As you can see from the photos below, our cat has claimed the Christmas tree for her own. Ever since we put it up she has been sleeping under it and drinking the tasty water in the tree holder. She walks around it as though she owns it.
This is first Christmas tree we have had for about three years. Other years we were traveling to Brookings and didn’t want to have a fully decorated tree sitting around unattended for days. Luna the tabby has been known to to climb the tree and/or knock down and play with ornaments. She also chewed the straw beards off the Julebukke. I am happy to report that the dog has ignored the tree entirely. Our previous Welsh Terriers were famous for unwrapping presents and stealing ornaments.
We bought the current Frasier fir at the local farm store. It is fairly small. We put a string of lights on it, and plan to decorate it today. We shall see if Kyrill can resist plucking ornaments off the tree. This is a pretty low key holiday for us even with the tree. Best friend is coming down. This is the first Christmas in decades we aren’t doing any Christmas music in church. We will celebrate with our son and his family January 3rd. His cat and dog leave their tree alone. Luna will probably give us heck for taking down the tree after Christmas. It is her tree, after all.
How have your pets treated your Christmas tree, decorations, and presents? Do your pets have Christmas stockings?
Husband and I made a trip to the Rock County Historical Society last week to look around and see what they had in the gift shop. I was delighted to find 8 oz bags of Old Mag Seasoning, an all purpose spice mixture for meat, eggs, and veggies developed by the rather rascally proprietor of the now defunct Magnolia Steak House and Bar in Magnolia, a little town about 6 miles east of Luverne. It was famous for decades as the place to go for the best steaks. I am really looking forward to putting it on our food at home. It smells wonderful. I have fond memories of the wonderful food I ate at the Magnolia Steak House when I was a kid.
AC Dispanet was ftom Estherville, IA, and opened the Steak House in 1938. He went by Ace or Claire. My dad grew up near Magnolia and graduated from High School there. For a while in the 1950’s he worked at the steak house as a bar tender. He got to know Claire pretty well. Claire worked for Al Capone in the 1920’s driving a beer truck on the North Shore. He quit and left the area after he had to phone Chicago to report one of the trucks was stolen and two guys he knew who had driven the truck were sumnarily executed by Capone. He started his own bootlegging business after that, and was arrested and put in Leavenworth Penitentiary for a few years. He lost his US citizenship due to that, and didn’t get it back until the 1950’s with the help of Hubert Humphrey.
My dad’s brother farmed near Magnolia and liked the clearly illegal high stakes poker games Claire allowed to operate after hours. My aunt got so mad at my uncle for spending so many nights away from home gambling that she threw a chair through a glass door at the bar when the door was locked and they wouldn’t open it to let her in. He stayed home more after that.
Claire’s wife was a very devout Roman Catholic. Claire was not. When he died in 1972 his wife had him buried in the Catholic Cemetery in Luverne as close to the grave of the former parish priest as she could arrange. My dad said she hoped Claire could grab onto the priests robes and get transported to heaven in the Resurrection.
In 2010 I wrote a post about the Steak House, so feel free to read that, too. I can’t believe it has been 15 years!
Tell about some noted rascals you knew or knew of. What are some of your favorite spice mixtures.
One disadvantage of our subscription to the NYT cooking app is that we end up cooking things we hadn’t initially planned to cook. Some of those recipes are hard to resist.
We start the week out with a good plan for meals. Last week, for example, Husband decided to make chili ala Penzeys, and I thought that the chili and a North German fischgulash would take us through all week and weekend, and we made both. Then I saw a NYT recipe for braised pork shoulder. We told each other that would have to wait until the following week. We had all the ingredients for all three dishes except two large leeks for the pork shoulder. Wouldn’t you know, I spied two large and beautiful leeks in our local grocery store on Saturday. They rarely have such lovely leeks there. Well, of course I had to buy them, and I spent yesterday making the pork shoulder, since we couldn’t let those lovely leeks get funky in the fridge. Husband justified the purchase by conceding there was pork shoulder in the freezer that just had to be used up.
