Category Archives: holidays

2026, animals, crops, Family, Farming Update, holidays, Nature, Seasons, Technology, Weather, work

BY THE NUMBERS

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This weeks Farming Update from BEN

On Thursday I collected the mileage and hours from vehicles and tractors then put it all in my ‘Yearly Mileage’ spreadsheet. Everything was about average. We used the lawn mower 31 hours, put 43 hours on the big tractor, and 127 hours on the other tractor. Drove the 4-wheeler 22 miles, and put 306 miles on the gator using it 48 hours.

Egg count for 2025 was 419 dozen. 5028 eggs. Plus a few dozen that froze or got broken.

On Tuesday daughter and I took a road trip to Potsdam and Meyer’s Seed, then John Deere in Plainview. And got sundaes at DQ and then back to Rochester for a stop at Barnes and Noble. She thanked me for the adventure. 

At Meyer’s the oat seed for 2026 is ordered and paid for, and corn and soybean seed has been ordered and financed, at 0% interest with a 4% savings. (6% savings would have given me prime -2%). $11,700. A bag of seed corn now is over $300. I ordered 25 bags. That’s a separate loan from the $43,000 for fertilizer and spraying. I got TWO free seed corn hats!

You know how you’re supposed to save receipts for seven years? I brought up a box from 2002 and sorted through that. Oh my goodness. We’d been married 12 years. Kelly was making $17 / hour. We had 2 kids in daycare, and $36 in our savings account. I’d get a milk check twice a month. It totaled maybe $2200. I owed the vet $1000, the breeder $500, the feed co-op $500, plus there was always other bills and expenses. I got anxious just looking back through this stuff. Once I saved the important stuff, I took the unneeded stuff out in the snow and burned it. 

It was a small fire; not much stuff. And I just used my gloved hand to ‘swish’ it around to get all the papers to burn. Evidently the cheap nylon mechanics glove I was wearing have a lower melting point than the flame of even a small fire. I didn’t get hurt or anything, it just melted the sides of the fingers of the glove. Daughter came over to see what I was doing. I pointed out that she shouldn’t use her hand to stir up a fire. She looked at me like I was a complete idiot. And she basically said, “Well duh!”. Oh good. A win on the parenting front! She knows enough not to stick her hand in a fire. 

The wedding we attended on New Years Eve was really very nice! The bride was stunning, the groom looked sharp in his black tuxedo. They were both relaxed (or at least looked that way) and the ceremony was low-key and they wrote and read their own vows and had fun. We had a full three course meal, and there was a live band. I got a lot of compliments on the fact I was wearing sleeves. I did have to dig to the back of my closet for this shirt, and one cuff was a slightly different color than the other. Solved that problem by rolling them up a bit. 

For Christmas Kelly gave me this hat:

I picked up oil filters and grease tubes at John Deere. I changed the engine oil and filter in the 630. I was looking in the operators manual for the tractor and realized I’ve never checked the oil level for the transmission. On modern tractors there’s the engine oil dipstick, and then a dipstick, or sometimes a site tube, showing transmission and hydraulic oil level. On the 630, there’s a dipstick for the engine oil, and one for the hydraulics and I remember always checking that as a kid. I don’t know what fascinated me about that dipstick, but I checked it often. And then there’s a check “LEVEL” plug for the power take off. And on the side, according to the book, another check “LEVEL” plug for the transmission.

HUH!

Never seen that before.

I had to scrap some dirt off to find this.

You take the plug out and add oil until it starts to run out the plug, then it’s full. I don’t remember Dad checking that. I’m sure he did, I just didn’t know about it. Now the tractor is good to go come spring.

And the 1940’s music station is back on my car radio.

Life is good.

WHAT DO YOU DO WITH YOUR RECIPTS?

HOW ARE YOU AT RECORD KEEPING?

2026, Food, Gatherings, holidays, Uncategorized

Bottoms Up!

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Most of my friends and acquaintances know me well enough to know that New Year’s Eve does not find me out drinking and partying wildly.  The only time I’m up at midnight these days is if I need to make a trip down the hall in the middle of the night. 

I have only been drunk twice in my life.  The first time was when I was living in Northfield during the summer between what would have been my junior and senior year.  I was working at Ole Piper Inn and went to a party with my co-workers.  I hadn’t really had drunk much prior to that and there was a lot of mixing of different kinds of alcohol.  I woke up in my bed but don’t remember how I got there.  Keys were in my jacket pocket and the car was in the driveway – luckily nothing amiss. Thank goodness the party was only about 10 blocks from my apartment.

