Scarface

I came out of the bathroom, and Mel and Kiddo burst into laughter. Can't blame them. No one has seen my face for 3 years. :)

"Roll up your right sleeve and have a seat, please." :)

Ron

Career change

Clarity arrived at 4 a.m.

It was 3 years ago or so when I left a high-paying successful job in IT. I had many reasons for leaving. For a number of years, the stress had accumulated and my satisfaction with my life had gone seriously downhill. I wanted to be outside. I wanted to do something besides sit behind a monitor all day. I wanted to live.

It also helped that we were all about to get laid off anyway. The writing was on the wall, so to speak. :)

Since then, I've managed to stay engaged to some degree, part-time, doing some database work while we built a lifestyle and homestead out here in the woods. A number of things have become clear to me though, as I contemplate trying to re-enter the workforce in some manner:

• IT is brutal. You are highly in demand today, gone tomorrow. To stay current is a relentless drive to reinvent yourself... pick the wrong technology to get proficient in and you're, essentially, dead. I'm already 'the old guy.'
• IT tends to be focused in population centers, which is exactly where we don't want to live.
• Working from home is not all it's cracked up to be. The freedom of working at home is offset by the lack of face-to-face communication with peers, and the easy access to management to prevent things from getting seriously derailed on projects.
• IT tends to be "all or nothing." Sure, you can make good money there, but finding a slower pace or part-time work is a real challenge.

This has all been on my mind lately. The relentless bad economic news hasn't helped either. Unemployment/underemployment can really affect one's mental health, and it's put me through some ups and downs over the past few years. Something has got to change. I have to get realistic about the situation, regardless of how I feel about it. I've got to figure out our next move in life. I don't regret the "timeout" we've taken one single bit, but it's time to embark on a new journey.

There's a part of me that would be perfectly happy just driving a dump truck. Do good work for honest pay, nothing wrong with that. I've tried this path before, though, and found that working in a field that is not in demand is challenging. I fear the same would be true about starting my own shop out here, or trying to sell homestead products (meat, produce, firewood, etc). There just isn't a high demand for those things here.

The question is: what can I do around here that is valuable, and do I have what it takes?

There are several things I could try to do that I'm not necessarily good at. Could we get by ok? Well, maybe... but pursuing something that I'm not really a good fit for puts me at a disadvantage before I even start. Male modeling comes to mind... :)

What I really need to do is to think about my strengths, and find a way to take advantage of them. One thing I can do, better than some, is to put mind over matter when I need to. Feelings and desires are secondary to me. If I know something needs to get done, I can do it.

Well, for the foreseeable future, health care is a greatly in-demand field, even around here. I don't relish the idea of working in a rest home, necessarily, or administering shots, but I can sure do it. And being needed and challenged provides it's own sense of satisfaction to me, regardless of the actual work. Since it is in demand, there are many job openings locally, and many different possibilities for getting my foot in the door. Will that be true in 20 years? Who knows.

Step 1: shave the beard off. :)

Ron

Yet another summer day

Today's harvest, minus the carrots that I forgot to include. We decided to go ahead and try harvesting a vegetable spaghetti squash, since the plants are all but dead now.

Lunch was carrots, spaghetti (using the squash) with home-canned sauce from last year, homemade bread full of cracked wheat and flax seed, boiled corn, and a fresh tomato. It doesn't get much better than that, in my opinion. The only photo I got was after the fact.

Here's why I grabbed one of the squashes. The center of this photo used to be dense beautiful foliage. Those squash bugs killed it. I really hope getting a stand of lemon balm going will help, as I sure do like my squashes... I'll have to figure out what to do with this vacancy once the vine completely dies off.

Pigs were overjoyed to see me, and went racing around their pen, jumping, hopping around, laying down... they are quite a sight to see. I brought them the left overs from lunch, plus bits of cuke ends and carrot ends. They turn the things we don't find appetizing into the most delicious pork... pretty nifty.

