Just a few observations from Opening Day at the Fair!
Cookies. Sweet Martha’s has made a big change, well a big change in my book. Instead of the smallest size coming to you in a paper cone, it now comes in a cup. Of course, they still fill it up 50% higher than the lip of the cup, so I continue to need my collapsible cookie container!
Tantrums. Normally you see more tantrums in the afternoon but this one little gal (I’m guessing four years old) was getting the day off to a rip-roaring start. I’m not even sure what she was raging about but her poor father was sitting on the curb, holding onto the stroller (which she was trying to rip out of his hands), while he tried desperately to “reason” with her. I didn’t want to pry, so I didn’t hang out long enough to see how long the meltdown lasted but as worked up as she was, it might have been awhile.
Community Building. One of the bands in the parade was the Eden Prairie High School Band, which is a whooper. As the muscians marched by, I noticed that the entire drum section was wearing pig ear headbands from the Oink Booth. None of the rest of the band was sporting any headgear.
Creating a Stir. There was a fairly large crowd at AFL-CIO Corner, but all but one of the little kiosks was quiet. Turns out six St. Paul Firefighters were present to sign and sell the firefighters’ annual calendar. Two of the six were wearing muscle shirts, the others no shirts at all. They were doing a brisk business in calendars and photo ops.
Sad Shakespeare. I have a pretty high tolerance for Shakespeare in any form and it’s a good thing. There was a short performance in the West End towards the end of the day. The little troop did the Pyramus and Thisbe play from the end of A Midsummer’s Night Dream. It was a silly bit and only lasted 15 minutes but without the rest of the play to explain it, it didn’t make much sense. The poor sound system didn’t help them much. Pyramus’ death scene however was a hoot.
We took a long weekend last week. Daughter has been saying we needed to take a vacation, and we fully agreed with her. But May through July is Kelly’s busiest time, and of course spring is bad for me, and, well, we can always come up with an excuse NOT to go somewhere. Spur of the moment, we decided, let’s just take a weekend. We asked daughter what she thought we should do; I mean are we renting a cabin on a lake or are we going to a hotel. Well, she wanted swimming, and rides at Mall of America. OK, sounds like we do the Embassy Suites, which has been a family favorite over the few years because they do complimentary breakfast really well. They set the standard for hotel breakfasts! Fruit, yogurt, Sausages, bacon, eggs (not as good as ours of course), hashbrowns, bagels, made to order omelets, cereal, drinks: milk, juice, coffee.
We got there late evening Thursday and had supper at the hotel restaurant. Friday we all slept in and took naps and didn’t leave the room until 3:00 PM. Over to “THE” mall and had lunch, then walked around a bit and bought some ride tickets. We waited in line for an hour so we could all do the log flume ride. Because there was some bad weather in the area, the rides were going at half capacity, so the wait was longer than it should have been. Boy, if we didn’t get covid waiting in that line. Then daughter and I did a crazy spinning loop de loop roller coaster and I think I learned I might be too old for those rides. Woo boy. A couple times I had to just put my head back and close my eyes and I’d think, “DON’T CLOSE YOUR EYES!” There was a young boy about 8 years old who was on the ride with us; he said he had two little sisters and mom had to stay with them. After the first spinning loop he said “That was unexpected!” Yep, sure was! When it was over, I told him I had no idea what had happened in the last 40 seconds.
Even daughter, who’s a daredevil, was a little shook up after that. We all went to the Ferris wheel from there. And then Daughter and I went on our favorite roller coaster from 10 years ago; the one that goes straight up, then straight down. And upside down and right side down and over this way and around and back upside that way. Aye aye aye. Whew. That was easier last time I did that. Kelly and daughter did the carousel and we decided that was enough. I saw a sign that read, ‘Barking Lot stroller parking’, and I thought it said ‘Barfing lot’ which I thought was really appropriate.
I bought the 30 point arm bands, but no one put them on our arms, so I’d just show them to the ride operator. The first ride scanned them all. The second person was talking and looking away and only scanned one, and the third ride just put us on without even scanning the tickets. We gave them to a young couple and told them to have fun.
Daughter also wanted Red Robin for supper. We don’t have one of them in Rochester. At some point in her brief past, she had a shake at a Red Robin she really liked and wanted another. Supper was really good there and my vanilla malt was yummy. I don’t know about hers.
