New Life Old Farmers

We still need a LOT of rugs here, as the floors are cold.  While winter was upon us, I thought it would be a ‘great’ idea to make some rugs…or at least one.  After all Pinterest is loaded with beautiful rugs people have made from ‘stuff’ just lying around their house.  Wha-la, I thought, I can do this!  It will save money.  It will be crafty.  It will have my mark on it and keep us warm.  No problem.  Hahahahaha….

The ‘great’ T-shirt rug was begun.

Step 1 – tackle My Loving Spouse and talk him out of a heap of his old T-shirts, that had all seen better days and were not fit to be worn, even on a farm.  (Note to future rug makers – this is a very delicate process and should not be undertaken when the original T-shirt owner is in a possessive or ornery mood.)  I procured 20 T-shirts for the ‘great’ T-shirt rug.

Step 2 – Cut the T-shirts into strips 2 inches wide.  My Loving Spouse was the T-shirt strip cutter only moaning a small bit as he came upon a previously beloved shirt (not fit for anything but the ‘great’ rug or the rag-bag).

Step 3 – With a large (really, really large) crochet hook, crochet the strips into a single strip giving them the look of being braided.

Step 4 – Lay out the ‘great’ rug and start sewing the pieces together.  This step is a ….’Bad British Word’.  I found this is very difficult to do while keeping the rug tight but not too tight… the Damn Cat did not help.

After hours of sewing, at this point, I picked it up only to have many pieces fall apart…grrrrr.  I’d almost abandoned the ‘great’ rug project, but did not relish the idea of hearing about how ‘one’ of us gave their all for the project and kept at it, saved when I remembered a trusted crafters friend…the hot glue gun.

Step 5 – Hot glue the rug together, slowly being careful to keep it flat as you do so, not let the glue seep through and of course do not burn yourself.  (Actually, I’ve never used my hot glue gun and not burned myself, so that last bit of advice was just to look like I know what I am doing…..hahahahaha).

Step 6 – I mention to My Loving Spouse that the ‘great’ rug is going to be a tad too small and could I please have some more t-shirts…’Bad British word’… apparently we all ‘agree’, that a small ‘great’ rug will be just fine.

Step 7 – put the ‘great’ rug down and admire it’s beauty, small but pretty

Step 8 – stand on the ‘great’ rug and although it is warm, it is highly uncomfortable, as all the hot glue dried in small clumps making it sort of lumpy

Step 9 – Do NOT even think of not using it, as My Loving Spouse gave up his ‘beloved’ collection of rags t-shirts for the ‘great’ rug.  Place the rug where a small spot of color is appreciated, but no one really needs to walk on it.

Step 10 – Be glad it is Spring, go out and garden.

Someday the attic will be done…hahaha…no really, it will.  I’ve just no idea when!  With a recent visit from the Number Ones, we managed to get the new floor in.  We sort of saved this project for Number One Son, as it was a clean, quick, rewarding job, nothing like the beginning of this project!  He is always happy to help us here, but seldom gets to do a job that doesn’t require knocking stuff down and burning stuff up, (although those are some of his favorite things).

My Loving Spouse was the chief floor layer outer, note the official red pencil.

Number One Son was the floor installer, getting to use our favorite new power tool, the floor installer whacker nailer that is hit with a rubber mallet.

Number One Wife looks on to because:

a. She is curious about this tool and might want a new floor at home

b. She wants to be sure it is done right

c. She loves the attic

d. She is pregnant and is wondering, if the toilet will ever get installed for upstairs usage

e.  all of the above

With the floor in and the tub in the garden, we just need a couple of strong sons (or the CWU Rugby team) over at the same time to carry the tub upstairs.  Then we’ll put in the plumbing, the walls and the sink and the much awaited toilet…  Summer visitors are watching this site with baited breath…all I can say is when you visit…pack some tools and a strong bladder.

My Girl and I start new jobs tonight/tomorrow.  Weird…as we are just reaching our 2 year anniversary…  talk about being patient…oh yes, that’s right we were not really patient…we just didn’t have a choice.

As we got ready to move folks would ask me, what are you going to do for work?  (Work like where you ‘make’ money, not work, like on a 120 year old house where you ‘spend’ money).  I had the sense that I would work in a school environment…but still, I did not really have a complete plan or an incomplete plan for that matter.  Still, the Ellensburg School District has kept me busy for most of the last year…from crowd control to short vowel sounds to my current stint in Kindergarten.  I have loved being in kindergarten.  The kids listen to my stories about cows!  I’ve dispensed a lot of hugs and tied a lot of shoes, but the job is not permanent…in other words next school year it is gone.

