A day in the life

A friend and I were noodling around a blog post called "A day in the life" in which I would document what I do in a 24-hour period, thus answering the eternal question of "What do you DO all day?" now that we're empty nesters. So I did just that -- documented a couple of sample days, namely Thursday May 17 through Friday May 18.

Thursday, 5 am
Got up, made tea, scanned the news on the Internet, started some writing projects.

6 am
By this point Amy and the calves started to bellow. At the moment, Amy is a nurse cow; she's nursing not only her own calf, but Little Orphaned Anna as well, after her mother Polly died. Amy will tolerate Anna's nursing, but only when her own calf is nursing. To make sure both calves will nurse simultaneously, we put them in a separate pen at night and I let them out in the morning.

Because Amy can get a bit testy with Anna, I usually stand and hold the lead rope to keep Amy quiet. It can be boring until I remember to look around and enjoy the scenery. I imagine there are a lot of people who wouldn't mind watching the dawn come in and listening to a chorus of birdsong.

When Amy finished nursing the calves, I put her down in the pasture with the other cows until noon or so. I released the chickens and checked for any morning eggs.

6:20 am
Back into the house to work on my tea and on the computer. I'm a morning person and my brain is most alert during this time of day, so it's the logical time to write. On this particular day, I finished up my WND column...

...and drew up a calendar for my writing commitments over the next couple of months to make sure I don't miss any deadlines. I sent article queries to two parties and got no bites. I worked on an article I have due in a week.

8:30 am
It's my turn to bring dessert for the Friday potluck, so I made a quadruple batch of shortbread cookies.

10 am
By this point Mr. Darcy was bouncing around the house, ready for his walk, so Don and I took him out to stretch his muscles and run. He's still technically a puppy and boy does he need his exercise. It's been cooler in the last few days, cloudy and raining at times.

10:30 am
Breakfast (brunch?), then Don and I peeled off for our separate tasks of the day. He went into the shop. I coated tankards for a production run we're finishing up.

When they were all coated (for the first time -- we coat twice), I put them on a shelf to dry.

11:30 am
Then it was into the garden. I'm still prepping beds, weeding and adding compost, then planting. On this day I worked on watermelon and cantaloupe tires. Weeding:

Adding compost:

Planting (pardon the misspelling):

12:00 pm
Time to fetch Amy in from the pasture so she could feed the calves. She's often a bit grumpy about this, so I sweetened the deal with a bit of grain. Sometimes she eats the grain and sometimes she doesn't.

12:20 pm
I put Amy back in the pasture with the other cows. On the way back, I slipped a string through the faucet handle near the well pump. The other day one of the cows, using the faucet as a scratching post, turned on the water for a few hours. The string prevents the handle from being pushed up.

12:30 am
Back to the garden, where I moved compost and weeded beds. At this point the rain had held off and we weren't sure if it would skirt around us (as it often does), so I watered as well. (As it turns out, I shouldn't have bothered.) We have the drip system set up but not connected yet.

I noticed the potatoes are just starting to poke up.

I also saw an American Goldfinch from a distance.

3:30 pm
Time for barn chores. I put some hay in the pen for Amy and the calves...

...gathered any eggs I found (at the moment I'm getting between 7 and 11 eggs a day)...

...and fed and watered the chickens.

The calves eat the hay, but what they really want is milk.

"Where's mama?"

4 pm
But first it's time to take Mr. Darcy out for his long run. We have two routes we can take him: either on the road for a two-mile circuit, or over a neighbor's field to a point we call the Overlook, then looping back on a dirt access road to the house.

At this point the weather was thickening. (You can see the cows as distant black dots on the grass.)

This time we chose the field walk. The neighbor is an absentee fellow we know very well and he's given us full permission to walk his land whenever we want. The field walk is shorter than the road walk, but Darcy can run more freely...

...through nice broad fields.

Approaching the Overlook.

The Overlook is a point where the property drops sharply into the canyon that surrounds us. This photo doesn't do justice to the splendid view.

5 pm
I threw in a load of laundry...

...then did dishes. With just the two of us, I only do dishes once a day. Before:

After:

Hanging laundry.

6 pm
Time to bring Amy in from the field for the night. On the way to fetch her, I saw several Hoary Redpolls flitting about.

Usually I have to haul Amy in since she's reluctant to leave the grass, but tonight her udder must have been full because she actually came without a lead rope.

