The iris is my favorite flower; I have always loved them. It’s probably an inherited trait; I’m pretty sure it was one of my mother’s favorites. To be honest, I don’t know for sure as my mom was never a flower planter. She did like to do yard maintenance but didn’t add shrubs or flowers in any of the homes we lived in. She did however take us kids to the Missouri Botanical Gardens every year, always during the time that the iris gardens there were in full bloom. That can’t be a coincidence.
Alice Hahn Goodman Iris Garden (photo credit: Heather Osborn)
I have iris planted all over my yard, front and back, and in a wide variety of colors. The iris in the header photo is the first to bloom this season – I don’t even know the name of it. It was supposed to be an orange variety but when it came up the following spring it was this startling white. Gertens actually credited me for them so not only are the gorgeous, but they were free. Two of my favorite things.
Of course this year these blooms are bringing my mother to mind so today I am remembering her and thanking her for infecting me with the love of iris!
Any blooms you’re remembering today (literal or metaphorical)?
I think it’s really interesting that aluminum foil in the oven doesn’t get very hot. I can pull it out with my fingers. So I googled it. And learned this:
Extreme Thinness (Low Mass):Standard foil is incredibly thin (about 16 micrometers). Because there is so little metal, there isn’t enough total heat energy to warm up your thick, water-filled skin. The instant you touch it, your cooler fingers absorb the tiny amount of energy, dropping the foil’s temperature immediately.
High Conductivity:Aluminum is an excellent heat conductor. Heat passes through it and dissipates into the cooler room air almost instantly.
Isn’t that interesting!
Wednesday was my first day of half summer vacation. I work half time at the college until June, then I’m off for a couple months. I worked at home ALL DAY Wednesday.
I had my annual performance review at the college the other day. As I prepared for that and looked for a paper copy of last year’s review I found a phone book on my desk. I guess I kinda knew it was there. I haven’t opened it in a while. It was from 2014. I put it in the round file finally.
This is a phone book, kids!
I finished planting soybeans last Saturday.
Sunday I drove over it all with the drag. The fields look great! Smooth and even. Hopefully they get lush and green soon.
It was sprinkling late Sunday evening when I was out with an old hand cranked seeder spreading grass seed on one of my new field boundaries.
This thing has hung in the basement as long as I can remember. Asking my siblings, we all played with it but no one remembers seeing anyone actually use it. I’m thinking dad used it to seed grass around the house after it was built. But I’m sure I’m just making that up.
The directions are on the bottom:
I have a few thoughts. I don’t know what 2.5 MPH is when walking, and a spread of 18 feet?? You gotta really be cranking that thing to get 18 feet! Man, I don’t know how the old guys did it back in the day seeding acres and acres with this thing.
I am planting ‘BLM #4’. It’s a quick growing pasture mix commonly containing ryegrass, tall fescue, and Kentucky bluegrass.
At home Padawan and I got a lot done this week. Cleaned out the seed and power washed the corn planter. Parked it outside for the moment and pulled out the seed wagon. Cleaned that off and parked it away. As we were rounding up flowerpots for Kelly, we got sidetracked by crap in a corner of the old shed and ended up hauling out a gator load of scrap iron and a gator load of garbage.
Tired
I’ve wanted to clean up that corner, just didn’t intend to do it then. It was clean back in 1968 when we were living in the machine shed, then it turned into the tire storage corner. I’m down to about 5 old tires to get rid of, and 3 good spares I store there. And once you start a spare tire corner, it becomes a junk corner real quick. Padawan cut the top off a tote while I was cleaning the planter so we can use a second tote for scrap iron. I forgot about a zoom meeting on Wednesday. Had it on my calender… even knew about it in the morning. Then got a text from someone asking if I was coming to the meeting. I joined from the tractor.
Padawan and I made a fence and got the adolescent chicks out.
We put mulch around the seedling trees and starting making a, sort of, ‘tent-fence’ to keep the deer from eating the tree’s and peeling bark off the tiny little things. Stupid deer! These little tree’s are costing us a lot of money! Water totes, pump, hose, fencing, Mulch was free, then more fencing and more posts… jeepers. And who knows how they’ll survive next winter. I don’t have high hopes.
I need to clean out the grain drill yet.
Oops. Forgot to turn on the drill in time there.
