Category Archives: work

2025, Automotive, Business, Family, Farming Update, Nature, Seasons, Uncategorized, work

July

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The weekend Farm Report comes to us from Ben.

Happy day after July 4! Everyone still got all their fingers and toes?

Corn and oats both made knee high.

It’s been a busy week for a lot of different reasons. Monday morning I got a call from the co-op asking if I could pull out a stuck sprayer. No, I couldn’t, I was about to head to town with daughter and I also had an appointment. They called neighbor Dave, and he ran right over. I was pretty sure where the sprayer was stuck: a field that was wet when I tried to plant it a month ago, and that was before we got 6 inches of rain.
I talked to Dave later and he said all he did was get the sprayer more stuck. The sprayer driver had gotten out and looked before he drove into the field, and Dave agreed, it was dry on the top. But you broke through that crust and it was muck underneath. And he didn’t get more than about 10’ into the field. Heck, I didn’t even think that was the wet spot.

Eventually a tow truck was called to pull the sprayer out. This was one of those fields that neighbor K wanted for a deer food plot and it’s the first time it had been worked up in 20 some years. I kept telling the neighbor there’s a reason this field was put in the Conservation Reserve Program back then, but I don’t think he’s figured it out yet.

Sunday afternoon Kelly and I had our usual Sunday Farm Gator Tour and we also found a wet spot in a field. Didn’t get stuck but close enough.

When I came home Monday afternoon there was another drone at the farm. neighbors Dave and Parm, who rent our pasture hired a company that uses a drone to spray for weeds. They used the drone to spray the wonderful crop of thistles. It was really pretty cool to watch. The pasture is so rugged, with so many gullies, and steep slopes, that you can’t drive it with a tractor and mower, so this was an absolutely perfect application for a drone. Talking with the operators, the drone will cost you about $25,000. They also have $75,000 in the spray trailer, complete with a 30 kW generator on the front, landing pad on the top, room for a second drone, chargers, chemical storage tanks, etc. Maybe we could all chip in and buy one. Then what should we do with it? Oh, you also need the drone operator’s license, which is fairly involved, and a license from the federal government allowing you to spray chemicals from a drone.

I did cut the grass on the sides of our road, and the one small field here in the front of the shed. I put the exhaust pipe and the new muffler on the 630 and used that for raking. That thing is as loud as ever. I never really thought about it before but evidently John Deere two cylinder tractors were not known for being quiet. I got it baled Wednesday afternoon. The baler worked perfect, never missing a knot on the bales, and my camera to watch the knots, is still slick to have.

Kelly’s tractor and the smoking wire I still haven’t completely diagnosed but I’ve ruled out a few things.I replaced a couple wires and I’ve disconnected both the rear light and the front lights and the wire still gets hot, so now I’m not sure if it’s the switch, or there’s something else wrong. I don’t really know what it could be, and adding to the mystery is a blown fuse on the dash. And if the fuse is blown, why is anything still working?

There’s a couple different places I order old tractor parts from. Lind Brothers included a bag of microwave popcorn in their box. It was really good popcorn. Steiner Tractor Parts always puts “Cow Tails“ candy in with their parts. When I order theatre stuff from Monkey Wrench, they throw a handful of candy in their boxes, usually something banana shaped. And Sweetwater, of course has to put candy in their box too. Can’t have a name like that and not include candy.

The padawans and I spent three days working on summer remodeling projects at the Rochester Repertory theatre. One day I painted the bottom of the balcony black.

We are adding a few more hanging racks in the costume room, and trying to remove an old boiler that was original to the building,1959. I asked a few plumbers how to get it out and they’d all groan and roll their eyes and say get a sledgehammer and a couple young men. Every day I bring a new Implement of destruction, we are working on it, and it’s slow going.

The big job will be insulating a north wall which is just concrete block. 
I have two by fours and blue insulation board and I’m bidding on a power actuated nail gun on an auction. It’s a “hammer“, that uses a 22 blank as a charge to drive a nail. I’ve seen them, never used one. Sounds like fun. I think that would be faster than trying to use cement screws. This is the auction that I took that old cultivator, running gear, and garage door to be sold. As of Friday the cultivator is at $41, the wagon is at $6 and the garage door at $7. Drifting off to sleep one night I bid on a really nice 26 foot cabin cruiser, and a mower. I need to not open the auction page as I’m falling asleep. Thankfully I was outbid on both within a day or two. The boat was gonna be a steel at $6!  Kelly said I should at least go up to $10. It jumped to $96. We thought we could make a B&B out of it. Park it out on the lawn. 