Ron

Zucchini club

The summer garden is really starting to come in now. Several tomatoes turned orange overnight. Okra is starting to produce fruits. Corn is heavy with ears. Cukes are finally accumulating. Zucchini and summer squash are still producing, even though plants look horrendous now. Peppers are starting to come in, and plants are setting fruits like crazy.

Today's harvest. I'm not sure what happened to this photo. A monster zucchini was hiding out there.

Mel made a gallon of refrigerator pickles, since we don't quite have enough cukes to can pickles yet.

These will easily last for months in the fridge, although we'll likely eat them way before then. :)

I took the pigs some eggs and watched them eat today. They are really looking awesome now, nice and plump, eating like... uh... pigs. I paid $35/each for them, and they were smaller than I would have liked at the time. Now, we've just about gone through a $7/bag of feed, and they are fine looking feeder pigs. So, I think we did pretty good, money-wise. I had my doubts when we first got them, due to their size.

Ron

Happy anniversary to us

Today was a pretty lazy day, for me at least. Kiddo had her first day of Girl Scouts, and Mel and her spent most of the day doing activities and hanging out with other girls and moms. I didn't really have anything going on, so technically I could have gone with, and I would have probably enjoyed it for the first 20 minutes or so... but being the only guy at a Girl Scouts event would probably get me labeled as a pervert forever. Unfortunately, there is no handbook of social conduct for a male underemployed homesteader...

It sprinkled a little bit here, which was welcome. We actually spent the past half hour down in the root cellar, waiting out the tornado warnings. I can hear lots of thunder nearby, but not much of any activity here yet... I'd love an inch or two of fairly slow rain, minus the baseball-size hail and tornadoes they've reported...

We lost a chicken overnight. I was just telling Mel that one of them looked pretty bad, and we should cull her soon. I found her dead this morning, half buried in the sawdust of the coop. Mel and Kiddo weren't home. I gave her a decent burial service in the compost pile and kicked myself for not culling sooner...

Today was our 11th anniversary. We got all dressed up this evening, me in a tee shirt without holes and a pair of preppy jeans from the thrift store. Mel wore a dress... dang!... she cleans up good! :) I took my ladies to a Mexican restaurant in the city down the road, run by a hard-working Hispanic family. Mel had a marguarita and got goofy. :) Our big celebration set us back 15 bucks, which made us laugh. Doing without makes it easy to feel spoiled. We ran some errands while we were there and tried to buy ammo. Sold out...

I've been worrying about finances. We're not broke yet, but that's only true until I saw my leg off, or a tree falls on the house, or wildfires blow through, or a tornado sends the homestead to the land of Oz. As frugal as we are, we spend more than we earn, and we can't do that forever. Taxes, electricity, gas, car insurance... all things that are pretty basic, but when you have virtually no income, a penny spent is a penny gone. Mel doesn't like my idea of growing cash crops. One of these days I'll have to figure something out. I don't want to be rich, and I have no problem with working my tail off, but the employment forecast doesn't look too good for the next decade...

Ahh, well, life is full of uncertainty. When we think it isn't, we're deceiving ourselves. Best to enjoy every day to the fullest, methinks.

Pigs don't worry about such things. They just try to figure out how to chew my irresistable shoe. :)

Finally, at long last, a tomato ripened. Another is orange. Life is good.

The teenagers all roost in a nest box.

The babies still hang out with Buffy. She is such a good mother, and I hope to keep her around for a long, long time. Make any sudden moves towards her kids and you can kiss your forearms goodbye. :)

Kiddo sure did have a blast with the other girls today, and all the activities. I'm so proud of her I could burst. :)

Ron

Chicken tractor

I woke up sometime this morning... pretty late. Sun wasn't shining. Body was sore as heck. I figured I better get up and see if I could get something done before the rain arrived that the weatherman promised.

