Today we brought our pups to Brandon. SD to be groomed. Our Cesky Terriers have a very specific hair cut, leaving them with a shaved back, tail, head, and ears, with a fluffy beard, eyebrows, chest, and ballerina skirt on their front and sides
Their longer fur is very curly and prone to matting. Last night I noticed lots of mats on Mitzi’s legs, so I grabbed my bottle of corn starch and the grooming comb I got from the breeder. The cornstarch really helps with detangling. I was able to get most of the mats out, so I hope today’s grooming won’t be so traumatic for her. She was so good and patient during my combing. The only problem with squirting the dog with cornstarch is that you can’t let them get wet afterwards.
My first haircuts were by Kay Aanenson, a rather flamboyantly gay barber on Luverne’s main street. I don’t remember this, but I was told that I cried the whole time, and Kay just stuffed chewing gum in my mouth to keep me quiet. Kay was a noted dancer of the Charleston, worked as a dancer on Atlantic cruise ships in the 1920’s and 1930’s, and wore very gaudy, colorful suits to our Lutheran church. He came to church every Sunday until he passed. I remember those suits.
I really need to brush out our dogs on a more regular basis. Mitzi loves to plunge in the water feature in our backyard, and I think that leads to more matting. I need to invest in more cornstarch.
Where was your first haircut? Have you had dogs who needed grooming?What is your favorite production of Anything Goes?
Well, Kyrill’s worst fear has been come true: Mitzi can now jump up on the sofa all by herself. For Kyrill, this means that he has lost the “upper paw” he had with her.
Prior to last week, Kyrill could steal any of Mitzi’s toys and chew bones, jump up on the sofa with them, and she couldn’t do much about it. Kyrill and Mitzi both have a “I’ll have what she/he is having” attitude about possessions. They want anything the other has. Now that she can ascend the sofa, she can more easily steal things back from him. We are happy with this developmental milestone since we no longer have to hoist her up all the time. Cesky Terriers are long dogs with short legs, and her back finally got long enough. Kyrill was definitely stressed and needed lots of pets and reassurance after her sofa jumping became regular.
Despite vying for possessions, the two dogs are always close by one another and snooze right next to each other all the time. They remind me of human siblings, with Kyrill taking the role of an older brother who wants to be dominant over his younger sister but who still tries to take care of her.
What sibling rivalry did you experience? How did your family cope with it? If you have more than one pet how do they get along?
It has been Buffalo Days here for the past week, and there has been a car rally, a parade, a 5K run, a quilt show, a craft fair, and many food trucks around town. Yesterday was to be Woofstock, a celebration of dogs. You can see the Facebook page below listing all the activities
Our pastor was scheduled to do the blessing of the Dogs. Our terriers needed blessings as well as forgiveness and penance! Husband and I left home with the dogs at 4:30 to head to the city park, but we hadn’t gone more than a block when the sky darkened and the wind really picked up. I turned the car and headed back home just before the thunderstorm hit. We got .50 of rain in about 20 minutes. Woofstock was officially rained out. I imagined all the wet dogs that were at the park and what a chaotic scene it must have been.
All this brought up memories of the original Woodstock, and what an awful thing the grownups around me viewed the goings on at the festival. I was still in elementary school but was fascinated by the scenes I saw on TV.
I was thankful that our rain and wind weren’t destructive We won’t need to water the garden for at least a couple of days. They were expecting 85-100 mph gusts, hail, and tornadoes back at our old home in ND last night. I can’t imagine a garden making it through something like that!
Been rained out? What are your memories of Woodstock? What Woofstock activity would you have wanted to do?
Yeah, I know. When I was planting crops I commented on how nice it was to have good lights on the tractors and lights outside the shop so I could keep working after dark. But now that the crops are in, and I’m on the rest of my ‘to-do’ list, it’s a good thing it gets dark so I know enough to quit and come in the house.
Sometimes that happens because I’m still at the college so I don’t get home and doing anything until 5:00, or the last few days it was so hot I didn’t go out until late in the afternoon, I worked in the office and did bookwork and fought with websites and dealt with government bureaucracy in the morning, and then I went out and fixed the hole in the bottom of the feed room door and finally got half of the larch trees planted, and weed barrier around them one night, and then the next night rounded up the weed barrier that had blown away, got them all stapled down and found some hoses and gave the trees a good watering. I gotta find a good place to put about 10 more larch trees.
Kelly and I worked one night, finishing the mulch around the seedlings, and building the deer fence over the windbreak seedlings. The deer sure like the Ninebark. They aren’t bothering the gray dogwood, but they’re peeling the bark right off the Ninebark. Stupid deer. When we finished that night Kelly had 6, SIX ticks on her! And she had applied tick repelant! No one hates Hates HATES ticks more than Kelly. She still shivers when we talk about it. I said it’s because she’s irresistible.
