I have often written about Husband’s frets and worries, but if I am completely honest, his anxiety doesn’t hold a candle to mine.
This has been a sleep deprived week for me due to progress we made toward moving to Minnesota. A local realtor is coming to the house today to give us the lowdown on what we can sell this place for, and I got some financial stuff done so that we can contact a realtor in Luverne next week to start looking for a place for us there. We plan to buy in Luverne before we list this place in Dickinson. I even found a Dickinson moving company that will move us.
My anxiety comes from getting too far ahead of myself. I woke up at 1:00 am on Wednesday worrying how my best friend, who is moving in with us, would get a Real ID driver’s license if none of the utility bills in Luverne are in her name. This is completely irrational, and it shouldn’t be a problem, but that is how far ahead of myself I am getting. I keep telling myself “One step at time!” to slow myself down. The progress we made toward moving is good, but it also makes real all the unknowns about what is going to actually happen. I hate not being in control!
Do worries wake you up at night? Who have been memorable control freaks in your life?
When I went to bed Monday night, after uploading yesterday’s post, I was doing a mental run-through of things to get done on Tuesday.
The biggie was the tree so I was thinking about what I would need to bring up to my bedroom: extension cord for the trimmer, the trimmer, a rake to shake loose any bits that get stuck.
Then, because it was dark and I was very tired, my brain went a little sideways. I thought maybe I should be sure to wear shorts with pockets so I could have my phone on me, in case I somehow fell off the roof. If my phone were in my pocket I could call for help right away, rather than try to drag my broken body into the house.
As if that weren’t enough then I started thinking about the chewed up tree that I would be falling onto. If I skewered myself, the phone probably wouldn’t do much good. Or what if I hit my head on the way down and bled out while unconscious. All my neighbors work during the day, so they couldn’t come to my aid either.
It was at this point, around 11 p.m., that I made the decision to forego climbing out on the roof to trim the tree from above. Sleep, which had been eluding me while I imagined my gruesome end, came fast at that point. My decision was solidified when it rained at 5:30 a.m. and then again around noon, and the roof was wet. If only Mother Nature had informed me sooner I would have had a better night’s sleep!
Life is what you make out of it. It’s always an adventure.
Monday you’re bit by a dog, Tuesday daughter will run out in bare feet to greet you when you return home, and Wednesday she stands outside your door and says she hates you. Thursday there’s a tree on fire. Is it any wonder I can’t remember what day of the week it is?
Whoosh! Another week gone. Or maybe that was just the wind on Thursday.
Got the college show open and it is going well. The floor turned out OK and the wall patterns, well, I can’t decide if it looks like giant presents, or wall paper. The concept is still good, it’s just the execution that lost traction. There’s a lot of justification in this if you know the story and think about it long enough. Love, relationships, difficulties in both.
I got corn and oat seed picked up last Saturday,
Got the wagon top swapped on the running gear,
Had all four tractors out and running, and got 3 of them back inside the shed.
Got the shop stereo hooked up to one speaker, and the blu-tooth receiver connected to an old cell phone and streamed Radio Heartland as the inaugural music. Will be better when I get the second speaker mounted, but at least it works.
Monday I got bit by a stray dog I was trying to pick up for the township and spent a few hours in the Emergency Department. I was inspected and injected and injected some more. Two more rabies shots to go (four total) I got a Tetanus booster, and immuglobulin in the ED. Had a great RN and to my astonishment, the ER waiting room was empty when I arrived! Honestly, there are worse things in life, this was nothing. I joked, I’m going to go pick up all the rabid dogs now! The other township guys joked I will need to wear a rabies tag.
I got a call about running another 20 acres of ground in the neighborhood. I’m going to do it, but I also had to run some numbers first. It’s not the best soil, and there are just as many deer there as my place. And with input cost up, and crop prices down, I offered a low rental price. It was accepted for this year, and we’ll see how it does. “Experts” are predicting an increase in farm income, due to Government Rescue payments, and cattle prices are up, but…it’s still going to be a tough year financially.
We had thunderstorms Thursday night, and over an inch of rain, which we really needed. As I came home from the college show, about 9:30 PM, I could see a light where there shouldn’t have been light. A tree was on fire.
I always thought if lightning struck a tree it exploded. Nope, this was just on fire 30 feet up. I called the non-emergency line for the fire department, because I wasn’t quite sure what to do about this. It rained enough after they put it out that there wasn’t a risk of re-igniting. At the time, I didn’t know how much rain we had gotten and I was concerned about the dry grass below it.
