At this time of year when you wake up to ice and snow, you have to work hard to find the fun in it. I’ve been very crabby the last week (due to work) and boy, did the crummy weather not help. All morning I was kind of fuming about it.
YA goes into the office on Wednesdays (although starting next week, we both have to go in on Tuesday/Wednesday/Thursday). When she drives, she turns her car around near the garage so that she goes headfirst down the driveway. When I went out over lunch to do a couple of errands, the tracks that her car made in the ice were kind of pretty, like the work of a modern artist working in an unusual lmedium. It was just the lift that my spirits needed.
Have you seen anything that struck you as “artsy” recently?
Girl Scout Cookies came up in conversation yesterday. I sold GS cookie as a kid and was the Cookie Mom for several years when YA was in scouting. I am aware that as cookies go, they are extraordinarily expensive, but I’ve always thought of them as more of a charity than a fair purchase. Any time I see Girl Scouts selling cookies, I buy a box or two. The grocery store, the hardware store, at my office and from the grand-daughter of a friend of mine.
This year that habit netted us well over 12 boxes of cookies. We tried all the new ones (none of them passed the “we’ll buy them again next year” test). YA’s favorites are Thin Mints and PB Patties. Mine are Samoas and Shortbreads. But clearly neither of us are as enamored of the cookies this year as we have been in the past. I still have 2 boxes of the Shortbread sitting on the counter and have googled what I could do with them (I did get a good idea for something to put in spring baskets this year – I’ll take a picture in April when it happens). YA has a box of PB that has been opened but clearly not touched for at least a week and there is a half a package of the Lemonades in a ziplock that no one has touched for quite some time. (Don’t get me started on the packaging for the Lemonades and the French Toast – it’s criminal!) I’m pretty sure the Lemonades are going to get tossed.
It’s making me re-think my strategy where GS cookies are concerned. Maybe if I run across Girl Scouts who are selling, I should just buy one box. And buy fewer from my friend’s grand-daughter. And maybe pass on signs I see up at the office. Because even if I just think of them as a charity, it bugs me to throw out cookies or to finish a box just because we have too many of them. At least I have a year to refine how I’m going to handle this next time.
Do you have too many of anything in your house because it’s a good cause?
Cold again this week. The farmers’ spring excitement has tempered a bit this week. Next week it will be back.
Tuesday was such a nice day, Kelly and I went out and took down the snow fence we so carefully put up last November. The mid- December storms shredded up 80% of it and the weather turned too cold to fix. We had more snow in the road this year because of it, and it made me realize how useful the snow fence is and why we put it up every year. I was tired of looking at the remains of it and we got it picked up. The dogs helped.
The ducks have split into their summer groups; Mostly the fliers and the non-fliers, but there might be some other sort of grouping that I haven’t figure out yet. It makes it hard to get a good count on them. But I did see 6 mallards take off and then 7 more took off. And still got 2 poufs, 3 cream, 4 black… and some others.
The chickens are enjoying the grass again. And leftovers. And they like when I fill the bird feeders.
Kelly and I saw ‘Hadestown’ last week at the Orpheum. Boy, was that good. And my friend Jerry and I saw Colin Hay at the Pantages. Colin Hay was the lead singer for ‘Men at Work’ way back when. I saw them in concert way back when.
I should have found this picture of the barn for Wednesday’s article about selling the cows.
Dinner at Olive Garden Wednesday night was yummy
I know some of you read ‘Independently Speaking’ by Brent Olson. His latest article is in the same vein as I’ve written about lately. Getting machinery ready and being in town before the stores are open. We’re both still farmers at heart. www.brentolson.online He’s also on FB as ‘Independently Speaking’. He’s got great stories. Colin Hay told some stories too.
Pies, donuts, chairs, cows, dogs. We’ve had it all this week.
What’s in your fridge and what are you making for supper? What do you WANT for supper?
