Husband attends a weekly men’s bible study at our church, and a man more elderly than Husband welcomed him and told him he had moved to a good county, as people here take care of each other.
I always knew that people here were good to one another, but this was really brought home to me by an article in the local paper last week that a private and county funded program was paying for outpatient mental health treatment for county residents with unaffordable deductibles or no insurance. There has been a 200% increase in residents using the program over the past year. Eligible residents only need to pay $25 per session for up to 10 sessions. As a mental health professional and county resident I am elated to hear this. I believe we will contribute to this fund.
Yesterday we attended the grand opening of the new butcher shop in town started with funds from a community group and owned and operated by the granddaughter of our former milk man. It is a wonderful place, and hundreds of people visited it and loved it.
Husband has signed up for a canoe/kayak day trip on the Rock River on June 13th sponsored by the Chamber of Comnerce. He is renting a canoe from the Chamber for the trip. The woman at the Chamber was so concerned that a canoe might be too much for him that she told him they will bring an extra kayak just in case he needs it. I am really happy we moved here!
What has your city or county done lately that makes you proud? What are your favorite charities and local help organizations?
In North Dakota we would see the occasional hummingbird in the fall as they migrated west to their winter quarters. They loved the flowers in our garden, especially the monarda and cone flowers. I was glad they could get some sustenance in our yard before they headed over the Rockies.
I never saw many hummingbirds in Luverne when I was growing up. I was fooled many times by hummingbird moths.
Since moving back we have seen several hummingbirds in our yard, small, emerald green ones. Yesterday Boommate concocted a clear, bird friendly hummingbird solution to put in the feeder outside her window. She plans to lure them with a basket of flowers on a plant hanger. I am excited to have this. The birds are so magical. I am sure her cats will be fascinated as they peer out the window at the birds.
Boommate tells us there used to be, or perhaps still is, a couple in the Cities who had several dozen hummingbird feeders in their yard who would cook up gallons of liquid for the feeders every day. They apparently had hundreds of hummingbirds in their yard. I don’t think we are up to something of that magnitude, but what a sight!
Got Hummers? Been fooled by the moths? Opinions about bird feeding?
Daughter is really putting down roots in Tacoma and has purchased a condo. It is quite a bit bigger than than her apartment.
Daughter has enlisted numerous friends to help with the move. She has a dear friend who is an engineer of some sort and who has been through the house buying and refurnishing process and who has taken her in hand regarding buying new furniture.
Daughter needs a new sofa. Friend insisted that the sofa must have a frame made from wood from a certain place in North Carolina for strength and longevity, along with many other caveats for structural stability. The two young women spent the day in Seattle yesterday sitting on sofas. Daughter texted me that she found one she loved at Crate and Barrel and was deciding on fabric swatches. I do hope the internal structure met the engineer’s specifications!
I think I like the advice another friend gave daughter regarding buying furniture: “buy once, cry once”, meaning buy the best you can afford so it lasts longer.
Any furniture buying stories? How do your tastes in furniture style run?
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.
The childhood song has been going through my head. Husband is 72. Boommate and I are 68. Between the three of us, I think we have one functional body (but three functional brains).
Husband has arthritis and carpal tunnel issues in both hands. Boommate has had both knees replaced. She also had a shoulder repair after getting knocked over by a horse. I was doing pretty well until recently when I seem to have developed arthritis in both my shoulders that has greatly reduced my range of motion and caused a lot of pain. The sciatica issues for me are manageable and just intermittent. I have a broken toe that healed crooked and is totally numb.
It has been interesting seeing how we have managed to get gardening and moving chores done cooperatively. I am the only one who can crawl on my hands and knees. That means I can get down really low and weed and plant and plug things in. Boommate and Husband are taller than I am, so they can stretch and reach things that I can’t. Boommate and I have great manual dexterity to counter Husband’s hand problems. Husband is very strong and can carry stuff we can’t. It is all working out!
How are you joints and tendons these days? What chores are you doling out to others? What is the best team you ever worked with?
I’ve done the math before about how many cards I send out so I won ‘t bore you with the numbers again. The biggest category is birthday cards – that averages to about 14 cards per month.
For quite a few years, all birthday cards got the same postage stamp:
The post office also did a “Celebrate” stamp but I used those for anniversary cards and other momentous occasion cards. Then five years ago, the postal service broke my heart when they announced they were discontinuing both those stamps. Aarrgghhhh.
I had a nice supply on hand and I bought a bunch of the Happy Birthday before USPS ran out. A close friend of mine also gifted me with three sheets of them as well. I began to use them a little more sparingly. Six cards a month go to folks in one of my stamping groups – they got moved to the non-HB stamps right away. Then “outer-ring” folks stopped getting my special stash. Then the next ring in went to “regular” postage. I limped along like this for FIVE YEARS. I used the last one the first week in May.
