An Offering of Myself to the World

Important Lessons

Hopefully, everyone learned valuable life lessons this Thanksgiving. I know I did. Since we couldn't make it to Nebraska to see Matty, he traveled all night to get here for Thanksgiving dinner. I wish Jough and Beleisha could have been here as well but I learned to cherish what time I have with my boys. I learned that if you are really, really hungry nothing satisfies quite like turkey. I learned that watching an old episode of America's Funniest Home Videos is better when more people are laughing at it. I learned that my cat, McCoy, really likes Matt. And the most important lesson I learned this holiday was...

PUMPKIN PIE DOESN'T TASTE QUITE THE SAME WAY WHEN YOU FORGET TO PUT SUGAR IN LIKE IT SAYS IN THE RECIPE!! Believe me, not even the taste of homemade whipped cream could cover it up. It was downright awful.

My boys still tease me about the time I made my award-winning Tuna Fish Casserole and forgot to put in one main ingredient....the TUNA FISH! So now I have created yet another family memory which will be passed down for generations.

I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving and made lots of new family memories!

Thanksgiving 2006

Farming 101: Sugar Beet Harvest

Good morning, students. Since I am on vacation this week, I thought I would take you all on a little field trip. Today we are going to see how sugar beets are harvested. I took my trusty camera out to the field, where all the action is, and took some photos to share with everyone. As always, clicking on the picture will make it larger...

This picture is of the field we are currently harvesting. It looks dried out because of the hard freeze we experienced last month. We also received quite a bit of rain so we were unable to harvest the beets as soon as we would have liked.

This is a sugar beet. It takes quite a process to turn this little guy into a bag of granulated sugar or brown sugar or powdered sugar, etc. I was fortunate enough to take a tour of the Western Sugar factory a few years ago. It was quite an eye-opener. I found a website that explains it in an easy to understand way. Anyone who is interested could check it out.

Here is a picture of some sugar beets which have been cut open. They are white on the inside just like sugar. And if you take a bite, they are very sweet. But the only thing you can do with them is make sugar. You can't take them into the house raw and cook them. Back in the old days, the German farmers used to make beet syrup with them but it is a very long process. Beet syrup can be used like maple syrup but it tastes a little like molasses and I never quite developed a hankering for it. But I really love the smell of raw sugar beets.

When harvesting sugar beets, the first thing to do is to take the green leaves off the top. Green leaves cannot be taken to the sugar factory with the beets so we have to cut them off. In the old days, this used to be done by hand with a tool like a scythe. The person would bend down, grab the green top of the beet with one hand and swipe the scythe across the top to cut it off. I'm glad we don't have to do it that way anymore as I could see myself chopping my leg off in the process! Now we use a machine called a beet topper or a defoliator. A beet topper uses knives to chop off the top of the sugar beet. The top is then left in the field and, after harvest, cattle are allowed on the field to eat the tops and fertilize the field all at the same time. The machine in the picture above is a defoliator. It does what it says...defoliates. It literally beats the leaves to fine particles which are then incorporated back into the soil. However, the hard freeze caused the tops to turn black and ropey so that the defoliator had a very difficult time taking the tops off. The following pictures show this.

The last picture shows the naked sugar beets with their tops removed. Next up, the sugar beet harvester (or digger).

The sugar beet harvester uses digger wheels to lift the beets out of the ground. This machine can do six rows of beets at one time. These wheels also try to lift the beet out of the ground with the least dirt possible. The goal is to try and put as many beets as possible in each truckload without much dirt or beet tops.

After the digger wheels lift the beets out of the ground, they are placed on the "elevator" which lifts them up and places them either in a truck or in the tank, when there is no truck available.

Here are some sugar beets in the holding tank waiting for a truck. This picture might also give you an idea of how large a sugar beet is. They are much larger than a red beet or a turnip.

When a truck pulls up underneath the harvester, the beets travel from the tank, up the elevator, and into the truck.

Whheee...the sugar beets LOVE this part! Free falling!

Here is a truck being filled "on the fly". The truck drives right next to the harvester as the beets are lifted out of the ground and sent up the elevator into the truck. When the truck is full, it will travel to the beet dump. This is literally where we "dump the beets".

