Category Archives: Funny

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So. That’s How My Evening Went.

I had a long day at work Monday.  Not that the work I do is difficult, it’s just that I screwed something up.  I try not to burden my blog with my primary vocation but, in this instance, it suffices to say, while doing some fairly routine maintenance, I broke a production server in the middle of the day and scrambled to fix the problem before anybody noticed.  I barely pulled it off but I’m sure I took minutes off of my life.  One of those moments when your heart jumps into your throat, you break out into a sweat and you curse the fates that brought you to the Calypso’s island of the tech world held prisoner in her not unpleasant grip forever but unable to return home.  So anyway, enough about my job.  It pays the bills while shortening my life, eating away my time and crushing my dreams…yet at the same time, enabling me to continue losing money farming.

In the late afternoon I stopped by my parents house to attempt to answer some questions about their new laptop.  I learned first-hand how terrible Windows 8 is.  It’s awful.  I have no use for “Metro-style” apps.  But I can make it work.  I click on things, make some configurations, install a printer and my mom looks at me and says, “Do you go this fast when you teach classes in Florida?”  Sigh.

Around 8:30 in the evening Aunt Marion called needing a white 18″ zipper, wondering if Julie just happened to have one laying around.  She did.  Not that Julie is a world-champion seamstress like Aunt Marion, just that when we moved into Grandma’s house there was a bundle of sewing supplies left behind.  Julie and I agree that the roads are good enough for her to drive the mile to Aunt Marion’s house and she sets off.  Aunt Marion doesn’t seem to sleep.  You’ll find her sewing, cooking or checking her stock at any time of the day or night.  I guess after 94 years she’s tired of laying in bed.  Maybe she’s racing to take advantage of her remaining time.  I don’t know.  She needs the zipper now or she wouldn’t be calling.

As Julie drives away, I leave the kids playing in the front room to go check something in the back room.  The “Family” room (built when mom was in high school and used by grandma for special occasions, now home to our wood stove.  I’ll come back to this.).  As I’m walking through the kitchen I hear something rattle in the basement.  “That’s strange, the light is off and the kids are in the front room.”  My phone rings as I walk toward the basement.  Just as Julie says the words, “Well, I’m stuck” I put my eyes on a raccoon in our recycle bin.  The recycle bin in the basement.  “I’m sorry you are stuck, honey.  We have a raccoon in the basement.”

Now, in the history of the world, how many times has that conversation happened?  A wife stuck in the snow while taking a zipper to an elderly neighbor and a husband finding a furry mammal has invaded the house.  It could have been worse.  I could have been stuck in the snow when Julie discovered the bandit.  I quickly realized how unprepared I was.  I was not carrying a gun.  Even if I was, I’m not going to shoot a raccoon with a 9mm hollow point bullet in my basement.  What a mess that would make!  And my 10/22 was put away in the dining room.  So I did the only logical thing remaining to me.  I froze.

Now, let’s set aside the concern that I might freeze were this a 2-legged invader and I was unarmed.  I wouldn’t.  Well, I might.  Let’s set that concern aside.  I saw a furry little monster who could not possibly escape except to run up the stairs past me.  He pushed out a broken window to enter the basement, fell 6′ and could not return that way.  He chose the only logical option and ran to hide under the bathtub.

You see, when they built the addition that included indoor plumbing and the famous “Family Room” they didn’t include a bath tub.  But grandpa wanted a bath tub.  So they put one in the basement.  I have never known anyone to use said bath tub.  It’s just there.  It drains directly into a floor drain in the basement.  There is a slight partition but no door.  Just a tub.  We don’t use it.  We don’t even look at it.  We just use it as a shelf, really.  I had never noticed that it sat 10″ from the wall and it was accessable to things small and four-legged…like a raccon.

Did I mention my wife was stuck in the snow in the middle of nowhere and not wearing a coat?  Oh, she wasn’t wearing a coat.  I love my wife.  I hate raccoons.  But I love my wife.  But there’s a raccoon in my basement.  And what I really want is to go play video games with my kids.

