The son of my BFF is what we used to call “a gentleman farmer”. He and his family live in the big farmhouse and they have goats and chickens, a massive garden and maple trees. Every fall he taps the trees and boils down the sap to make syrup. He also has black walnut trees which are harvested. I don’t understand the science behind any of it but the output of the maples and the black walnuts varies greatly from year to year. I try never to get my expectations up about whether I will see the syrup and about whether any of the syrup will be “maple black walnut”.
This year the maples did fine but not the black walnuts our holiday gift was maple alone. This is not a problem for me and I was looking forward to a couple of months of fresh from the farm syrup. (This is particularly good when paired with Ben’s fresh from the farm eggs!) YA tends to shy away from foods that are “different”; this means that farm eggs and fresh maple syrup are usually left completely to me. Last years black walnut syrup was all mine. Delicious.
For some reason YA decided to taste this year’s syrup. Then she decided to make pancakes that night. She’s now made pancakes four more times since Christmas – she even went out and purchased a new box of Bisquick after she used up the box in the cabinet. I’m thinking I’d better make some pancakes of my own pretty darn quickly or I won’t even get to TASTE this year’s syrup!
How do you like your pancakes? Is there a place that makes particularly good pancakes?
We’re putting away all the holiday decorations today. Normally we do everything today but YA has been chomping at the bit so started cleaning up “around the edges” the last couple of days. She doesn’t do more because, of course, she’ll leave most of it to me. Not a problem… pretty much everything goes into the plastic bins that are currently sitting on the front porch. Only takes about an hour or so.
Except for the wreath. I like to leave it up until after Chinese New Year. Not entirely sure why – except that they are darn expensive and I like having it on the front door with our welcome sign.
Still “discussing” whether to put the tree out in the back. YA wants to but I’m a little skeptical that it might lure little critters into a false sense of security when there is a killer beast let loose in the yard several times a day. I’m campaigning for the front yard but YA thinks that will look messy from the street. It’s pretty much the last thing that will be done today – plenty of time for more “discussion”.
Other than that, no particular acknowledgement of the beginning of the new year. We used to write bad habits that we wanted to leave behind onto flash paper and burn them up but haven’t done that for years. I’m not even sure the magic store, where you can find flash paper, is still in the Mall. As I suspect is the case for most of us on the Trail, it’s an arbitrary day and if you’re not already in the mood to make changes to your life, circling this day on the calendar probably won’t do it. Don’t tell the weight loss companies who are right now flooding the market with ads that I said so.
Will put up all the 2024 calendars today as well!
Do you still write checks – how long does it normally take you to write the correct year in the date?
Just like that, another year gone. 414 dozen eggs sold in 2023. April was the highest with 63 dozen sold. September was lowest at 20 dozen. I’m thinking in 2024 I’m gonna try recording how many dozen I box up rather than sold.
2023
We lost some really good friends. We made some new ones. We got a new dog. We finally took a weekend trip after a few years of hunkering at home. We saw some fantastic theater, (I was even in a show), had a visit from my friend Keith for the first time in 25 years, and got so much stuff done at home! Most of it had to do with the shop remodeling, but still, it’s a wonder to look over the list and see how much got checked off! Just for fun, I put the list in a spreadsheet and there was 221 line items. Twenty of them aren’t done yet. There’s always next year.
I was grateful to not fight major health issues this year, and to revel in the simple joy of walking up a hill or carrying some feed. Or just to wander up the road from barn to shed!
We got some concrete poured and started work on the shop. The crop year wasn’t the best. And if you enjoy snow, the year didn’t end well for you. There was a lot of snow at the beginning of 2023, but it melted fairly quick.
I’ve been rebuilding the carburetor for the 630 tractor. (Line item #192) I had a good start on it early this week, but the last few days I’ve been busy elsewhere. But in my “New Heated Shop”*‘ (*sort of) I can keep working. I try not to think about how the tractor itself is out in the UNHEATED part of the shed. But that’s just 8 bolts and a couple fittings… right? Easy Peasy. Might be the first thing of 2024 to check off that list! I think I’m even gonna use most of the parts. I spent an hour on the phone with the oldest parts guy at my John Deere store, and another guy who restores antique tractors, to figure out one piece on my carburetor that’s not in the pictures. They figured it out. Surround yourself with good people. That might be my goal for 2024.