And then... what do I hear?! Pitter patter of raindrops! Well, I just laid there and thoroughly enjoyed it. I spent an hour or so reading a fantastic book, Weeds, Guardians of the Soil. Finally, got up, drank a cup of coffee, and laid on the couch some more watching the rain trickle down. What a relief to get some, at least, with more on the way.

Well, it finally fizzled out, so I went out and worked on the last of the hickory I had to split. While I was out there, I pondered the pokeweed, which we have in abundance. Those tap roots can grow well over 3' long (I dug some up once). The leaves are toxic (although can be eaten if water is changed a couple times). The berries are good food for birds, and the little chicks love to frolic around their base, sheltered from hawks. But I hadn't really thought about how valuable their service is in piercing the hardpan and creating good drainage until reading that book this morning. In fact, lots of 'weeds' are like that... they have roots that go far into the subsoil... far deeper than machinery can. Every day, the magnitude of my ignorance hits me... I'm at least 10 times dumber than I was a decade ago... :)

Pokeweed 'trees'. Just missed the frolicking chicks.

I found lots of these big beetles in the hickory wood. I let a few go by the pile of wood. A few got tossed over by the chickens... my entertainment for the day...

Well, there's the stack. Not too shabby for a borderline obese guy during a heatwave. :) I can't wait to smoke the meat!!! Nothing like that aroma on earth!!!

With that all done, there was no excuses left for not working on the chicken tractor. I just made it from wood, using treated lumber on the bottom. 2x2s.

There are training wheels to help in moving it. I put a hinged door on that end, and a plywood back to mount water and feed to. Overall, it's not too heavy.

The finishing touch was to staple some roofing felt over the plywood to help it last longer.

Twas a good day. Even wrote a song, set to the tune of "Sister Golden Hair." No time to record though. :)

Ron

SWEET corn!

I worked my behind off today. I was just about to call it quits and head over to the solar shower, when Mel brought me an ear of corn. After an intial taste-test, I dug into that raw ear like nothing Mel has ever seen. She managed a flattering shot of the action, which I feel obligated to share with the world. :)

I guess I really did plant yellow corn, after all! Don't I feel silly eating the earlier white-kernel ears. :) Well, the good news is that it is the best tasting corn I have EVER had. This ear had a touch of damage, which is why Mel pulled it. Very soon we'll be canning and freezing a bunch... and gorging on the fresh stuff!

Kiddo told me she really wanted to start using her playhouse yesterday (the back is my garden shed). When I built it this spring, we stored a bunch of old windows in it. This was the first time she really seemed interested in it, so we decided to clean it out today before I resumed splitting and stacking hickory.

While we worked, Mel cooked, and gave us a terrific lunch as usual. Pork chops, grilled zucchini, and fresh potatoes. All from the homestead!

These windows are the raw materials for a greenhouse project. If I ever get around to it. If not, Mel will run an ad: "Free windows, must take all, husband was a packrat." :)

The volunteer cukes out in the hog area are being more productive than the ones in the garden. We need rain pretty bad now. Mel said she has plans for these big slicers...

With the playhouse cleaned out enough for Kiddo to sweep it out, I went over to get another load of hickory to split and stack. The pigs were happy to see me.

I brought them all the straw we had gathered a while back. It didn't take long for them to be burrowing in it and tossing it around, chewing on it.

Acorn-pumpkin squash? This was another volunteer in the hog area that I let grow in the hopes of producing edible food for the pigs. It doesn't really look like an acorn squash... or anything else for that matter... the parent vine probably crossed with the pumpkins or other vines.

While splitting wood, I took a peek inside the smoker and discovered this enormous wolf spider. She was about 3" across or more.

Tomorrow, I should finish up the splitting and stacking. Then I hope to make a real chicken tractor... the temporary one worked pretty good, but it would benefit from being smaller and more concentrated, moved frequently. Which works well because then I can move it and store it more easily.

Then, hopefully, it will rain on Saturday. My blisters need some downtime.

Ron