This is sort of a family problem. Daughter lamented her inability to resist the urge for buying things she doesn’t need from young children at markets and booths. Saturday she ended up with earrings, a knitted hat, bracelets, and origami. She said “How do you resist buying a hat from a 7 year old boy who loves to knit?”
What are you finding hard to resist these days? What kind of excuses do you make for giving in?
So much going on in the world these days. Rob and Michele Reiner, the shootings in Stewartville Mn, and Brown University, and Australia. We all need to remember to “just be nice”. Sometimes it all feels overwhelming, but we can still choose to be nice.
Daughter told me the other night that she was thinking about going to bed earlier. “I’ll just give it a try”. I told her that sounded like a good idea, and yes, to give it a try. Remember, she’s a teenager. 2AM is her usual bedtime. We’ve been dealing with this bedtime for a few years and I was excited that perhaps there was a glimmer of realization that mom and dad do know what they’re talking about and maybe she finally is recognizing that she’s tired during the day. The next day she said “You know, with Santa coming and all, I thought I should go to bed earlier.” Oh. This is just because of Santa. There is no acknowledgment of consequences. Yet. But evidently she does know she should be in bed before Santa shows up at the house.
Classes at the college finished Friday and I finished my class in Forensic Chemistry. The Organic Chemistry section was hard. The DNA section was interesting, and I enjoyed looking at stuff through the microscope. The official final grades haven’t been posted but it looks like I got 93.5%. Whew. Still waiting for the note from the teacher saying “How did you get 100% on the final test??” Well, it was open book, and I finally realized the quizzes come from the book, so maybe I paid more attention on reviewing the quizzes? Believe me, I was as surprised as she was. And when I finished the test, I unceremoniously “plopped” the lecture notebook in the garbage can.
I signed up for ‘music appreciation’ for spring. It’s all online. Three credits closer to actually getting a degree. I signed up for this right after telling Kelly I was glad to be done with this class and maybe I could spend my time on the computer doing bookwork now. Man… why do I do this??
The chickens were enjoying the warmer weather and the rain melted more snow and they were all out roaming again. The pheasants have come around sharing in the chickens’ corn. I counted 14 one day. They’re skittish. Soon as we come out the door they fly away. And now I’m getting squirrels in the feedroom. They don’t want corn off the ground evidently, they want it from the bin. They’ve chewed ANOTHER hole in the bottom of the door.
The dogs always think there’s going to be a squirrel in there so if I head that direction the three of them are at the door barking and trembling. Watching all three dogs get through the door is like the Three Stooges: they all jam up in the door at the same time. Luna has taken to standing on the straw bale to the side so she can get a leap over the other two. One day the squirrel bounced off my chest and then out the door. This morning the squirrel went over my head and I was in the way so the dogs couldn’t get out.
Tuesday morning the weather warmed up so I turned off the heater in the well house. Here’s the interior.
The well-house.
I talk about this a lot and some of you may not know exactly what I’m referring to. What freezes in the well-house is this little pipe to the pressure switch.
The blue tank is the pressure tank. The submersible pump fills the tank to 60 lbs of pressure, and when we use some water and the pressure drops to 40, the pump kicks back on. But if that little pipe freezes, the pump doesn’t know the pressure has dropped and it never kicks back on. And that’s a terrible feeling at 6AM when you realize there’s no water… a chill ran down my spine as I wrote that. I can’t describe the apprehension of going out there to look at what might be the problem. Is the whole thing in flames? Or just cold? Are we pulling the pump out, or getting a hair dryer? In the fall of 2013 we had the pump and tank replaced and I rebuilt the well-house. It might be time to replace the pump next summer. Better to do that when planned, than in January and unplanned.
Pulling the pump. There’s a hole in the roof for the pipe and winch cable
The original pressure tank, from1949.
A new system
Building new walls
Luna’s newest favorite toy, after chasing a ball and before the frisbee, is an empty pizza box. (Actually I haven’t tried a full pizza box. That would probably just be a distraction).
So excited!
Always running.
I have figured out how to get the grill screen bent and installed in the brackets and back on the tractor hood.
End of the semester. I sat in the dark in the theater and just absorbed it all.
The ghost light, a few exit lights and aisle lights.