2024- I need to renew my private pesticide applicators license. I haven’t used it more than a few times in the 25+ years I’ve had it, but I’ll renew it again, simply because it’s one more link to farming I want to keep.
Monday, 1/1/2024 I’ll go round up the mileage and hours on all the vehicles and tractors and fill in my annual mileage spreadsheet. I always enjoy that. I’ll need to start finding numbers for our assets page. That too is pretty interesting. I had a young lady tell me how rich farmers are. She didn’t know we farm. I had to explain a few things to her. We have a lot of ASSETS, and we have good credit. We may or may not have a lot of cash in the bank. Sometimes were rich in daughters only*, or dirt. Just not cash. Every farm is different.
*Thank you, Greg Brown.
Looking ahead, I’ve ordered a textbook for next semester’s class on creative writing which begins on 1/8. An in-person class so that should be fun. Got crops planned, will be ordering seed and inputs soon.
There was a beautiful full moon on Tuesday night,. I believe it was called the Cold Moon by the Farmer’s Almanac, from a Mohawk tradition. I always wonder who names the moons, and why, and who decides what the names will be. If I were to name the moon tonight it would be the Fog Moon. It is really foggy here in Brookings. I am glad we reached our destination by dark. Grandson thought that we should name the moon the Cat moon.
I don’t know what the track record for accuracy is for the Farmer’s Almanac. I don’t seem to think it is that accurate. We have a native friend who thinks he can tell how bad the winter will be by how thick the chokecherries are in the spring and how high up from the bottom of the draws some of the flowering prairie plants are growing. He is never right, but he likes to try anyway.
Come up with some new names for the full moon this year. What is your go to source for weather prediction?
Manitoba and southwest North Dakota have quite a few Ukrainian communities. We have several Ukrainian friends on both sides of the border. Some are members of the Ukrainian Orthdox Church, some the Ukrainian Catholic Church. Both denominations have married priests. I don’t quite understand that.
Both denominations also seem to celebrate Christmas on January 6th instead of December 25th. I personally don’t know if I could stand waiting until January 6th for Christmas to be over. I read with interest the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in the Ukraine militantly moved Christmas celebrations to December 25th this year in a punch in the eye to the Russian Orthodox Church.
Husband was doing some idle research and found that in Scotland, Ireland, and in Amish communities in the States, January 6th is called Little Christmas, and there are traditions of the men that day doing all the women’s work. How big of them! I certainly hope in those societies that Christmas isn’t just for women to arrange and orchestrate! It certainly isn’t in our house.
I regret that our basement is all in disarray and our TV and various media players are all packed up waiting for carpenters and carpet layers. One of my favorite recordings is the 1998 production of Twelfth Night from Live From Lincoln Center with Paul Rudd and Helen Hunt in the leads. Watching that is a nice way to end Christmas.
When is Christmas over for you? Any memories or good quotes from Twelfth Night, by The Bard?
YA and I don’t do much fast food but we do like Taco Bell. I’m probably in the drive-through at the Edina location every couple of weeks.
Two weeks ago our fridge was filled with ingredients for party food so I stopped by Taco Bell on the way home for lunch. We almost always get the same thing so it wasn’t a very eventful stop until I came around the back of the building. Right in front of me was a Papa John’s delivery car, complete with the sign on top.
I thought it was pretty funny and understandable. Even if you get all the pizza you want to eat for free when you work at Papa John’s, every now and then you probably need something else to tease your tastebuds.
Hopefully his management thinks it’s funny too and not poor advertising!
Our daughter had an inexplicable yearning for a caramel roll the other day and went out to find one in Tacoma. No one she asked knew what she was talking about. Some people suggested sticky buns, but they didn’t look right to her. The ones she likes are available in every little café around here. The caramel is at the bottom of the pan, and the rolls are dumped upside down when they come out of the oven and the caramel drips down over the hot rolls.