So I was ripe for the on-line voting that USPS instituted last fall. They said they were going to bring back some older stamps and let the general public vote. The site did not have any limits about how many votes you got… .not even any limits on how many times a day you could vote; you gotta love a good loophole. I spent the entire month of September going online every morning and voting for the Happy Birthday option 20-30 times; it only took about 10 minutes a day.
My persistence paid off. They made the announcement the first of the year that my favorite stamp would be returning. They released it on April 18 although the pre-sale went up in March. The big surprise is that they did a completely new design – it’s in the header photo. I’m not sure why – it probably cost them more, first for the design itself and then for whatever it takes to produce a new stamp. Maybe after five years, the old design specs didn’t work anymore. Who knows. But no matter – the new design is fine by me. Technically I like the old look better but I’ll take what I can get.
We won’t talk about how many of them I’ve already purchased.
When was the last time you actually went to a post office?
I think it’s really interesting that aluminum foil in the oven doesn’t get very hot. I can pull it out with my fingers. So I googled it. And learned this:
Extreme Thinness (Low Mass):Standard foil is incredibly thin (about 16 micrometers). Because there is so little metal, there isn’t enough total heat energy to warm up your thick, water-filled skin. The instant you touch it, your cooler fingers absorb the tiny amount of energy, dropping the foil’s temperature immediately.
High Conductivity:Aluminum is an excellent heat conductor. Heat passes through it and dissipates into the cooler room air almost instantly.
Isn’t that interesting!
Wednesday was my first day of half summer vacation. I work half time at the college until June, then I’m off for a couple months. I worked at home ALL DAY Wednesday.
I had my annual performance review at the college the other day. As I prepared for that and looked for a paper copy of last year’s review I found a phone book on my desk. I guess I kinda knew it was there. I haven’t opened it in a while. It was from 2014. I put it in the round file finally.
This is a phone book, kids!
I finished planting soybeans last Saturday.
Sunday I drove over it all with the drag. The fields look great! Smooth and even. Hopefully they get lush and green soon.
It was sprinkling late Sunday evening when I was out with an old hand cranked seeder spreading grass seed on one of my new field boundaries.
This thing has hung in the basement as long as I can remember. Asking my siblings, we all played with it but no one remembers seeing anyone actually use it. I’m thinking dad used it to seed grass around the house after it was built. But I’m sure I’m just making that up.
The directions are on the bottom:
I have a few thoughts. I don’t know what 2.5 MPH is when walking, and a spread of 18 feet?? You gotta really be cranking that thing to get 18 feet! Man, I don’t know how the old guys did it back in the day seeding acres and acres with this thing.
I am planting ‘BLM #4’. It’s a quick growing pasture mix commonly containing ryegrass, tall fescue, and Kentucky bluegrass.
At home Padawan and I got a lot done this week. Cleaned out the seed and power washed the corn planter. Parked it outside for the moment and pulled out the seed wagon. Cleaned that off and parked it away. As we were rounding up flowerpots for Kelly, we got sidetracked by crap in a corner of the old shed and ended up hauling out a gator load of scrap iron and a gator load of garbage.
Tired
I’ve wanted to clean up that corner, just didn’t intend to do it then. It was clean back in 1968 when we were living in the machine shed, then it turned into the tire storage corner. I’m down to about 5 old tires to get rid of, and 3 good spares I store there. And once you start a spare tire corner, it becomes a junk corner real quick. Padawan cut the top off a tote while I was cleaning the planter so we can use a second tote for scrap iron. I forgot about a zoom meeting on Wednesday. Had it on my calender… even knew about it in the morning. Then got a text from someone asking if I was coming to the meeting. I joined from the tractor.
Padawan and I made a fence and got the adolescent chicks out.
We put mulch around the seedling trees and starting making a, sort of, ‘tent-fence’ to keep the deer from eating the tree’s and peeling bark off the tiny little things. Stupid deer! These little tree’s are costing us a lot of money! Water totes, pump, hose, fencing, Mulch was free, then more fencing and more posts… jeepers. And who knows how they’ll survive next winter. I don’t have high hopes.
I need to clean out the grain drill yet.
Oops. Forgot to turn on the drill in time there.
Right up at the end of our driveway there’s this gap in the oats field.
It’s the first thing you see driving in. I’ve seen it coming all spring, I need to get out there and replant that. Course it will always be a month behind. But a bare spot allows weeds to grow. And I have several bushels left in the drill to clean out so I may as well go plant that and fill in a few light spots in another field.
Padawan has gotten a new job. He’ll be working 11:00 AM – 8:00PM Tuesday – Saturday. I’m gonna miss him. He and I have really connected the last few months. I enjoy having him around and he kinda likes having us as his surrogate family. In fact, he listed me as “Family Friend / Dad” on the job application. Awwwww…
As I drove to Brookings this week I heard MPR play a recording by Van Cliburn. I remembered my confusion, as a child, regarding his name. I could never figure out why no one ever mentioned his first name. My confusion stemmed from growing up in an area heavily populated by Dutch immigrants. There were Vanden Hoeks, Van Neuenhuizens, Van Roekels, etc, so I thought Van Cliburn was his full last name. Imagine my surprise when I realized Van was his first name and he wasn’t Dutch!
