Monday, May 05, 2008, 21:33
The Field Work Begins
The "field boss" came over Saturday afternoon. He is otherwise known as my big brother, Ingman. He wanted to see how wet our field was. It had rained an inch and a half the day before and overnight. Because it was windy and sunny on Saturday, the field was actually drying out quite well. It wasn't very warm on Saturday, only about 50 degrees Fahrenheit with a 15 to 20 mph wind out of the west. The wind actually felt quite cold. But the field dried out all right anyway.
Randy wasn't home early Saturday afternoon. He had left first thing in the morning to do the "running around" with another gentleman to pick up pies and buy other supplies for our chicken dinner at church on Sunday. We are now raising money to shingle the main part of the roof. I sent out 7 bid requests and got 4 back. We will be opening the bids next Sunday. Since the construction business has slowed down due to the recession, we're hoping to get some good, competitive bids.
Anyway, the long and short of it is -- my nephew came over later with his tractor and the chisel plow, and Ingman brought his tractor and the disk, and they started working up the field. Randy was home by that time, too. The field itself is fairly level, but there are steep hills and ridge lines not too far away.
After a while, Ingman turned over the tractor to Randy, and my husband spent the rest of the afternoon disking the field. He probably won't have time to work on planting until next weekend, but at least the field has been worked up. It probably needs to be disked some more, too.
Pixie and Charlie thought it was a lot of fun that there were so many people and tractors around. When my nephew came to make the turn at the end of the field, Pixie made sure the tractor turned the corner all right and was headed back in the proper direction.
Chicken dinner
When we set the date for the chicken dinner in January, we didn't realize other churches the area would be holding Confirmation on Sunday. We have to set the date early because our cook is in great demand in the area to cook for graduations, Confirmation, weddings and family reunions. If we know when we're going to have the chicken dinner, then he tells other people he is booked for that weekend. Mass quantities of pork and chicken are his specialty.
We ended up being surprised by the number of people who came to dinner. The closest we can figure is that we served between 160 and 170. We started out with 180 chicken quarters and ended up with 5 left. A couple of "to go" orders received extra pieces of chicken because by then, we had run out of pie. We served 12 pies, and by 12:30 (dinner was finished at 1:30), we were out of pie. Good thing we still had some ice cream left and some store-bought cookies. And good thing my sister-in-law, bless her heart, volunteered a banana cream pie she had in her refrigerator a half mile away that she had baked the afternoon before. We made a quick trip to get it, and then 8 more people were able to have pie. I must say, after I cut that banana cream pie, it was gone in less than 3 minutes.
I made a Lemon Pineapple salad for the dinner and a Cranberry Orange salad, too. I also made some coleslaw. I will include the recipes for the salads and the homemade coleslaw dressing in the next issue of Rural Route 2 News on May 10.
Meadowlarks!
The meadowlarks are finally here! I was starting to get very worried about them. When Randy and I walked the perimeter of our field Saturday evening, I heard a meadowlark singing. I don't know what took them so long to arrive. But I'm glad that at least one of them is here.
Whippoorwills
The whippoorwills are here, too. I took Pixie and Charlie for a walk along the road Sunday evening at dusk. I heard a whippoorwill down by the neighbor's place. And then on the way back I heard several more calling from various places in the woods.
White-crowned sparrows
The white-crowned sparrows are here, too. I know that because of my little black kitty cat Juliette. I was outside Sunday afternoon after I got home from cleaning up after the chicken dinner, and Juliette was sneaking toward the lilac bushes. In the blink of an eye, she snaked her way in among the lilacs and pounced on a bird. She backed out of the lilacs with the bird in her mouth.
I quietly walked over to the cat. I could see it was a white-crowned sparrow she was holding in her mouth. I grabbed Juliette by the scruff of the neck, which caused her to open her mouth. The white-crowned sparrow seized the opportunity and flew off.
I know Juliette was disappointed about the bird. She spent quite a while looking for it after it flew away. I explained to her that I was very sorry, but that we need all of the song birds we can get, including the white-crowned sparrows.
Babies!
This past week has been incredibly eventful. Field work. Chicken dinner. Birds arriving. Cleaning up manure around the pastures. Watching it rain. And now we've got kittens in the barn. Little Sister had her kittens on May 1. Momma Kitty had her kittens on May 2. They had them both in the same nest, tucked back in a corner of the hay. I have peeked in there many times with the flashlight beam trained into the nest. As closely as I can tell, there are six all together. I think each mother cat has three.
It's funny how they both keep their babies in the same nest. For right now, I think each mother cat nurses her own kittens, but later on, when they are bigger, I think the kittens will nurse both mother cats. When I checked on them Monday morning while the mommas were out getting kitty food, the kittens were in a heap all snuggled up together. That's why it's kind of hard to tell how many there are. They are always in a heap when I look in there. Unless the mommas are in there. Then it's hard to see the kittens at all.
