Our normal, gifts, prep for travel

Thing have been quiet and normal at the farm for the past few days. That is a blessing considering what has been going on around us in our nation and in the world. The overlapping stories and rebuttals, the shouting down of one narrative versus another, the lies being exposed and the posturing of those now proven to have lied is enough to put a rational person in a prolonged bad mood. But when I look carefully at our animals there is a powerful object lesson the be learned. Our chickens don’t care about the political turmoil. They still like Mama’s treats and they continue to lay eggs for us. Our goats don’t care. They still want to be fed twice daily and will try to knock you down to be the first at the feed trough even though they know that the feed will be the same as it has been every day prior. The dogs don’t care. They still want our attention and the still work hard to protect our property. Their dependence on us for their daily needs reminds of our dependence on our Heavenly Father for our daily needs. There is a constancy for us.

We still need to do our part to make things right in the world, but we cannot be so distracted by all the hubbub that we lose focus on those things that anchor us to truth and reality. Our garden will still grow in spite of the confusion around us. We will still eat several meals daily in spite of the cost of everyday items rising faster than we imagined possible. I cannot say that we are unaffected by the condition of the world around us, we just get the chance to compare that to something predictable, something reassuring in our everyday lives – more so that many around us who are absorbed in the conflict, wasting so much emotional energy on things that we have little influence to change. Little ability to determine the outcomes for the better. So, Mama and I pray, we plant, we feed, and we stay alert for the chance to make a difference. Limited though those chances will be. We connect with others at the individual level and keep our local connections current. We may not be able to affect the nation, but we can affect the neighborhood.

Mama is on a shopping mission today for one of those individual connections. She bought a Bible for Yilin for her birthday but has not been able so far to get a case for that Bible. Today she hopes to rectify that fault. This has been a several weeks long frustration for Mama. Since Yilin's birthday was last week, Mama decided to make the trip today in the hope of finding the Bible case she has her heart set on so the gift can be completed and given. Mama will make several other stops in her outing, but we are guarding our finances for the trips we have planned for the two weekends coming up after this weekend. One trip will be to Amarillo and one to New Jersey. We are excited about both visits and Victoria has arranged time off for each of the trips, which excites Zoe and Sophia immensely. It cannot remember for certain, but this might the first time Victoria and Gailyn will meet. That will be fun.

In our absence from the farm for each of those trips, Trace will take over the feeding and care of the flocks and herds. Both he and Mama are fretting about that, but Trace, to his credit, has gone with both me and Mama multiple times to see how things are done in all the areas where feed is put out and water is provided. He is learning all the hidey holes our chickens seek out to lay eggs when they do not want to make the trip back to the nesting boxes in the coop. He has taken a good deal of time to try to learn all the nuances of Mama’s thinking for providing treats, keeping our two roosters apart, and looking for stragglers every night to ensure all the chickens have come home to roost. Something we definitely think of in a positive way. Barring any unusual circumstances, he will do fine. My only concerns are with the weather and that he knows what to protect from overnight freezes. Ultimately, we will deal with what we find when we get back, but I think Trace has a good enough handle on the major needs of all the animals. All the idiosyncrasies of Mama’s logic are still not fully known to me.

Trace will certainly not master them before we leave.

Class, planting plans, heating

Yesterday’s class was a great class – at least from my perspective. I had nine participants in the class and all but one commented or interjected a thought or question into the class as we paced through the seven hours of material. It is not unusual for a disparate group of participants to get along with each other as the group did yesterday, but it is does not happen in every class. It is certainly fun when the classmates (typically total strangers) banter and joke with each other through our time together. Yesterday was such a class. I need one of those fun groups interspersed through the mix to keep me encouraged as I present the same material twice per week through the year. The one commonality fir the classes is the industry we all work in and the understanding that we are all in this together. The participants seem to always be able to rally around that common interest – especially when I keep it foremost in our minds.

