Last weekend we vacationed in La Crosse, WI with our son and his family. It was a lovely time. We have wonderful memories, like seeing our 11 month old granddaughter have her first ice cream. She thought it was pretty wonderful. We also took away a nasty upper respiratory virus that Granddaughter brought from her daycare. Son, Dil, and Grandson all were ill by Sunday evening. Husband seems to have avoided it. I got it on Monday. By yesterday I was running a low grade fever, had lost my voice, and was coughing my head off.
I don’t get sick very often, but I must give the impression I don’t take care of myself when I do get sick. because I have never felt so bossed around as I felt this week. Husband insisted he drive me to the doctor after he and Boommate made sure I made an appointment. Boommate ordered my out of the kitchen when I was just trying to straighten up, and they both made me set up a nest for myself on the sofa. The dogs even got in on my care by lying on top of me so I couldn’t get up. Then Boommate started to work on a big pot of homemade chicken noodle soup that takes hours to simmer. I feel very loved.
It has been ages since I had a summer cold. The doctor told me that the symptoms would be the worst on the fourth to sixth day. There was very little she could give me aside from something for my cough. I don’t like going viral this way.
What sort of a patient are you? Any good “first” stories?
It’s been hot. Got the fan on in the chicken coop. At the moment, daughter just came back from her walk and the dogs are panting. She was smart enough to cut the walk short. Wednesday when it was so SO hot, I convince her to just make her laps in the shop, the only place we have AC. How funny is that? The shop has AC, the house does not. Well, just how it goes. Don’t want the tools to rust you know.
The boys and I found work in the shop this week. Sure glad I’m not milking cows in this weather. I’d have been grumpy and ornery. And hot and sweaty.
Man, life is just relentless. I went back to read last week’s farming update so I’d remember what I’ve already told you. Padawan 1 quit another job and he’s back with me. Which is OK, but I’ve still got P2 around. I can’t really afford both. And together…well, you know, two nineteen year olds… It’s more work for me to keep them both working independently. And they still chatter and make noises. Such nice young men… can’t wait to see how they are in about five years.
We’ve gotten 2.5” of rain the last few days. The latest drought monitor map has us as “abnormally dry” back on June 30, so presumably we’re in a little better shape now. We don’t need two inches in two days, but an inch over a day, every week would be nice. Down around Grand Meadow, they got 8″ of rain. My goodness…crazy stuff.
One day in the shop I had P1 in the cab of the tractor trying to figure out why the blinkers would only work randomly. I had him start in the fuse box. It has a diagram on the cover so you know which fuse is what. Somehow he still managed to read it backwards. Considering this is all kinda new to him I wouldn’t be so concerned. However as he’s rebuilding the engine in his car, I wish I had more confidence in his skills… Eventually he deduced the switch was bad. He removed the steering wheel and got the cover off so we could see the multi function switch. High and low beams, horn, and blinkers. I called John Deere. $665 for a new switch. Well. Blinkers are overrated. He squirted some circuit cleaner in there and reassembled. It took a few tries and he had to take the steering wheel back off to bend up some tabs to keep the nut holding the steering wheel tight. Again, should I be concerned about the lack of attention to detail? Well, it’s not my car engine he’s taking apart.
I took the boys on a road trip. We picked up a part in Plainview and then to my tire place, Appel Tire in Millville. Dropped off four tires: The one that was packed full of mud this spring which I cut apart to get the mud out of, a tire off the generator meaning I just needed a used tire to hold the air INSIDE, and I replaced two tires on the haybine. We went to lunch at the only place in town, Whiskey Dicks. Brat burgers were the special and they were really good. The boys spent an hour talking like hillbillies, which kind of annoyed me. Then we picked up the tires ($476.52) and came back home.
P1 mounted the tires back on to the haybine. (Funny how all the machinery I bought in the 1990’s or 2000’s needs new tires these days. The haybine, wagons, the corn planter, the grain drill. Like I should only expect 25 or 30 years out of a set. It’s not the tread, it’s the sidewalls that crack and wear out.) On a car, there are the studs, or bolts that stick out and you fit the wheel over them and add nuts. On farm machinery there’s a bolt that goes through the wheel and threads into a hub. So a little fussier getting things lined up. And it gave him trouble and he got mad and didn’t want to listen and I just had to walk away. It took him an hour but he got the two new tires on. It doesn’t help when I point out he’s letting a couple tires make him mad. There’s that lack of a soft skill again. It’s such a shame when you get in your own way, you know?
