I’m reading a memoir right now (Thirty Rooms to Hide In by Luke Sullivan). In the early pages, the author paints a picture of his life growing up with his five brothers in Rochester in the fifties. Here is an interesting passage on bedtime:
“Bedtime was indeed death. Even the rituals were the same: the preparing of the body (the solemn washing of teeth, the funereal donning of pajamas), the readings, the occasional prayer, and finally the inevitable darkness. All that was missing were Hallmark sympathy cards arriving in the mail.”
I never really thought about bedtime in terms of rituals but in my world, it’s probably the most consistent rituals that I have. Teeth, pajamas, highlighting items done from my to-do list, making a list for the next day, med/vitamins, daily entry in my “good things” journal. Once I’m actually settling in, there is the arranging of Nimue’s blanket on my side of the bed; her ritual is to settle in for about ten minutes, knead a few biscuits, purr while getting some scritches and then heading to her favorite bed on top of the radiator.
Almost forgot the “bang” treat for Guinevere and the yummies for Nimue… this usually happens between teeth and jammies.
Since I have been home full time after retiring on February 1, I have had time to sort through some closets, papers, and freezers that had been pretty well neglected over the past couple of years. It has dawned on me that we can either have a clean, organized home or work full time. We can’t do both. Husband is still working essentially full time and has been for the past several years.
Because of our harried work schedules and after work exhaustion, things like papers have been thrown on our work desk or filing cabinets to be gone through “later”. It is hard to see what you have in closets if it is poorly organized and things are just stuffed in. It is also hard when you live in a food desert and you love to cook and you run across hard to come by items that you get excited about and buy a whole bunch because they are scarce, and then you throw them in your poorly organized freezers and you sort of forget you have them as they get covered up with subsequently purchased groceries, and then you inadvertently buy more the next time you run across them.
I decided to start by sorting and organizing the freezer that has all the sausages, ground meat, lamb, and homemade brodo. I was rather dismayed to discover we have seven pounds of ground veal, five pounds of ground lamb, and four legs of lamb and a huge lamb rack. Veal and lamb are virtually impossible to obtain out here, so we bought a bunch when we had the chance, then forgot we had it. There will be meatballs and meatloaf on the menu for the next several months. I have plans for one of the lamb legs for Easter.
I also organized the linen cupboard, and found we have eight sets of queen sheets. We only have three queen beds, and we only sleep in one of them, and I have no idea why I thought we needed so many. The sheets are all in great shape. We will not need to buy new sheets ever again.
I have several closets to go through and a couple of freezers to organize. I am so glad I will only work part time starting in March so that I can finish sorting and organizing.
How do you fold fitted sheets? What are you prone to buy too much of? Any helpful home organizing tips?
And we thought it was cold during the last cold spell.
Not much happening on the farm this week. The sun is sure getting stronger, and the chickens stand on the south side of the shed, in the sun, out of the wind, against the white steel, and they don’t venture much further. They even laid a few eggs.
I’m having a hard time feeling motivated lately. Every now and then I get to a point where I feel like the Earth is going to fall into the sun, so what’s the point anyway.
Sigh.
And then I get up and go do something.
It could be the political climate, it could be the cold weather, it could just be the same old routine day after day. Have you noticed? Even though there’s a lot going on, and every day is different, the routine is still the same.
And coffee. Evidently, I’m a coffee drinker now. One day I bought a bag of coffee. Wait, back up—Why didn’t this group tell me there was different flavors of coffee?? I spent a day researching coffee flavors, and then I was determined not to buy a coffee maker because I wasn’t sure how committed I was to all this, so I tried various methods of making coffee without a coffee maker, and I researched egg coffee, and reusing the grounds, and strainers and filters, and I spilled a lot, and I made too many cups, bowls, and pans dirty… and then about the fourth day I bought a $10 coffee maker at Menards.
Sigh.
And a bag of small bag of Highland Grog coffee.
Sigh.
When we say we had “one cup”, are we actually referring to the volume measurement of one liquid cup? Because my travel mug is roughly two cups, and if I have two in a day, am I having four cups of coffee or two? This morning I made about three circles in the kitchen trying to figure out what I was doing first or next. I just haven’t gotten this whole coffee making process figured out yet.
Sigh.