Since we are currently warm and dry here, Mama and I are going to plant potatoes in the garden this evening and tomorrow afternoon. It may actually be the first time we have gotten potatoes plants on schedule. Today will be far warmer than tomorrow so I will try to get the bulk of the planting done before dark today. That should be doable since Mama got only five pounds of seed potatoes. It is possible I will have time to till a row or two during my lunch hour but my priority during the heat of the early afternoon is to open the hives and see if the bees need more feed. We will cool rapidly through the night and start back with the overnight freezes again.

Fortunately, most the days are now well above freezing which allows us to move forward with some of our Spring planting. I am anxious to see how differently the potatoes in the garden grow and produce (hopefully) from the ones I have started in small pots currently placed in the sunroom. That planting idea came from an online video of gardening hacks. It cost us very little to try it out, so I am tracking the experiment to determine whether or not to repeat it. The biggest challenge will be finding a place for the pots to sit through the entire growing season.

Tomorrow is Trade Days. Mama is definitely going but I am still undecided. I do not get much pleasure from seeing the same vendors hawking the same wares every time I go, but Mama likes the outing. At least we get to visit with friends who are there every month. Tomorrow we need to deliver some boxes from our garage to a friend from BBTI who sells at Trade Days every month. We have stored dishes, kitchen utensils, specialty kitchen appliances we no longer use and several other mostly forgotten items that I want to eliminate from our storage and give to someone who may be able to use such things in the many houses they outfit for students at BBTI. I believe we have at least four or five boxes full of such items. It will be nice to move those along since we have had no use for the items in the past four of five years.

Also, this weekend I will begin to transplant the seedlings that have sprouted in the tea bags I used to germinate the seeds.  I have two cherry tomato plants to repot and one strawberry. The flower seeds I planted have not sprouted yet, but I need to give them a bit more time. If I do not see any growth by the end of next week, I will discard the plate and tea bags and start a new set. It is far too early for the tomatoes to be outside so they will be replanted into small paper pots that will allow them to mature to the point that we can plant them in the containers that will house them through the growing season. It is fun to see things grow knowing that Summer and Winter and Springtime and harvest will not fail because of the process that is continuously maintained by our Heavenly Father. Until this earth ends, it will always be so. Every seed that sprouts is a little reminder of that grace and providence.

Our electric bill for the past month reflects the extra heaters we have been using in the sunroom, the wellhouses, and the garage. We have also had heat tracing on three yard hydrants and a stock tan heater in the water trough for the female goats. All of that adds up to about $150 more on this month’s bill. Not horrible but with the furnace working overtime to warm the house, we have quite the bill to pay this month. It is worth it since we have managed to keep all the waterlines from freezing and keep the temperature in the sunroom warm enough to enable out tropical plants to thrive.

Hopefully, this bill will be the highest for the Winter, but that is not a certainty.

Work delays, looking ahead

Mama’s appointment was a bit of a let down for us both. The appointment was only a consultation. The oral surgeon outlined a plan of action to remove the tooth the dentist had identified but the main reason for the visit was to schedule the extraction for a future date and collect the fee for that work in advance. Mama and I were required to pay almost $600 in order for the office to put the procedure on their schedule. We were both a little disappointed by the outcome. I do not have a problem with the price for the dental work, I just found it a bit manipulative to have us pay in advance of any work being done. Anyway, the first available date was in early March overlapping a day I have a class scheduled.

Fortunately, it is one of the classes that has been repeatedly cancelled, so it remains to be seen if I am available to Mama on that day. I will be required to go with Mama since most of the fee for the removal was to cover the anesthesia recommended by the surgeon and having undergone anesthesia, Mama will require help to get home. Since nothing was done yesterday, we shopped our way out of Denton and got back home a little before 4 pm. It was not a complete waste of the vacation hours I took, but it proved an unnecessary secondary cost for that dental visit since I will have to use more hours when the actual procedure is done.

Mama is meeting up with a frustrated Bro. Plumley today to take him to see if there are any seed potatoes available for him to plant in his raised bed garden at the Assisted Living facility where he lives. Many of the nurseries in our area are not well stocked yet. It is a little too early to have vegetable plants ready for purchase, but one of them should have seeds and seed potatoes available for purchase. Mr. Plumley lives by a schedule for gardening and according to his schedule the due dates are passing for the planting of potatoes. If I remember right, we planted in West Virginia by St Patrick’s day which comes in the middle of March. Any later than that and the potatoes would not make before the summer heat burned up the plants. So, here we try to get our potatoes in the ground in mid-February. Hopefully, Mama and Plumley can get the potatoes for him before he really gets agitated about the late calendar date.

