Things I Have Learned

The other night at bowling, the discussion turned to money and finances.  Princess and another gal were talking about budgets and debt repayment.  I told them to use the “trickle up” method.

This is something that radio talk show host, Dave Ramsey, talks about frequently and it really does work if you follow the plan correctly.  

The ladies wanted more detail, so I explained that you have to first establish a budget, and then write down all your balances and what the payments are on them.  The first step is to target the smallest balance and get it paid off, while maintaining the monthly payments on the others.  

Once that smallest balance is paid off, you then take whatever you were paying monthly on that balance and apply it to the next smallest balance in addition to the regular monthly payment.  And so on.  

It sounds simple, right?  Not so much because, if you are like us, some unexpected and/or major expense usually occurs while following this plan, and it is easy to get derailed.  But I am here to testify, it can be done!  It isn’t fun by any means, but if you stick to the plan, once the snowball effect kicks in...those debts start disappearing.  

I added the caution to my advice that the catch is...once the debts are paid off...all that money that was going for debt repayment should be put into savings instead of just being spent.  I have fallen into that trap a few times.  Oh, look at all this extra money I have...what can I buy?  Bad, bad, bad idea!

The conversation eventually moved from monthly budgets to mortgages, taxes, and insurance.  Princess has been batting around the idea of maybe buying her own house in the next few years.  My motherly advice to her (and everyone else sitting at the table that night) was two-fold:  (1) always, always, always finance a mortgage with a fixed interest rate versus an adjustable rate, and (2) from Day One add 1/12 of your monthly mortgage payment to the regular payment amount.  Doing so can shave 10 to 15 years off the life of the mortgage and save thousands of dollars in interest.  

On the drive home, it occurred to me that somehow when I wasn’t paying attention...I have become the Old Wise Woman.  How did that happen?!  Trial and error mostly, I’d say.  

I’m not smarter than other people at all.  I’ve just, over the years, learned everything that doesn’t work and finally figured out what does.  It’s that school of hard knocks thing we talked about last week.  

So I got to thinking about what other stuff I might have gleaned over the years and came up with a few miscellaneous things.  These are not earth-shattering or life-altering, and you may very well know all this already.  But I'll tell you anyway just because I can.

• Vinegar and baking soda will deodorize and clean a drain, chemical-free.
• Soaking whites in diluted Cascade dishwasher soap will remove any and all stains, including grass stains.
• The leftover water after boiling sweet corn makes a good weed killer.
• Putting a piece of bread in the container with your brown sugar will keep the sugar soft.
• You can thicken any homemade soup with a dash of instant potato flakes.  
• If you put a dry bath towel in the dryer, the load will dry in about half the time.
• Mayonnaise is a good deep conditioner for your hair.
• Diluted apple cider vinegar spritzed on a sunburn will ease the sting.
• Crumpled newspaper in a pair of shoes will remove odors.
• Running your hands under cold water before shaping meatballs will keep the meat from sticking to your hands.
• Adding a few grains of rice to your salt shaker will keep the salt from clumping up.
• Use a staple remover to add things to your key ring and save your manicure.

The best helpful hint I have for you is to be grateful for what you have and always count your blessings!

Changing seasons

The weather the last couple of days is both a blessing and burden.  After five weeks of hitting harvest hard, the rain (and that s-word) is giving everybody a day or two to decompress, catch up on sleep, and just relax for more than five or ten minutes at a time.

It’s a burden because it is hard for Captain to have to stop when the end of harvest is in sight, though!  He is down to the last 20 acres of his own corn to pick and then will pick a couple of fields for a neighbor before calling it done for the year.

He has someone running the chisel plow for him so he doesn’t have to think about doing that after finishing combining.  That trip to Split Rock is still looming in our minds.

The end of harvest always brings a bucket of mixed emotions.  Relief, satisfaction, and pride...those are all top of the list.  However, Captain tells me there is also something very much like postpartum depression that sets in after the last bushel of corn is harvested.  Sort of an anticlimatic letdown.  

