In about a week, carpenters will arrive at our home and start demolishing two of our three bathrooms. One slated for renovation is just off our bedroom. The other is in the basement.
In order to prepare for the carpenters, we had to move three large bookcases in the basement that were full of vinyl record albums, sheet music, and all our cookbooks and various other books. The carpenters need access to the basement ceiling which is under the upstairs bathroom and right above the bookcases. As long as we were moving them, Husband decided to cull what he didn’t want or need anymore. His pickup is now full of what we threw out. We are exhausted but feeling accomplished. We were able to eliminate the contents of one bookcase entirely.
Next, Husband has to move all the things from the bathroom off our bedroom (the one which he uses) into the one I use that isn’t being renovated. For a couple of weeks, we will have to share a bathroom. This means I have to go through the cupboards in my bathroom to make room for Husband’s stuff from his bathroom.
We will be “at all sixes and sevens” most of November until the renovations are done. We are spending Thanksgiving with our son and family in Brookings, so no pressure to have the house all up to snuff. I am glad we don’t do this on a regular basis. I like having a bathroom to myself.
How many bathrooms do you have? What are your experiences with remodeling. How are you at sharing?
Today’s post comes from Ben. Header photo from Kelly.
Had a few real cold mornings. It was 21° on Tuesday morning, and below freezing for a couple days this week, but it was nice in the sun. I had to break the ice out of the chickens water buckets. The buckets are still outside for now. Don’t need the heated bucket quite yet. I did turn up some of the house heat.
The chickens have certainly dropped down on egg production. I got 2 eggs one night. The next day I got 8. Then 6, then 4, then 2 again. The last couple days it’s just been 2. It’s not the weather so much as this bunch of chickens is just aging out. The chicks from this spring should start laying any time now. I do add light to the pen, as it’s the amount of day light that triggers egg production. Some people let their hens take the winter off. I figure my hens have a pretty good life so I’m OK keeping them laying.
We picked up 10 young adult guineas from my friend Dave. He has an assortment of animals, mostly it seems because he and his granddaughter spend a lot of time on Craigs list finding animals. But come winter, they need to pare it down so they all have shelter. I’ve gotten good animals from Dave. And we were down to just 2 guineas, so this is nice. Kept them locked in a side pen for a couple days to learn that this is home now. They’ve been outside the last few days and the dynamics are interesting. They mix right in with the chickens and ducks, but the two older guineas are showing them who’s boss. There are 7 dark gray, two white, and a silver one. The silver one got outside a day before the others. And now they’re all shunning that one. I don’t know if it didn’t get along before or why this is happening.
Then Thursday night, as I closed doors, I was looking to see where the new guineas had settled for the night. Evidently, they were outside behind the barn as Humphrey the dog, scared them all out. They panicked and flew every which way. I saw one go up over the barn, another off in the trees, one down in the swamp. Friday morning there was only 7. Shucks. They make enough noise I’d hope they’d all find their way back together sooner or later.
I needed to fill all the water buckets one day and I knew the hose would be froze in the morning, so I did it in the dark after I got home one night. Got a lot of slush out of the hose but at least it wasn’t frozen solid. Here’s a photo of the poufy duck and some others.
I did get the pressure washer put into the well house. It’s a cumbersome process simply because there’s not much room for me AND the pressure washer. One of us at a time fits just fine. Add in some electrical conduit and a water pipe and it’s a bit more of a challenge. But if I lift it just so, and suck my stomach in, and grunt a few times, it fits. It’s in for the winter. I could find an easier place to put it… but… this is where it’s always been.
I’ve delivered some fall straw. Some for gardeners, some for chicken raisers. One of my neighbors raises strawberries so I’ve got 150 bales still on a wagon for him to cover the plants before winter.
One day on the blog I mentioned my dad helping and how Kelly looked forward to “Dad Stories”; me telling her what he had done that day, whether it was breaking something and going home, or just making me crazy. Oddly enough, now I can’t really remember any. When I had the Deutz tractor, it had a manual parking brake by the seat. A mechanical one you pulled up to set, then turned and pushed down to release. It wasn’t a very good parking brake given how many times we drove off with it still engaged. Dad did that often. I’d get in the tractor after him and the brake has been on for the last hour. That frustrated me. And he hated AC, so he’d open all the windows, filling the cab with dust. I’d roll my eyes.