You should know by now that I love my wife.  I find I have little control over my love for her.  It came to me reluctantly as I was a particularly stupid 17 year old.  But it happened.  I love her.  I find the intensity of my feelings for her wax and wane over time but persist throughout.  Contrast this to my burning hatred for raccoons.  I hate them.  They eat chickens.  My chickens.  They dig up plants in my garden.  They eat my corn.  They jump out at unexpected moments when I can’t swerve my car and break the bumper of my car in their crazy kamakaze road attacks.  They, most recently, attempted to (get this) dig a hole in the roof over my kitchen causing a river of water to run off of my roof directly onto my kitchen counter during a night time heavy rain storm.  There is no waning of my burning hatred, only persistent intensification.  When we first moved to the farm I would feel pity and remorse when a raccoon was caught committing a capital crime.  I would aim carefully and pull the trigger reluctantly then bury the animal in the compost bin along with the chicken he was caught eating.  That reluctance was quickly burned out of me.  I am not eager to do the work.  I would rather just leave them alone but there seems to be no end to the raccoon horde constantly testing my defenses, stealing chickens the moment my fence shows weakness and, now BREAKING INTO MY HOME to lick the aluminum foil in the recycle bin!  That’s too much.  But my wife needs me right now.  And I love her.  But there is a raccoon in my house.  And I hate raccoons.

So I called my father.  Now, to be fair, it was 8:45, I suspect he had his robe on and was ready to call it a night but he was…maybe…less than enthusiastic about coming out in the cold again.  When his SUV couldn’t pull the van he returned to the house with Julie and asked me to go with him.  Since Julie was now home, I handed my oldest son the gun, asking him to guard the stairs while Grandpa and I took the tractor down to the car.  We got that sorted out in short order and dad delivered the zipper by tractor.  In the dark.  In the cold.  With the wind blowing.  On an open-cab tractor.  You can understand his lack of enthusiasm.  He stopped by to see what could be done about the raccoon issue, helped me set my live trap and said goodnight.

Live trap.  It’s branded “Have-A-Heart”.  Yeah.  They should rename the brand “We’ll-Hold-’em-Till-You-Bring-A-Gun”.  Do you know how unpopular I would become if I relocated every raccoon I could catch to someone else’s farm?  Raccoons are territorial anyway.  They would either have to fight for new territory or fight to return home.  Relocating raccoons is pretty heartless.  We set the trap with some leftover buffalo chicken we made for supper then sit at the top of the stairs listening.  Nothing.  Nothing.  Nothing.  I sneak down.  Maybe he has moved.  Oh, he moved all right.  He cleaned out the trap.

I baited the trap with some scrambled egg and peanut butter.  He ate it but did not trigger the trap.  It was growing late.  I was growing desperate.  I put a cantaloupe rind under the trap, near the trigger and put a couple of boards and boxes on top of the trap to block him from climbing over the trap to escape.  It was 11:00 when we heard the trap close.  I offered him a blindfold and a cigarette.  My gun jammed.

Raccoon

While all of this is happening I am discovering I am either allergic to something in my basement or, more specifically, to raccoons.  I’m hoping to see/hear a raccoon while sitting at the top of the stairs with a gun in my hand and I’m sneezing and wheezing and otherwise ruining the hunt.  Are you with me to this point?  I blew up a server at work, I failed at teaching my mom how to use her new laptop, my wife got stuck in the snow and I couldn’t help because a raccoon I’m allergic to has invaded my home.  At this moment my wife turns to me and says, “We need to remodel the bathroom.”

Honey, let me fix the leaky roof and block the raccoons out first.  Then we can talk about remodeling the bathroom.

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Dreaming of June

Look at the Blueberry plants!  Oh!  One more year and we can stop pinching the blossoms and start eating them fresh!  Can’t wait!

BlueberriesAnd it looks like the strawberries are really going to make this year.  We’ll have jam, we’ll freeze some, we’ll eat mountains of them fresh with spinach!  I mean, here it is, pretend June 1st and we’ve already eaten so many of them…

Strawberries

And the green beans!  We’ll be busy canning all July to handle the crop that’s out there.  Bush-type beans planted 8″ apart in a grid as demonstrated by Jeavons really do well.  It helps that this row received 6″ of compost and another 4″ of mulch in the last year.

GreenBeans

The potatoes are really coming on.  We’ve already hilled them twice and have high hopes that the drought will hold off this year.  Last year the drought started around June 15th and the potato plants withered quickly.  In fact, I started digging potatoes before July 1.  This year I don’t want to dig the main crop until at least August 1.  Just soon enough to plant our fall crop of broccoli in the same row but late enough that a fair portion of the potatoes will keep.

