I saw in the news that the creator of the game, Settlers of Catan, Klaus Teuber, died a few days ago. If you don’t know of it, Settlers of Catan is a multi-player game; you settle and expand on the land using hexagonal tiles. I’ve always assumed it was similar in play to Risk, but I could be wrong. It was wildly popular right off the bat in the late 90s and while still played in boardgame fashion, it has also spun off into cyberspace so you can easily find Catan communities of players.
I have a friend, Laurie, who has played Dungeons and Dragons every Tuesday for decades. This is a serious commitment for her; I’ve known her to turn down other invitations if they fall on Tuesday. I’ve known her for 40 years and she’s never once invited me to join; non D&D folks just aren’t allowed. That’ fair – all I know about D&D is what I’ve seen on Big Bang Theory!
But seeing the news about Klaus Teuber made me think of our blog about jigsaw puzzles the other day which led me to thinking about the games I’ve played in my life. We didn’t have a lot of boardgames when I was a kid. The obligatory Candyland, which I never cared for much. My Nana had Chutes & Ladders at her house, which I adored. I begged for the game Operation and never received it. It was just as well; a friend got one for Christmas and it was BORING. Same with the Mousetrap game.
I played a lot of backgammon in college but hardly ever since. I like trivia games, although I’m not very good at the ones that have a lot of current/trendy questions. We played one at Thanksgiving that had a lot of current sports questions and even a category about stock exchange abbreviations – I stunk. When YA was little, we did Yahtzee and cribbage on vacation, but almost never at home. I do play mahjong online but just with myself which isn’t anything like real mahjong. I guess my favorite boardgame is still Aggravation, which I play exclusively with my mom. We each play three colors and we’re a little cut-throat. YA won’t play with me although when we were in St. Louis last summer she did play once, she and Nonny and I each fielding two colors. She complained later that Nonny and I are mean.
I am waiting for a blizzard to hit while I write this. We are expecting up to 6 inches of snow to add the the 96 inches we have had thus far this winter. We are told that after this it will warm up, with highs possibly in the 70’s next week. I will believe it when I see it, but I will try to be hopeful.
If it warms up quickly it will be a muddy, mucky mess for a while. Our daughter in law sent a video of our grandson riding his bike gleefully through large puddles that had accumulated in their street. Kids on bikes in puddles are sure signs of spring. There are also dismal looking lawn and Christmas ornaments that are emerging from under the snow piles, which I suppose could also be signs of impending spring.
I have a third cousin who a couple of Baboons also know who is an expert about snakes and amphibians. He is excited about finding garter snakes coming out of hibernation already this year, signs of spring for him. I have yet to see robins or other migratory birds, but Husband saw hawks on his drive back from Bismarck on Monday, more signs that winter is losing its grip. Here is a favorite Canadian folk singer from Saskatchewan who understands about spring.
What signs of spring are you noticing? What are your favorite and least favorite aspects of April? Know any good poems or songs about spring?
I got a text from Daughter Sunday letting me know she talked her way out of a speeding ticket. She said she was only going 10 mph over the speed limit. I told her she needed to slow down.
I don’t know how she does it, but this is about the fifth or sixth ticket she has talked her way out of. I have only had one speeding ticket in my life, only going about 5 mph over the limit in town, and the police officer had no trouble citing me.
Husband got several speeding tickets from the Dunn County Sherriff and Tribal police driving back from the Reservation. The Tribal tickets were never reported to the State, so he didn’t get points on his license for them.
The Highway Patrol in western Minnesota often cite people who don’t notice that the speed limit changes when you cross the Dakota borders into Minnesota, and assume they can still drive Dakota speeds. Our governor just vetoed a bill that would have increased the speed limit to 80 in ND. People drive that speed here anyway, so it wouldn’t have made much of a difference for him to sign the bill.
Every talked your way out a ticket? What is the fastest you ever drove? Why were you going that fast?
Daughter’s visit last week was an opportunity for us to finally celebrate a very belated Christmas. She got her father a 1000 piece puzzle of Birds of the Backyard, which we have been working on daily since he unwrapped it. We haven’t worked on a jigsaw puzzle since the kids were young.
The puzzle It is set up on the dining room table, and we will just eat and work around it until it is completed. The dog got a couple of pieces but only did minor damage to them.
We may have a lot of opportunity to work on the puzzle this week, as a snow storm is coming that the National Weather Service says could be a blizzard of historic proportions. Their models are showing wind speeds that are the strongest they have seen in 20 years.