P2 has more soft skills. He was mounting a couple new LED work lights to the rear of the cab. I thought we’d have to run new wires up to the top lights and splice them in. But that’s when I noticed connectors tucked under the fender as part of the blinkers. Often, the entire wiring harness is installed and then only some of it is used. The lights that we added would have been part of a ‘premium’ lighting package. Up in the cab, I ordered a new switch for those lights ($67), and it came with a couple wires that simply plugged into a connector and BOOM! More lights. Can’t wait to need them. Looking forward to it.
Just add a couple wires
Bottom right, new switch!
P2 also figured out how to get my shop garage door to talk to my phone again. It used to work, then I think I hit ‘factory reset’ or something. I gave him the manual and my phone, and eventually using his phone, it all works again and I can open the shop door from your house. He told me never to get the book out again. He did it all by asking AI how to make it work. Crazy stuff. And that’s why I gave that job to him.
Crops are looking good. The beans are starting to fill in, the corn is well over knee high; it’s at least waist high if not chest high in some fields. The oats is starting to turn color. I picked up two bales of twine last week, because we’ll be doing straw before you know it.
On Saturday, Husband, I, and Boommate met up with our son and his family for a Father’s Day hike at the Pipestone National Monument, aka The Pipestone Indian Shrine. (I don’t think 47 would like to see that name.) It is almost equidistant from both Luverne and Aurora, SD, where son and family live. Here are some park photos.
My mother’s family is from Pipestone. My Uncle Harvey’s old farm abuts the park. It is an odd place, consisting of a quartzite quarry surrounded by prairie with a creek. For hundreds of years, native tribes would come from all over the contnent and get rock for ceremonial pipes. It is a holy place, and there were many cloth prayer bundles tied up in the tree branches. There continue to be native carvers at the visitor center who make pipes. Husband’s is in the header photo. We bought it several years ago. Boommate made the case it rests on. We keep it in its case, as our native friends say it is disrespectful to display it.
On our hike through the park we ran into a graduate school friend of DIL who heads a program at SDSU for disadvantaged students to help them transition to university. The students were with him. He and DIL hadn’t seen each other for some time, and it was nice for them to meet up.
We have a Hidatsa Indian friend from the ND Fort Berthold Reserve who attended the Pipestone Indian School. It closed many years ago. He also worked briefly at the park visitor center as a pipe carver. All the staff at the visitor center are native, and Husband took a chance and asked the older woman at the checkout if she knew our friend, Leo. Well, of course she did, and knew his wife’s name and the name of the band he played bass guitar and drums in. She was so delighted she gave us a bunch of free bumper stickers!
It is a small world, and it was fun to feel connected in so many diverse ways.
When have you felt the world is small? Ever been to Pipestone?
Daughter is really putting down roots in Tacoma and has purchased a condo. It is quite a bit bigger than than her apartment.
Daughter has enlisted numerous friends to help with the move. She has a dear friend who is an engineer of some sort and who has been through the house buying and refurnishing process and who has taken her in hand regarding buying new furniture.
Daughter needs a new sofa. Friend insisted that the sofa must have a frame made from wood from a certain place in North Carolina for strength and longevity, along with many other caveats for structural stability. The two young women spent the day in Seattle yesterday sitting on sofas. Daughter texted me that she found one she loved at Crate and Barrel and was deciding on fabric swatches. I do hope the internal structure met the engineer’s specifications!
I think I like the advice another friend gave daughter regarding buying furniture: “buy once, cry once”, meaning buy the best you can afford so it lasts longer.
Any furniture buying stories? How do your tastes in furniture style run?
