Category Archives: Acreage

Beyond Random

Dear Disapproving Neighbor

If you don’t want to see me wandering around in my undershorts, you should give me some warning before coming over. A person should be afforded a modicum of privacy, I mean, It’s my yard and I’ll rake it how I like. Sheesh.

Thoughts on Omaha

I read an interesting blog post on Omaha this morning and opted to leave the following comment:

This will make me seem exceedingly backwoods, but Omaha scares me. Close to half a million people? Ye cats! When people ask me where I’m from, I always say, “Sioux City, a town of 60,000 just north of Omaha,” because no one knows where Sioux City is. But I’m not really from Sioux City, I just say that. I’m from Le Mars, a town of 8,000 people just north of Sioux City. Except I’m not really from Le Mars either, I’m from Brunsville, a town of 120 just west of Le Mars. Well, actually, I’m closer to Ruble, just west of Brunsville, which had a population of two until Bill passed away a few years back…

I don’t get off the farm much.

So for me, going to Sioux City is spooky big, and Omaha is HUGE! Whenever we go to Omaha the traffic spooks me (I’m really not used to anything with more than two lanes) and I want to put a big sign on the back of my car that says, “Please Don’t Scare Me, I Poop Easily.”

Dejittering

About six months ago or so I switched to half-caff coffee. A few weeks ago I started mixing the half-caff in with decaffeinated, so I’m at about a quarter-caff. My stomach doesn’t hurt nearly as much now, and I find I’m able to concentrate better in the three hours a day I’m awake.

Le Sigh

I’ve talked to about twelve or fifteen different people about getting estimates to finish my basement. (Cash is scarce now, but I really do want to get the basement done sometime so I can set up a photography studio down there. Walls are up, paint is done, need a false ceiling, lights, floor of some kind, doors hung, that sort of thing.) But so far no one’s actually come out to our place to even look at it.

Meanwhile our garage door opener pooped out on us again. It’s worked maybe six months in the three years we’ve lived here, so I called a pro. He took my money, said he’d order a new unit, and told me he’d call me first thing Monday morning to set up a time either Monday or Tuesday to install the thing. It’s Tuesday, and I haven’t heard a word from him yet. I’m wondering if he took my money and ran.

Late yesterday afternoon I had occasion to use the water spigot on the side of our house (I was filling buckets of water to dump on some baby trees I got in the mail a few weeks ago from the Arbor Day people). After a bit I noticed water coming out from under our siding, leaking down the foundation. That’s NOT good. A quick trip to the basement revealed a nifty puddle of water along that wall. So I called the plumber. He said they’d be out today or tomorrow to fix it. I hope they follow through.

I worry. It feels like our little paradise is slowly falling apart, but I can’t seem to get people to come out and fix it, and if they do I’m not real sure how to pay them. It makes me feel helpless.

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The Day’s Ruminations

There Are Good Things…

The past few days have been pretty good, all things considered. Beloved Wifey is still ill and is having a lot of trouble getting around, but we truly feel there may be an end in sight. The thought of having a healthy Dagmar next spring makes me all happy!

And there have been other little blessings. Pops came over with his tractor and helped get some of the junk metal out of my grove, and I was able to get out there with the chainsaw and clear some deadwood out (it’s a never-ending project, that). My back isn’t nearly as hurty as it was last week. I’m very nearly finished with my last large photo project of the season. Things are good.

So THIS is why statistics are important…

Random SEO Cogitations

I often get asked about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – the technique behind getting your web site boosted higher in the search engine rankings. Here’s what I told a friend of mine earlier today:

Here are two articles that explain SEO fairly well. The first one is very detailed and explains how it all works, what you can do, and what you can expect.

The second article explains why you don’t need to do any of it.

In my experience, there are just a few things you can do to increase traffic, but websites like ours will never be getting 3,000 hits a day – it’s just not going to happen. There’s not a market that large for big numbers. (I remember back in the beginning of time when “hit counters” first started coming out. People were amazed that their sites were getting 10,000 hits a day – fantastic! The problem is that those weren’t real people – they were getting five hits a day. Four from themselves looking at the silly hit counter and giggling in glee, one from their mom, and 9,995 hits from search engine robots.)

The best ways, in my opinion, to get good results are pretty simple.

Have a good, solid site with engaging content. That gives a visitor impetus to remember your site and come back again.