As you read this post this morning, I will be welcoming four psychologist interns from the Human Service Center in Fargo to my Human Service Center on the opposite side of the state. The Fargo HSC has a 12 month internship accredited by the American Psychological Association, and when the interns finish next August, they will graduate with their doctorates and start their postdoctoral training wherever in the US they choose to go. They are being sent out to tour the two centers in the western part of the state in hopes that they would consider doing their postdoctoral training at our western HSC’s that are understaffed. I will only have the morning with them, so I plan to entice them with homemade banana bread at our morning Youth and Family Team meeting, and then have them watch me do intellectual and adaptive testing with a 2 year old. They don’t get to do that kind of testing at the Fargo center, as there are private providers on the eastern part of the state who do it. I am the only psychologist, in either the private or public sectors west of the Missouri River in this state who tests, so I get to do all sorts of evaluations no one else in the state system gets to do. It is testing Nirvana, as far as I am concerned.
It was always a big deal when my mother was a hostess for the various women’s groups she was a member of. Out would come the glass plates with the special section for the coffee cup. She would make egg coffee, serve butter mints and mixed nuts, and get fancy finger sandwiches and cakes from two elderly Norwegian sisters in town. The living room and bathrooms had to be spotless. It was always much more formal and fancy when she had her Lutheran Women’s Circle over, more relaxed when her sewing club or fellow elementary teachers came over. I would sit on the periphery of the group, observing and taking in all the conversation.
What sort of gatherings did your parents host? Any special plates or foods? What sort of host are you?
Last week was really windy here, with gusts up to 61 mph all day Wednesday. It looked like we were back in the Dustbowl, with the sky obscured by blowing dirt.
Kyrill, our Cesky Terrier puppy is a pretty intrepid boy with the usual terrier bravado, especially when the fiends (neighbors and pedestrians and the Postie) are outside and he is looking through the bay window. He even tolerates the vacuum and electric floor sweeper. He gets afraid, however, whenever he hears flapping noises, like those made when garbage can liners are shook out preparatory to going into the empty garbage can, or when the neighbor’s flags are flapping loudly in strong winds like we had last week. He wanted to get past the neighbor’s flag pole as fast as he could as we were buffeted by the Wednesday winds.
Our children didn’t have many fears, aside from our daughter when she was about 4 not wanting to go to a new doctor named Dr. Wolf because she was afraid he was a real wolf. My mother said I was afraid of the vacuum cleaner when I was little, and she had to wait until my father got home to hold me so she could clean the house.
There are several “Haunted” venues in our community to get good and scared at before Halloween. The mall and the old hospital building have been turned into such places. I don’t like things like that at all, but most of my coworkers have been to them and enjoyed getting terrified. I fly into Bismarck late in the afternoon from Washington DC. on October 31. That is scary enough for me!
What scared you when you were little? What is the scariest book you ever read? What are your experiences with “haunted” venues?
On Sunday, I texted a friend to see if I could drop off a book for her. I knew she’d be there but figured I should give her a heads’ up anyway. She returned my text and asked if I would mind helping her with a quick project when I stopped by. I said “sure” because any time she does ask me for assistance, it’s not usually much assistance. And, of course, my schedule is now “fluid”….
The project was changing the lightbulb in an outdoor light fixture. Sounds easy enough but the light fixture is above the side door, which is itself at the top of four stairs. We needed the tall ladder for this. Opened up the ladder didn’t fit on the top step. It didn’t fit over the steps either. Leaning the ladder up right under the light fixture didn’t seem like a good idea since its full weight would be on the glass of the side door; we ended up shifting half of the weight to the left door lintel (is that the right word?).
My friend was nervous about this procedure and although I volunteered (it wasn’t quite high enough up to trigger my fear of heights) she insisted. Unfortunately it did frighten her and her hands shook enough that she dropped the screw a couple of times. After the second drop we decided we’d better test the light before trying again. She came down the ladder and I swiveled it out of the way so she could go inside to flip the light switch. It was then that I got a very hard and painful thump on the head – she had left the screwdriver on the top of the ladder and it tumbled right off onto me.
It broke the skin and my friend was really worried that I’d been stabbed with the business end of screwdriver (it was a Phillips). We applied a paper towel and a small ice pack. I was sure I’d been thumped by the handle. There wasn’t all that much blood and a good stab would have bled more. The physics were also on my side. It was about a 4 foot drop from the top of the ladder to my head and the weight of the handle was enough that, like a cat, it would have righted itself and hit me handle first.
After a few minutes we finished up the job. Fourth time was a charm; I tried again to take over the ladder climbing but after I’d been injured helping with her project, she was adamant that I stay off the ladder.
No headache, no pain, no other symptoms. I do have a scab now that I’m trying to avoid with the comb and the shampooing but my brush with the screwdriver doesn’t seem to have damaged me permanently.