As I drove to Brookings this week I heard MPR play a recording by Van Cliburn. I remembered my confusion, as a child, regarding his name. I could never figure out why no one ever mentioned his first name. My confusion stemmed from growing up in an area heavily populated by Dutch immigrants. There were Vanden Hoeks, Van Neuenhuizens, Van Roekels, etc, so I thought Van Cliburn was his full last name. Imagine my surprise when I realized Van was his first name and he wasn’t Dutch!
This memory triggered another language based misunderstanding regarding Offenbach. In one of my first piano books I had a very simple piece written by Offenbach, but I didn’t know that was a formal name. I thought it was a German word that meant that you had to stand up when you played the piece, getting “Off the bench or off your backside”. I remember my piano teacher trying not to laugh when I explained my reasoning for why I stood up to play the piece.
A few weeks ago I was complaining to my daughter in law about my dislike for my exercise class, but how it was helping me improve my strength and stamina. Grandson was eying the Tylenol bottle at the time, and asked why, if I took Tylenol and it said “extra strength” did I even go to my class, since the Tylenol would give me extra strength. We explained it was the Tylenol that was strong, but it didn’t make me strong.
I think my favorite childhood misunderstanding was that held by a good friend from college. He was an accomplished oboe player from a small town in Eastern ND. The summer after he graduated from high school he travelled to Europe with a concert band from the International Music Camp (located on the ND/Canadian border). They played a concert in Washington, DC before heading overseas. He told me his confusion hearing the length of time the flight to Europe would take from DC, because it seemed so short, and his embarrassment realizing that his entire life he thought Washington, DC was in Washington State, hence the shorter travel time!
There’s never any warning. Trader Joe’s Fearless Flyer doesn’t have a set schedule – without any notice it shows up in my Inbox. In the olden days (back when the dinosaurs roamed the planet) it would appear in the snail mail box. It’s the same document these days but I have to admit that I enjoyed relaxing with a cup of coffee or tea and leafing through the hard copy.
But this is not a rant about the death of print. I swear. It’s more a rant about how YA and I are completely helpless in the face of this flyer. It’s unbelievable; we are both completely drawn to the new (and probably never-to-be-seen-again) products that are featured. A little bit like the seasonally colored items that I can’t stay away from.
The theme of the flyer and the seasonal items this time is “strawberry”. While I love fresh strawberries and I practically live on my strawberry jam, I’m not otherwise a massive strawberry fan. But YA is. And there are certainly lots more items featured in addition to the strawberry-laden stuff. We made a list and I headed out. Managed to find everything on the list with the assistance of a customer service gentleman who went to the back and found two items that were out on the shelves. Here is a partial list of what I came home with:
Pickle Potato Chips: these were primarily for YA – she’s also a fan of Pickle Pizza at the fair.
Parmesan Tapenade: I love all kinds of tapenade, so this looked promising. It made a great pizza topping on Tuesday.
Potato Cheese Stix: like it says. Cubed potatoes, mixed with cheese, frozen on a stick. YA says they’re pretty good.
Spicy Taco Sauce: This turned out to be a great sauce for the afore-mentioned potato-cheese stix.
Strawberry Gummy Bears. Completely for YA. I never even liked jujubes when I was a kid, so no gummies for me now.
Turkish flatbread with cheeses, spinach and onion. In the freezer section – can’t wait.
Spicy Spuds. Another freezer options – spicy roasted potatoes.
Oat Bites. There are two kids – PB&J and Raspberry. Bitty little muffins with filling.
Strawberry Snickerdoodles. I might try this although YA will probably eat most of them
Garlic Salted Mixed Nuts. They also have little garlic toasted chips in the can. Quite nice.
There were several other things, including a six-pack of San Pellegrino; we splurge on this a couple of times a year. None of these items were necessary and neither of us had a plan for any of it, although I did get a pizza dough while I was there, thinking about the tapenade. I’m of two minds about this silliness. One the one hand, it was a lot of money for nothing that we had a plan for. On the other hand, it’s food; we have to eat regardless of the absurdity of the food items.
Tried anything new (food or otherwise) the past couple of weeks?
Muscle memory is an amazing thing. On Saturday, YA and I had our next-door neighbors over for lunch. Just veggie burgers and corn on the grill. At the last minute, we decided it was a little too chilly to eat outside, so I set the table inside.