REMEMBER CRACKER JACK’S? WHAT SURPRISES WOULD YOU LIKE TO GET IN A BOX?  

2025, Family, gardening, home, Nature, Uncategorized, work

Pavers & Bricks

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Yesterday YA had the day off so we decided to tackle a couple of outdoor projects first thing in the morning before the heat took over the day. 

I started with putting some paving stones on the south side of the house under the water spigot.  The pavers were left over from when we expanded the little patio two summers ago so I thought I’d put them to better use than just being stacked up in the garage.  Unfortunately the ants didn’t think this was a grand project and it took a bit for them to give it up and I did get a couple of good bites out of it before they moved their party elsewhere.

By the time I was done, YA had made a good start on edging our northern “garden” with bricks that we inherited from our neighbor who just moved.  She asked which of the jobs I wanted – digging or placing the bricks.  While placing the bricks seemed like the easier of the two jobs, I know my daughter well.  If I placed the bricks, she would eventually come behind me and “fix” what I had done.  I admit freely that she is more patient with a lot of home projects and therefore does an overall better job.  This made it an easy choice – I dug and let her place the bricks.  It was a great decision.  As I dug I watched her running her hands along the bricks to make sure they were even and using her finger as a measurement tool to make sure they were all the same depth.  I would not have thought to do either of these steps. 

We didn’t finish yesterday.  It got a bit too steamy so we knocked off about half way through and vowed to finish in a couple days when it’s a bit cooler.  Looks good so far.

Any projects for you over the holiday weekend?

animals, Business, Food, Gatherings, Stories, work

Relishing Every Bite

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On the phone with my friend Pat last week, she reminded me of the following story.

This was about 20 years ago.  Cell phones were a thing but not the ubiquitous kind of thing they are today.  In a department meeting, Lydia’s cell phone (names changed to protect the innocent) buzzed in her pocket.  When she looked at it, she got a funny look and zipped out of the meeting room.  About 5 minutes later she came back in and announced to all of us that she needed to leave.  I don’t know about anybody else, but all kinds of dark thoughts jumped right into my brain.  Sick kids, husband in car accident, mother fallen down steps… that kind of thing.

Apparently her dog had gotten out of the yard and wandered several blocks over to a local gas/convenience store.  He headed straight over to the bread section and proceeded to help himself to a couple packages of hot dog buns before anybody noticed him.  Luckily Lydia and her family had a chip so the local animal control was able to get hold of them pretty quickly.

After she rushed off, the meeting broke down completely.  Apparently we had all thought the same kinds of horrible scenarios and were really relieved that it was a funny story instead of a tragic one.

The next morning when Lydia showed up, her desk was covered in packages of hot dog buns.  I can’t say whose idea that was, but I do remember who did the leg work with a handful of collected cash!

Why do all hot dogs look the same?

2025, Family, gardening, home, Nature, work

I Think I Can, I Think I Can

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If you noticed that I didn’t have a presence on the Trail on Saturday, it’s because it was stump removal day.  The tree itself had all been cut down by Friday evening so Saturday was all about the stump.

We had a couple of offers to help us yank the stump out with a truck (thank you, tim and my neighbor Don) but with my front yard garden flourishing this year and some of the perennials starting to bloom, YA and I didn’t want to risk trashing those; hence the decision to utilize the “dig to China” method of stump removal.

You ever have one of those times when you’ve taken something on and as you’re working on it you start to question your sanity?  The first couple of hours went fine – the beginning of the work and you’re still full of optimism and energy.  By lunchtime, we were lagging a bit so we took a break and ate sandwiches on the front steps.  I will admit that I did google “stump removal” before we got back to business.