Part of that comes from not having a single, solitary focus where everything revolves around harvest.  Part of it is that whole here-comes-winter-again thing.  Captain won’t admit it, but I think part of it is that he won’t be able to see Sparky on a daily basis anymore, but that’s just a theory!

Like most years, Captain has a list of projects that need to be done in that very narrow window of time between end of harvest and freeze up.  There is a waterer (that’s a livestock drinking fountain) that needs to be replaced because fixing it is no fun when you have to stick your hand in cold water when it’s 20 below and windy and probably dark.  There’s a section of fence that needs repair before snow flies.  He needs to check the water level in the in-floor heat pipes in the basement before we fire up the boiler for the first time.  Lastly, he wants to finally get our garage wired for an overhead door opener and lights.  

And, joy of joys, we have to move cattle around to get them all situated before Old Man Winter arrives for good.  That job might not be so bad if Captain didn’t always think that just the two of us can handle it.  Sometimes it works, and sometimes it’s a FUBAR.  We’ll see how it goes this year.  

This year he gets to add a new task in there...buying baby bull calves at the local sales barn.  We have raised dairy steers for ten years now and have never had to buy them at the sales barn.  We have often used the barter system with neighbors.  Will Work For Bull Calves.  It’s been a good system up until now.

After we sold our dairy cows, Captain sort of lucked into milking every other weekend for a neighbor.  He liked it because he said it was enough for him to get his “cow fix” and enough to remind him he didn’t want to do it everyday anymore.  He also got bull calves from his boss, so that worked out extremely well for all parties.  

However, his boss recently decided to retire.  We are happy for him, but it means finding a new source for calves.  Hence, the new experience of a trip to the sales barn.  Captain hasn’t had any baby calves to feed for a couple of weeks now, but there are 20 empty hutches out there to fill.  That will keep him busy over the winter!  

Unlike the rest of us, Captain enjoys winter in Minnesota.  The cold doesn’t bother him, so he does outdoorsy stuff like ice fishing and snowmobiling.  Me, not so much, but I try to go out on the ice with him once a year.  We have snowshoed at Oxbow in the past, and that was actually fun.  

I still think winter is for blanket, books, and burrowing.  I go into complete hibernation mode when the time changes, which apparently is going to happen this weekend on Halloween, giving all the little spooks and extra hour for mischief!

Fabulous Day Off With Friends and Family

I had the most fabulous day off yesterday!  First...I wasn’t working so that was a bonus.  That’s the payoff for having worked the weekend.  There’s always a catch!

I started the day out with leisurely watching the news and having coffee in between chatting with Captain about his plans for the day.  He was going to be finishing up at one field and moving to another, so I had to do some chauffeuring but nothing majorly time consuming.

Then it was off to Victoria’s to meet an old friend for lunch.  Jimmy was the first resident I worked for when I started at Mayo after coming off maternity leave with Young Man.  You could say we trained each other in the Mayo Way.  After he was hired on staff in Scottsdale, Arizona, I have only seen him once in the last 24 years, although we have stayed in touch via email and Facebook.  

Seeing him in person and having an actual conversation...freaking awesome!  We covered everything from morel mushrooms to organic farming to crime scene investigation plus religion and politics.  Best hour I’ve had in a long time...thanks, Jimmy!

I met Captain’s mom in the Dress Barn parking lot (we resisted the urge to go in and shop) so she could ride with me to get my hair done.  Since it’s an hour drive down to Harmony, we had a nice visit, and it was a beautiful day for a drive.  We saw a lot of farmers out in the fields doing all that fall stuff...combining, plowing, making corn stalk bales.  We even saw a couple of Amish buggies on the road which is always a thrill for some reason.  

The Shop - A Cut Above is my niece’s hair salon in Harmony.  I love, love, love having Amy do my hair!  She has it set up so nice inside.  You can watch TV or she will turn on an iPod for your listening enjoyment.  You get a beverage, hot or cold, and free popcorn.  I don’t know about her other customers, but I just love having time to catch up with one of my all time favorite people.  Got a bonus yesterday when Amy’s stepdaughter, Laurel, came in after school and lost a tooth while we were there!  We also got to see Amy’s son, Corey, and order some FFA fruit.  It just kept being a win-win-win kind of day.  

