Happy Boxing Day, Baboons! Today is also St Stephen’s Day. I have been thinking all week of this song from the Chieftains and Elvis Costello. We appreciated Boxing Day as a great day off when we lived in Winnipeg.
It has had good company with any number of earworms that have plagued me for a while.
O Canada seems to always be playing in my mind. I also have been hearing Ode to Joy and the hymn Earth and All Stars which has pretty wild lyrics and which I haven’t heard in church for a couple of years. I seem to hear these songs when I wake up in the middle of the night.
For some really strange reason I woke up earlier this week with this playing in my head:
I have no idea where this came from. Why on earth would I dredge this from my memory the week of Christmas?
How do you think we ought to celebrate Boxing Day as a holiday? Any earworms lately? What is your favorite production of Guys and Dolls?
We made a quick trip to Sioux Falls yesterday to stock up on groceries before the horrible winds hit. I don’t think we will need to go back until the New Year. Before we went, though, Husband had a guitar lesson at the local music school that is housed in the former Carnegie Library building. He is very excited about this.
He has had a Taylor guitar for several years, and took guitar lessons as a child. He tried to teach himself over the years, but decided he needed more help. He really likes his teacher, and is relieved to find that he didn’t acquire any bad habits over the years. His teacher is a young man in his 30’s who also teaches ukulele and mandolin and directs two ukulele choirs. The music school is open to all ages, and provides lessons in voice, strings, piano, brass, and woodwinds. His next lesson is in two weeks, and he is working on a French folksong Au Claire de la Lune. It is a duet he will play with his teacher.
My first piano teacher was one of the Holy Sisters who taught out of the local nunnery. I then had a teacher who taught out of her home and was married to the high-school shop teacher. She played piano at our wedding. I haven’t played much over the past several years. Once all the Christmas baking is done and the holidays are over I intend to go back to playing piano again. Husband has some intriguing minimalist Bartok piano pieces I want to try.
Our daughter became quite close to her Bismarck violin teacher who taught her for seven years. Daughter and another Suzuki friend went to visit their old teacher in New Mexico where she and her husband retired. Music lessons have kept them together even after the lessons are over.
What lessons, music or otherwise, did you have as a child? Taking any lessons now?Tell about some memorable teachers.
Brrrr. We are hardy Minnesotan’s but it’s still cold out. Hope you can stay inside and warm for the weekend.
Honestly, how did people do it 100 years ago? Or 500? Or 1000??
We have so much to be thankful for.
I got my corn check from the co-op last week and put it in the bank. And this week I paid off the loan I borrowed from a month ago to pay the bills. And the co-op emailed about setting up the loan and credit for 2026 crops. Easy come, easy go. Repeat. I spent some time this week comparing interest rates. It’s kinda hard to find out what the actual Prime rate is. Course it varies by bank and how much money you have. And it was kind of interesting how that works. One of the companies the co-op uses does Prime minus 0.5% until August, then Prime + 0.5% until Feb of 2027. Another company has different rates on some of the products and zero interest on some, but then Prime +2% on fertilizer. In the end, it doesn’t amount to that much money. It would be a different story if I was spending $450,000 at 7.5% interest. (That’s $33,750 @ 7.5% if you’re curious. Now we’re talking real money!) And the government is going to bail me out with the poor prices on soybeans. So they say. I don’t know what that’s going to amount too yet. It won’t be $33,000 I can tell you that. I’ll bet I can take off a couple zero’s there and be more like it. I always say the difference between me and the big farms is a couple zeros on the expenses and the income.
I’ll fill out the forms this weekend and figure out next years crops. Samantha, the agronomist I work with at the co-op sent out a rough worksheet of next year expenses for my planning purposes, and I’ll get things ordered and prices locked in by mid January for the best rate.
Yesterday on the blog we were talking about things from the past. I had a guy at the farm the other day who had a front wheel drive car and was almost stuck on the bare, but snow covered driveway. He clearly didn’t know how to drive on snow. His wheels were spinning and he blamed the posi-traction. I can still hear my dad’s voice “DON’T SPIN YOUR WHEELS!” Our mantra in winter back in the day of rear-wheel drive cars. “Sit heavy! Don’t spin your wheels.” And my family jokes that Dad would say, “NO TALKING! BE QUIET BACK THERE!” I don’t remember that, but I’m sure it was so Dad could hear the wheels not spinning. Shift to low, back up to the garage so you can get a run at it, and don’t spin your wheels. And the guy got out. Our driveway is long and starts right off with an uphill “U”. (So right, “get a run at it” but you’re making a corner at the same time. You learn a lot about friction doing that.) Then you’ve got a flat 75 yards to gain some speed before the next uphill corner to the left. Most people, if they get around the U, can make the next corner. Although there was some days I had to back up 50 yards and get a run at the second corner again. But a front wheel drive car? Dude. Learn to drive. I remember years ago, the guy who would come in to breed the cows. He had a little tiny car. Rear wheel drive. He couldn’t get out. And he turned around and went backwards really fast around both corners. I was very impressed. But he made it.