I got a 12Volt pump hooked on the large water tote and that’s working pretty slick. Now one person can water the trees from the cab of the gator.
The dairy guys are working on that first cutting of alfalfa. Good weather for that. Some guys are making hay from cover crops they planted last fall, and will get soybeans in after they take that off.
I’ve got a contractor out and he’s gonna fill in a gully and construct a couple berms to help control erosion. And then fill in another gully, and get a tile inlet and perforated tile installed to prevent a gully from returning in a place that has springs. As dry as it is, the springs are pretty well stopped for now. It’s all part of the Soil & Water projects that I’ve got going this year.
I’ve got the last of my college rentals on Saturday, and then Tuesday is officially my last day for the year, but there is an ongoing project that I’ll stop and work on throughout the summer. It’s no big deal, doesn’t need to be done until fall. It’s sound baffling for the music department.
Padawan had a minor hiccup with his job so he’s still helping me out for a while. At least that’s what he says, that there was a minor hiccup. We believe 98% of what he tells us. “Trust but verify“
Soybeans are finally up enough we can see the rows.
They need some rain. I was talking with one of the agronomists from the Co-op the other day and she said everyone is in the same situation. Just waiting for rain.
Growing Degree Units: to Date 631, Normal is 370. 261 above normal… jeepers. Need some rain. The corn is looking real good, it’s about a foot tall. The co-op was out and sprayed for weeds on Thursday.
The chicks are enjoying being outside. They’re about half full size. They’re big enough to get OUT of the fence, but can’t figure out how to get back IN the fence. Unless Luna is “following” them, I’ve seen them freak out enough they fly over.
Chickens always look so ticked off.
Stop taking pictures and put me back in the pen!
GET THAT CAMERA OUT OF MY FACE!
Last week I worked a GOP debate at one of the local high schools. They brought in 3 candidates for governor. Three that “agreed to abide by the Republican Convention endorsement and support the candidate who the convention endorses”. Well, that left out a few.
Wasn’t much of a crowd to be honest.
I just turned on the lights and let the local TV station crew and the schools IT guys sort it all out. The technology of live broadcasting has really changed from the days of the Van with the big tower coming out the top. So that was kind of interesting.
In the past I have mentioned the monitor that works with the corn planter to alert me if a row stops planting seed. It’s a box with 6 light bulbs and orange covers over them. This is 1980’s technology and they’re like old flashlight bulbs. Well, one burned out on row six, and I really hoped it wasn’t row six that ran out of seed first. I was almost done planting and I didn’t have a spare. So I figured I’d get LED versions of those bulbs. And then trying to get a bulb out of the unit, I dropped the bulb in the tractor cab and it vanished. I thought for sure I saw it in a tote I carry in the tractor and I took out the paper towels to get the bulb and it still wasn’t there. Don’t you hate that? Where could it go?? Well, no matter, I took out another one. And then I found out I can get PURPLE replacement bulbs. Well, yes, Please and Thank you! Now I’m looking forward to planting crops next spring with my purple light bulbs. I hope they work. Sometimes, because LED’s take so much less power, it messes up the circuitry and things don’t work right… In theater lighting, sometimes we have to put a ‘dummy load’ backstage, just something like a 15 watt incandescent bulb to pull enough current to make the LED dim properly. New technology has mostly solved that, but it’s not unheard of to need a dummy load in addition to the LED. In regard to the planter box. I may need to leave one row as an old bulb. We’ll see.
YA really needed a puppy fix over the weekend, so yesterday we cajoled Jacque into lending McGee to us. We picked him up in the afternoon and had him for about three hours.
There was a short walk up the block (it was pretty hot and he has little short legs) and then hung out a bunch in the back yard. He was very well behaved for a puppy – no romping in my plants, no barking, no chewing on my toes. He did find a good stick:
It was interesting to see him taking in all the new stuff in our city back yard. Here are the things that McGee was momentarily afraid of:
the fire pit
birds flying near the bird feeders
the birdbath
the grill
the wind chime
Here are the things that fascinated him:
planes
the birdseed under the feeders
my neighbor Don who was clearing up after grilling
the boxer who poked it’s head out the car window and barked (friendly bark)
We pulled out the kiddie pool and lifted McGee into it twice, followed by the application of treats. He didn’t actually seem to mind the pool but didn’t want to tarry and wouldn’t jump in on his own. YA thought maybe it was too big a jump for him (until we moved inside and he felt quite at home jumping up on the sofa) but I think maybe the water was too chilly. There was some tug-of-war and he was very willing to chase a toy when YA tossed it but bringing the toy back is not in his toolbox yet! We had YA-chasing and some zoomies as well.