A year ago, I decided I wanted to let my hair grow.  I haven’t had long, straight hair since I was about 5 years old.  

If I ever in the past 40 years have had long hair, it has always been permed.  However, I am at a stage in my life where I had to decide between color or curls because it is counterproductive to try and do both.  Given the increasing amounts of gray I see in the mirror, I opted for color.  Amy has been helping me over this past year to get it cut and styled into something spectacular.  We have found a great auburn color that works well for me, and she has given me styling tips on creating volume and...well...pizzazz.  

Yesterday after getting the color in and my hair all blow dried, she spent a half an hour styling it...which is about 25 more minutes than I spend on it!  I was styling when I left there to go watch Cubby while Young Man and Mama Bear were working.  Closing out the day with Cubby just capped an absolutely wonderful day.

Cubby didn’t care what my hair looked like, she just wanted to play.  She likes it when I lay on my back on the floor so she can come running and the body slam me...she laughs like a loon every time.  She thought it was great fun to bring me the tea cup from her little kitchen set so I could make loud slurpy noises while I pretended to sip tea.  She was just go, go, go until she started doing her okay, I am tired now and want to cuddle routine.  She will grab her fleece blankie and hold it up to her nose.  It’s something she has done since she first figured out how to hold onto something.  So by the time Young Man got home from work, she was pretty well wound down and ready to cuddle with Daddy.

I really can’t think of a better way to have spent a day off than seeing people I love.  Must do that again at the first opportunity!

Gardens and Libraries

According to Cicero, I have everything I need!  It makes perfect sense because gardens fill up spring and summer while books take you through autumn and the dark, cold days of winter.

My gardens are ready for their winter sleep.  The corn field next to the vegetable garden will be chisel plowed soon, and they will also run the chisel plow over the garden.  Memo to me:  put stakes around the asparagus plants so they don’t get dug up!

My flowers are so darn hardy that they are still blooming in their containers despite the fact that I have completely ignored them since the end of August.  I haven’t watered them or weeded them, and they are actually thriving.  Some got dinged by that frost we had a couple weeks back, but the petunias are still going great guns!  

We do want to plant a couple of apple trees yet this fall.  Still, I am ready to be done with gardens so I can move on to books.  

There is nothing better, in my mind, than curling up on the couch under a cozy blanket and losing myself in a book.  I can travel without leaving my nest, I get to meet exciting new people, and I always learn something new in a book.  Even the romantic suspense novels that I favor have some nugget of knowledge in them I didn’t know before.  

I started out my “library” when I was a teenager with the Trixie Belden series.  Hunt Drug in Rochester carried them, and with my $5 allowance, I could buy four books.  Eventually I had the entire 31-book series which, unfortunately, went up in smoke when the house burned.  I thought about restarting the collection, but they are no longer $1.25 per book!

I went through the stage as a young adult of reading all the romance books by Harlequin, Sillouhette, and Putnam.  That’s when I discovered my all time favorite author:  Nora Roberts.  

While I love to read, Nora Roberts is the only author whose books I will buy the day they are released.  I don’t wait for a paperback or check them out at the library.  I must own them.  I do believe I own every Nora book that has ever been published.  Furthermore, I have read and reread every one of them at least a half dozen times.  

I also own every book she has written under the pen name J. D. Robb which is sort of a sci-fi, futuristic crime drama series.  In fact, I have so many of her books that I have run out of room on my bookshelves for them.  

My kids got me hooked on the Harry Potter series, so I have that entire set as well.  Captain, he likes the James Herriott books:  All Creatures Great And Small, etc.  Those are floating around here someplace, too.  Young Man likes Louis L’Amour stories.  Most of L’Amour’s book are about western men...cowboys, gunslingers, law men.  One, however, has a female lead role...The Cherokee Trail.  That’s one that I have also read a half a dozen times.  

In my fantasy world, I would actually have a library in my house with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves on every wall, cozy reading chairs, soft lighting, and a monster coffee machine.  I’d live there.  