Right up at the end of our driveway there’s this gap in the oats field.
It’s the first thing you see driving in. I’ve seen it coming all spring, I need to get out there and replant that. Course it will always be a month behind. But a bare spot allows weeds to grow. And I have several bushels left in the drill to clean out so I may as well go plant that and fill in a few light spots in another field.
Padawan has gotten a new job. He’ll be working 11:00 AM – 8:00PM Tuesday – Saturday. I’m gonna miss him. He and I have really connected the last few months. I enjoy having him around and he kinda likes having us as his surrogate family. In fact, he listed me as “Family Friend / Dad” on the job application. Awwwww…
As I drove to Brookings this week I heard MPR play a recording by Van Cliburn. I remembered my confusion, as a child, regarding his name. I could never figure out why no one ever mentioned his first name. My confusion stemmed from growing up in an area heavily populated by Dutch immigrants. There were Vanden Hoeks, Van Neuenhuizens, Van Roekels, etc, so I thought Van Cliburn was his full last name. Imagine my surprise when I realized Van was his first name and he wasn’t Dutch!
This memory triggered another language based misunderstanding regarding Offenbach. In one of my first piano books I had a very simple piece written by Offenbach, but I didn’t know that was a formal name. I thought it was a German word that meant that you had to stand up when you played the piece, getting “Off the bench or off your backside”. I remember my piano teacher trying not to laugh when I explained my reasoning for why I stood up to play the piece.
A few weeks ago I was complaining to my daughter in law about my dislike for my exercise class, but how it was helping me improve my strength and stamina. Grandson was eying the Tylenol bottle at the time, and asked why, if I took Tylenol and it said “extra strength” did I even go to my class, since the Tylenol would give me extra strength. We explained it was the Tylenol that was strong, but it didn’t make me strong.
I think my favorite childhood misunderstanding was that held by a good friend from college. He was an accomplished oboe player from a small town in Eastern ND. The summer after he graduated from high school he travelled to Europe with a concert band from the International Music Camp (located on the ND/Canadian border). They played a concert in Washington, DC before heading overseas. He told me his confusion hearing the length of time the flight to Europe would take from DC, because it seemed so short, and his embarrassment realizing that his entire life he thought Washington, DC was in Washington State, hence the shorter travel time!
There’s never any warning. Trader Joe’s Fearless Flyer doesn’t have a set schedule – without any notice it shows up in my Inbox. In the olden days (back when the dinosaurs roamed the planet) it would appear in the snail mail box. It’s the same document these days but I have to admit that I enjoyed relaxing with a cup of coffee or tea and leafing through the hard copy.
But this is not a rant about the death of print. I swear. It’s more a rant about how YA and I are completely helpless in the face of this flyer. It’s unbelievable; we are both completely drawn to the new (and probably never-to-be-seen-again) products that are featured. A little bit like the seasonally colored items that I can’t stay away from.
The theme of the flyer and the seasonal items this time is “strawberry”. While I love fresh strawberries and I practically live on my strawberry jam, I’m not otherwise a massive strawberry fan. But YA is. And there are certainly lots more items featured in addition to the strawberry-laden stuff. We made a list and I headed out. Managed to find everything on the list with the assistance of a customer service gentleman who went to the back and found two items that were out on the shelves. Here is a partial list of what I came home with:
Pickle Potato Chips: these were primarily for YA – she’s also a fan of Pickle Pizza at the fair.
Parmesan Tapenade: I love all kinds of tapenade, so this looked promising. It made a great pizza topping on Tuesday.
Potato Cheese Stix: like it says. Cubed potatoes, mixed with cheese, frozen on a stick. YA says they’re pretty good.
Spicy Taco Sauce: This turned out to be a great sauce for the afore-mentioned potato-cheese stix.
Strawberry Gummy Bears. Completely for YA. I never even liked jujubes when I was a kid, so no gummies for me now.
Turkish flatbread with cheeses, spinach and onion. In the freezer section – can’t wait.
Spicy Spuds. Another freezer options – spicy roasted potatoes.
Oat Bites. There are two kids – PB&J and Raspberry. Bitty little muffins with filling.
Strawberry Snickerdoodles. I might try this although YA will probably eat most of them
Garlic Salted Mixed Nuts. They also have little garlic toasted chips in the can. Quite nice.
