The other night I got some mushroom ravioli out of the freezer. It was some pasta we moved from ND. It was purchased at our local ND Family Fare store.
The pasta was somewhat remarkable for being imported from Italy. It is a brand that Family Fare regularly stocks. I am not a big mushroom fan, but the pasta was pretty good. Our Boommate thought it was absolutely superb. She loves mushrooms.
It had porcini and champagne mushrooms in the filling. We looked up where we might find the brand, and it is specific to Family Fare. The closest stores to us are in Cannon Falls, Litchfield, and Northfield.
The day after we had the pasta, Boommate drove to St. Cloud for a quilt show. She reported massive construction detours, one of which took her close enough to Litchfield for her to justify a side trip to the Family Fare store. It had the pasta brand, but no mushrooms ravioli. Sigh.
I have made ravioli from scratch in the past, but I don’t think I could replicate the mushroom filling. I admire her determination to get to Litchfield. These days the farthest I drive for things is Sioux Falls.
What is the farthest you have gone to get something you really wanted? Ever made pasta from scratch?How are construction season and detours going for you?
Husband and I have very tall ceilings in our dining room, and kitchen. Most of the lights are recessed. These are the lights in the kitchen:
We haven’t had any bulbs burn out, but when we do I am afraid I will have to phone an electrician to come and change the bulb. We haven’t a tall enough ladder, and I can’t manage heights any longer.
The living room also has a very high ceiling with a large fan that works well to circulate air and keep the house cool. You can see it in the header photo. It is little too rococo for my tastes, and like many appliances in our new home it needed to be repaired. I had the electrician come over on Thursday to fix it. The fan worked, but made an intermittent grinding, scraping noise that was maddening to listen to. Sometimes it was quiet, sometimes it wasn’t. It is also very high up, and there was no way we could check it out ourselves.
The electrician figured out that one of the blades was not flush and was making the scraping noise. He told us it needed a very thin shim to raise it up, and that he would “MacGyver” something to solve the problem. It was quite a process to take the globe and other internal parts off to get to the blade turning mechanism, and he did it while standing atop a very tall ladder. He intended to use a very small, thin piece of wood as a shim. He inadvertently broke off the tip of his screwdriver in his attempt to raise the blade mechanism to put in the shim. To his surprise the metal tip stayed under the blade and was exactly the size shim he needed to keep it from scraping. Now it runs really quietly.
I was able to wash out the glass globe before he reassembled the fan. It hadn’t been cleaned out for a very long time. The electrician couldn’t “MacGyver” how to change the direction the fan blades circled, but at least it is quiet.
What have you had to “MacGyver”? Broke many tools? Got ceiling fans?
First off, I am not a runner. Never have been and don’t expect I ever will be. So kudos to those of you that do get out there and run. Having said that, some runners have a much better form than others. And again, not criticizing anyone, this is just an observation. Some people just “glide” and they look so natural as they run. And others, they really don’t look like they’re enjoying it. And some look so “clunky”…I wonder if they’ll have joint issues in a few years. But still! At least they’re out there exercising.
The amount of construction going on in Northwest Rochester is kind of mind-boggling. There is dirt being moved everywhere, and there are so many excavators and dump trucks and earth moving equipment…it’s a kids dream come true! Most of the construction is for apartment buildings. So I guess it’s good for those construction companies, and the operators, and good for the developers. I don’t know how good it is for everyone else.
I was at this intersection Thursday:
Years and years and years ago, this was out in the country and this was a gravel road and I believe there was a trailer house in those trees. I remember going there to visit a friend of a friend or something. I don’t remember any of those details, but I’ve always had a good memory of locations and driving and I just know that I was there once. Now it’s a pretty major intersection on that northwest side of town, and I’m kind of surprised that the trees are still there.
Back on the home front, the fire flies are back and that makes us happy.
Daughter had a birthday and she’s now 31! Wow.
