2024, Family, Health, Medicine, Uncategorized

Fainting Away

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Every eight weeks we get a call from the Memorial Blood Center.  I assume it’s because her name is before mine in the alphabet; YA gets the first call and usually before I even get my call, she has come to me to pick out a good date for us. 

We went down to our local center as usual but unlike usual, YA got light-headed afterwards and instead of grabbing a snack, put her head down on the table where we were sitting.  This was like an alarm bell going off in the center.  Suddenly there were five folks around us, one bringing a cool cloth, one bringing a wheelchair, two helping to get YA into the wheelchair and one poor gal, who was just hovering but didn’t seem to have a specific job.  YA actually lost consciousness for a second in the wheelchair.

The phlebotomist (what a great word) who had done my draw was the one who appointed himself as YA’s guardian while she recovered.  He was very knowledgeable and answered all our questions.  OK, all of my questions.  He was very clear about what he was doing and how long before the next “check-in”.  It was very comforting for the anxious mother.  YA stayed reclined for about 45 minutes before we took off.  She wanted Taco Bell on the way home and then she spent the rest of the afternoon in bed, watching tv. 

I asked if this has soured her on giving blood.  She said she doesn’t think so.  Guess we’ll know in another six weeks or so!

Have you ever seen those fainting goats? 

2024, Food, home, Uncategorized

Wild about Cherries

39 Comments

The plan was just to go into my local Aldis, get the shredded cheddar and a half gallon of milk.  I swear.

You know those big cardboard boxes that usually are full of watermelon at this time of year?  Or all those bags of freezee-pops?  Well, right inside the door was a big cardboard box of cherries.  Bag after bag of gorgeous cherries and at a very good price I might add.  I was powerless.

Yesterday I pitted all the cherries from one of the bags – chopped up the amount was exactly what I needed for a batch of cherry freezer jam – 6 and a half jars.  Fairly quick but the messiest of all the jams I make.  I ended up using my Vidalia chopper – it made just the right-sized bits for the jam and it also didn’t spew cherry juice all over the place. 

But here’s the kicker; you all know that I didn’t just buy one bag of cherries.  I’ve never actually made cherry jam before so wasn’t sure exactly how many cherries I needed.  Well now I know.  With YA out of town for work, it’s just me and that whole bag of cherries. I suppose I could make more jam but I’m already pushing the limit of how much jam I can eat in a year.

What should I do with all these cherries?

2024, animals, Games, Gatherings, sports, Uncategorized

Team Goose

43 Comments

As I was leaving the gym yesterday morning, there was a large group of geese walking away from the building.  I’m not sure why but all I could think of was a group of teenagers having just finished a quick basketball game at the gym, heading off for a burger and a pop. Made me laugh.

For a very short time in high school, I was on the track team.  Very short.  My trail leg didn’t quite clear a hurdle during practice and while it was a life-threatening injury, it was pretty gruesome and it ended my extremely short track career.  That was my only foray into team sports. 

What about you?  Any team sports for you?

2024, Family, Farming Update, Nature, Seasons

Summer Heat

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The weekend Farm Report comes to us from Ben.

The weather is changing. The rain has stopped and the temps and humidity are up. I’ve turned on the chickens fan, and got the ducks in their outside pen.  The ducks are at that awkward stage where a gallon of water last them half a day, everything‘s wet, and they chewed off the string on the bottom of a brand new sack of feed so then I had an open tube that used to have 50 pounds of feed in it. It was time to get them outside.

This was a mixed assortment of ducklings so I don’t really know what I’ve got yet, although six of them are all black, a couple are twice the size of a couple others, and like most teenagers, we just gotta get through this phase. 

It takes a while for the ducks to learn how to get back in again at night, which means for now, Kelly and I have to wrangle them back inside. Everything is still wet down there, and it is stinky mud, and they’re not the smartest animal on the farm, so it’s kind of a whole big thing, but this too shall pass. Eventually. 