We got our new baby chicks on Tuesday. These 40 chicks are Black Australorp, and Barred Rock. Twenty of each.
I used a new hatchery this year due to supply issues with chicks at the hatchery I have been using, and these were the available breeds. We’ve been looking up guineas to order later this summer, and again, some places have NOTHING available for 2025. I’d sure like to do more ducks, but not if they’re only going to get eaten by something.
There’s a female Cardinal really stuck on watching herself in our car Windows.
I did a little fieldwork Thursday afternoon.
It was good to get out in the dirt. And now with the rain, I can take the time to check tires, and grease machinery and replace some parts.
So it’s been a busy week. With the show open and no more evening rehearsals, I hope to get some farming done now.
It always feel like I should have more time, and then suddenly the weather is nice, and the ground has dried up and, worst of all, I’ve seen some neighbors out working, and then I gotta get out there! Springtime is always hard. There’s always a college show to open, and then concerts, and commencement, and depending on how the winter was and how soon the snow melts, assuming we had any, it all affects what all I should be doing at the same time. And it will all get done. I still should cut down some trees hanging over the fields, and I still have branches to pick up in the waterway area. Plus getting the machinery greased and tires checked, and oil changed.
When I swapped the wagon top last weekend, I tightened up the rear wheel bearings and added grease to the bearings on the running gear. That’s not something I do often enough, but this was the perfect time to do it before I put the wagon on top.
We’ve got an Easter ham thawing and I’m looking forward to that.
I’ll promote a place we’ve been ordering meat from lately:
It was started by a couple guys who raise hogs down in Iowa. They have a Youtube channel and I watch them. They started marketing their own hogs, and it expanded into other farms with beef and chicken. Beef from Sonne Farms in South Dakota (and others). Sonne Farms also have a YouTube page I watch.
For the past two months I have been inundated with the question “How are you enjoying your retirement?” I usually smile and say that it is nice, but, if truth be told, I would tell people that it hasn’t been the greatest experience.
To begin with, my body has let me know it is unhappy with me by having increased aches, pains, sciatica, a week long low grade fever, and a nasty bout of diverticulitis. I seem to be over most of those ailments now.
I also have been beset by corporate stupidity that has left me exhausted and anxious. I don’t know why these things seem more exhausting and overwhelming than they used to. For example, for years we have dealt with a computer virus protection company we previously utilized that keeps thinking we still want their services, and keep trying to charge an expired credit card to renew our account. I was getting several emails a week saying “Hmm, your card was declined”. Monday it seemed that they had somehow managed to actually get the card to work, so I spent an hour on the phone with their customer service explaining repeatedly we didn’t want their products, we didn’t need their products, and to please leave us alone. The customer service person kept insisting we really needed their products. After repeatedly telling her we wanted this all finished, she finally relented. I think I finally got it taken care of. It was exhausting. Of course yesterday I got an email asking to rate my experience with customer service. Arrrgh!
In January I heard from our auto insurance company that the insurance for our 2011 van was being transferred to a subsidiary company for the same but less expensive coverage, and that I would receive all the particulars in a couple of weeks. Yesterday it dawned on me that I hadn’t received any such information, and the coverage for the van expired tomorrow. Our long term agent retired, and it seemed that the new agent lived in Watford City, about 70 miles away. We finally figured out that she had moved her office to Dickinson, contacted her, and she printed off our new proof of coverage. That took a whole morning to accomplish. They had just forgot to send me the renewal cards. Arrrgh!
Retirement has been an adjustment for mind, body, and spirit. I thought the months leading up to my retirement were stressful. I just hope I can tolerate the change now that it has begun.
What corporate stupidity have you encountered lately? What are some big adjustments you have had to make?
Over the years I’ve tried a lot of different food plans. Whenever I hear of someone talking about how good they feel on some particular diet, I get curious. I’ve even tried raw a couple of times; the second time I lasted the longest – four days. Tried the zone for a bit. The Mediterranean is pretty close to our regular habit, although as vegetarians, we pass on the occasional fish/meat.
The keto diet was the one that I toyed with for quite some time before giving it a shot. I have two good friends who swear by it. I loaded up on a few keto carb substitutes and I made it three weeks. But I didn’t feel better. In fact if you factor in how much I was thinking about carbs, dreaming about carbs, crying about carbs, I was much worse.