We finally got some rain. Wednesday afternoon about 4:30 we were getting a nice light rain shower and then suddenly the wind picked up. Kelly and I were both working in the office, and papers blew off the desk and she went to close one set of windows while I was closing another set and in that short amount of time, the wind shifted around to the south and the rain came HARD and it was starting to get a little bit scary, and about then it was over. And then I got a call about a tree down on a township road. I was changing clothes when I got another call about the same tree. We had a few branches down on our driveway but nothing serious. Before I got to that tree, a sheriff Deputy called to tell me the tree was down. Yeah I know, thank you. Before I got there, I found a second tree down. It wasn’t blocking the road, just on the shoulder. Got that one cut up got and got a call about a third tree down. Finally got to the first tree, the Deputy was sitting there with his flashers on. We talked township business for a bit and by that point a second supervisor had shown up and the two of us cut up the tree. It was a limb from an oak tree and a lot bigger than it looked in the picture.
Objects may appear smaller than they actuallly are.
But we got it off the road, and we have a real good tree service the township works with. I told them they could come out the next day to pick up the mess. The inch of rain that we got came pretty hard, pretty fast, and there was a little bit of erosion in my new waterway. The wind was so intense I saw some corn really bent over. It was about knee high and it should come back yet, but still, it is traumatic to the plant. I thought maybe the new tile and the springs would be running again but nope, hardly anything there. We’re gonna need more rain than this I guess to cure the drought.
Rebuilt a little bit of fence in the area we call the swamp. The neighbors said they’re gonna bring their cattle out this weekend. I redid one corner of the fence where I planted the Tamarac trees and one little area that we mow and I needed a little more room for the lawnmower. It gave me an opportunity to dig out some bags of electric fence insulators that I still have but typically wouldn’t need to use anymore. I had some barb wire left on an old roll that I’m pretty sure I got from Kelly’s dad 25 years ago. (Not having cattle myself, I happily quit making fence.) It probably would’ve rusted away except it got a bunch of oil spilled on it once and that’s kept it from rusting. Which is good cause I needed about 30 feet of that.
I finally got the dog wash in the garage hooked up and operating. We had hot and cold water added in the garage a couple years ago, and that’s been very helpful, and we had a drain line put in at the same time. I built the walls and base and while I don’t have it tiled yet, I connected the drain and Luna and Humphrey both got baths. Neither of them appreciated it as much as I did. But Humphrey did submit and stood quietly. He’s a good dog that way.
You smell like a wet dog Humphrey.
A niece and her husband came to visit along with their two girls. They have done a real good job convincing the oldest one how cool Uncle Ben and Aunt Kelly are. And when they come to Minnesota, going to visit Uncle Ben on the farm is a pretty big deal. She throws out corn to the chickens, we collect eggs, we ride in the tractor and the gator. She’s 5 1/2 years old. I might have a couple years yet that we are still cool. Her little sister is about 2 1/2. She’s very busy. She’s figuring out we’re the cool aunt and uncle.
I think next week I’m gonna buy a couple bundles of shingles and re-shingle one side of the little building where we store bags of feed. The one side of the roof that needs work is only about 12′ x 8′. I shingled the south side several years ago but the North side desperately needs it. I’ll get one of my summer kids to help shingle. A skill everyone should have.
I know. I know. All bugs are insects, but not all insects are bugs. I had biology minor in college, and took an invertebrate zoology class where I learned that Rock County, where I currently live, is one of the very few counties in MN where they have termites that actually swarm. In ND, we had very few insects or bugs or other pests in the garden. We had the occasional flea beetle on the cabbagey plants. (I applied Sevin, but hated using a pesticide. ) No aphids. No slugs. None of those cane borers in the raspberries. Cabbage worms were easily dealt with by applying Bascillus Thuringiensis, a natural cabbage worm killer. We had virtually no mosquitoes due to being in a semi arid part of the country.
It has come to my attention that there are more insect/bug pests in MN than I remembered after being away for 50 years. I have had incredibly large carpenter ants in the house, presumably living in the decaying sections of our deck, and drain flies in my bathroom. We are planning how to replace the deck. Boommate has abandoned hopes of a hummingbird feeder due to ants getting into the sweet nectar she put out now on two occasions.. I have not yet seen a mosquito, but I am sure they are coming.
Our vegetables are planted in raised beds and thus far we have had no pest issues. A couple of weeks ago we had a pleasant guy from a pest control company come to the house to offer us pest eradication services for ants, hornets, and other home invasion pests. In the past I would have sent such a guy packing, since I hate the thought of pesticide use, but I engaged his services after finding out many of our neighbors enlist his company’s services. They may know more about potential pests than I currently know, and I don’t want any unpleasant bug surprises in the house.