I went out with the tractor and loader and moved the downed trees off the edge of the fields. The soybeans were sprayed with fungicide and broadleaf preventer on Thursday. I wanted the tree in the bean field out of the way for that. I’ll be mowing weeds in a week or two, and oats will be ready in 3 weeks or so. I moved two trees out of the oats field.  I saw the neighbors cornfield just starting to tassel Friday afternoon 

I’ve been spending a lot of time rebuilding the stage at the Rochester Repertory Theater. The old stage had been there since we moved there in 2007, and it was built of used lumber then, so it was squeaky and kinda wonky and wore out. Last year’s ‘Give to the Max’ campaign raised money for this new stage. I had a good group of volunteers come in to cut up and haul out the old one. We loaded it on a trailer and I hauled it to the recycling center. I didn’t expect it to cost $450 for disposal. Ouch. There went my budget. 

 Of course, what’s a project without a few extra items thrown into the mix? We are creating a tool room out of the former elevator room, we are insulating some windows, and we are making the control booth window larger too. All good stuff! 

Except that I’m not getting much done on my machine shed shop project. I get a little done, it’s just slow going.  I got steel wrap and the window trim done on one window, so I can get back to the steel siding. I did change the windshield washer pump on my truck and I need to replace one nozzle. And I cut off a tree root and reset some rocks interferring with the wellhouse door. And I got to use a pickax and a grub hoe. 

I’m just not getting the shop work done. 

Thursday, Kelly and I took a road trip to Golden Valley to ‘Monkey Wrench Productions’ and picked up some lighting stuff.

A new lighting console for the Rep theater (thanks to a very nice grant from the Carl and Verna Schmidt Foundation) and with all the construction on Hwy 52 that we ran into, we decided to take a different way home. Came back through Hastings, and had lunch at the ‘Lock and Dam Eatery’. Walked down to the river, and had a nice talk with a photographer. 

A few days ago we took the four wheeler down through the woods. There’s a trail that a neighbor keeps mowed and I had been on part of it, but not all of it before. Although there were places I remembered checking fence 35 years ago when I still had beef cows down there. Like this gate; people would open it in the winter and if not closed again, cows ended up in their yards and they didn’t like that. Guess they never learned the rule to leave the gate like you found it. But that only works for the first person. 

You gotta take your adventures where you can get them. 

What’s the most money you’ve paid to get rid of something?

2024, Family, Food, home, Kids, Nature, Seasons, Uncategorized, Weather

Melting

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I received a text from Daughter on Tuesday in a panic because it was 93° in Tacoma, her apartment was hot except for her bedroom, where she has a portable air conditioner, and her refrigerator had stopped working and everything in her freezer/fridge was melted. She had to throw out eight grocery bags of food. Only the cheese was salvageable.

I immediately went into problem solving mode, inquiring about rental insurance, repairs, etc. This was not what she needed or wanted. She just wanted me to commiserate and console. It turned out to be a problem with the fridge shorting out the fuse panel in her apartment. She just needs to keep an eye on it.

Very few people in the Pacific North West have air conditioning because it rarely gets that hot there. There have been unusual but increasingly frequent heat waves there. I am a person who is always cold, so no matter how hot it is, it rarely bothers me. I could probably do ok there. I remember how excited my parents were when we got an air conditioner installed in the dining area of our house when I was in about Grade 1. It only kept the livingroom cool, but it sure made them feel good.

I have never had to deal with a freezer or fridge that went on the fritz. I often wonder what we would do if we had an extended period of electricity loss given all the freezers we have in the basement. I think I would gets lots of ice to keep everything cold and get a gas powered generator to fill in for the loss of power.

When did you first have air-conditioning? Ever had to deal with a freezer or fridge that malfunctioned? What kind of help do you want when you are upset?