It’s warming up. Last week I talked about the slope of our land and how bad it is when icy. Mud isn’t much better. After my shoulder surgery I’m being extra careful not to slip and fall. I was extra careful walking on the snow or ice, and now it’s mud and I’m trying to decide, should I put that hand in my pocket just to keep my arm down? Any suggestions? In a slip, it’s the sudden lunge with the arm—as well as the stop at the end, that I’m worried about. So far so good fingers crossed. As the weather has warmed up this week, first I unplugged the well house heater and put it up on the shelf. I’m really done with it for this year. Then I unplugged the heat lamp over the dogs’ water dish. Next day I unplugged the chickens water bucket. I haven’t had the tractor plugged in for a few weeks now. The only winter thing left is the heat tape on a water pipe down in the barn. I’ll wait on that yet for a while. I’m pleased the electric bill is going down.
Missing another poufy duck. Dang, I don’t know if it’s because they’re white they stand out in the early morning light and it makes them easy to pick off? Or are they just that slow moving so the weak get picked off first? You may notice I don’t comment on missing chickens. The ducks stick together for the most part, and there’s fewer, and they’re more identifiable and easier to count. Of the 40 or 50 chickens, some are in the nest boxes, some are in back eating, some are in the rafters, a few are in the bushes, a few are at the bird feeders, and a bunch are scattered around the yard. I try counting them, but they move too… so I don’t know how many chickens we have. Forty or fifty. I try to count them at night, but still, a few on the perch, a few in the rafters, a few in the pen, some over there, some over here… it’s a mystery! So, I don’t know if one disappears. Except the ones with the funky hair. The rule of thumb is the fancier the bird, the sooner it’s gone.
These didn’t last long.
Daylight Savings Time. Do the chickens care? Egg production is up so maybe they do. The other day there was 9 eggs in one box! They had a second level going in there. Never seen that before and I don’t know why they like that box so much. Usually, they spread out more. (see header photo)
All the animals are sure enjoying the lack of snow and they’re free-ranging all over the yard.
During the winter as we move snow, it’s not unusual to scrape up some gravel as well. And then come spring, as the snow melts, we end up with piles of gravel in the grass. It’s a bummer. The other day just before it got really warm, I had a thought: I used the loader and pulled the snow piles back into the road, so when the snow melted, the gravel would be back in the ROAD, and not in the grass. Seemed like a revolutionary idea to us.
We have one really nice day this time of year and all the farmers get excited. We know it’s a false spring and the ground is frozen and we haven’t gotten though basketball tournaments yet (there’s always a snow storm during tournaments they say) but suddenly we all think “SPRING! I GOTTA GET MACHINERY OUT!” and everyone gets excited. The parts guys are busy. I’m thinking about what needs fixing before spring planting. (I need to put new fertilizer openers on the corn planter this year. Got the parts last year and they’re sitting there. Thankfully, we got the drill fixed last summer) I’ve also started looking at Camera systems and options. Cameras have really become popular on machinery as a way to see behind things or be sure critical components are working. I’m thinking about putting some inside the drill grain box so I can monitor the seed level without having to stop and go look. Time is money! Plus, I could put them on the baler to know the strings are tying, which would save bales and time. This year I’m also thinking what I can actually, physically, pick up with my left arm. It will be helpful that I’m having the co-op do all the fertilizing as that will save a lot of wear and tear on my arm. (not to mention time. Notice I didn’t say “money” there…) I’m a little concerned about the reality of scheduling them. I’ll need to have all the fields worked up at once (all the corn, or all the oats or beans) and then hope for good weather until they get too it. Plus, at the college, as covid settles down, all the extra spring concerts are coming back, so I have extra shows to deal with.
I feel my stomach knotting up already.
Talk about your hair stylist or barber. Got a favorite hair style?
I’ve been writing a lot of notes these days and it’s been hard. I don’t find I have much to say about my life. It’s kinda boring. I work, I sleep, I read – the triumvirate. Then there’s all the day-to-day stuff that makes life run (cooking, eating, laundry, errands).
There is crafting of course. It goes into the “Other Stuff” category because it’s not a daily activity; I tend to do most of my crafting on the weekend, when the big a** work monitor is moved off my desk in my studio. It probably accounts for 6-7 hours a week.
