I have no problem admitting that Husband, I, and the dog are spoiled when it comes to food. I started to subscribe to Goumet and Bon Appetit when I was in Middle School. That has certainly skewed my expectations for meals in my home ever since.
The dog is spoiled because he will only eat his kibble if we put a spoonful or so of homemade broth on it. This week it is goat broth. He is a happy boy.
Winnipeg is a foodies paradise, with every sort of ethnic restaurant and grocery store you can imagine. Six years there left me unprepared for spartan western North Dakota and only two chain grocery stores. Fargo, the nearest food mecca is 300 miles away.
We have taken to ordering on-line to obtain harder to find cooking ingredients. This Christmas, Husband found a source for all sorts of food from Spain, including wonderful serrano ham, Portuguese linguica, cheeses, chorizo, smoked beef, olives, and Galician sourdough bread partially baked in Galicia and frozen, shipped to the US, then shipped frozen to us. It is lovely bread that we tried, but failed, to reproduce at home. We also order 10 lb hunks of parmesan, olives, and pasta from an Italian importer (the parm lasts for a year and costs less than buying smaller packages in the grocery store) and beans from Rancho Gordo. I also order celeriac by the case from Oregon because we can’t grow it well here and I like to cook with it in soup stock. Daughter just visited the Rogue River Creamery in Southern Oregon and decided we needed 4 lbs of their award winning cheddar and blue cheeses. It will arrive on Wednesday. She and son have similar food attitudes as we have.
I justify all this by noting we don’t travel much, have little to no debt, rarely eat in restaurants, and don’t own a boat, camper, or a lake home. We shall see if living near to Sioux Falls after we retire allows more access to these foods, or if we will still order from afar.
If you lived in the middle of nowhere, and cost was not an issue, what would you order on-line to eat and cook with.Where do you like to find recipes?
For the past several weeks Husband and I didn’t go out of our front door. Some enterprising robins built a nest atop the light that illuminated the stoep, hatched four eggs, and were busily feeding their chicks. We didn’t want to disturb them by going in and out the front door. You can see the nest in the header photo.
We could see the chicks getting bigger, and by Saturday, the last of the chicks was perched on the bench below the nest.
I like the baby tufts on his head. He sat there for a day, then flew off. I hope he has a nice adulthood.
I was always pretty independent and left the nest pretty easily, although with lots of anxiety. So did Husband and our children. I have known a few families in town where the children never manage to leave. In Winnipeg, it was typical for young people to buy their first home on the same block as their parents. That would have been pretty weird, I think, but typical for Canadian society.
What kind of a fledgling were you?Got any good bird stories?
We brought a picnic lunch to eat afterwards, and Husband suggested we go down by the campground, a mile or so down the road. So at Prairie Island Park, adjacent to the campground, we found a table and were situated in a perfect spot to watch perhaps the last campers arriving and setting up in the remaining grassy spaces.
We got to see a family of four unload two kids’ bikes, then setting up the screen tent. After biking a bit down the path, the two boys tossed around a football. Another family farther away had put up a net and the teens were playing badminton. Eventually a couple and their toddler returned to their site with fishing poles (though I saw no fish).
Along the road into the campground, a couple of strollers rolled by powered by older boys, while two dads and another kid on a scooter brought up the rear. I’ll bet the moms were back at the campsite, setting up the “kitchen”.
It was the best place we could have chosen for our picnic. I’d been sort of lamenting that we had no place to go on this long weekend. But we got to “go camping” in a fashion – vicariously. We watched people do things we’ve done before, just not for a long time. And none of the things I saw are things I want to do at this point – but it was fun to watch other people doing them!
Our grandson is now 6 and has developed an interest in rocks. I remember my mom getting me a cardboard box that displayed all different kinds of rocks when I was the same age, some polished and all quite colorful and interesting. I had them until our children were in elementary school and they somehow disappeared after that.
Grandson wants to identify and collect every interesting rock he sees. Our son got him some geodes in a rock shop that they had fun opening with a hammer to see the crystals within. Earlier this week I sent Grandson a set of very heavy and colorful polished quartz bookends we had in the basement. It is a win-win for all of us since they are just what Grandson is collecting these days and now we don’t have to find somewhere for them when we move. They also serve a double purpose as bookends.
My neighborhood has kids in it. This may not seem remarkable to you but for several years, there were no kids, YA being the youngest of the previous bunch. But now there are four girls and two boys spread among four households. It’s fabulous.
Just next door are Minnie and Marie (names changed to protect the innocent) who are 9 and 5. Both a bit on the dramatic side (compared to YA at that age anyway) but very entertaining. As with most kids these days, they have lots of activities; both their parents are music teachers, so music and dance are pretty high up on the list.