There were several other things, including a six-pack of San Pellegrino; we splurge on this a couple of times a year. None of these items were necessary and neither of us had a plan for any of it, although I did get a pizza dough while I was there, thinking about the tapenade. I’m of two minds about this silliness. One the one hand, it was a lot of money for nothing that we had a plan for. On the other hand, it’s food; we have to eat regardless of the absurdity of the food items.
Tried anything new (food or otherwise) the past couple of weeks?
In looking for my packing list on my pc last night, I found a Word file titled “From Books I Like”. It’s only a couple of pages long and I would not have remembered that I have this document if I hadn’t stumbled upon it. It has a few quotes from books that I’ve read; one of the quotes is that wonderful metaphor about the town from TheEgg&I by Betty MacDonald that I’ve written about before. Then there are two other quotes from Michael Perry’s OffMainStreet. One is another transfixing metaphor….
“Summer is a seducer. After bundling through another tight-lipped winter, after enduring the mounting frustration of spring’s titillating dance of veils, we gape as summer comes sliding down her blazing ecliptic like a woman down a banister. She laughs with her head thrown far back; she throws her hands high in the air, releasing fistfuls of butterflies. She belly dances through the cornfields until the dust rises like a charmed snake, hanging in fat curls, leaving you cotton-mouthed. She makes the fox pant, she drives the hawk to think air. Weaker creatures curtain themselves away to complain.”
Fairly appropriate as I’m enjoying the beginning of spring/summer this week. My major gardening push is done so now I can enjoy my yard without massive effort. Bird feeders are full, hummingbird feeders are out (although I haven’t seen any hummingbirds yet). YA and I have new Adirondacks in back as one of our old ones gave up the ghost a couple of weeks back. Windows open. No fans down from the attic yet although I have had my overhead fan going a couple of times in my bedroom. Did my twice-a-year laundering of my bedding and allergy covers. Swapped out my spring/summer wardrobe for my winter one. Aaaaahhhhhh.
Of course, unearthing these quotes on the pc makes me wonder if I have other files like this started and squirrelled away. Suppose I’ll have to take a look one of these days!
Muscle memory is an amazing thing. On Saturday, YA and I had our next-door neighbors over for lunch. Just veggie burgers and corn on the grill. At the last minute, we decided it was a little too chilly to eat outside, so I set the table inside.
I set out seven little bowls in the kitchen. Onion slices, tomato slices, pickles and Boston lettuce to get started. Just as I started to squirt ketchup into the fifth bowl, YA walked in and immediately said “what are you DOING?” I told her I was putting the condiments in bowls and she pushed back with “WHY?” It took me a few minutes of standing at the counter, looking at the bowls before I realized why I was about to put ketchup, mustard and mayonnaise in little bowls.
When I was growing up, condiments went into little bowls. Not just for when we had company, but all the time. Even when we had dinner at my Nana and Pappy’s on Saturday nights, condiments went into little bowls. In fact, if condiments ever went on the table in their bottles, it was called “pinkert style”. It wasn’t until I was in high school that my mom told me why. When she was growing up, they lived a few houses down from the Pinkerts. Apparently the Pinkerts never put their condiments into little dishes… they always just set the bottles out willy nilly. So it turns out that my grandparents calling that “pinkert style” was actually quite pejorative – I never knew.
While I almost automatically put out little bowls when company comes over, YA and I do not do this when it’s just the two of us. Of course, YA and I eating a meal that requires condiments on the table is fairly rare.
On Saturday I put out the bottles; I really don’t need to be the third generation getting little bowls dirty in the name of shaming some family up the block from my grandparents!!
Any habits that have come down the generations in your family?
Neither of my folks liked crowds. Long lines, throngs of folks – count them out. I’ve never been sure why I can take lots of folks but whatever propensity I have, it has been handed down to YA.
The two busiest days at the Minnesota Zoo are always the last Saturday and Sunday of their very popular Farm Babies program. They have all kinds of activities and music out at The Farm and there are always plenty of babies; this year baby cows, llamas, goats, lambs and piglets. YA and I had other things going on for the first four weekends so it was this past weekend or no Farm Babies program until next year. We’ve been to the last weekend of Farm Babies before but it was even more crowded than we remember.
