Category Archives: Uncategorized

2025, animals, Business, Uncategorized

Junkyard Cats

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We have made several trips to our local landfill lately disposing of lots of stuff. Our landfill is set up so that you drive onto a scale, they weigh your truck, you empty your stuff in the appropriate bin, then you drive back onto the scale and get weighed again. It costs $3.00 for every 100 pounds.

The people who weigh the truck and calculate the cost are in a sunny office where we frequently see at least one of the three cats who live at the landfill. They have soft beds and full food dishes in the office. Sometimes they sleep beneath a sunny window on the workers desk. One cat has only three legs, and that is the cat we most often see running around, prowling , and sometimes taking a nap in a sunny space. They are very well loved cats and they make going to the landfill a more pleasant experience.

What are your landfill experiences? Where have you unexpectedly run into resident animals at businesses?

2025, animals, Family, home, Travel, Uncategorized

Traveling Kitty

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Today as you read this, Husband and I are making the first of two trips to Luverne over the next two weeks. The main purpose of this trip is to go to our 2 month old granddaughter’s baptism in Brookings on Sunday. The other reason for the trip is to bring to the new house as much food from our freezers and liquids the moving company won’t transport.

Wedged in the back of our van, surrounded by coolers filled with frozen food, boxes of home canned tomatoes, cans of olive oil, and jars of fancy vinegars will be our cat, Luna, in the dog crate. We decided to move her on this trip since it seemed rather too stressful to move both the cat and the dog at once.

The last time Luna made this trip was nine years ago when she was a kitten and had been rescued by our son and daughter-in-law from underneath a deck in Brookings. Our daughter was visiting them at the time and drove the cat to Dickinson after staying with Daughter and her college roommates in Moorhead a few weeks. Her only trips since then have been excursions to the local vet. It is a 550 mile trip to Luverne. Once we get her there she will be boarded at the Rock County Vet Clinic until we are moved into the new house on the 22nd.

We are going to try to make her as comfortable as possible with a litter box, soft blankets, and a small water bowl in the dog crate. I am not optimistic about her being happy at all with this trip and then being subsequently boarded. I will let you all know how it is going as the day progresses.

What are your experiences traveling with pets? Any advice for us today?

2025, Family, Food, Uncategorized

Fermentation

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Sunday night I received a cryptic message from our daughter that said “Breaking News: I love sauerkraut”.

She had an out of town friend visiting a week or so ago, and the friend just whipped up some sauerkraut and left it to ferment. I like the taste but not the texture of sauerkraut, but I never had it homemade. Maybe it is crisper than the store bought variety. Husband sneaks a jar into the fridge every so often. I think that this is perhaps the only time Daughter may have eaten sauerkraut.

I stopped making pickles quite a while ago, since we always ended up with too many to eat in a year. My favorites now are cornichons from France. They come in a small jar so you aren’t left with too many. Husband occasionally teases about home brewing beer. He never has fermented anything on purpose. I wonder if Daughter’s discovery means she is going to start making her own kraut.

What are your favorite pickles? Ever done any fermentation?

2025, Gatherings, Uncategorized

Quilts

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Last Sunday, we sang in the choir at the 9:30 service, and were acknowledge for 38 years of musical service to the church in both the choir and bell choir. They even had a God’s Speed blessing for us, which I had no idea they were going to do. After that, we were expected to sing a choir anthem all about leaving and journeying. It is awfully hard to sing when you are choked up.

We have committed quilters in our various musical groups, and they gifted us with a queen size quilt with musical motifs. It is gorgeous, and you can see it in the header photo. As soon as I took the photo, our dog jumped on the quilt and snuggled in, claiming it for his own.

What motifs would be on a quilt someone made for you to commerate your work and life? How do you keep yourself from crying?

2025, Family, Food, Kids, Uncategorized

Tradition!

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I wrote on Wednesday about getting moose meat from our next door neighbor, a moose his brother-in-law had shot last year. The reason for the gift of moose was to make room in their freezer for the venison from a deer that Neighbor’s 12 year old daughter shot over the weekend.

Neighbor comes from an extended family for whom hunting is really important. Last Saturday he and his daughter drove to the sparsely inhabited grasslands south southwest of us, and she got her deer. It wasn’t a clean shot, and they had to chase it. It took a while for the deer to expire. They gutted it out, and loaded it in the truck. On the way back, the girl told her dad she didn’t want to go hunting anymore.