What hand tool would make the best weapon if you needed to protect yourself?
Sunday has never been a day of rest for us, Yesterday was particularly busy, and we ended up in very odd but very affirming encounters with other people.
We started out the morning at 7:30 with a run-through of our choir anthem “Hear me, Redeemer” which is written in a gospel style that has a soprano soloist belting out a solo/descant with the choir echoing her lyrics. The soloist was a terrific singer who is a member of the local LDS church but who sings with us on occasion. People in the congregation loved the song, and said it was “inspirational”, something we consider a real success given this is a pretty traditional Lutheran congregation. They even clapped.
We then spent a couple of hours doing a fall clean up the church garden with other congregation members, and it was during this that a woman drove up in a car with Florida plates, a missing driver side window, a grown daughter, and four chihuahuas. She asked Husband for help, as they were homeless. Husband found a hotel that would take dogs, gave her the number for the homeless coordinator at my agency, and our pastor found some funds for a night at the hotel and gave her a bag of leftover food from the church brunch we had earlier after our service.
We then went home and vacuumed and dusted the house, dropped some kohlrabi off at a friend’s house, and headed to the liquor store for a well deserved bottle of wine. It was there we encountered the clerk who had worked at the store several years ago, quit due to health problems, and started working again. She said she remembered us, and told us she had married, quit drinking, and was really happy in her sobriety. We congratulated her. I don’t know if working in a liquor store is the best work environment for her, but it was inspiring to hear her success. She teased us that if we stopped drinking, she would be our sponsor.
What or who inspires you? How do you spend your Sundays? What are your favorite choir songs?
It was 28° on Wednesday morning. We lost the other creamy colored duck. And the next morning a coyote was howling just 100 feet below the house. At first, the yipping noise they make sounds a little bit surreal and I ran outside to see what was going on. Even the dogs came running back to the house looking at me like “Did you hear that? What the heck is that??“ I yelled and the dogs remembered they’re supposed to deal with stuff like coyotes and they took off after it. Kelly was out the other door slapping her ‘bird away’ boards together. There’s too many leaves on the trees yet, and the corn and beans still out there and too much coverage for things to hide in and it’s tough to see much. And that’s why, a few days later, I was out in my pajamas hunting a coyote.
I was standing at the kitchen window filling the tea pot and I saw something moving out in the pasture. It was too far away to tell clearly what it was, and by the time I got my crocs on, and found the shells for the rifle, (which were behind the toothpaste box), and got out there to a better vantage point, there wasn’t anything to see. But as long as I was out there already, I fed the chickens and let Rosencrantz and Guildenstern out of their pen. Rosie and and Guildy are doing good.
I realized all the chickens spend a lot of time hiding, so it’s not just them. (See the first paragraph.) Course hiding under a bush seems more helpful for attacks from above than from coyotes.
Bringing pears in the house was the solution to eating them. They soften up and taste really good.
I have seen a couple guys combining soybeans around here. The freeze kills the stem and they harvest better that way. A few more days now and everyone will be going full force.
I still get some dairy magazines in the mail and I spent a bit of time wondering what I would have changed if I still had cows. My whole calf raising situation would have been the first thing to improve. I’d have needed to get them out of the dairy barn pen and into individual stalls somewhere.
Adding more cows and getting out of the stanchion barn would be important, but where and how I’m still not sure. We’re on low ground and it’s wet and I don’t know where I could have built, or how, or if I even would have wanted too.
Kelly asks me sometimes if I ever wanted to be one of those big farmers with thousands of acres? Well, the machinery and toys are fun, but it also turns into more management and less actual work at some point. So I don’t know.
As I’ve always said, just add more zero’s to the bills and income.
Despite already having way too many kitchen toys, last month I couldn’t resist a set of hand pie molds on sale in a catalog of cooking fripperies. I had never heard the phrase “hand pies” until I moved to Minnesota and even then, I don’t hear it often.
Now that YA and I are overloaded with apples from our trip to the orchard on Sunday, I decided to try out one of my new molds – the apple one. I didn’t use any particular recipe, just some thinly chopped apples with sugar and a bit of cinnamon. At the last minute I tossed in a half cup of raspberries from my canes. I also used refrigerated pie dough (Trader Joe’s) since I wasn’t sure how it would all come together. I hate wasting dough made from scratch!
They turned out pretty well considering that I was just winging it. I figured out pretty quickly that flour was needed in the mold and that although I was using an egg wash on the outside, I should have used water as the binder between the two layers of pastry. The last issue is one I’ve encountered before; when working with store-bought pie dough, you have to really work the edges together when you roll out the scrap pieces or they don’t hold. I know this but didn’t follow through well because I was rushing a bit (I had already made an apple crisp at YA’s request). They turned out OK but not as pretty as any of the online pictures. That’s OK, I didn’t expect masterpieces the first time around.
