Mama’s day at the races, crowded time spaces, drinking from a fire hose

Mama spent the day at the races in Ft Worth. The church school met with a local church school and competed by age/grade category in several long races. The longest was two miles - for the older teens. The shortest was one mile - for the smaller ones. The medium grades were sandwiched in between with the mile and one half distance. In all categories our students came in second place or less with the more competitive students from Ft Worth  coming in an unquestioned first place. There were only three or four competitors in each category so second place and after was basically a giveaway. I have no idea if there was any kind of real practice for the distance but I do know that there was little motivation to really compete. On the bright side, everyone who actually competed finished their race.

Mama and I are slowly adjusting to the tighter schedule. We try to break up the chores at the farm to inside and outside tasks. The inside tasks usually wait until after dark and the outside tasks are raced to completion in the quickly fading evening light. Fortunately, the early dusk gives us a good deal of time a to get the inside chores accomplished before bedtime. Since Daylight Savings is ending this weekend there will be a short reprieve in the very short evenings; at least until the days move to their normal wintertime brevity.

This evening I hung a gate I brought back from Chappell Hill at the opening to the pig building. The goats have made claim to the area and are giving it their unique aroma. The culprit is Boomer - the only billy goat we have. Not to mention, both Boomer and Kai  are a real bother when we go to get feed out of the container we have stored in the pig building. They butt, bump and hop on either Mama or myself through the entire routine. So about a month ago Mama asked me to put up a gate and the one I found in Dad’s shop was perfect - or nearly so.

Work is a real challenge right now. A good friend of mine referred to the learning process as having to drink from a firehose. That is a pretty accurate description. As I was in one of many calls where I needed to ask for help - if not turn the call over to someone else - I remarked that I did not feel like I was pulling my weight. A coworker chided my remark by saying, “And you’ve been here for seven days now. Get with the program.” That was a pretty good encouragement to me. I am doing better but the unbelievable scale of nuanced questions asked are more than any one person can master in a lifetime - much less a week.

So I won’t be too hard on myself — yet.