What advice do you have for me regarding MN garden or house pests? What bug or insect issues have you successfully or not so successfully dealt with?
It made me laugh at the time but now I’m thinking that this has to be on purpose. Cereals have been in non-resealable bags for decades now. I can’t think of one single good reason except that not being able to re-seal the bags means the cereal gets stale faster and then we toss the stale stuff and buy new. YA and I have quite a collection of clips that we use for cereal, veggie sausages, pasta, marshmallows – all items that aren’t re-sealable. YA likes to sort these clips by colors on the hood of our oven.
Thinking about this of course led me to thinking about shampoo bottles. According to the internet, shampoo companies began to use the phrase “lather, rinse and repeat” in the direction sections of their bottles. I can’t find anything that specifies which company’s marketing department came up with it first but I’m guessing all the other companies jumped on that bandwagon as fast as their little feet would carry them. I don’t know when consumers caught on and probably caused an uproar, but in checking the shampoo in our bathroom currently, one kind (baby shampoo) doesn’t say anything about repeating. The Prell and the Head & Shoulders both now say “repeat if desired”.
So what will it take to get re-sealable cereal bags? Another consumer revolution?
One of the more frustrating aspects of moving and unpacking is the tendency I have noticed of my putting things away in places so they won’t get lost, and then forgetting where I put them.
I made certain when we packed up our pictures and wall hangings in ND that the hanging-up hardware was put into sealed bags and accurately labeled. Upon unpacking them in MN I tried to keep the hardware filled bages in one place.
This week I intend to finished hanging up the wall decorations and have done with them. One main thing I wanted to hang is a Zapotec rug. I knew I had the hanging hardware in a marked bag, but do you think I could find it? It wasn’t with any of the other picture hanging hardware. I also knew that neither I nor Husband I would have tossed it out. That meant that I had moved it somewhere for “safe keeping”. Sigh.
I spent much of yesterday going through drawers, arranging and straightening closets and cupboards, and searching any possible place for the rug hardware. I resigned myself to go to the hardware store today to find suitable hanging brackets when, at 5:45, I finally ran across the bag in a bookshelf in the guest room where I intend to hang the rug. I had put the bag there for “safe keeping” but didn’t remeber that I had put it behind a three ring binder. You can see the hardware in the header photo. Today the rug goes up!
When have you lost something after you put it away for safe keeping?
On Saturday, the Rock County Historical Society hosted a program of reenactments of the lives of several people buried in Rock County. One was that of a priest, Father Francis Sampson, buried in Luverne’s Catholic Cemetery. He was known as the Paratrooper Padre, and served as a chaplain with the 101st Screaming Eagles in WWII. He parachuted into Normandy on D-day and was the guy who alerted the top brass that a young soldier had lost several brothers in other engagements and since he was the last of the brothers he should be sent home to their mother. Hence Saving Private Ryan, the movie.
Another compelling story was that of a young woman, Captain Lenore Hansen, from Hills (about 15 miles from Luverne and buried in the Hills Cemetery) who was one of the first women allowed to enlist into the Marines in 1945. She worked with the Navaho Code Talkers. She was noted for her really good memory, and memorized over 200 Navaho words, and was involved in creating English words for which there were no counterparts in Navaho. Thus, the Navaho words for Iron and fish were combined to represent “submarine”. She never told her family what she had done in the war. She became a special education teacher in Rochester, MN. She is said to have not told her family about what she did in the war since it was considered classified information.
I think it would be really fun to be a reenactor in these scenarios. It is really wonderful to know about the people who lived and are buried in this country. I look forward to see who they find for next year’s Tales From The Grave. Although he is buried in Pipestone County, it would be fun to see a reenactor present my great grandfather who was a grenadier in the Prussian army and who fled Germany in 1914 after being found out by the authorities to be smuggling butter on the Hamburg wharves with his dray company.
Know any women veterans? Who of your ancestors would you like to present or see presented in a historical reenactment?