When I was a kid, my mom built us each a bookcase for Christmas one year...also went up in smoke.  Maybe I’ll give making my own book case a shot, except I suck at carpentry projects and Captain won’t teach me how to use a circular saw.  Hmmmm…

I have started a little library for Cubby with some Dr. Seuss classics, the Poky Little Puppy and other Golden Books, and one Dick and Jane antique book I found in a little shop in Duluth.  

Fantasy library or not, I can always find a few moments, or hours, of enjoyment when I open a book.  I invite you to go back and read your favorite book on one of the long winter days ahead!

Education versus Experience

Okay, apologies, but it’s a soapbox kind of day today instead of a comic kind of day.  

When did theory begin to outweigh practice?  I am talking about job qualifications that require a college degree but ignore experience.  Don’t get me wrong, as the proud holder of a bachelor’s degree, I completely understand the importance of education.  However, being a woman of a certain age, I also hold experience in high value.  

Captain chose to fore-go college after high school because he wanted to farm.  Keep in mind that at that time, agriculture wasn’t the high tech industry that it is now.  All that was needed was a strong work ethic, dedication, and—hey, get this—some experience.  He performed all the duties of a herdsman in his dad’s dairy operation plus was assistant shop mechanic, veterinary assistant, and general farmhand for 20 years.  

Then life intervened and changed things.  Circumstances forced his dad to retire from farming, and Captain was in the market for a new job.  While scouring the classifieds in the local paper, there was a help wanted ad for a herdsman at a large dairy in a neighboring town that sounded good, so Captain called to find out more details.  

The first question the owner/operator asked was “Do you have a degree in dairy science or livestock production?”  When Captain said no, he was told to not bother applying.  The owner/operator didn’t even give him a chance to explain that he had the equivalent of a Ph.D. from the School of Hard Knocks, which is often a more demanding curriculum than anything offered at the iviest of Ivy League schools.  

Captain is nothing if not determined.  He decided, with my full support, that if he couldn’t find a job as someone else’s herdsman/crop foreman, he would just start his own operation.  It was many long, tedious, and often frustrating months later when we were able to buy out his dad’s operation.  This year, 2015, marks the tenth crop season with Captain at the helm.  

Since one man can’t do it all, Captain hires seasonal help in the spring and the fall.  We have been blessed to have a wonderful young man helping us all these years.  Sparky was Young Man’s best friend in high school--still is, actually--and spent much time here.  After he graduated high school and got his CDL--but hadn’t yet found a full-time trucking job--he drove semi for Captain in the fall.  Even now after he has worked for Pepsi for six years, he still comes and helps during his off time.  I really don’t know what we would do without Sparky around to help.  

Did Captain ask Sparky for a college degree?  Hell, no!  His main question was:  Will you come on time every day and stay until we are done for the day?  The answer was yes, so he was hired.  We have never regretted it.  

Education is never to be scoffed at, but I would much rather have some working for me who has actually done the stuff than someone who has just read about doing the stuff and thinks they know what they are doing.  Experience is just as vital as education.  

There have been several news articles or clips on TV about shortages in most of the job categories classified as “blue collar.”  Those are the jobs that require--if anything--2 years of school versus 4 years, and there is a lot of hands-on, practical training that is required.  Jobs like welders, truck drivers, plumbers, mechanics, and electricians.  

At a time when our community was fighting to keep the vocational education program from being cut from the high school curriculum and we were meeting resistance from some influential people, the superintendent said “I don’t know how to fix a toilet, so I want to know there is someone out there who does.”  Finally...someone with some common sense!

I just saw a clip on KTTC the other day about Rochester and the state leadership wanting to keep the “talented” people working in Rochester.  The implication was that these would be associated with health care or technology.  My question is...aren’t we all talented at something?  

Take restaurant servers.  I have met some truly awful servers, and I have met some servers who are unparallelled.  Or how about cab drivers?  It’s the talented ones who can not only get you to your destination in a safe and timely fashion but provide you with entertaining conversation during the ride.  Or we could talk about the Fed Ex or UPS delivery person.  Let me tell you, if I order something, I am glad to know that there is someone out there who can get the package to me with no muss and no fuss.  