Saturday, we got the swimming in and had the pool to ourselves for an hour. We saw the Barbie movie, (and got a free icy drink), and had supper at Giordano’s pizza with a hostess named Joy who was super helpful and sent us back to the hotel with plates, drinks, and plastic ware.
Sunday, we stopped to see our son and daughter in law. When we got home, the dogs were glad to see us, (our neighbors took care of the dogs and chickens while we were gone) and Humphrey just had to stay outside for a couple nights. Once in the house, he had a big drink of soft water, and slept for several hours on his pillow.
Everyone survived on the farm, and Monday morning, daughter said she wasn’t ready to go back to her program. None of us are kid, none of us are.
We called this our ‘practice vacation’ to remember what works and what doesn’t when travelling together.
The soybeans are looking good, you know, for 6 weeks behind. They’ve finally started to canopy and, to add insult to injury, the weeds are coming too. A few buttonweed, lambsquarter, and ragweed are towering over the soybeans. Plus, a lot of volunteer corn. Which doesn’t really hurt anything, it just looks bad in a nice field of soybeans.
I started working on the shop again and started getting 2×4’s put on the walls and removed from the work bench an old radial arm saw that I haven’t used in I-don’t-know-how-many years. Back on Amazon Prime day I ordered one of those 360 degree green laser levels. It is pretty cool!
Remember a few months ago I showed a bunch of eggs under the deck? Well, the chicken hatched out 13 baby chicks the other day. She’s a good momma and moved them down to the main pen and she’s keeping a good eye on them. Thirteen chicks?? Don’t hold your breath for all of them. The other chickens seem jealous: ‘How come YOU got chicks!??’
My brother came out and we unloaded the last load of straw into the barn. 600+ bales in there again. Coming up, planting winter rye as a cover crop! Deep roots good for the soil, but it will over winter so it will have to be killed off in the spring before planting corn.
And back at the college, all my computer stuff is working this week! Yay!
I know I’ve talked about this topic before, but it’s fascinating when I see glimpses of myself in YA. She is in Dublin for two+ weeks for work and the morning of her flight, I found the clipboard (in the photo above) sitting on the counter downstairs. In an interesting twist on the apple-not-falling-far-from-the-tree, I note that she has used three colors of highlighters. I am a one-highlighter gal when it comes to my lists; it looks like the yellow highlighter is for her backpack but I’m not sure about the fuchsia or even the dots.
My list-making has evolved in the past couple of months. My weekly spreadsheet went by the wayside around the holidays last year; it was a gradual decline but I realized it wasn’t doing it for me any longer. I actually went “list-less” for several months with the occasional list of errands on a post-it or groceries on my phone’s note app.
Then a few weeks ago, after I re-retired, I wrote out a list of things for the next day. Just on a pad of paper I had laying around and only a few items, nothing that is part of my regular routine. It felt nice to take a highlighter to the list at the end of the day so I did another list for the next day. Again – just written by hand and just a few items. It’s become my new routine — for the most part. There have been a few days with no list and I survived!
YA doesn’t do daily lists (that I ever see anyway) but it’s nice to have evidence that every now and then she’s takes a page from my playbook.
Would you rather have a pet dragon or a pet unicorn?
Our son and DIL and grandson were in Alabama last week for the baptism of our DIL’s niece. I was glad our grandson got to spend time with his only cousin. It was really hot there, though, and between the weather and the politics, Son said he could never live there. I wish our grandson had cousins who lived closer.
I remember summers as the best times to hang out with my cousins. We all lived within 30 miles of each other. As an only child, my cousins were the closest people I had to siblings, and I got to spend weeks in the summers at their various farms. They all lived on farms. They were mainly boys, and I learned how to set gopher traps and set off fire works and play rough and tumble football and baseball. We played and messed around and had a great time. When I was in Middle School and High School I spent summers with a married cousin and she taught me to sew for 4-H.
The other day, Son was filling up his car with gas in Pipestone, MN where many of my cousins lived, and saw a really tall, thin, older blond man filling up his car. He looked like one of my relatives, and after Son introduced himself, it turned out he was one of my cousins, who asked when I was moving back to Minnesota! He lives in Norfolk, NE, and he is going to move back, too, when he retires. I don’t think he still traps gophers.
Where in the US wouldn’t you want to live? If you had cousins, what did you like to do with them? What are some of your favorite summer memories from childhood?
When I was packing for a long weekend in Madison, I noticed Henrietta watching me from her spot on my little dresser. Since Henrietta was a gift from my Madison friend, I thought I would take her along. She seemed excited to be on the move.