Art, Baboon Achievers, Baboon Blog Redux, Nature, Uncategorized

In Memoriam – Little Jail Bird

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It’s been five years since we lost our Little Jail Bird, Edith.  I think of her often and whenever I tell someone about her, I say what a hero she is to me, that she made a courageous decision to go ahead with the risky surgery rather than live the rest of her life with her illness (her words). In her memory, I’m running her most iconic posting on the Trail.

Until last fall, I had never been to Banning State Park. I had driven by it dozens of time, because when I head up to my sister’s house, I always turn off 35W and take Highway 23 into town. I didn’t know much about Banning, but when I was looking for a day trip, it seemed to fit my needs perfectly.

First, I wanted a park where I could drive there and back in one day without getting too tired. Second, I wanted a park that didn’t involve driving several back roads, because I knew that I would be driving in the dark due to the shorter fall days and my night vision and sense of direction is bad enough that I would get lost unless I kind of knew where I was going. And third, I wanted a state park because I had a state park sticker and wanted to use it as much as possible to get my money’s worth out of it. Banning fit all of those qualifications. Plus it has a waterfall, which is a big plus in my book.

So, off I went, one sunny morning in October. When I arrived, I stopped at the visitor center to get maps and ask where the best spots were. I was so excited. It seems that often when I go north, I am early for the fall colors and often find myself driving home just a few days before “peak”  and this time I was not too early! I said something about that to the woman at the desk (while trying to not jump and down in excitement) and she shook her head woefully and told me in a discouraging tone, “You’re going to see LOTS of brown out there.” Gee thanks, way to burst my bubble.

Of course, since I drove all the way up there, I figured I better go on the hike anyway even if I would see mostly brown. I drove to the parking area and when I stepped out of the car and looked up, I knew it was going to be a good day (see header photo).

I hiked all the way to the falls and back and shot lots of photos. It was an incredibly beautiful day: that clear, deep blue sky that you only seem to see on autumn days and – surprise! – lots of colorful leaves on the trees. It can be a challenge shooting in bright sunlight, but I was so overcome by the beauty of it all that I just took that in my stride. There was that wonderful northwoods smell in the air – pine trees and dead leaves. Nothing like it! and nothing else invigorates me like that does.

It was getting pretty cool and the sun was going down quickly by the time I was heading back on the trail but the golden evening light only made things more beautiful and the colors more intense. I went home pleasantly tired and very happy and glad that the woman’s prediction of “lots of brown” wasn’t true.

Any comments / reflections on any or your heros welcome

2024, Automotive, Family

Taking Up Space

47 Comments

When YA was four, my folks sold their house and moved into a condo, a small condo which necessitated some serious downsizing.  Quite a few items went into storage in my aunt’s basement but there were other items that my folks wanted my sister and me to take.  One was a lovely china hutch that had always been earmarked for me and a nice side table that my mom thought would look good with the hutch. 

Since I’ve always been a small-car person, driving down to get the furniture was out of the question.  Renting a truck to drive all the way down and back didn’t seem too appealing either.  We decided to take the train to St. Louis and drive the rental truck back.  It was a fun trip.  We took an atlas and a big batch of stickers which we affixed at every town we sailed through.  YA spent a good couple of hours playing with two other little girls and their large collection of Barbie dolls.

Driving the truck back wasn’t too bad although it wasn’t a good truck for sightseeing as it was not easy to park due to it’s size.  A couple of times we ended up parking in a lot that was quite a distance from where we wanted to go (especially in Hannibal).  Eventually we got home in one piece, unloaded the furniture and returned the truck with not too much fuss.

I hadn’t thought about this trip for a while until yesterday at the post office.  Now that my post office has re-installed the drive-through, I find myself there a couple of times a week.  Yesterday as I was coming down the street, I saw a HUGE RV kind of thing trying to make the tight turn into the little parking lot.  The woman driving had to scuutch it back and forth quite a bit, only getting 2 or 3 feet each time.  Eventually she got straight but had to get out of the vehicle to put her letters in the mail box because the door was too high for the slot.  It would have been much faster to double-park on the street and jump out quickly to mail her envelopes. It reminded me so much of The Intimida and I hoped she didn’t have too many more errands to run driving that beast.