I will try to make a journey up to the beet dump tomorrow and get some photos of that as well. Please do your studying tonight as there is a quiz in the morning.

Beet is a Four Letter Word

I couldn't resist using that as a post title. Thanks, Karen!

Overheard at last week's football game..."Yep, this year on Christmas Eve, we are going to rush in, open presents, and then rush back outside to dig more beets!"  I thought this was hilarious even though it is almost a true statement.

The factory gave each farmer a quota on how many of the frozen beets the factory would accept for processing. The frozen beets cannot be stored in a pile because they will spoil. So the factory will only accept the amount that they can process quickly. Our quota was met on Friday when we still had about a fourth of our beets left to dig. This was actually pretty good considering that a couple of weeks ago, we thought we were going to lose over half of our acreage. We had been planning a trip this Thanksgiving week to go to Nebraska and see Matty, thinking that we would be long done with the beets by then. But...

Now, the factory says that we can dig 105 more truckloads starting on Monday. While it is good to be able to dig more out, it is sad that we can't see Matty for the holiday like we had planned. Hopefully, we will be finished digging by Christmas!

I already had planned to take this week off and it was too late to change it. Someday this week, I will venture into Billings to get Christmas shopping done. And I hope to get my house all gussied up for the holidays as well. And maybe, just maybe, I will do a little much-needed maintenance on my ole blog.

Hey, Foxy Lady

Check out my new picture for mySpace (now with 56 "friends")...

I thought it was hilarious because my high school yearbook picture looks almost like the one they use in the Classmates.com ads. And don't laugh...that hairstyle was all the rage back then. (think, "Captain and Tennille" circa 1977) :-)

My husband is finally able to get back into the field to try and salvage more of our sugar beet crop. Keep your fingers crossed everyone. The way I understand it is that they probably won't be able to harvest all of it but like my husband says, every load trucked out is a good thing.

Four Hundred Children and a Beet in the Field...

When I was just a young'en the song Lucille by Kenny Rogers was popular. OK, maybe I was a wee bit older than a young'en. Anyway, we would always sing these words to the chorus. Sing along everyone...

You picked a fine time to leave me, Lucille
With four hundred children and a beet in the field...

Speaking of a beet in the field, (you were probably wondering in what direction this post was headed), we have more than one beet left in the field. The Billings Gazette finally printed a story in yesterday's paper which explains the plight. I normally don't like to blog about farming because, 1) most people do not understand the lifestyle and, 2) there are not a lot of happy, heartwarming stories when it comes to farming, no matter what the Hallmark movies try to tell you. The sugar beet harvest began the beginning of October and has not ended. Every time it was dry enough to dig, the piler at the dump would be down for half a day. Or it was too hot to pile the beets. Or it was too cold to pile the beets. Or you can't pile frozen beets. Or wait, maybe you can pile frozen beets but oops, here comes another storm. We have more than half of our frozen beets still in the field. And everyday things only look worse.

What I find in interesting are the comments to the Billings Gazette article. Of course, you always have the one or two loudmouths who don't even know what they are commenting about. And of course, they can only leave a negative comment. But the majority of comments were people showing their support for sugar beet farmers. And this was heartwarming.

My husband is pretty heartsick about the whole thing. It is very difficult to put in so many hours of labor nurturing and tending something, only to watch it deteriorate and spoil. And everyone knows the feeling. Most people at one time or another have felt this same way.

I don't really know what the future holds or how this will all pan out. We all only get to live one day at a time. And change comes to everyone whether you really want it to or not.

Gee, I didn't think I was THAT blond!