Husband is traveling to Bismarck for work Sunday and Monday, and will return Monday before the storm hits on Tuesday. We are rarely bored, but a puzzle will be just the thing to help us pass the time if we are snowed in.
How do you like to pass the time when you can’t leave the house? What is your most memorable jigsaw puzzle?
The snow has been melting slow enough we haven’t had the big spring rush of water coming down our valley. And that’s OK. Not that we have damaging floods, but most years we have the usual snowmelt rush. This year it’s just a nice little stream. Plus still got piles of snow in the shadows and on the north sides.
Ground is still cold, in fact, I Just ordered some soil thermometers, mostly because this new oat venture I’m trying, they want oats in the ground as soon as it’s possible. Oats can survive down to 20-degree air temps. And guys using ‘no-till’ equipment can get in sooner than I can. Using traditional equipment I need the ground to warm up and dry enough I can work it, then get it planted. But I do want to try and push it a little more this year than I have other years. Pending two shows I’m lighting and college commencement. (I usually try not to do a show outside of the college in April, but… life happens). Commencement is May 10th. Oats should be in for 3 or 4 weeks by then. By the way, soil temps yesterday were about 35-degrees.
This week on the farm I hauled scrap iron to the scrap iron recycling place. Forgot to take a picture of the first load, which was some junk from a theater in town, plus my scrap metal tote at home. The tote is a 4’x 4’x 4’ box and I throw all the misc. scrap iron in there. Old, worn out disc blades, pieces of pipe, or broken bits of things. Old ceiling fans, old electrical conduit… just… junk. Bolts, empty propane bottles, I don’t know… just … stuff. But it does accumulate over time.
I also had the front of an old chopper box I had cut up several years ago. I use the tractor loader and put it on the trailer. That load of scrap was 2200 lbs.
There’s a pile of scrap machinery behind the shed I need to get hauled in. Accumulation of many years.
The next load was two old rotary hoes, an old snowmobile I last rode in about 1987. (Took Kelly for a ride. It was a John Deere 400. Dad bought it back in the late 1970’s. My high school friend Pete and I rode a lot. But then I got interested in theater. And Girls. And there wasn’t time for the snowmobile anymore.) It sat outside behind the shed for a lot of years. Weeds and trees grew around it and through it and I ran into it with a tractor once or twice. Finally added it to the junk pile when I was cleaning up back there.
Also in the junk pile was a mower I didn’t even remember. Dad must have bought it and I don’t even recall it, so it must not have worked very well. Before I started buying the rear mounted ‘Brush Hog’ type mowers, Dad had a side mounted sickle mower. It was good for mowing because it was off to the side in front of you and easy to watch. Dad cut a lot of hay with this back in the day. (When he also pulled a ‘crimper’ behind him. Clyde knows what I’m talking about. Nowadays those jobs are combined into one machine called a ‘mower-conditioner and can be pull type ((like mine)) or self-propelled. Or the big guys mount three units to the tractor: one on the front and two on the back and cut 30 feet at a time.)
When that side mower wore out, Dad found some other old, used, sickle mowers. I even bought one too. They all sucked. Brush mowers work great, but behind me, it’s more cumbersome to operate.
The mower had been back there so long I had to cut a 12’ tree out of it before I put it on the trailer.
(The spikey things are the rotary hoe.)
This load was 3300lbs. Back in December I talked about hauling some scrap in and it was $50 / ton, a low low price. Tuesday it was up significantly to $195 / ton.
You know, it’s interesting how many things used to mount right onto the tractor, rather than hooking on behind as we do now. I have a lot of memories of helping Dad mount the brackets on the side of the tractor, and some pieces under the axle, and then hooking the mower to those. Or the corn picker that had a real heavy frame that bolted to the sides, and more heavy frames over the wheels, and then the elevator mounted to the back, and we’d drive the tractor into the picker to mount it. Or the cultivator; that had two small brackets bolted to the front of the tractor, then drive into it and muscle the two sides over into place and bolt it on, and a couple rods connected to the ‘rocker arms’ to raise it.
These days, everything hooks on behind. It’s easier to hook up or unhook, but not so easy to watch what we’re doing. I wonder why that changed. Convenience? Tractor size? (probably size; and cabs made all that stuff impossible to attach, which means it was comfort), and just the size of farms and efficiency. Farming was a lot more manual labor back then. Over in Europe there are more front mounted implements. Which is becoming more of a thing here, again. More tractors have front mounted hitches in addition to the rear.