Potatoes

The rhubarb is doing well but the plants are a bit crowded.  I need to move them to a new home.  I really don’t know where to put them.  The rest of the row is just odd plantings.  Some onions, some lettuce (it’s about to bolt), some marigolds.  I may put in a little buckwheat in this row.

Rhubarb

But this year is THE year for tomatoes!  I’ve never seen anything like it.  We put down layer after layer of chicken manure, horse manure and 10″ of well-composted wood mulch last year and this year I have the best crop of tomatoes ever.  The peppers were looking a little leggy early on but they are bearing now.  The jalapenos are long and flavorful.  Takes 2 pieces of bacon to wrap one popper.  If you look carefully, you can see we planted oregano between plantings of tomato and pepper.  That kind of planting brings in a lot of wild pollinators.

Tomatoes and peppers

Well.  One day winter will pass.  One day I’ll be out working in the garden thinking, “what was so bad about winter?”  But today, looking out at a foot of snow and more falling from the sky, I’m wondering if it will ever end.  You can see a brooder in the potato picture above.  That brooder has 140 chicks in it.  I say chicks but they are nearly a month old.  They should be on pasture.  I may have to sacrifice two rows of the garden to make a pretend pasture for them…feeding them hay daily.

It is nice to have an excuse to sit down for a few days though.  You can assume I’m working when I disappear from the blog for a few days.  I have been working a lot lately.  Let me know if the snow gave you a chance to do some dreaming.

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Green Acres of My Life

My father has known me for 36 years and, next to Julie, qualifies for the title of “Best Friend.”  He’s pretty well in tune with my likes and dislikes.  Dad said, “You should watch the first episode of Green Acres and write a blog post about it.”  So, Dad.  Here it is.

Now, before we get too carried away I invite you to watch it for yourself.  Julie found herself crying in laughter and sympathy with Lisa (Oliver’s wife).  Oliver’s enthusiasm and naivety mirror my own.  In fact, though we lack a hole in the floor leading to the cellar, the show hits a little too close to home.

Oliver reads the blogs of his day, USDA bulletins, every spare moment of his life.  That sounds familiar.  He spends every moment growing anything he can including mushrooms in his office desk drawer.  His job is just something he does well though mechanically and without enthusiasm.  He lacks that feeling of accomplishment, purpose and fulfillment.  That good kind of tired you get after a day of physical labor.  He says:

“A farm would give me a feeling of accomplishing something.”

and later…

“This has been the dream of my life: to buy a farm!  Move away from the city.  Plow my own fields.  Plant my own soil.  To get my hands DIRTY!  Sweat and strain to make things grow!  To join hands with you, the farmers…the backbone of our economy.”

Like Oliver, I wanted a real farm like the one I was born on.  Unlike Oliver I actually bought the one I was born on (er…well, the one my parents lived on when I was born at the hospital).  Like Oliver I bought a run-down house with sheds that are falling in on themselves, failing fences and odd bits of junk everywhere.  Unlike Oliver I wasn’t suckered into it.  Like Oliver I have a beautiful, sophisticated, thin, blonde wife.  Unlike Oliver my wife came along willingly…and doesn’t have a Hungarian accent.  Like Oliver, I bought with big, unrealistic expectations, no experience and inhuman optimism.  That optimism has been just about beaten out of me.  Maybe this year we can limit our losses to just a couple thousand dollars then turn things around to positive numbers in our 5th year.  I don’t know.  The infrastructure needs are so great.  It looks to me like Oliver just pours money into the farm every episode.  My pockets aren’t deep enough for that.  Fortunately I don’t have a Mr. Haney in my life.

Look.  I don’t have any help for you if you have decided to get your hands dirty and join the backbone of the nation.  You’ve picked a tough row to hoe.  I think we can do it (or I wouldn’t be trying) but it’s not easy.  I have to suggest that Oliver’s adjustment would have been easier if there had been no house at all…if he had only had the sense to send Mr. Haney packing then take a match to the empty house at the beginning of episode 2 and build new.  My land itself is a fixer-upper.  I don’t have time to deal with the house issues.  Neither does Oliver.  I like to encourage my farmers that they can succeed.  You can.  But try not to put yourself behind the 8 ball from the beginning just because you were born somewhere.