So it probably won’t surprise anybody that every now and then I let my delight in carbs get the better of me. Every month or so YA asks if Great Harvest is making Derby Cookies; they are her favorites. She is also very fond of the various cheese breads that Great Harvest makes. When she looked at the March newsletter, she was happy that the Derby cookies were on the docket as well as the gouda garlic bread. Since she was traveling and I was in party prep, I made the bakery run on Saturday (that’s when they do the gouda bread). I thought that ordering ahead would help, but it didn’t. In addition to YA’s bread and cookies, I left the bakery with a White Cinnamon Chip loaf and an Apple Caramel loaf (mostly apple, not much caramel – a perfect ration for me).
This is a lot of bread, even for me. YA will take care of the gouda and probably most of the cookies. Guess I’ll just have to suffer through my two loaves. Sigh.
Anything that occasionally just makes you lose control?
Aside from a mild bout of diverticulitis when we were in Brookings, I felt pretty good during the visit. Everyone else seemed to feel pretty good, too.
Grandson went home from school on Wednesday with a fever that had spiked to 102° by yesterday afternoon. Daughter-in-Law was also home with a fever, and Son was at home taking care of both of them.
Yesterday Husband started feeling puny, as the say out here, with fatigue and a a low grade fever, so he took a nap and decided to not go into the office in the afternoon. He chose not to take any Tylenol so as to give his immune system time to heat up and fight off whatever was plaguing him. By evening he felt better.
Thus far I have not started to feel “puny”, but I plan to engage in my self care, which is to stay at home, cook, sleep late, and not leave the house until Sunday morning when we sing at the 9:00 church service and play bells at 3:00 at the local If Music Be The Food Of Love concert at our church to raise money and donations to the food pantry.
What is your self care when you start to feel “puny”. What are your euphemisms for illness? What major childhood illnesses did you have?
Well, if there is one thing I have learned from my 40+ years of marriage is that Husband makes the salad dressings. He is so finicky about salads, and he always insists that we have to make our dressings from scratch.
He recently found on the NYT food site a basic vinaigrette that appeals to a fusspot like him. You add what ever herbs and/or mustard you want to 1/4 cup of olive oil and two tablespoons of wine vinegar., along with a little salt and pepper. He is insistent that it must be white pepper. Don’t ask me why. Oh, and the herbs must somehow complement the greens in some obscure way I am not privy to and seem to change unexpectedly. I must admit his dressings and salads are really good.
I, however, make the hollandaise. I wouldn’t trust him to not poison us with salmonella if not done correctly. I make a quick blender hollandaise that hasn’t poisoned us yet. Thank you, Julia!
What are your favorite salads and dressings? What do you get fussy about? Ever made hollandaise?
I never used to drink coffee. Notice the past-tense there. This week I’ve had it two different mornings. It started about a month ago with a morning meeting and all they had was coffee, so I had some in a Styrofoam cup that was more cream and sugar than coffee. I learned coffee in a foam cup gets cold really fast. Like, REALLY fast. And then this past Tuesday at the college was AED day. Nope, not the defibrillator thing even though that’s what we all thought of. All Employee Development day. And again, coffee. In a foam cup. I do tend to drink it fast in this case. When I make tea at home and put it in my 20-ounce travel mug, I might not finish that until 2 o’clock in the afternoon and it’s still warm-ish. But the coffee I drank fast because I didn’t want it to get any colder. And then on Thursday morning, I stopped at Kwik Trip, and there I was looking at all the coffee flavors. I tried a machine that was supposed to mix French vanilla and caramel and something else, but when I hit the ‘dispense’ button, I got about 2 drips and that was it. Even their cardboard cups with a lid on it didn’t keep it warm for long. I don’t know that I need to get addicted to coffee right now. I’m not sure that’s what I need in my life at this moment.
I heard an ad on the radio say something about remember when the hardest thing in your life was whether to file your Marshall Tucker album under M or T?
I had the crate full of records. I may have even had two crates. And while I never had Marshall Tucker, I remember a few bands and not being sure how to alphabetize them. Pink Floyd, The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin. I never alphabetize my CDs, but the records I did. I kept the plastic on them, the vinyl went inside the sleeve, placed back in the jacket with the opening to the top. Yep, I had to take the sleeve out of the jacket to get the record out. But that was OK, because I always liked the liner notes. Certain record album covers were pretty racy. Was it Queen’s, ‘Jazz’, that opened up to all the naked girls on bicycles? Pretty hot stuff for a teenage boy. The Car, Candy-O was another good one.