There’s a spot in the yard where I get a real good echo off the barn and chicken coop. I stood there one day and yelled ‘Hello!’ a dozen times. I’d get two good echo’s off that and it was kinda fun and I enjoyed myself.
Out in the shed, I’ve gotten a cabinet mounted, and I’m working on the bolt storage shelves.
I saw a truck from a concrete company on the road the other day. I took a photo of it at the stoplight and was able to contact them for an estimate on adding more concrete in the shed. $13,000 for a flat slab 25’x50’. Well, that’s not a ton of money. I mean, it’s still $13K, but that’s hardly anything! Oh, it’s not going to happen this summer. I’ve said before, just because crop prices are up one year, doesn’t mean we should go crazy buying stuff, because you’d still have to make that payment next year. That’s how this whole shop project started: crop prices were really good in 2022 and I felt like I had money and I signed a contract for concrete in 2023 and began my shop. Here we are in 2025 and I’m still paying off the shop.
People may be curious about the agricultural environment in this administration…well, there’s lots of speculation. Prices are holding steady for the most part for corn and soybeans. They vary a few cents up and down every day based on talk of a trade deal with China, or good weather in Argentina. And I’ll say again, it’s such a global market, tariffs will send a price down, but bad weather in Brazil will bring it back up. It’s kinda crazy. I have a little corn in storage at the elevator, I put it there last fall, knowing I always need cash come spring, and hoping the price will have gone up enough to offset what I’m paying for storage of it. $0.06 / bushel / month. So, maybe today I win, and tomorrow I’ll lose. I’ll need the money either way.
This weekend at the college is the physics department club doing their demonstration show fundraiser. They physics kids are nerds as much as the theater kids are. They’re a good group though, and even though the show hasn’t changed too much in the 15 years I’ve been doing this, the audience kids seem to like it.
My mother and her four paternal aunts (Lena, Meta, Bertha, and Greta) spent a great deal of time in the mid-1930’s filling my mother’s Hope Chest with patchwork quilts they sewed. They used cloth scraps from their own and others’ unneeded clothing as well as larger pieces for backing. Mom never really used them and just kept them in her cedar chest.
I started using them after Husband and I married. There were four of them. One is still in tremendous shape and we have it on a bed in the basement. The quilts worked best as blankets under the bedspread as they are all sized for double beds. Two of the quilts disintegrated after about 10 years. I decided to preserve the third one and patched it as best I could and put on a new backing. I hung it on the wall in my work office for many years until time and gravity started it to sag and tear at the seams.
It has been in a cabinet in my new office until I started to clean and get rid of stuff preparatory to my retirement. I took the quilt out to our van and left it there to be used as part of winter survival gear
Husband brought it into our son’s house when we were visiting there last week, and our grandson insisted that we put it on his bed, and he slept under it every night we were in Brookings. Mind you, it hadn’t been laundered in 25 years, and was probably full of dust, but grandson loved it and wasn’t happy when we took it home. I told him I wanted to patch it better and we would bring it back to him at our next visit. It dawned on me that the quilt is about 90 years old. My mother and her aunts would be pleased some of their handwork is still being used and loved.
What precious things do you have that have been handed down? What do you want to hand down for future generations? What do you think are essentials for “Hope Chests” these days?
Get your long johns out for this coming week. Better yet, just stay inside until next Saturday. Nature is trying to kill you this week.
No further progress on the bathroom this week, still waiting on the countertops. We heard the electrician was on vacation last week, and when I pestered the boss electrician yesterday, he said two guys were on vacation and he’d get them out when back. Huh. Are they still on vacation or is he bluffing me? Could be either one.
Good thing our neighbors went on vacation again so we could do some more laundry.
The guys put heavy paper down on the floor when they started remodeling, and that’s still there, so we stopped the Roomba at the first of the year. Thank goodness for cordless vacuums, am I right?? So Much Dog Hair! My goodness…
Out in the shop I’ve finally figured out what I want to do for bolt storage. I cleaned out under the shop work bench, (That’s Luna helping me in the header photo) which hasn’t been cleaned out in 30 years, and I bought some good heavy duty storage bins to replace the old anti-freeze jugs we’ve been using since dad cut the sides out of them 40 years ago. I lined up a few bins that I’ve used over the years to see the progression in storage:
I’m not sure where the metal cans came from. They were up in the old shed ‘attic’. Dad made the yellow antifreeze jugs, I went to the small red bins, and now I’m doing the clear ones.