Channeling Lisa, my wife, lovely as ever, upon viewing the farm as we return from a business trip to Florida, looks at me from the passenger seat and says, “Let’s go back.”

Green Acres offers a response, “Keep Smiling.”

If you’re going to do this, Keep Smiling.

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Pareto’s Farm

Have you ever reviewed Pareto’s Law?  The 80/20 rule?  The idea that 20% of the things I do around the farm make 80% of the impact is probably true but I find it offensive anyway.  I’m wasting 80% of my time and there’s no way to fix it.  In fact, 80% of that 20% is also a waste of time.  That means that 4% of my labor on the farm accounts for 96% of the impact.  For those of you troubled by percentages I offer the following clip:

For sake of example, let’s say I spend 80% of my farming time raising layers (egg birds), moving netting and houses, hauling water, grinding feed, gathering, washing, sorting and packing eggs and outsmarting the raccoons.  Then sell the eggs for 20% of my annual profit.  Actually, that’s a pretty accurate example so I’ll push forward.  Constrast that with the pigs.  I spend about 20% of my farming time with the pigs and make about 80% of the comparitave farm profit.  Now, I do more than two things with my time but among layers and pigs, 80/20 seems to hold water.

So what do we do with that thinking?  Is it a waste of time for me to keep a layer flock?  I don’t know.  I would guess that 80% of my sales are egg sales.  But 100% of my pig sales are to customers who already buy something else from me…typically eggs.  20% of my revenue gets my foot in the door for the rest.  If I sell off (or make soup with) the layer flock I would have a lot of extra time on my hands each day (80% of my farm time).  My farm revenue picture would immediately go down a bit but not more than 20% even though I would abandon 80% of my customer base.  What percent of future revenue would be negatively impacted?

I don’t know but let’s run with it.  Let’s pretend I have cleared house.  I got rid of the items that I have currently identified as accounting for 20% of the revenue and 80% of the time.  Now what happens?  That’s right, We get to drill into that profitable remainder and cut out the fat.  What else do I do with my time?  Well, I have this job off farm that uses more than 20% of my time but brings in more than 80% of the family revenue.  I guess that means the pigs get cut out too so I can focus more of my energy on my job.

Well, that took an unhappy turn.  Let’s not take Pareto to it’s logical conclusion.  There is joy, purpose and value in inefficiency.  Don’t sweat it, egg customers.  I won’t abandon you.  I do think there is value in evaluating how I spend my time as time is mine to steward as well as family, land and livestock.

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What Does “Romantic” Mean?

Ah, the fire.  The warmth.  The light.  Somehow the food tastes different when cooked on the wood cook stove.  There’s a slight crackle.  Instead of the normal 57 degrees in the house, we have one room that’s 90.  There’s always hot water.  You come in from outside and park your tookus next to the stove and you are instantly warmed up.  It’s the fulfillment of some romantic dream of hers.  Best thing ever.

Well.  Sort of.

Sopka Magnum Wood Cook Stove

The crackle, the smell, the warmth all come at a cost.  My time.  You see, my lovely bride loves the wood cook stove.  To her it’s just a matter of splitting some kindling, lighting a fire and keeping it fed.  Works well enough.  But from my perspective it’s hours with the chainsaw then hauling, splitting, stacking, restacking when it falls over, etc.  My days off.  My weekends.  Every trip out in the woods I’m looking for a standing dead tree or a snag to cut down.  What will I do when the woods are clean?  Where can I start growing the forest I’ll need over the coming years?  Should I burn that log or should I run it through the sawmill?  Oh, the stress!  Oh, my leg!  Oh the guilt! (Anybody get that reference?)

Why are we burning wood when it’s barely getting to freezing at night?  I think the word “romantic” is French for “because she wants to”.  Why isn’t it romantic to sit under a pile of blankets reading a book?  Oh well.  The kids are a big help and do most of the stacking and carrying.  My oldest helped split this time too.

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I Know He Can Get the Job…

I know he can get the job but can he do the job?

So.  You want to be a farmer.  I know you can buy the land but can you work the land?