It seems like our bathroom and laundry room construction is pretty well done. Waiting on the countertops, and of course the plumber and the electrician to do their final connections. They did the countertop measurements on Wednesday and I think they said a week to 10 days for that. And there will be some tile to finish once the countertop is installed. We’re just hoping to get the washing machine back soon. We’re down to rationing our socks and underwear. We’re all kind of tired of this disruption. It sure does look nice though. It doesn’t even look like it belongs in this house. I think Kelly’s plan is to paint this weekend. I’ll post a picture once it’s finished.
Out in the shop, I installed Snirt Stoppers on Monday evening. See the header photo. A Snirt Stopper to keep out snow and dirt is just an extra piece of weather stripping that can go all around the garage door. At this point I only needed it on the bottom. The concrete that I had poured in the shop is not exactly level or flat. When I met the guy that did the concrete, Matthew, he had a real good business going and I used them at the theater for a couple jobs. When they got to doing my shop, he was starting a new branch of the business down in Florida and had left his brother, Max, in charge. It’s unfortunate that Max was not up to the task. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m still thrilled to have concrete in here, but they didn’t do a perfect job by any means. Sounds like Matthew is now divorced, the company went out of business, and Matthew went to Florida and started over. So, a bit of a gap in a spot of the floor and the need for a Snirt Stopper.
I have been getting things cleaned up in the shop. I even revealed part of the workbench the other day! I moved out some stuff I’m not using, vacuumed a big part of the floor, and my fancy dancy lights were delivered on Wednesday, so I just need to get the electrician back to get the garage door opener and the lights all connected. It’s all coming together.
When our daughter was in college, it never failed that every time she came home at the end of a semester she would spend at least a day lying on the sofa with a low grade fever. I attributed it to her body’s reaction to the stress of finals and assignments.
Last Saturday after my last full time day of work, I was felled both by a flare up of sciatica and a low grade fever that has lasted all this week. Hmm? Could daughter and I have similar reactions to stress? I think so. She probably inherited it from me.
Both our children teasingly blame me for their propensity to Generalized Anxiety Disorder. From their father they inherited flat feet. I have lumbar scoliosis like my maternal grandmother. So does one of my cousins. I did not inherit my father’s athleticism, but I did his musicality. Goodness only knows where I got A- blood type. I did not inherit my maternal grandmother’s ability to do complex math in her head. Our grandson seems to have that ability, and is proud to tell me that in Grade 1 he can do algebra in his head and is in an enrichment Math program. It is hard at times to know what is nurture and what is nature, but however our forebears hand things down to us, it can make our lives interesting.
What did you inherit or wish you had or hadn’t had inherited from your forebears? Ever read Running In The Family by Michael Ondaatje?
Our scale is broken. It doesn’t show the weight we want it to show. Especially after a day of wandering around the shop trying to find my tools. And swearing. Evidently swearing isn’t an aerobic activity no matter how loud or flowery I get with it. Humph. Who knew?
How many rings have you got? They weren’t always a big deal. 1886 is when Tiffany and Co introduced the popular diamond setting, then after WWII, De Beers created the ‘Diamonds are Forever’ slogan and now I have 4 silicone rings. My everyday ring, two middle ground rings, and the dress ring that Kelly gave me which says “Adventure is Out There”. Sometimes I wear it so you can read it, sometimes so I can read it. Depends how I’m feeling. When we got married in 1990, we had the real gold bands with diamonds. Kelly had the engagement ring plus wedding band. I have a silver band with tiny diamonds in it, but I wouldn’t wear it farming. So, then I got a plain silver band. And I wore it for a lot of years, and I put it in my pocket one day while working on some machinery and trying to fit my hand up in a tight spot and I didn’t want to get my hand stuck up in there by my ring. And then I forgot about it for a few days and then it wasn’t in my pocket anymore.
I’m still hoping to find it someday.
My brother-in -law wore his ring on his pinky, snagged it on a railing when jumping off something, ‘degloved’ his pinky (peeled the skin off, right down to the bone) and then had to get his pinky amputated. And that’s why we wear silicon rings now. Plus, they’re cheap and come in fun designs. Kelly has several as well.
HOW MANY TIMES DOES / DID YOUR PHONE RING BEFORE THE MACHINE ANSWERED? DID YOU DO FUNNY MESSAGES?
Trail Baboon 