He didn’t stop moving the whole time we had him… Jacque, I assume he slept well last night?
Our initial plan for heading to St. Louis after Nonny’s passing was to take the dog and leave the cat at home with our fabulous neighbors coming over to feed her and take care of her box. Then the dog passed and I knew immediately that I simply could not leave the cat at home. I have a very bad history of pets passing while I’m gone (it’s happened twice). We did think about boarding Nimue but even that was giving me anxiety.
I bought a brand-new kitty carrier – bigger than the one we use for the block-and-a-half transport to the vet – and a new harness. The plan was to let her out every 100 miles or so and I even brought an aluminum cake pan for a litter box and put some litter in it for traveling. All of this turned out to be pointless. Nimue had no interest in how comfortable we were trying to make her. She didn’t make any noise, but the getting out of the carrier on a harness was not on her list of things to get done that day. The first time we took her out, she sniffed around a bit, but more puffed up than we’ve ever seen her. She wouldn’t eat a treat, wouldn’t drink any water, certainly didn’t do any business. Crickets.
We tried two more times with the same result. After that we quit trying. When we arrived at Nonny’s condo, she headed straight underneath Nonny’s bed. I was pretty sure it would be time to go home before she came out. For the next three days, we had to keep Nimue in her carrier for most of the day – with people coming in and out, boxing up stuff, tossing stuff – there was no way to keep her safe except in her carrier. And when we were gone from the condo, we also kept her in the carrier. Both my sisters, my niece and nephew all had keys and I didn’t want to run the risk that they might stop by for some reason and accidently let her out.
All of this made me feel terribly guilty – after all, we were torturing her because of my anxiety. She would probably have been happier at The Cat’s Meow than with us. So, it was with a bit of joy that I came into Nonny’s bathroom late on Wednesday afternoon to find Nimue ensconced in the sink looking like butter would melt in her mouth.
On Friday, when we headed home, we put Nimue in the kitty carrier with a few treats, put her on the backseat and drove off. We talked to her quite a bit during the day but never attempted to take her out – 9+ hours. Within minutes of getting home, she had eaten, done some business and settled down on her kitty bed in my room. Like nothing had ever happened. Apparently no kitty ptsd here!
There are many down-sides to not having a dog. No walking companion, no one to keep the kitchen floor “clean”, no big furry foot warmer on cold nights.
And then there are the squirrels. They have absolutely figured out that there is no dog patrolling the territory any longer. And they certainly don’t see me as a threat. Yesterday I made a trip to get something from the car and the squirrel on the feeder and the squirrel sitting on the swing hardly even looked in my direction, much less fled in terror.
They’re also eating the hot seed cylinder that they’re not supposed to like. I called Mr. Bird, the company in Texas who makes the cylinders to ask about the problem. They said at this time of year, when squirrels are having their young, they are particularly ravenous and will deign to eat things that might not taste too good to them. This phase will probably pass but in the meantime, they also make a hotter cylinder called “Disco Inferno” that I can try. I looked it up and Gertens carries it. Guess I’ll add that to the cart when we are there next week!
Hopefully there will be a dog to guard the sanctity of the yard some time this summer; until then we’ll just have to put up with the squirrels laughing at us!
Our puppy is 5 months old and at the peak of teething. I am happy to report that she isn’t a chewer of furniture, although like most terriers she loves to steal socks and tries to haul off shoes that get left out.
We get her collagen chewing sticks of various lengths. She loves to gnaw on those. Rawhide is now deemed very unhealthy for dogs. She also loves to chew on her brother when they wrestle and chase. He reciprocates by stealing her favorite collagen chew whenever he can. Here she is with her longest chew. There are chews of various lengths all over the house.
Mitzi may not chew on furniture, but she has set herself a bigger goal of devouring our deck floor. We have a very large deck. It is perfect for the dogs to run and chase and tumble and wrestle
It even extends beyond the vertical boards you see, which is where the previous homeowners had their hot tub.
We knew the deck floor wasn’t in the best shape when we bought the house, and we plan to replace it one of these years with some indestructible modern composite like Trex. Mitzi decided about a month or so ago to speed up the replacement process by finding vulnerable sections in the flooring and chewing them up.
We didn’t catch on to what she was doing right away. After we realized what was happening we bought some inexpensive welcome mats to put on the vulnerable floor sections and we watch her very carefully when she is outside. The Vet and her breeder assure us that she will be over the Big Chews in a couple of weeks.
Any stories of destruction by your pets? When have you bitten off more than you could chew?
It was a year ago on the 25th that mom died. Here’s to mom.
This weeks Farming Update from Ben:
It was April of 2021 I started writing these farm updates.
