Well, on Monday we phoned the real estate company in Luverne for the first time and explained the sort of house we needed and our price range. Wouldn’t you know it, they had a house that met our needs and price, and later this morning we are having a video tour of the place. I am quite sure we will buy it. We saw lots of interior photos already.
It was built in 1998, with tons of room, so that we and my best friend who will live with us will be able to stay out of one another’s way and have privacy. It is a ranch style home with a finished basement. There are five bedrooms and lots of room for Husband’s books and Friend’s quilting stuff and visiting family. It also has a hot tub on the deck. The hot tub in the header photo is not the hot tub we may own. The one in Luverne is more square with a canvas cover.
I would never in a million years buy a hot tub. I don’t even own a swimming suit! We are just not hot tub people. I am more excited about the large gas range with double oven in the kitchen.
Any creative ideas what to do with the hot tub? Any interesting home buying stories?
About three years ago, Husband and I planted a climbing rose along the railing of the stoep. The rose did very well. It is a winter hardy Morden Rose from Manitoba. Two years ago we planted two more of the same variety along side it. I had no idea they would take off the way they did. You can see them in the header photo and below. There are hundreds of blooms and buds on them. The only problem is that the railing isn’t high enough to support them, so I have to tie them to the railing with twine. I have tried to wind the stems and branches in the railing, as well. We often underestimate how well our plants and shrubs are going to do. It really is too much rose for the area, but I love them.
Our raspberry patch has exploded with new growth this spring, and I anticipate having one of our largest crops ever.
Our neighbor trimmed a tree that had been shading them, and we got lots of rain. I am sure we will be giving lots away, since there is no point in freezing them since we are moving.
We also have far too many books. The shelves in the next photo were full of books until yesterday, when Husband culled some and packed the remainder into 15 banker boxes, the boxes all labeled as to genre and topic. The books will stay in the boxes until after we move to Luverne.
We had to do this so that the painter can paint the wall behind the shelves. The culled books are in the back of his pickup and are going to the landfill on Tuesday. Our next chore is to move the remaining bookcases away from the wall so that she can paint behind them.
We will just empty the bookcases and put the books and record albums somewhere temporarily until the paint is dry, then put them back in the bookcases. We won’t box them up until we actually move. Many of them are our cookbooks, so we will need access to them.
It is hard to decide if I would rather have too many roses, too many raspberries, or too many books. I suppose there are worse things to have in excess, like a friend of ours who has 17 house cats.
What do you have too much of? What are your favorite roses? Any favorite raspberry recipes?
It’s been a good busy week, got a lot done this week. Finished planting those two food plots, got the four wheeler running again, set a tractor on fire, fixed several little odds and ends, and I felt pretty brilliant. And then I forgot to check the fuel in the big tractor and ran it out of diesel fuel. Diesel engines you have to prime them to get running again. Dad always warned me about not running a diesel out of fuel. I’ve done it twice now. It’s not as big a deal as he was afraid. The typical highs and lows that we should expect from a life, right?
A few weeks ago I talked about getting a ton of chicken layer ration and it was meal, not pellets. The co-op did agree to take it back and get me pellets. I loaded the pallet of meal in the truck and hauled it to Plainview. They took that out and when he picked up the new pallet I thought the pile was leaning precariously as he put it in the truck, I strapped it down and I made it 19 of the 20 miles home. When I slowed down to talk with a sheriff deputy at least it fell into the truck. I was pretty sure I was gonna lose it at some point; the question was where.
It’s been a while since I had to unload a ton of feed by hand, but this way I could re-stack it properly. Evidently there is some skill to stacking bags on a pallet because it was hard to get them level and flat. Five bags per row, 40 bags total, and it depends on how full the bags are and the density of the material inside and how that all works. But it is stacked in the feed room and it’s not going back in the truck. It will be fine.
Bought some 12 foot tall, 12 foot wide pallet racks at an auction. My summer padawans are back so we assembled one of them in the shop in place of the loft. The whole loft idea, while good in concept, wasn’t really gonna work too well in my application, so this was a better idea.
Hauled some machinery I’m not using anymore up to the next Plainview auction: a 6 row cultivator that’s been parked in the weeds for many years, I probably only used it a handful of times after I bought it. I washed off all the lichen and it looks pretty good now.
And the old running gear from this spring when I put the seed wagon on the new running gear.
Got the grain drill and the corn planter cleaned up and put away.
Had the boys haul the empty seed bags out, and we picked up a bunch more sticks from the new waterway.
I put the seed wagon away and I even sat in the office and did some bookwork one day! We’re six months into 2025, it’s about time I started doing bookwork.
I went to a seminar on oats that was very interesting. Learning the lifecycle of fungal diseases was interesting, like how the spores can travel and how it might take two or three disease cycles for certain fungus’ to reach what we call ‘economic threshold’. Perhaps my biggest take away was that oats and straw are really two different crops. I’m gonna sacrifice one to get the other. Typically the stalk (straw) isn’t quite dry and ready to be cut, when the grain is at its optimum point. But cut too green and it won’t go through the combine.