Last weekend Padawan called me about 10:00 at night to see if I would help pull a friend of his out of a ditch. So I went. Because we’ve said Padawan is our second son, so, that’s what you do for your kids. The friend had a new sporty little car. Still had the temporary plates. Skidded on the snow and slid into a ditch. Another kid who needs to learn how to drive. He was only a little stuck. Pulled him out with the truck.
Haven’t had much time to work in the shop this past week. Concerts at the college, homework, (had the last ‘in person’ class. I have a couple tests to take yet and some online lectures to watch. Last day of classes is next Friday) And I’ve been moving snow.
Our mailbox is out on the highway. It’s on a swinging post so the snow launching off the snowplow doesn’t damage it, the box just swings out of the way. Meaning it WHIPS the mail out into the ditch…More than once we’ve found the mail under that pine tree behind the mailboxes. Sometimes we may not find it until spring. Hopefully it wasn’t the check we’ve been waiting for. There are three mailboxes as there used to be three homes down our road. The third, unused mailbox our neighbor named “S. Lamb”. The sacrificial lamb. Our neighbors are very witty.
The choir sounds really nice this year. It’s a new conductor and he’s doing a great job with the students. At rehearsal I heard him ask the kids, “Are you ready for the concerts Friday and Saturday?” And they responded, “Thursday and Friday!”
“Good. What time is the concert?”
“7:00”
“Good. What time are you going to be here?”
“6:00”
“Good. Saturday and Sunday concerts, It will be fun!”
“THURSDAY AND FRIDAY!”
“Good.”
Clearly, he’s worked with teenagers before.
In my happy place.
HOW YOU GONNA STAY WARM THIS WEEKEND?
HOW DO YOU THINK YOU WOOD HAVE STAYED WARM 500 YEARS AGO?
I know that November and December are very busy seasons for musicians, but I have been astounded by the number of musical performances by local musicians since we moved here. When I grew up here, all the music was in the school and the churches.
In the last two weeks there have been musical performances by a variety of groups downtown in stores, in outdoor public performance spaces, and in the Palace, the old Vaudeville theatre. They performed in the snow storms. The music ranged from classical, folk, and rock. Children and adults have been playing and singing all around town. The school is having concerts.
Next Sunday, there is a big concert of a variety of musicians at the Senior Center. We bought tickets to attend. I signed Husband up for guitar lessons at the local music school. Is this typical for small town Minnesota? Our ND town was extremely musical, but not like this.
What is your favorite holiday music? What would you like to perform or hear?
Husband and our 7 year old grandson spent most of Thanksgiving Day in the basement messing around with various string instruments. Grandson brought the three-quarter size guitar we got him in the summer. He and his Opa (Husband’s German name. I am Oma.) practiced tuning the guitar and his cello to eachother, and Opa taught him the difference between bass and treble clef, and that you could play the same tune in both clefs. Grandson also noodled around on the piano upstsirs using the sustain pedal until it got too annoying and we had to have him stop. He actually asked Opa if they could “jam” next time.
During the afternoon, grandson came upstairs and excitedly announced “Opa is teaching me finger picking”. He is to start piano and guitar lessons in the spring. At home he likes to just strum his guitar once a day and practice trying to play chords. He also thought Opa’s cello was pretty cool.
I learned cooking, gardening, and that History was a most interesting subject from my grandparents. Grandson wants me to make tirimisu with him one of these days, and loves to cook with his parents. I am so glad we can help foster these interests, as they really make for a satisfying life.
What skills did your older relatives and grandparents teach you?What names did you use to address your grandparents?
Except for thirty banker’s boxes full of books, we have unpacked everything else from the move. We are awaiting the arrival of seven bookcases sometime next week.
There are a few things that we can’t find, and I doubt they are in with the books. I am missing the widemouth graniteware funnel I use to fill canning jars. The cornstarch container has gone missing. Snow scrapers for the truck are nowhere to be found. All of those are easily replaced.
Husband was distressed earlier this week, however, when he couldn’t find his cello endpin anchor. It prevents the cello from sliding out from underneath him when he plays it on a wood or laminate floor. I found some on Amazon, but they would take several days to arrive, and he really wanted to try out the cello . We searched all over with no luck, and then I got what I thought was a brilliant idea for a temporary solution. The plug for the kitchen sink broke shortly after we moved in, and we went to Ace Hardware in town to get a replacement. Since we weren’t exactly sure what one would work the best so we bought a couple of different kinds. I remembered that one we had stored under the sink would work great for an endpin. It was rubber and perfectly shaped if put upside down:
He was so happy to play his cello. I will order some real endpins, as he always seems to misplace them, but this will work well for now.