Last summer Minnie did a drama camp for a couple of weeks and at the end they put on the musical “The Little Mermaid”. At one point Minnie invited me to see the show although I’m not sure she really expected my attendance. YA and I both went and had a fun evening. Lots of little kids playing undersea critters, including Minnie who was a crab. She sang and danced in three numbers. Both her folks were extremely grateful that YA and I attended.
So it wasn’t a surprise when Saturday afternoon, as I was heading to pick up an order at Target, Minnie called me over to the fence and asked me if I wanted to go to her piano recital. I said “Sure, when is it?” to which she replied “2:30”. As in 2:30 that same day, in fact, just 45 minutes from right then. Yikes. I told her I’d try my best. Luckily not too much traffic to Target and back however I did need to change as I was wearing the dirty shorts and t-shirt that I had been gardening in earlier in the day. I never changed so fast in my life. If you’d been my other neighbor looking out the window at 2:20, you would have seen me pulling a shirt over my tank top as I was heading across my backyard to the car! But I made it with a couple of minutes to spare (music school is just 5 minutes from the house – phew)!
It was a typical recital. A couple of kids for whom this was their first public performance. Mostly pianists but there was one guitarist and two violinists. I would say most of the kids were between 5 and 10, although the last girl to play the violin was probably 13 or 14 (she was very good). Several of the students had the teachers doing a complimentary part with them so no one seemed too nervous and nobody flubbed anything noticeable. Minnie played a piece called “My Dream” and did a nice job. I really enjoyed clapping and whooping it up for her and all the other little reciters.
Minnie’s musical this summer is “Annie”. I can’t wait.
The rabbit hole that is the internet never ceases to amaze me. A few days ago I stumbled across a YouTube video called LettersLive. It was Oliva Colman reading a 17th century letter from a wife to her husband. It was hysterical. Since then I’ve found several other clips of letters ready by other celebrities. I adore letters – some of my favorite books are epistolary (Guernsey Potato Peel Pie Society, Daddy Long Legs, Cold Comfort Farm and Julie Schumacher’s Payne University series). Turns out that LettersLive is actually a series of live events that began back in 2019. I’ve found four of them so far. There are usually 20 or so letters read during the evening, many of them funny, many of them insightful, some of them incredibly touching and almost all thought-provoking.
Letter-writing is certainly one of our lost arts. I remember Steve writing to his friend every week until his friend passed away; it was an amazing feat. When YA was young, I used to send a letter to Nonny and JB every week – mostly just bullet points of the week along with a page of photos. I send a lot of cards these days, but don’t consider them letter-writing. Watching the LettersLive has made me think maybe I should start up the Nonny habit again.
LettersLive is sponsored by Montblanc, which seems perfect but funny. Celebrating letters is “write” up their alley but what they are sponsoring are live performances and a technology-fueled YouTube site. I can’t think of anybody better!
The only problem with LettersLive is that there aren’t endless quantities; they are not putting up new YouTubes every week. Once I’ve listened to all the letters read at the four events, I’ll have to wait until the next one which is in Berlin sometime later this year. I’ll have to dole them out to myself carefully!
Do you remember the last hand-written letter you received? Or wrote?
This is not my normal rant about strollers. I promise.
Over the weekend, as I was driving down Penn, I passed Wagner’s Garden Center. There was a family leaving: two smaller kids, maybe 5 and 6 on their little scooters. Behind them was Dad with the stroller, full of plants and flowers. Behind Dad was Mom pulling the wagon full of bags of potting soil and mulch.
I’ve seen strollers full of kids, all the various stuff you take with you when you leave the house with kids. I’ve seen strollers with dogs and even a stroller once with two cats. But never a stroller full of plants. It was a charming scene – it made me smile all through the rest of my errands.
Zoos and animal parks are some YAs and my favorite places to visit. Minnesota Zoo, Como Zoo, Fawn-Doe-Rosa, Carlson Llama Farm – these are our local haunts. Zoos and animals parks are also, in my experience, the places with the highest percentage of child meltdowns around.
YA was a very easy child (we’re just talking child here, not teenager!) so I have zero experience with a melting down child. She abandoned the idea of the stroller by the time she was three and never looked back. She never ran around in a zoo restaurant. She never banged on the glass to get the attention of the spotted leopard on the other side. She never pushed another child out of the way to get a better look at a penguin. She never had a tantrum of any kind when we were out and about. Never.
Over the years, YA has heard me extol her virtues as a child a lot. Way too much from her experience. So I work hard to keep my lips zipped because these days any time I say something I get a massive eye roll and usually an exasperated “I know”. But it’s difficult because every visit guarantees some bad behavior on the part of children who are over-tired, over-stimulated and probably hungry to boot. The examples in the second paragraph all happened yesterday at the Zoo.