Sunday night when I went down to the barn, there was a raccoon raiding the few pieces of the dry kitty food that were left. Usually when I go down to the barn, the momma cats come out right away for more kitty food. I did not see either mother cat. Charlie and I tried our best to chase the raccoon off and scare him away. I don't think we succeeded. I think he just went into the lean-to and either hid underneath the trailer or behind the fence posts stored in the corner. I never did see either mother cat Sunday night. I think they were too worried about their babies and decided to just stay in the nest for the time being.
Wild turkeys
Sunday morning when I went out to feed the horses before getting ready for church, Kajun had worked himself into a real panic. He was running around and snorting and whistling and blowing.
I looked out in the field, and right behind the barn, there was a flock of wild turkeys -- 10 of them all together. After I fed the horses, Kajun would run into the barn, grab a mouthful of feed and then run outside to look at the turkeys. Isabelle seemed quite unconcerned about the turkeys and just kept eating her feed. When I had put out hay and filled up their water buckets, I headed up to the house to get the camera. Kajun was still running inside to grab and mouthful of feed and then running outside to look.
By that time, the turkeys had made their toward the end of the field. All together, there was five toms strutting with fanned tails, and there were either five hens or maybe a couple of them were young toms (known as 'jakes' -- don't ask me why). I wasn't close enough to get a really good picture of them. I knew, though, that if I walked out into the field, they would take off. The turkeys must have liked the turned-over dirt where they could more easily find some bugs.
Randy missed the whole thing because they started cooking chicken for the dinner at 6 a.m.
Wood Ducks in the City
Randy was scheduled for a class for work in the Twin Cities Monday and Tuesday. He called Sunday night to say that the hotel they are staying in has an indoor pond with wood ducks swimming around in it and trees and lots of plants. He e-mailed Monday morning to say he didn't sleep worth a hoot because of all the traffic noise from the Interstate highway (I-94) right outside the hotel. I e-mailed back and said maybe that's why they have the pond and the wood ducks and the trees and plants -- to "make up" for the noisy location.
Personally, I find it sad to think that maybe the closest some people might ever get to wildlife are wood ducks in a pond inside of a hotel lobby.
LeAnn R. Ralph
Friday, May 02, 2008, 06:11
Trouble and More Trouble
The trouble started Wednesday evening when Randy took our 460 Farmall tractor out of the barn and hooked onto the disk. He was planning to disk our hayfield again in preparation for planting oats. It was a lovely day on Wednesday -- sunny and warm at around 60 degrees Fahrenheit.
He made it part of the way across the field when the tractor began sputter. I was in the process of taking the hay off my tomato bed in front of the basement and putting it in a big pile. The tomato bed also happens to be located right over the septic tank. It's because of the septic tank that I have a tomato bed there.
The first winter we lived here, the outlet pipe to the septic tank froze. I never wanted to go through that again, so ever since, we've been covering the septic tank with hay in the fall. The hay killed out the grass, so I figured it would be a good place to plant tomatoes. And it is. Every year since then, I have ended up with volunteer tomatoes.
Later on, after the volunteer tomatoes have sprouted (if there are any, that is, which I hope there will be), I will put the hay back around the tomato plants to keep the weeds from growing.
I had only moved a few flakes of hay over to my pile across the driveway, when all at once, I heard the tractor quit. I watched as Randy climbed off and began to tinker around with the gasoline sediment bowl on the tractor. In a couple of minutes, he climbed back up on the tractor, started it and began to disk again.
A minute later, once more, the 460 began to sputter. And then it quit. Randy got off, tinkered, got back on, started it, drove it a few feet. And then -- you guessed it. The tractor began to sputter again. And it sputtered until it quit.
Not Again . . .
It sounded like the same problem we'd had with the tractor last summer. It would run for a while and quit, run for a while and quit. Eventually Randy took the gas tank off the tractor and took it over to a friend's machine shop. The tractor was built in 1962, and the gas tank was beginning to rust. The sediment bowl assembly coming out of the tank was getting plugged up with rust. They cleaned out the gas tank and put an additional stem on the sediment bowl assembly so that if rust did settle out, the top of the stem would be above any of the rust.
Draining the gasoline out of the tractor last summer had been a real job. Cleaning out the gas tank and adding a longer stem to the sediment bowl assembly had been an all-day job. When they were finished, they were sure that the problem was solved. And it had been. Until Wednesday evening.
Countless
I lost count of the number of times the tractor quit and Randy got off. After a while, when he finally got it started again, he headed back toward the barn. I figured he wasn't going to be very happy by the time he parked the tractor in the barn. And I was right.
"I thought," my husband said in a disgusted tone of voice, "that we fixed that problem last summer."
"So did I," I said.
"Now I'm going to have to drain the gas out of it again," Randy said.
My husband sighed and went back to the barn. By this time, I was working on picking up more of the manure out of Isabelle's pasture. I've got quite a pile now, and I am hoping within the next week or so that I can use the wheelbarrow to haul it out to the garden.
In a little while, Randy came out to Isabelle's pasture.
"I really don't want to drain the gas again," he said. "It's such a mess. But I guess I'm going to have to."
When I went into the barn a while later, Randy had hooked a hose from the bottom of the gas tank and had put the other end into one of the gas cans.
