Voodoo!

 Do you believe in black magic? Curses? Spells? I typically don't, but every once in a while, I get a not so gentle reminder that maybe it does exist. During those times I swear someone has a voodoo doll of me and is having fun at my expense. 

I'll be walking along and all of a sudden, I am on the ground, my knee will go out. No warning, just me stumbling because my knee forgot its important role in keeping me upright. Or, I am sitting there minding my own business and someone jabs a pin into the side of my voodoo doll. Again, no warning, just a sharp pain and a yelp as Barb looks over at me as though I have lost my mind. 

Ah, the joys of getting old. Luckily, whoever has my doll does not know how to create cramps. Whoever has Dino's voodoo doll specializes in cramps as that is all I hear about when I talk to him. Unlike Dino, I am able to "man up" and carry on a normal life, not curl up in the fetal position whining and sucking my thumb. 

One of the first things I did upon arriving home was to check the trail camera on the small critter waterer that I had put up just before leaving for the farm. My intention was to provide water to the turkeys, rabbits and other small critters that could not reach the water in the bigger tank. The actual results are a little different than that. It turns out it is more like a glorified bird bath providing a place for the local bird population to come and get a drink. 

Robins, bluebirds, finches, chickadees and crows. Not a single turkey or rabbit. Well, there was one rabbit, but it looked like a hop-by and it did not drink from the tank. 

One unexpected visitor was a pair of mice who seem to spend almost every night near the waterer. 

As far as big critters go, there was one deer who checked it out and a couple of calves from the neighboring ranch which is particularly interesting due to the fact that they are not supposed to be over here. 

The neighboring ranch has about 100 head of cattle, cows, calves and heifers. All kept in by electric fencing. Despite that, there was two pair (two moms and two calves) that spend more time on our side of the fence than they do on their side of the fence. How, we have no idea. The way is obvious, as everyone knows the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. It does not bother us, and we just let them do their thing on our side of the fence. 

The other day however, there were 40 or so head on the wrong side of the fence. Not our side, but on the road. That is not a good scenario, and the rancher was out of town for the weekend, so Barb and I jumped in the side by side and jeep and got them wrangled up and back into their proper pasture. No pictures as it was too action packed to take pictures. They had pushed a steel panel away from one of the sheds on their property creating an escape route where they could enjoy the green grass in the field and ditches adjacent to the road. 

In fact, here is a picture I took a day or two ago. Not the best picture as it was taken through the screen, but a lot going on. The first thing you probably noticed is the three deer enjoying the green grass. Beyond that you can see the two pair of cattle under the windmill getting a drink of water. What you probably did not notice was the dozen or so goldfinches on the ground in the foreground. I could not help but think to myself "It doesn't get any better than this" to look out and see this from your living room window. 

What else did we do this week? After being gone the last 3 or so weeks, I had some spring maintenance to take care of. First up was draining, cleaning and refilling the hot tub. 

Then it was up on the roof to clean the chimney. Not a task I enjoy as I have to climb a 16' ladder and climb onto the roof. 

Then it was time to spray weeds. They are popping up everywhere in the driveway and patio area. If we do not take care of them now, it will be a mess by the time we get back from our next adventure. 

I installed a pair of lithium batteries and a wireless rear-view camera on the camper. I am looking forward to seeing how these perform on our upcoming trip.

There was a camera on the back of the camper when we got it, but it never worked and was not wireless.

I also worked on the boat getting it back together after removing the old carpet and recovering it with marine vinyl. As you can see from the "before" picture, the carpet was worn and torn. This was a long process, and I am so happy to have it at least this far for now so we can get out fishing soon!

Before

While I was doing that, Barb was working in her workshop making a frame for the painting our friend Greg gave us recently. He is such a talented artist, and this frame is perfect for it!

She then put up some peg board and went about organizing her tools. 

Speaking of Greg, we went over to his house for happy hour followed by supper at Kevin and Cheryl's. While we did not take any pictures of that event, we did take a few of the day that Ryan, Alana, Dan and Bonnie came over for an afternoon. 