What have been some of your memorable misplacements? What have been some of your more brilliant ideas?
The former owner of our home runs a satellite communication company that provides TV and entertainment systems to health care/senior living facilities and hotels nationwide. His office is right on Main Street. He and his wife insisted that the three televisions in the home had to stay when we bought the house. They are hard-wired into a myriad of cables that run through the walls and from upstairs to downstairs and out of doors. They also left us several DVD players and stereo receivers.
There are six speakers upstairs in the ceilings of the kitchen, dining room, and living room, along with three speakers in the garage, and two attached to the house in the backyard. The ceilings in the basement bedrooms and family room also have speakers, and another huge room in the basement has several speakers in the ceiling and walls.
The header photo shows the main controls for this sound system. It resides in a cupboard in the kitchen. One can choose what part of the house you want to have sound from the radio, TV, DVD. CD, computer, or any other media player you can figure out how to hook up to the main system. The former owner graciously came over last week to show me how to operate the system. I gave him a package of lefse. It is complicated. I am a successful trial and error button pusher, so I think I will figure it out. eventually.
When did you get your first sound system? What did it consist of? What music do you think we should play on the outdoor speakers?
Did you ever watch a dog chasing a ball or a stick and watch them running and grabbing at it off the ground and think, doesn’t that hurt your lips scraping them across the gravel like that?
We pondered that playing with Luna the other day. It doesn’t seem to bother Luna.
Daughter came up with this Halloween costume all on her own:
Last week driving to Plainview there was a lot of corn still standing. This week a lot of corn has been harvested. Not mine, but all the corn around us. Several guys have finished. And now they’re hard into fall fertilizer and tillage. If any of you retired people want a job, I’m sure you could go to any of the larger farms in the area and get a job driving a tractor or truck for about 3 months. Depending on weather, it’s long days, lack of sleep, field meals, and, if you’re like my brother, “it’s just round and round- it’s boring!” But it’s big equipment and it can be fun. It wouldn’t work for me right now. I can’t get there until mid morning by the time I take daughter in. And I may have to leave mid-afternoon to pick her up. And I have a show this evening… Nope, I’m not the ideal candidate. YOU might be!
And the equipment sure is fun to see.
This week was all about getting the college show finished. We have our first show at 2:00 PM Saturday, the 1st. It will be ready, and ‘good enough’, but if I had more time, I’d tweak a little more.
It’s a good thing this set isn’t any bigger. I don’t know what happens to me that everything turns into a rush at the end, whether trying to get book work done to meet my accountant, or finish a set, or get the machine shed enclosed before cold weather comes, apparently I think I like the thrill of the rush of adrenaline and the whooshing sound the deadlines make as they go past.
Music lately has been some boogie woogie piano, my usual ‘All That Jazz’ movie soundtrack, and then playing a video of “The Gospel at Colonus”, from 1985. The full show is available on YouTube. I’ve had the CD for years, and we saw it at the Ordway maybe 10 years ago. This production has Morgan Freeman, Jevetta Steele, The Five Blind Boys of Alabama, and SO MUCH good gospel music. I was painting alone and singing and shouting along. HALLELUJAH! AMEN!
So. The lack of concrete. I mentioned on the blog one day that I didn’t feel good over the weekend and postponed the concrete.
Last Friday afternoon I rented a little machine called a plate compactor. It’s about the size of a small snowblower, I believe the plate measured 17“ x 20“ and its got a little Honda gas engine on it, and a long handle and when you rev it up it vibrates really fast and compacts whatever it is you’re trying to compact. In this case, about 8 inches of gravel as a sub-base for the concrete. It goes really good in one direction; pretty much drives itself. And it’s not too hard to go in circles, but if you drive it into a corner, you’re kind of stuck. The only instructions they gave me when I picked it up was how to start it. Later on I was on YouTube trying to find some instructions on running this thing, or if there was a certain amount of time you needed to compact material and the only videos I could find were how to start it. What somebody needs to make is a video that’s gonna tell you right up front, this thing’s gonna kick your ass. For the first half an hour. Because when you drive it into the corner the only way to get it back out is to use brute force and pull it back against the machine’s compaction motion. And eventually you’ll figure out you can flip the handle over and sort of steer it, almost one handed, but that doesn’t really help if you’re in a corner with a couple of walls. Anyway I learned a lot that first hour. And when I woke up Saturday morning, muscles I didn’t know I had hurt. And then my stomach started to hurt, then I got the chills, and I just didn’t feel that great. But, I had a lot of work to do.