Let’s paint a picture.  Little house…just big enough for the fam but no room for clutter.  A cellar for your jars of canned goods.  A wood burning cook stove.  A milk cow, a couple of pigs, some chickens, a big garden and a couple of fruit trees.  Ah, the good life.  If you have children, add homeschooling to the mix because you love spending time with your family and you know you can give more personalized attention to the children than they would get anywhere else.  Yup.  One of you stays at home with the kids and keeps the farm chores under control, the other drives off to the city to actually pay for the farm and get insurance.  Those rose colored glasses are already clearing up aren’t they?

Did you know gardens grow weeds?  That orchards grow deer?  Did you know that livestock die?  Worse, did you know they sometimes get sick and don’t die?  Can you actually send that steer off to be killed, shoot the pig or kill the chicken?  Do you want to sit out all night hoping that ^&*(#! raccoon/mink/possum/skunk/etc. comes back so you can shoot it?  Sleeping (well, tossing) in the open air night after night with a gun in one hand and a flashlight in the other.  Do your children see roadkill and ask if we should stop to pick it up for the compost pile?  Have you ever had a hog bite the sleeve of your Carhartt and pull if off of you (and drag it through the mud) while another hog bites a hole in your new rubber boot and the rest of them put their dirty noses against your work pants and nibble at the seams?  Then you’ve got manure on your sock, in your boot, on your pants, all over your jacket.  You become immune to the smell that lingers and only the other customers at the shopping center notice it.  How many layers do you want to keep on your acreage?  DO YOU KNOW HOW MANY EGGS THAT IS?!?!?!?  How many eggs do you think you can actually eat and sell?  Seriously!  What are you going to do with them all?  Throw them at the pigs?  (…that’s not a bad idea…)

How about compost?  Each day you muck out the stall (horse, cow…whatever) into a wheelbarrow.  Then you add it to a pile (probably requiring you to fork or shovel it high onto the pile).  Then you fork or shovel the pile a couple of times to keep the compost active and hot.  Then you fork or shovel it into a wheelbarrow again and head off to the garden for more forkin’ shoveling!  All so you can sneak a few minutes here and there of pulling bushels of weeds and handfuls of produce from your garden that never quite manages to look the way it did when you first envisioned it.

And oh!  A wood cook stove!  How romantic!  You see the nice glow in the stove, you see the lovely wife pulling a roast out of the oven with a pie in the warmer.  You don’t see the husband off camera with a hole in his boot wearing a smelly jacket (stupid pigs) holding a chainsaw for his entire week of vacation, felling, cutting, splitting and stacking the wood so he can save a few dollars over just buying propane.  Oh, you can get the job.  No problem.  But can you do the job?

Fresh milk!  It’s fresh!  It’s raw!  It’s fun! (for the first two or three milkings).  Then it becomes a chore.  Another chore.  I mean, you got up early this morning, fired up the wood stove, went mud-wrestling with the pigs, let the chickens out (checking for dead birds), moved the chicken tractors, watered the ducks, pulled a couple of weeds in the garden while getting a beet to feed the cow, somehow managed to catch the cow, squeezed the milk out of her for 30 minutes (oh, my aching everything), strained and chilled the milk and somehow 7:00 turned into 9:30 and those small humans you keep in the house haven’t eaten yet.  Oh, and there’s laundry to wash, laundry to put away, summer clothes to pack, fall clothes to unpack, lunch to make, phone calls to answer (your husband asking if you are having a nice day), eggs to wash, sort and sell, somehow you have to make time to teach those small humans to read, write and cypher, the goats managed to escape somehow so you have to chase them down.  Then that husband of yours who drives to the city to sit on his rear all day will be home soon and he had the gall to ask what you did today since there is still a basket of laundry that needs to be folded and you didn’t gather the eggs…you know, because HIS TIME IS TOO VALUABLE TO WASTE GATHERING EGGS OR PUTTING AWAY LAUNDRY!  HE CAN GO FEED THE STUPID PIGS TONIGHT!  Oh, and you totally forgot to work on the applesauce, to pick and freeze peppers out of the garden, and another day passed without watching that webinar for that new side business you’re thinking of taking up in your free time and if you don’t start making cheese soon you’ll have to buy yet another fridge!

You can get a farm.  No problem.  But can you do the work?  Whew!

