our township business with the county, and we talked for half an hour. Five minutes of that had to do with the shed remodeling.
Yesterday I got a 100 gallon propane tank placed so I can have temporary heat in the shed this winter. The deliver guy joked I was going to use a lot of propane trying to heat the whole shed. Yep. I better get the temp wall up. That’s my plan for these couple warm days. So far I’m not making much progress.
While I’m making plans for shed heat, back on Sunday night it was 8° and the well house thermometer was showing 35° and I am a gambling man and I hate to pay for electricity I don’t really need to use, but it’s also worth hedging your bets and I went out and turned on the well house heater. It was 18° the next morning but I slept soundly knowing I didn’t have to worry about that. Myself, and I know other people, use that phrase: I may do something that seems extreme, but, “I will be able to sleep at night”.
Got my final dividend check from AMPI, the co-op to whom I sold milk. They are on a 20 year dividend payout and this was my last one. Whopping $2.19 cents. Twenty years since I milked a cow and did all those chores seems like a lifetime ago. Seems like a whole DIFFERENT life. And it really was. I wouldn’t of missed it for anything. I still miss the cows’ personalities, and the situations they gave me and the people I met as a result.
Our kids daycare having a barn and farm tour.
Our bulk tank was a “Zero” brand. Kind of an oddball as the company had a unique design that didn’t work the way most dairy pipelines did. It was the first pipeline we installed in 1983 replacing the Surge brand buckets. Surge buckets were revolutionary when they came out in the 1920’s. (See this website for a lot of interesting information. “Interesting” if you’re into that sort of thing. https://www.surgemilker.com/history.html
The zero pipeline had some really unique features, but it also had a couple pretty serious drawbacks that affected the cows health. Too complicated to get into here. I replaced the pipeline, (keeping the Zero tank) in the mid 1990s with a Delaval system; a much more traditional system that was easier to service and cheaper parts. I sold the bulk tank a few years after we sold the milk cows. I saw a video online the other day of the same brand of tank and it brought back some nostalgic memories.
This photo was the milk house. The bulk tank is on the left. 600 gallons. Note the step stool to reach the lid for cleaning or samples. The four milker units are hanging, for washing, on the right. Wow, looking at this photo myself gives me so many memories. So many things I fixed over the years and so much time spent in there. The milkhouse was remodeled when we did the pipeline in 1983, but before that it was still the milkhouse and I remember washing the old bulk tank and surge milkers in there and my folks would say, “How did you get so wet??”. Well, I was washing stuff. Shrug. My history.
This photo was the ‘receiver jar’. You can see the milk came into that, and when it was about 2/3rds full, it pumped over to the bulk tank. I really loved having that jar. I know I’ve mentioned it before, but that was my favorite part of dairy farming: watching the milk rush into that and pump out. I’d watch that jar for hours.
Everybody travel safe if you are. Merry Christmas and/or Happy Holidays!
HAVE YOU EVER HAD TO DO SOMETHING SO YOU COULD SLEEP? WHERE WERE YOU IN 2003?
Thank the Lord! We are done with all our Christmas church performances for the year! Being a church musician can really be exhausting in December. Yesterday we played bells for two morning services and then sang, played bells, and read various things in a Lessons and Carols service in the afternoon. We had a great time, but are so relieved it is over.
I love reading lessons and scripture verses in church. I know how to pronounce some of the more difficult names, and I understand what I am reading so I think I can communicate the meaning of what is being read to the listeners. The words from the King’s College Bidding prayer are almost poetical and I was so happy to read them. Last night, several Grade 5 and 6 students read some of the Lessons, too, and they did a really good job.
I have always secretly wanted to narrate things like the public narrations of Joyce’s Ulysses that you can hear on public radio. I know that reading in public is torture for some. I love having wonderful words crafted by someone else to let others know about.
How do you feel about reading in public? What would you like to narrate and read to others?
One benefit of singing in our church choir is that we sit in the front of the church and get to watch the antics of the children in the pews during the service. Our congregation is pretty tolerant of noisy children in church. Parents of the most rambunctious children sit in the balcony so they don’t make too much of a ruckus.
The other Sunday our backyard neighbor was in the balcony with her two boys, ages 5 and 3. They are very active boys. Once, this summer we heard the mom in the backyard yell at the oldest one “Don’t you put that rope around your brother’s neck!” Neither boy would sit still in church, choosing to instead run around in the balcony and not listen to their mom. She tried her best to get them to sit quietly, but it was a losing battle, and she eventually left and went home before the sermon.