Tell me about a time you drove a vehicle much larger than you were used to!

2024, books, Mysteries, Uncategorized

Sidewalk Marketing

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Walking through Tangletown early last week I noticed what initially looked like a DVD case on a house’s front sidewalk.  I didn’t think too much about it until I found the same things in front of other houses.  Turned out they were books – two different books in fact.  I was intrigued, not enough to pick up one of the books, but enough to while away at least an hour in cyberspace once the dog and I got home from our walk.

The author of the book is the member of a religious group, fairly fringe.  The books are proselytizing products; apparently this guy is filthy rich and has blanketed other neighborhoods and cities with these tracts.  His world view is fairly unappetizing and some of his beliefs are pretty unpalatable (to me anyway).  I read a few excerpts from the two books and I can’t believe that they would convince anyone to join their organization.

But what intrigues me the most is the lackadaisical way the books are distributed, especially considering how much money is being spent on the effort.  Most of the homes in this neck of the woods are on alleys; people tend to go in and out of their backdoors way more than their front doors.  In addition, the books seem to be tossed willy-nilly on front walks, not closer to the homes nor on the front steps or stoops.  It could be a long time before some of these tracts were discovered by their home owners.  In fact, just yesterday on our walk, Guinevere and I saw several of them still sitting out, clearly ruined by the various rains the last two weeks.  I don’t know all that much about marketing but this doesn’t seem to be a good ploy.  Not that I want to encourage this guy by suggesting better methods!

What do you call a sidewalk that swindles you out of your money?

2024, animals, gardening, Nature, pets, Uncategorized

Herb

58 Comments

Today’s post comes to us from Krista.

A couple of years ago, sometime in October, I decided it was time to bring my rosemary plant in. I was just kind of quickly grabbing plants – some would go down to the garage and a couple would stay in the house. I grabbed the rosemary plant and was stunned at what I saw. A fat, little tree frog snuggled up next to the stem of the rosemary plant!  

It was cold! I was surprised to see him there, hunkered down next to the plant in the soil. He was about the color of the soil, very well camouflaged. He was already in a state of torpor.  I knew a bit about the overwintering habits of tree frogs. I knew he needed to be in a wooded area, down beneath the thick leaf litter, maybe under a partially rotten log. I knew he needed to find that shelter himself and that he wouldn’t have time anymore, especially since he was already sleeping.  

I considered my rosemary plant. I knew life would be just fine for me if I didn’t keep it. I knew his life depended on it. But how could I use it to make him a safe place for the winter?  

I took the pot outside near my driveway. In the corner of the front wall of the house and the front steps there’s a terracotta sunny face and some prairie agates. This corner is sheltered and when the sun is out, it’s warm enough to melt ice even if the air temp is in the 20s. The corner also has an abundance of oak leaves.  

I pulled all the leaves and debris out of the corner, set the rosemary plant in the corner, and gently buried it with leaves. Then I placed another empty terracotta pot upside down over the top of all the leaves. The frog was still in the rosemary plant when I buried him, sleeping soundly. I placed the terracotta sun face in front of it to hold it all in place. He had air to breathe through the loose leaves, even though he would be breathing very infrequently. He was covered and had plenty of shelter. He would freeze almost completely in the winter and thaw out again in the spring.  

I asked my friend TeeJay if he thought the frog would make it. I also wanted to name it. TeeJay suggested “Herb” since it clearly loved the rosemary plant. He said he had no idea if it would make it or not, but the shelter I’d made might work. 

I thought about Herb all winter. I wondered if the shelter would protect him. It got awfully cold and we had a lot of snow. Sometime in April I took the shelter apart and looked in my dead rosemary plant. Herb was gone. He’d gotten out on his own.  