For me and Mama, I took a potato from our pantry that had gone to seed and planted pieces in several pots. In the past, we have not done well with potatoes planted directly in the ground of the garden. Maybe we started too late, maybe the ground is not fertile enough for the plants to produce, but we have had two years of very poor yields, so this year I am going with pots for most of our vegetables – potatoes included. Squash, beans, peas, pumpkins, etc. do well enough as long as we water thoroughly through the early Summer. Flowers also do well in the garden, but we do not have a lot of success with tubers. Maybe pots will solve that issue. I also want to move our nectarine tree from the garden into the back yard to keep the raccoons from stripping it before the fruit even ripens. That has happened for two years in a row, and it is very frustrating.

I have trimmed back all the fruiting trees and bushes through the cold weeks so we should be ready for the Spring. I even was able to cut a peach sprout from the base of our peach tree and plant it in the back yard as well. I will know in a couple weeks whether or not the cutting will survive. The pecan trees I started from seeds should be coming to life a few weeks from now. They are the last of the trees to leaf out in our area. This year they will be two years old – still about three years from producing any pecans, but it has been a fun experiment. Mama and I found out a couple weeks ago that one of the older couples that has recently joined our church have a commercial scale pecan grove so I will be able to get advice from him with my little pecan project.

I will be teaching a class tomorrow. My only class this week. I am looking forward to the class. Next week there are three classes on the docket, but I am pretty sure one of them will not make. If it does, it is only a half-day class and one of the more fun classes I get to present. We are zooming through February. 2022 will be over before we know it. It may seem early to say that, but Mama are planned out through August this year and if we are not looking ahead, those dates will come up on us before we have adequately prepared. Holding onto the required vacation time, setting aside the necessary finances, planning for backup on the farm, coordinating our breeding programs, harvesting honey, etc. All need to be well-planned in order to ensure we can follow through with those plans. That planning happens now and in the days to come. I like planning ahead when we are able, and for the moment, it seems we are able. That can change very unexpectedly so we are bathing all our plans in prayer.

After all, the outcomes are in God’s hands, and we can trust him with our lives.

Pending, Grandpa, lingering ice

Mama’s rescheduled extraction is this afternoon. She has been dreading that appointment for a few days now. The causes for concern are twofold. First, she in not looking forward to the pain or the recovery brought upon by the extraction. Secondly, we do not know if the extraction will take place today. She is set up for a “consult” today and the dental office would not commit to actually proceeding with the extraction today. That has Mama frustrated because I will be accompanying her to the appointment today which, in fairness to my employer, will require me to take vacation this afternoon to accompany her. The class I had on the schedule for today was cancelled so I am available to go with her. That may not be the case in the future so she would really like to get this over with. All we can do is proceed with the appointment and hope for the best. Things will all work out eventually. They always do. Most of the time they work out to our benefit. It is just hard to see from this vantage point.

We have been getting mixed signals from Grandma and Grandpa in the past few days. Grandma has been more concerned than normal lately about Grandpa. It is not always clear what, if anything, has changed in Grandpa’s condition because Grandma is hesitant to share in any detail about what is going on. Grandpa is a very private person and Grandma seeks to protect that privacy. However, in the past few days Grandpa, as best we are able to determine, has been suffering more from his ongoing prostate issue - more pain, more bleeding and far more frustration than in the recent past. With Grandpa’s ongoing heart issues and the fact that he has been some months without his prescribed medications, Grandma is worried for his condition.

