My dental exam was Friday. Like most folks, I don’t spring out of bed on dentist day, singing with joy and sprinkling my path with rose petals. Honestly, if I could take a pill and never have to worry about my teeth or go to the dentist again, I’d take that pill every darn day.
My dental history isn’t all that happy. I have a small mouth to start with, not really enough room for all my teeth and then when my adult teeth started coming in, we discovered that I had some duplicates. That meant tarting at the age of 9, I got the first set pulled, then wore retainers. Then when the second set descended, those got pulled as well. More retainers. Then, the eventual braces, followed by more retainers. During that time, I had another adult tooth that wasn’t breaking through the gum so had to deal with that. 5 years total.
Before marriage to wasband #1, I had my last dental exam while still on my folks’ insurance. Dentist said all four of my wisdom teeth were there but didn’t appear to be doing anything. Since my mom’s wisdom teeth never came in, the decision was made to leave them be. Literally six months later (after wedding and without any dental insurance) all four came in. They had to come out (small mouth, no room) and three of the four were impacted.
I’ll stop there, but suffice it to say I’ve had plenty more drama – broken tooth, crowns, bridge, more gum issues. And this is all for a person who brushes and flosses every single night. For decades. Did I mention that my dentist growing up was my uncle? So there was no sloughing off where the teeth were concerned.
Anyway Friday was just a cleaning but as I was laying back, I had to “un-tense” constantly. It didn’t hurt but every few minutes I would realize that I was tensing up and have to force myself to relax. At one point the hygienist knocked the tray with her elbow and I just about jumped out of my skin. She said “it’s OK, you can relax” and I laughed so suddenly that I snorted. Luckily she didn’t have any implements of destruction in my mouth at the time. During a little break in the action, I asked her if anyone ever relaxes in the chair, she said “about half”. That surprised me, I would have thought that most folks can’t relax. I prefer not to be the outlier in this area. We’ll see if that desire helps me relax next time around! Snort.
What do dentists call the x-rays they take of your teeth?
On Thursday I collected the mileage and hours from vehicles and tractors then put it all in my ‘Yearly Mileage’ spreadsheet. Everything was about average. We used the lawn mower 31 hours, put 43 hours on the big tractor, and 127 hours on the other tractor. Drove the 4-wheeler 22 miles, and put 306 miles on the gator using it 48 hours.
Egg count for 2025 was 419 dozen. 5028 eggs. Plus a few dozen that froze or got broken.
On Tuesday daughter and I took a road trip to Potsdam and Meyer’s Seed, then John Deere in Plainview. And got sundaes at DQ and then back to Rochester for a stop at Barnes and Noble. She thanked me for the adventure.
At Meyer’s the oat seed for 2026 is ordered and paid for, and corn and soybean seed has been ordered and financed, at 0% interest with a 4% savings. (6% savings would have given me prime -2%). $11,700. A bag of seed corn now is over $300. I ordered 25 bags. That’s a separate loan from the $43,000 for fertilizer and spraying. I got TWO free seed corn hats!
You know how you’re supposed to save receipts for seven years? I brought up a box from 2002 and sorted through that. Oh my goodness. We’d been married 12 years. Kelly was making $17 / hour. We had 2 kids in daycare, and $36 in our savings account. I’d get a milk check twice a month. It totaled maybe $2200. I owed the vet $1000, the breeder $500, the feed co-op $500, plus there was always other bills and expenses. I got anxious just looking back through this stuff. Once I saved the important stuff, I took the unneeded stuff out in the snow and burned it.
It was a small fire; not much stuff. And I just used my gloved hand to ‘swish’ it around to get all the papers to burn. Evidently the cheap nylon mechanics glove I was wearing have a lower melting point than the flame of even a small fire. I didn’t get hurt or anything, it just melted the sides of the fingers of the glove. Daughter came over to see what I was doing. I pointed out that she shouldn’t use her hand to stir up a fire. She looked at me like I was a complete idiot. And she basically said, “Well duh!”. Oh good. A win on the parenting front! She knows enough not to stick her hand in a fire.