Or teachers.  Let’s talk teachers for a minute.  This is a job that there is no way I could do because it takes an extremely special personality to teach children.  They put in many hours above and beyond their regularly scheduled classroom time and often spend their own money for supplies.  They are the ones that we depend on to raise the next generation of “talented” people, whether that is the world’s greatest neurosurgeon or your friendly neighborhood business owner.  Kudos, teachers!

Theory and education are vital and important, no question about it.  However, the laborers of the world deserve recognition as well for rolling up their sleeves and doing the stuff that some of the smartest people we know don’t know how to do.  

He's the Yin to my Yang

They say opposites attract.  I wonder why when opposites generally drive one another crazy.  Granted, being the partner of someone just like me would be totally boring, but being married to someone so completely unlike me is both interesting and frustrating.  I would imagine Captain would say the same thing.

We like to self-diagnose in this house, and I’m pretty sure Captain has a mild to moderate degree of OCD.  Or, as Captain tells me it is CDO because that is alphabetical...which just proves my point that he is kooky.  

Me, I have ADD…pretty sure about that.  I’d lose my head if it wasn’t attached.  True statement!  I cannot count the times that I have been at Target, Wal-Mart, or Hy-Vee...and I have left at least one item that I purchased laying on the checkout counter.  Miss Ditz, that’s me.  

So our days pretty much consist of Captain trying to organize my chaos.  Or vice versa.  Sometimes we both have OCD but about completely different things.  

Captain recently took over the task of emptying the dishwasher.  This saves me time, and I appreciate it.  Until he tells me I have to keep the clean plates in the cupboard all stacked up by pattern…no mix and match thank you very much.  My thought…who cares?  A plate is a plate is a plate.  As long as it is clean and available, it will do the trick.  Makes me nuts that he obsesses on this one little thing.  

In the interest of fair play and full disclosure, my OCD obsession is condiment and meat/cheese storage.  Don’t ask me why.  Captain and I have been married for 27 years now, and up until about three months ago, he still put the salt and pepper shakers in the fridge when he cleared the table.  I mean, yeah, thanks for helping clear the table and all, but dude, salt and pepper are in no danger of going rancid and don’t need to be refrigerated.  We are still working on getting him to remember to put the cheese and lunch meat back in the meat/cheese drawer.  

Captain and I also are widely divergent on philosophical issues.  I tend to focus on the immediacy of a debate and how it affects—or doesn’t affect—me personally.  Captain is more of a big picture kind of thinker.  This makes for some interesting nights sitting on the deck enjoying an adult beverage.  After one too many adult beverages, it can get ugly but that’s rare.  Which is a good thing because I am bigger than Captain and I can be a mean drunk.  

Sometimes Captain takes the opposite side of a debate just to rile me up.  I don’t know why he thinks this is comical, but he does.  Sometimes I clue in relatively quickly, but sometimes it doesn’t dawn on me until further into the argument that he is just yanking my chain.  By then, I’m too mad and fired up to see any kind of humor in it and we retreat to our corners.

It has recently been brought to my attention that I spend too much time picking on Captain.  I thought we covered this or did y’all miss the post about what an awesome guy he is?  If you did, it’s out there; go find it.  

But, again, in the interest of fair play and full disclosure, I will cover some of my own...idiosyncrasies.  

I am scared of the dark.  Yes, this 48-year-old enlightened, modern woman is scared of the dark.  Flog me.  It’s vastly improved from the nights when I was a child and would wake up with night terrors about Bigfoot invading the house.  My mom...no lie...would have to get out the United States map and show me that Bigfoot--IF HE EXISTED--was waaaAAAaaay out there on the West Coast and we were waaaAAAaaay over here in the Midwest.  

Hey mom...that guy’s got long legs!  How do you know he couldn’t run here and scare the crap out of me and then go back home all in one night?!  It could happen, I was sure of it.  So sure, in fact, that I would lay on my back in the exact middle of my double bed so that I would be able to say anything that popped out from under the bed.  