Of course, almost everybody was a young family with kids (and those proverbial strollers – I promise I’m not whining about strollers, despite the photo above). It was, however, truly amazing to see the number of strollers, especially when they were “parked” in several locations. Wow!
YA and I have different modus operandi at the zoo. She will walk at my pace but doesn’t always stay right at my side if I dilly dally. I am more than able to stand and watch a moose do basically nothing for 10 minutes but if I do this, sometimes YA will wander off to see something else. Conversely, she can pet a baby cow forever. On Saturday, there was a restaurant chain sponsoring a scavenger hunt. There were three stations that you had to find and have you little map stamped. I thought it was a hoot but YA didn’t want to play (this was when she went off to pet that baby cow).
One of the projects in the Activity Barn was making homes for mason bees who apparently are solitary bees that don’t live in hives. I thought this was very interesting and I let the volunteer tell me everything. When I was done there, I found YA petting goats. The one time we were perfectly synced was when we got hungry for lunch!
Toward the end of our day we stopped at the Service Desk – I wanted to ask when Llama Trek was going to open and to find out if the snow monkeys (whose exhibit is being re-vamped right now) were still here in Minnesota or if they were hanging out at a different zoo until their habitat is finished. The guy behind the desk was talkative and I’m not even sure how we got from the snow monkey habitat discussion to the Kodiak bear who broke the window at the zoo several years back. Or how the zoo has multiple possible plans for adding new bears now that there is only one left.
As we were leaving YA said “I didn’t think he was ever going to stop talking.” I laughed and said “I could have stayed and listened to him talk about the zoo all day.”
I guess it’s different strokes for different folks. But neither of us were bothered by the big crowds!
When was the last time you visited a zoo? Any favorite zoos? Zoo animals?
WE’re at 384 growing degree units. Two hundred over average and 600 predicted in the next 14 days. It takes 100-120 units for corn to emerge.
Remember GDU’s come from a formula using temps above 50°F and under 86°F. Divided by 2 and subtracting 50. And…I don’t know, my mind went blank when they put parenthesis in.
The tree service was in on Tuesday with their remote controlled stump grinder and he ground out twenty-some stumps in about an hour. Pretty slick!
Kelly and I watered the seedling’s a second time. Got a bigger tote and strapped it in the gator. Haven’t got the pump hooked up yet… maybe next week.
The first part of this week was commencement set up. Monday I picked up the rental lights just outside of Rochester. Got them hung, cabled, and running on Monday. A few extra trips up the lift because something weird was happening. Tuesday they start adding decorations to the stage. I add some lights on the ground to uplight banners, and just some ‘eye candy’ for the crowd while waiting for 2 hours. Yep, Grandma and Grandpa / moms and dads arrive at 4-ish for a 6:00 ceremony. Gotta get a good seat, right?
View from the stage
From the top in the lift
My station
I’m working on planting soybeans.
On Thursday another piece fell off the planter, and on Friday, after fixing, I got rained out.
Treated soybean seed
Kelly and I always enjoy taking a farm tour in the gator, but it’s been awhile since we have had time. We fit one last week. Saw a male and female pheasant. The next day, doing fieldwork, I saw 3 pairs. There are several males that don’t seem to be too afraid of me and the tractor– as long as I’m moving. If I stop to take a picture, they scatter. They are so pretty, and nice to hear.
I heard a song on the ’40’s radio station last week, called ‘I never See Maggie Alone’ by Kenny Roberts. He’s a yodeling cowboy. We were just talking about that!
Here’s part of the chorus:
One night while we were out walkin’ And she grew tired of talkin’ She invited me up to her home I turned the lights down, they were too bright Oh, what a night, but when I turned on the light There was her father, her mother Her sister and her brother Oh, I never see Maggie alone
There are several verses, he never does get Maggie alone. I sure do enjoy the ’40’s music. They don’t write songs like that anymore.
As I plant, especially for corn, I need to think ahead and how the combine will be moving through the field. It needs room to turn around on the ends and it can’t make corners too sharp.
Especially when planting over at the cemetery, because it’s so goofy shaped, there was a few times I apologized out loud for leaving a dead end row or doing something stupid. The nice thing is Craig, in the combine, is pretty good at just shifting over a row or, when done right, he can sort of cut sideways at least enough to make a path. But still, folloing along and suddenly the row ends?? What the heck, Ben. Yep. Sorry about that.