The wedding we attended on New Years Eve was really very nice! The bride was stunning, the groom looked sharp in his black tuxedo. They were both relaxed (or at least looked that way) and the ceremony was low-key and they wrote and read their own vows and had fun. We had a full three course meal, and there was a live band. I got a lot of compliments on the fact I was wearing sleeves. I did have to dig to the back of my closet for this shirt, and one cuff was a slightly different color than the other. Solved that problem by rolling them up a bit.
For Christmas Kelly gave me this hat:
I picked up oil filters and grease tubes at John Deere. I changed the engine oil and filter in the 630. I was looking in the operators manual for the tractor and realized I’ve never checked the oil level for the transmission. On modern tractors there’s the engine oil dipstick, and then a dipstick, or sometimes a site tube, showing transmission and hydraulic oil level. On the 630, there’s a dipstick for the engine oil, and one for the hydraulics and I remember always checking that as a kid. I don’t know what fascinated me about that dipstick, but I checked it often. And then there’s a check “LEVEL” plug for the power take off. And on the side, according to the book, another check “LEVEL” plug for the transmission.
HUH!
Never seen that before.
I had to scrap some dirt off to find this.
You take the plug out and add oil until it starts to run out the plug, then it’s full. I don’t remember Dad checking that. I’m sure he did, I just didn’t know about it. Now the tractor is good to go come spring.
And the 1940’s music station is back on my car radio.
Guesstimating how long a task will take is not one of my long suits.
Bad estimates happen often when I’m trying to give myself enough time to get somewhere. Don’t get me wrong – when I’m going from one place straight to another, then I’m pretty accurate. I like to arrive with a few minutes to spare and this usually works out. It’s when I add errands to a trip; the more errands, the worse I guess. Two weeks ago, I had a knee therapy appointment at 7:30 a.m. At that time of day I know it takes about 15 minutes to go straight there. I added stopping for gas and estimated 10 minutes for that, then 5 minutes to swing by the post office, 10 minutes for Dunkin Donuts. Figuring 10 minutes to check in and cough up my co-pay, I decided I should leave the house at 6:30.
Got all my errands done and showed up at my therapy place at 6:50. My car was warmed up at that point so I sat in the parking lot for 20 minutes listening to my book on CD. That still left me 20 minutes (of which the check-in/co-pay took 3 minutes…sigh). Good thing I’m a morning person.
The other time this problem rears its ugly head is when I have some chore that I’m not too excited about. A 10-minute job becomes an hour in my mind, a 20-minute chore becomes an afternoon. Then the procrastination kicks in. I found this meme last year on Facebook; I even printed it out and pasted it in my journal. Whenever I’m putting something off, I TRY to remind myself of this silliness in my nature. Occasionally it helps
I’m hoping that showing up 40 minutes early for my therapy will be a learning experience but I’m not exactly holding my breath. You know – that old dog/new tricks problem.
Do you have a good relationship with time-keeping? Any procrastination problems?
Most of my friends and acquaintances know me well enough to know that New Year’s Eve does not find me out drinking and partying wildly. The only time I’m up at midnight these days is if I need to make a trip down the hall in the middle of the night.
I have only been drunk twice in my life. The first time was when I was living in Northfield during the summer between what would have been my junior and senior year. I was working at Ole Piper Inn and went to a party with my co-workers. I hadn’t really had drunk much prior to that and there was a lot of mixing of different kinds of alcohol. I woke up in my bed but don’t remember how I got there. Keys were in my jacket pocket and the car was in the driveway – luckily nothing amiss. Thank goodness the party was only about 10 blocks from my apartment.
The second time was at a work party at the bakery in Milwaukee. No memory loss this time (I remember the bus ride home from the bakery QUITE clearly) but I felt so awful the next day that I wished for memory loss. It was after this horrible hangover that I decided that overdrinking was just not something I wanted to do.
I’m not a teetotaler but I rarely have more than a glass of wine or one mixed drink. It’s not hard as the taste of alcohol isn’t my favorite anyway. Not imbibing much was a little challenging with clients over the years but nothing too awful. The pressure that many people experience for not drinking in social settings hasn’t happened much to me; I’ve found that if I don’t call attention to my beverage in a party setting, most folks don’t even notice that I’m nursing one glass of wine for an hour or that I’ve switched to a non-alcoholic option.