It was overall a very lazy and relaxing weekend – we spent a lot of time sitting and reading but we did have a few outings so Henrietta could get some fresh air!
We did the farmer’s market at the capital. Henrietta enjoyed meeting some of the vendors and smelling all the good smells. We stopped at the library to pick up a couple of books and then had to have ice cream from Sassy Cow, a great creamery close to my friend’s house. Henrietta met two little girls there who petted and hugged her.
My friend is seriously considering buying a Tesla so we had a loaner for the weekend. Henrietta enjoyed the view but didn’t get to drive because she couldn’t reach the pedals. We drove up to Lake Merrimac and took the ferry across and back. Henrietta appointed herself “authorized personnel” but since the ferry ride is only four minutes, she didn’t get to flex that authority!
All in all a great trip although Henrietta is not a great conversationalist so the drive to and from Madison was a little quiet!
My kitchen windows look out over my neighbors’ driveway, so I often get a front row view of the comings and goings. Yesterday I saw the youngest (she’s almost 5) dancing with her shadow while waiting for the car to get loaded for the day. She was completely entranced, lifting first one arm and then the other, then pointing one toe to the side followed by the opposite toe. She shimmied and wiggled and eventually began to sing. It was charming.
It reminded me of a favorite childhood poem, My Shadow, by Robert Louis Stevenson
I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me,
And what can be the use of him is more than I can see.
He is very, very like me from the heels up to the head;
And I see him jump before me, when I jump into my bed.
The funniest thing about him is the way he likes to grow
Not at all like proper children, which is always very slow;
For he sometimes shoots up taller like an india-rubber ball,
And he sometimes gets to little that there’s none of hi at all.
He hasn’t got a notion of how children ought to play,
And can only make a fool of me in every sort of way.
He stays so close beside me, he’s a coward you can see;
I’d think shame to stick to nurse as that shadow sticks to me!
One morning, very early, before the sun was up,
I rose and found the shining dew on every buttercup;
But my lazy little shadow, like an arrant sleep-head,
Had stayed at home behind me and was fast asleep in bed.
I still have this poem in The Illustrated Treasure of Children’s Literature. There are several poems in this collection that I remember and treasure. I didn’t have a huge number of books when I was little but this was one of them and I had my mother read to me from it quite a bit.
When I graduated from high school my parents gave me luggage as a graduation gift. Matching luggage. This was a few years before all black luggage became all the rage. Two suitcases, one over the shoulder tote and a make-up case (although very in-aptly name in my case, since I wore next to no make-up, even back then). I doubt my folks were predicting my eventual career in travel; back then luggage was a common gift at graduation or wedding – something you needed as you were launching yourself out into the world. My mother also bought me a sewing machine and a few lessons to go with it.
Obviously after all these years, none of that luggage has survived. I now have a rag-tag assortment of suitcases and bags, many of which I got as gifts from clients (leftovers from programs). Mostly black.
YA has purchased two suitcases since she started traveling for work – and black is apparently not the color or choice these days. Her big bag, which she uses the most, is a blue pattern thing with wheels that go in all directions, a handle and a plug in for charging her phone. Fancy dancy. I don’t have any problem with her suitcase EXCEPT when she gets home from a trip. She empties it out fast enough, but then she tends to roll it out into the hallway. Where it sits.
Now I’m not the fastest “put your bag back in the attic” gal, so I tend to be lenient. I also know that YA doesn’t tend to drop anything to attend to a request from her mother. But after the last trip, the suitcase sat in the hallway for two weeks and at least three requests to put it away. Being raised by the Queen of Passive/Aggressive, three days ago I pushed the suitcase right into the middle of YA’s doorway. It was in the attic within an hour.
Passive/Aggressive isn’t my favorite mode but sometimes it’s better than nagging. At least that’s what I’m telling myself at this point!
Do you prefer hard-sided or soft-sided luggage? Check or carry-on?
YA and I went to some friends’ home to have dinner last week. They live in an apartment with a security system; you ring their apartment and they buzz you in after you’ve identified yourselves. When Peter answered the ring, I said “Candygram for Mongo”. YA looked at me as if I had hot frogs on the loose.