Oh yeah, that tractor I set on fire. It was just a little fire. The old 630. There’s a 4 inch piece of rubber fuel line that I knew was old and cracked, and in fact I bought some new hose just last week. I used the tractor and left it sitting outside running for about 15 minutes while I moved some stuff inside. When I walked back out to the tractor, the fuel line was on fire, and it had dripped down onto the block, which is covered with some grease and oil, and that was on fire, too.
I may have panicked just a little bit. The first thought in my head was to push the clutch lever ahead, (because the clutch / belt pulley was rattling and I was going to put it in neutral and engage the clutch to stop the rattle) And I had walked out there to do that, so the hand clutch was the first thing I grabbed. Butu then the whole fire thing… and it was still in gear and I was standing in front. It just nudged me a little bit and then I turned off the key and then my mind was racing and I thought about dirt and I thought about gas and I thought I should really just go get the fire extinguisher and I sort of chuckled as I walked into the shed thinking ‘well good for you having a fire extinguisher out here’, and at the same time thinking ‘if I use this I have to get it recharged’ and when I came back the fire was mostly out. The little bit on the hose I was able to blow out, but some of the grease underneath was still burning and I thought oh heck, just do it, and I pulled the pin and squirted a little powder on it and then figured, well it was already open, may as well hose the whole thing down just to be safe. I should replace the hose now.
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?
The only issue I have when we visit our son is the temperature of his home. He lives in a split level home, and the guest room is in the lower level. No matter the time of year, I always freeze in his house. I am always pretty cold in most settings, I must admit, but it is really cold for me there. (I have a space heater under my desk at work that I run most of the year, but our office building is generally experienced as a cold place and they can’t seem to regulate the temperature.)
Son got heat stroke a couple of summers ago and keeps the house very cool ever since, especially at night. The design of the house means that the cold air stays in the lower level and the hot air rises to the upper level. There is a big ceiling fan on both levels, but they don’t seem to do much in terms of drawing the warm air downstairs or pushing the cold air upstairs. Son and DIL spend most of their time on the upper level. Son closes the vents in the lower level in the summer, but I am still cold. I wore a down vest around the house on Sunday.
I sometimes resort to surreptitiously turning up the thermostat when no one is looking, but Son notices and turns it back down to 70°. That doesn’t sound cold, I know, but 70° there feels a lot colder than 70° in our house. I am thankful he has nice down comforters on the beds so I am warm enough when I sleep.
What are your standards for house temperatures?Where have you visited or stayed where you been the mostuncomfortable? Ever had heat stroke or heat exhaustion?
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?
Husband had just finished mowing the lawn on Monday when two boys, looking to be about 11 or 12, came by offering to mow for us. They had their own mower. Husband explained he had just finished mowing, but they would certainly be welcome in the future to do it for us. Their asking price was reasonable.
I never had a “business” as a kid, unless you count babysitting. Girls in Luverne didn’t hire out to do lawn work back then. The boys who came by on Monday looked energetic and excited. There aren’t as many older people in the neighborhood as there used to be, so I hope they don’t get discouraged if they don’t get as much business as they hoped.
Husband has arthritis in his hands. I am having increased mobility issues with chronic sciatica, probably caused by lumbar scoliosis. I can see us hiring more yard work done in the future.
Did you have a business as a kid? What tasks do you see yourself hiring others to do in the future? If you were 12 right now, what business would you start?
The house next door has sold and my neighbors are moving out this weekend. Just by chance, I was out front gardening on both the days that there was an open house, so I actually got to talk to quite a few folks who had walked through. The question that almost everyone asked was how it was to live on my street, which is a busy thoroughfare – in fact, it’s a county road as opposed to a city street.
Everybody got the same answer. I love living on my busy street – it’s easy to get to, easy to get out and around. During the winter, my street is always clear; the plows start early and are consistent. Even when side streets are still snowed in, we can always get out.
The other great thing is that you can get rid of anything by just putting it down on the boulevard. You don’t even have to put a “free” sign on it – if it’s on the boulevard, it’s fair game. Two summers ago, the house across the street was almost gutted and their boulevard was like a second-hand store for three or four weeks. I thought maybe there might be a traffic accident one day because so many people were pulling over to look and grab. Over the years I’ve put out a lot of items and the only thing that never got taken was a mattress (which makes sense) – but the city took it on trash day anyway.
The surprise this week is that someone stopped during the day yesterday and took all the little logs and all but two of the bundles of sticks that YA and I had put on the boulevard after the first day of our “tree adventure”. We didn’t put them out because we thought anybody would want them, but because that’s where they need to be for the city pick-up. But, what the heck – if these little logs and bundles will make somebody’s life better – whoopee.
Of course, I wonder why they didn’t take ALL the bundles. Maybe they didn’t have room in the car? Maybe they have just so much room back home to store the bundles? Maybe there were two of them and they weren’t aligned on whether to take any of them? Hopefully it didn’t start a fight. I also wonder if they’ll come back at some point for the last two. Or will somebody else take them? Maybe I should just put out a table instead of schlepping things to Value Village and GoodWill? I could call it Boulevard Freecycle?
Do you live on a busy or quiet street? Have you ever had a great garage sale?
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!
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?
Trail Baboon 