By 2 p.m., I was seriously thinking about having myself committed.  We’d been digging down around the stump for hours, cutting roots whenever we came upon them and even with both of us with our backs to the house and pushing vigorously, the stump wasn’t moving at all.  At this point, my mantra was “We can do this because we’ve done it before” – a little like Harry Potter in Prisoner of Azkaban – since I had been part of the stump removal team when my wasband and I took down a tree when we first bought the house. See:

The Chainsaw Massacre | Trail Baboon

So YA and I just kept digging; by this point we were more excavating than digging as we were trying to get under as much of the root system as possible.  I really did say to myself “we’ve done this before” repeatedly. 

Suddenly at 3:15, when we shoved it, it moved.  So we shoved a little harder, then there was a good sized “cracking” sound.  At this point I shoved and YA got underneath with the chainsaw and finished off the last root holding it and voila!  At 3:20 the stump was out.  It was a little stunning since it seemed like we’d be digging forever and then suddenly we were done.   We rolled the stump down to the boulevard and since we are both good at cleaning as we go, we only had to put all the various tools back on the porch.  You can’t really tell from the photo but I was just about the dirtiest I’ve ever been from a yardwork project – maybe even dirtier than when tim and I sandblasted to porch.  I had to take a scrub brush and the hose to myself in the backyard before I could even go in the house.  Then it was a shower with another scrub brush and a LOT of body wash. 

We finished up the work on Sunday – digging up the area and leveling it out.  We did find the black edging that I put down decades ago as well as the various layers of black tarp that truly did not do anything about weeds.   Now we have two pretty little Dwarf Globe Blue Spruce planted that will not grow above the window level and should fill the space nicely.  To make it look a little prettier for now, we also put in a few hostas as a minimal border.  I told YA as we were inspecting our handiwork yesterday that I was never, ever going to do that job again. 

Ever.

Do you have any mantras that have been useful in your life?

2025, Baboon Achievers, gardening, home, Kids, Uncategorized, work

Young Entrepreneurs

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Husband had just finished mowing the lawn on Monday when two boys, looking to be about 11 or 12, came by offering to mow for us. They had their own mower. Husband explained he had just finished mowing, but they would certainly be welcome in the future to do it for us. Their asking price was reasonable.

I never had a “business” as a kid, unless you count babysitting. Girls in Luverne didn’t hire out to do lawn work back then. The boys who came by on Monday looked energetic and excited. There aren’t as many older people in the neighborhood as there used to be, so I hope they don’t get discouraged if they don’t get as much business as they hoped.

Husband has arthritis in his hands. I am having increased mobility issues with chronic sciatica, probably caused by lumbar scoliosis. I can see us hiring more yard work done in the future.

Did you have a business as a kid? What tasks do you see yourself hiring others to do in the future? If you were 12 right now, what business would you start?

2025, Family, gardening, home, Nature, Uncategorized, work

Timber!!

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YA has lots of opinions about the house and yard.  Granted, she does do quite a bit of work on both, but the bottom line is that I’m still doing a good 80%.  So when she gets a bee in her bonnet, I don’t always jump to attention.

She’s been nagging me for about three years to get rid of the tree in the front of house.  To her credit, it’s in awful shape, and has gotten tall enough that it pretty much blocks all the sunlight to the front porch and some of my room as well.  But I don’t want to have a whole bunch of projects going at once (actually, this drives me to distraction) so I’ve been putting her off.  For two years I was able to use the “not until the front porch is done” knowing full well that the last couple of steps were hers.  Unfortunately she did finally finish her little bits and now I can no longer use the excuse.

Smart people would have hired a tree guy, but I think the last 20 years have shown that we don’t always have smart people at our house.  So we purchased a new chainsaw (the old one died last summer) and got to work yesterday.  For the most part, it went well but as always happens with a big job, it’s much bigger than we thought.  As you can see from the photo below, we still have a chunk to go but after 7 hours, both of us were really running out of steam so we decided to call it a day and go to Dairy Queen.

The good news is that YA and I are truly aligned when it comes to how we like to get things done.  We like to clean up as we go – neither of us likes a big mess at the end.  So each big branch that came down, we chopped it up, filling yard bags and making bundles of little logs and branches.  So as we were getting worn out, we didn’t have a massive amount of clean up to do.  The header photo is what’s on the boulevard for yesterday’s work.