I saw Blazing Saddles at the Grand Theatre in Northfield when it came out in 1974. I laughed so hard I almost fell off my chair a couple of times. Like Star Wars, I went back two more nights in a row to see it again. Also like Star Wars (and Princess Bride and Romancing the Stone), I dragged various friends with me on those additional nights. I’m a huge Mel Brooks fan, starting way back in his early writing days of Show of Shows into his directing years of Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein and up to 2000-Year-Old Man in the Year 2000. I love that he was politically incorrect about everybody and everything.
Mel Brooks has been on my mind since we had dinner at our friends’ home because, to my utter shock and dismay, neither of them had ever seen Blazing Saddles, they were with YA on the “hot frogs” theory. How is that possible to be an older adult in America and never had seen Blazing Saddles. Isn’t there a law against that. Turns out they’ve never seen Monty Python and the Holly Grail either. I may have to re-think my friendship with them. At least they have seen Princess Bride. I might have had to leave their apartment otherwise!
Yesterday was Mel Brooks birthday…. He is 97. He’s been retired for quite some time but is still alive and kicking. He gave an interview yesterday saying that he was glad to still be alive! I’m not sure there will ever be anyone else quite like him!
Tell me about movies you’ve seen REPEATEDLY. To the point that you quote them standing in apartment building lobbies.
Daughters program held their second annual prom on Friday. It was fun to see the participants dressed up and waving and dancing. Daughter came out blowing kisses. That’s been her thing from her cheerleading days. She loves the limelight. She does have a tendency to light up a room when she enters. I had to laugh, staff asked me if I could tie a tie and I did that for a couple of the gentlemen. Another lost skill that means I’m old. And I thanked my dad for teaching me how to tie a tie.
On Tuesday night, Kelly and I had dinner at the Mayo Clinic Foundation house. It is the former home of Dr. William J. Mayo and his wife Hattie Damon Mayo. We were there for the Pathology Residents Graduation, the program that Kelly works with. It was a full 5 course meal with 3 forks, 3 glasses, a charger plate
and food I couldn’t pronounce, and was held up in the third floor Balfour Hall. (The Mayo’s oldest daughter, Carrie, was married to Dr. Balfour) We had time to snoop around the house and see some Frederic Remington statues, Dr. Will’s study, and wonder at living in such a place as this. The gentleman who was the guide said he’s been there for 18 years.
I’m still working on the shop project. I don’t feel like I got much done on it this week; Been busy with ‘stuff’, just not that stuff. Last Friday they poured the outside slab of cement and I’ve started to back fill that. It needs about 10 days before I can start driving tractors on it. I picked up some windows for the shop and hope to get them in next week.
It’s not like I’ve been busy cutting grass…
The baby chicks are doing real well, just starting to get tail feathers. Of the eggs I put in the incubator, we only got the one early chick, and then we got five guineas. Kelly spent several hours on Saturday trying to convince one of our broody hens that they’d like to be the mom they think they’re already doing in their heads. But none of them wanted anything to do with an actual live chick. We tried getting them to sit on some actual eggs over in a side pen, but they didn’t want that either. You can lead a hen to eggs, but you can’t make her sit on them. The guineas are living in a cardboard box in our entryway.
Crops are still looking pretty rough. The oats is just starting to head out, (we call that the ‘boot stage’), and, according to the seed dealers, they haven’t seen any oat fields in our area that look good. It’s about knee high. It should be almost waist high. I expect there will still be an oats crop, it just won’t be that great. And with the shorter height, there won’t be as much straw either.
The corn is still doing all right, it’s about knee-high. It will be canopied soon. But it’s coming up on a point when it will be taking up massive amounts of nutrients and moisture. Moisture requirements are between .2 to.3”/day at its peak and this will also be when the length and girth of the ear are set. Stress then makes bad yields well before the ears even show up.
My Soybeans. Ugh. They still look terrible.
There are plants out there, but they’re small, and many haven’t emerged. I drove to Northfield on Wednesday, and it appears if you were able to plant soybeans early enough, and they got some of that moisture in the ground, they got off to a good start. A lot of beans were planted in dry ground and it just hasn’t rained. I’m wondering if it wasn’t also the fact I planted with the drill, and most are planted with a planter, and that gave them better seed to soil contact than I got. Seed to soil contact is important, and most years I haven’t had a problem, perhaps because it’s rained. So, this crop feels like it’s already 3 weeks behind, even though it was planted when it should have been. We’ll see.
I baled the roadsides on Thursday. Not much there. I cut some waterways too and got 50 bales total. Most years I have 70 bales just on the road. The camera I added last year to watch the twine strings, was super helpful!