WFriday evening I had finished compacting the sub base inside the shed, that 20′ x 20‘ area. Saturday morning I started putting gravel in. Kelly came and helped. That woman really is too good for me. She has an attention to detail that I don’t. She’ll spend hours working on something that I said was “good enough” long before. I was still feeling terrible and I finally had to go in the house and take a nap. Three hours later she was still adding a little gravel here, taking off a little there. She used those YouTube videos to learn how to start the machine and she was compacting gravel. We use one of those laser levels that sits on a tripod and puts out a green laser beam line. Then I have a stick with three marks on it: the height of the existing concrete, then a mark for the sub-base, and a mark for the Gravel.
Kelly is not afraid of hard work and she said she was enjoying it. I just wanted to move on because I’m always moving onto the next project.
Saturday night I came in the house and took a shower and then I soaked in the tub for half an hour and I went to bed.
Sunday morning we were back at it. All we had to do on Sunday was a little area 13‘ x 6‘ to be a walkway at the front door of the shop. I didn’t have much energy and if I had to get on the ground to do something, I tended to stay there for a while. Outside the shed, I cut a hole in the wall and shoved a piece of PVC pipe in for the drain, and then I laid in the dirt for a while. There was a thistle under my left shoulder. It hurt. Eventually I got up.
And by Monday, I knew I had to postpone the concrete. I needed to take that off my plate. A friend told me I don’t need a plate, I need a turkey platter. Yeah. That’s about right.
Almost ready!
Speaking of pondering, I read these two phrases in a new display at the college art gallery. :
Ouch. That seems kinda harsh.
This one reminds me of that quote: “In order to discover new lands, you must consent to lose site of the shore.”
The display is photographs by Ethan Aaro Jones, and is called “Unsearchable Distance”.
My BFF suggested we go see Ann Reed last week; I haven’t seen Ann in a live performance for many years so I was excited to go. She has such a huge repertoire, I hate to admit that this is still my favorite:
She (along with Joan Griffith) did a great set and in between many of the songs, she shared haiku with us, some of hers and some that she had found along the way. When I went looking on the internet afterwards, I discovered she has a book entitled Our Daily Breath: Haiku & Photographs.
During my search I found a website, Haiku Universe, that will sent you a daily haiku or short poem. You know me, I couldn’t resist. It’s been fun the last week or so to get a little haiku every day. Here’s one I particularly liked (by Tomas O’Leary):
then it came to me
like a bomb in my lunch bag –
it was my day off.
So I’ve had haiku on my mind. Here are a couple of mine:
My orthopedists
Are both about twelve years old.
Having bad knees stinks.
It’s that time of year –
All of my hard work, yard wise
Fills up many bags.
Do you have any fall clean-up/organizing that needs doing? Any haiku or poems speaking to you?
October 5, 2025 was puppy day. Lou and I travelled to Kimball, MN to a small acreage outside of the little town where the kennel, Minnesota Country Corgis, is located. This is the same dog breeder as the one who provided us with our Phoebe. He is her half brother (same sire). We had been there to visit ten days before. At that time we were offered the choice of the last puppy left from a 6 puppy litter (mama Betsy), or to choose one from a 4 puppy litter (mama Annie). The 4 puppy litter was an accidental pregnancy after the breeder’s husband mistakenly let the dam and sire “socialize”. Diane, the breeder, was away from home that weekend. Her husband reversed her instructions, so the Christmas litter was born in August. Oops.
We chose the last puppy of the 6 puppy litter, and named him McGee. It has been a week now. McGee is making himself at home. He has gained 1 pound, survived a mild case of diarrhea after eating too much, and he slept almost all day on Wednesday. He seemed exhausted by the adjustment to a new home. He is personable and loves to play and chew. Watch the teeth. So now McGee is the best puppy ever, only rivaled by our other past dogs. My son, the neighbor kids, and other friends have come to visit him and welcome him to the world.
Our Baboon, Linda, in a rush of inspiration, wrote this parody of Me and Bobby McGee earlier last week on the pizza blog. It makes me smile about the puppy and at remembering Janis Joplin and Kris Kristofferson, great musicians. (The dental plate reference is about Lou’s lost dentures, which were restored to him and are safely in his mouth.)
Sittin’ down in Eden Prairie, thinkin’ ‘bout a plate. Dentist’s office lost it in the mail. Puppy chewed a shoelace up, left me in a state And he just sits there waggn’ his little tail.
Boredom’s just another word for nothin’ left to chew Nothin’, don’t mean nothin’ hon’ if it ain’t chewed. And feelin’ mad is easy, Lord, when Puppy chews the shoes. But feelin’ mad is never good for me…. Never good for me and my Puppy McGee.
Trail Baboon 