But even with the crafting, my life right now feels boring to me. I lost my winter attitude way too soon this year and I’ve been feeling trapped in the house by the cold weather. This is not something I usually experience during Minnesota winter. The only difference between this winter and other winters has to be the lack of seeing other folks. Calls, text, even online meetings for work aren’t quite the same as being with people (although I will admit the irony that I wish I could keep working from home starting the first week of April).
I am really looking forward go warmer weather so I can add a socializing slice to my pie. And then there will soon be a gardening/yardwork slice to my pie as well as a dog-walking slice. Can’t WAIT for a more interesting pie!
What does your pie include these days? Any new slices coming up for you?
Our farm is in the “gently rolling hills” of SE MN. I have one field that is mostly flat and that’s on the low ground by Silver Creek and is in the Conservation Reserve program. The rest of the farm, the valleys, and the shape of our farm, is primarily the result of hundreds and thousands of years of water erosion. Its beginning was hundreds of millions of years ago and the seas that covered the area and created the limestone layers that eventually I played on as a kid. (Thank you Dr. John Tacinelli and the class MN Rocks and Waters for teaching me that). The topographical map in the header photo is part of our farm; the closer the lines, the steeper the slope. All those lines also mean our ground is considered highly erodible, which is why we use conservation tillage practices and crop rotation.
Also, when we get freezing rain, every step is treacherous. Everything seems to be downhill from wherever I am. Course then it’s all uphill back.
Those thousands of years of erosion are still happening… heavy rains or spring melt and there’s quite the stream coming down through our place. It’s impressive to think about the total area it might be draining; roughly 70 acres doing a quick Google Map distance check.
Last Saturday morning it was warm and the snow was melting and we’d had a little rain and I could hear the water rushing through the culvert under the field road down in the swamp.
Later in the day, the snow melt had grown in volume and was over the road.
The culvert is mostly frozen yet, so it didn’t take too much more to overload it. But since the ground was frozen it didn’t hurt anything. Later in the day the runoff slowed and it was back in place. When I was a kid there wasn’t a road here, we had to go off through the pastures to get to those fields. And my siblings talk about skating on the pond down there. I think I even caught a crawdad down there once. Then dad put in some old culverts and made the road, and when that washed out, I had a better culvert put in.
Sometime last week we lost two more poufy ducks. Then the next day one was back! Pretty beat up, moving slow, and all bloody, but back. We started calling him Lazarus. He’d be gone one day and back the next. We couldn’t get too close, but we could see he had something wrong with his bill. One day I went to get corn for the ducks and when I came out of the feed room, he was right there. I gave him some corn and got him some water. He seemed like he wanted our help. To leave the other ducks, go off by himself, and come that close to us… the ducks don’t normally do that. He drank some water; I used the hose and ran some water near him and sprayed a little on him. He seemed to appreciate that. Then he let me pick him up and I could see he had a chunk tore off his bottom beak. I didn’t want to try cutting it off yet. I put him in the feedroom with food and water so he could just rest. Kelly went down at noon and checked on him and talked with him, and I went down after work and he’d died. Shucks. I wonder if he came to us for help, or as animals do, was he looking to go off on his own because he knew he was dying? We hate to lose one, but it’s worse when we’ve been helping and we get attached to them.
Township elections and the Annual Meeting was last Tuesday. The second Tuesday in March is ‘Township Day’ and all 1780 townships in MN have elections and annual meetings that day. A township is the rural equivalent of the city council. Townships provide or coordinate road maintenance, fire protection, law enforcement, and whatever other issues may arise. It might be property boundary issues or animals at large. Usually, it’s a pretty low turn out and a pretty quiet meeting, which means we’re doing alright. When there’s a crowd, there’s usually a problem.
You’re up for election. What position did you win?
Pants! I’m wearing pants. I can’t button pants with only one hand (I’m not sure anyone can) so it’s nice to have two (almost) working arms again and have pockets and I have my flashlight and micro Leatherman and all my accessories. It’s nice.