All this is coming to mind because in addition to the New Year, I finally gave in and let the Medicare/BCBS home wellness visit happen last week. It was easy enough, no invasive stuff and only took about 30 minutes. The nurse practitioner asked me all the same questions that the doctor asks every year at my usual wellness checkup. When he got to the “how often to you drink alcohol” question I hesitated after saying “one or two” and he immediately filled in with “a day?”. I laughed and said “no, probably one or two every two or three months”. I had hesitated because I was trying to decide between two to three months and three to four months. He clearly didn’t believe me. I reported that I had just had a glass of wine the Saturday before at my party but that I couldn’t even remember the last time I’d had any alcohol. Maybe Blevins back in September?
He did write down 2-3 months, although I’m not sure he really thought that was the truth. Oh well.
Did you party last night? What makes for a good celebration in your opinion?
I can’t say I regret the end of 2025. This has been the most disturbing and disruptive year in my memory.
Moving and politics have taken their toll. We are very happy where we are in terms of location. I have hopes the political situation will improve.
Our goals are modest. We want to install raised vegetable beds in the back yard. We want to plant Boyne raspberries. Husband wants to improve his guitar skills. We are not traveling.
We plan to have best friend relocate here in the spring, and get a Cesky sibling for our pup. All these things are potentially exhausting, but change that is in our control is far more manageable than unexpected change.
What are your goals for the new year? Garden and travel plans?
DIL texted me on Sunday to report they had arrived safely in Brookings from Mankato the evening before and were spending the blustery day playing board games and reading books.
She said that 7 year old Grandson was reading his favorite DogMan books in a blanket fort made up of sofa pillows and his infant sister’s bouncy chair. Any fort in a storm!
I loved blanket forts as a child. The sofa cushions made great walls. My farming cousins and I tried to erect forts in trees in the groves, in the granary, anywhere we could find. It sure kept us busy. Perhaps this explains the allure of tents.
I was always so happy when we had snow days from school, as that was the only time my mom made waffles. We still call them Blizzard Waffles. Husband says he has sourdough discard and we can have waffles on New Year’s Day!
What were your favorite ways of making forts? How do you spend stormy days at home?
Husband came down with a head cold late last week. He really suffers when he has a cold. His allergies seem to make cold symptoms worse than normal. He spent the weekend doing nasal irrigation and concocting soup to ease his symptoms. We had quite a bit of the turkey brodo I make from The Splendid Table cookbook, and he doctored it up with lemon juice, poached chicken, turmeric, hot peppers, and Penzey’s Bangkok seasoning. He said it helped, and he feels he is on the mend.
My mother never did much when we had colds. They were just things you suffered through without much fuss. A fever might warrent some aspirin, but there was rarely any Vapor Rub or other over the counter cold medication in the house. My father took a different approach. In the fall and winter he always had a bottle of peppermint schnapps in the freezer. If I had a particularly bad cold he would slip me a shot of the icy schnapps at bedtime. It was really aromatic and put me into a restful sleep
I still tend to ignore cold symptoms and don’t use cold medications. I don’t use schnapps, either, although a hot toddy can be nice at times when the symptoms are bad. I rarely get colds, though, having become immune to many cold strains through 30 years exposure to drippy-nosed preschoolers in the play therapy room.
How did your family deal with colds and flu? Got any good home remedies?
I took a walk on Christmas morning. Me and the dogs, out through the fields. Saw a bunch of pheasants, tree’s I need to cut down, and lots of deer tracks. The header photo is from our walk.
Weatherman Mark Seeley has a weather forecast and article on the back page of The Farmer magazine. In the last issue, he talked about January of 2006 being the warmest January in MN weather history. “January 2006 started a remarkable trend of warmth in Minnesota. Fifteen of the 19 Januarys since that time have brought warmer-than-normal temperatures to the state. Of further note, seven Januarys since that of 2006 also rank among the warmest 20 in state history.” — https://www.farmprogress.com/farm-life/january-2006-started-warm-and-never-wavered
There are many reasons to be appreciative of the deep-freeze cold we normally get in winter. It kills off harmful bugs, it helps breakdown the soil for better working conditions in the spring, helps break up compaction layers in the soil, it helps keep stored grain in condition, to name just a few benefits. The worst thing is repeated cycles of freezing and thawing. That’s hard on certain crops, like alfalfa. Ice sheeting, and the repeated freeze thaw or a lack of snow cause winter kill. I bet you master gardeners have examples of the problems repeated freezing and thawing can cause in the gardens. Not to mention how tough the warmer temperatures are on cattle that have a winter coat and are prepared for cold. Respiratory issues can really become rampant.