I’m not saying you can’t do the job.  I’m asking if you can do the job.  I know you can get the job.  I’m not arguing that with you.  Banks will loan the money.  Interest rates are attractive.  But what are you going to do when you get there?  Will you miss your manicure?  You won’t miss the weight you are guaranteed to lose.  You might miss putting your feet up from time to time.

So that takes us to why.  Why do we do it?  Why do we quite literally work our rear-ends off day after day?  That’s a question for another post.  I’ll give you a hint: Before the farm I felt like Joe from the clip above walking around the office in his pointless life.

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Coming soon…?

We are playing with the idea of a regular video blog entry.  We can use this to answer direct questions from readers or just to address questions we are regularly asked…or just to have fun.

So.  Here we are having fun.  It’s a little weird for us too.

Let us know if there is anything you would like to see.  Nothing is off-limits, even for remote viewers.  So do us a favor.  Ask us something in the comment section.

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Rabbit Jailbreak

The rabbits got out this morning.  Again.

We have two hare pens.  They found a way out of one of them.  I couldn’t catch them so I put on my Elmer Fudd voice and went hunting wabbits.

5 fewer rabbits on the grass and 5 more in the freezer.  Little stinkers.  I’ll have to review the design of hare pen #2 because this is the third day they escaped.

How about a little backstory?  My sister is visiting.  We woke her up this morning with gunshots at 6:00.  She rolled her eyes and went back to bed.  Apparently there had been a conversation the night before about the frequency of gunshots in the city vs. out here…

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Always? Usually? Sometimes? Never?

My wife asked a friend (who has 7 children of her own) how she gets it all done.  The friend replied, “I don’t”.  How great is that?

People ask me all the time how I get it all done around the farm.  I don’t.

As I write, it is 10 at night.  I stopped in Jerseyville on my way home from work to pick up a few hundred pounds of ingredients we use to grind chicken feed.  As soon as I got home I unloaded the van and we all piled in to head to church.  Once home, I closed up the layers, checked on the chicks and poults in the brooder, moved a fence to surround the outdoor brooder (first use this season) and ground 500 pounds of feed.  I’m eating supper as I write this.  There are dishes to wash, laundry to put away, books I have put off and a blog I have neglected.

“Gosh, it must be nice to be so young and energetic.  BTW, how old are you?”  35…a bicentennial baby.  Not as young as I used to be but stronger than I have ever been.  It’s just that everything hurts now…where nothing hurt before.  Not always…just sometimes.

And if you think I work hard, you should see my wife!  I sit for 12 hours every day either driving or chained to my keyboard.  She makes more than 1000 animals happy every morning before breakfast, babysits the cows all day, home schools the kids, cooks excellent meals, gathers the eggs and makes this all possible.

So is the work around here usually, sometimes or never finished?  It’s never finished.  Our top priority is keeping our family functional.  Next, we have a lot of animals to entertain.  Somewhere after that come dishes, laundry and hot spots (flat surfaces that seem to attract clutter).

I need to make sure I never walk in the door after my long day of pushing buttons and show my disappointment that the dishes aren’t washed.  I need to love, encourage and even sacrifice myself for her.  Usually I do a fair job of it.  Sometimes I screw up.

It isn’t always like this.  It’s not even usually like this.  It’s just sometimes like this.  We run a seasonal farm.  Right now everything has to be done at once.  Soon the chickens will be gone and we will begin canning our garden produce.  We’ll put up hay through the summer.  In the fall we’ll pick some apples, can pie filling, press cider and can applesauce…maybe can some pears too.  In the winter we catch up on our reading and cut wood.  But throughout the year we make time to swim…like today.  We make time to play catch.  We make time to go see the Avengers (can’t wait!)  We make time to watch Dr. Who.  We remember to enjoy our lives, not just our work.

We always have plenty to do.  The work is usually there waiting for us.  We sometimes get to do nothing.  A double-negative is never not funny.

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Vocabulary word: Audible

Normally, this kind of post belongs at the 20 Acre Academy but I’ll post it here.

Audible.

Used in a sentence:

I lifted the metal top of the chicken tractor with my left hand and heard an audible pop as the wind blew the electric fence against my back.

or another sentence:

Language I normally contain may have been audible by the pond as my left arm began to tingle.

Just so you know, this solar charger kicks like a mule.  I’m going to relocate the fence.  Whew!