I find it interesting how the tools change by the size of the tractor. Our oldest tractor, the little, two cylinder John Deere 630, has a plain wood handled hammer, a straight screwdriver, and an 8 inch adjustable wrench in the toolbox. Our next tractor, the 6410, the one I use for just about everything, has two 10 inch adjustable wrenches, two screwdrivers, a claw hammer with a fiberglass handle, and some various adapters. Then our big tractor, the 8200, has a 12 inch wrench, socket set, a 4 pound sledge hammer, and one large screwdriver / pry bar in the toolbox. The bigger the tractor, the bigger, the tools I guess. It seems like, when I was growing up, we fixed a lot more things out in the field. Every tractor had various nuts and bolts, and chain links in the toolbox. Add a piece of wire from a nearby fence and you could repair and keep going. These days I don’t hardly fix anything out in the field. It doesn’t seem like things break as much, or it’s something I have to go home to fix.
My shadow, Bailey, has to go everywhere I go. Humphrey just keeps an eye on me so he knows where I am but then he might go sleep at the house. I was laying on the floor of the shop, on my new cement, changing the drawbar length on the tractor and there’s Bailey, right in my face to help. I can appreciate that she wants to be my friend and she’s such a good dog and she makes me laugh, but does she have to be my friend from half an inch away? Can’t she be my friend from 6 inches away?
She also had a 12” piece of barb wire stuck in her coat and trailing behind her. Eventually I was able to snip off the part of her fur holding it tight.
All of our car talk the other day struck a nerve here.
YA loves cars. She has always had all the cars in the neighborhood memorized and can tell you the make of any car she sees as we’re driving down the street. I wondered if she might go into some kind of automotive engineering but she never seemed interested in that route.
When it was time for her to purchase her first car, she did a lot of research. Unfortunately the first car we went to look at turned out to be one of those cars that was totaled out by an insurance company and fixed up by a third party. As these cars are generally not insurable and YA needed my name on the loan paperwork, I was able to put my foot down easily on this.
The second car was at a dealership and didn’t start. I would have left right then – what kind dealership doesn’t even run down to check that the car will start before an appointment? But she pleaded with me so we looked another car on the lot. It didn’t look to me like the kind of thing she would like but she REALLY wanted a car. The salesman then tried to convince her (while I sitting right there) that leasing a new car would be good. Her eyes got that kind of glazed-over look. I squashed this idea as well as telling the sales guy that he was out of line. But she REALLY wanted a car, so ended up buying one that had fairly low mileage and pretty good price. I told the sales guy that if he was even thinking of telling her it was pre-owned by a little old grandma, to think again.
This was the car that got sideswiped and totaled out two years later. Back down to a different dealership. This car turned out to be a stick, which was why it had been sitting on the lot for a while; the website didn’t say it was a manual so everybody who came to see it passed on it. I suggested to her that if the dealership couldn’t be bothered to fix the listing online, maybe they weren’t to be overly trusted. But she REALLY wanted a car so she signed on the dotted line. Luckily she learned to drive in Civetta, my Honda Civic, which had been a stick.
She’s whined about this car for a bit over the last few years and in the past month or so had set out a timeline (about 8 months from now) for looking for a new car.
Fast forward to last week. I got some frantic texts – she had locked herself out of her car at the station/carwash down the street. Apparently she got out of the car to pay for the carwash and the door swung shut. I know you’re thinking, how did it get locked? Well, if the car is RUNNING when you get out to pay for the carwash……. I drove down with her spare key, but of course it didn’t work. It took about 20 minutes and $80 to get somebody there to break into her car (AAA had a 2-hour wait). As I was driving home I thought to myself “that’s the nail in the coffin for that car.”
And I was correct. A couple of days ater, she took off at lunch with a “I’m going to look at a car” called over her shoulder. I thought to myself “she’s going to buy a car today”. Luckily the days of my having to go with her are over. I was correct again – she bought a car. A new car. Honda (I can’t remember the make) with some kind of hatch back and I think it’s a hybrid as well. Won’t know for sure until the end of June when she picks it up. She’s done the math and says she can afford it, although she did sheepishly say she should probably cut back on some of her clothing/shoe purchases for a while. Good thing she’s living rent-free with mom!
There’s been A LOT of car talk the last few days – I’m just grinning it and bearing it – hopefully it will die down for a bit soon. At least until it gets closer to the car’s arrival!
Trail Baboon 