I was wondering why I wasn't getting any comments at all with my "new" template look. I just figured everyone was busy Christmas shopping...after all, it is after Halloween. But I discovered that when I messed around with my template, I also ACCIDENTALLY changed the comments so that I had to approve them first. So I beg everyone's forgiveness! Please don't be mad at me. :-)

I have to share a funny story from work. I normally don't blog about work but this story is hilarious. Or maybe it's one of those "I guess you just had to be there" type of story. Oh well, here goes...(names are changed to protect the innocent)

The copy machine repairman had just finished cleaning and tuning up our copy machine. Nothing was wrong with it. It was just time for a timely maintenance job. Of course, once he finished his work and left, the copy machine started acting up. It was printing a dark line down one side of each copy. Co-worker A and I were trying to figure out what was causing the dark line to show up. We tried cleaning it and using canned air but nothing seemed to work. We wanted to see which side the line was printing on so co-worker A drew a smiley face on a piece of paper and then made a copy. As the copy came out, co-worker B walked up to use the copy machine. "Is something wrong with the copy machine?" she asked. "Yes," I replied, "It keeps printing these darn smiley faces on every copy!" And with that I showed her the freshly copied piece of paper with the smiley face on it. Then I placed the same sheet of paper in the copier, pressed copy, and (of course) another piece of paper came out complete with a smiley face. "OH, how cute!" she said, "I want a smiley face on my copies!" She put her paper in the copier, pressed copy, and out came her copy...but without a smiley face. She was so downhearted. I thought she was simply joking but she wasn't. She actually thought I was telling the truth when I told her that the copy machine was putting smiley faces on all the copies! The three of us about split a gut laughing about that one!

MySpace friend update...as of 9:00 pm tonight, I have 29 friends!

Fun with MySpace

I just discovered that MySpace can be rather fun. In the beginning, I had my two loyal blog buddies (Sam and Chad) as my two friends. I could be content with that. Then on a lark, I added Mr. Barry Manilow as a friend. Now I am not clueless enough to think that celebrities actually look at regular people's mySpace pages. I know that they have some hired hand doing their promotional stuff for them. But I thought it would be cool to have Barry as my friend. And it was only a couple of days before Barry accepted my friendship. (Com'on everyone...Aaaaahhhhhh) So then I thinks to meself...what if I tried to get as many famous "friends" as I could. Just to see how many would like the free advertising become my friend.

First, I am starting with the bands. Just since yesterday, the number of my "friends" has risen to 14! So I am going to see how many musicians that I know of also have mySpace profile pages. I have learned that some don't (like Rufus Wainwright) but most fairly recent bands do. And I even got a "thank you" message from one of my most favorite bands, Collective Soul.

So this could turn into a fun hobby. Some people collect stamps, others collect coins. I collect MySpace friends.  :-)

Wake Me Up When Tuesday Ends

I had a productive weekend which didn't include working on NaNoWriMo. I think I will outdo my previous attempt and actually write zero words. I don't know what is wrong with me lately. I don't seem to have a coherent thought in my brain. I sit down to try to create something of some worth but all I feel like doing is settting in front of the television set. Not watching television, mind you, but simply staring at it. Not that there is anything worth watching on it anyway.

I did get my closets cleaned out. Or at least the clothes in my closets cleaned out. I have "Pack-rat Syndrome" which means that I never get rid of anything. I'm a hoarder. I hate to get rid of clothes that don't fit me because eventually I will fit into those size 10 jeans. I KNOW I will. Someday. But I bit the bullet today and cleaned out everything that did not fit me. And I say "closets" because I had clothes in three of them.  First, I divided all the clothes into piles according to what decade they were from. I had a 70's pile, an 80's pile, a 90's pile, and a current decade pile. I debated whether to keep the 70's pile or not because some of those clothes are back in style again. But I talked myself out of keeping the Hash bib overalls and the elephant-ear blue jeans. Plus, I will never again fit into clothes I wore in high school. So six large garbage bags later, I had sorted and gotten rid of most of it by carting it in to Community Hope. So if anyone sees some pretty hip and cool looking ladies out walking the streets late at night wearing some down right funky threads, you can thank me for that.

I use to hoard TV Guides. When I was young, I would read them from cover to cover, mark all of the programs that I wanted to watch, and do the crossword puzzle. In ink. And then save them in a cardboard box. I had about two years worth before my stepfather "accidentally" threw them out during one of our many moves. He had a hissy fit and said that he was tired of carting those magazines around the country. Well, it wasn't my fault we moved so often. Anyway, I had to laugh when I saw the Seinfeld episode where George's dad saved TV Guides. He was yet another sufferer of "Pack-rat Syndrome".