I thank the room for all the energy we exchanged so far. And I ponder what might happen next. It’s been another good group of kids. I hope some of them are still around next semester.
HOW DOES SANTA GET IN THE HOUSE WITHOUT A FIREPLACE? DID YOU EVER HAVE TO EXPLAIN THAT TO ANYONE?
Pay close attention to the times I note. On Wednesday, Husband and I went to Sioux Falls to do some grocery shopping and to drop some packages off at the UPS store there. I had five packages of treats and presents going to Ohio, St. Paul, Dickinson, Tacoma, WA, and another Minnesota town. I was very anxious about the packages getting to their destinations before Christmas. I was a little late with my baking this year.
We arrived at the UPS store at 1:30 pm CST. We went through the regular rigamorale of how to ship the fastest, and I chose regular ground delivery for all the boxes except the one to Tacoma, for our daughter. For that one I paid more to get there guaranteed by Monday the 22nd. The other packages might make it by Christmas Eve, but no guarantee.
Daughter phoned me yesterday to tell me that a package had arrived at her apartment st 12:25 pm PST. It was the box I had taken to UPS on Wednesday! Despite the awful weather conditions, that package was delivered in about 24 hours. Then, I heard from my St. Paul friend that her package had also arrived! I have never had such quick delivery of things.
Earlier this week, Daughter stated that an Uber Eats delivery person had dropped off six entrees at her door from a Thai restaurant. She hadn’t ordered them, and wasn’t at home when they were delivered. She had no way of contacting the restaurant or the people who had ordered the food. It is a good thing she likes Thai food. Sometimes deliveries work. Sometimes they don’t.
Tell about some delivery experiences you have had. Have you shipped you holiday packages?
We made a quick trip to Sioux Falls yesterday to stock up on groceries before the horrible winds hit. I don’t think we will need to go back until the New Year. Before we went, though, Husband had a guitar lesson at the local music school that is housed in the former Carnegie Library building. He is very excited about this.
He has had a Taylor guitar for several years, and took guitar lessons as a child. He tried to teach himself over the years, but decided he needed more help. He really likes his teacher, and is relieved to find that he didn’t acquire any bad habits over the years. His teacher is a young man in his 30’s who also teaches ukulele and mandolin and directs two ukulele choirs. The music school is open to all ages, and provides lessons in voice, strings, piano, brass, and woodwinds. His next lesson is in two weeks, and he is working on a French folksong Au Claire de la Lune. It is a duet he will play with his teacher.
My first piano teacher was one of the Holy Sisters who taught out of the local nunnery. I then had a teacher who taught out of her home and was married to the high-school shop teacher. She played piano at our wedding. I haven’t played much over the past several years. Once all the Christmas baking is done and the holidays are over I intend to go back to playing piano again. Husband has some intriguing minimalist Bartok piano pieces I want to try.
Our daughter became quite close to her Bismarck violin teacher who taught her for seven years. Daughter and another Suzuki friend went to visit their old teacher in New Mexico where she and her husband retired. Music lessons have kept them together even after the lessons are over.
What lessons, music or otherwise, did you have as a child? Taking any lessons now?Tell about some memorable teachers.
When you have fifteen kinds of cookies on the front porch during the holidays, you’re always open to ways to spread the wealth. I usually make cookie platters for my local library, my vet and my hardware store guys. It’s fun and between assembling the platters and delivering, it takes less than an hour, as all the recipients are very close by.
This past year, I really tested the Inter-Library Loan department of the library system so I decided that I should provide some holiday cheer for them. I found out that ILL works out of the downtown library (not much of a surprise) and do a straightforward 9-5 schedule.
I spent several weeks waffling about how to get the cookies downtown as I detest driving downtown and I detest paying a fortune for parking even more. As of Monday afternoon, my plan was to take the bus. A long trip two ways but only $2 out of my pocket and the bus stops literally at the front entrance door of the library. I even went to the bank to get a few one dollar bills.
As Monday afternoon wore on, I wavered more and more about this plan. I checked online and found that the library parking is only $4 for the first hour. I even called the library; the librarian confirmed that this was true and that you could park near the elevators and come right up to the atrium. She also said that if you were in and out in 15 minutes, there was no charge.
