If you like dull overcast weather, we had it. Last week was not my favourite weather. Plus, most days we had wind that cut like a knife through your clothes right down to your socks. I don't mind the days where we have sun, but I begrudge the cold, cloudy days. Maybe one way to look at it is we are one day closer to spring. Ha Ha Ha! It's not even Christmas yet. Last year at this time we had snow, so thankfully we are not blessed with that white stuff yet. My sister-in-law Margaret sent us a picture from her cell phone of the snow on the deck at her house. They live at Turtle Lake and I guess that it looks like winter there.
On the home front, I still need to put the bulldozer blade on the tractor. Sven has told me on his days off when he will come and help me. That will be much appreciated. I have beavers in the creek on the northeast corner of my home section. They have dammed up the creek so there is four or five feet of water laying there. This is not the bad thing, the bad thing is they have blocked the culvert so water cannot go down the channel and now it has been flowing across my field. It has cut a 10-foot wide channel, a foot deep, a quarter of a mile across the field. It has also made an area that we used to farm too wet to cross. The beavers have also cut trees and left them in the field. The beavers have to go! I have been here 50 years and never had a problem like this before. It's the beaver or me, and I'm not leaving, so I guess we know what must be done.
As we are into Halloween, I can reminisce about years past when Halloween was a big event in Waseca. When I was informed I was too big to get treats, I went for the tricking. There were several of us young guys going Halloween trickin'. No names will be used to protect the innocent. Most of it was in good fun, but we got carried away sometimes. We had a short, grouchy old lady named Mrs. Long living in the community. She could bite the head off a tough bulldog. She ran a hardware store although I never really saw her sell anything. After the Depression there were no banks left in Waseca and she was the bank as she cashed the farmers' grain cheques. She had a wooden toilet as did everyone else in Waseca and us young guys were always determined to tip her toilet. This went on for several years. She tried to stop us with different ways. One year she had four large posts driven in the ground and the toilet spiked to the posts. We got the posts loose and over went the toilet, posts and all! The best trick she played on us was to move the toilet beside the hole. There were not any streetlights and the toilets were always in the back alley. One of our guys ran up to tip the toilet and fell right in the hole. That was the end of the evening for him as he had to go home and clean up.
If there was toilet paper you could always make streamers over people's trees. Stealing a bar of soap from home would be entertaining soaping people's windows. One year we stole the dray wagon from the railway station house and after dragging it around town we left it on Main Street. One year we carried Mrs. Long's toilet around and left it in the middle of Main Street. Anything not tied down was fair game.
One of the dirtiest tricks we played was tipping a toilet over, door down, with our school bus driver inside. When he started yelling we all fled. The next day he told us how he had to tear the boards off the seat to get out. We all had a good laugh but not in front of him.
One other thing we did made me feel bad. There was a farmer who lived on the edge of town. He had a rack full of bundles. There was about a dozen of us. We got the rack rocking back and forth and then over it went. Then we all ran. I heard after that the rack got broken when it landed. I felt bad about that since I was my grandfather's gofer. We fixed racks. I knew how much work it was to have to fix a rack. Most of our fun was non-destructive and we thought we all had a good time.
After three or four years, I quit going out Halloweening, because even if you had nothing to do with some of the pranks, if you were seen in town, you were blamed anyway.
Now my Halloween evening consists of watching the grandkids come for treats. The other day Bev came home with a big bag labelled "Treats." I thought, oh boy, I could get a few of those before she hid them. When I got into the bag here it was dog treats! Dog treats, I tell you, sure makes me realize where I stand in the pecking order of things around here. Dog treats, indeed! Whoof, Whoof!
A clean printable joke of the week: An old farmer goes to the barber shop for a shave and a haircut. He tells the barber he probably can't get a close shave because he has too many wrinkles. The barber took a wooden ball out of the cupboard and told him to put it in his cheek. After they were done the farmer said that was the best shave he had had in years but he wondered what would have happened if he had swallowed the ball. "Oh just bring it back in a couple of days" said the barber "that's what everyone else does". YYYEEEeech!
