Sarah Jane Humke

The life of a traveling, reading, writing, spining and knitting shepherdess.

Unit

Sarah Jane Humke

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November 1, 2011

Last Thursday my container arrived in Central Iowa.  I had found out the day before that it had been sitting in Cedar Rapids for several days as no one seemed to have contact information for me.  Also, it had been inspected by customs and I had a nearly $500 charge that I needed to pay before I could get at my stuff.

I didn’t take a picture of the container though I wish that I had.  It said in very big letters something like Mexicanana International on it.  I have to admit, had I been a customs person just seeing it I would have wanted to inspect it myself.  Anyway, the truck came with 4 guys to unload it into the storage unit.  Now, I have half a storage unit, the other half looks like it has grandma and grandpa’s detritus that none of the kids or grandkids wanted and is waiting to be sold off at auction or garage sale.  It’s very tidily arranged on tables or planks put across saw horses and labeled with things like, “Grandma’s telephone and sewing supplies”, or “Grandpa’s BBQ equipment”.  The tables and saw horses are precisely lined-up along the line in the concrete floor which denotes the middle of the storage space.

This is what it looked like at about 9am on Thursday morning as you entered the door.

And this is from the back of the space.

To give you perspective it’s about 30′ long by about 10′ wide and around 8′ tall where the roof meets the walls.  This was what it looked like after the guys left on Thursday from the door.

And from the back (as far back as I could get!).

And from a slightly different perspective…

I’m thankful for the movers on this end for taking the bubble wrap off of all the large plastic crates for me.  However, I had to open dozens of large boxes to get all the Deli-Cat and cat litter buckets out.  They packed them anywhere from 2 to 4 to a box as well as all the bags of wool and yarn.  Their labeling of the boxes was more than a little esoteric and creative.  More than one box labeled with “clothing” was found to contain yarn or even books.  Some of the boxes were labeled only with what was on the very top of the box, even if it comprised only a very small percentage of what the box contained. This has made finding the half a dozen things that I really wanted to get out sort of like a very bizarre Christmas where I’m battling open boxes taped very securely (I will say this for them, they didn’t skimp on tape or bubble wrap!) to find my own belongings in extremely odd groupings.  My bathroom stuff sharing a box with a tambourine and other musical instruments or a whole passel of shoes from the bedroom with kitchen equipment (that last one was labeled “dishes”).

While naked, I look as though I was trying to be a leopard for Halloween as I have that many bruises randomly marring my legs and arms.  My hands are completely unladylike as nearly every knuckle has been scraped raw.  Speaking of unladylike, the popping of my knees and creaking of my ankles as I stand or sit would make a proper lady check that the floorboards weren’t about to break.  Moving heavy boxes and furniture from 8′ in the air has really left its mark on me these past days.

While we were unloading, the guys were on the lookout for any boxes labeled “conservatory” or “pots” as all the pots were not put into the storage space as well as my shed parts and spinning wheel.  Oh and the sofa, can’t forget that!  I had driven Dad’s cargo van over and it was full when I left with a few things blocking the walking space in the storage unit for me to pick-up the next day.

The shed was a bit of an adventure as I had all the parts for it except the special plastic bolts that hold the whole thing together.  They were all carefully labeled and put into a 2.5 gallon zipper bag which ended-up getting put into a plastic crate that I thought had yarn in it.  I only found them today and had been going over plans to somehow lash the shed together without them at this point.  However, I was looking for yarn (stop laughing! It was specific yarn for a Christmas project!) and I opened this not-yarn container and voila! there they were.  I also found the yarn (I think it’s the same color as Lighting McQueen.  I’m not all that up on Disney characters.  It’s red at least!) so today was a total win in the “adventures-in-finding-stuff-in-a-solidly-packed-30′-storage-unit”.

I also built a shed today.

Rawr!

 

Harvest

Sarah Jane Humke

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October 22, 2011

So the past week or so has been all about getting the corn (maize) out of the fields.  I figured that I would share with you a few photos of it…

This is the combine with the head up. The head is the front part of the combine that looks like a demonic comb or fingers. You put the head up when you aren't actually harvesting, like when you are trying to get from one part of the field to another.

Here it is with the head down, ready to start harvesting the corn.