Of course, yesterday when the GPS got me to the library, that particular lot was full. I went around a two block area about five times – no on-street parking open and all but one ramp had their “FULL” lights lit up. Grrrr. I considered just going home and dismantling the platter but I figured, I’d come this far…. At this point, I was pretty stressed. There were two machines at the entrance of the only open ramp near the library and it took me a bit to figure out how to get a ticket. Found a parking spot near an elevator but when I pushed the door open to the outside world, there was a small sign saying you needed the QR code from your parking ticket to get back in. Luckily I hadn’t let that door shut, so I went back to my car to grab the ticket.
Delivery went really well but when I exited the parking ramp (about 20 minutes later), they charged me $17. OUTRAGEOUS. At this point, I just wanted to get home but my GSP wouldn’t open until I was actually out of the ramp. More stress. The fortunate part was that once I got going in the right direction downtown, I did know how to get home. Even being directionally-challenged.
It’s all I can do to no look up “parking-induced anxiety” on the internet. Not sure if it would make me feel better to know I’m in good company or if it would make me feel any more weird. And we’ll have to wait to see if ILL ever gets holiday cookies from me again. Please don’t hold your breath.
Any directionally-challenged issues or parking anxiety for you this month?
We were having some problems with our 15 year old gas stove. If you didn’t start a burner just right, the whole control panel would short out, and we would have to reset the clock, the timer, and the ovens if we had them going.
This was pretty annoying, so we called the local appliance repair company. The technician came out, unplugged the stove from the electrical socket, and pulled the stove out (now I know where the gas turnoff is for the stove. That was an anxiety for me). He removed the back of the stove, checked for frayed wires, checked out connections, replaced the back, and put the stove into position. Nothing needed to be replaced or fixed. It worked perfectly. No matter how the burners were started the electrical panel didn’t short out. The repair guy said sometimes just unplugging the appliance and jiggling the wires will do the trick. We plan to get a dual fuel stove in summer, as electric heat is better for baking. If there wasn’t a gas connection, I would have loved to jiggle the wires.
What appliance woes have you experienced? How are you at jiggling the wires and seeing what happens? Any current appliance worries for you?
Recently, I have decided to begin traveling again. I have husband’s care plan in place, as well as reliable people to carry it out, so I feel ready to plan travel experiences for myself. This last week I had an opportunity to take a road trip overnight as a preliminary test of my travel plans. My son stayed overnight with husband, and husband’s PCA (Personal Care Attendant) was scheduled for a long day so his regular activities were in place. After checking weather, which was looking unpredictable and snowy, I decided I could drive to my destinations between cold fronts. I was out the door 1pm on Sunday. Where did I go?
Hints:
There was an invitation from another state far away.
During my visits I encountered a dog and two cats, but one cat I did not see.
As I reached the state line Sunday evening, it snowed hard.
My group of childhood friends were there.
A Baboon was there.
Delicious treats were involved, as well as a scrumptious lunch of baked salmon.
On my way home it snowed again Monday evening about 6pm, starting in Belle Plaine, MN
In one destination the famous falls were entirely frozen and snow covered. In the other destination the music is wonderful.
When I arrived home everyone was happy. Puppy McGee was delighted to have me back home. Husband and PCA attended a fun Christmas party, and son had his usual workday here. But he had to take a Lyft home due to the snow.
I will travel far away in April for 5 days given the success of the care plan this time. I cannot wait!
Where in the world was I? When was the last time you got together with old friends? What was the occasion?
Brrrr. We are hardy Minnesotan’s but it’s still cold out. Hope you can stay inside and warm for the weekend.
Honestly, how did people do it 100 years ago? Or 500? Or 1000??
We have so much to be thankful for.
