New Life Old Farmers

I got invited to go pick blue berries… with the ‘cool’ kids (disguised as middle-aged moms).  These gals are fun and funny.  My complete instructions were to bring an ice chest for the berries and cash.

Honestly, this was not really enough information to someone born and raised in Southern California, who had never eaten a blue berry until they were an adult and certainly has never been berry picking.

How big of an ice chest?

How much cash?

What does one wear?  (Do I need gloves?  Long pants for the thorns?  Do blue berries have thorns?  Will it be hot?  Will it be cold?)  The gals might be ‘cool’, but they were not actually a plethora of information, but I was game and jumped into the ‘blue berry picking’ opportunity.

The berry picking farm was at the base of the mountains and the day was gorgeous.

The ‘cool kids’ were shocked that I’d never been berry picking.  Trying to figure out how many blue berries this novice picker needed to pick was daunting.  The ‘cool kids’ were talking about pounds and pounds, enough to last all year, how to wash them or not wash them, freeze them, how to use them, fresh, frozen, on oatmeal or for baking.  Clearly, I was with some serious blue berry lovers.

Given a large blue bucket and 2 hours, I did my best to fill it.  Stopping only occasionally to ‘sample’ the fruit, for informational purposes, as some of the berries were tart and some sweet and I was just trying to make sure I only picked the sweet ones, which I am pretty sure I did not.

Slowly my bucket filled and the berries stopped plinking into it and started plunking into it.  It takes a LOT of blue berries to fill a the big blue bucket!

13.5 pounds of blue berries, each one picked by yours truly and as My Loving Spouse said, “What on earth are we going to do with 13 pounds of blue berries?”

“I have absolutely no idea….hopefully eat them.”  I sort of got into the whole challenge of just trying to fill my bucket and the ‘cool’ kids frenzy about whether they were going to have picked enough to last all year.

I’ve washed them, froze them and shared them.  I have now possibly eaten more blue berries in the last week than in the rest of my life all together…. oh, and best of all…. I had fun!

This is really not about puppy’s at all, except for her cute pictures…it just seemed a much nicer title than say… Septic Tank Days or Clogged Plumbing Days.  As things do, everything got worse before it got better.  ‘We’ spent an entire evening snaking sewer lines only managing to stop up the clog completely, wheeling long snakes around the bathroom, only managing to get the bathroom dirtier in the process.  We dug up the septic tank, which of course was gross and seemed rather too full…yuck.  It was also hot and smokey from the fires in our mountains.  What can I say….it was not pretty.

(With this in mind, I’ve decided to include some pretty and fun pictures that have absolutely NOTHING to do with our plumbing issues.  My flower border around the vegetable garden with beets and onions in the background.)

We went to bed, dirty with admonitions to the Offspring to not shower, not flush, do not run water and do not do laundry.  Other than that we were good.

The morning came and we were to have a two prong attack.  My Loving Spouse would go to work and I would first call the septic tank specialist and then the root-digger-out-of-the-pipes-specialist.  I was feeling optimistic and grateful that this hadn’t happened when we had 9 people here…  Until, I came into the kitchen to find Number Two Son sitting on the floor, looking flushed with a leaking grocery sack he was throwing up in.

(Probably time for another nice picture….Zoe meets Elsie Gump.)

The Teen was having her first job interview and was a bit panicked (rightly) about the shower issue.  “Phone a friend” was the life line I tossed out to her.

I proceeded to call the septic company, who hemmed and hawed.. said they’d get back to me, weren’t sure they had anybody!!!  YIKES!  So in an effort to handle at least some of the poop around here Zoe and I cleaned up the pond pasture of cow poop and felt like we were at least making progress somewhere.  The septic company called back and said, someone would be here by early afternoon and might be able to pump the tank AND fix the clog.  She quickly became my new favorite person in Ellensburg.  Not to be fickle or anything, but my even newer favorite person was the Septic tank guy who actually showed up at 10:30 AM and not only quickly fixed the clog, but said we didn’t need the tank pumped ($$$), oh, and they’d bill us.  Yep, still not use to that.

We could flush…we could shower….some of us were really happy!  One of us was still throwing up…again…just like last week….

My Loving Spouse and I conferred that Number Two might have more than the flu and needed to be seen.  Except…the doctor we had hoped to be his had been in Kenya on a mission trip most of the time Number Two has been home, so Number Two was not an established patient yet anywhere….  I called the Family Practice, who first said..

“Next week?”

“Yes, except…he’s pretty sick now…”

“Yes..let me see…hang on..”

Then my even newer favorite person came back on the line…

“Tomorrow”, she said.

We pretty much love living in a small town.

By evening Number Two kept down a piece of toast and ginger ale,

everyone had showered,

the bathroom had been cleaned,

life was looking good.

