I’ve been thinking about this term for a long time. What exactly is a lifetime? How good is any guarantee? And do I own any thing (product, device, appliance, clothing, etc.) that has been sold to me that came with a lifetime guarantee?
After all, a lifetime for a human can be less than a day to more than 120 years. Mosquitoes and many insects have lifetimes measured in days. Tortoises can outlive humans by a factor of 2, if the experts are to be believed. And Redwood and Sequoia trees live for four centuries or longer.
But let’s focus on human lifetime. Mine in particular. We bought the bathroom scale shown in the title photo from Brookstone at Southdale most likely, wayyyy back in the 1980s. It is battery operated, and I use it nearly every day to weigh myself. I’m weird that way. I think monitoring my weight daily helps me cut back on calories or exercise more to keep my weight roughly the same over the years. Not for everyone, but it works for me.
Lately, after easily 40 years of usage, the battery is showing signs of dying. I’m not positive, but I see larger than normal daily fluctuations in my weight. Normal is 1-2 pounds. Lately, I’ve seen several 3-5 lb. jumps or drops. I eat and exercise about the same amount every day other than an occasional restaurant or dessert pigout. So maybe the battery is at the end of its useful life.
I don’t even think Brookstone is around anymore, but if they were, and the battery died, would they honor their lifetime guarantee on this scale? Or did I miss the fine print in the sales literature saying something like “Lifetime guarantee or 40 years max, whichever comes first”?
No matter, the scale has been reliable and troublefree for decades, so if it dies, I’ll get a new scale that might be relatively cheaper because I won’t have to worry about getting a “long-term” lifetime guarantee. 20-30 years is about the best I can hope for.
MY QUESTION: Tell us about any products you’ve bought that came with a lifetime guarantee and have actually lasted far longer than you ever would have expected.
Last week was fraught with baking. On July 26 the peach man arrived. He is a guy from Mott, ND, about 50 miles to the southwest of us who spends his summers driving out to Washington and picking dark red and Ranier cherries, and Cling and Freestone peaches, and driving them back to towns in southeast Montana and southwest North Dakota. He sells them in the mall parking lot in our town. The Freestone peaches are the best. We bought half a crate of them. It was very important for my parents to get a crate of peaches in the late summer and gobble them as fast as we could. I continue the tradition.
The peaches went into paper grocery bags and ripened in three days, all at the same time. It was another mantra in my family that it was a sin to let food spoil, so I set to making peach crumble, peach upside-down cake, and a pasta salad with peach, corn and tomatoes. and we ate the rest on Grape Nuts and ice cream. Husband will eat the remaining four peaches on cottage cheese.
We only buy peaches from the guy from Mott. He will come around in a few weeks with cherries from the Flathead Lake area of Montana. We will get them, too. It is unfortunate that Mott has been known in the area for decades as “Mott, the spot that God forgot”. I have no idea why. I think a more apt description would be “Mott, the spot where fruit is hot”.
What were the important traditions you grew up with?What was the town you grew up in noted for?
I finished lighting the show in Chatfield last week, in time to fly out on Saturday with Kelly and our daughter. Kelly had a work conference and we got to travel along and amuse ourselves for a few days. I was under the impression that taxi drivers were always better than Uber / Lyft because they are more professional and know the roads better. But that plan falls apart if they’re all independent taxi’s and they all seem to need to enter the address in their phones anyway. And they tell me they’ve lived here multiple years, so it makes me wonder why they don’t know their way around yet? But whatever. Our first driver was crazy; drove like a maniac and told me he liked American women and big boobs! Second taxi was a nicer driver, but his car broke down and when daughter and I came out of the Butterfly Pavilion he was sitting right where he had left us. He called a friend of his to take us back to town. And the taxi back to the airport was a nice guy with sheet metal screws holding his car door together. Resourcefulness!
Daughter and I had a good time walking around downtown and there was lots to see. I took lots of photos of old buildings. The day we saw the butterflies, that only took an hour. We never got going too early in the day, because we were on vacation after all. I was surprised that I could out-walk daughter. It was as hot there as it was back in MN, but less humidity, so that was nice. I didn’t expect it to be that hot. I found it interesting so many restaurants and bars had wide open windows or garage doors and yet there was very few bugs. One bartender told us they really spray the place down at night, but she said there was less flies this year than usual.
On Wednesday Kelly gave a presentation on Laughter Yoga. I snuck in the back and watched. It was well received, the group liked it, and she had several good loud laughers, so that got the rest of the group going.