When I was a teenager, I decided to try and Face My Fear, so what did I do?  I couldn’t do something as simple as just standing outside at night for five or ten minutes at a time to ease into it.  Nope, I read Amityville Horror.  Bright idea, that.  Slept with my bedroom light on for a week.  

But, at least now I can step outside at night by myself for short periods without having a panic attack, so that’s an improvement.  

I am also terrified of bridges.  And anyone who wants to mock me can just remember the day that the I-35 bridge collapsed.  If I am a passenger when we have to travel over a bridge, I simply close my eyes until we are across.  It works for me.  If I actually have to drive over a bridge, I have to stare directly forward at a spot in the distance and block out my peripheral vision of all that water.  I’ve learned to adapt to it.  

Heights will also just do me in.  If I get more than a foot off the ground, I am paralyzed.  Going up isn’t bad.  It’s that coming back down thing.  I once sat on my in-laws' roof and bawled for an hour because I couldn't bring myself to step off the roof onto the ladder.  Don't ask my why I was up there in the first place.  Stupid, apparently. 

We had an 80-foot silo when I was a kid, and one day there was rain coming and nobody home but me, so I had to climb up the silo to shut the door on top.  

Most people climb down a ladder moving right foot and left hand or left foot and right hand simultaneously.  Me?  Right foot...left foot...right hand...left hand.  One agonizing rung at a time.  It took me 45 minutes to get back down to the ground, where I simply collapsed in a heap for another half an hour.  It was traumatic.

So, you can see, even if I tease Captain, I am really the one who is a stew of whackadoo.  The bottom line is that even with the differences, the thing we have in common is a mutual respect for each other--including our differences--that is glued together by great love and humor.  

Unanswered Prayers

Young Man used to have that stupid fish that hung on the wall and sang “Don’t worry, be happy” when someone walked by.  Drove me crazy!

Maybe because that is just an extremely irritating song.  Or maybe because I was spending a lot of time worrying about things and was tense and on edge, and the fish was reminding me I shouldn’t do that.  

Really, stupid fish?  You think you know what it takes to manage my life and family?  Aren’t you just the arrogant little so-and-so.  If I don’t worry about the bills...the kids...the corn prices...the weather...my job, then who would?!

Along with the worrying, I prayed, because that’s what we Christians do.  Dear God, do this.  Give me that.  Make this other thing happen.  And then I would go back to worrying because this, that, and the other thing didn’t happen.

Then came a time when we were looking to buy our own acreage.  What we really, really, really wanted was to buy the home farm, but that seemed unrealistic, so we were exploring other options.  

One option was a piece of real estate that was being auctioned.  We had the financing lined up, we had a realtor involved to keep us in line, and we were prepared to purchase this building site.

It didn’t happen.  

Complete devastation.  Much tears and wailing.  

Now what?  Back to worrying and praying for what I wanted.  

Know what?  In the end, we ended up being able to buy the home farm just like we wanted.  It took a lot of sweat, blood, and tears...and some Divine Intervention.  

Now, every time I drive past the property that we lost out on at the auction, I praise God for having the best plan despite all my instructions otherwise.  

It made me realize I had approached the prayer thing all wrong.  I was going about it thinking, Dear God, MY will be done instead of the correct attitude of Dear God, THY will be done.

It was at that point that my prayer habit changed, and I realized I needed to pray for peace, strength, and/or comfort while I put the problem--whatever it might be--in God’s hands because He is so much smarter than I am and knows what will be best for my life.

Someone once asked me how I managed to maintain an “even keel” attitude when facing challenges.  The short answer is that you have to have a whole bunch of big, bad crap happen to realize that most of life’s obstacles are small stuff and not worth getting bent out of shape about because God will work it out.  All the worry I may or may not do wouldn’t change a thing, so why waste the energy?

I’m not saying that life doesn’t require some work and effort along with the prayers.  Far from it.  I’m saying we need to let God orchestrate His plan while living our lives as best we can.

I still have my moments when I get stressed because--hey--I’m human.  But by and large, I don’t lose sleep anymore.  

Hey, stupid fish, I am happy!