She did some research and found that the caramel rolls that she was familiar with as well as the name caramel roll are peculiar to the Dakotas, Minnesota, and maybe parts of Wisconsin. She phoned some friends from California and they confirmed that they had never heard of caramel rolls. They had sticky buns. A Bismarck friend who lives in Virginia said no one there knew what caramel rolls were. Her best friend from childhood now lives in Reno, NV, and she said no one there spoke of caramel rolls, either. That led to her friend getting her aunt’s recipe for the caramel rolls that she bakes at her restaurant called The Cowboy Café in Medora, ND. Daughter sent me the recipe. It makes six pans of rolls, and the girls are hoping I can reduce the recipe to a single batch so they can make them. Her friend’s mother also sent them a caramel roll recipe from a cookbook published by a Lutheran church in Sharon, ND.
Husband found the cookbook from my Lutheran Church in Luverne. It had two caramel rolls recipes. He also found caramel roll recipes in the New Prague Hotel Cookbook and in The Norske Nook Cookbook from Osseo, WI. I sent the recipes to Daughter and her friend in Reno. They are thrilled. They both like to bake. Now they have multiple recipes to choose from when they are feeling homesick.
What do you miss most when you are away from home? Ever had genuine homesickness?
Merry Christmas! All the Baboons have presumably opened their gifts by now. W e have always been Christmas Eve present openers. This year we are we are waiting until Thursday when we arrive in Brookings to open the family presents our daughter in Tacoma sent us to transport to South Dakota. We had to wrap them.
My mother was an expert wrapper, as is my best friend. I am a so-so wrapper. I find it annoying to wrap a gift that is only going to be ripped open in a fraction of the time it took to wrap it. I am just not meticulous in that way. Don’t even talk to me about gift tags, ribbons, or bows!
Husband is left handed and right eyed, and watching him try to wrap gifts is painful. He insisted wrapping my gift from our daughter, even though I offered to. He admits everyone will know he wrapped it. There are tears in the paper and an unusually large amount of tape. He is just happy he could do it.
When do you open Christmas gifts?What kind of a wrapper are you? How is your Christmas Day shaping up?
No snow this year. I’m kinda OK with that. I’m sure it’s coming yet…we got 2 or 3 months of winter to get through, so I’m hooking up the rear blade and I’ll keep watching the forecast and I’ll get the snow blower in the shed if I have too. We will need the moisture somehow, and the cold weather does help kill bugs, but these up and down temps are really hard on cattle. Pneumonia and respiratory issues are common with these temperature fluctuations.
The farm magazines are making predictions and they pretty much always say “stay the course”. Don’t make drastic changes in crop rotations or marketing plans. Yet. I’ve gotten pecuniary plans from the co-op for fertilizer and spraying for 2024 and things are actually down a little bit from 2023. A few thousand dollars here and a few thousand there and pretty soon I’m talking real money. But I’m not planning any more major projects for next year. Yet. I mean beyond getting the fourth wall in the shed. We may not do that next slab of concrete. Yet.
County property tax adjuster was here this week. The permit for my shed remodeling project came in and he was following up. I know the guy from our township business with the county, and we talked for half an hour. Five minutes of that had to do with the shed remodeling.
Yesterday I got a 100 gallon propane tank placed so I can have temporary heat in the shed this winter. The deliver guy joked I was going to use a lot of propane trying to heat the whole shed. Yep. I better get the temp wall up. That’s my plan for these couple warm days. So far I’m not making much progress.
While I’m making plans for shed heat, back on Sunday night it was 8° and the well house thermometer was showing 35° and I am a gambling man and I hate to pay for electricity I don’t really need to use, but it’s also worth hedging your bets and I went out and turned on the well house heater. It was 18° the next morning but I slept soundly knowing I didn’t have to worry about that. Myself, and I know other people, use that phrase: I may do something that seems extreme, but, “I will be able to sleep at night”.
Got my final dividend check from AMPI, the co-op to whom I sold milk. They are on a 20 year dividend payout and this was my last one. Whopping $2.19 cents. Twenty years since I milked a cow and did all those chores seems like a lifetime ago. Seems like a whole DIFFERENT life. And it really was. I wouldn’t of missed it for anything. I still miss the cows’ personalities, and the situations they gave me and the people I met as a result.