Grandpa has been without his maintenance meds for a couple reasons. First and foremost, no doctor in the immediate area will issue a prescription for those meds without first examining Grandpa to determine if those meds are the right course of action. Secondly, Grandpa will not schedule an appointment with any local doctor because of his mistrust of the local medical community of providers after a very bad experience with one particular doctor.  He was basically run out of that medical office because he wore a Trump hat to his appointment with the doctor. So, any attempt to get him to go elsewhere and go through the rigmarole of setting up with a new office has been met with less than enthusiastic welcome. The issue with Grandma’s reporting on Grandpa’s condition seems to be dependent on how well Grandma is feeling. One day Grandma will report that Grandpa is at death’s door while in a follow-up call later that day, everything will be worry-free sunshine and daisies. No reason to worry. It is hard to follow.

Grandma wants during the times she is most worried about Grandpa to return to Texas where Mama, who is more available and more constant than Norman, will be nearby to help and comfort her through her painful days. I am certainly in favor of that, but Grandpa made his decision to follow some perceived calling in their relocation to Florida, and though things have not worked out in that area of their move, Grandpa is unwilling to make the return trip to Texas. At some point, it may become a medical necessity for him to come back to the doctors here, but we are not there yet. Honestly, such a trip would be very hard on Grandma and Grandpa knows that. Though the return would certainly help them both, until a solution is offered that would make the trip easy on Grandma, Grandpa will not risk the move. On that point, we will trust his judgement, but it would be beneficial to have them closer.

Meanwhile, the ice and snow in our area is gone in all the areas that get any sun through the day. In the shaded areas we are still walking carefully on the residue. In front of the coop building, we still have a large area of snow and ice since that area is always shaded. The same is true for parts of our road, our driveway, and areas in the front of the house. Yesterday was near sixty and today is supposed to reach seventy degrees, yet the ice lingers. Every time I watch how slowly the ice and snow recede or melt away, I think about the last ice age and how long the ice covering the ground lasted with temperatures hovered near freezing as the earth slowly warmed. That ice blanket could have lasted for hundreds of years.

It is just an idle thought, but it is interesting to consider.

Cleanup, plant life, normalcy

With much of the ground and sidewalk covered with snow that has now been thawed and refrozen into sheets of ice, I elected Saturday to reclaim the garage space that had become cluttered with multiple items set in the once open space for no apparent reason. I knew we would have at least a truck load of trash and junk when all the unnecessary clutter had been set aside and loaded up for disposal. That turned out to be true. Many months ago, Mama had hauled home a cabinet style bathroom sink that needed a lot of work.

Her idea was to use it in the hall bathroom. In my opinion, it was too far gone to rehabilitate but I was waiting for Mama to agree to dispose of it. That agreement came Saturday as I moved things around to rearrange items we wanted to keep into more compact, more organized, more accessible settings. In all we had six large trash bags of junk and trash, two totes full of small items that would not do well in a trash bag – glass, broken picture frames, rocks (yes, rocks), small pieces of wood, etc. I threw out a stool type wicker chair that Mama had hauled home, but we had never placed for use in the house because the stand for that chair had no padding on the feet.

I was debating loading the accumulated mass into the truck because we did not know if our little dump was open due to the ice that we still had lying on roadways, but Victoria went to work in the early afternoon and swung by the small satellite dump to see if it was open. It was, so Trace and I stuffed the bed of the truck, putting the overflow in the back seat of the truck and we took the entire load to the dump. The attendant there is someone who also lives close by, and we have had several lengthy conversations in past trips to throw away our household garbage, and he charged us $20 for the load. I was very pleased with that price. I was even more pleased with the renewed empty space in the garage that the effort brought. Mama was quite pleased as well since we went through all the totes and boxes of her stored items and located some craft items she had been searching for over the past few weeks.

By late Saturday afternoon the goats had begun to venture out of their barn for the first time since the snow started falling Wednesday night. The temperatures got into the high forties by late afternoon. I had put a tank warmer into their water trough, but they had been licking snow at the edge of the barn to slack their thirst versus getting their feet cold in the snow. Today temperatures will be in the sixties and by midweek, the seventies. The nights are still at or near freezing, but the very cold days are past for now. I fully expect we will have at least one more stretch of blue cold before the month runs out but for the most part, we are seeing more warm days than cold days. That is a blessing to me and Mama – and our animals.

