Category Archives: Music

2025, animals, Business, Family, Farming Update, gardening, Music, Nature, pets, Science, Songs, Technology, Uncategorized, Weather

What Mystery is this?

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The weekend farm report from Ben


Welcome to the sick house. We all have colds. You should buy stock in tissues. My head is all fogged up so who knows what may come out in this…course that hasn’t stopped me running heavy machinery. 


After last week and breaking things, I made some progress on repairing things this week. And I don’t think I’ve broken any more. Yet. (Never say never). I replaced the lift cable on the bale elevator and got that repaired. On the hay wagon I got the remaining pieces of the wheel bearings out of the hub, meaning I got both the inner and outer bearing race removed, which, thankfully, had identification numbers on them, and a local place could use that to find the correct bearings. We double checked dimensions and I got four bearings; a set for both back wheels and the plan is to have one of my padawans help me install on Saturday. It will be a good experience for him to ‘pack’ grease into a bearing. It’s not hard, but there is a process, and it is messy. 
It’s supposed to be hot on Saturday, so I’m planning a shop day. We’ll put the old John Deere 2 cylinder tractor, the 630, in the shop, drain the coolant and replace a radiator hose, take off the carburetor (for one of my friends to deep clean) and we’ll see what else we can get into. I’d like to replace the exhaust manifold, and those bolts will be difficult to remove as I’m not sure they’ve been out in 50 or 60 years, and through innumerable heating and cooling cycles. I’m told to heat the area red hot, let it cool for a few hours, then smack it with a hammer. That may work on some of the bolts, but on two of them, the heads are broken off, meaning the usual method is to weld a nut to the broken off bit. I’ve never tried that. I’ve seen it done successfully, just never tried it. We shall see. 


Looks like we’ve lost 1 baby guinea. Still got 11.

Some of the baby guineas. They’re pigeon sized.

And they sure get around. Often when I leave in the morning, the three mom’s and them are half a mile up the road, hanging out on the edge of a corn field. By evening they’re all back home. Weird. And there’s been one pheasant hanging out around the barn. 
Now that the oats is out and straw baled, I’ve been mowing the edges of those fields. Cutting down weeds I couldn’t get to while the crop was growing. And I mowed the new waterway. The barn swallows sure loved me doing that. It was fun watching a couple dozen of them flirting around.

You can kinda see the barn swallows fliting around.
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The new waterway.
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The chickens like it when I mow, too.


On Wednesday this week I drove to the twin cities to pick up some lighting stuff for the college. I have mentioned before that my favorite Bob Dylan song is ‘Tangled up in Blue’. I don’t often listen to song words or meanings, but that one appeals to me. I love a good story, and one of love lost tugs at my heartstrings. I was aware of two versions of the song, Dylan’s and Joan Osborn’s. Then I heard of this guitar player who was recently in the cities by the name of Billy Strings, and he does a cover. So I started looking for his version. It’s on YouTube, but not Apple music yet. However I found several other versions. 


I spent half the trip up, and the entire trip back listening to these different versions of the same song. The differences were really interesting to me. I really like the rhythm of the song, the tempo, the structure, and, depending on the version, the instrumentation or harmonies. A group called Grain Thief has a bluegrass version. The Indigo Girls have a section that drops into a solid blues verse. KT Tunstall’s gritty, throaty voice gives it a different vibe. Then there’s Mary Lee’s Corvette, who I hadn’t heard of before this, and she’s got a good rocking version. Jerry Garcia’s Band has a version complete with guitar jam. Bob Malone does a  ROCKING bluesy version that I really liked (And a solo piano version available on YouTube). Robyn Hitchcock is just guitar and piano with a very folk / blues sound.  A few are simply guitar, one starts as piano before adding the full band (and I really like a song that grows like that.) There was one version that seemed to be punk rock or something. I only got 20 seconds into it before deleting. Overall, the different guitar sounds, the slightly changed lyrics, the interpretation of each artist was fascinating to me and I still am not tired of this song after listening to it 58 times. 