So I stroll along with YA, thinking to myself what a wonderful child she was and what a terrific young adult she had turned out to be, all the while saying NOTHING. NOTHING. I wonder if one of these days my head will just explode.
Occasionally she will let me take her picture, although sometimes bribery is involved. The above picture cost me a trip to Dairy Queen.
What summer treat would I need to bribe you with for a photo?
Husband and I are back from Boston, he at home and I in Brookings helping out son and daughter in law as they need an extra hand with home and grandson due to work demands.
We flew out of Boston yesterday to Minneapolis first, then to Bismarck and Sioux Falls respectively. While we waited for our plane in Boston we were delighted to watch the antics of a Minnesotan Special Olympics mixed gender hockey team heading back home. One of the members, a young man named John, held a rather large trophy his team had won at a hockey tournament in Boston, They took multiple photos with their coaches and parents, all so happy with what they had accomplished. It was so nice to see such joy and happiness. They looked so proud of themselves.
What joyous things have you noticed lately? What gives you joy in your day to day life?
We’ve had some nice rainfall, and I’ve got the show open, and I’m trying to stay home and get ready to farm. Yet, every day seems to be interrupted by minutiae and farming has not become the priority it should be. Yet.
My brain cleared enough I found the three things I couldn’t find last week. Kelly pointed out to me the extra chicken waterers behind the house. Yep, that’s exactly where I put them last fall when that chicken hatched those eggs under the deck. And I found the rain gauge in the garage right where I thought it should have been last week. And it turns out the dog’s tick medication is good for 12 weeks, not four, so I had only bought one dose. And that’s why I couldn’t find more. There’s usually a rational explanation, isn’t there.
Over the weekend Kelly and I got 2/3 of the seed wagon cleaned off. (The “shed remodeling tool storage wagon”) so at least I have room for oats and corn seed and the oats will be gone before I pick up the soybean seed and then that can go on there. Daughter and all three dogs and I picked up oat seed on Monday. I also picked up another ton of the layer ration for the chickens. One ton, in 50 pound bags, equals 40 bags, so they are good for about eight months.
On Friday I got the tractor hooked to the soil finisher. If you park something in a field over winter, you need to put a board under the jackstand, otherwise it will sink into the dirt and the hitch of the implement will not line up with the tractor drawbar. I had a board under the jackstand when I unhooked it back in October, but the implement shifted and the jackstand slipped off the board. And then Friday it was 8” down in the dirt. I took a regular jack out to lift up the tongue to get it hooked to the tractor and that jack pushed down into the dirt as well. I had a board to put under the jack, but it was stuck under the hitch at first. Eventually I got that out and under the jack, and was able to raise it up, get the hydraulic lines hooked to the tractor, and attach the tractor and implement. See? I’m making progress!
I moved the chicks out of their first, smaller tank, and into the larger pen. They are about robin sized now.
The spring play at the college will close this Saturday afternoon and next week is a band and choir concert. We need to be out of the theater by about 5:30PM on Saturday, so we don’t have much time to dismantle the set. I hope to get things off the bookshelves on the set, and the small grand piano (it’s an electronic keyboard) off the stage. I’m hoping to get three or four strong young kids to carry it up the steps rather than tipping it on its side, taking off two legs, and trying to get it through a doorway sideways, like it came in. Goals.
I started delivering some straw this week.
Speaking of Straw, I was talking with a family friend about the hayrides that we used to do with 4-H or church groups. It used to be a very popular thing to take a tractor and wagon, make a pile of loose straw on the wagon, and then at night, in the dark, 15 or 20 kids would pile on the wagon and you’d go out in a field and drive around and push each other off, and by the time you got home again there was no straw left on the wagon. We don’t do that anymore. Can you imagine? What could go wrong?
I don’t know how come nobody got seriously hurt. My folks did it for the church youth groups for a lot of years. The only accident I remember is when one kid jumped off a wagon early and was going to cut across a corner of the driveway to catch a second wagon, and he ran into a barbwire fence. After that, the kids were told to stay on the wagon until they got to the field.
There is a story in my grandmother’s diaries of a 4-H hayride mid 1950’s, when the tractor slipped into a ditch. The wagon tipped over and several kids were hurt – none seriously by some miracle, but my uncle, who was driving the tractor, had several cracked ribs.
When our kids were young, the daycare would visit the farm and we used a hayrack with the tall sides, and they sat on bales, and we went in the daytime, and it was just a wagon ride. Not a hayride in my sense of the word.
I googled “hayride” to see if I could find examples of our type of hayride. Wikipedia says it’s a traditional activity consisting of a recreation ride which has been loaded with hay or straw for “comfortable seating”. They say it harkens back to farmhands or kids riding the load of hay back to the barn for unloading. And has since become a tourism gimmick to generate income for the farmer. I guess that’s one way to do it.