The second time was at a work party at the bakery in Milwaukee.   No memory loss this time (I remember the bus ride home from the bakery QUITE clearly) but I felt so awful the next day that I wished for memory loss.  It was after this horrible hangover that I decided that overdrinking was just not something I wanted to do. 

I’m not a teetotaler but I rarely have more than a glass of wine or one mixed drink.  It’s not hard as the taste of alcohol isn’t my favorite anyway.  Not imbibing much was a little challenging with clients over the years but nothing too awful.  The pressure that many people experience for not drinking in social settings hasn’t happened much to me; I’ve found that if I don’t call attention to my beverage in a party setting, most folks don’t even notice that I’m nursing one glass of wine for an hour or that I’ve switched to a non-alcoholic option.

All this is coming to mind because in addition to the New Year, I finally gave in and let the Medicare/BCBS home wellness visit happen last week. It was easy enough, no invasive stuff and only took about 30 minutes. The nurse practitioner asked me all the same questions that the doctor asks every year at my usual wellness checkup.  When he got to the “how often to you drink alcohol” question I hesitated after saying “one or two” and he immediately filled in with “a day?”.  I laughed and said “no, probably one or two every two or three months”.  I had hesitated because I was trying to decide between two to three months and three to four months.  He clearly didn’t believe me.  I reported that I had just had a glass of wine the Saturday before at my party but that I couldn’t even remember the last time I’d had any alcohol.  Maybe Blevins back in September? 

He did write down 2-3 months, although I’m not sure he really thought that was the truth.  Oh well.

Did you party last night?  What makes for a good celebration in your opinion? 

2025, animals, gardening, holidays, home, pets, Uncategorized

The New Year

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I can’t say I regret the end of 2025. This has been the most disturbing and disruptive year in my memory.

Moving and politics have taken their toll. We are very happy where we are in terms of location. I have hopes the political situation will improve.

Our goals are modest. We want to install raised vegetable beds in the back yard. We want to plant Boyne raspberries. Husband wants to improve his guitar skills. We are not traveling.

We plan to have best friend relocate here in the spring, and get a Cesky sibling for our pup. All these things are potentially exhausting, but change that is in our control is far more manageable than unexpected change.

What are your goals for the new year? Garden and travel plans?

2025, books, Family, holidays, Kids, Uncategorized, Weather

Forts

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DIL texted me on Sunday to report they had arrived safely in Brookings from Mankato the evening before and were spending the blustery day playing board games and reading books.

She said that 7 year old Grandson was reading his favorite DogMan books in a blanket fort made up of sofa pillows and his infant sister’s bouncy chair. Any fort in a storm!

I loved blanket forts as a child. The sofa cushions made great walls. My farming cousins and I tried to erect forts in trees in the groves, in the granary, anywhere we could find. It sure kept us busy. Perhaps this explains the allure of tents.

I was always so happy when we had snow days from school, as that was the only time my mom made waffles. We still call them Blizzard Waffles. Husband says he has sourdough discard and we can have waffles on New Year’s Day!

What were your favorite ways of making forts? How do you spend stormy days at home?

2025, holidays, Music, Uncategorized

St. Stephen’s Day Earworms

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Happy Boxing Day, Baboons! Today is also St Stephen’s Day. I have been thinking all week of this song from the Chieftains and Elvis Costello. We appreciated Boxing Day as a great day off when we lived in Winnipeg.

It has had good company with any number of earworms that have plagued me for a while.

O Canada seems to always be playing in my mind. I also have been hearing Ode to Joy and the hymn Earth and All Stars which has pretty wild lyrics and which I haven’t heard in church for a couple of years. I seem to hear these songs when I wake up in the middle of the night.

For some really strange reason I woke up earlier this week with this playing in my head:

I have no idea where this came from. Why on earth would I dredge this from my memory the week of Christmas?

How do you think we ought to celebrate Boxing Day as a holiday? Any earworms lately? What is your favorite production of Guys and Dolls?

2025, Family, Food, Games, holidays, Kids, Seasons

Christmas Eve Chaos

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When I was growing up, there were only two holiday celebrations – both on Christmas Day.  In the morning it was just me, my sister and my folks opening gifts.  We opened one at a time, in order of age.  The next person couldn’t open anything until we had all sufficiently ooohhed and aaahhed over the current gift.  Then later in the afternoon, my mom would host Christmas dinner.  This was a potluck; Nonny did not like to cook, so hosting a dinner in which she cooked many dishes was not an option.  The attendees were different every year, depending on who was in town for the holidays.  I have 11 cousins but it was a rare Christmas when there were more than three of them joining us.  Quiet.  Christmas for me was quiet growing up.