The biggest issue now is finding time to tackle the rest of the job, since the weekend is over and YA has to work this week.  I can work on the ground level and maybe even do a bit of cutting back from the roof outside my bedroom, but the actual cutting of that last two branches will take both of us.  And probably some ropes and rakes to try to get the branches to fall where we want them to.  I’ve had experience with this part going wrong in the past, so I don’t want to attempt it alone.  YA thinks she can get an afternoon off in a couple of days.  Fingers crossed.

What was the last project that really took it out of you?

2025, Automotive, Business, Farming Update, Kids, Nature, Seasons, Songs, Uncategorized, work

Dirt

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The weekend Farm Report comes to us from Ben.

I heard a snippet of a blog and they said, “A person will work three jobs so they can go home and farm. You never hear of a person working 3 jobs so they can open a plumbing shop.” Sweeping generalization alert there. I’ve been thinking about that since I heard it. And while I’m in the tractor I think about what it is that makes farming so entrenched for us. What exactly is it that calls us to it? For me, it’s a lot of things: I like the machinery, I like working on the tractor or changing the oil, and learning, and having the skills and tools (and shop!) to work on stuff. A sense of achievement. I like working up a field and watching the soil turn black. Stan Rogers says it best in ‘The Field Behind the Plow‘ “Watch the field behind the plow, turn to straight dark rows. Put another season’s promise in the ground”.

I like being this close to the seasons and the circle of… everything. The growth, a faith in something bigger I guess. It’s deep and it pulls in my chest.

I’ve had a few late nights. Working at the college, then home and it might be 6 or 7:00 before I get out in the tractor and to the field. But it’s my time and I got nothing else at the moment. I feed the chicks, talk with Kelly. Daughter asks me to sit on the deck with her. We play with the dogs. Going out half an hour later doesn’t matter. (unless there’s rain in the forecast)

Daughter, turning 30 chronologically, but maybe 16 developmentally, she gives lots of hugs, but when we say “Love You!” she responds, “yep” or “OK” or maybe just “Bye”. And it makes me chuckle. That is when she doesn’t roll her eyes and simply walk away.

So, I’m in the tractor. One night I listened to Joni Mitchell. I haven’t had her albums or listened to much of her stuff. Just the hits. We saw Ben Folds in Rochester on Wednesday night and I listened to his stuff. I did some classical MPR. On the weekends it’s MPR News and their great programming: Wait Wait, Moth, This American Life, Radio Lab. It’s all so interesting! And some podcasts. In the tractor is the only time I can really do that, when I can listen and pay attention.

Best of all, I found some podcasts of TLGMS!

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/mpr-skits-from-the-morning-show/id104720092

It has been so fun to hear all these characters again. Cap’n Billy, Bubby Spamden, The Bowzer Bed, Wally’s Sherpa, Dr. B. Marty Barry and his bottomless Well of Wellness, Spin Williams, Congressman Beechly, Genway, and that wonderful cure-all pill, Purplex from Spendy Popper. I cannot get over what an amazingly creative writer Dale is! How he came up with all these ideas! We didn’t know what we had at the time, did we?

Me and Bailey enjoy our tractor time. She’s 7 1/2 years old and I have to boost her up into the tractor. Every few minutes she sits up and put her head against my knee and I scratch her ears and she lays down again.

It was a busy week. Filled the big tractor with fuel. It only needed half a tank.

Ordered more diesel and gasoline for the barrels.

I’m using the boating app again to find my place in the fields. And how can I take the linear distance to make it acres? (13.6 miles x 5280 feet divided by 24′ digger divided by 43,500 sq feet / acre = ? Hmm, that doesn’t come out right. Seems like it should make sense.

Did a lot of math figuring what 18, 50 lb bags of oats, at 32 lbs per bushel and I want 3.5 bushels / acre will do how many acres. And if I ran out at 6 acres, how much did I really apply?

Went back to Meyer Seeds on Wednesday morning and bought 12 more bags. Remember last year when I ran out 1/2 acre short of finishing with rain in the forecast and I said I would order extra seed next year so I didn’t run out?? I DID order extra! But I got a different variety of oat seed and the rate changed so… back for more.

After planting, this year I had time and cooperative weather to go over the oat ground with the drag (harrow) to smooth it out and help cover the seed in the tractor tracks that don’t always get covered.

Got the old 630 running pretty well. And I’ve ordered a new exhaust pipe and muffler for it. I’m looking forward to working on that after the spring rush.

