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This is a rough draft of Rants for your Maine Private Radio show for August 2, 2015.

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The humble Farmer's TV show is now on YouTube. Google "Robert Karl Skoglund" and they should come up.

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1. My wife Marsha’s friend Donna is very generous, and I mentioned it to her one time. Donna was raised on a hen farm over in Waldoboro by Seidenspacker Pond. She had four or five brothers and sisters and Donna said, “I learned to share at an early age. If I didn’t give them what they wanted, they took it anyway.”

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2. You won't believe that I could be capable of this but yesterday morning I finished transplanting the 30 new rhubarb plants. Raked and shoveled the dirt off the grass back into the dug area. And while doing so thought of my friend and relative Jazz Man Ames, who was struck down while working in the heat (after living on donuts for 30 or more years as a postal employee). I kept stopping and wondering if I could do just a little bit more. When I got all the dirt I'd slopped back where it should be I ran over it several times with the tractor to pack it all down good. And now I'm flooding it with water so the plants will spring forth from the soil. I'd love to mulch it now and kill the grass and weeds that will come fifth, but I know I'll never get to it. How do you replant your rhubarb?

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3. I put wire fence around my squash, which is very wilted from lack of water and the heat, and around the rhubarb, and called the cow friends up into a new area to graze. They were grateful, as they've eaten 8 or more acres of pasture down and it is pretty dry. This is the first day they've been grazing in the lawn on the north side of our house all year. Too bad it is so late, as a week or so ago there was plenty of rich clover up there but today it is all dead from the dry heat. It’s time to move them across the road into the west pasture. How long are you able to keep your cows on your pasture before you move them?

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4. The other day my neighbor Bruce called to ask if I had a 1 1/2 inch socket as he was working on his mowing machine. I told him to come up and we'd look. When he came up I told him, "I don't have one." Of course my wife Marsha, The Almost Perfect Woman, knows that I do this all the time so she would have said, "So you have three?" I had two sockets that size so I gave him one. They are 3/4 inch drive, I think. Quite a bit of authority there. You get an inch and a half nut, and most often you have to put a six foot length of pipe on the t-bar wrench just so you can move it. And then Carol, a radio friend from years ago stopped in to say hi. She pretended that she wanted to know the way to Port Clyde, but a person who works for L. L. Bean and comes to St. George with a GPS doesn't stop in here and ask for the road to Port Clyde. There is only one road in this town. I chewed her ear, figuratively speaking, until she was glad to leave. After I hung out the wash I rested and waited for the grandchildren to arrive. When they are here, nobody rests. I drank some lemonade. It was in a bottle in the refrigerator. Was I supposed to drink it? No. It was for the grandchildren. Can I do anything right? No. If you have ever been a husband you might know what we’re talking about here.

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5. You might be surprised to hear that I have what I believe to be the only solar powered Model T Ford in Maine. I have what I believe to be a 22-volt solar panel charging the battery in my 1919 Model T Ford. My friend Mike, who is a solar electrician, hooked it up for me. As you know, I built the PV panels several years ago but didn’t know how to mount one on the side of my Model T. It needed a little box to shut off the power when the battery was fully charged and I didn’t know what the box was called or where to get one until recently. There is a little red light on the box and when the red light is on, it is charging. The next time you come by, you can tell me how to attach this PV panel to the side of the Model T. Also, instead of having two clips that I fasten to the battery that I have to hook up and take off every day, I think I'll have a junction box put on that the solar panel will simply plug into. Sound good? Where can I get this little junction box? What is it called? My friend Mike works all week hooking up solar panels on libraries and town offices in Massachusetts. Not many people in Maine like solar power on town offices as it is detrimental to the coal business, but they’re doing it in Massachusetts. Mike did a great job hooking the wires from that solar panel to the Model T. No one was injured in the operation.

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6. I think it is Steve up in Washington, Maine who emails me silly things. One said: After a night of drink, drugs and wild sex, Jim woke up to find himself next to a really ugly woman. That's when he realized he had made it home safely. Even worse is this one that says, A boy asks his granny, 'Have you seen my pills, they were labeled LSD?' Granny says, forget them pills, have you seen the dragons in the kitchen?

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7. While clicking through the channels the other day, I heard this exchange between two men dressed in business suits. One was a young man. One was an old man. I have no idea of what the program was or what happened later. All I heard was what the older man standing said to the young man who was sitting in the chair, “Your daddy’s money is not going to keep you out of prison --- well, actually it might.”

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8. My wife Marsha, The Almost Perfect Woman, recently put a small card on my desk and asked me if I’d look up her friend’s website. Of course the website that her friend sent was wrong and I had to Google around until I found it. In the process I read the note that her friend had written on the card. In this note Marsha’s friend described her husband as open and caring. I showed it to my wife and said, “Open and caring. I hope you never describe me to anyone as Open & Caring.” And Marsha said, “She’s a psychologist at Columbia University --- she talks that way.”

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9. Do you remember when you could do things that you cannot do today? I’m talking here about man made laws. Are things moving too fast for you in the present world? Are you concerned about your loss of civil liberties? You might remember when a very cheery and contented Santa Claus smiled up at you from your favorite book as pipe smoke curled around his ears. Remember those good old pictures? And, to move up a generation or two, you might remember when the Cookie Monster gorged himself on cookies. Mmmm Coookies. And right there on the television screen the Cookie Monster ate plate after plate of the kind of warm, sugary ginger snaps that my wife Marsha bakes especially for you. But now, no more will the Cookie Monster wolf down cookies right there on the screen before millions of his young fans. Did you know that The Cookie Monster can no longer gorge itself on cookies? First they took away Santa Claus’s pipe. Then they took away the Cookie Monster’s cookies. Where will it end? When will they be coming for you?

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10. My wife, Marsha, is the Almost Perfect Woman. When you’re been single for 51 of your 79 years, you know how scary some women can be, because you’ve had the opportunity to read the service manuals on several different models. For some reason that I’ve never understood, some women can’t just say what they have to say. They look at you and say, “We’ve got to have a talk.” So one day I thanked Marsha because she had never said to me, “Robert --- we’ve got to have a talk.” And she said, “Talk. What good would it do to have a talk with you? You don’t hear half of what I say --- and I can’t tell what you do hear because you don’t say anything. You always say that nothing is worth discussing unless it’s a life or death situation or if somebody is going to lose a limb. You’re just like my father.” That can happen when you marry a younger woman --- her father usually is just about your age.

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11. Booth Tarkington wrote Penrod in 1913. Chapter 19 is a litany of the things Penrod consumed in one afternoon. Candy, lobster croquettes, an extrodinarily large pickle, a glass of raspberry lemonade, a box of sardines, and a half pint of lukewarm cider. Mug in hand, a gentle glow radiating toward his surface from various centers of activity deep inside him, he then ate a slice of watermellon, a bag of peanuts, a box of popcorn larded with partially boilded molasses, three waffles thickly powdered with sugar, a slab of Neapolitan ice-cream, and two and one half weniers. Because you might be having supper right now, I’m not going to tell you what happened next. But Penrod’s lack of intestinal fortitute came to mind one night when, for the first time in our marriage, my wife Marsha, The Almost Perfect Woman, was suddenly struck down. She never gets sick, so I couldn’t believe it was the flu and I asked her what she had eaten since supper. Do you believe peanuts, popcorn, a large Dairy Queen chocolate sundae that a friend had left in our freezer, and a diet coke? Just the diet coke would have finished me.

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