Yesterday YA had the day off so we decided to tackle a couple of outdoor projects first thing in the morning before the heat took over the day.
I started with putting some paving stones on the south side of the house under the water spigot. The pavers were left over from when we expanded the little patio two summers ago so I thought I’d put them to better use than just being stacked up in the garage. Unfortunately the ants didn’t think this was a grand project and it took a bit for them to give it up and I did get a couple of good bites out of it before they moved their party elsewhere.
By the time I was done, YA had made a good start on edging our northern “garden” with bricks that we inherited from our neighbor who just moved. She asked which of the jobs I wanted – digging or placing the bricks. While placing the bricks seemed like the easier of the two jobs, I know my daughter well. If I placed the bricks, she would eventually come behind me and “fix” what I had done. I admit freely that she is more patient with a lot of home projects and therefore does an overall better job. This made it an easy choice – I dug and let her place the bricks. It was a great decision. As I dug I watched her running her hands along the bricks to make sure they were even and using her finger as a measurement tool to make sure they were all the same depth. I would not have thought to do either of these steps.
We didn’t finish yesterday. It got a bit too steamy so we knocked off about half way through and vowed to finish in a couple days when it’s a bit cooler. Looks good so far.
YA works in the office on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. Occasionally she also goes into the office on a Monday or a Friday. When she has a big project, she likes the quiet of the office as well as the big screen on her desk.
There is a fairly complicated (from my perspective) process for her to get ready for work. During her junior high and high school years she started wearing make-up and taught herself how to apply it. As part of her beauty routine, she has a massive number of products, from masks to foundations to mascara to eyelash curlers to lip glosses. Massive. She can sit at her make-up table for upwards of 30 minutes some mornings. It’s exhausting just to watch.
She learned none of this from me. Not one smidge. I think I’ve told the story of when I quit wearing make-up; it was well before she was born. Even when I DID put on make-up it wasn’t anything as robust as YA’s routine.
Every now and then, when she is in a rush (usually when we’re going some place on the weekend or if she’s gotten up really late), she can cut the time down but very very rarely goes without. On work mornings, I don’t usually pay that much attention. I have my morning stuff to do (feed animals, make bed, eat breakfast, gym, errands, etc.)
Last week on Friday, she came rushing down and out the door before I even had a chance to look up. After 15 minutes, our ring doorbell dinged my phone, which was in my pocket and as I was opening the app, I heard the front door open and YA’s footsteps running up the stairs. She didn’t come down for almost 10 minutes, way too long for a forgotten key card or computer mouse. When she was headed for the front door I asked what she had forgotten and she replied “I forgot to put on make-up.”
I’m still thinking about this. First off, how do you forget something that is so much a part of your every single day routine. And mostly, why get 10 minutes from the house (about half way to the office) and turn back to put on make-up when it’s Friday and there’s next to no one in the office? Her answer when I asked her later was “just in case”. When I asked “just in case what?” all I got was a shoulder shrug.
So, yet one more instance of my certainty that I live with an alien from another world!
Do you have anything that is an every-single-day-no-matter-what routines?
We rolled the stump down to the boulevard. I didn’t think that anybody driving along would see it and think “hey, we could use a big stump for something, couldn’t we?” and take it. I was hoping however that it was small enough that the yard waste folks would take it. Nope. Turns out that they’re fairly strict about that kind of thing and my Plan B of rolling it into my trash can was quashed when I saw in the garbage/recycling website that it is actually illegal to put “substantial” yardwaste into your garbage can.
YA was not tricked into thinking that chopping up the stump was a fun way to spend her time so I finally decided to tackle it myself. If I chopped it into small chunks, I could put them in my yard wastebags with my run-of-the-mill weeds. In order to make myself do this, I had to say “just 20 minutes”. It helps that our little chainsaw has a fairly short battery life so 20 minutes is about all I can do at one shot. At the rate it was taking, I figured this would be a 10 or 12 day project.
While I was working on this, I noticed a woman working on the yard kitty corner to me. She didn’t look familiar and there was a name emblazoned on her pick-up that indicated she had been hired, as opposed to living there. As I continued on other yard projects, I noticed she was coming across the street. Turns out she is the mother of the gal who apparently has just bought the place. She asked about what kind of bags the city requires and I pointed out my paper bags. I asked her if she needed a couple and I gave her two and when she asked, I gave her directions to Menards which is about as cheap as you can find the bags these days. We talked about what you could and couldn’t put out; I told her about leaving bigger branches/small logs out for people to take. I then mentioned that the city wouldn’t take my stump which was why she had seen me cutting bits off. To my surprise she immediately said she could take the stump in her truck; her home is on 30 acres in Wisconsin and she has a perfect place to dump it. I was stunned. And grateful. I almost offered her more bags.
So within 5 minutes, we had rolled the stump into her wheelbarrow, pushed the wheelbarrow across the street and gotten the little monster into the back of her pickup. After three weeks of it sitting on the boulevard, miraculously and suddenly it’s gone!
I don’t think I’ve ever had a good deed of mine reward me so quickly and so wonderfully.
Can you think of a time a good deed has paid dividends?
This Thursday a photographer is coming over to take pictures of the house and yard for the real estate listing. We spent the weekend packing eight more bankers boxes full of books and sheet music and stowed them and the fourteen boxes of books we packed last weekend in the empty closets in the basement bedrooms. Then we put all the basement furniture back in place as the painter finished up painting the basement last Friday. We also took lots of unwanted things from the shelving in the furnace room and put them in Husband’s truck so he can take them to the landfill tomorrow. I straightened out the remaining items on the furnace room shelves so they look neat. Our new house has tons of storage and we don’t need to take any shelving with us. We hope to use the furnace room shelving as an added enticement to buy our ND house.
Today I am painting the front door and a couple of small garage doors and touching up some chipped interior paint upstairs. My goal then is to stow anything that might make the upstairs look cluttered in the upstairs closets. It will come out after the photographer is done on Thursday. I also plan to straighten up the work benches in the garage so they look neat and tidy. All this is an exhausting nuisance, but I guess this is the game you play when you sell your house. There is some consolation in knowing that everything we box up or toss out will make the final move that much easier.
I am thankful our realtor thinks our house looks nice enough as is (now that the basement is newly painted) without asking us to do any more “prettying up”. The idea to paint the doors was mine. (I intended to paint the front door 10 years ago when we had new siding put on, but never got around to it.) We will have to be vigilant about keeping the house as clean and uncluttered as possible though, for when the realtor has people over for a showing.
What kind of “prettying up” would you need to do sell your house? Any long put off chores for you?
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?
Trail Baboon 