Cell phones, itchy eyes, water needs

Those of you who know me know that I am not a lover of cell phones. I am less inclined to fawn over the outrageous contracts that accompany their use. I realize my children, who are not teenagers anymore (except for Chase), probable do not even remember a world without cell phones. A world in which people talked to each other face to face, or on home phones. A world where we wrote letters to each other – on paper.


Now we text and IM. We email. We post our lives on Facebook. We get aggravated when someone does not respond in a timely manner; generally less than an hour. Now we are at a stage in this present world that Mama and I cannot even get a land line activated to the farm house in Bowie. No matter who we call, there is no service available so we are stuck with cell phones and the inherent lack of privacy they bring to our lives.

If you have ever watched the show, “Person of Interest”, you will know what I am referring to. It is more fact than fiction. In an episode of GBTV that I recently watched, Glenn Beck asked his audience if anyone had a regular cell phone, one on which the battery could be pulled out. Out of thirty or so in attendance on the set, only one person did. All the rest had iPhones. The point being, the only way to truly shut down a cell phone – and the ability to track a person as well as listen in on conversations even when turned off – is to pull the battery out of the device. Can you remove the battery from your iPhone?

That does not alarm me. It annoys me that I am trapped in the system; forced to go along. A case in point; Last night we were trying to cancel out some of the cell phone lines I have been paying for months. One line is being used by either Grandma or Grandpa. The other line they have is on a contract that Victoria and Brittany pay separately. In trying to reduce my expenses as much as possible, cancelling the lines made sense to me. The fuss we ran into surrounded the fact that the line we are keeping active is with us in Amarillo which – horror of horrors – will leave Grandma, Grandpa and Victoria sharing only one cell phone until Friday evening. They will even have to drive four miles to the home of the person who is delivering the donkeys and pigs to inform him of the disruption of service to the number they gave him to call them on when he is on the way to the farm.

Cut off from the world, their civil liberties violated, they will have to drive down the road, knock on a door and talk to someone face to face. Can you imagine the embarrassment? Shame on me for being so stingy. The one who fussed at Mama the most when she called to tell them what we were doing: Victoria.

Mama has been suffering with severely itchy, inflamed eyes for the past day or so. It looks to be more like allergies than anything else, but we are watching carefully to make sure it is not pink eye. She seems to feel it is because of the dust from the chicken coop getting in her eyes last weekend, but I really do not know.

My eyes were itching for a couple days after disturbing the termite treated dirt under the floors of the little farm house; at least, that’s what I attribute it to. Living where the normal wind speed exceeds fifteen miles per hour, it makes such diagnosis difficult to assign with any surety.

Mama is quickly filling up the little van with purchases for the farm. With the influx of livestock, the needs have changed quite a bit and the need for water has dramatically increased. Having the well operating was a great first step. Now we need to get the water to the animals – the pig building and the calf lot particularly. Grandpa is planning on housing the donkeys in the calf lot until he can acclimate them and water will need to be delivered to them. I am making the purchases and the plans to do so since filling a 50 gallon tank with gallon jugs seems impractical and inefficient.

Once the donkeys are allowed to roam freely, they will have access to several tanks of water. But for now, we would like to get to know them and vice versa.