My Girl has looked and looked and looked for a job, when she has gotten tired of looking, like good parents, we’ve increased the chores and responsibilities around here to make getting a real job even more appealing.  My Loving Spouse gets the credit for keeping her on track and helping her move through the process.  Finding jobs in a small town is tough, finding good jobs is even tougher.

My new job is only 3 hours in the morning, so I will still be with my Developmental Kindergarten class in the afternoon, a combination of crowd control, encouragement and counting.  I’ll still hear things you do not expect to hear…ever…like…

“Do not lick the desk!”

“Do not put that rubber band up your nose.”

My new job is permanent, in other words…they are stuck with me…I’m coming back next year and the year after that etc. and so forth.

My Girl not only has a heart for people, but she is a night owl.  It is how she is wired, so a job helping people in the middle of the night?  Perfect!  Graveyard shift at the fancy resort in the next town, night auditing and front desk assistance…a jacket..a name badge…employee discounts at the resort, (Mama wants to know when we are having a spa day?)  Good pay and a good fit and we are so happy for her!  We all stayed up to say ‘good night/good-bye/good luck’ as she nervously took off.
…and as for me…

I will be in the school library!  Library assistant…books and kids…no homework…what could be better?  I get to be immersed again in children’s literature, just in time for grand kids, I get to dispense encouragement for books, I will probably still tie a few shoes and be an encourager to kids…to all the kids and that is the best most important part…and I am thrilled.  Who knows, I might even find some good books about cows.

Last week Number Two Son and I were sent to Yakima to do some serious shopping.  We had an exact list:

– Chain Harrow

– Bath tub

– Insulation & tacks

What we looked at:

Fabric

Baby Chicks

Sprayers

Cattle feeders

What we bought:

– Insulation & tacks

– a gallon of green paint

– 2 hot dogs at Cosco

…at least we came in under budget.

A lot of Farmers save everything, because they usually have the room to do so and because they never know when they might need it.  Every once in a while they might have a bit of a clean up.  Luckily for us, we were around when Our Friend the Farmer was doing a bit of Spring Cleaning from his… treasure trove.

Chain harrows most often come in 8 to 12 foot wide lengths of special iron chain stuff/pieces (technical farm term), which are then dragged around fields to break up the ground, as well as break up and spread around any manure/animal poop.  We didn’t need one that big, as I wanted one I could use on the bike.  My Loving Spouse saw part of an old one on Our Friend the Farmer’s trash pile and knew he could rig it to fit our needs.  So we went ‘shopping’ in the treasure trove, except you cannot really shop in someone’s treasure trove, because they are hanging on to their good stuff.  However, if you are there when they are having an extremely random Spring Cleaning, you could really be in luck.  Especially, if they are your friend and know what you ‘need’ and just happen to have it in their trove, which is how we ended up with a very fine bathtub for the attic as well as the bits for a small chain harrow.  As the guys co-ordinated the loading, Number Two Son and I were looking around the trove/now marked trash ready for removal.

and as luck would have it…
We found some really cool old iron farm tractor ‘packers’ (old farm term) that we (with My Loving Spouse’s help) envision turning into extremely cool end tables….which is why we now have the perfect size chain harrow for the bike, a bathtub in our yard and a pallet of iron bits not dissimilar from the junk yard art I fell for in January. ready for creativity…life is good…now about getting the heavy cast iron bathtub in the house and up the stairs and around the corner…

Sometimes My Loving Spouse accidentally utters a ‘Bad British Word’. Tonight he might have done it a few times…  Now that it stays light out later, we can get a lot of work get into a lot of trouble after work.  When I got home, I began to drag the driveway.  (Yes, Southern California this is a real thing, which I will explain another day).  I was just getting into a good dragging mode on the quad, when our neighbor The Fire Captain came over.