Neighbor spoke proudly of how courageous his daughter was for telling him how she felt about an activity so important in their family, and how he was supportive of her decision. He said they had great conversations on the way there and back about all sorts of things like boys, her plans for the future, etc. He is a good dad, an educator, who spent are least one summer in San Francicso coaching swimming for Stanford. His daughter is a lucky girl.

What family traditions have you kept or dropped? What qualities do you think make for a good father?

2025, animals, Family, Nature, Uncategorized

Hiss!

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Tuesday Husband and I took the dog to the groomer in a little town about 10 miles west of us. I drove, and on the way back I had to swerve to avoid running over a very long rattlesnake that was slithering across the highway. We estimated it to be about four feet long. We have Prairie Rattlesnakes out here. Their markings are unmistakable. We have seen them all lengths, from tiny ones no thicker than a pencil to the long one on Tuesday. The weather has been so warm here I suppose it was a good time for the snake to check out the available mice in the ditch. We have never seen any in town.

I had some clients years ago who had to move out of their rental home on the south side of town because there were dozens of garter snakes in the walls of the basement. The house was later condemned and torn down. We heard that the lot the house was built on was a noted breeding ground for garter snakes. No other structure has been built there.

The town of Narcisse in Manitoba interlake region is well known for the tens of thousands of garter snakes that emerge from their nests in the spring and return in the fall. I guess it is quite a tourist attraction. We never visited there when we lived there. Snakes aren’t my cup of tea. I have a second cousin who I love dearly who lives near St. Peter and who loves snakes. He has bred snakes for commercial sale in the past, and loves it when his cats find garter snakes in the basement and bring them upstairs.

What are your experiences with snakes? Do you have any friends or relatives with interests you find odd?

2025, home, Mysteries, Uncategorized

Fingers Crossed

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A month before we closed on our house in Minnesota, the realtor phoned me to let me know the hot tub had sprung a leak, and the current owners were told it wasn’t worth fixing. Did we want them to replace it or remove it? I told her to remove it.

Now that we are three weeks from our move, and four weeks from closing on our North Dakota house, I have become very watchful and worried for anything going wrong here and needing to be fixed or replaced. I had a scare Sunday when I noticed that the dishwasher wasn’t draining, but a quick application of a plunger cleared whatever was plugging it up.

I have to calm myself and tell myself to stop when I start worrying about one of our vehicles breaking down, the plumbing exploding and ruining the drywall, or one of us getting injured or dropping dead. It is stressful enough to move, but we sure don’t need a last minute disaster.

What last minute disasters have you experienced? How do you get yourself to knock it off and stop fretting?

2025, Art, gardening, Mysteries, Uncategorized

Aromatherapy Times Two

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My current world is a battlefield of aromas.

My tomato and pepper plants are still putting out fruit, so I am out at the bales every day harvesting.  If you’ve ever grown tomatoes, you know that you can’t pick them without getting a very pungent smell all over your arms and hands. 

I’m also working with melting beeswax (Ukrainian eggs).  It gets on my fingers and under my fingernails.

The tomato plant smell is easily washed off (if I remember when I come in) but the beeswax smell lingers not just on my hands but on my clothing, in my hair, probably in the air.  Even after a shower, I can still occasionally recognize a whiff of it.  A couple of times the last few days I’ve noticed that the tomato smell and the beeswax smell are duking it out to be the top dog.  The beeswax always seems to win.

I don’t mind either of these aromas.  Not like patchouli.  This is an odor that I just can’t abide; in close quarters it actually makes me a little nauseous.  Since there are people who seem to like it, I’ve always assumed that it was some sort of biologic response, kind of like how Jacque can’t stand the taste of cilantro.  I haven’t found any science to back up my theory but I’m going to stick with it for now!

I’ll be done with the eggs in a couple of days and the tomatoes are slowing down, so assuming that the war of the smells will be over soon but it’s interesting while it’s going on!

Do you have a favorite aroma?  A least favorite?/

2025, animals, Farming Update, Uncategorized

A DIZZYING … SOMETHING

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The weekend Farming Update from XDFBen

Not much happening at the farm this week. I got a case of vertigo about Thursday, and I worked half day, and felt like crap the rest of the day. The weekend was pretty much spent in bed. Several years ago Kelly had vertigo for a few weeks, the plain old BPPV, positional vertigo. We tried the head exercises to reset those crystals in my ears, and last Friday they seemed to work. Saturday, oh boy, that just made me feel absolutely terrible. I remember being at the clinic with my Dad when he was maybe 70+. He must have been having dizzy spells because the doc laid him down on the bench and had him turn his head and I can still picture and hear him groaning. Dad, not the doc. And it wasn’t a good Sound. And Dad didn’t want to do that again.