I set out seven little bowls in the kitchen. Onion slices, tomato slices, pickles and Boston lettuce to get started. Just as I started to squirt ketchup into the fifth bowl, YA walked in and immediately said “what are you DOING?” I told her I was putting the condiments in bowls and she pushed back with “WHY?” It took me a few minutes of standing at the counter, looking at the bowls before I realized why I was about to put ketchup, mustard and mayonnaise in little bowls.
When I was growing up, condiments went into little bowls. Not just for when we had company, but all the time. Even when we had dinner at my Nana and Pappy’s on Saturday nights, condiments went into little bowls. In fact, if condiments ever went on the table in their bottles, it was called “pinkert style”. It wasn’t until I was in high school that my mom told me why. When she was growing up, they lived a few houses down from the Pinkerts. Apparently the Pinkerts never put their condiments into little dishes… they always just set the bottles out willy nilly. So it turns out that my grandparents calling that “pinkert style” was actually quite pejorative – I never knew.
While I almost automatically put out little bowls when company comes over, YA and I do not do this when it’s just the two of us. Of course, YA and I eating a meal that requires condiments on the table is fairly rare.
On Saturday I put out the bottles; I really don’t need to be the third generation getting little bowls dirty in the name of shaming some family up the block from my grandparents!!
Any habits that have come down the generations in your family?
When I was in high school I was fortunate to have wonderful music teachers and choir/ band directors. My favorite choir director, Mr. Phelps, was a Concordia College, Moorhead grad who eventually settled in the Twin Cities, where he was equally beloved by students there.
Mr. Phelps, aka Showboat Phelps to other local directors, really knew how to put on a show, be it musicals or difficult choral pieces. One Christmas we did The Messiah. It is a demanding piece with a very high First Tenor part. Mr. Phelps had no qualms about enlisting the Second Altos to sing First Tenor in the Messiah as well as on any other song the Tenors struggled with. I am a Second Alto, and to this day I still know the First Tenor part from The Messiah much better than the Alto part.
My speaking voice isn’t particularly low, but singing Tenor in high school as my voice was maturing kept my singing range really low. My voice breaks at the C above Middle C, and I am able to get down comfortably to the D below Middle C. That is pretty low.
Last week in church choir the Bass section was having a hard time with a couple of measures that had several accidentals. it was identical to the Alto part an octave higher. The director joked that it was too bad we couldn’t sing the part with the Bass section in their register. I told her I could, and I did. The Sopranos were astounded I could sing that low. I was the only one who could sing the measures correctly. Thanks, Mr. Phelps. It’s just too bad you didn’t have me sing along with the Sopranos as well as the Tenors. Think of what my vocal range would have been if you had!
What were your best/worst school music experiences? What is your vocal range?
Sometimes I think maybe I should have gone back to school to get a PhD in family manipulation. I got my Masters training from the master – my mother. Even when I could feel her working her magic on me, I succumbed time and time again.
The inheritance of this talent is a two-edged sword. It certainly works wonders sometimes but then I occasionally feel guilty. I should probably feel badly that I don’t feel THAT guilty. Some things are a slam dunk… if I ask YA to clean in the bathroom directly, she might or might not. But if I leave a wet wash cloth on the edge of the tub or some hair from my brush on the counter – voila! Bathroom cleaned in no time. In the dining room (where she works from home on Mondays and Fridays), if I spread all her stuff (bills, junk mail, computer mouse, keys, etc) all over the table, then she cleans it up lickety split. If I just organize it into a pile myself, the pile will sit there forever. I never ask her to come help me with yardwork but if I ask for one thing – like moving a bag of mulch from the back to the front, she almost always stays to work. My latest discovery is that if I just rinse out the kitty fountain and mention that I’ve done it, she will take the fountain apart and do an extremely thorough cleaning. The funniest thing about all this is that if you saw her room or the sink after she’s been working in the kitchen, you couldn’t imagine she would have any cleanliness streaks in her.
We had two weeks between my mom’s passing and when we went down to St. Louis to clean the condo and have her service. During that time, YA had two trips, one long work trip to Cancun and another for-fun trip to Washington DC to see the cherry blossoms. She had planned it a couple of months back and was scheduled to get home on Sunday night and we were leaving very early on Monday morning for St. Louis.
