The mornings work was just me, Tina was home schooling the kids and Jim was on the phone ordering seeds so it was just me working from 6 till around 11 with only minor input from Jim or Tina. It felt good to start feeling more accomplished. If there has been anything about the last two weeks that has frustrated me, It was my own lack of knowledge, and feeling like I couldn't take initiative on anything, because I didn't know enough. But that is all starting to fade away, I am taking more and more initiative now that I know more of the ins and outs of the farm.
Aside from a brief job that I did in the pig pasture, I was harvesting all before lunch. In the pig pasture I moved their shelter to higher ground and then re-staked the corners of it. Before, the stakes were re-bar that only went maybe a foot or less into the ground, and they were secured to the structure with just a bundle of baling twine wrapped around the re-bar and the metal piping that was part of the structure. I pulled out the re-bar and used t-posts instead which are longer and stronger, its the kind of post that speed limit signs are often posted on. I drove each t-post about 2 and a half or 3 feet into the ground and then lashed some extraordinarily tight lashes that really secured the whole shelter, my dad has always taught me to take pride in all my work, any job that I do, and for the most part I do that in everything, even school where I wasn't particularly happy about the work I was doing, I still did mooossstt of it to the best of my ability, and my GPA reflected this, but here on the farm, pretty much every task I have to do, I try to do to the absolute best that I can, especially lashing, because I love it!
In the garden, while I was harvesting for 4 hours, I also have to entertain myself a little bit by chasing bugs. I have already mentioned the game with grasshoppers, but I caught a new bug today. Imagine a golf ball, cut in half and with six little legs stuck on the bottom, the domed surface is the top. Now give that golf ball a shiny iridescent green color as well as the power of flight, and you have the beetle that can be found here in the garden. It is an massive bug and when they whiizzz! past your head it is very loud. The first time it happened I ducked!! Anyhow, that is the bug I caught today! I felt like Harry Potter catching the golden snitch! Except this snitch was green and pinches you once you catch it! Ha, I don't know why I'm equating everything to some movie or book today.
I noticed something I was grateful for this morning while harvesting and that is the fact that I can feel my back getting stronger by the day! Each day when I'm doing short bursts of strenuous lifting or long hours of stooped harvesting, I feel by back has more and more strength and resilience in it! I fatigue less quickly and am able to keep up a faster pace in whatever it is that I am doing at the time! It's fantastic, and I have only been here two weeks!
It had been getting cloudier and cloudier as the morning went on, and at one point you could tell that it was going to rain at some point today. I didn't really give it to much thought though. As I was just starting to harvest the volunteer tomato plant, the thought of, "It's going to start drizzling soon." popped into my head! I hadn't even been thinking about the weather or anything really. And then literally 3 seconds after that thought passed through my head, a rain drop hit the leaf right next to my hand. And then another, and another, and all of the sudden it was drizzling! I was astonished! So pretty quickly it turned into a driving rain coming at me at a 45 degree angle and a fierce wind! It was the first time I have ever been truly cold since I have been in Arizona. But I continued to harvest because I was about to break for lunch and didn't know how long the rain would last. Turns out that it finished the down pour right as I finished working. The sun popped out from behind some clouds and the whole world changed moods along with it. And that, my friends, lead me into another moment of philosophical thinking that only ever lasts me about 1 minute, in my head, but then takes me about 30 minutes to capture it here, in writing. Never the less, here is, I think I'll give this one a title.