Ryan and Alana of course brought Sophie and Loki for a doggie play date. What they did not realize was that it was dress up day and were going to be totally humiliated!

We played Shake-a-day and sh#tbox with many laughs all around. The highlight of the day is pictured below. If you look in the background, you see Bonnie laughing her ass off. If you look in the foreground, you see the reason. Look at the bottom of Dan's glass.....was when it was Dan's turn for shake-a-day and after his first shake, instead of putting the dice back into the dice cup, he deposited them into his drink glass! 

I did treat myself to a new shotgun the other day. A new 12 gauge over/under pheasant gun. Much lighter than my old one. I cannot wait for this fall to get it out in the field!

Last, but not least we made some venison sausage on Sunday afternoon to take with us. This is our first attempt at this type of sausage. After a couple hours of smoking and cooling off, it was ready to package. It is delicious!

 I will leave you with this picture that Chris sent me from the farm. He was out checking fields with his drone when he came across the moose with two calves. How cool is that?!?!?

The past 10 days have gone super quick as we had a lot to do before we head out again. Our next post will come to you from somewhere out west where will be spending some time in Barb's old stomping grounds on the Oregon coast! Now if you will excuse me, I need to grab my Dino doll, I think a cramp is in order!

Week Three of Farm Life!

 This week we start in South Dakota with "The Adventures of Barb". That could very well be a blog title in itself as she always seems to be up to some kind of adventure. The workshop table done, she set her sights on a different kind of adventure altogether. Cattle branding! That's right, it is that time of year again. I am super bummed that I missed it but that did not mean Barb had to!

She's had a variety of jobs at the branding over the year; bucket girl, where she followed Rancher John around collecting castrated nuggets, brand girl, where she was responsible for heating and delivering the branding iron to unsuspecting calves and this year, injection girl, where she vaccinated each of the calves while they were held down my someone else. She has had years of injection experience from her horse days, so this came second nature to her. So much so that she was able to hold a Bloody Mary in one hand and inject with the other!

She also had her garage sale. It only netted a few hundred dollars, but the real bonus was just getting rid of so much of the junk we had laying around. She had priced the items super low, then started just giving stuff away. Anything that was left over went to the thrift store and dump. 

Meanwhile. 22 hours to the east our grandson Dylan got his driver's license! I cannot believe that we have a grandchild old enough to be driving. 

Back in North Dakota, we were still busy with the spring planting duties. I was pretty much running trucks of fertilizer between the field, farm and elevator with fencing and root pulling intermixed. How many people do you suppose have driven a truck that has over 1,000,000 miles on it? I am guessing not many!

 As I mentioned in an earlier post, they had taken out a couple of tree rows and while the excavator did a pretty good job, after Chris had seeded it pulled up a bunch of roots that needed to be cut off with a sawzall. Not a really hard job, but daunting in the fact that there were so many and it was cold and windy. 

Bob S and I continued to pull fence and fence posts.

I also tackled some stumps from trees I had cut down several years ago. Even though these were old stumps, they were still stubborn and had new growth sprouting up around them. In the end the payloader won and the stumps are no longer part of the landscape in that field. 

Ty and I (mostly Ty) welded up some rebar trail camera holders for me. I am looking forward to using these when I get home and seeing what this year's deer herd looks like!

I was able to make it to my first basketball game this week! Both Gavin and Chase play for their schools, I think Gavin is 12 and Chase is 10. They play on the same team some games, others they play on different teams. Let me tell you, these two are basketball fanatics and it shows in their play. Of the 44 points in one game I think Gavin had over 30 and Chase had 6. I am not a huge basketball fan, but it was fun to watch them play. 

Oh, and I finally saw a moose! It was from a distance and I only had my cell phone, but it was definitely a moose!

Before I knew it, my three and a half weeks was up and it was time for me to go home. We were not done with planting, but we were well over 75% done. That just leaves Chris, Dylan, Farmer Bob and Ty to finish up the last 4-5 days of seeding. Scratch that, Farmer Bob had to go to a conference in Orlando, so it just left the other three. 