Not much happening here yet. We are into the first mud of the season. Every time the dogs go out, they come back with muddy feet that need to be cleaned off. Humphrey is pretty good: he waits on the step, “foot” means he gives me his left front paw, “other foot” is right paw. Bailey sure wants to be a people dog, she loves people. Every time I come home she will be on the step with a paw in the air so she can climb in my lap; a problem when she’s muddy. Front door or side door, she runs ahead of me and gets up on the edge to look into my eyes. That’s her in the header photo. We got her from an Amish family. Her mom is a Blue Healer, Dad was a Pomeranian. She’s just over 3 years old.
Allie, the Queen of them all, finally used her new pillow.
She’s all attitude for 15.
The chicken’s feet are muddy which means the eggs are muddy (unless I get them before they step on them to lay another). They are enjoying the warmer weather and taking dust baths in the pen.
The driveway is getting mushy, snow is melting fast, and that one room in the basement has got a little bit of water on the floor again. I put the extension on the gutter downspout for a few weeks while the snow is melting off the roof and the water in the basement goes away.
The duck pond is getting bigger every day as the ice melts, but it’s going to be a month yet before I can reset the drain outlet and regain the 6 inches of depth they’ve lost due to a leak. It’s just a homemade pond, made when the tile guy was replacing a drain tile, he just excavated a hole and dumped a little dirt at the end to make it pond up. Didn’t take much for the water to cut a trench and to that I added a piece of PVC pipe, but it’s still hard to keep it sealed up at the end. We’ve got good green clay, known as Decorah Edge for the outlet. It just needs an hour with a shovel.
The other morning, I went out to do chores and the ducks were not in their usual place at the pond. Then they weren’t in their second usual place with the chickens, nor their third usual place under the trailer. I found them in their fifth usual place out behind the pole barn. And a few hundred yards beyond them, coyotes are howling. Saw a coyote some 400 yards away and took a shot at it. He jumped and spun in circles about three times and then trotted off. The ducks came home, back to the usual spot without any casualties. I wish you would stay closer to home ducks.
Spring also means the yahoo’s are dumping ditch trash; the township guys have picked up 2 batchs of trash in the last week. First load was just plain junk and trash. Second load was two box springs, two different size mattresses and a door. Idiots.
Which body part would you like to be bionic and what features would you have?
Sunday night and yesterday we were in a winter weather advisory and got 4 inches of snow that blew around and actually drifted. People assume that because we live in ND, we must have scads of snow all winter. In our part of the state we are semi-arid the best of times, and since we are currently in a drought, our snow fall has been negligible. Our snow is typically light and dry.
There are times when snow removal is necessary, though, and this recent snowfall was one of them. Husband went manfully out into the bitter cold yesterday afternoon and attacked the drifts in the driveway and between the garage and the front steps using three of the five snow shovels he has in our garage. They differ in the volume and weight of snow that can be thrown from the particular shovel. You can see them lined up in order from least to greatest volume in the header photo. He insists his numerous shovels and judicious selection of shovel to weight and volume of snow is ergonomically sound and the reason he has not had a serious injury or heart attack clearing the snow. He has not succumbed to the lure of the Dakota Roller, a shovel with wheels.
When I clear snow, I grab whatever shovel I can find and push the snow around to where I want it. Tossing the snow seems like too much work. I sort of share the philosophy of our municipal street department. If it isn’t too deep to drive through, why bother with it? It is going to melt by the middle of May.
How many snow shovels do you own? What is your philosophy of snow removal? Do you drive through through drifts and puddles just for the fun of it?
Today’s farm/township update comes to us from Ben.
Kelly and I saw “Come from Away” last Sunday. It was fantastic. In the lobby we heard a guy walk up to his wife and say, “My glasses fogged up and I was following the wrong lady in a red jacket.”
It was so cold! How cold was it? It was so cold I wore sleeves. It was so cold I saw a duck standing on one foot. It was so cold the handle on the water hydrant by the barn wouldn’t move. Then it warmed up for a day and the chickens came out, and the hydrant worked, and the ducks just looked at their corn.
In the winter, we get pheasants coming in to eat the corn I throw out for the ducks. Each year there’s a couple more and this year it’s 9 or 10. It’s pretty cool. The crows have learned there’s free food here too. Kelly doesn’t like the crows.