We’ve had this one chicken living in the garage all winter. During the day she has taken to perching on the bottom rung of a sawhorse and looking at herself in a mirror.
Mirror Mirror…
And then the other night, there were 5 chickens in the garage! OK, seriously, the poop from the one chicken is gonna be bad enough come spring, and at least she’s over in a corner. Having five of them: one in the rafters, two more on recycling containers, and one on the dogwash wall are too much.
An unneeded bonus chicken in the garage
The next day I kept the garage door closed. I figured they’d just go back down to the coop. Three spent the night around the corner perched on the bird seed containers. Why have they moved up here in the first place? I don’t know what their problem is. I’ve got several spending the night in the nest boxes where they lay their eggs. They’re not supposed to do that either. They’re not too crowded as some are in the right side space, some are in the left side space (and they all pile up on top of each other for some reason), some are up in the rafters, and the rest are in the main coop area. I did add another board in there if they need another place to perch. Is it too many roosters? I think we have 5 roosters these days. And maybe 55 hens? I don’t know exactly how many, they are too hard to count. Really 2 roosters would be a good number. There’s a couple that seem extra ornery to the chickens. How come they never get picked off by coyotes?
Christmas day late afternoon I forgot to shut the garage door in time and had to chase out 3 chickens. Yeah, even being Christmas, I chased them out. I had given them extra corn and layer ration in the morning. They’re fine. The one in the corner, she’s earned it, she can stay.
Out in the shop, I added a metal top to the work bench. Dad built this work bench after the shed was built, so maybe in 1982 or 1983. When I started on the shop project two years ago, the guy doing the insulation wanted me to pull the bench off to redo the insulation behind it. I said no. Dad had put styrofoam and fiberglass insulation on that wall before he added the bench. I tore the top four feet off the wall as part of the shop project. The old insulation was pretty bad. Yeah, I probably should have redone the bottom four feet too, but I was already in over my head on this project and didn’t think I could handle any more. Hindsight you know. The bench is pretty well built, and the top is 2×8 boards with a gap between them. Stuff is always falling into that gap. Maybe it was Dad’s way of cleaning off the bench, to sweep the dirt and dust into the gap. Which then ended up in the bolt storage he had underneath. A couple weeks ago, I lost a screw down that gap and I decided that was it! I am covering this! I bought two sheets of 16 gauge steel (about 1/16th inch thick) 2′ x 4′ from a big box store. ($70 each! Jeepers!) Thanks Obama! (That’s a joke you know) And I rounded over the front edge. I need to get some different screws to hold it all in place, but it looks real professional. I’m glad I did that.
Kelly helped me get the last screen back in the 630 grill and I have that all reassembled.
Reassembled 630. Runs and sounds Great!
Needs an oil change yet and it will be ready for next summer’s work and projects. Next summer’s project I think will be rebuilding the belt pulley assembly. Clyde probably knows what a belt pulley is. You’ve seen pictures of back in earlier days, a long canvas belt ran between the tractor and an implement to provide power before the advent of power-take-off on the rear of a machine. That’s the belt pulley.
On the 630, that belt pulley is also the hand clutch assembly. And it rattles like some of the plates inside there are broken. I remember Dad adjusting it once in a while, but I don’t recall him ever pulling it all apart. The tractor also hasn’t had a working tachometer / speedometer / hourmeter for as long as I can remember. A few hundred dollars will get me a new gauge, new cable, and I don’t know yet if I’ll need a new gear inside the governor assembly or not. It’s all only money.
I’ve done my crop rotation maps for next year and got the acres figured out. Talked with Nate at Meyer’s Seeds and I’ve got until January 16th to lock in the early order discount pricing on oats, corn and soybean seed. I was approved for $43,000 in loans for chemicals and fertilizer from the Co-op. That doesn’t include the loan for seed. I’m really hoping I don’t need all of that loan as the crop prices aren’t that good. The first few years I farmed I stressed out a bit more about the crop loans. Of course 35 years ago I probably spent $10,000 on everything and it was still big money. Now days it’s just part of the deal. I don’t stress over it so much.