"This is going to take a while," he said. "It's running pretty slow."
A Long Process
For the next hour, Randy worked on draining the gas out of the 460 Farmall.
"That's enough for tonight," he said at a little after 8 p.m. "I guess I will have to finish tomorrow."
By this time, too, he was really disgusted.
"We spent all that time last summer fixing the gas tank!" he said. "And now I've got the same problem again! How am I going to get the field disked so we can plow it if I can't get the tractor to run?"
"I don't know," I said. When my husband is in that kind of a mood, I know that it is best to try to keep my comments to a minimum.
"This is just disgusting," he said. "All that work, and the gas tank is still plugged up with rust! I can't believe it!"
"Well," I said. "Maybe you should just buy a new tank."
He looked at me for a moment. "They don't make new tanks for a tractor this old."
I looked back at him. "I'm sure they do. Maybe not for this particular tractor, but there's got to be a cross reference of some kind for a gas tank that will work with this kind of tractor."
My husband grunted noncommittally.
I knew that it was time for me to clam up again.
More Draining
Thursday evening as soon as Randy came home from work, he went back down to the barn to start draining more gas out of the 460. Fortunately, the tractor only had a half a tank, or about 15 gallons. If the tank had been full, he would have been draining 30 gallons out of it.
Finally, after the tank had been draining again for a couple of hours, he was able to take the sediment bowl assembly out. If he had taken the sediment bowl assembly out without draining the gas from the tank, all of the gas would have run out onto the barn floor.
He brought the assembly up to the house and put it on some newspaper on the kitchen table.
I am sure that for some people, the idea of putting a piece of a tractor that smells strongly of gasoline on the kitchen table on some newspaper would seem completely alien.
To me, it seems completely normal. I grew up with my dad bringing pieces of the tractor into the house to work on them. I also grew up with a father who warmed up the oven, turned it off, and then let the tractor's distributor cap sit in the oven for 15 or 20 minutes until it had dried out so he could get the tractor started.
A Flashlight and a Toothpick
Randy got a small flashlight and a toothpick and went to work trying to clean out the stem. I was sitting across the table, looking through my weather book to find out when the meadowlarks had arrived last year (end of March).
All at once, my husband exploded.
"I can't believe this! I just cannot believe this!"
"What?" I said.
"It's a [very bad expletive -- use your imagination] lady bug!"
"What?" I said.
"I said -- it's a [very bad expletive] lady bug!"
"A lady bug?"
"Yes! It's a [very bad expletive] lady bug! I can't believe it!"
"A lady bug," I said.
"A [very bad expletive] lady bug!
"It's not rust?" I said.
"No it's a [very bad expletive] lady bug. I don't believe this! It's not rust at all! It's a [very bad expletive] lady bug!"
My husband generally is not one to go around swearing. But by the time he was finished, the air was rather blue in the kitchen.
"How did a lady bug get in the gas tank?" I asked when he had calmed down a little bit.
"How should I know?" he said. "I suppose it just crawled in the gas tank."
"But how?" I said. "The gas tank is sealed up."
"I don't know how. I suppose it managed to crawl in under the gas cap and got down in the gas," Randy said.
"Well, you know how they are," I said. "When it gets to be fall, they're looking for someplace to spend the winter."
"The gas tank on the 460 is NOT the place for a lady bug to spend the winter!" Randy said.
"I know that," I said. "The lady bug did not."
Sometimes when I move a bale of hay away from the wall in the barn during the winter, there will be hundreds of lady bugs huddled up behind it. You would think the freezing temperatures would kill them, but below zero weather doesn't seem to bother them. They wait it out until spring and then go on their merry way.
"I went through all of that for a [very bad expletive] lady bug!" Randy said.
"Yes, dear. You did," I said.
And Also, The Coffee Pot
I reminded him that we'd had problems with one of the coffee pots at church, too, last fall. It's one of those of where you can get a cup of coffee out while the pot is still brewing, except that one Sunday, the spigot wouldn't shut off. Another lady and I took it apart over the sink -- and you guessed it. A lady bug had become stuck in the coffee spigot. Quite dead of course. But it was still stuck in the spigot.
"That's different," Randy said. "You didn't have to go through so much work with the coffee pot. And besides, it was a coffee pot. Not a tractor."
He shook his head. "It was a [very bad expletive] lady bug!" he said.
"Yes, dear," I said. "It was."
The truth of the matter is, of course, that the lady bug could have floated around in the gas tank for years without giving any problems at all. It just happened to float over to the sediment bowl assembly and got stuck in the stem.
Then again, every fall we have thousands of the Asian Lady Beetles flying around the house and the barn, looking for a place to spend the winter. I have been sweeping them up off the basement floor now for several months. Every morning, there's a fresh batch of the crunchy little orange bugs scattered around on the floor. And they are still crawling around on the ceiling of my office on sunny days, looking for a way out of the house.
Is it any surprise, then, that one of them found its way into the 460's gas tank?
I think not.
LeAnn R. Ralph