This week I learned if I use the diesel pump for semi’s at the gas station, they pump fast. Like really REALLY fast! Twenty two gallons in about a minute! It’s awesome. I’m gonna make a habit of filling the truck with them when available.
I thought Padawan should have his own set of chainsaw chaps. (We have big plans for summer! He may not know this part of them yet…) I have pretty good chaps from Stihl, a very reputable name. When Kelly bought them for me – I think it was a Fathers Day Present- she said if I was going to have some, they better be good ones. Yep. I’d agree. And now I’m looking at them for P and I’m not sure how much we’ll really need them and good ones are $150+, so I look at cheaper ones and then I think, I’m going to skimp on something that could save his life?? I pictured myself at the ER. “Well, Doc, I thought they’d be good enough.”
I bought him a good Stihl pair.
It’s a little crazy around the farm. I went from late nights in rehearsal to late nights in the tractor. Life is still relentless! Daughter asks me why I’m out in the field. Well, because. Work to be done! I just keep thinking, what if I was still milking cows?? Add another four hours into my day.
Padawan is going to be able to go full time for me this summer. That will be huge. I was listening to a podcast in the tractor the other night and they talked about jobs and how people have ‘soft skills’ and ‘hard skills’. The hard skills can be taught. It’s the soft skills he needs help with. That can be our goal this summer. He’s got some of them, he’s a really nice young man, but he’s 19 and they’re not his focus right now. Just gotta bring them back to the surface.
I had him doing fieldwork. A hard skill.
Get off the phone… a soft skill…
Sold some more straw to the Fire Department. They add it to their practice fires to make smoke. They tell me it’s the least toxic way to make smoke.
The oats is all planted.
Used the new Track Wacker! Or ‘Track Eraser’ as I learned the company calls this machine. It took a little finagling to get it adjusted and folding properly, but it worked great!
Folded and ready to go.
In field position.
Whacking a tire track!
After the first 100 yards I stopped to check and be sure everything was working on the grain drill. That’s when I made a terrible mistake. I backed up with the drill in the ground. The drill uses two disc’s, in a V shape, to get the seed into the ground. The front is the point and makes the seed trench. The back is open. And when I backed up, I filled that open V with dirt. I knew it felt wrong as I backed up and it took driving ahead another 20 yards before I saw it plugging up and knew what I had done. Crap. It’s tough cleaning them out. I had to go back home and get a long screw driver and vice grips and I got all but one cleaned out. The last one I had to take one disc off to get it cleaned. NOTE TO SELF: Don’t do that again.
Wednesday I hooked up the new drag — the new to me drag– and went over all the oat fields. It worked pretty slick!
Got the corn planter out and greased and ready to go. Paddie did that and hauled out deck furniture while I was using the drag. I gotta get a list of jobs for him when I’m doing something else. He needs more self motivation. Is that a hard or soft skill?
I headed out to the corn fields Thursday afternoon. With my buddy.
The chicks and chickens are doing well and they love a field of freshly tilled dirt.
Fresh Dirt!
I thought, what should I listen to as I begin? I chose a ‘favorites’ playlist on shuffle mode and the first song was Mingo Saldivar playing ‘Rueda De Fuego’.
Tex-Mex Ring of fire. Haha- perfect!
Got a good start; enough to check seed depth, placement, and be sure everything was working on the corn planter. Then it rained a bit and I had time to go home and take a nap before coming back for another college show.
Friday was a road trip (me and the dogs) to Byron for a 275 gallon water tote to water the trees. Then to Plainview for parts, then to Wabasha for another 100 trees. Back through Plainview, picked up stump killer for Kelly in her pursuit of buckthorn, and finally home. It was a nice drive.
I planted another 40 tree’s. 60 to go! And it was Arbor Day to boot!
As an only child, there were very few occasions when I had to share much with anybody. I always seemed to know that no matter what, any friends or cousins would eventually leave and I would have sole possession of my toys. That made it easy for me to share.
It has been interesting watching our older dog struggle with sharing dog toys and chews with the puppy. He wants her to play with him, but just can’t seem to figure out that if he would just let her play with or chew on a particular toy, he could just get another toy or chew thingy and they could both be occupied. Oh no. Any toy or chew she has, he has to have. Why? Why does he need to be King of the Toys? I suppose it has to have something to do with his need to be the Alpha. Why can’t Alpha characters be magnanimous??
Our older dog is only 4 years old and seems solemn and careworn beyond his years since the puppy came home. I will watch with great interest how things change as she matures and becomes stronger and more assertive. Until then, we shall have to referee the distribution of dog toys
How easy was it for you to share as a child? What were your most precious toys?
Trail Baboon 