It has been Buffalo Days here for the past week, and there has been a car rally, a parade, a 5K run, a quilt show, a craft fair, and many food trucks around town. Yesterday was to be Woofstock, a celebration of dogs. You can see the Facebook page below listing all the activities
Our pastor was scheduled to do the blessing of the Dogs. Our terriers needed blessings as well as forgiveness and penance! Husband and I left home with the dogs at 4:30 to head to the city park, but we hadn’t gone more than a block when the sky darkened and the wind really picked up. I turned the car and headed back home just before the thunderstorm hit. We got .50 of rain in about 20 minutes. Woofstock was officially rained out. I imagined all the wet dogs that were at the park and what a chaotic scene it must have been.
All this brought up memories of the original Woodstock, and what an awful thing the grownups around me viewed the goings on at the festival. I was still in elementary school but was fascinated by the scenes I saw on TV.
I was thankful that our rain and wind weren’t destructive We won’t need to water the garden for at least a couple of days. They were expecting 85-100 mph gusts, hail, and tornadoes back at our old home in ND last night. I can’t imagine a garden making it through something like that!
Been rained out? What are your memories of Woodstock? What Woofstock activity would you have wanted to do?
You know, if he was gonna leave the excavator here for a week, the least he could’ve done was leave the key in it. He even locked the door. It’s like he doesn’t trust me. Or maybe just that he knows people like me….
Graduation season and the local newspapers have been highlighting the top graduates at the four High Schools in Rochester and you read about the achievements of these kids and where they’re going to college and what they’ve been involved with and double majors and even one triple major and pre-med and you look at their pictures, (We were all that young once!) plus I’m struck by how senior photos have changed. Nothing formal in the studios anymore; they’re sitting in the grass or leaning on a railing or holding a basketball, anything they want. One kid in shorts that I thought to myself I could hear my mother‘s voice “you can’t have your picture taken in shorts!”
Here’s a sub question, what do you think of that, good or bad they get to do what they feel like in the photos?
And how about those kids working two jobs? Supporting their families? Working a job, going to school, raising kids or supporting their parents, and just trying to survive? Too bad they don’t get celebrated in the papers more often.
I realized the other day we didn’t get any lilacs this spring. We have a row of lilac bushes 75 feet long and there was one branch on one end that got a few blossoms and nothing on the rest. I expected them to be coming and all the ones in town blossomed and ours are always a week later than that and then the other day I realize we never got any. They must’ve frozen off at some point. And then we have that one tree that does it in the fall and I don’t know what’s up with that either. But I miss the lilacs.
Let’s see, on the farm, the Oats was sprayed with fungicide, it looks really good this year and it should be heading out I’d say in a week.
Corn was sprayed last week with herbicide, the weeds are starting to get bad in places. Over on some of the rental ground there’s a neighbor that is not a fan of the spraying so the Co-op can only spray there when the wind is out of the north, or there’s no wind so there’s no drift around their place. Plus I asked the Co-op to leave an extra buffer around their place. And that’s not a problem, I completely understand where they’re coming from, it’s just tough to find the right weather conditions. It got sprayed Friday morning.
Last week I took the back off the chicken coop and have the fan going in there.
On Tuesday I had a contractor fill in a gully and dig in a tile line out in the pasture. This one area is what started all of this work I’m having done with SWCD this year. Soil & Water.
“Before” – The “S” line is the gully. It was too big to drive over even with a tractor.
“After”
Luna inspecting the new tile inlet
Padawan in his natural habitat. On his phone. Notice the spring water at his feet, the tile inlet in front of him, and the dozer finishing up in the background.
I was just gonna put a culvert there in the gully and fill it all back in but they said we should really get to the root of the problem which was a much better idea. There’ll still be some work to do on the upper end of this, building a small dam once the oats is off (because some of the dirt they’ll need will come from a field where the oats is). It’s sort of two problems: Some erosion at the top end, and springs on the bottom end where they put in the tile, which will take the spring water underground down to a swampy area, and then the other work up top will prevent further erosion. The excavator mentioned above was used to dig in the tile line. The work was inspected and approved Wednesday morning and I got it seeded down Wednesday afternoon. Just needs a little more rain than the .2” we’ve been getting. I also seeded down another area. It’s a long slope and I’m having a grass headland area created, with two small berms to help direct the water off to the side. Hard to get a good picture of the work done, but Humprhey approves.