We’ll try to avoid the Thunderstorms and blizzard this weekend. Still double checking my bookwork from 2022 and meet the accountant mid-April for taxes. And busy with the show at the college. It’s called ‘Boy Gets Girl’ by Rebecca Gilman, and it’s about a stalker. Well written… hard to ‘enjoy’ but it’s a good show. We’re doing it ‘in-the-round’ with the stage in the middle and the audience sitting right around the actors.
The critters are good, although I hadn’t seen the ducks in a few days, but they showed up yesterday. They must hang out back in the swamp or maybe they just need to ‘get away’ occasionally. Got one black hen that has gotten ‘broody’, meaning she’s trying to sit on some eggs. Course I gather the eggs every night, but that doesn’t dissuade her.
It has been a busy week. Monday, I hauled some equipment to Plainview for an online auction, made two trips, the first hauling our old rear blade, a fertilizer auger, and some smaller stuff. And a second with the forage chopper, and other stuff that I think, if they market it as ‘vintage,’ it could do well. The auctioneer wasn’t even sure they had ever sold any before, but he finally agreed to put it on a pallet and see what happens. (Details after the auction in April). Tuesday I had one more clinic appointment: I have now been dismissed by the shoulder doctor, the knee doctor, the toe doctor, and the foot doctor. It’s a pretty good feeling.
I also had a meeting in the Cities on Tuesday. Plus the week was busy at the college working on a set.
I have the song, ‘Mercy, Mercy, Mercy’ by the Cannonball Adderley Quintet in my iTunes, and in the opening, Cannonball says, “You know, sometimes we are not prepared for adversity. When it happens, sometimes, we’re caught short; We don’t know exactly how to handle it when it comes up. Sometimes we don’t know just what to do when adversity takes over. And I have advice for all of us. I got it from my pianist, Joe Zawinul, who wrote this tune, and it sounds like what you’re supposed to say when you have that kinda problem. It’s called, “Mercy Mercy Mercy”.
I think that’s true. We talk a lot about how we don’t know how to deal with conflict and how it is hard to learn that a little conflict can be OK — when you know how to handle it. I started to learn that 40 years ago at one of the theaters, and the founders would get into some pretty big arguments behind the closed- but not soundproof door- And then they would come back out, and we are all shuffling our feet and looking at the floor. ‘Conflict is OK’, they would say, ‘You gotta learn to work things out’. I also have the Buddy Rich Big Band doing a version of ‘Mercy Mercy Mercy’. They are both good.
I have three versions of the song ‘Jessica’; The original, plus two bluegrass versions. I have two versions of ‘Layla’ (the original and the unplugged), ‘As Time Goes’ by Maynard Ferguson and Tony Bennett, ‘El Paso’ by the Grateful Dead and Marty Robbins. Again, so different and both so good. ‘Eli’s Coming’ by Three Dog Night and Maynard Ferguson, ‘The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly’ theme, the original and a version by The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain. ‘Limehouse Blues’ by Jerry Reed & Chet Atkins and also by The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain; they are strikingly different versions. ‘Mama Told Me Not To Come’ by Three Dog Night and Randy Newman. Two versions of ‘Sing, Sing, Sing’ by Benny Goodman, and James Horner & Orchestra. ‘Tangled Up In Blue’ by Joan Osborne and Bob Dylan (The Joan one is really good. Nothing against the Dylan version either!), a couple versions of ‘Stairway to Heaven’ by Led Zeppelin and Rodrigo y Gabriela. A song called ‘There’ll Be Some Changes Made’ from the movie, ‘All That Jazz’, which I thought was original to the movie, until I heard Gene Krupa doing it on the 40’s station. And then, as I googled it for this blog, realized I have Mark Knopfler and Chet Atkins doing a version that is SO different I didn’t even make the connection it was the same song. Prior to this revelation, I didn’t realize there were other versions of that song.
Chickens and ducks are still fine, but the coyotes are back. Kelly chased one away Wednesday morning. We’re keeping our eyes open. Bailey needs back up; she won’t engage when alone. She’s a lover, not a fighter.
I spread two bales of straw out for the chickens. They enjoy scratching in that, and it covers up some of the mud.
Daughter is coming home for a visit Friday through next Monday, the weather gods willing, and we are all excited. She hasn’t been home for two years. She is currently working six days a week at her agency job and her private therapy practice, and is exhausted. She begins her full time private practice in mid April.