Our kids daycare having a barn and farm tour.
Our bulk tank was a “Zero” brand. Kind of an oddball as the company had a unique design that didn’t work the way most dairy pipelines did. It was the first pipeline we installed in 1983 replacing the Surge brand buckets. Surge buckets were revolutionary when they came out in the 1920’s. (See this website for a lot of interesting information. “Interesting” if you’re into that sort of thing. https://www.surgemilker.com/history.html
The zero pipeline had some really unique features, but it also had a couple pretty serious drawbacks that affected the cows health. Too complicated to get into here. I replaced the pipeline, (keeping the Zero tank) in the mid 1990s with a Delaval system; a much more traditional system that was easier to service and cheaper parts. I sold the bulk tank a few years after we sold the milk cows. I saw a video online the other day of the same brand of tank and it brought back some nostalgic memories.
This photo was the milk house. The bulk tank is on the left. 600 gallons. Note the step stool to reach the lid for cleaning or samples. The four milker units are hanging, for washing, on the right. Wow, looking at this photo myself gives me so many memories. So many things I fixed over the years and so much time spent in there. The milkhouse was remodeled when we did the pipeline in 1983, but before that it was still the milkhouse and I remember washing the old bulk tank and surge milkers in there and my folks would say, “How did you get so wet??”. Well, I was washing stuff. Shrug. My history.
This photo was the ‘receiver jar’. You can see the milk came into that, and when it was about 2/3rds full, it pumped over to the bulk tank. I really loved having that jar. I know I’ve mentioned it before, but that was my favorite part of dairy farming: watching the milk rush into that and pump out. I’d watch that jar for hours.
Everybody travel safe if you are. Merry Christmas and/or Happy Holidays!
HAVE YOU EVER HAD TO DO SOMETHING SO YOU COULD SLEEP? WHERE WERE YOU IN 2003?
Christmas parties at my behavioral health agency have always been somewhat controversial. Back in the days of the “good ol’ boys” administrators they were boozy and pretty wild evening affairs at the local Elks Club or Knights of Columbus. People brought their spouses or significant others. Husband and I once played harmonica and bass guitar, respectively, in a employee blues band that had our LDS (Mormon) psychiatrist standing on her chair and clapping and shouting. The occasional employee invariably had too much to drink and had to be talked to the next work day about their behavior. We now have far different administrators who are female and more concerned with team building. Our Christmas parties take place in our building during work hours, there is no alcohol, and only employees attend.
Our workplace has been pretty stressful this past year, and many of us are getting burned out. Our head administrator and new clinical director were intent that this year’s party was going to be fun and healing if it killed us. We had our Christmas party on Wednesday. There were about 35 of us. The party was from noon until 4:00. It was considered a staff meeting, so everyone was expected to attend. We had been randomly divided into four teams the end of November and each team had given the assignment to decorate one of the doors in the waiting rooms. They had to be decorated by December 10th. This was a team building exercise. We had to vote on which door was the best. The teams were also assigned various categories of foods to bring for the potluck meal. My team was assigned main dishes and sides. We were encouraged to bring “ethnic” foods. I brought butter chicken, North Indian mixed vegetables, homemade chapati, and basmati rice. (One of our new crisis workers is from India and got tearful eating the vegetables because it tasted like the vegetables her mother makes.) Our Filipina psychiatric nurse brought Lumpia and a chicken dish. Our Ukrainian Crisis Team lead brought cabbage rolls. There were lots of pasta salads, barbecue, snack chips, dips, and desserts.
We then had team competitions playing multiple rounds of Family Feud. My team won. We had a white elephant gift exchange. I got a Willie Nelson chia pet planter kit. I gave a 3-D model of the brain that we had in the basement.
I was pretty exhausted by 4:00 with all the socializing and snacking. (I had got up at 5:00 AM to fry the chapati.) Was the party fun? Yes and no. I don’t think forced jollity works real well, but it was nice to be at work and be able to talk to coworkers and not worry about productivity. Our administrators are already thinking of next December’s team building exercises.
What do you think would make a good team building exercise for a work place? What are the best and worst work parties you had to attend?
Trail Baboon 