The weather was definitely thickening up. Evidently I shouldn't have bothered watering the garden.

In the corral, I held Amy on the lead rope while the calves nursed, then unclipped the rope and left the animals to themselves. Then it was time for a much-needed shower.

7 pm
Ah, my evening indulgence: a glass of iced wine and a book.

8:30 pm
Time to give the parrot some attention. With the departure of Younger Daughter into the Navy, we have her Quaker parrot Lihn for the next few years. It's become an evening routine to release her from her cage and let her fly around and get some exercise. Usually she ends up sitting on my finger (while I wear a glove, or she'll nibble my cuticles to death as she "grooms" me). She'll groom herself and attend to her feathers as I watch mindless YouTube videos.

9 pm
Don and I shood the sleepy calves into their separate pen for the night, then I closed up the chicken coop as well.

10 pm
Bedtime (for me). Don's a night owl and he stays up later. When two people live and work together 24/7, it's important to have one's own quiet time. Evenings are Don's quiet time; mornings are mine.

Friday, 5:15 am
I awoke to a power outage and rain. Lately we've been getting some short-term outages of a few hours. Rather than scanning the news or working on writing projects, I made tea and drank it while reading a book.

6 am
Repeat routine with chickens and cows.

The power came back on when I was out in the barn. Later it was chilly enough to start a fire in the cookstove, first time in a couple weeks. I took advantage of the surface heat to cook breakfast, a broccoli-onion stir-fry that makes Older Daughter gag but which I love.

10:30 am
After taking Mr. Darcy for his walk (with umbrellas), Don departed for the shop and I sat down to second-coat the tankards.

11:30 am
Because it was raining too much to work in the garden, I finished washing and hanging laundry.

12 pm
Fetched Amy up from the field for the midday feeding. Afterwards, I dipped the shortbread cookies in chocolate and let them cool for tonight's potluck.

2:30 pm
The rain eased enough for me to get a bit of gardening done. I transplanted the broccoli I started in the house several weeks ago.

Then I weeded out one of the beds in which I'll transplant the peanut seedlings. I also weeded the pea beds. (It's a good thing I rather enjoy weeding, isn't it?)

The peas are coming up strongly.

4 pm
Time for Mr. Darcy's evening walk. Don and I took him along the road, where he dragged a suitably macho and manly stick for at least a mile. Good dog.

5 pm
Showered and got ready for the weekly potluck, this time held at our neighbor's house.

6 pm
Full house for the potluck -- I counted 27 attendees. Man I love these potlucks.

8:30 pm
Home. We closed in the calves and chickens and I let the parrot out to play.

And that, dear readers, is a typical routine for a couple of our days. Obviously tasks vary from day to day and with the needs of the season, but this is a typical sample of the varied work we do. It's nothing profound or earth-shattering, but it's peaceful, calm, and productive (for us).

From billionaire to bankrupt

I never paid much attention to a woman named Jocelyn Wildenstein (nicknamed "Catwoman" due to her hideous plastic surgery) until Don forwarded me an article on how this socialite ran through a $2.5 billion divorce settlement she received in 1999. Let me repeat that: She squandered $2.6 billion. How is that possible?

"It is a shocking turn of events for Wildenstein," noted the article, "who first became a fixture in the New York press around the time of her split as she bragged about the high costs of her lavish lifestyle and penchant for plastic surgery. ... Two decades later, the woman ... finds herself with no checking or savings accounts, no retirement fund or pension plans and no investments according to her filing. The filing also lists the $900 check Wildestein gets from Social Security each month as her only source of income."

How -- and I mean that literally; how -- do you spend $2.5 billion? What can you do or buy that would squander that much money in less than 20 years? I don't care how many jewels or furs or luxury cars or high-end homes you buy -- that's still a lot of money. And are we supposed to feel sorry for Wildestein now that she's "reduced" to surviving on social security? (She's not, by the way.)

Wildenstein's sordid past appears to be catching up with her and sadly illustrates what happens when too much store is put into worldly possessions and too few riches in heaven. What a sad, pathetic woman.

So maybe I do feel sorry for her. She's really really poor in so many ways.

My Mother's Day gift: A great big pile of...

I've been working like a mad thing in the garden. Unlike a lot of years past, this May has been warm and dry rather than chilly and rainy. There were years I couldn't get seeds in the ground until early June; but this year's weather has been so cooperative, I've been frantically getting stuff in early.