Make sure your “keywords” are in your site somewhere. If you don’t say “I do graphic design in Sioux City, Iowa,” in the text somewhere, Google won’t have any way of knowing that you do graphic design in Sioux City. That sounds simple, but it’s the one thing most people forget.

The third thing is to give it time. The search engines all send out little “spiders” that crawl the web, looking for new sites, categorizing, indexing, and combing through the text. It sometimes takes a month for Yahoo or Bing to trip over your brand-new site. And when it does, the search engine won’t give the new site a whole lot of credence – the longer a site is up and active the higher your ranking will be. (Active is a key word there – you need to update the site occasionally or the search engines assume the site is dead and it will start to drop in the rankings again.)

It also helps if you can build links. The more people who link to your site, the more important the search engines will think your site must be. Mention your site in a blog, or on FaceBook. That helps.

But the best way to get people to your site is to market the heck out of it – make sure it’s on your business cards, start a business page on Facebook and G+, make sure you tell prospective customers to check out your site. I still get most of my customers from the phone book. “I saw your name in the Yellow Pages, checked out your website, and I’d like to hire you to take our family photos…”

If you’re interested in getting a website designed, please check out HippieBoy Design – it’s what I do!

Awk!

The Asian Beetles are swarming! And I’m not talking about Korean folks driving VWs – I’m talking about hundreds, if not thousands, of little red bugs all all swarming our happy little home, all trying to find their way in for the winter. And the swarm is just beginning – I imagine it will be much worse in a few hours…

We do have a pest control company that comes out a couple times a year to spray our house. The little buggy bugs will soon perish – hopefully outside!

When we first moved here, just three winters ago, we had Asian Beetles way, way bad. Without exaggeration, I’d go through the house two or three times a day with our “handi-vac” thingy, vacuuming bugs up. There were specific spots where they’d congregate – around the windows, on the ceiling in our laundry room, by the tub upstairs. I’d quit often empty the vacuum bag in the toilet three or four times a day and flush thousands of beetles to their watery little graves.

In other news…

WordPress sucks because I’m stupid. And, this rules:

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Random Thoughts for the Day

Good doggy

Burning sticks is interesting when you have a Golden Retriever nearby.

She’s always trying to help Papa. Unfortunately she was trying to help Papa by bringing Papa the sticks he dropped in that big smokey pile… Even when Papa goes inside.

I happened to glance out the window to see a branch (about the size of your arm) on our wooden deck, merrily burning away, leaving a nice scorch mark for me to worry about. The scorch mark matches the burned hole in our yard where she dropped the other burning branch…

Serenity, with Bugs

Last December Dagmar and I moved to our acreage. It’s early July now, so we’ve lived here just over six months. This home seems so natural to us it feel like we’ve lived here for years, yet every day we’re surprised by some little aspect of the land.

During the winter we were surprised at how often the wind came howling from the southeast. The wind never comes from the southeast – it always, always comes from the northwest.

During the spring we were surprised at how often the wind came howling from the southeast.

During the early summer we were surprised at how often the wind came howling from the southeast.

Last night we were surprised – the wind quit howling from the southeast for a few hours. Magically the fireflies came out. Not just a few, but hundreds – thousands – happily blinking away in our yard, the grove, and mostly out over the fields. Sometimes it seemed like the lightning bugs were blinking randomly, but other times it almost seemed as if they were creating purposeful art – a wave of light coming from the west, sweeping up through our yard into the pasture to fade out up over the fields a quarter mile away. Neither Dagmar nor I had ever seen anything like it.

When I was a child there was a certain spot in our grove, a small clearing, where there would often be fireflies. That’s where you would see them first, dancing in their own little meadow, surrounded by trees. They signaled the depth of summer to me. All is right with the world when there were fireflies dancing in the meadow – no wind, no rain, warm weather, calmness.

When I grew up and moved to Le Mars, I missed the fireflies. I’d see them occasionally in the small town, blinking in back yards as I’d drive by, intent on whatever errand I was running before shutting myself back into a windowless apartment. Later, when I moved to Sioux City, I gradually forgot about fireflies altogether. You simply never saw them. In our old neighborhood we didn’t feel safe sitting outdoors or going for leisurely walks – too many drunks, thugs, gang-bangers. And if there were any fireflies in the city, their lazy glow was drowned out by the constant stream of headlights, streetlights, the haze coming from the kiln factory across the street.

I never imagined, as a child, that I’d lose the magic of fireflies. And until just a few months ago, I never imagined I’d find that magic back again.