We have these fuel barrels for the farm: a 300 gallon barrel of gasoline that’s up on a stand so it’s gravity fed. And a 500 gallon for diesel fuel that’s electric and has a pump. The automatic nozzles like you use at the gas station don’t work on gravity feed, the only work with a pump, so it was a big deal when, however many years ago I got a used barrel from a neighbor and went from gravity to a pump on the diesel barrel. I rented a trencher and ran an electric line across the driveway from the shop to the barrel and then could buy one of those automatic shut off nozzles. When I needed to refill the tractor the other day, I started the fuel flowing, went to the house to grab a snack, and got back to the tractor two seconds before the fuel stopped. I remember a few times with the gravity system and we used a big square nut to hold the lever up and then I would go to the shop and get distracted and I spilled a few gallons… I appreciate not having to worry about that anymore.


The header photo and that hole in the ground? I dug up the cover of the septic tank. Bailey helped.

Those eyes!
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We got the tank pumped out. It’s been on my ‘to-do’ list for a couple years. Also got a riser installed so the cover isn’t 2 feet underground anymore. Digging it up on Thursday I was thinking that is going to be a really good thing. 


SIMPLE CONVIENCES YOU APPRECIATE? 

AND MUSIC-

FAVORITE COVER SONG?
 
 

2025, Media, Music, Uncategorized

Esoterica

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For the last several weeks I have been plagued with an ear worm of Oh, Canada. Don’t ask me why. It is a nice enough tune, but it was getting annoying. I woke up at 3:00 am Sunday with another tune going through my head. I was sleepy and had to think for a minute but recognized it as Polka and Fugue from Schwanda the Bagpiper by Jaromir Weinbeger.

I pride myself for an ability to identify pieces of classical music by ear. I had the advantage of playing the Schwanda piece in college concert band, so it wasn’t too hard to identify it. I challenge myself as I drive or listen to Classical MPR to name the piece or composer before the announcer does. I still have some trouble discerning between Poulenc and Milhaud, as well as all the Spanish guitar composers, but on most other composers I think I am pretty solid.

This knowledge, as well as $5.00, will get me a cup of coffee, but it is pretty satisfying to be able to say, if anyone asks “Oh, that is such and such by so and so”.

What area of esoteric knowlege or skill do you pride yourself on? What long running 1960’s television program made repeated use of a composition by Brahms? What classical music are you most familiar with?

2025, Media, Music, Poems, Songs, Words

Tom Lehrer – RIP

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Like many musical artists, Tom Lehrer was introduced to me on the LGMS.  I loved his funny songs and they way he crafted them with language and great satire.  This is probably my favorite:

Sadly, Tom passed away four days ago at the age of 97.  He was born in New York City and began his musical studies when he was seven.  He entered Harvard at the age of 15, studying mathematics as well as entertaining his fellow students with his comic songs.  His mathematics career and his music career existed together for many years.  His last performance was in 1972 and he taught until 2003.

Another of his most popular songs puts the table of elements to a Gilbert & Sullivan tune:

There haven’t been too many artists who can skewer the world quite the way he could.  His voice will be missed.

Do you have a favorite Tom Lehrer song?  Or another satirist?

2025, Family, gardening, home, Music, Uncategorized

Bob

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I can’t remember a more rainy July than the one we are having this year. In addition to keeping the house interior spotless, we are intent on getting rid of garden weeds. The weeds have been horrendous because of the rain.

Weeding for us entails crawling through the garden beds on our hands and knees with dangerous looking implements to remove the weeds, and large buckets to put the removed weeds into. We rarely use herbacides. Husband is currently limping around with a walking stick due to a strained knee muscle from weeding. With apologies to Bob Dylan, this song keeps going through my head every time I pull weeds.

Buckets of weeds,

Buckets of shears.

Got all these buckets coming

Out of my ears.

Buckets of bind weeds in the yard.

Why does weeding always have to be so hard?