The snow we did get is watering the ground well as it slowly melts away. There was not enough of an accumulation to produce any runoff, rather, the slow thawing has allowed the moisture to pierce the previously dry ground more deeply than any topical application of water could have provided in any other form. We will see the benefit of that soaking veery quickly as the warm afternoons spur the grass to grow.

In preparation for the coming planting season, Mama and I (mostly me) are starting some seeds in a variety of methods from ideas we are borrowing from something we saw online. Right now, I have some tomato seeds that have begun to sprout in the teabags I am starting them in. I did not plant too many seeds because I did not know if the method would actually work. Now, I am seeing the results and since Mama and I have a lot of used teabags available, it is something I will continue to do.

So far, I have started strawberries and Echinacea flowers in addition to the tomato seeds, but the tomatoes are a week ahead of the others. I am putting the teabags on a paper plate and putting that paper plate in a gallon Ziplock bag. That creates a little greenhouse for the initial sprouting of the seeds. If this really does work, it will save me a lot of money we normally spend on vegetable plants at the nursery. Especially since many of those purchased plants do not survive being transplanted into our garden. Maybe this method will have greater success. Time will tell. At the very least, I will be able to provide a lot of plants to be set in the garden at a very low price.

Services were great yesterday although we are still down in attendance somewhat. I have not been able to restart the choir because many of my normal choir members are still hesitant to attend services. That will change over time. I just have to be patient. Pastor announced last night that he will start passing the offering plates as we did in the past.

That is a big step toward normalcy.

Weather woes

Early yesterday morning, after I tried everything I could to prepare to present the class from home, I had to abandon the idea. With the winter storm settled over us, I had very spotty internet connectivity. So, I let my team know the issue I was dealing with, and a coworker took over the presentation of the class.

His broadband service was more robust than my line-of-sight service. I guess the snow that we were getting was able to interfere with the signal just enough to cause me problems. Nevertheless, the class for the two individuals was successfully accomplished so there was not loss of their time and no need to reschedule. Later in the day, by early afternoon, the internet service was back to full force. Mama, Victoria, and Trace did not notice the weak signal strength, but the program I was using for the class certainly did.

The temperatures remained well below freezing through the day yesterday. The high was twenty-two degrees. During my lunch break, I gathered the water pans from the coop, all of which were solid blocks of ice, and brought them into the sunroom to thaw. It did not take long, only a couple hours, for the ice to thaw to the point that I could dump out the remaining ice to empty the pans. That done, I took them back to their respective locations at the coop and came back to the sunroom for a five-gallon bucket of water to refill the pans so the chickens could get a drink. They had been without water all day. When I got the bucket in hand and walked across the patio, I hit a slippery place on the patio, slipped and fell hard onto the patio, spilling the entire contents of the five-gallon bucket onto myself as I hit the ground. I was more angry than I was hurt. One of those “should have known better” moments. Anyway, I refilled the bucket and continued the chore of getting water to our flock. This morning, I can feel the aftereffects of the fall, but they are not causing me too much additional pain. Praise the Lord!

The goats have not ventured out of the barn into the snow. If they do, they will find that they have fresh water available. Before the freeze I placed a floating tank heater in the galvanized tub we use to provide water to them, and it has kept the water from freezing. Not so with the two other goat areas. The bucks have a rubber tub for water so I cannot use a tank heater for them. They have been given little drinks twice per day and hopefully the ambient temperature and abundant sunshine will warm their container and sufficiently thaw the water to allow them a good deep drink later today. The bucklings have had their small water dish in the building with them and it has not frozen solid in spite of the low temperatures. Freezing temperatures are the most difficult weather issue we deal with, mostly because we do not have to deal with it very frequently or for long periods of time. This cold snap will soon pass, and the afternoon temperatures will get well above freezing. We always appreciate those days. Cold mornings, warm afternoons. A good Winter mix.

This weekend will be spent thawing out. Hopefully, the afternoons will get warm enough that I can see the bees stir about. They have been a concern of mine during this cold. But as I watch the sparrows flock to the feed Mama sets out for them, I have faith that God has provided for our bees as well. I certainly have tried to do my part in feeding and sheltering them, but what I can provide is limited. Mama and I are very hopeful that this, our third year with the bees, will see our honey harvest finally come. Time will tell.