Monday I picked up some motion sickness pills and they’ve helped a lot. Wednesday I was at about 80%, now I think I’m back. I’ve got too much stuff going on to lay around. To quote my favorite movie, ‘All That Jazz’ and the doctor telling Joe Gideon he needs to rest, Joe responds “I GOT A SHOW TO PUT ON! WILL YOU TALK TO THESE PEOPLE?? THEY DON’T UNDERSTAND ANYTHING!”

Anyway, not much happening out in our countryside.

Most corn chopping has finished, and guys doing high moisture corn are working on that. Soybeans will be coming along soon. And from there it’s right into the fall rush.

Tuesday afternoon I did manage to hook the tractor onto the haybine and pull it out of the shed. I need to get the oat fields mowed off before the weeds take over. The last few years, I’d been digging them up after oats, to stop the weeds from sprouting. Then I would plant cereal rye as a cover crop. This year, crop prices and finances being what they are, I decided not to spend the money on rye seed. The cover crop wasn’t a direct cash benefit; it was one of those bigger picture concepts where a person has to realize they’re doing this for the greater good. And I know that, but still… it was another $600 in seed and my time, and fuel, and I just decided to skip it this year. And now I have to mow off the weeds. They’re too big to dig up at this point, and I want to keep the oats growing until winter. The other thing about rye, it had to be sprayed to kill it in the spring. So, there was another expense I decided to avoid.

We got 2” of rain. Rain is always welcome, almost always, but it’s getting late enough in the year, and with harvest approaching, most farmers would rather skip the mud. It’s a tough alternative, rain or no rain. Good thing the weather isn’t left up to farmers.

I hauled in all the old tires I cut off the machinery. Plus a few others I threw on from the shed. There was a corner of the old shed full of old tires. One never knew which tire might be the one we needed to fit whatever it was that went flat. Including a couple tires with such an odd rim, there wasn’t a chance it was gonna fit anything except the 1949 International Harvester baler it came from. The one dad sold in 1968. But we still had a tire for it because you never know. And there’s an old pick-up tire that fell out from under the truck as I was leaving one day, that’s still leaning against the wall in the shed. Why? Just because. I still keep spare tires in that corner, but it’s not such a huge pile anymore. I have  3 or 4 plain old wagon tires, size 9L15’s that fit every wagon and just about every implement on the farm. I should have run the old tires to my favorite tire place in Millville, but that is half hour away and I didn’t have half an hour, so I took them into Rochester and they charged me $6.35 each. Dang. I was sure they had said it was like $6 for a set when I called.  At least they’re gone.

The guineas. Remember when they hatched, there was 3 parents taking care of the 13 chicks. And then it was 12 chicks for a while, then 10, 9 for a week, 8 for a week, and now 7. And the other two adults have disappeared. Not sure what’s become of them, or why or how they managed to hang around long enough to get the kids mostly grown up, but they haven’t been spotted in a few weeks now. We were hoping maybe one was sitting on a nest somewhere, but usually we’d have seen them by now. Out behind the barn, near the pole barn, I did find a teenage chick missing a head. Which means raccoons. Did some of them move to the pole barn and raccoons got them out there? I don’t know; haven’t found other carcasses yet. But dang.

The guinea mom, she is a real bully. She chases the chickens away from her kids. Even the roosters.

Working on a show, the Dolly Parton musical “9 to 5”, opens at the Rep theater next weekend. The vertigo kinda messed up my schedule finishing theater projects and working on that show. It will be fine. Que sera sera.

REMEMBER ROLLING DOWN HILLS AS A KID? EVER ROLL IN A TIRE?

2025, Nature, pets, Uncategorized

Going Buggy

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The other day our terrier came into the house with a large, green caterpillar in his mouth. We got it away from him before he could eat it but it was clearly dead.

Our deck off the back of the house has a pergola that is covered by layers of grape vines. It provides nice shade and also harbors birds who like to eat the grapes. A night or two ago I was sitting on the deck when the green wiggler in the header photo dropped to the floor right in front of me. I guess the vines also provide a nice environment for caterpillar development. The caterpillar was still alive, so I moved it into some bushes so the birds and dog would have difficulty finding it. I hope it gets a chance to form a cocoon.

One of my favorite memories from Grade 3 is finding a really big cocoon and bringing it to class. My teacher let me keep it in the classroom, and a couple of days later we came to school to find an enormous Cercropia moth flying around the room. I don’t know what kind of caterpillar our green one is, but I hope it doesn’t turn into a destructive moth.

Any idea what kind of caterpillar this is? Ever have an insect collection?