The combine cuts the corn plants off a little under a foot from the soil surface and then "ingests" it eventually separating the corn kernels from everything else, which gets ejected out the back-end of the combine.

There is a lot of organic material left behind the combine. Farmers used to disk this all under every fall but now most leave it on top of the soil as it helps to prevent erosion.

I don't have a lot of chances to get pictures of the combine this time of the year when it's not moving. They had a flat tire, which is why it's in the farm-yard. Here you can see the head clearly. This combine can harvest 6 rows at a time. There are combines that are out right now that can harvest 12 rows at a time. They are HUGE and have to remove their heads before they can go on the road.

 

This is what it looks like between two of the fingers on the head. You can see the chains with the teeth that grab the cornstalks and drag them in. These are why you don't want to be wandering around out in a field when they are harvesting! (Well, one reason at least!)

This is the hopper where the corn kernels go. It's a lot bigger than it looks in this photo.

A view from the driver's seat.

When the hopper is full, the combine unloads the grain into a truck or wagon. It used to be uncommon to see grain trucks being used but now pretty much everyone uses them as they are much faster than using a tractor and wagons.

Gratuitous cute shot!

 

The Creek

Sarah Jane Humke

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October 17, 2011

The corn down along the bottom land has been harvested so we can get to the creek now.

This time of the year it’s pretty low, perfect for exploring with some little dogs!

I’ve found a nice sandy bend which is out of the wind and sort of hidden from the world.  We are obviously not the only ones enjoying these characteristics!

Malcolm loves walking around in the water checking out all the angles.

Weezy gets excited over every little sound.

Meara and Micheal are really not interested in coming down here and have to be coerced into coming down the bank.

Malcolm seems to think that the water in the creek tastes better than anywhere else!

Meara is skeptical about this claim.

Buried Treasures

Sarah Jane Humke

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October 16, 2011

Since I’ve been home, I’ve been cleaning-out the upstairs closet of my parents house.  This is sort-of an exciting endeavor as I couldn’t ever remember getting to the back of this closet in my lifetime.  It’s a really deep and big closet as the makers of this house simply closed-off the end of the hallway and put a door on it!  This house is the oldest of a trio of houses built by members of my family from the same blueprints.  Makes sense if you think about it as it’s more or less what they do in modern housing developments.  Our house is (I think) the closest one to the original layout minus a wooden front porch and with the addition of an enclosed back porch.  One of the houses has been pulled down and the other is so different from ours that I didn’t realize that it was the same floor plan as a child until someone pointed it out to me.  But it has a built-on garage and a fair number of changes from the original plan so I think I can be forgiven my oversight:-)

I decided to clean out this monster-sized closet more or less on a whim.  It was like the answer that a lot of mountain climbers give when asked, “Why did you climb that mountain?” “Because it was there.”  The stuff at the front of the closet was all pretty modern.  The further back I got, the older things were until I came to a huge box full of linens and blankets.  When I say linens, I think I mean linens from linen.  Some were so patched that it was hard to see where the original sheet had been.  There were embroidered pillowcases and old quilts.  There was one blanket that had been wool, but was now mostly a pile of moth dust (it was kinda gross to get rid of!).  All of the linens are stained and in need of a serious cleaning, which I plan on giving them when I get to a point where I could put them outside to dry without major dust issues.  One of the tricks that I learned a few months ago when I was trying to get sweat stains out of some vintage pillowcases with colored crochet work on the edges is that the sun is an effective bleaching agent.  If you keep something damp, the sun will just keep working on it to get it white.  I think I am really going to miss my conservatory for this effort!  I will share these with y’all when I get them to a point where they don’t look a mess (don’t worry, I’ll try to take before and after photos!)

I finally managed to get to the shelf up high at the back of the closet.  There were some really heavy filing boxes back there and I asked mom what was in them.  It was some teaching materials from when my mom taught home-ec in the late 60’s and early and mid 70’s.  She had been given a ton of information by a teacher that was no longer teaching which what was in these massive boxes.  Getting them down off the shelf meant that I had to remove about half of the files from each of them before I could manage the weight (they probably weighed around 70 pounds full).  I’m glad that I had to as I found a few treasures in those massive filing boxes.  One was an envelope from the Belgian Linen Association containing a bunch of glossy black and white photos showing the processing of Belgian linen, some pamphlets about Belgian linen products and a sample of both raw and dressed flax.  This will be fun to use when I am giving spinning demonstrations!