If you’re reading this on Facebook, you can see the original blog at www.radloffs.net, click on “Blog.”

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After the clouds go to bed…

I realized today that I’ve spent most of my life yearning. Sometimes in earnest, sometimes the yearning is set on simmer, but it’s always there. I spent a little time analyzing just what’s causing me such angst…

While everyone certainly wants more moolah and bigger, better, fancier, flashier toys, I’m pretty satisfied with what I have. Dagmar and I will never be rich; to the contrary, I’m reasonably sure we’ll always struggle with debt – but we have food, clothes, a place to call home and a VERY happy marriage… But still I have this strange yearning. Why? It took me a long time to figure it out…

I want time.

That’s all. I want time. I want a summer off. I want a summer like they used to be. I want the kind of a summer that can only happen to kids between the ages of five and nine – when you’re old enough to go outside and play on your own, but you’re young enough that you don’t know there are things you’re not supposed to do. That’s what I want.

I remember waking up in the morning, lazing in bed and watching the shadows in my room move, the dust motes slowly swirling in a sunbeam. A single, well-aimed breath would make them dance, even from all the way across the room – but once you’ve made the dust dance in the sunlight, you have to be patient for a long time before you can do it again. One look out the window and you knew if it was a wet, dewy sort of day or a dry, dusty sort of day. Both are good, but it’s best to wear shoes if it’s a wet, dewy sort of day. Out the room, down the stairs and out the door – sometimes fully clothed, sometimes wearing nothing but britches – it all depended on who caught you before you got out the door. Never mind taking a bath – time enough to do that later, after the clouds go to bed.

Growing up on a farm spoiled me. Once out the door, so many things to do. But there was never a decision to make. Within thirty seconds of leaving the house, something would capture my energy – sometimes a pretty bug climbing up a tallish stem of grass to get a good look at his kingdom, other times a sparkly rock would keep me entertained for a while, dreaming of the places it had been. Sometimes I’d want to see the sky, so I’d wander off to the fields where the trees stand solitaire along the edges of the rows, keeping watch.

The sky can look powerful big when the trees are far away – a good place to watch the clouds. How far can the clouds see? Can they see all the way to town? Where have they been? Did they like it there? Sometimes, though, it’s nice to watch the clouds with just one tree to keep you company. That’s easy enough… If you do it right, you can find a spot under a tree where the green leaves make the sky look electric blue – that’s the best.

Ooh – there’s a milkweed. Any butterflies around? They like milkweeds. There are usually some butterflies in the fields, but sometimes they like to go in the grove and hang out with the trees there for a while. Off to chase the flutterbyes.

The grove is always a fun place to be. Davy Crockett and Dan’l Boone help me sneak through the woods, so quiet and slow the rabbits don’t notice me. Sometimes it’s nice to go slow, to feel the leaves brush against you, to look at the bark on the trees, to smell the grass, to wonder at the complexity and harmony. Sometimes it’s nice to be a rabbit. I could never get my nose to wriggle right, though. Other times it’s fun to help Stanley and Livingston find their way out of the wilderness, making lots of noise so the elephants don’t attack. Sometimes it’s nice to climb a tree. If you’re real still in a tree sometimes a bird will land close.

Sometimes there are birds in the barns. But sometimes there are bees and wasps and hornets, too. Best not to go there. Better to play in the dust for a while. Ever figure out why there’s so much dust over here, but not so much over there? Why does it pile in one place when it’s outside? Or is it just a thing that happens on farms in the summer? Throwing a handful of dust if fun, if you’re not throwing for distance.

You could tell when it’s getting late – the cicadas start whirring, the crickets tune their orchestras, the frogs tell the crickets to shut up, sometimes the first lightning bug of the night flashes. Time to go in. Gotta pause for a while first, though – this is the best time to listen. How many crickets are there? Where are the frogs, anyway? Why can’t I find the frogs in the daytime?

Methinks the joy of childhood summers lies partly in the patience to take the world at it’s own pace, and partly the knowledge that you have no responsibilities. Of course someone has to cook the meals and clean things and do all the things that need to be done by responsible people, but can’t we wait until the clouds go to sleep to do that? There’s plenty of time…

So, that’s what I’m yearning for. I want one more childhood summer on the farm. But this time I want company – I want my wife there. It’s more fun to look at bugs if you have someone you like with you. I promise, if I get my summer, I’ll waste it well.