Disclaimer: I don’t know how to sex frogs. I have no idea if Herb is female or male. And the frog I saw sunning himself for several hours on my deck rail today may or may not be Herb. It might be one of Herb’s kids! There are lots of tree frogs here. I hear them calling a lot. I haven’t seen one since Herb left though. It was very nice to see Herb today! I know how silly it is but I thought maybe he was going to get too hot so I set him in my herb and flower garden. He can choose which plant he wants. For now, he’ll be catching lots of mosquitoes and flies. He’ll be getting fat for winter. I’m happy to have him here.  

Any unusual pets? Pet names?

2024, Farming Update, gardening, Technology, Weather

Survey Says

109 Comments

Man, it just keeps raining. Thursday afternoon, we were headed to my sister’s house a few miles away, and it rained so hard we could barely see to drive. We had gotten .2″ of rain in the morning, came home to see we gained another 1.6″ which came hard and fast. I could see where it overflowed some culverts, and backed up behind others. We had some washouts on a couple township roads, and I was out Friday putting warning signs up to alert drivers until we can get them graded on Monday. And I said it was wet LAST week. This latest rain came with some wind too and the oats are a little ruffled. Once it starts to turn color and the stalks are dying and turning yellow, it becomes more brittle, and the oats are more likely to shell out. It may rebound a little bit at this point. About a month to go yet before the oats are ready to harvest.

The corn is nearly as high as an elephant’s eye, to quote Oscar Hammerstein.

The soybeans are looking good, but that one low spot has been wet long enough, and a couple acres are turning yellow. There is water standing in a lot of fields now. It’s just plain wet enough, for now.

I finally finished that fence. Glad to have it done.

Building that brought back a lot of memories. One of the things I bought in preparation of making this fence, was 3 pairs of leather gloves. Good cowhide leather gloves. Deer skin is too soft for working with barb wire. As are plain cotton and canvas gloves. I bought extra pairs in smaller sizes for my helpers. (Photo credit to Kelly)

To attach the wire to the steel ‘T’ post, I use wire clips.

They used to be included with each 5-pack of posts. Now they cost extra, of course, and are not nearly so well made. I found it curious, the previous batch wasn’t made as well as the batch before them, either. I can see the companies cutting costs with each manifestation!

The clip should hook on the fence like the previous photo, then I use my pliers to bend the end around the wire.

The new ones are lighter wire, and they don’t snap on like the old ones. Cheap, cheap, cheap.

Course, we didn’t always have the clips. In that case, we would cut a piece of wire about 20″ long, separate the strands of wire, (barb wire is two strands twisted together: one with barbs, and one without) wrap one end on the wire, go twice around the post and over the fence wire, and attach to the wire again on the other side of the post. Doing that on a post this week, I heard my dad’s voice teaching me how to do it. The old fence ends up in a heap and will go to scrap metal.

A new roll of barb wire is 1320′ long. I used two full rolls and was about 150′ short. Good thing I had an old roll left in the shed. I think it was from Kelly’s Dad. I had to use that to make the gate, and to finish one narrow end of the fence.

1320′ is 80 rods. 80 rods is a quarter mile. One rod is 16.5 feet. Dad used the term ‘rods’ when describing the size of fields, but I don’t think anyone uses the term anymore, maybe not even surveyors.

When I was measuring fields for the ASCS office, I had an actual metal wire that was 66′ long- a “chain”. And a rod is a 1/4 of a chain. And I had a belt pack with 10 metal hooks in which to pass the wire through as I walked a field. I only used it a few times because it would snag and slip out of the loops and it was a huge pain in the tuckus. Mostly we used a measuring wheel that counted in chains. The wheel itself was maybe 2 1/2′ feet in diameter, so I don’t know how it figured out the distance, but it was the official tool for measuring fields.

Curiously, most township roads have a 66′ right of way. Thirty Three feet from the center of the road including the ditch. 33′ is two rods. Coincidence??

The ducks are doing well and enjoying their new pen.

Wild black raspberries are turning ripe. Yummy on vanilla ice cream. 

Any unusual units of measurement you use?