A few days before she left for Washington DC, she told me that I should get the car washed and vacuumed before our trip. Luckily I was on my game at that moment so I said “well, I’ll try but I have a lot to do for the service and getting ready for the trip.” Three hours later, I looked out the back window and found her vacuuming my car – see the header photo. Heaven forbid she should have to travel to Missouri and back in what she considers to be a health hazard. (Brekke is NOT a health hazard unless you compare her to YA’s car, which is clean enough that you could eat off the seats!) After she was done, I volunteered to run the car through the little car wash down on 54th while she was in DC.
Win/win, right? What chores do you prefer to outsource?
Things really have been going well so far. Last Saturday we closed the spring college show, the last show for the director, Jerry. He’s retiring at the end of the academic year. He and I have worked together at the college for 25 years, (I was free-lance the first few years) and have known each other longer than that.
Notice the students in the background.
Did you make the connection? His name is Jerry. And we like ice cream.
Our buddy Brian, in a scene from the play. Brian has been around, like, forever. As a student he was the thorn in my side. A fun thorn, but one of those kids that pokes the bear right up to the edge. He’s one of our besties now.
Monday we got 0.65 inches of rain. I had concert rehearsals Monday and Tuesday with a final spring concert on Wednesday and we finished planting the windbreak bushes. The oats started poking out of the ground on Thursday. Got some more corn planted, too. Making progress.
I have 25 Tamarack trees to plant yet. I didn’t realize they’re also known as a Larch. And when I heard that, my head immediately said, in that Monty Python voice, “The Larch”.
Saturday, at one of my other jobs, I’ll be working the Bernie Sanders visit to Rochester. As usual, I’ll be way in the back in the booth. His advance crew has been very nice and on our walk through with six Rochester Police officers, the high school kids were sure staring at us. I saw one young lady, whose mouth fell open at the sight of us, and I said, “You’re in trouble now.”
On Tuesday the township had a culvert replaced on the only road into our place. The neighbor and I just planned on staying home. As part of my township duties, I went up and was an official inspector. They had a shovel I could lean on.
It was interesting to watch them start the project. Another contractor had a high-pressure water jet, and a giant vacuum, and they made a trench to expose the two telephone lines and the fiber optic line that bisected the culvert on the West side. That fiber line through the culvert is what started this whole thing. Turned out to be another phone line on the East side. The old culvert they could cut in pieces to get out. The new one, the contractor put all the way to the west, then slide it in under all the cables. Added the aprons on both ends, and add some rip-rap. Good for another 85 years.
Padawan is getting more experience every day. There are days I feel like I spend all my time explaining things and answering his phone calls. I try to remember he really doesn’t know anything about this stuff. And the more he learns, the more valuable / knowledgeable he becomes. The other day I had him move the tractor and digger on to the concrete, then I showed him how to replace digger points, and I went out and graded the road. He found a broken shank, which he learned how to replace one other day, although this one was a bit more difficult, and it took a few more phone calls but he got it. Two weeks ago he would not have know what a broken shank was or that it was important.
He cut grass. Until he ran it out of gas. I mentioned that it has a gauge. “That thing sucks!” he says. “Don’t blame the tools” I remind him. “That gauge was blinking way over there. I cut grass for another hour!” …so you had an hour’s warning to fill it?? He walked away from me. And got a gas can and refilled the mower.
He has a one-track mind and that track is cars. My goodness he talks about cars a lot.
Friday morning a crew was out to burn the CRP ground. Conservation Reserve Program. They burn every five years as part of the regular maintenence.
I spent 6 hours chisel plowing the cemetery field I started running last year. It was the last field to be harvested last fall, just before it snowed, so I didn’t get it worked up last year. After I got that worked up I spent an hour planting corn.
It’s been some real nice weather.
Sunset
Moon rise
BEEN TO A BEN AND JERRY’S ICE CREAM STORE?
GOT A FAVORITE MONTY PYTHON OR FAWLTY TOWERS MOMENT?
Trail Baboon 