Another treasure in these boxes were samples of fabrics of the time.  They were used for demonstrations so the majority of them were stapled to cardstock along one side.  I am going to have to learn how to quilt after finding these as some of the prints are just too cute for words!

A very special treasure that I unearthed is a stack of Needlecraft magazines from the early to the mid 1930’s.  They are in perfect condition and have been sitting in a Sunkist Orange box for who knows how long.  All of them are addressed to various women in my family tree, which is a bonus in my opinion as I can imagine these ladies reading through them making the patterns just like I am.   I’m really looking forward to going through these when I have some time to do it correctly not just flip through them.

These little gems make all the cobwebs and dust worthwhile!

He’s like the wind

Sarah Jane Humke

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October 7, 2011

We’re finally running in the wind here again.  Malcolm has been in full-on sniff mode for the past few weeks.  Rather than running around and getting his energy out he has been nose-to-the ground checking-out all the new and interesting smells.  Sometimes I wish I could explain things to him as you can almost see with the look on his face his questions.  Like, “What is THIS smell?  I’ve never smelled this before!”  I wish I could tell him (with pictures and graphs and maybe an interactive display of some sort) that this smell is a raccoon and it is called a wash-bear in Dutch because it washes it’s food and it looks like it is wearing a little mask and it is very cute but leave it alone as it can be very mean and tough.  But, I can’t so I just watch his fascination when he comes to the smell of an animal that he has never met before.

Today was one of the first days that he has really stretched-out his legs and ran.  Maybe it was because it was windy or perhaps it’s because he is getting used to all the new smells but today he ran.  And I didn’t capture it at all.  These are the two shots that I got on my iPhone of him today.

You can get an idea of just how windy it is seeing how his tail it nearly flattened and his ears are flopped the wrong way!

 

I think that Malcolm and Micheal will be playing outside soon enough as this little hop preceded Mal trying to entice Micheal to play with him.  I’ll be really glad when they start to rough-house outside and not only in the living room.  Neither one of them is especially small and it sounds like a herd of elephants jumping on each other!

 

Autumn In Iowa

Sarah Jane Humke

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October 5, 2011

Autumn in Iowa is… quirky.  It can go from the 80’s to below freezing in a day and does so often enough that it’s not commented on as “strange weather”.  There isn’t as much fall color here as there is in other places I’ve visited.  It is definitely not Rhinebeck, but few places are!  However, we do have the harvest, which is oddly fun to watch.  In my opinion, it is way more interesting than the football that everyone seems to get all excited about this time of the year. They even have stats on the evening news like they do for the sports as to what percentage of the crop is harvested, etc.

Perhaps I am a little odd.

The past week has been so warm that I feel sorry for the kids in the non air-conditioned schools around here. It seems a pity to be trapped indoors in this weather with its crisp mornings and flawless skies.  Knowing the kind of weather that will be coming down for us express from Canada in a few weeks makes these few weeks all the more glorious.
I’ve been taking the dogs out at every chance but I’ve not brought the camera all that much.  Today I rectified that.

This is a field that was harvested earlier this week.  It had soybeans planted in it and at one point they had 3 combines taking them out at one time.  It didn’t take very long for the crop to be out when you have that many machines (and people) working on it.  In the background you can see the Ackley Co-op and water tower.

The dogs are enjoying their daily walks with the exception of Meara who has to be coerced into coming along.  Micheal, who is a tubby little tank of a dog alongside Malcolm, sometimes quits early too, but he’s always game for going!

Autumn color in Iowa is more subdued than in other parts of the county, but it’s still there.  These are the sugar maples in front of our house from out in the field.

And from up close:

Trees aren’t the only things that provide fall color.  Here is a wild asparagus plant that grows in the ditch in front of the house:

One of the bad parts of harvest time is the grain trucks.  These are semis that haul grain from the fields to the elevators.  There’s nothing wrong with the trucks or the folks driving them in themselves, it’s the amount of dust that they kick-up on the road.  Even the dust isn’t really their fault, it’s just that it’s dry and the road gets dusty.  But the fact that there are probably a dozen of them going by each hour makes it so that everything outside is covered in a fine sifting of beige dust.