I got my corn check from the co-op last week and put it in the bank. And this week I paid off the loan I borrowed from a month ago to pay the bills. And the co-op emailed about setting up the loan and credit for 2026 crops. Easy come, easy go. Repeat. I spent some time this week comparing interest rates. It’s kinda hard to find out what the actual Prime rate is. Course it varies by bank and how much money you have. And it was kind of interesting how that works. One of the companies the co-op uses does Prime minus 0.5% until August, then Prime + 0.5% until Feb of 2027. Another company has different rates on some of the products and zero interest on some, but then Prime +2% on fertilizer. In the end, it doesn’t amount to that much money. It would be a different story if I was spending $450,000 at 7.5% interest. (That’s $33,750 @ 7.5% if you’re curious. Now we’re talking real money!) And the government is going to bail me out with the poor prices on soybeans. So they say. I don’t know what that’s going to amount too yet. It won’t be $33,000 I can tell you that. I’ll bet I can take off a couple zero’s there and be more like it. I always say the difference between me and the big farms is a couple zeros on the expenses and the income.
I’ll fill out the forms this weekend and figure out next years crops. Samantha, the agronomist I work with at the co-op sent out a rough worksheet of next year expenses for my planning purposes, and I’ll get things ordered and prices locked in by mid January for the best rate.
Yesterday on the blog we were talking about things from the past. I had a guy at the farm the other day who had a front wheel drive car and was almost stuck on the bare, but snow covered driveway. He clearly didn’t know how to drive on snow. His wheels were spinning and he blamed the posi-traction. I can still hear my dad’s voice “DON’T SPIN YOUR WHEELS!” Our mantra in winter back in the day of rear-wheel drive cars. “Sit heavy! Don’t spin your wheels.” And my family jokes that Dad would say, “NO TALKING! BE QUIET BACK THERE!” I don’t remember that, but I’m sure it was so Dad could hear the wheels not spinning. Shift to low, back up to the garage so you can get a run at it, and don’t spin your wheels. And the guy got out. Our driveway is long and starts right off with an uphill “U”. (So right, “get a run at it” but you’re making a corner at the same time. You learn a lot about friction doing that.) Then you’ve got a flat 75 yards to gain some speed before the next uphill corner to the left. Most people, if they get around the U, can make the next corner. Although there was some days I had to back up 50 yards and get a run at the second corner again. But a front wheel drive car? Dude. Learn to drive. I remember years ago, the guy who would come in to breed the cows. He had a little tiny car. Rear wheel drive. He couldn’t get out. And he turned around and went backwards really fast around both corners. I was very impressed. But he made it.
Last weekend Padawan called me about 10:00 at night to see if I would help pull a friend of his out of a ditch. So I went. Because we’ve said Padawan is our second son, so, that’s what you do for your kids. The friend had a new sporty little car. Still had the temporary plates. Skidded on the snow and slid into a ditch. Another kid who needs to learn how to drive. He was only a little stuck. Pulled him out with the truck.
Haven’t had much time to work in the shop this past week. Concerts at the college, homework, (had the last ‘in person’ class. I have a couple tests to take yet and some online lectures to watch. Last day of classes is next Friday) And I’ve been moving snow.
Our mailbox is out on the highway. It’s on a swinging post so the snow launching off the snowplow doesn’t damage it, the box just swings out of the way. Meaning it WHIPS the mail out into the ditch…More than once we’ve found the mail under that pine tree behind the mailboxes. Sometimes we may not find it until spring. Hopefully it wasn’t the check we’ve been waiting for. There are three mailboxes as there used to be three homes down our road. The third, unused mailbox our neighbor named “S. Lamb”. The sacrificial lamb. Our neighbors are very witty.
The choir sounds really nice this year. It’s a new conductor and he’s doing a great job with the students. At rehearsal I heard him ask the kids, “Are you ready for the concerts Friday and Saturday?” And they responded, “Thursday and Friday!”
“Good. What time is the concert?”
“7:00”
“Good. What time are you going to be here?”
“6:00”
“Good. Saturday and Sunday concerts, It will be fun!”
“THURSDAY AND FRIDAY!”
“Good.”
Clearly, he’s worked with teenagers before.
In my happy place.
HOW YOU GONNA STAY WARM THIS WEEKEND?
HOW DO YOU THINK YOU WOOD HAVE STAYED WARM 500 YEARS AGO?
Trail Baboon 