Here’s a picture of some dark colored blobs down there. Those are pheasants.
I’m on our local townboard. Been on there since 1998. We have one house on a major road that is city on both sides of this house, and there is 100’ of sidewalk in front of that house. I don’t know if it’s a ‘walking path’ or ‘bike path’ or ‘sidewalk’ but It’s the only sidewalk in the township. (because the rest of the township is rural or subdivisions that don’t have sidewalks). The city clears the walking path out in this area because there are no home frontages here, but they have been skipping that 100’ in front of this house. And the property owner has never plowed it. As it’s in the middle of this stretch of path, it’s a problem for people using the path. I learned all this last winter when I got an angry phone call from a city resident who lives out there and uses this path. I didn’t even know it was a township problem. I didn’t know the homeowner and I didn’t know if he had health issues or what reasons there might be for him not clearing the sidewalk. Took me a few days to connect with him, during which, the county snowplow just pushed all the snow back off the sidewalks and so the path was open. Turns out the guy just refuses to clear the walk on principle. Huh. He figures he didn’t ask for this sidewalk, so he’s not going to plow it. We, as the township, don’t have a sidewalk ordinance and we don’t want to make one for 100’ of sidewalk when we have 33 miles of roads to deal with, therefore we couldn’t force him to clear it. And the city says it’s not theirs, so they don’t want to clear it (even though they’re clearing a mile on both sides of it). Last winter the weather warmed up and the problem went away.
This winter I’ve been watching it as I drive by this area. I’ve seen the guy out there with his small tractor and blower doing his driveway, but he still isn’t doing the sidewalk. And I can’t decide if I admire him for sticking to his principles or if he’s being a jerk. And the city now is clearing it as they’re driving through there anyway. Which makes sense, but I could also see them leaving it… on principle.
Twenty-five years ago, just after I got on the Townboard, we repaved some roads in a subdivision. One resident never paid his share believing no one would come and tear out the road. Jokes on him; the company DID tear up 100’ of blacktop, leaving a section of gravel on this road. Didn’t take long for him to pay up and the road to get fixed. Maybe the neighbors convinced him.
We have a mystery going on at our townhall. It’s an old building, looks like a one room school. (Maybe it was the school that got blown across the road in the great tornado of 1883, or maybe it was always a townhall; depends who you ask and what maps you choose to believe).
For the last 3 years we’ve been picking up Phillips vodka bottles in the gravel parking lot. I wish LJB was still around; we need a good story for this! We have our suspicions… once a week, there will be 1, 2, or sometimes even 3 vodka bottles. Very few are empty. Some have never been opened! Most will be between ½ and 2/3’s full. We’ve got a collection in the hall now of 14 bottles, and there are a lot that have been picked up and thrown out and don’t make it to the hall collection. The hall is at the intersection of two major roads. People park there in summer and ride bikes or jog. A school bus stops there. Sheriff deputies park there to do reports.
Why are you not finishing the vodka? And why are you leaving them there? Bonus points if you can tie in the glasses fogged up guy.
I got an email a couple of weeks ago from the State Fair folks. They wanted to give everybody a heads’ up that ticket prices are going up this year. And that wasn’t all – they also wanted to give folks a chance to pre-purchase tickets before prices go up. The difference in ticket price is one dollar. This doesn’t seem that big of a deal to me – after all, the tickets have been $13 for years. The cost of setting up the website to pre-sell tickets plus the cost to send out the communication probably wasn’t inconsiderable, so my cynical side kicked in; I’m thinking they just need some cash before the fair. I didn’t delete the email, but I also didn’t give it much more thought.
Then yesterday morning, our ring doorbell chimed as someone was delivering a package. It was for YA and it was about the size of a shoebox but didn’t seem heavy enough for a pair of shoes. When I asked her about later, she said it was a pair of sandals. Seeing as it was -2° F when we were having this conversation, I commented that this was a great show of hope and faith on her part. She laughed.
So I decided that I could have some hope and faith as well. Most days I don’t feel particularly hopeful about the end of pandemic but I went online and ordered all our State Fair tickets for August. Hope, faith and I saved $8!
Trail Baboon 