“Would you like some help burning your ditch?”  Burning ditches is a spring time farm thing, kind of like ‘weeding on steroids’.  Instead of pulling all the dead brush and tumble weeds out of the long, long ditches, you can just set them on fire…and it is legal…even if you are not The Fire Captain.  It is a quick and easy way to tidy up the ditches prior to running the irrigation water in them this summer.  I was happy to stop dragging and go burn the ditch, because believe it or not, but sometimes ditch burning gets out of control and starts a fire and then the Fire Department has to come out.  I am a bit intimidated about the whole ditch burning thing, so having a trained professional there setting them on fire was kind of a relief.  Also, I wouldn’t be the one embarrassed, if the Fire Department had to come out.  My Loving Spouse came home from work and he could see the smoke from a way down the road.  He knew I was home and he knew ‘sometimes’ I don’t wait for his help before starting a project and he saw me and he saw the fire, but he missed seeing the Fire Captain…so he said a ‘Bad British word’….like I would be crazy enough to do something like that!

With the ditches safely burned we turned our attention to the project of the evening.  There is a small strip of land that borders our field that was not originally sold to us, but now has been and there is a long involved legal reason why for all of this, that has nothing to do with my tale.  The strip of land will square up our property and offer more feed for the herd.  It had become a tiny bit of a junk yard.  The old dry weeds have grown up high, and you cannot just set them on fire, so cleaning it out must be done carefully, to prevent running over old farm equipment.  We intended to let the herd clean up the field.  Step one was to begin fencing in a small portion for the herd to graze down.  My Loving Spouse had a plan and he assured me, it would be easy.

Step 1 was to haul an old heavy gate to the field using Blue and her front end loader.  This did go quite well.  That front end loader can lift and carry all kinds of stuff, so all he had to do was drive out of our field, over the ditch, then up into the strip of land.  Except…Blue went into the ditch and the blade on back of Blue dug into the ground and they were very stuck, very stuck actually, going no where…not forward..not backward…’Bad British Word’.  This is the kind of thing I usually do, so I was very understanding, mostly thinking to myself, (I am glad it is not me).  The blade was successfully removed and momentarily abandoned at the end of the field.  Back to gate installation, which went quite quickly and exactly as planned.

My Loving Spouse then decided to try to do a small careful bit of clean up in the strip, not part of the plan.  Their first discovery was an abandoned 12 foot chain harrow, which got drug out of the strip.  Then they found that they had a flat tire…’Bad British Word’.  Not wanting to leave Blue in the strip, My Loving Spouse drove it back to our field, where it got stuck in the ditch again…’Bad British Word’, possibly said more than once.  My trusty tractor Jubal was called to the rescue.  Jubal and I dragged Blue back into the field, carefully maneuvering around our blade, which we’d left on the first ditch mishap.

Once all tractors and farm equipment were back into our field I decided that it was time to plan dinner and call it a night…and the flat tire will be removed and fixed another day…’Bad British Word’.

We’d never been to a hockey game, so when we were invited to go, we jumped at the chance.  The Wenatchee Wild  was our learning experience.  A minor league hockey team that was fighting for a play off spot.  Going with our Sweet Neighbor’s just made it all the better.

Hockey impressed us pretty quickly, but that could partly be because we can barely ice skate, stay standing up and going forward, to say nothing of skating backward, going across the ice with other players knocking into you, trying to steal your puck.

The crowd was an enthusiastic bunch, howling like wolves when the “Wild” did well.  The thing about minor league is that the players looked like kids, NOT because we are getting old, but because these players we’re told are barely out of high school and the referee’s looked like they were still in high school.  We don’t like fighting, so we were a bit apprehensive about how much penalty box time we’d be witness to.  There was surprisingly little in the way of out-and-out brawls.  It could be that there is something in the ‘air’ at a hockey game, I quickly came to sort of…enjoy when they all slammed into the glass…especially if it was right in front of us.  Minor league hockey…we loved it…

…the skater’s speed…

…the ‘chuck a puck’…

…the 50/50 that we almost won…

…that all we had to do was park across the street…

…and that the most amazing thing to ever happen to me at a sporting event, especially a professional sporting event….NO waiting, NO line in the Lady’s room…an amazing choice of stalls…I was stunned…I was smiling…

Minor League hockey…it is a beautiful thing.

Our clutch did not make it!  Truthfully, we were not too surprised as we’d feared they had gotten a tad too hot in our new and improved home-made incubator, but we were disappointed not to have the peck, peck, peck of little beaks breaking through their shells all the same…and checked them often on their ‘due date’ with great hope.