I have not seen the new Bob Dylan movie. Husband reminds me we saw him in concert at the Bismarck Civic Center about 30 years ago. He only had a bass player and a drummer with him. I don’t remember the concert very well. I never was a big Dylan fan, but some tunes just stay with you.

Did you ever see Bob Dylan live? What Dylan tunes stick with you? What is your weeding strategy? At what age is a person too old to weed?

2025, Gatherings, Music, Mysteries, Uncategorized

A Bell Curve

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Cantus refers to itself as a low-voice vocal ensemble.  Sounds a little sterile; it is anything but.  They do a wide variety of mostly a cappella offerings: a lot of internation, classical, commissioned pieces.  Yesterday it was an entire program of Frank Sinatra covers – amazing. 

My BFF and I have been attending Cantus concerts for 30 years; we do six to seven concerts a years, depending on the season’s program.   We attended their concerts all over the place – St. Thomas, a church in Excelsior, the McPhail Center, the Ordway.  Yesterdays was at Westminster Presbyterian downtown.  Over the years we’ve been to the Westminster dozens of times; it’s a great space with wonderful acoustics. 

Two thirds of the way through the program, Chris Foss, a bass, stepped up and began a beautifully rendition of I’ll Be Around by Alec Wilder. 

About a minute into his performance, which had a piano accompaniment, the bells of Westminster began to rang.  It was just loud enough that you could certainly here it but not loud enough to completely drown Chris out.  The bells ended very shortly before the song ended.  In all the times I’ve been in Westminster for concerts, this has never happened before.  Not sure why the bells were ringing at noon on a Thursday.  I’m guessing that many performers would have stopped and waited for the bells to stop, but Chris kept his composure and kept going.  He got wild applause after his number; I guess because it was a great song but also as acknowledgement of a rotten situation. 

I didn’t see Chris in the lobby after the show but I hope that anyone speaking to him praised the other song he did during the concert – not just for his calmness during the bells.

Do you live near a church that still rings their bells? Would you have stopped singing?

2025, animals, Gatherings, Music, Nature, Uncategorized

Don’t Pet The Fluffy Cows

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Yesterday we left the house at 7:15 am to drive to Medora. Our church bell choir had a gig at the Congregational Church there. Medora is a little town just outside Theodore Roosevelt National Park in the heart of the ND Badlands. It is full of tourists and tourist attractions. The church only has services in the summer now, with guest pastors each week. It is a small, one room church with about 20 pews.

On the way there, we saw a couple of Forest Service trucks on the side of the road near a deep ditch. There were about four guys there, along with a big bison. We gathered that the bison had somehow got through the very tall fence that marks the park boundary along the interstate. The fence is presumably high enough to keep the elk and bison from jumping over. I wouldn’t want to have the task of herding an angry bison, intent on roaming, back through the fence. They are fierce creatures. I don’t understand why any sane person would think they could walk up to one and pet it.

We encountered another wild creature once we made it to the church. The preacher for the day was a well-known local Lutheran minister, retired now, with a reputation for being a real character. The mild mannered librarian in our bell choir muttered “Oh s##t” when she saw his name in the bulletin. She has known him since she was a young adult and had him as a pastor for a while. He is a kind, gracious and well-intentiond man, but one who is all over the place in terms of his sermons and impulsive changes to the liturgy. He would be as hard to manage at a church council meeting as that bison in the ditch would be. He named several people sitting in the pews told and anecdotes about them and their familes (including the librarian) from years past, somehow connecting them to the theme of his sermon. His sermon didn’t run over the time allotted, though, and he only digressed from the order of service in the bulletin a couple of times.

On the drive home we saw the forest service trucks along with a Sherriff’s Department truck a mile or so west of where we saw them on the way to Medora. I guess the bison was still on the move. I hope they can get it back through the fence without anyone getting hurt.

What up close and personal experiences have you had with wildlife? Who are some characters in your life?