Parked the tractor in the shop and changed oil, engine air filters, (there’s two) and cab air filters. Two tall, narrow ones outside, and two small ones inside the cab.

The new exterior shop lights are great!

Finished planting oats on Friday while my brother was out working up corn ground. The Co-op applied corn fertilizer on Thursday, and I hope to be planting corn on Saturday.

When I’m planting, I’m travelling at about 5 MPH. Faster than that and the seed spacing gets messed up. And seed spacing is really critical in some crops. Corn it’s extremely important. Soybeans it’s moderately, and oats doesn’t matter so much.

Fancy newer ‘high speed’ equipment carries a seed to the ground using a brush belt to gently place the seed in the trench. New planters are capable of 10 MPH. Time is money you know. It’s fascinating how fast some of these parts are moving to drop a seed every 6″ at 10 MPH. There’s some math for you. Bill, how long does it take to go 100′ at 10MPH and how many seeds does it drop if they’re 6″ apart? That mechanism is really moving!  

Getting ready for commencement at the college. Hung some of the fixtures over the stage, before they place the stage. Had the gym to myself and it was pretty nice.

Will look a lot different this time next week.

Got the laptop and ‘Hog’ console set up and doing all that math / prep work. Or trying. Thursday afternoon the laptop didn’t want to play nice. But Friday morning all was well. I have a plan B and C. It will be fine, FINE I tell you!

HOW MANY JOBS HAVE YOU WORKED AT ONCE?

FOR WHAT GOAL?

2025, books, Family, Mysteries, Travel, Uncategorized, work

Packing

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When I packed for the book festival, I went about it like usual.  I printed out my packing list (that I keep on the computer), filled it out and started to pack.  I was gone two and a half days (six hours of which was driving) and two nights.  Since I was wearing jeans and t-shirt to drive down, all I really needed was two t-shirts, two undies, two pairs of socks, pjs, a pair of zorries for relaxing at David’s and assorted personal hygiene stuff.

Obviously I didn’t need a big bag for this so I pulled a small bag from the attic and threw everything in.  15 minutes from beginning to end.  Except then the conversation started:

YA: Are you taking that bag?
VS:  Yep.
YA:  What are  you taking (picking up the packing list and perusing it).
YA:  No extra socks or underwear?
VS:  Nope.
YA:  What two t-shirts?
VS:  The coral t-shirt with books on it and the black rocket sheep for breakfast with the boys
YA:  Nothing else?
VS:  Nope.
YA:  What if you decide you want a different shirt?
VS:  Then I’ll suffer from my poor choices.l
YA:  What about shoes?
VS:  My blue tennies.
YA:  No other shoes?
VS:  Not for 48 hours.
YA:  (sighs and walks away)

When I was traveling for work, I packed a little more robustly.  Having an extra shirt or pair of socks can’t hurt when you’re on a business trip, but I’ve always been a fairly minimal packer.  YA is completely opposite.  She packs her work uniforms then at least one full non-work outfit for each day.  Multiple pairs of shoes.   For a couple of years she used that cube system, in which you packed all your stuff into individual cube/cases and then put the cube/cases into your bigger suitcase.  Personally I never thought this was a big help to the packing process, but to each their own.  She got the cases free from work; they were popular as pre-travel gifts a few  years ago and there were always extras laying around.  I haven’t seen her using those the last year.

My packing strategy worked out perfectly.  When I got home from the festival, all I had to do was dump the contents of the bag straight into the clothes hamper.  Hygiene stuff all lives in one zipper pouch together so that’s easy to put away as well.  Two minutes to unpack.

I’m pretty sure I packed and unpacked in less time than it took to talk to YA about it!

What about you?  Over-pack or under-pack?  Do you have a “process”?

2025, Farming Update, home, Theatre, work

Twist And Shout

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Today’s Farming Update comes from Ben.

Another week that zipped by at breakneck speed.
I feel like I barely get time to comment on the blog these days. The next month and a half will be this way. Maybe longer, depends how the spring goes.