This memory triggered another language based misunderstanding regarding Offenbach. In one of my first piano books I had a very simple piece written by Offenbach, but I didn’t know that was a formal name. I thought it was a German word that meant that you had to stand up when you played the piece, getting “Off the bench or off your backside”. I remember my piano teacher trying not to laugh when I explained my reasoning for why I stood up to play the piece.
A few weeks ago I was complaining to my daughter in law about my dislike for my exercise class, but how it was helping me improve my strength and stamina. Grandson was eying the Tylenol bottle at the time, and asked why, if I took Tylenol and it said “extra strength” did I even go to my class, since the Tylenol would give me extra strength. We explained it was the Tylenol that was strong, but it didn’t make me strong.
I think my favorite childhood misunderstanding was that held by a good friend from college. He was an accomplished oboe player from a small town in Eastern ND. The summer after he graduated from high school he travelled to Europe with a concert band from the International Music Camp (located on the ND/Canadian border). They played a concert in Washington, DC before heading overseas. He told me his confusion hearing the length of time the flight to Europe would take from DC, because it seemed so short, and his embarrassment realizing that his entire life he thought Washington, DC was in Washington State, hence the shorter travel time!
Neither of my folks liked crowds. Long lines, throngs of folks – count them out. I’ve never been sure why I can take lots of folks but whatever propensity I have, it has been handed down to YA.
The two busiest days at the Minnesota Zoo are always the last Saturday and Sunday of their very popular Farm Babies program. They have all kinds of activities and music out at The Farm and there are always plenty of babies; this year baby cows, llamas, goats, lambs and piglets. YA and I had other things going on for the first four weekends so it was this past weekend or no Farm Babies program until next year. We’ve been to the last weekend of Farm Babies before but it was even more crowded than we remember.
Of course, almost everybody was a young family with kids (and those proverbial strollers – I promise I’m not whining about strollers, despite the photo above). It was, however, truly amazing to see the number of strollers, especially when they were “parked” in several locations. Wow!
YA and I have different modus operandi at the zoo. She will walk at my pace but doesn’t always stay right at my side if I dilly dally. I am more than able to stand and watch a moose do basically nothing for 10 minutes but if I do this, sometimes YA will wander off to see something else. Conversely, she can pet a baby cow forever. On Saturday, there was a restaurant chain sponsoring a scavenger hunt. There were three stations that you had to find and have you little map stamped. I thought it was a hoot but YA didn’t want to play (this was when she went off to pet that baby cow).
One of the projects in the Activity Barn was making homes for mason bees who apparently are solitary bees that don’t live in hives. I thought this was very interesting and I let the volunteer tell me everything. When I was done there, I found YA petting goats. The one time we were perfectly synced was when we got hungry for lunch!
Toward the end of our day we stopped at the Service Desk – I wanted to ask when Llama Trek was going to open and to find out if the snow monkeys (whose exhibit is being re-vamped right now) were still here in Minnesota or if they were hanging out at a different zoo until their habitat is finished. The guy behind the desk was talkative and I’m not even sure how we got from the snow monkey habitat discussion to the Kodiak bear who broke the window at the zoo several years back. Or how the zoo has multiple possible plans for adding new bears now that there is only one left.
As we were leaving YA said “I didn’t think he was ever going to stop talking.” I laughed and said “I could have stayed and listened to him talk about the zoo all day.”
I guess it’s different strokes for different folks. But neither of us were bothered by the big crowds!
When was the last time you visited a zoo? Any favorite zoos? Zoo animals?
When I was in high school I was fortunate to have wonderful music teachers and choir/ band directors. My favorite choir director, Mr. Phelps, was a Concordia College, Moorhead grad who eventually settled in the Twin Cities, where he was equally beloved by students there.
Mr. Phelps, aka Showboat Phelps to other local directors, really knew how to put on a show, be it musicals or difficult choral pieces. One Christmas we did The Messiah. It is a demanding piece with a very high First Tenor part. Mr. Phelps had no qualms about enlisting the Second Altos to sing First Tenor in the Messiah as well as on any other song the Tenors struggled with. I am a Second Alto, and to this day I still know the First Tenor part from The Messiah much better than the Alto part.
My speaking voice isn’t particularly low, but singing Tenor in high school as my voice was maturing kept my singing range really low. My voice breaks at the C above Middle C, and I am able to get down comfortably to the D below Middle C. That is pretty low.
Last week in church choir the Bass section was having a hard time with a couple of measures that had several accidentals. it was identical to the Alto part an octave higher. The director joked that it was too bad we couldn’t sing the part with the Bass section in their register. I told her I could, and I did. The Sopranos were astounded I could sing that low. I was the only one who could sing the measures correctly. Thanks, Mr. Phelps. It’s just too bad you didn’t have me sing along with the Sopranos as well as the Tenors. Think of what my vocal range would have been if you had!
What were your best/worst school music experiences? What is your vocal range?
Trail Baboon 