2025, Family, Kids, Music, Uncategorized

First Instrument

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Our 7 year old grandson has taken a keen interest in his mother’s Ibanez acoustic guitar, and spends up to an hour at a time trying to pick out chords and play tunes on it. His dad taught him the tune “Nothing Else Matters” by Metallica that he likes to pluck out.

Grandson isn’t big enough for a full size guitar, so yesterday we went to Sioux Falls and got him a three-quarter size Yamaha guitar. It fits him really well, and has just the right sized neck and fretboard. He is very excited! His parents have been in touch with a Brookings guitar teacher and are going to sign him up for lessons this week. His new sibling will arrive in August, and he will need something to keep him occupied when all the attention is on the new little one.

My first instrument after the piano was a B flat clarinet. Son had a trombone. Daughter was so excited to get her French Horn in Grade 5 that she marched around the block blasting on it. The first time she saw a violin that a friend had brought over to the house to jam with Husband, she almost wrestled him to the ground to get it away from him. She was 5. Husband set up violin lessons for her the next day. Husband had a cello, and still has one he loves to play. Daughter in law is a piano and flute player.

Grandson assures me that practicing won’t be a problem. We shall see. It is lovely, though, to have another musician in the family.

What was your first instrument? If you are an older sibling, how did you adjust to your younger siblings’ arrival. If you have older siblings, how did they react to your arrival?

2025, Medicine, Music, Songs, Uncategorized

How’s That Again?

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We live-stream Classical MPR from our computer in the study. I drilled a hole in the wall that separates the study from the living room so that we could put a speaker wire through the wall and have a speaker play music into the living room. It works swell, although the volume control is on another speaker on top of the piano in the study. Sometimes it isn’t loud enough. My ears have been pretty plugged up due to spring pollens, and it is sometimes hard for me to hear well.

The other day I was sitting in the living room listening to MPR play a Beethoven Piano Concerto. The volume wasn’t as loud as I would have liked, but I was too lazy to get up and go into the study to crank it up. It was a lovely performance, and I was surprised to hear the announcer say at the end of the recording that the pianist was Elton John. Well, of course Sir Elton can play the piano, but I never heard that he had entered the classical sphere. I double checked the play list and saw that the pianist was actually a Chinese pianist named Huang Tiange. I don’t know how I translated that name into Elton John, but I think it was the way the last name was pronounced. I had a good giggle thinking about all the other absurd and wonderful combinations of people and activities I could think of, like Mick Jagger’s preschool curriculum. I need to take more Sudafed so this doesn’t happen again!

What have you misheard, and when have you been misunderstood? What are some weird and wonderful people and activity pairings that you can think up?

2025, animals, Farming Update, Music, Mysteries, Nature, Uncategorized

Who???

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The weekend Farm Report comes to us from Ben.

I heard on the radio the band ‘The Who’ is beginning their farewell tour. I thought back in 2016 they were on their farewell tour. Which isn’t anything new, the Rolling Stones are still out there and how many farewell tours have they had. Anyone seen the Stones? 

I saw The Who in 1982. I think it was my second big rock concert and as an 18-year-old, driving with a State Farm atlas in my lap from Rochester up to the big city of St Paul and the St Paul Civic Center, it was a pretty big deal. I’m sure my folks were concerned sending me out into the world like that, even if it was just two hours away. I know I’ve told the story before but I like to brag about it so I’m gonna say it again: My first rock concert was Queen 1982, when Freddie Mercury was still strutting around the stage. My brother says Queen was the warm-up act when he saw the band Chicago right after Bohemian Rhapsody had come out.

So I set the bar quite high to have Queen and The Who as my first rock concerts. I know I have programs from them both, might even have tickets stubs in a drawer somewhere. And that’s when you had to go to a ticket office on the second floor of Dayton‘s department store. I feel like I found out about both of these fairly late so it’s not like I was waiting at the doors the first day tickets went on sale and a bunch of us rushed to the window. And then I found out you could call in to get tickets, so you called, getting the busy signal, hung up, and called again. In 1986 when tickets for Pink Floyd went on sale at the old Metrodome, I was home sick in bed and Kelly, while at work, was able to call and get tickets for us.