The problem with thinking, "The Grass is Always Greener":
What I realized today, during the rather sudden down pour that soaked me to the core, accompanied by driving winds that carried away all my body heat, was that there was nothing I could do about it. I know what you must be thinking. "You could go inside Ben! Duhh!" but for the sake of this philosophical moment, let's say there was no concrete, water proof shelter for me to run and hide in. Let's say that my options were limited to a time before man started his sub-conscious struggle to barricade himself off from nature and it's elements, at first physically, and then by default, mentally and spiritually. Let's say that I was an Plains Indian, from 350 years ago, when most of nature was pure, and modern expansion had not yet occurred. So there I was, in the garden, with driving wind and rain pelting me, and yes I was quite cold, where 45 minutes before, I had been quite hot, sweating, drinking tons of water, and feeling the sun bear down on my back like an actual weight. If in both cases I had wished for the opposite of my current experience, I would have been just as miserable when I got the opposite. I think that it is impossible to enjoy the "greener grass", so to speak, if you can't learn to enjoy the "grass" that you have already been dealt. So by that mind set, disappointment is inevitable. I remember I used to do it in the middle of winter, and in the middle of summer I would wish for the other. It wasn't until recently that I was self aware enough to realize the pattern of wanting whatever was the opposite of my current situation. So I made concerted efforts to enjoy winter as much as possible. To savor every breath of cold air! And as the season changed, I savored that exact temperature and climate. By continuing that mindset all the way through a full year, looking back, there was never a moment of longing for something I didn't have. To go a bit deeper, let's add the layer of control. We cannot control when a storm hits, or when the sun beats down on us. Their is no curse you can shout at a storm to make it dissipate, and no complaint you can utter, that will make the sun feel sympathy for you and cut you some slack. When storms come, they come and when the sun shines, it shines! This is the case of many things in nature, and that is largely due to the fact that most event's in nature are about the greater good, by that I mean, when it rains, it is raining because the plants need water, and when the sun is out, it is shinning because plant's need to photosynthesize. That is the way things are done because when everything is a system, what's best for the system is what takes precedence over the wants or desires of the individual ( including humans). And back to the point of control, often times, for me at least, if feels like the situations we get most frustrated about are the ones that are ultimately out of our control. I am no longer talking about natural events any more, although they absolutely fall into this category. I'm talking about any event or situation where we feel tempted to impose control, when in actuality, nothing we do affects the matter at hand. That urge to control the uncontrollable, combined with the mindset of "The grass is always greener" will lead down a frustrating path. But we don't have to buy into that mindset, we can resist it, and try to enjoy every "season" of life and know that what is the present shall soon be the past and that the bright future will soon be the present, all we have to do is stay in the moment and do our best to enjoy the present. And the passage of time takes care of everything else. To bring it full circle back to nature and my rain storm in the garden, when one does surrender to what is happening, it takes away any frustration as well as allows you to potentially enjoy the less than ideal situation. When that rain started really coming down, I got excited! I started thinking about how cool it was that I was harvesting Tomatoes in the middle of a storm. I had fun with it, I started pretending I was rescuing the tomatoes (which in a sense I really was, because if they get to much water on the outside of them, it will burst the tomato when the pure water osmosis's it's way inside of the tomato to try and balance out the salinity inside the tomato). And then when the sun came out, I was excited once again because it was there to warm me back up and dry me out. Perhaps all of what I just wrote is nothing new to anybody, but that's okay because it wasn't really new to me either. I think that these types of things are always good to be refreshed on though, and that's the way I see today's rain storm, as a refresher course in the truth that, "The Grass is always greenest, right where you are!"
As I got back into my wet muddy clothes after lunch I was reminded of a familiar football camp sensation. During sports camp when we would have multiple practices a day, each time you put your pads on they get more and more saturated with the sweat and mud of the previous practice! But you do it anyways because you know that cleaning them properly would be a waste of time. This truth held up today at the farm.
My post lunch work was to continue digging at the irrigation hydrant, and boy did I get muddy! I ended up digging all they way to the main pipe which runs at a depth of 4 feet, and the hole is probably another 4 feet across. But before I could dig out any dirt, I had to bale water out of the hole until the whole main pipe had drained into my hole. Remember how the other day I said I was really far away from the farm, well the main pipe starts at the farm and its a big pipe, about 8 inches in diameter, and it was full of water from the last time a field was irrigated, similar to how a garden hose still has water in it after you turn it off at the spigot. Well this was a biggg garden hose, I and it took me two hours of non stop baling to clear it out! Once cleared then I added on to the digging I had done yesterday. Yesterday was just about finding the fracture in the pipe, but today I prepared to work on it. I widened the hole so I would have room to saw off the pip at the break, and I dug it deeper so I could cut below the break to add a coupler and patch everything up! While I was out there working I kept hearing whistles, I guess they were from a bird or something, but at first I thought it was an illegal immigrant because Tina told me that sometimes they whistle at you from far away to get your attention to see if you are willing to help them. Which I guess happens often down here, because a lot of people don't like border patrol.
Here are some shots at different times of me digging the hole, this first one was when I was letting the puddle refill so I could bale it out again.
This is the water level in the hole's early stage, I would say I was only 2 feet deep at this point.
This was closer to the end I was probably 3 and a half feet deep now. It doesn't look like it, but that's because I snapped off the remainder of the hydrant.
