Visiting, what we leave behind, duck hatchlings

Mama and I spent the evening visiting last night. One of the elderly gentlemen in our church who is a dear friend is in hospice care due to an inoperable cancerous tumor in his lung just behind his aorta. He is nearing his 90^th birthday and he is ready to go home. The prognosis is that he has less than a few months to spend here with us, but the actuality is that his body is giving up more quickly than that. When we are looking at nearly nine decades of life, a few months is a very short time. He is in good spirits and in good company as each of his children spends extended amounts of time with him in his convalescent state. His children, adults our age, are delightful people so our visit with Bro Stallard was a very enjoyable one. Mama and I plan to repeat those visits at least weekly for as long as we have that opportunity. Soon enough we will all be in Heaven together where our timeline for visiting with each other will extend out into eternity. The way the world is looking today, Bro Stallard may not be there too far ahead of the rest of us.

After leaving Bro Stallard, Mama and I went a short distance to visit another octogenarian in our church. Lola is a widow who lost her husband late last year. What prompted the visit was that Sunday evening at church, Lola asked me if I needed any tools. A dangerous question to ask a man. So, with that invitation, Mama and I spent about an hour in the garage at her house going through some of the accumulation of tools her husband had left there. It was a mess. Much of the tool inventory was well past its usefulness and many of the electronic items were antique and unserviceable. I picked out a good quality BB gun, a couple unique hammers, a die set for threading pipe and a floor jack. There were ten or more safes of various sizes, a wide variety of hand tools, battery powered tools and corners filled with a great variety of items I did not recognize. All flat surfaces were piled with testers, screwdrivers, fittings, parts I could not find any use for, multiple small vacuum cleaners, etc. It was a mess and Lola was still a bit overwhelmed by the clutter. She, and her son, who came over to price the items I had pulled out of the clutter, encouraged me to find a lot more, but I passed. Maybe later, but not last night. Even I was a little overwhelmed by the disorganized accumulation of items that had once been important enough for her husband to keep.

As we traveled home, I was sharing again with Mama that I do not want to do that to her and my children. So far, the only real clutter I have is in the barn where Grandpa and Norman have deposited some of the junk, they did not feel that they could part with. That area will be cleaned in the next few months as I load it without reservation in the bucket of the tractor and drive to the dump to get it off the farm. I suppose there may be some way I could recover some money from the junk, but it is not worth the time and effort to do so. It is simply safer and more efficient to throw it out – even when I have to pay the dump for the privilege of leaving that junk in their scrap trailer. From my perspective, I have organized my tools in a way that keeps them clean and accessible, but I still have a lot of stuff. On the bright side, most of the items I have in my inventory are easily recognized and functional. Even at that, I still need to pare down what I intend to keep longterm to a more reasonable stockpile and eliminate those tools that I no longer use. As difficult as that may be, I do feel compelled to do just that.  

Next week we should see our duck hatchlings. I have to make calendar announcements to time the removing of the automatic egg turners for each batch of hatchlings, and I have that noted as being required on the 25^th. By the 28^th we will see how many of the ducklings hatch. The duckling that hatched while Mama and I were in Honduras are now in the grow out pen where they will stay for about a month, maybe less. When Mama thinks they are large enough to be integrated into our flock, we will simply move them over to that area. The last eight we integrated are doing very well. We are now getting six to eight eggs per day from the mature ducks and hope, if we have sexed the new arrivals properly, we will be adding a potential five eggs per day to that number. My overall goal is to have a dozen duck eggs per day. Now, we just need to find a steady market for those eggs.

I will be teaching classes tomorrow and Friday. Tomorrow is an in-person class. Friday’s class is online. Both are full day classes. I still prefer the in-person classes to the online version, but we do what we have to do to meet the needs of our clients. The class on Friday is for a specific customer who requested the class to be presented as soon as possible. They made the request yesterday and we offered three potential dates, the earliest of which was Friday. It will require some urgent work on our part to get all things ready for the class, but since it is online, that can be organized fairly quickly.

It keeps us on our toes.