I spent my last day there fueling up the tractor, getting more fertilizer, doing laundry and cleaning the camper. Lord help me should I bring home a dirty camper! It is somewhat surreal spending that much time with another group of people, you really become part of their family. At least that is the way they make me feel when I am up there. It is like a second home to me. Bob, DeAnne, Chris, Holly, Dylan, Sydnie, Ty and Stephanie are like family and there is a little bit of sadness whenever I leave. Outweighing all of that is the excitement I feel to get home and seeing Barbie however. That evening Farmer Bob, DeAnne and I went out for supper at Iron Ore in Riverdale. The food was fantastic! Since the restaurant was 45 minutes on my way home, I drove separately and just carried on when we were done. 

The beautiful thing about having a pickup camper is that you can just drive until you are tired and then just pull over. Which is exactly what I did. I got 3 hours behind me before I was too tired to continue. I just pulled over into a farm field approach, climbed in back and slept for a few hours before getting up at 3am and continuing on. I made it home at 6am on Mother's Day where we spent a not so quiet day splitting wood until about 4pm. 

It is so good to be home, but it is going to be short-lived as we have another adventure planned in just 10 days! 

North Dakota Critters

 Every spring I try to do at least one post highlighting all the critters in the area. And when I say "all", I usually just mean the waterfowl and upland birds in the area with the occasional deer and moose smattered in there. The pictures in this post are all pictures I took in the last couple days. 

So far this year, I have only seen a handful of deer and no moose at all so I do not know if this year's post will include any of either. What it will include is birds, lots of birds. Ty was asking me about a particular waterfowl the other day that had a black head and chest, white sides and a grey back. I told him that it sounded like a male scaup. 

Scaup

In total Cliff Clavin fashion, I went on to tell him that it is also called a bluebill because it, well, has a blue bill. He said they were really beautiful. Continuing on, I explained to him that the male species of many animals is much more beautiful or colorful this time of year than the females of that species as the males need to look their best to attract females for mating. He looked at me in wonderment of my vast knowledge of all things duck. I told him that this phenomenon is just not limited to ducks, that it also carried over to the human species. "I mean look at you and me", I told him, "It is spring, and even though I am 60 something and you are 20 something, we are so much more beautiful than the female gender as we stand here in our spring plumage". The look of wonderment was quickly replaced by one of confusion as he went about his business muttering something about a senile old man. 

Canvasback

Mallard

Pintail

Okay, while that may be true for many bird species, it is certainly not true for humans. The male humans never were, nor ever will be as attractive as females. It got me to thinking what species of animals or birds it is difficult or near impossible to tell the difference between the sexes of them by just looking at them. Most, you can certainly tell the difference between a male and female. 

Blue wing teal

North American Shoveler aka Spoonbill

Redheads

While these birds are beautiful the most beautiful one to me is the ringneck pheasant. The translucent nature and colors of this bird is just incredible. If you ever seen one, you know what I mean, if you have ever held one in your hand, you really know what I mean. 

Their colorfulness is a sharp contrast compared to the female of this species and the mottled coloring designed only to camouflage them while they nest. I bet you did not even see the hen in the upper right-hand corner of the first pheasant picture above. I was taking pictures of a rooster in a field when I noticed three hens standing in the stubble just a few feet from me, you would never know they were there they blended in so well. 

The only ones that I hunt that it near impossible to tell the difference in gender that came to mind is geese, ruffed grouse and doves. I can tell the difference in grouse once in hand, but it is almost impossible to tell on the fly. You have to spread their tail feathers and look at the two in the middle to tell for sure. I do not know if there is a way to tell on dove or geese once in hand. What other species can you think of where it is difficult or near impossible to tell the difference between genders?

How about bees? That is actually an easy one. All the bees but one in the hive are males. All working to please one queen. Story of my life...