Wednesday night Padawan and I went to the opera movie. I can’t tell you what it was called because I can’t pronounce it because it was all in Spanish. But it was about the day of the dead and the artist Frida Kahlo and her husband Diego Rivera. I was gonna go with Kelly and then she ended up with a work thing, so Padawan said he’d come with me. I let him leave at intermission. Which was longer than I expected him to last.
Thursday I spent a chunk of the day navigating one of the chloride trucks applying chloride oil as dust control on the township roads. It’s an annual thing.
Refilling. I was riding shotgun in the smaller truck.
Friday Padawan and I returned some left over seed, picked up some parts, and got a ton of egg layer ration. At the feed store, I saw a 50 pound bag of ‘Garlic Salt’. For cattle. They say it helps deter biting insects. It’s a natural way of stopping horn flies or face flies. HUH!
Renee? Shopping in bulk for you.
We also stopped at DQ.
Then when home, we went out in a corn field and measured out 175’, which is 1/100th of an acre. Other years I’ve talked about measuring 17.5’ , 1/1000th of an acre, and counting the plants, which gives us a ‘final stand’ count. A colleague told me yesterday, measuring 175’ is a much more accurate count. As I was riding around the township in the chloride truck, doing 2 mph up the road, I was looking at the corn “singulation”. That’s how well the planter does placing ONE kernel of corn EXACTLY where it should be. Not TWO kernels, or not SKIPPING a kernel, but ONE KERNEL ONLY EXACTLY THERE. My corn planter does a lousy job of singulation and it shows up in the rows now that it has emerged. They look terrible; lots of skips and doubles. Newer planters do better. But even at 99% singulation, when you look at a seed every six inches, and moving at ten MPH, it’s still gonna miss one every now and then. So I planted at a rate of 32,000 seeds / acre. Final stand count is between 28,200 and 30,500. Obviously, the better final stand count, the better crop.
I put some of the new purple LED lamps in the planter monitor.
It won’t make it plant better, but it makes me happy.
I replaced some bearings in the corn planter gauge wheels. The bearing presses into a hub. I put the bearings in the freezer in the shop, to shrink them a bit, then press them into the hub.
Pressing
I heard a YouTube farmer say, “You can fill one hole with two gates, but you can’t fill two holes with one gate.” And as obvious as that sounds, anyone who has dealt with cattle knew exactly what he meant. We’ve probably all been in that situation.
I was sweeping out the feed shed before putting in the new pallet of egg layer. I have this broom in there.
I had to laugh. I must have a handle I could put on this. But the building is only 8’ x 12’. And I only sweep it out once or twice a year.
A while back I posted about the nutcrackers in Luverne. A local retired teacher/amateur historian donated her collection of several thousand nutcrackers to the local museum. The Chamber of Commerce jumped on the idea of nutcrackers as a marketing ploy, and obtained funding to erect the world’s tallest nutcracker at the I90- Highway 75 exit. It was designed to stand more than 70 feet in the air.
After months of waiting, all the pieces of the tall nutcracker have been delivered from their manufacturer in Utah, and sufficiently high lifts have arrived to erect the pieces. I took a photo yesterday at the site:
There continues to be some mild controversy over the wisdom of the nutcracker motif as a town symbol, but many businesses on Main St. have put nutcracker placards outside their doors. The one below is outside the Green Earth Players office, a local theatre company. I think it must date from when they put on A Christmas Story.
Other entities have commissioned artists to construct nutcracker statues with different motifs around town. The one below is in honor of hunters:
Other statues honor women WWII service personnel and factory workers, as well as farmers.
As for Betty, the woman who started it it all, she is 95 and still working at the museum. Grandson and I ran into her the other week. She was somewhat in a tizzy as there were nutcrackers in storage due to getting new display cases and she was eager to get them unpacked. There are a little over 7000 at the museum now. I posted a somewhat older video to give an idea of the collection.
We haven’t any nutcracker placards or statues outside our house, but if we did, they would have to symbolize terriers or musicians.
What motif would you choose for a nutcracker placard or statue outside your house?
Trail Baboon 