With the chickens and goats spending most of the past two days inside their enclosures, there will be some cleanup of the manure they indiscriminately deposit wherever the need arises. On warmer days some of that manure is dropped outside their coops and barns. Not so recently and that creates a mess Mama and I deal with. Fortunately, all that refuse is recyclable, and we will be tilling the garden soon. Much of the manure will be added to the garden soil so our accumulation of the winter cop and barn cleanings will be put to use as natural fertilizer.

Meanwhile the slowly melting snow will deeply water the grass and plants. That is long overdue. I have watered our fruit trees, bushes, and perennials and about once per week – weather permitting – but this slow saturation will do more good than I have done so far.

By Saturday evening, the roads will be clear, and the snow will be gone, and we will be back to “normal”. God is good.

Class, waiting, hoping we are ready

While Mama traveled yesterday to visit with Kimberlyn and pick up feed in Muenster, I taught a class. A very full class. I had to stay over a little longer in this class to give the test to someone who could not access the Google form we use for participants to take the test. It is not uncommon for some company protocols to block the test form. When that happens, we give the exam to participants orally – one person at time. I had to give the test to four participants in one class recently. That took about an hour. I read the question-and-answer pairs and the person being tested selects their choices for each pairing. I mark that selection on the test from for them as they make their selection. It is a little disconcerting to some of the participants who are tested in that way, but the gentleman who took the orally presented test yesterday was not at all impaired with my reading of the questions and answer choices to him.

It did make me late leaving the HQ house and as I did so I ran into a mess. The only choice of routes home was blocked by a multi-vehicle accident. Apparently, the accident had only recently happened because all the vehicles, two trucks, and three cars were still littered on or near the road – blocking both lanes of the two-lane road and both shoulders of that roadway. I looked for alternate routes home, but most would have taken me thirty to forty minutes out of my way, so I queued into the traffic at the driveway of the house and waited. There were seven or more police vehicles on scene, two ambulance, one fire truck and many tow trucks lined up waiting to begin the process of moving the damaged vehicles. That took about an hour to accomplish, so I sat in the Sequoia and listened to the Dan Bongino podcast as I waited. So, it was not a complete waste of time.

Once home, Trace and I got the feed into the shop and the bales of hay Mama had purchased offloaded from the truck. I wanted to place the bales in the goat barn but Monday evening I sealed up both ends of the loft so I did not have the easy access I typically have to place the hay in the loft. I sealed the loft because we are expecting freezing rain and snow over the next two days, and I did not want to have that accumulate on the floor of the loft. Plus, closing those openings completely takes a bit of the draft out of the barn giving the goats a better selection of places to rest that will be free of overhead drafts and blowing snow. The east side of the goat barn is open because the goats do not like complete enclosures. Most of the time that works well, but with the coming cold snap I do wish I could give them a warmer area to bed down. Oh, well, they will manage. At least there will be no snow blowing in overhead.

Mama and I are about as ready as we can be for the cold temperatures. The wind has picked up and the temperatures are rapidly falling. Predicted low for tonight is the low twenties with freezing rain turning to sleet then turning to snow as the day progresses. The next several days will stay at or below freezing with the overnight lows in the teens with one or two nights predicted to be in the single digits. That is cold for our area. That is really cold for our animals…especially my bees. I feel like I have done all I can to prepare. We will wait to see what more can be done as the opportunity arises. So far Mama is not asking to keep the animals in the house through the cold nights.

With the road conditions deteriorating rapidly late in the day and worsening overnight, I will need to teach tomorrows class from the house. I have not done so before, but I am hopeful it will work out well enough. It is only a half-day class so I will be done by noon if all goes well. The main roads have been treated in anticipation of the freezing rain, but our little county road will not be treated so the ice that accumulates on our road and driveway will persist until the ambient temperatures are high enough to melt it away. That will not happen until Saturday. Until then, we will be home-bound. Not at all a hardship as long as we have electricity.

I will get some pictures of the ice and snow over the next couple days. I know many of my readers will not be impressed by those images, but for our area, this is a significant weather event.