I thought for sure Kelly and I were gonna win the lottery the other night. And what would we do with all that money? As the old joke goes, keep farming until it is gone!
EVER BEEN THROWN OUT? TOLD TO LEAVE? EVER THROWN SOMEONE OUT?
Happy Boxing Day, Baboons! Today is also St Stephen’s Day. I have been thinking all week of this song from the Chieftains and Elvis Costello. We appreciated Boxing Day as a great day off when we lived in Winnipeg.
It has had good company with any number of earworms that have plagued me for a while.
O Canada seems to always be playing in my mind. I also have been hearing Ode to Joy and the hymn Earth and All Stars which has pretty wild lyrics and which I haven’t heard in church for a couple of years. I seem to hear these songs when I wake up in the middle of the night.
For some really strange reason I woke up earlier this week with this playing in my head:
I have no idea where this came from. Why on earth would I dredge this from my memory the week of Christmas?
How do you think we ought to celebrate Boxing Day as a holiday? Any earworms lately? What is your favorite production of Guys and Dolls?
When I was growing up, there were only two holiday celebrations – both on Christmas Day. In the morning it was just me, my sister and my folks opening gifts. We opened one at a time, in order of age. The next person couldn’t open anything until we had all sufficiently ooohhed and aaahhed over the current gift. Then later in the afternoon, my mom would host Christmas dinner. This was a potluck; Nonny did not like to cook, so hosting a dinner in which she cooked many dishes was not an option. The attendees were different every year, depending on who was in town for the holidays. I have 11 cousins but it was a rare Christmas when there were more than three of them joining us. Quiet. Christmas for me was quiet growing up.
Fast forward. YA and I have been celebrating on Christmas Eve with some of my oldest friends (Alan and Julie) for 25+ years. Back then there were Julie, Alan, their 3 girls, me, YA and usually a couple of Alan’s sisters and a few cousins. As the kids got older, Alan’s sisters moved away but were replaced in number by boyfriends who then became fiancés who then became husbands. Then the grandkids joined the fray. 14 of them. No, not a typo. The kids range in age from 1½ to 17.
This year Christmas Eve started out with about half of the kids snowmobiling/snowboarding; I thought it would tire them out, but I think it just revved them up. Stockings first – Julie does those and they are low-key affairs: a mandarin orange, little pack of Kleenex, a candy cane and this year, each kid got a placement that Julie quilted for them with fabric chosen for each grandchild. Gifts were next and that’s when it got a little wild.
We always start out going by youngest to oldest, but that breaks down pretty quickly, especially when someone chooses their Ukrainian egg box or their ornament box (I always wrap these in take-away boxes – perfect size). Then everybody opens theirs at the same time and then the order of gift opening usually goes awry from there. One of the sons-in-law is a bit of a neatnik so every gift that is opened, he supervises where the wrapping and ribbon and tissue went so he can scoop it up. Once we’re all opening packages willy-nilly, this gets a little stressful for him but we can’t convince him to relax about it.
A couple of the older kids started the “it’s a box” joke when taking off wrapping paper. Then the younger kids took the joke and ran with it. For the rest of the evening, every box was met with a chorus of “it’s a box”. The teenagers had tired of the joke at this point so there was a lot of sighing and eye-rolling by a couple of them.
Several of the kids received stuffed animals and Howie, who is 9, got a capybara. I guess they’re popular right now and Howie was smitten with it. Its little legs were just the right size that it could sit right on top of Howie’s head, where it stayed for at least an hour, even when the unwrapping was done and the kids were split into various groups, playing some of the games they had received.
The noise levels are so far beyond what I either experienced as a kid, or am used to these days that I find myself just sitting back in wonder. When YA and I carried our stuff to the car and headed home, my ears almost rang from the silence. And when we got home, it felt so chaos-free (even with the dog excited that we were home) that I breathed a little sigh of relief. I love them all but glad the chaos doesn’t follow me home!
Trail Baboon 