One of the necessities was a fresh layer of compost on every garden bed. Trouble was, the compost pile was down in the woods and the garden was not.

This pile of former barn waste has been quietly sitting here for the last three years, decomposing. It's the perfect state to put on the garden. The logical thing was to move it from here to there via the tractor, but Don's also been working like a mad thing on tankard orders, so here to there wasn't happening.

This represents a partial production run of an order we're trying to finish by the end of June.

And then Don gave me my Mother's Day gift: a lesson in tractor-driving, resulting in a great big pile of manure moved from there to here.

This was not without its occupational hazards. Every time I took a fresh scoop, the chickens would descend on the pile en masse. I had to be careful not to run them over.

Soon I had a satisfactorily large pile of compost much closer to the garden.

After that came the tedious wheelbarrow work as I moved compost to the individual beds.

But you can see the difference.

Don also took some time away from his busy schedule to help me do something that we've needed to do for a long, long time: chicken-proof the garden. Last year the birds did a lot of damage. They scratched up the corn seed, ate the grapes and blueberries, and in general were a pain in the patookus. But we installed chicken wire in strategic locations along the fencing where they were slipping through, and it seems to be working.

So far I've planted potatoes, carrots, onions, peas, seed poppies, and tomatoes. I'm hardening off basil, broccoli, and cayenne peppers.

Today I hope to get the watermelon and cantaloupe planted, and by the end of the week the corn will be in the ground. Meanwhile the other crops (either perennials or planted last fall) are growing great guns: grapes, strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, garlic, potato onions, and herbs. The pears (below) have blossomed, and the orchard (peaches, plums, apples, and hazelnuts) are blooming out.

I'm also trying an experiment this year, thanks to a reader suggestion: peanuts. Apparently it's possible to grow peanuts in northern climates as long as they're started indoors. Right now the peanut plants are hardening off.

If this works, I'll always grow peanuts.

So anyway, as you can imagine the farm work is taking up an enormous chunk of each day. It starts around 6 am when I release the calves from their pen so Amy can feed them, then I put Amy in the pasture with the rest of the cows.

Then it's into the house for some computer work (usually writing), then Don and I take Mr. Darcy out for his morning walk, then it's into the garden until noon when I fetch Amy from the field and let her feed the calves again; then it's back into the garden until about 4 pm when I take Darcy out for his afternoon walk.

Then it's barn chores, then it's time to fetch Amy up from the field for the night and have her feed the calves again. And that doesn't count helping Don with the tankard work.

Which is why I found the following article so grimly amusing about the so-called "indoor generation": "A quarter of Americans spend all day inside, survey finds."

I don't seem to have that problem, especially this time of year.

Chickens: The latest urban status symbol

I must admit, I love chickens. They're dumb, they're noisy, they're messy -- but I just love 'em. On warm evenings, it's a fairly common thing for me to take a glass of wine and a book and sit outside "communing with chickens," as I call it. Half the time I'm not reading my book; I'm watching the birds preen, peck, scratch, doze, or just sit, with a foolish and satisfied smile on my face.

Which is why I found it amusing to see this article from a few weeks ago entitled "The Silicon Valley elite’s latest status symbol: Chickens." The subheading read: "Their pampered birds wear diapers and have personal chefs — but lay the finest eggs tech money can buy."

Urban chickens have been rising in popularity for years, of course. It's now a "humblebrag" to say you have your little backyard flock of hens (roosters are discouraged in urban quarters for obvious reasons). I found it interesting that the high-powered tech gurus profiled in this article enjoy their birds for the same reason I enjoy ours.

Johan Land, a tech elite, enjoys "relaxing with a glass of wine in the back yard alongside his wife, kids and the family’s 13 chickens and three sheep. It’s mindless, he said, but far from banal. 'It's a fascinating thing to sit and watch the animals because instead of looking at a screen, you're looking at the life cycle,' Land said. 'It’s very different from the abstract work that I do.'"

Yep, chickens ground people. They're not abstract. Even rural folks enjoy them.

Of course, the article then illustrates where homestead chickens depart from urban chickens: Fancy living quarters.

In true Silicon Valley fashion, chicken owners approach their birds as any savvy venture capitalist might: By throwing lots of money at a promising flock (spending as much as $20,000 for high-tech coops). By charting their productivity (number and color of eggs). And by finding new ways to optimize their birds’ happiness — as well as their own.