The good news is that even though they weren’t picture-perfect, they taste great. The addition of the raspberries gave them a bit of a twang and being able to pick up your pie and eat it without a fork or spoon is a lot of fun. Maybe I’ll try blueberries next time around.
What kind of food have you discovered as an adult?
Rosie and Guildy are still good. They look like they’re finally growing. They’re still spending most of the day hiding under something, but they do come out and go in by themselves morning and night so that’s progress.
We lost one of the creamy colored adult ducks. Still the two black and white, one creamy, one poufy, and 6 mallards. And two guineas. And roughly 52 chickens. Daily egg count is somewhere between 7 and 12, down from summer peak. Newest hens haven’t started laying yet; late October they’ll be 6 months old and they start laying somewhere in there.
This is Rooster #3 — Kelly calls him ‘Top Gun’ because he thinks he’s hot stuff.
Some of the latest batch of chickens have more black around their eyes than other years. They are ‘Black Australorpe’ breed and they have good longevity, but they can be kind of ornery. I like them. Most chickens in a close up just look ornery.
I’ve been busy at the theaters this week. The HVAC being installed brought in a scissor lift and I use it when they’re not. Replaced a bunch of non-functioning fluorescent lights in the theater with LED retrofit kits. Pulled down all the cables for the stage lights so we could redo them. (It just turns into a rat’s nest after a while. Good to pull down and start fresh.)
Created some new doorways and redid other odds and ends over the summer break between shows. On Saturday all the platforms for the seating are going back in place so I must finish the bulk of the work that I want with the lift before that.
I’ve been saying there’s not much happening on the farm. That’s not true. I’M not doing much on the farm, but there’s a lot happening. The corn and beans are both maturing and drying out. Beans are losing their leaves and drying down, corn is turning brown, maturing, and drying out. Birds are migrating, bees are busy, deciduous trees are turning colors, the world rotates, planets are moving, the moon changes phases… there’s a lot happening. Just not by me.
I watch some youTube farming channels; they’re busy getting things ready for harvest. Soybeans could be going in our area in another week or two.
The pod right in the center of the photo has 4 beans in it. BONUS! Most only have 3. Four isn’t unusual, but it’s not the normal either. See the pods at the very top of the plant? Those are the ‘bonus’ pods. Not only because the deer didn’t eat the buds off the top, but the plant develops from the bottom up, so the better the conditions, the better resources the plant has, the more pods it can create. It’s looking like a pretty good year for my crops. Knock on Wood.
WHO HAVE YOU KNOWN, OR DO YOU KNOW, THAT LOOKS ORNERY BUT WASN’T OR ISN’T?
I decided to put the egg table up Sunday afternoon (since I had to skip Blevins due to continuing cough). This just involves setting up the candle, cutting wax into teeny bits, lining up the kistkas that I’ll need for this year’s design and also making the dyes I’ll be using. The actual set up takes less than an hour but there’s a 24-hour lag before I can start working on eggs. The dyes need to be completely cooled and the eggs need to be room temperature.
Yesterday when I woke up at 5:30 (about the norm), it was all I could do to keep myself from going downstairs, firing up the kistkas and getting started. I know myself well enough to know that the minute I start, I’ll be obsessed until I’m done. Sitting in that chair for too many hours in a day just makes my back and shoulders hurt so starting at 6 a.m. is not a good idea.
There are very few things that I get this obsessed about. In card-making, I don’t have any problem putting things away at a good stopping point. Jigsaw puzzles can keep me busy for quite some time but I do tend to run out of puzzle steam after 3-4 hours. Reading is a passion, but except for the rare “I just have to finish this book right now” situation, I can stop when I need to. (I do occasionally have to throw YA out of my room if I’m down to the last few chapters of something I’m really into and I was once late to work!) But once I start the first egg, the decks need to be cleared because I want to keep going and going. In prior years (before retirement) I used to take the egg week off from work because I’d end up sitting at the table until 2 and 3 in the morning. Several years ago when I didn’t take the week off, I ended up pulling an all-nighter; that was ugly.
Waiting until 7:30 to go downstairs was a good idea. I ate all my meals at the table today and except for an hour when there was a tradesman here measuring stuff, I worked straight through to 8:15 p.m. Then I hobbled upstairs and headed straight to the ibuprofen bottle! I figure, based on yesterday’s work, I’ll have four more days before I’m done.