Another one that is hard to tell when not in hand is the Hungarian Partridge. Also hard to photograph as they are hard to see and very nervous birds. I did manage to get a decent shot of these two as they flew away as I was getting ready to take pictures of them on the ground. 

Maybe gull? I have never really studied gulls enough to know if there is a difference. I am guessing there is. Speaking of gulls, they sure love following behind the air seeder. Constantly circling Chris as he goes down the field then landing and cobbling up whatever morsels he uncovers. 

This of course makes everything a mess as they use the air seeder as bombing practice as they fly over. I asked my friend Merlin what kind of gulls were there and this is what he told me....

We have moved on from wheat here at the farm having gotten all that in the ground. We even started and finished peas with only three fields planted in this legume. That was another word that I did not know prior to helping out up here. Legume or a leguminous plant is part of the pea family. Farmer Bob actually serves on the boards of the North Dakota Dry Pea & Lentil Council as well as the state and national USA Pulse boards. Suffice to say Farmer Bob knows his Legumes. 

Peas, of course means rolling, probably my favorite job of the springtime work. I do not know if it is the actual act of rolling, or the fact that I am just sitting in a tractor for hours and not walking a field picking up sticks or rolling up fences. Both rather physical endeavors. 

I think it is a little bit of both. I just love sitting in a tractor going across the field at about 12mph, lost in my own thoughts while watching the world go by pushing all those nasty rocks just below the surface so they are not in the way for harvesting. 

After peas, it was on to durum. Durum is a variety of wheat used primarily for pasta. Only one field of that, 100 acres or so. 

So, that is where we stand right now, maybe a little over halfway done with planting, just two crops left: canola and chickpeas. We really need the soil temps to increase a bit before we get those in the ground. It is supposed to be 70, or near 70 the next day or two so we are hoping they increase quickly so we do not have any down days. 

In addition to the usual duties of loading the seeder we carried on with numerous other tasks. And yes, there was more fence to be rolled up this week. Whenever we find ourselves in a lull with a free hour or two that is our "go to" duty. 

Bob S and I even spent an hour or so cleaning and sweeping the quonset whose concrete probably has not seen the light of day in over a decade. 

Ty and I spent an hour cleaning up spilled grain from all the filling going on in the yard. 

Notice in both of those pictures I am in the skidsteer and they are shoveling. While I did do some shoveling, my back can only take so much. What I can take is removing stumps. Remember those trees I took down last week? Now it was time to get rid of the stumps. Between the payloader and the skidsteer, I managed to get rid of them. 

By far, the funniest part of the week was Bob S and I helping Farmer burn a couple of sloughs. And when I say sloughs, I mean big sloughs, probably 20 acres or so. Why, you ask? To try and recover some of the farm ground that has been overtaken by the wetland in the past few years. There is a cycle to the dry and wet years up here, right now we are in a dry cycle which means many of the sloughs are either dry or much lower than previous years so they try to recover some of this ground for seeding. The first step is burning off all the cattails. Well, the first step is actually plowing a fire break around the sloughs then burning them but Farmer Bob had already done that part. Now, it was time to light the fire!

We start on the downwind side to create a back burn so there is less chance that the fire jumps the firebreak and gets into the field. Then Bob S went around the slough with the Ranger lighting the cattails along the way. 

You better hope that you did everything right as once this thing starts there is no stopping it!

There was only one intense moment where the fire tried to sneak into an area where it was not supposed to go, but we had rakes and water extinguishers ready and got it back on track relatively quickly. 

Overall, it went great and was over in about 3 hours recovering probably 20 acres of ground from the cattails. 

That was my week in a nutshell. Overall a very good week, I am fully recovered from last week's illness, but the virus claimed on more victim when Bob S's wife, Sue came up for a few days. Yup, three days later she came down with "the sickness". 

Meanwhile, back in South Dakota, all the snow is gone again and Barb has been busy working on one thing or another. Her big project of the week was building a rolling table for her workshop. She sent me progress pictures throughout the week. 

7 days left, it doesn't look good for us to get done before my departure, but we are certainly going to try!