We decided that this would be a lazy weekend.  No big jobs, no big messes to fix, just some minor puttering and a lazy, quiet weekend, but then we got a puppy.  (Insert cute puppy picture here…playing with toy frog)

Saturday, we ‘just’ needed to buy a dog kennel/crate, go to the vets, rake out the dog run, seed the dog run, set up a temporary fence for the dogs, empty the old mud room for the temporary dog space, clean up a few ‘whoops’ puppy messes and share our pup with the neighbors, which was very fun.  (Insert cute puppy picture here….puppy playing with the swing)

That is okay, we said, we will have Sunday.  Sunday will be a lazy day, a day of rest.  We’ll even take a nap!  Zoe, the puppy, got us up early (duh) we were having our coffee, when Our Neighbor Gal called to say, she thought her cow was in labor.  Her husband, the Fire Captain was at work, so she told me what the cow symptoms were.

“Yep”, I said, “I’ll be right over.”

“What are you going to do?” My Loving Spouse said laughing, “My wife the cow mid-wife”.

“Well, I’ve seen 7 calves born and that is 7 more than she has.  I know what to look for and if there is a problem..well, we’ll just call Our Friend the Farmer”.

Let me tell you, this cow was definitely in labor.  I explained what we need to look for and all I knew about calving, which didn’t actually take very long.  We were checking for the hoofs coming out the right way and so far it looked good.  The Fire Captain checked in to see how it was going, if we’d boiled water (haha) and wondered how long we thought it would take.

“20 minutes”, I (the city-girl-cow-watcher-calf-non-expert) said.

It was born in 15 minutes.  I have learned a bit!  All good, Mama doing her job…cute little calf born early on Sunday morning with plenty of time for us to make it to church on time.

We’ll rest after church.  We won’t do anything…except a little bit of cleaning and a few loads of laundry, maybe cut the grass, because we were going to play croquet.  (Insert cute puppy pictures here…croquet puppy).

We even did lie down to rest sometime in the afternoon.  We could hear the hum of the washing machine, and the gurgle of pipes as everything backed up into the master bathroom.

If you ever buy a house and the former owners leave you 4 different plumbing snakes…all I can say is…let that be a sign.

Daisy was our city dog.  A terrier who chased (and killed squirrels), was so protective of her home and her people (including the Damn Cat), that many people including family were not comfortable around her.  When I was alone in previous years, she did keep me feeling safe.  When the Damn Cat got stuck in the tree she climbed the tree (TRUE story) and showed her how to come down.

Daisy was not a good farm dog.  She liked to run off, even with 4 acres she chose to run down the street and away.  She did not hear, but probably she won’t have come anyway, because she was a bit headstrong.  When she did get out, she also liked to roll in horse poop.  She had a muscle virus that left one side of her head caved in…she was not a pretty dog…but still she was ours.  We were afraid of her transition to farm life….she was getting old…

So, last week when she died peacefully in her sleep, we were sad, but actually a bit relieved.  She did not get hit by a car, she did not have to be put down.  We were sad…

One child was sadder than the other.  One child left the ‘grave’ and said, “Okay, so now we can get a puppy!”

We, the parental units laid down the rules…

There would be NO ONE bringing home any puppies.  This was our word and we were going to stick to it…. and we did, well, at least until after dinner.

We are sort of a two dog family and our sweet old lab was lonesome, you could say we are just not patient people, but we were…we’d been patient, taking care of Daisy for the years she took care of us.

And so welcome to Glory Farm little Zoe…

We’re not really the kind of people who spoil their pups..she’s just trying to keep my pillow warm for me…

I thought we were getting a sweet family dog…. My Loving Spouse…(with his eyes lit up)..Hunting Buddy!

And for our dear old dog… a perky little friend…

“So, how are you really?”, asked my loving Mentor as we caught up on the phone.  I was dusting as we talked.

“Honestly, the hardest thing for me to get used to is how quickly and how dirty the house gets”.

“Well, on your blog it seems so charming.”

“It is“, I answered, “and can you believe I just dusted the windows in the family room, where I dust all the time and wiped out a huge spider web with 5 dead flys in it!”

“Perhaps you should put a picture of that on your blog”, she said.  Now, she is a wonderful, kind, wise and enriching friend…but I am pretty sure she is wrong here.  No one wants to see a picture of that, however the odds of you seeing it, should you visit are actually fairly high.

As I texted My Loving Spouse the other day…

Even cleaning outside doesn’t last that long…so we have a simple system.

Washing the windows – spray them with the hose…

Washing the porches – spray them with the hose…

Washing the horses – hose..

Washing the cow – ha!  Trick question… even we don’t wash the cow.

Washing the car – (almost never happens)…hose.  I put The Teen to work.  She was on it, with the hose today.

Washing the dog…hose.

The old cold storage room/dog room was really stinky.  We’d pulled out the carpet, removed the rest of the ancient linoleum and tried to dust out the dirt the dogs had brought in…still dirty…still stinky.  So…if it works so well outside…let’s bring it inside…somebody, please bring me a hose.

I wish I could hose down more rooms…it was so therapeutic!

Our scarecrow is up!

She was built out of the ‘good junk’ from the work shop and she is one classy lady.

(Tons of great junk with lots of potential or Tons of junk that is not going to be easy to weld together)

‘We’ built her, our responsibilities breaking down as follows:

Design – 100% Me

Welding – 80% My Loving Spouse, 20% Me

Grinding – 100% My Loving Spouse

Arguing about design details 50%/50%

Arguing about the inability to weld just ‘anything’ I thought should go together 50%/50%

…but we did get her done…

she is fantastic….