When these wear out it will be someone else’s problem.
A month ago, as egg prices were increasing, I thought I better look into getting chicks ordered in case they’re months out like they were a few years ago. To my surprise, nothing seemed to be delayed. I put 40 or 50 chicks in the cart, but didn’t want to order yet.
And then the company sent an email saying they’ve been overwhelmed, the website is down, and they’re not taking any more orders for this year. Well heck. I thought it seemed too good to be true. I started looking up other hatcheries. All seemed to be months out on orders. I know the local Fleet Farm will have chicks this spring, which is new for them. And the local Tractor Supply always has chicks, but again, this year, better get there as they’re coming off the truck to get any. And I saw even some of the local grain elevator will have chicks, but they’re also saying, ‘First come, First served’. Way back in the OLD old days, Rochester had two full-fledged chick hatcheries, and one of the buildings is still there, subdivided into multiple small businesses.
I haven’t seen the local elevators have live chicks in many years.
I found a small hatchery out in Willmar, MN that could get me chicks in April, and I got my order in. I did ponder just hatching my own. Guess I still could. I hope the new place is able to follow through.
I mentioned to daughter that we’re giving her Monday off because it’s Presidents Day and the college is closed. Kelly still has work, but daughter and I can take the day off. Then I proceeded to tell her about George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, asking what she remembered about them. I suspect sometimes she claims no knowledge because it’s easier than telling me what she does know. I told her about General George Washington, being the first President, and the dollar bill, and then started on Abraham Lincoln and the civil war, and his assassination, which led me to question the difference between murder and assassination (yep, politics, that’s what I thought) — and then I got a phone call which took a few minutes. When I got off the phone, daughter said, “What about having Monday off?” and I got the giggles. All of this information and she focused on what I said ten minutes ago?? I guess I should have known her priorities. And then, two hours later, she texted me a paragraph on Abraham Lincoln. Hmm! Maybe she was listening after all? Now I’m really curious: did she look that up herself or did they talk about it at her program? The kid never stops fascinating me.
This rooster was waiting for me to put corn out. 2 PHOTOS
Notice his comb? Not the traditional one you pictured in your head, is it.
And this rooster:
He got frostbite on his comb. He’ll be OK.
Did you know, there are 9 different types of rooster combs.
My current batch of chickens is really not cold weather hardy. Last week I was getting 12 – 16 dozen eggs / day. Then the weather got cold again and I’m down to 4-8 eggs / day. Some varieties are more winter hardy than others. The fancier the breed, the more ‘delicate’ they are. I’m sticking with tried and true this spring: Black Australorp and Barred Rock.
WHAT ELSE IS THERE ABOUT CHICKENS SHOULD WE TALK ABOUT?
Most Wednesdays I leave the house very early to hit my favorite donut place. When I left yesterday, YA said she was going to the gym before work and would probably be gone before I got back.
I was thinking about that when I pulled into my driveway and saw that she was starting to back out of the garage. She didn’t notice me right away (I was on the hill part of the driveway so my lights were pointing higher than her car) so she didn’t wait for me to pull into the garage next to her so I just sat and waited.
What you need to know is that YA and I have different strategies for dealing with our long driveway. I almost always just back all the way down to the street. YA does several little turns at the top of our driveway so that she is driving out headfirst. Both techniques have their pluses and minuses. But it meant that by the time she had turned herself around at the top, there would be room for me to get by and into the garage.
Went exactly as I had expected but while I was waiting it did make me think about “playing chicken”. I’m not a big playing chicken kind of gal but it does feature in a movie I’ve watched too many times:
Have you ever been in a submarine? Do you have a favorite submarine movie?
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.
Husband has been keeping the bird feeder in the back yard full this winter. Once he fills it, the sentinel chickadee who sits in the lilac hedge and watches him sounds the news, and pretty soon the feeder and the ground below are full of birds. They swoop into the feeder area in groups, and others wait their turn in the lilac hedge and the grapevines on our deck.