Actual fields
Planting app final map
The boating app tracks
The guys who harvest my corn use a 16 row corn planter, and their corn head is 8 row. Everything fits nicely. I have a 6 row planter. The first pass through the field he has to take 8 rows. The six is no problem, row 7 and 8, it depends how well and straight I planted as to how well he can get those two. Once open though, and once he has a path, then he’ll leave two rows empty and just take the 6. And you never want to take the outside 6 rows first, because there may be a tree down or something on the edge you need to go around. So they take the second set of 6 on that first pass. Later on, once there’s room, they’ll come back for the outside rounds. And with the deer damage, there’s not always much there anyway.
Soybeans and oats doesn’t matter so much because you don’t need to follow the rows. The different headers will cut across without issue.
Podcast listening this week has been “Strike Force Five”, in honor of Stephen Colbert’s show ending. The Strike Force Five is Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen, Seth Meyers, John Oliver, and Jimmy Fallon, who started this podcast back in 2023 during a writers strike as a way to support their show staff. Now, with Stephen leaving, they’ve reunited. And they laugh a lot and tell stories and it’s fun to listen to them.
When I was in high school I was fortunate to have wonderful music teachers and choir/ band directors. My favorite choir director, Mr. Phelps, was a Concordia College, Moorhead grad who eventually settled in the Twin Cities, where he was equally beloved by students there.
Mr. Phelps, aka Showboat Phelps to other local directors, really knew how to put on a show, be it musicals or difficult choral pieces. One Christmas we did The Messiah. It is a demanding piece with a very high First Tenor part. Mr. Phelps had no qualms about enlisting the Second Altos to sing First Tenor in the Messiah as well as on any other song the Tenors struggled with. I am a Second Alto, and to this day I still know the First Tenor part from The Messiah much better than the Alto part.
My speaking voice isn’t particularly low, but singing Tenor in high school as my voice was maturing kept my singing range really low. My voice breaks at the C above Middle C, and I am able to get down comfortably to the D below Middle C. That is pretty low.
Last week in church choir the Bass section was having a hard time with a couple of measures that had several accidentals. it was identical to the Alto part an octave higher. The director joked that it was too bad we couldn’t sing the part with the Bass section in their register. I told her I could, and I did. The Sopranos were astounded I could sing that low. I was the only one who could sing the measures correctly. Thanks, Mr. Phelps. It’s just too bad you didn’t have me sing along with the Sopranos as well as the Tenors. Think of what my vocal range would have been if you had!
What were your best/worst school music experiences? What is your vocal range?
Claustrophobia, agoraphobia, hydrophobia, hemophobia, acrophobia, Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia. There are a LOT of phobias out there. Luckily I’m only stuck with two that occasionally bug me.
Acrophobia bugs me the most. I don’t like to take the escalators at the Mall of America. I don’t like to stand near the edge of anything and a couple of those tall tall buildings in London did throw me for a loop. Three weeks ago, my next-door neighbors got a new roof and after a couple of hours, I had to take my book and move downstairs because watching them work out of my bedroom window was giving me the heebie jeebies.
My claustrophobia is milder and mostly manifests in my deep desire to not be underground or in a cave. Oh, and I don’t care much for curtains – give me a good valance any time. I’ve passed twice on the underground river at Xcaret in Mexico and doing the big cave on Gibraltar really got my heart going. I even stopped reading the Anna Pigeon series after a book set in a cave. Ish.
YA doesn’t have a titch of claustrophobia and years ago hung curtains in her room in addition to window shades (I am NOT a window shade kind of gal). Yesterday a package got delivered and she swooped on it immediately. Curtains. When I asked why she needed new curtains she said that her shades had started to curl on the edges and she decided black out curtains would be better. Black out curtains. I’m not making this up. If she only pulled these curtains during the night, when we have a lot of ambient light from living on a county street, I could kind of understand, but like her previous curtains, these have been pulled shut 24/7. It’s dark in there.
I’ve never wanted a cave of my own so it’s hard for me to get her desire for one, but it’s her room so if she feels the need to have a grotto of her own, so be it!
Any fears you’ll cop to? Do you like serious darkness for sleeping?
Trail Baboon 