A week of egg disappointment followed, where all we did with our eggs was eat them.  (They are very, very delicious.)  However, we were not ready to give up.  I was sure My Loving Spouse could make the proper adjustments to the incubator to hatch the next set of eggs, and so we started collecting them again.  We were just at the ‘magic’ number 13 when fate intervened.  We found an old-fashioned/new age solution…we got a surrogate.Some people are crazy about their chickens, a tad like some people and cows.  One such Chicken Lover had posted on the Ellensburg Farm Exchange Face Book page that she had a hen that had gone broody and was trying desperately to hatch a clutch of non-fertile eggs.  Did anyone have a few fertile eggs that she could get/buy/procure/borrow to put the hen out of her misery?  Chicken Lover just wanted to make her hen happy.

“I’ll give you some eggs…” began the conversation and the great egg surrogate hen plan was hatched…(sorry bad pun).  I handed over the eggs to Chicken Lover, and explained why there were 13 (because that is how My Loving Spouse’s Dad always did it).  I knew that her hen will turn them and cluck over them, so all Chicken Lover needed to do was get eggs under her.  We were told we could come look at them anytime we wanted.  The final custody arrangements and splitting of the brood will be handled at a later date.

For now, all seems to be going well, all 13 eggs got tucked in and sat on…life is good.

I am not an ‘orange & teal’ person.

I am not an ‘orange’ person.

I am not a ‘teal’ person.

I am most certainly not an ‘orange & teal’ person.

To awake with the dream/vision/idea/thought that I was to make a quilt with orange & teal is not my ‘norm’, but the ‘message’ seemed clear.  I was to make an orange & teal quilt, for our dear friends J-1 and J-2 who need rest, comfort and restoration.  J-1 has been in the hospital for most of this year…8 weeks in the hospital, 5 weeks in ICU.  A young man (34) with H1N1 flu that turned into pneumonia and then Respiratory Distress Syndrome…a time when concern was grave, if he would make it…and prayers were abundant.  I told My Loving Spouse, I think I am supposed to make a quilt for J-1 and J-2.

He said, “Well, then you should.”

“In orange & teal.”

“Really…”

The thought came quickly together as my mind drifted through church that morning…with black and white…I am to make a quilt for our wonderful, dear, amazing young friends, who are in a long ordeal…and to comfort them.

The most common question heard at quilting is, “What are you making?”  Answering this question as I launched into a new project began with, “Well, it is sort of a God-thing.”  As I explained why I was making it, one dear friend said, “Oh, you are learning to listen to the voice of God.”  The quilt became known as “My God Quilt”

When I ‘listen’ stuff happens.  The amazing thing, is not that God calls us to act in love for others.  The amazing thing is that as I listen and do my best to give God the glory, he still gives us all the fun!To J-1 and J-2, be well my friends and know that you are loved.

………

Pattern adapted from Plus Quilt.  

I used dimensions for cot size, but piece count for queen size to build a larger lap quilt.

We got to help work Our Friend the Farmer’s cattle!  I knew Our Friend wanted us to come, as the day of ‘working cattle’ is a celebration of sorts.  In farm fashion there is a job that needs to be done, it takes a lot of people to get it done and there is food, beer and a bit of celebrating.  Celebrating the successful births of the herd.  80 calves to vaccinate and brand.  Last year we were invited to the celebration and I was delighted, but my job was watcher-don’t-get-hurt-stay-out-of-the-way-especially-from-the-branding-iron job.  I highly recommend staying far away from the branding iron at all times no matter what your job is.  However, this year I got to be a Shooter!

Tetanus was my job.  I might have been given tetanus, because if I accidentally shot a person it wouldn’t be all bad.  However, I was very careful and only got the bull calves….now steers, which leads me to My Loving Spouse’s job…  He was handed an empty bowl and assigned the duty of Ball Boy.  Our Friend the Farmer and he were a team, one took the balls off the bull calves and the other carried them around.

All 5 of Our Friend the Farmer’s grown kids were on hand to help work the cattle, with their kids in tow.  It was fun to watch the Dad’s teach and help the younger ones to not only throw the calves, but keep them down while the Shooters, Brander and the Ball team did their jobs, as all the calves want to do is to find and get returned to their Mama Cow.

Grand Daughters were not left out of the calf throwing…as were small ones wanting to help and learn…The littlest calf was 201 born just Thursday night.  She was saved to the end for the youngest Grand Daughter to have a turn learning to throw the calf.Like all celebrations, the most rewarding and tiring for the guy in charge.  A morning of family and friends helping to work the cattle, all calves successfully ‘worked’ and returned to their Mooing Mamas and plenty of food and beer served to the human helpers.  No accidents, no one was hurt or branded… a good day.