In this you can see how deep it is, as well as the hydrant head laying and my baling bucket laying on the ground.
During chores, Arnold decided to mate right in front of the gate that I needed to go through in the cart so I had to wait till he was done, so while waiting, I decided to let you guy see what I see everyday 5 times a day, at least!
Jim and I were re-stocking the hay bales in the feed room today during evening chores and I thought maybe it was my imagination but these hay bales seem bigger that the ones I had seen before (primarily on Smallville when Clark is chucking them around like footballs, and his father, Jonathan Kent, played by John Schneider, is struggling with them the way a normal person would be.) These hay bales were enormous! I asked Jim about it and he started shaking his head slowly the way he does when something is slightly upsetting to him. He said that hay bales have gotten bigger because the dimension they are now makes them optimal size for fitting as many on a semi as possible. Since everything is mechanized now, it doesn't matter how heavy the bales are because the machines don't notice it. The only person who ever touches the hay from the time it's been cut to the time it's in Jim's feed room, is Jim. He is a strong guy, but he makes a good point when he says that stacking 130 pound hay bales is a much bigger pain in the ass than stacking 60 pound hay bales. I bring all this up just because it is interesting to think about the fact that the motivating factor behind changing the size of the bales, were so that more could fit on the semi's. No body thought about the Farmer who would have to handle them.
While Jim and I were working on chores Maggie and Colm came out to see what was going on. Maggie just got her ears pierced yesterday and must have told me about it 5 times today, but this now she had a purse slung over her little shoulder. She came walking up with some attitude in her step and says,
"Look Poppa, do you see me, look, What am I Poppa??"
"I dunno Maggie honey.. What are you?"
Maggie replied with an excited, "Well I'm a town girl Poppa! See, look at my purse and earrings, Poppa!!"
Jim laughs, "Oh, wow, I don't know why I didn't guess that, sorry sweety."
I was smiling at the whole exchange between her and Jim, both the kids always say "Poppa" or "Momma" about 5 times in one sentence to their parents. Then I asked,
"Why would you ever want to be a Town girl when you are already a farm girl, Farm girls are wayyy cooler. What's in your purse anyways?"
She looked at me and says, "Oh just town girl things.."
" Oh yeah? Like what?"
"Just some plants.."
I laughed out loud at that and said, "Maggie, I don't know any Town girls that carry plants around in their purses, I think you are still a Farm girl, even if you dress like a Town girl. But that's a good thing! Don't worry."
That was pretty much the end of the conversation, but it was all very amusing! Both kids are pretty funny, they rode with me on the 4 wheeler while I was watering the hogs and dogs this morning. Maggie was chatting off my left ear, and Colm, my right ear. I couldn't hear either of them though because the 4 wheeler engine is so loud, so I just kept nodding and smiling at them.
Dinner tonight was an adventure of sorts. I made the salmon rice and beans again, but doubled everything! It was so much food to cook! The propane stove heated up my tiny room real quick! I got a little fancier with everything this time around, I started the salmon pan by sauteing some onion and garlic, and in the rice I put some special seasoning that I brought from home, then when everything was done and mixed together, I squeezed half a lime over it all and stirred that in! It was delicious! Oh and I filled up my cooking water jug before I started cooking anything, and when I came back to it 5 minutes later to pour water into a pan, out poured a spider along with it! That's just part of the benefits of living in a barn I guess! :)
I don't know if you cant tell from the picture, It takes a trained eye to notice cat teeth marks in butter, but this is photographic evidence that Stubbs was eating my butter stick.. I knew he look guilty when I walked in the room and he was licking his lips.
Here are some chronological shots of my dinner being prepared. Directly below you cant seen the onions and garlic browning, with the salmon waiting to go in, and the rice cooking on the far right.
This is the delicious mixture all together!
This is the final product! Oh and that's a "Truly Hand made" Tortilla from Trader Joes. It was so good!
My showers are getting colder and colder as September progresses, soon I may have to start using the house shower.
Tomorrow is my day off, but I will be using the first part of it to tend to some logistical matters surrounding a new adventure I am planning for when the Farm adventure ends. And then for the second part of my day, I volunteered to to some work, because I can't really rest easy when I know there is a lot of work to be done, I think Jim was surprised when I offered though, because I already don't take the normal 2 days off a week that I am allowed, and last week I worked on my day off, and tomorrow I will as well! It's easy to not take days off though when you love what you're doing!
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