We have two very tall spruce trees in the front yard, and many birds hang out there, especially the Eurasian Collared Doves. They also visit the feeder and eat the seed that falls onto the ground. They nest in the spruces and we hear hungry baby doves all summer.
One day last week I was backing out of the driveway when I spotted an American Kestrel sitting on the ground in one of our flower beds right by the sidewalk. It was devouring a dove. The kestrel didn’t seem to mind me at all. It was intent on the fat dove. It always amazes me how small kestrels are. I love the bluish grey on the head and the checkerboard pattern on its underside and legs. It finally flew off with the dove in its claws.
This is not the first kestrel we have had. I have seen them swoop into the spruce trees on one side and emerge seconds later on the other side carrying off a squawking dove. It gets pretty exciting here sometimes!
Any close encountersfor you this past couple of weeks? What is your favorite raptor?
Every time I went outside this past week I’d say “Hooo Doggie!” like Jed Clampet. It was kinda brisk.
No one was very interested in going outside.
The chickens were very happy to just hang out in the coop.
The guys working on the tower didn’t come back until Wednesday morning, and then Thursday they had a crane helping them.
Taking daughter into town one morning and I was telling her about a dream I had. (I have a lot of theater and lighting dreams). I was expounding on dream interpretation, when she said, “Okay Dad”. Ah. Point taken. I stopped talking. And I thought she was hanging on my every word.
The bathroom remodeling is in the dusty ‘sanding drywall’ phase. The guys are doing a pretty good job putting up plastic and sealing things, but that dust…it gets everywhere. Kelly taped baffles over the gap at the bottom of the doors, and even that didn’t help. I picked up my computer mouse and there was a dusty outline of that. And that was at the far end of a room with the door closed. Sigh. Part of the deal. This too shall pass. That’s Humphrey peeking through the plastic in the header photo, he’s just wondering when this will finish. Kinda like daughter. The guys know it’s not personal when she comes out of her room and yells, “WHEN ARE YOU GOING TO BE DONE!??” It’s just messing up her routine.
I’m making progress organizing the shop. Construction is basically done, other than adding shelving or cabinets, and I do have to finish installing some screws on the ground row (because I hate getting down on the ground unless I must, I put off installing those screws) and a couple other places I realized I forgot to install screws. I’ve mounted an air hose reel inside, and finished the wall outside, and moved some toolboxes. There’s a couple things I’m not sure I should mount until the electricians are finished. I’ve ordered some fancy dancy lights: A bunch for inside, a couple big ones outside the shop doors, a small one over the walk-in door, and two over the work bench.
Luna the dog. Short for ‘Luna-tic’. When we go outside, she’s so excited to be out doing something, she spends most of the time hopping on her back legs chewing on my hand. We learned a new trick where she bites a big stick, and I can spin her in circles. Well, I myself can’t spin too many circles before I fall over, but she loves it.
Bailey hates to be left out.
And all three dogs love eating the corn I throw out for the chickens. Luna will eat right out of the bucket while I’m dumping it out.
They’re all so weird.
Last week I got seed ordered for spring. This week all the necessary fertilizer and chemicals was confirmed. My goodness, nothing is getting cheaper. $30,000 this week. It’s only money!
Saturday is the Met in HD opera movie. ‘Aida’. It’s a long opera, 3 hour 15 minutes. I’ll be getting the large popcorn. And taking a nap. During the movie I mean. I can’t stand the music, but I enjoy the “production” of it all.
WHAT’S YOUR FAVORITE FOOD TO EAT RIGHT OUT OF THE CONTAINER?
Husband loves to grill and smoke meats. He has an enormous wood and charcoal smoker/grill in the back yard. It works pretty well, but it is often not possible for him to take a whole day to smoke something, and it isn’t possible to do it in the winter. In December he found on-line an electric indoor smoker that uses wood pellets as fuel. It is made by GE. We got it, and he used it for the first time last week.
I was somewhat skeptical that we could use a smoker indoors without smoking up the house, but it worked well, and there was only the smell of smoked meat, not smoke, in the house. It took 7 hours to completely cook a 4 pound chuck roast. The smoker is really quite small, and fits nicely on the kitchen counter. The smoke is filtered through water reservoirs and comes out of the smoker as warm air. It is a brilliant machine.
Have you acquired any new toys lately?What do you like to grill?
Trail Baboon 