Fast forward.  YA and I have been celebrating on Christmas Eve with some of my oldest friends (Alan and Julie) for 25+ years.  Back then there were Julie, Alan, their 3 girls, me, YA and usually a couple of Alan’s sisters and a few cousins.  As the kids got older, Alan’s sisters moved away but were replaced in number by boyfriends who then became fiancés who then became husbands.  Then the grandkids joined the fray.  14 of them.  No, not a typo.  The kids range in age from 1½ to 17.

This year Christmas Eve started out with about half of the kids snowmobiling/snowboarding; I thought it would tire them out, but I think it just revved them up.  Stockings first – Julie does those and they are low-key affairs: a mandarin orange, little pack of Kleenex, a candy cane and this year, each kid got a placement that Julie quilted for them with fabric chosen for each grandchild.   Gifts were next and that’s when it got a little wild.

We always start out going by youngest to oldest, but that breaks down pretty quickly, especially when someone chooses their Ukrainian egg box or their ornament box (I always wrap these in take-away boxes – perfect size).  Then everybody opens theirs at the same time and then the order of gift opening usually goes awry from there.  One of the sons-in-law is a bit of a neatnik so every gift that is opened, he supervises where the wrapping and ribbon and tissue went so he can scoop it up. Once we’re all opening packages willy-nilly, this gets a little stressful for him but we can’t convince him to relax about it.

A couple of the older kids started the “it’s a box” joke when taking off wrapping paper.  Then the younger kids took the joke and ran with it.  For the rest of the evening, every box was met with a chorus of “it’s a box”.  The teenagers had tired of the joke at this point so there was a lot of sighing and eye-rolling by a couple of them.

Several of the kids received stuffed animals and Howie, who is 9, got a capybara.  I guess they’re popular right now and Howie was smitten with it.  Its little legs were just the right size that it could sit right on top of Howie’s head, where it stayed for at least an hour, even when the unwrapping was done and the kids were split into various groups, playing some of the games they had received.

The noise levels are so far beyond what I either experienced as a kid, or am used to these days that I find myself just sitting back in wonder.  When YA and I carried our stuff to the car and headed home, my ears almost rang from the silence.  And when we got home, it felt so chaos-free (even with the dog excited that we were home) that I breathed a little sigh of relief.  I love them all but glad the chaos doesn’t follow me home!

Any fun/chaos/noise to report this week?

2025, animals, holidays, home, Uncategorized

Christmas And Pets

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As you can see from the photos below, our cat has claimed the Christmas tree for her own. Ever since we put it up she has been sleeping under it and drinking the tasty water in the tree holder. She walks around it as though she owns it.

This is first Christmas tree we have had for about three years. Other years we were traveling to Brookings and didn’t want to have a fully decorated tree sitting around unattended for days. Luna the tabby has been known to to climb the tree and/or knock down and play with ornaments. She also chewed the straw beards off the Julebukke. I am happy to report that the dog has ignored the tree entirely. Our previous Welsh Terriers were famous for unwrapping presents and stealing ornaments.

We bought the current Frasier fir at the local farm store. It is fairly small. We put a string of lights on it, and plan to decorate it today. We shall see if Kyrill can resist plucking ornaments off the tree. This is a pretty low key holiday for us even with the tree. Best friend is coming down. This is the first Christmas in decades we aren’t doing any Christmas music in church. We will celebrate with our son and his family January 3rd. His cat and dog leave their tree alone. Luna will probably give us heck for taking down the tree after Christmas. It is her tree, after all.

How have your pets treated your Christmas tree, decorations, and presents? Do your pets have Christmas stockings?

2025, Family, Food, holidays, Kids, Uncategorized

Surprise Deliveries

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Pay close attention to the times I note. On Wednesday, Husband and I went to Sioux Falls to do some grocery shopping and to drop some packages off at the UPS store there. I had five packages of treats and presents going to Ohio, St. Paul, Dickinson, Tacoma, WA, and another Minnesota town. I was very anxious about the packages getting to their destinations before Christmas. I was a little late with my baking this year.

We arrived at the UPS store at 1:30 pm CST. We went through the regular rigamorale of how to ship the fastest, and I chose regular ground delivery for all the boxes except the one to Tacoma, for our daughter. For that one I paid more to get there guaranteed by Monday the 22nd. The other packages might make it by Christmas Eve, but no guarantee.

Daughter phoned me yesterday to tell me that a package had arrived at her apartment st 12:25 pm PST. It was the box I had taken to UPS on Wednesday! Despite the awful weather conditions, that package was delivered in about 24 hours. Then, I heard from my St. Paul friend that her package had also arrived! I have never had such quick delivery of things.