Instead of cobbling together a plywood coop with materials from the local hardware store, the rare birds of Silicon Valley are hiring contractors to build $20,000 coops using reclaimed materials or pricey redwood that matches their human homes. Others opt for a Williams-Sonoma coop — chemical free and made from sustainable red pine — that has been called the “Range Rover of chicken cribs.” Coops are also outfitted with solar panels, automated doors and electrical lighting — as well as video cameras that allow owners to check on their beloved birds remotely.

Like any successful start-up, broods aren’t built so much as reverse engineered. Decisions about breed selection are resolved by using engineering matrices and spreadsheets that capture “YoY growth.” Some chicken owners talk about their increasingly extravagant birds like software updates, referring to them as “Gen 1,” “Gen 2,” “Gen 3” and so on. They keep the chicken brokers of the region busy finding ever more novel birds.

While the rest of the nation spends $15 on an ordinary chicken at their local feed store, Silicon Valley residents might spend more than $350 for one heritage breed, a designation for rare, nonindustrial birds with genetic lines that can be traced back generations. They are selecting for desirable personality traits (such as being affectionate and calm — the lap chickens that are gentle enough for a child to cuddle), rarity, beauty and the ability to produce highly coveted, colored eggs.

(Um, speaking as the "rest of the nation," who spends "$15 on an ordinary chicken" at the local feed store? For $15, it had better be something durned extraordinary. I know of no one -- at all -- who would drop that kind of money on a chicken. But I digress.)

The article continues: "All of it happens in cutting-edge coops, with exorbitant veterinarian bills and a steady diet of organic salmon, watermelon and steak." Some even employ personal chefs or outfit their birds with diapers so they can roam the house.

Okay, that's just silly.

And yet -- and yet, these tech gurus need to relax as much as anyone else. One so-called "chicken whisperer's" clients "are usually men in their 30s and 40s, with young families. After spending their days in front of computers, they long for a connection to nature. What they want most of all, she said, is a 'rainbow assortment' of beautiful, colored eggs in various shades of blue, olive green and speckled brown." -- due to the status symbol announcement that such eggs didn't come from Walmart. A hand-selected carton of beautiful eggs is supplanting a bottle of wine as a preferred hostess gift.

Another family notes, "Watching the chickens is one of the family’s favorite activities. They call it: 'Hillbilly television.'"

See, I get this. I get this. That's what "communing with the chickens" is all about.

My conclusion is as follows: It's hard to bury Mother Nature. The desire to connect with food sources is innate and can only be suppressed for so long before it erupts in one form or another.

We may chuckle at the waste of money -- personal chefs and "gingerbread coops" and organic salmon diets -- but in the end what these wealthy high-tech gurus are doing is exactly what I like to do: mindlessly watch the chickens cluck.

More power to them.

Toxic pride

If there's one Seven Deadly Sin from which I have never suffered, I have to say it's pride.

Oh sure, I'm proud of many things – how our girls turned out, how much Don and I have accomplished in our business and on our farm, that kind of thing – but I am not a proud person. Or does saying that smack of pride?

The reason for this (cough) profound observation is an article I stumbled across this morning entitled "25 ways to kill the toxic ego that will ruin your life." My life could be ruined by any number of things, but I'll admit a "toxic ego" is not one of them.

The author covers such helpful advice as "Stop telling yourself a story – there is no grand narrative. When you achieve any sort of success you might think that success in the future is just the natural and expected next part of the story. This is a straightforward path to failure – by getting too cocky and overconfident" and "Forget credit and recognition. … Submit under people who are already successful and learn and absorb everything you can. Forget credit." He also recommends "Getting out of your own head" and "Letting go of control."

I had no objection to any of the 25 pieces of advice this author upheld – it's fairly sensible stuff – but it also reinforced how little I care about ego. I have many other sins which elbow that one out of the way.

I think this lack of pride and ego is one of the reasons I don't understand the lust for power. It's often jaw-dropping to watch politicians in action: the need to build themselves up by tearing everyone else down, the constant bragging about all the stellar accomplishments they've achieved while in office (which usually means our personal freedoms have been further curtailed as a result), the pseudo-modest recitation of their flawless private lives.

So yeah, I have a lot of other sins to work on, but pride isn't one of them.

Except for the garden. I'm pretty proud of that.

I just don't think I'm "toxically" proud, nor do I think it will "ruin my life." Phew.