Sunday morning - in bed with Stripey Butt in These titles mean nothing.

It’s a little before 7 am and I’m still in bed. The pleasant gray striped cat is laying on my right foot. I’m thinking of taking a bath - would take LeCarre with me. Its a good book but it’s taking me too long to read it. Too many sudoku interruptions. I have a hard time keeping that characters straight. And it’s not the author’s fault. It’s mine.

LeCarre has this idealized woman - a wife who is slender and waifish, who is smart and loving and loved. I wonder if I could google a picture of his real life wife.

So I tried and found myself deeply mired in a whole day’s LeCarre on the internet search. To be honest that’s what I often do with my free time. I chase down stuff on the internet. A few weekends ago I found actress Sean Young tweeting pre-election advice to Donald Trump. I hadn’t heard much of her in a long time, so I googled, wiki’d and generally traced her down. Dark haired actresses of the era lead me to Debra Winger and I looked her up too. Winger takes me to Richard Gere with a detour on the gerbil story - nothing to it folks - and then a long time with the movie Breathless which he made with a young French actress named Valérie Kaprisky who inspired me to quit plucking my eyebrows. I spent time on Gere’s marriages, on his relationships with actresses in his movies.

It’s not a productive use of time. It’s an example of the world at your fingertips - at the vast CHOICE the internet gives you. I can lie in bed with Stripey Butt and look for LeCarre’s wives. Who would have thought the world would give us such capabilities? And that we would use them so casually, as such silly time fillers? We have become the brains in the jars in the old Steve Martin movie. (I just looked it up - ‘The Man With Two Brains’, 1983).

So anyway.

It’s a cold(er) gray day. Our warm fall may be ending. We had really heavy winds the day the blizzard came through Minnesota but no snow here and practically no rain. Jim combined the standing corn he was saving to pick as ear corn to put in Jamie’s crib and the grind for the calves. He likes to feed them ground ear corn (with cobs) rather than ground shelled corn. There is more roughage in it, more ‘extender’ in a way. They get hay as well.

I spent part of yesterday getting mad at public radio. I haven’t been listening to it a lot - mainly during commutes in the car when it’s Dan Damon on BBC in the morning and a cross between Minnesota Public with has a tower in Rochester that comes in pretty well and good old reliable Wisconsin Public. Wisconsin Public Radio is probably my biggest charity year in and year out. I give them twenty dollars a month from my checking account. I used to listen to them a lot. I enjoyed their phone in shows and their personalities were friends. Tom Clark, Jean Feraca, Larry Mueller, the woman with the Irish name.... I liked to listen to Chapter a Day, and Whad’Ya Know, and a bunch of other stuff. It was a connection to Madison’s culture and Milwaukee’s urbanness, plus the Great Lakes and .... well you get it.

Wisconsin was taken over earlier and more thoroughly by the Republicans than Iowa has been. Iowa is getting there, but Wisconsin’s been there for quite a while. And if it’s not Republicans it’s that kind of faux liberal I just don’t get it.

Example = twice yesterday afternoon I heard my beloved corn being attacked by people who know nothing. Corn is not the reason we are obese. We are obese because we eat too much of the wrong things. We have choices in life. We aren’t the geese with our feet nailed to the floor being force fed so our livers can be made into foie gras. Our grocery stores are filled with choices - good food. And farm policies are not making Doritos cheap. Doritos are not cheap. So there.

I just tried to tell you a story about corn yield checks. It was hard work, very technical - I remind myself of our President Elect - using short emphatic words that may or may not be true. Anyway I lost part of it and what I had left didn’t make sense so to heck with it. If you want to hear a cute corn yield check story, just say so in a note and I might give reconstruction a whirl.

Below are Jim’s harvest photos. The first three are at the 35 and show freshly made hay bales next to harvested corn. Very unusual situation. I haven’t asked him if he shouldn’t have made hay so late because it is hard on the seeding for next year. Hay is a perennial crop and it needs cover through the winter to keep it from heaving when the ground thaws and refreezes. He had terrible luck with summer haying - it rained and rained and rained. The only really good hay he made this year was late this fall when the weather became perfect for almost any activity.

Third photo is the sink hole that opened up again under the combine when he was picking corn. The combine’s front drive wheels pulled it through. I suppose it’s about 3 ft across. It opened up years ago before combining when my husband was still alive and vital. That was the day we hooked three tractors together to pull the tractor and mounted picker out of the hole. I was on one of them - the middle one I think. It was quite exciting. We later had the hole filed by a professional sink hole filler and it lasted until this year.

Ok. What do you think? Should I keep giving Wisconsin Public Radio twenty dollars a month?

Last updated November 20, 2016