Earlier this week, Daughter stated that an Uber Eats delivery person had dropped off six entrees at her door from a Thai restaurant. She hadn’t ordered them, and wasn’t at home when they were delivered. She had no way of contacting the restaurant or the people who had ordered the food. It is a good thing she likes Thai food. Sometimes deliveries work. Sometimes they don’t.

Tell about some delivery experiences you have had. Have you shipped you holiday packages?

2025, Automotive, books, holidays, Technology

Park at Your Peril

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When you have fifteen kinds of cookies on the front porch during the holidays, you’re always open to ways to spread the wealth.  I usually make cookie platters for my local library, my vet and my hardware store guys.  It’s fun and between assembling the platters and delivering, it takes less than an hour, as all the recipients are very close by.

This past year, I really tested the Inter-Library Loan department of the library system so I decided that I should provide some holiday cheer for them.  I found out that ILL works out of the downtown library (not much of a surprise) and do a straightforward 9-5 schedule. 

I spent several weeks waffling about how to get the cookies downtown as I detest driving downtown and I detest paying a fortune for parking even more.  As of Monday afternoon, my plan was to take the bus.  A long trip two ways but only $2 out of my pocket and the bus stops literally at the front entrance door of the library.  I even went to the bank to get a few one dollar bills.

As Monday afternoon wore on, I wavered more and more about this plan.  I checked online and found that the library parking is only $4 for the first hour.  I even called the library; the librarian confirmed that this was true and that you could park near the elevators and come right up to the atrium.  She also said that if you were in and out in 15 minutes, there was no charge.

Of course, yesterday when the GPS got me to the library, that particular lot was full.  I went around a two block area about five times – no on-street parking open and all but one ramp had their “FULL” lights lit up.  Grrrr.  I considered just going home and dismantling the platter but I figured, I’d come this far….    At this point, I was pretty stressed.  There were two machines at the entrance of the only open ramp near the library and it took me a bit to figure out how to get a ticket.  Found a parking spot near an elevator but when I pushed the door open to the outside world, there was a small sign saying you needed the QR code from your parking ticket to get back in.  Luckily I hadn’t let that door shut, so I went back to my car to grab the ticket.

Delivery went really well but when I exited the parking ramp (about 20 minutes later), they charged me $17.  OUTRAGEOUS.  At this point, I just wanted to get home but my GSP wouldn’t open until I was actually out of the ramp.  More stress.  The fortunate part was that once I got going in the right direction downtown, I did know how to get home.  Even being directionally-challenged.

It’s all I can do to no look up “parking-induced anxiety” on the internet.  Not sure if it would make me feel better to know I’m in good company or if it would make me feel any more weird. And we’ll have to wait to see if ILL ever gets holiday cookies from me again.  Please don’t hold your breath.

Any directionally-challenged issues or parking anxiety for you this month?

2025, Family, holidays, Movies, Mysteries

How Did This Happen?

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Holiday movies are a staple for me.  I wait (sometimes patiently, sometimes not) for the day after Thanksgiving and then I cut loose – holiday movies galore for the weeks.  I prefer older movies although it seems every year or so something pops up that gets added to be stable of favorites.  Last year was Red One.  Three years ago it was The Christmas Chronicles.  Four years ago it was Klaus.  I’ll try any Christmas Carol at least once although Alistair Sims is the top of my list, followed shortly thereafter by Patrick Stewart.  And I simply cannot stay away from White Christmas despite its drecky and implausible plot.

The Bishop’s Wife, Miracle on 34th Street (the original only please) and, of course, It’s a Wonderful Life are still my top contenders; I usually watch these more than once a season.  I had Wonderful Life on last night when YA wandered in.  I was about ¾ of the way through and she said “when does he go to his weird world”?  What?  What?  So I tried to succinctly explain that Clarence the angel was showing George a world in which he had never been born.  This took a bit of explaining.  Anyway, YA stayed for the rest of the movie and asked MANY questions as we went along.  Zuzu’s petals were particularly hard to explain. 

Then we got to the scene in which Harry shows up after flying through a snowstorm (questions about where had Harry been, where did the movie take place).  I’ve probably seen this movie 100 times and I still choke up a bit when Harry says “To my big brother George – the richest man in town”.  YA looked at me in surprise, as if tearing up at a movie you’ve seen before is just too weird to understand.  I suppose we shouldn’t discuss the last line of Princess Bride, should we?

How can YA, at the age of 30 and having lived her entire life under the same roof with me, not know this movie?  Or get a little verklempt at the end?  I feel like a complete failure as a parent!

Watched any holiday movies this year? And do not list Die Hard as a holiday movie.  Just don’t.