She picked up some swag for me with the catch phrase: “Wicked Smaht Pathologists” and a link to their group. It makes me laugh. If you need a pathologist, you’re gonna want one that’s Wicked Smaht.
We had a young lady staying at the house to deal with dogs overnight while we were gone, and some other friends that would take care of chickens and eggs and amuse the dogs during the day. They said, “Bailey and Humphrey make us want dogs. Luna reminds why we don’t have a dog.”
And on the way home, in the MSP airport, the gate agent was a girl I went to high school with and hadn’t seen in 40 years. We had a little reunion right there at the gate for 15 seconds. It was nice to see her again.
Last week as I was headed to Chatfield one night, I saw, walking on the side of the road, three nuns in full black habits with the veil and headpiece. I had to double take, and double take again. This was out in the country. A few days later, Facebook, of course, provided the answer. There is an old order Catholic Church in the area and they have been seen coming from there. Well that explains it. Sure did make me wonder though. And then, ten days later, I saw two more nuns in full habits. But that was outside a Catholic Church, and they were selling baked goods at a street fair. Although when I saw them, they were packing up. I saw them pulling the totes with the collapsible tents up the street. I hadn’t seen a nun in full habit for years and now here was twice!
You all had that big storm come through on Monday night with high winds… the oats got beat up. Yep, sure did. Maybe 50% of it down. We didn’t get any hail so nothing threshed out on the ground, it’s just broken off and lying down and it makes it more difficult to pick up for harvest.
The plan is to start harvesting Friday. Going to try taking it straight- meaning I don’t swath it and lay it in windrows first. A lot of guys do take it straight. When we have tried it in the past it didn’t work so well… we shall see. I have the swather ready just in case.
The soybeans are waist tall and looking good. At least some of them. They don’t all look this good, but some of them.
There’s a guy on YouTube goes by ‘Bushel Billy’, from the Ohio area and he was talking about a corn issue with a certain variety, in extreme weather conditions, having “tassel wrap” meaning the last leaf doesn’t unwrap from the tassel. So of course if the tassel can’t open up to shed pollen, it’s going to be tough to get all the kernels (silks) pollinated. It takes 90,000 kernels to make a bushel. Hence 90K pollen grains to 90K silks are needed. He pointed out how after pollination the silks turn brown and detach from the kernel after pollination. I didn’t know that and I had to check it out myself.
Notice how many silks are loose. Just a few on the tip still stuck.
HUH! Sweet corn would be so much easier if the silks would detach.
Husband and I find ourselves exhausted these days. We are sorting through our stuff, packing some and throwing some out. We also are at our jobs finishing the last of our professional work, keeping up the house and garden, and going through the work of selling one home and buying another. Husband commented that we are living in the past, present, and future all at once.
I have tried to imagine what it will be like once we move to our new community. I haven’t lived there for almost 50 years. There are still quite a few high school classmates and other people I know there, and I have been thinking how I want to reintegrate into the community. I think it would be a mistake to live in the past, as I am not the same person I was 50 years ago, and I doubt they are the same people they were. We integrated ourselves into our ND community 38 years ago by going to community events, joining a church, and through our jobs. I hope the we can have the same new beginning in our new home.
How have you integrated yourself into the communities you have lived in? How are you different now than you were 50 years ago?
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?
There has always been a vision in my mind for the backyard. Over the years we’ve added a patio, then a little bigger patio. A table and chairs for the patio. An umbrella for the table. A friend of mine gave YA a fire pit years ago. Another friend gave me a swing when they moved to an apartment. Of course, there are all the flowers and the bales. About 15 years ago I had enough credits at work to purchase a hammock, which I installed toward the back of the yard. Over the years I’ve had to replace the fabric several times as well as having to MacGyver the suspension a couple of times when the fabric wasn’t exactly the right size.
YA has always detested the hammock. First is that it is a collection spot for leaves and twigs that come off the trees. Then there is the issue of having to mow around it, requiring moving it about. YA thinks it makes the backyard look “cluttered”. When I suggested we get right of her Adirondack chairs and little table, she didn’t respond well. She has a point. We use the Adirondacks quite a bit and truth be told, I probably only lay in the hammock once or twice a summer. It’s not actually all that comfortable and I get impatient really fast.
As I’m pursuing my pre-downsizing project, I decided that I really needed to pay attention to the reality of the hammock instead of my emotional attachment to the idea of a hammock. To that end, YA and I carried it down to the boulevard. When we got down to the boulevard with it, YA had to shore up my determination. The miracle of my street worked as usual – within an hour someone was taking it apart to shove in their truck.