I digress.

The Who on a farewell tour.

They were well past their prime in 2016 and I decided I was not gonna remember that concert, I was gonna remember the 1982 concert.

You probably all remember the rock opera Tommy, and a really bad movie that was made after that. I always liked the Quadrophenia album better. Pete Townshend, the arm-windmilling guitarist, is married to Rachel Fuller. A singer-songwriter, musician, and composer. Together they created an  orchestral version of Quadrophenia and I recently saw it’s a ballet in England. I enjoy the sound of an orchestra behind a rock band. And the climactic final song of Quadrophenia called “Love Reign O’er Me“ sung by a full throated, powerful opera singer like Alfie Boe, is really something.

How long should you keep doing something?

I am sure they don’t need the money, and if you love it, and you are able to do it, I guess you should keep doing it, right? I mean should I quit farming because I’m “too old“? But I’m not farming in front of tens of thousands and charging an obscene amount of money for people to come see me struggle to climb up into the tractor and make crooked rows across the field.

But I’ll be skipping this tour.

Farming.

I’ve finished all my spring work. Although I am remembering now I’m supposed to plow up a couple fields and plant some corn as deer food plots for a neighbor. I kind of forgot about that. But the important fields, the ones that I’m trying to make money and survive on, they’re done.

I was hoping to finish soybeans last Tuesday, which is still two weeks later than all the neighbors, but… life.

It rained just enough on Tuesday that I had to quit. Once the dirt starts getting sticky, which only takes a couple of hundreds, it sticks to the gauge wheels on the planter. The gauge wheels control the depth of the seed, and sticking an extra half inch of dirt on the wheels changes the planting depth, and you’ve heard me say before, the depth is pretty critical. I  quit for a little while.

I spent most of Monday out working up all the ground, me and Bailey, and was a little bit sad to be done. Only because I enjoy my time in the tractor. The next morning I realized I had forgotten a field. So while it was a little bit too sticky to plant, it wasn’t too muddy to do fieldwork. Bailey and I got another hour of tractor time.

And then later on Tuesday I was able to go out again and I planted until 9:30 PM when it was again raining lightly and I was out of seed. I finished planting Friday afternoon. I started going over the fields with the drag, just like I did with the Oats, but the point of this is to smooth it out so that the combine header, when harvesting the soybeans, can ride as low as possible. Because soybeans pods will grow very low to the ground.

I had my last event at the college on Thursday evening. Tuesday will be my last day and I can haul out the garbage, and lock up cabinets, and take the rest of the summer off. So to speak.

The question was asked why my eggs are different colors. It’s different breeds. Some breeds of chickens lay white eggs, some brown eggs, and then there’s a couple breeds that lay the green eggs. I have Araucana’s.

Got the chicks outside and they’re enjoying that.

ORCHESTRAL ROCK MUSIC? DO THE STONES HAVE MOSS?

2025, Food, Gatherings, Music, Uncategorized

Sing For Your Supper

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The church choir year is winding down for us, and I couldn’t be happier. We have sang and rang bells since September, and now have one more service to ring at next Sunday. Then we are done for the summer.

There are only eighteen active musicians at our church, plus two organists. Many of us perform in both the choir and the bell ensemble. We are a rather large congregation with around 500 members, but it is only we few who keep the music going. That gets a little disappointing and exhausting at times. The congregation is quite thrilled with the music we provide.

We were pretty tickled at choir last week to hear that a congregation member who is a rancher wanted to thank the musicians for all our work, and donated 100 lbs of ground beef from his own cows to us. It came in 2 pound packages and had been processed at a butcher shop in Belfield, a little town just west of Dickinson. It was a rather unusual gift, but certainly heartfelt. It was also a reminder that we truly live in the West. We will all be fortified to start in again after our summer off.

What are your experiences in music ensembles? What are your favorite bird songs?