What do you think about the Elf on the Shelf?Who were the naughtiest children in your neighborhood when you were growing up?
I have been a member of our church choir for about 20 years, most of them seated next to Eileen, a retired college librarian. She and I are both Altos, and are used to following one another through the music for pitch and rhythm.
For Christmas this year we are singing Morten Lauridsen’s Oh Magnum Mysterium, a beautiful piece that has parts for Soprano I and II, Alto I and II, Tenor I and II, as well as Baritone and Bass. Here is a recording of it>
Our choir is small right now, with only two tenors and two basses. We have four altos. The Tenor I part in the piece is quite high, so I and one other low Alto are singing Tenor I. Both Tenors will sing Tenor II, and the two basses will split the low men’s parts. Eileen will stay as a First Alto. Eileen and I decided after rehearsal of the piece last week that we just can’t sit next to each other while learning the Lauridsen piece because I was following her and she was following me and neither of us was getting our parts right. Neither of us realized how much we depended on one another. It will be better being in the row with the Tenors.
Who are your favorite choral composers? Who have you led astray?
For those of you not at Blevins yesterday, I tried out a new cookie cutter. It was very cute and I couldn’t resist it when I saw it.
Unfortunately it was a big bust. The little ears and feet often got stuck in the cutter and pulled off when I took the dough out of the cutter. I tried extra flour, baking spray, even washing it off and re-flouring (repeatedly) but nothing helped. I would get one, maybe two good cuts and then the problem began again. For many of the cookies, I had to add little teeny bits of dough for the ears and/or feet. It was really irritating and took the fun right out of the project.
At Blevins, the cookies were a hit and got gobbled up by the end of book club. (I used a cinnamon roll out cookie recipe and a roasted almond.) It almost made me want to retrieve the cookie cutter from the trash can where I had thrown it. I humored myself by sending off an email of complaint to the company. I don’t know if I’ll hear from them – I’ve never had an issue with them before.
Not sure if I will cave and rescue the cookie cutter before the trash gets picked up.
We have a new church Worship and Music director, who also directs the choir. She is our son’s age, and we have known her since we first saw her at her infant baptism 35 years ago. She was an elementary music teacher and has a lovely mezzo voice. She has purchased lots of new, challenging music for us. We had got pretty entrenched with the same pieces with the former director.
Our church choir is pretty small with about ten regular singers. We are often short on sopranos, which we were yesterday on Reformation Sunday. This is a big day for Lutherans, and there was a display of Luther’s 95 Theses in the front of the church. Our choir director planned big, and we sang three very challenging choral pieces, and recruited the high school band director to play timpani, a college trombone student, a high school trumpet player, and three sopranos who sing in the Badlands Opera organization. Ironically, four of our visiting musicians were Roman Catholics, but they sat cheerfully through two services and sang “A Mighty Fortress” with gusto. They even took communion!
Our bell choir director is also the organist. She has been taking the choir director’s lead and giving us very challenging music, too. It is fun, but sort of daunting to try new things and stretch ourselves in ways we haven’t had to before. The congregation is very happy with our efforts. I believe it was Gustav Holst who said in reference to small church choirs attempting difficult musical pieces that “anything worth doing is worth doing badly”, which I take as encouragement to keep performing these challenging works even if we don’t do them perfectly.
What are some of the positive challenges you have had lately? Have you been part of an organization where positive “shake ups” have happened? What is the most challenging musical work you ever performed?
Our local newspaper has been running adds for the last couple of weeks for the various “haunted” venues that are being offered to the public. There is one in a small town about 20 miles west of us, and one here in town at the old hospital.
The Haunted Hospital is said to be quite frightening. The owners of the building rent out much of the space to the Food Pantry, some mental health provider offices, and some take-out food places. The bulk of the building, especially the older parts from the 1930’s and 1950’s is empty, and it is there that the haunting occurs. The owners make much of the fact that many people have died in the building. They recently bought out the inventory of a defunct haunted venue from Montana, including a really old hearse.
I have never been to any of the Halloween venues. I hate being surprised or startled. I can hardly watch a movie or read a book with any suspense in it. I believe most of the teenage population of town has visited this, I believe. The real world is scary enough without adding to it for Halloween. I suppose, though that I could tolerate performing as a scary person at a haunted venue. That could be interesting.
What was your favorite Halloween costume? Whatpart would you like to perform at a haunted venue?
Trail Baboon 