I thought I might be unhappy in the first few days after the hammock was gone but that hasn’t happened. That says to me that I made the right decision.
Tell me about something you have an emotional attachment to.
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?
The Mourning Dove in the header photo built a nest on the light next to our front door. She is a sweet little thing who has been sitting on successive eggs all summer. She never leaves messes on the deck, and sits on the nest even when we sit out on the front deck. We consider her our spirit animal.
One of the first real estate agents who showed our house told our real estate agent that we needed to get rid of that nest. Our agent, a real animal lover, reluctantly relayed the information to us, and said she didn’t agree that the nest had to go. She is just ethically bound to let us know comments from other agents. We told her that as long as we own the house the bird stays. She was quite happy with that news.
Ever since we have had our house on the market we have scrupulously cleaned, patched, dusted, vacuumed, scrubbed and tried to make the place look really good. I admit the kitchen and bathroom cupboard fronts need a good cleaning, but it isn’t all that noticeable, and we are having some nice women in later this week to do that as well as scrub the kitchen ceiling above the stove to get rid of grease stains. The agent who complained about the bird showed our house a second time, and then told our agent that our house needed a really good “deep cleaning”.
Our agent relayed this to us, but stated that she didn’t agree, and thought we were immaculate housekeepers. She added that she was never going to allow the complainer into her house. Our agent then told us the complaining agent lived just a few houses from us across the street, and that the complainer had also told our agent that she wanted to make sure that the people who bought our house were people she would want as neighbors. Her house, a new build, is always perfectly landscaped and pristine. There are children, but we never see them.
Well! I don’t know this person and have never met her, but since all the agents who show the house leave their business cards, I know her name. I asked some work colleagues if they knew her. Their responses were really fascinating. One of my coworkers had actually worked in the same long term care facility with the agent several years ago, and knew her sister in law really well, and described her as a terrible bully both at work and in her family. Another coworker stated she had heard awful things about the agent, all related to being a bossy, judgemental bully. Living in a small town has its benefits.
I admit I feel bullied by this person, but I am not taking her criticisms to heart, and I hope that whoever buys our house are even more radical gardeners than we are, and set up bird feeders and bird houses all over the property!
Who have been the bullies in your life? How did you deal with them?
It’s been six years now since we lost our Little Jail Bird, Edith. In her memory, I’m running my favorite of her postings on the Trail.
Until last fall, I had never been to Banning State Park. I had driven by it dozens of time, because when I head up to my sister’s house, I always turn off 35W and take Highway 23 into town. I didn’t know much about Banning, but when I was looking for a day trip, it seemed to fit my needs perfectly.
First, I wanted a park where I could drive there and back in one day without getting too tired. Second, I wanted a park that didn’t involve driving several back roads, because I knew that I would be driving in the dark due to the shorter fall days and my night vision and sense of direction is bad enough that I would get lost unless I kind of knew where I was going. And third, I wanted a state park because I had a state park sticker and wanted to use it as much as possible to get my money’s worth out of it. Banning fit all of those qualifications. Plus it has a waterfall, which is a big plus in my book.
So, off I went, one sunny morning in October. When I arrived, I stopped at the visitor center to get maps and ask where the best spots were. I was so excited. It seems that often when I go north, I am early for the fall colors and often find myself driving home just a few days before “peak” and this time I was not too early! I said something about that to the woman at the desk (while trying to not jump and down in excitement) and she shook her head woefully and told me in a discouraging tone, “You’re going to see LOTS of brown out there.” Gee thanks, way to burst my bubble.
Of course, since I drove all the way up there, I figured I better go on the hike anyway even if I would see mostly brown. I drove to the parking area and when I stepped out of the car and looked up, I knew it was going to be a good day (see header photo).
I hiked all the way to the falls and back and shot lots of photos. It was an incredibly beautiful day: that clear, deep blue sky that you only seem to see on autumn days and – surprise! – lots of colorful leaves on the trees. It can be a challenge shooting in bright sunlight, but I was so overcome by the beauty of it all that I just took that in my stride. There was that wonderful northwoods smell in the air – pine trees and dead leaves. Nothing like it! and nothing else invigorates me like that does.
It was getting pretty cool and the sun was going down quickly by the time I was heading back on the trail but the golden evening light only made things more beautiful and the colors more intense. I went home pleasantly tired and very happy and glad that the woman’s prediction of “lots of brown” wasn’t true.