Monday my friend Paul and I drove to Minneapolis to pick up some lighting fixtures that had been repaired. We enjoyed lunch at Doolittle’s Woodfired Grill, and had an uneventful drive to and from the big city. Tuesday was a trip to Northfield, with just me and loud music and my mind wandering. It was fun to see the farm fields and I saw a little snow in one ditch, and nobody doing any fieldwork yet. It’s early, it’s only April 12th, but when the snow melts and the temperatures are above average, everybody sure gets antsy. And when the weather is all over the place like this, who knows what’s gonna happen in two weeks. Crop Insurance doesn’t kick in until April 15th, so most people won’t start planting corn before then.

I do plan on picking up oat seed and corn seed Saturday afternoon. Remember I talked about that wagon frame a couple weeks ago and moving the flatbed wagon from one frame to the other? I haven’t done anything further with it yet but maybe this weekend. Especially since I use it for seed. Won’t take long once I get my butt in gear.


Our play at the college, Swimming in the Shallows, will open on Thursday. I’ve been busy with that. I painted the floor with a base coat of white one night after rehearsal. I don’t consider myself a good painter, my style with the floor is to thin down some paint, and use a couple hand sprayers and just have at it. It’ll look like something!
Often a show will take place in multiple locations so the floor may have to cover all the bases. Not always, sometimes it is just a house, and I can put a rug down, but often it needs to be rather neutral, and I don’t ever wanna leave it just plain black. A couple of the themes in this show are water and a beach. So first I mixed up some white paint, put it in a typical garden variety sprayer, and just based the floor white.

It’s kind of fun to watch the dots fill in the floor. It’s oddly satisfying. Then I’ll come back with blues and browns…or something. I feel a little like Georges Seurat, a little bit of pointillism.

I’m working with the marketing department for this show because they have a large format printer and I’m making tessellations. Repeating patterns.
My original thought was to use objects from the show like shoes, purses, cigarettes, but I couldn’t exactly make tessellation from those items. I found a free website where I could create and modify repeating patterns and then I include approximations of those items inside the pattern.


This was a sample as the marketing department and I worked out scale. There are six freestanding walls that will have six different patterns on them. I don’t want them so busy the audience is trying to figure out what it is, I just want to turn it into a texture. We talk a lot about texture in lighting and scenic design.
Two of the walls closest to center will have patterns that are just squares with some images inside.
The next two walls are more like diamonds but slightly skewed. And then the last two walls, centered on each side, are very skewed. It’s a visual metaphor for the twisted relationships in the show. Or the way real life can be twisted sometimes.

The electricians have finished in the shop. Three and a half days.
The outlets and the lights are wonderful.


I have lights over the bench!

And I have exterior lights that I’m excited about.

We had some kind of issue with the garage door opener, but on Friday I had the door company come back and fix it. I wasn’t home, but from my phone, I was able to open the door, pull up the shop camera, and watch the door open! I cackled gleefully. Then I watched it close again. From my phone. I giggled.

I got the stereo moved out there last weekend, and I have a Bluetooth adapter for it and now I just need to get the speakers mounted.

It’s all coming together!

PATTERNS IN YOUR LIFE?

WHAT’S YOUR TEXTURE?

2025, Food, home, pets, Uncategorized, work

Loungewear

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I am afraid I made a grave error with my last purchase of loungewear. I bought a really soft and fleecy cardigan that I wear over pajamas. The texture is very similar to fluffy cotton socks. Our dog is obsessed with stealing and chewing socks. Who do you think made off with the cardigan belt the minute I got it out of the package? I got it back before any damage was done. Now, though, I am afraid Kyrill thinks the cardigan is a big sock for him to chew!

Husband tells me that I am not allowed to cook in the cardigan as it is a cream color and he doesn’t want me to stain it. I confess that I do cook in my pajamas sometimes. I never wear them out of the house, though. My usual outfit is a sweatshirt with corduroy pants and soft socks. I wear those to work, too. I only have one pair of sweatpants. I only “dress up” if I have to testify in court as an expert witness.

I am still assessing what clothing choices I will make now that I am not working full time. I don’t think I will stock up on much more “loungewear”, especially if it is soft and fleecy like socks. I am drawn to comfy but not baggy, pants, and soft sweatshirts. I am taking care to keep my new cardigan out of Kyrill’s reach, along with all the other things he loves to steal and chew like socks, pens, papers, and eye glasses. Terriers certainly are good at helping us always put things away!

What is your favorite “loungewear”? Any memorable work uniforms?