(Funny enough, with the 4 trucks that I took pictures of in order to get these 2 photos, all but one slowed-down when they saw me snapping pictures of them.  I’d guess that they have had complaints about their speed [they are going fast] in the past:-))

There is still a little other color around.  I found a few wild violets blooming still.  These little plants with their heart-shaped leaves have mostly taken over the lawn here and I don’t think anyone is complaining.  They make a lovely carpet of purple in the spring and summer.  I used to pick handfuls of these when I was a child and display them in juice glasses on the kitchen table.

Dad and I had dinner tonight at The Goat Barn out at Crazy Acres which is a great camping facility not too far down the road from us.  As you can guess, they put the restaurant in what used to be the goat barn.  This is a great place to camp around here as they even have cute cabins that can sleep a ton of people for really reasonable prices along with RV hook-ups and more traditional camping stuff.  The food at The Goat Barn is really reasonable with good-sized portions.  If you are around Ackley, you should stop in!

Where’s my stuff?

Sarah Jane Humke

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October 3, 2011

So, all of my stuff was loaded into a container and left the London Thamesport on the 29th of September on the good ship (at least I hope it’s good!) Hoechst Express which is owned and operated by Hapag-Lloyd which is a German shipping company.  The ship is “expected” on the 20th of October in the Port of Chicago.  So if any of my peeps in Chicago see my container make sure the driver knows that they are headed to IOWA, not Ohio or Idaho:-)

To tell you the truth, I was a little surprised that my container was landing in the same city as I did.  I know that Chicago is a port because of the Great Lakes, but I still didn’t think of it.  I figured that my container was going to head into one of the big East Coast ports and travel by semi-truck cross-country.  Oddly enough, knowing that it is only going to be driven from Chicago makes me feel more… I don’t know, secure about it?

I wish that the Hapag-Lloyd site had a little map showing where the ship is now but I understand on many levels why they wouldn’t want that information out there:-)

I’m glad to have an idea of when my stuff is supposed to arrive.  I’ve been itching for my spinning wheel of late as well as my collection of ugly acrylic yarn to make scrapghans.  I stopped at the Hobby Lobby in Waterloo last week and had to physically restrain myself from getting some of their newest ombre and variegated yarns.  They were just so… special.  Hobby Lobby has their own brand of yarn called I Love This Yarn which is really quite nice to work with.  I now understand why some knitters are so hateful towards acrylic yarns as it does sometimes squeak when you knit with it but for crochet, I feel that it works better than wool blends.  Anyway, I have collected ombres and variegated yarns for years as they add a lot of color to my scrapghans and granny square blankets really quickly.  Hobby Lobby comes out with new colors a few times a year as well as special seasonal colorways (these can be most exciting!).  Going into this store can be a dangerous act from which my accounts usually suffer.  I was extremely restrained in that I only got 2 balls of cotton yarn and it was on clearance!  I figure that I need to start working on Christmas presents now that I am here and dish clothes are quite popular amongst my friends.

This is all a long-winded way of saying that it is interesting to me which things I am missing.  I’m also missing my shelf of books “to be read” as I’ve been doing a lot of reading of late.  I would’ve packed more books except for the fact that they weigh so much!  I wish I could have lined the inside of some of the animals crates with some books (in plastic baggies of course!) as they were well below 50lbs:-)  I’m not missing my clothes all that much…yet.  I have a feeling if I don’t have them by the time that snow flies I might be a tad antsy for some sweaters and sweatshirts.  The clothes that I packed are almost all causal, basically an assortment of long and short-sleeved tees and jeans.  But I can see it being a pain even in a few weeks as I only have one sort-of dressy outfit with me and I can’t wear the same thing to church every week!  I wish desperately that I had Mal’s normal wire crate.  The wooden one that was used to get him over here is much too big to be in my room and he really needs a place to be.  Once a dog has been crate trained they feel safer in their crates than they do roaming about and will settle down quite quickly often once they are inside it.  I miss my couch and ottoman as it is a really comfy place to sit.  I wish that I had packed more good writing paper as I hate using my fountain pens on normal paper (I know, such a snob!). Really, it’s been kind of surprising what I’ve been missing!

Anyway, go Hoechst Express go!  (Safely of course.)



 

 

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