Every day this week, five AM pretty much right on the dot, Bailey barks outside. Luna and Humphrey bark inside until I can get to the door and get them out. And then everyone runs in separate directions and Bailey quietly wanders back to the garage, thinking, “suckers”. Pretty sure there’s been a coyote around for all the sniffing the other two are doing. Luna, she’s just running in circles barking. Humphrey is on the trail of something along the trees and around the crib, and down the field road. He’s got his nose to the ground and his tail is up and going. Bailey may sit and watch a bit, but mostly she’s letting the others take care of it. She will not engage until she has back up. Raises the alarm well, but not going to do anything about it on her own.
An hour later, they’re ready to come back in. Luna with a gentle bark. Humphrey with a scratch at the back door. Very randomly Humphrey might get locked in the feed room and he will not bark for attention. We realize he’s not around, call and call him and he will not bark. Eventually we backtrack enough we find him in the feed room, just waiting for someone to let him out. Not a sound from him.
And every night for the last week, there’s been barn owls calling. The first night, there was one in a tree right in the back yard and I had a flashlight and it just bobbed back and forth looking at me. I didn’t know what the noise was; I thought Kelly was whistling in her sleep. Sometimes they’re further away from the house, and Thursday night there was two of them right here, plus at least one more further away. A soft, whistling, screeching noise.
Daughter and the dogs take their daily walks. Sometimes, especially in this hot weather, daughter will text us asking for a rescue pick up. And Humphrey, just because he’s 10 years old and has a sore leg, sometimes we just go pick him up to give him a break. Bailey and Luna don’t always go for the walk. Bailey especially, as Luna is a bully to her, she’ll opt out just to get a break from Luna. And Luna sometimes thinks there are more interesting things happening at home with me. But Humphrey always ALWAYS goes for that walk, sore leg or not. I went to pick him up one day, and, not thinking, took the 4 wheeler, rather than the gator. He does not like being picked up, which is the only reason I was able to pick him up and put him on the front rack of the 4 wheeler; he didn’t expect this! And he sat there quietly and didn’t have to walk home. A win-win.
Last week on one of those hot days, the fan in the chicken coop stopped working. What was in there was an old box fan from the theater because their other fan had stopped working last summer. And that fan was a replacement for a previous barn fan. I’ve always thought electric motors were interesting what with stator and rotors, the windings, the capacitors on some of the bigger ones, brushes, ect. We have had a lot of electric motors on the farm, many more when milking cows and they were vital to daily operation. Big 5 and 7.5 hp electric motors on the silo unloaders, a 5HP on the feel bunk, a 5HP on the vacuum pump, a ¾ HP on the milk pump, and any of them failing was a bad day. The ones on the silo unloader might be 35 feet up in the silo, so if it failed, it was a pain in the butt not to mention an expense. I learned how to check and change capacitors, and most of the time that was the only problem. They could be replaced in the silo. Getting the motors out of the silo was a much bigger deal. Ropes and pulleys were involved.
So the chicken’s fan. The box fan I threw out. I took the one motor apart, found decayed wires deep inside and tossed it into the scrap bucket. The old barn fan motor; it would run for ten seconds, quit for ten, run for another ten, repeat. I pulled it apart. Well, first I watched some You Tube videos, then I pulled it apart, which first meant getting the fan blade and the cage guard off. (A torch was involved, just to heat up the set screws and shank to facilitate removal, not to cut it off.) I remember Dad buying this fan as an exhaust fan for the dairy barn, maybe 40 years ago, and it was too powerful; it got too cold in the barn in winter, so he took it out and it collected dust for a lot of years. Then I rescued it and hung it in the middle of the barn alley so I had a fan on those hot humid summer days milking cows. And I sold the cows 22 years ago and it’s been gathering dust again. Not really surprising the motor had quit working. I got it apart, found a wire shorting out on the windings, added a piece of heat shrink tubing to protect it, and Viola! It works! The chickens are pleased to have a fan back.
The padawans managed to get the theater boiler apart and out on the boulevard. One of the neighbors asked if he could have the metal. I said “If you can move it, you can have it”. And he did! I don’t know how, but it’s over in his yard now!
One of the padawans brought his car to my shop.
He was replacing some part of the exhaust, to make it louder or sound “cooler”… I didn’t follow the full explanation. He and a buddy spent many hours removing the old parts. Started at 8PM, went for supper and came back, left at 2AM, back at 4AM, left at 7AM. Every time they came back the dogs barked. By 9 PM the next day it was reassembled. Padawan’s girlfriend drove him out. She hung out in the shop, played with the dogs, made a chicken friend that she sat with for an hour, and helped daughter do chores. We like her a lot.
Trail Baboon 