Her plans are to vegetate on the sofa, crochet an afghan for us, and be pampered. We have the yarn. She doesn’t want to go any where, just be at home and have us cook for her.
We planned menus yesterday. There will be chicken enchiladas Friday, German roast pork braised in apple cider with butternut squash risotto Saturday, and pasta with mom’s red sauce and Calabrian meatballs and bruschetta on Sunday. Monday will be leftovers. Her dad has to make bacon and scrambled eggs for her. The bacon must be Cloverdale brand, thick-sliced, hickory-smoked variety, cooked just the way she likes it, meaning it is crisp in the middle and more chewy on the ends. She also wants homemade French bread. I already have two loaves in the freezer as well as the chicken, pork loin, meatballs, and red sauce. There is one remaining butternut from the garden. I think we are set.
What would you request if you could have someone cook for you for three days. When was the last time you were waited on hand and foot?
When I was in my junior year of college, I lived on the fourth floor of one of the original buildings. Only two rooms (both triples) and no elevator. I shared with two other women who had, like I had, lived in a single room our sophomore years. Knowing we would probably get low numbers in the room choice lottery after having singles, we banded together to get a better room than if we struck out alone.
The other room on our floor was also a triple with 3 seniors. They weren’t around all that much and we didn’t really socialize with them. So we were surprised when they lugged a full sized Mobil Gas Pegasus sign up the steps and installed it in the hallway between the two rooms. We spent the rest of the year explaining it to anyone brave enough to come up to the fourth floor! Personally I never understood the appeal.
I moved to my current house about 30 years ago – about three blocks from the old Boulevard Theatre. As the years went by, it deteriorated until it just couldn’t afford to stay open. People were outrated and actually picketed in front of the theatre with it’s huge iconic sign. Eventually the owners agreed to keep the sign although the theatre was no more. It is still there, looking rattier and tattier by the year.
And now more signage in my neighborhood is in the news. The Aqua City Motel and Metro Inn, a little farther down on Lyndale have their iconic signage up for sale. Both properties actually belong to Hennepin County these days, having been purchased during pandemic when the county was using both motels for temporary housing. Right now both properties are empty and awaiting renovation into affordable housing.
I wasn’t crazy about the pegasus sign, I think the Boulevard sign is ridiculous looking and I can’t even imagine why anyone would want a Metro Inn or Aqua City sign but I’m sure that there is someone out there who will think they are purchasing a piece of history and will shell out way too much cash for it. Takes all kinds.
Any iconic signs you remember from your childhood? Have you ever acquired a sign?
Some of you probably remember the frantic phone calls and/or emails from me on Friday, March 13, 2020. It was the week the world turned upside down. I’d had a few cancels already but didn’t really think having a Pi Day party was a big deal. Then I spent all of Friday morning reading online articles about the virus, its spread, the possible consequences lurking around the corner and decided I didn’t need to add to the problem. It really bummed me out as I had already shopped for all the ingredients, set up things in the dining room and even made the placecards.
Back then I was one of many who thought it would be over by the end of summer. Nobody was really saying pandemic yet. Thinking I might have a Pi & ½ Day in September, I put the placecards and the list of ingredients in the drawer along with my “which pie goes in the oven at what time and what temperature” spreadsheet. Of course September was out of the question. So was March 2021 and even March 2022.
So Pi Day 2023 was easy peasy. All the upfront planning was done. And since I am (mostly) retired, I had plenty of time to do some ahead-of-time prep. I even had the nametags done from 2020. 11 pies (Dutch Apple, Blueberry, Red Velvet Whoopie, Vanilla Crumb, Banofee, Crack, Pecan Dream, PB Crunch, Pear Croustade, Lemon Custard, Berry Cobbler). I got done in record time. The pie was great and the camaraderie was warm.
Why should you never start talking to pi at a party?
I struggle to get in enough exercise – I almost always have – especially in winter. Stationary biking at the gym and swimming laps is about what I’m up for during the cold months. Thank goodness for snow shoveling. At this time of year (the first couple of months after New Year’s resolutions), it’s normally a bit busier at the gym so I never expect to find a close parking spot. It’s even worse right now because of the snow in the parking lot which has been haphazardly plowed recently.
This isn’t a big deal for me. By the time I’ve revved myself up to get to the gym, I’m usually in a “it’s some extra steps” frame of mind. But obviously on Saturday, not everybody was in the mood to get some additional exercise getting from the car to the front door.
Trail Baboon 