I’ll let the pictures tell the story…

(Shovel Head
Tractor Bit Bow & Chain Hair)

(Old Andiron Legs which are wonderful
or as some say,
“Why did you have to pick something so heavy?”)

(Body to Leg Attachment)

(Perky Blue Skirt)

(Gladys shoulders and arm attached
boob building first vise/mammogram)

(Gladys get a bit of neck grinding)

(Garden Gladys’ Ta Da moment)

(Garden Gladys where she belongs.)

It might be a ‘girl’ thing…so far, I’m about the only one that thinks Gladys is fabulous!  The guys….not so much.  My Loving Spouse to quote, “That is the strangest scarecrow I’ve ever seen.”  A neighboring male (who shall remain more nameless than usual) wondered why Gladys’ boobs went down, well.. I am using really old parts.

If you want to know her full name… Garden Gladys Night and the ________.  You’ll have to ask My Loving Spouse.

If you want to weld some junk, come on over, I’ve only just begun!

Future projects?

I got to drive Whoa Nellie Walton today.  Well, actually I got to steer Whoa Nellie.  She doesn’t run and did I mention she doesn’t have any brakes.  It seems My Loving Spouse has been ‘making steady progress’ on her and she needed a bath, or her engine cleaned or her gunk cleared.  Whatever, it was determined that taking the truck to the water would be easier than taking the water to the truck, so we did.

Notice the heavy chain…all we had to do was pull her out of the workshop across the yard (missing the chicken coop), through a gate and stop at the garage.  The whole ‘stopping part’ is what I’d call ‘hopeful slowing down’ as there are no, none, zip, zero, nada brakes.  I still stepped on the brake pedal, because that is what I am inclined to do when seated behind the wheel of a vehicle to which I’d like stopped, but still, it doesn’t help.

Putting her back into the workshop was going to take a bit more maneuvering, pushing the non-running truck backwards, lining it up to go back through the gate, turn around the chicken coop, straighten it up and push it back into the work shop again…none of this with power, very much room or as I might have mentioned….brakes.  My Loving Spouse asked if I wanted to be the Driver/Pusher in the running truck or the Steering Driver of the non-running truck.  I opted for steering the truck with no brakes (AND no seat…just a up-turned bucket), because I figured with no power and no brakes, if anything went wrong it couldn’t actually be my fault…all I had to do was steer….and hopefully slow down.

Being practical and thinking things through, we did have a back up plan and a reliable method of communication, should I need to alert My Loving Spouse aka Driver/Pusher that things were not going well on my end…

…truly never a dull moment.

My little view is one I treasure.  I’d started to say I was ‘lucky’, but as I read somewhere recently, that is not true…I am blessed.  Very much so, as I sit in one of my favorite spots…our front porch swing…and focus on the abundant daisies, not on the abundant chipped and peeling paint…I will get to that another day.

The Grand Dogs are here for their summer vacation, happily tearing across the pasture to fetch their ball.  They find the pond not cold, but delightful…as only two dirty dogs on a hot summer day can.

The chickens never cease to amaze us with their strange sounds and humorous chicken personalities.

Their eggs tend to come in all shapes and sizes, which makes me wonder where the eggs in the stores come from with their unity in form and color.  One of our hens tends to lay an egg like a very large torpedo, which almost does not fit in the carton, the egg is so long.

Yesterday’s mystery was an egg that looked left over from Easter.

Fresh from the nesting box….

unbelievable with two tones…

isn’t mother nature cool?

The Teen and I learned to weld!  Woo and Hoo!  I am ready to go burn some metal!  Melt some metal?  Whatever, there is a whole shop full of ‘junk’ just waiting for me to turn it into ‘stuff’!  All I have to do is not burn the work shop down, seriously, I think I can do that.

We had a great, relaxing and productive weekend.  One of those few times where we took on enough projects to feel happy about what got done, but not as overwhelmed as usual.  The big workshop door was repaired, so it can now be slid open and closed, which is making My Loving Spouse very happy.

Sometimes it is just nice, convenient even when ‘stuff’, especially tools work.  I get it!  This week the final wheelbarrow broke.  UGH!  When I had it full and was using it, which is the only time they seem to break!  I said, “To…blank-et-y blank with it”.  You know you’re living in the country when you have coveting wheelbarrow issues, which I confess I do.  I took my pocket-money and bought myself (but I share) a sweet new wheelbarrow… a two-wheeler… steel handled baby…destined for a long and happy life with me on the farm.

So, My Clever Loving Spouse had a great idea for the broken wheelbarrow.  He’d teach us to weld and build me a trailer for the John D. ride on mower at the same time, (as I’ll have to confess to actually coveting the ride on mower trailers as well.)   This would be a handy gardener’s dream on steroids kind of thing.

Step One, The Teen and I unbolt all the attached parts on the wheelbarrow and on an old power sprayer.

(Notice the multi-tasking teen, wrench in one hand, iPhone in the other)

Measuring the steel part we’d dismantled from the power sprayer, this gets bolted to the wheel barrow, after welding washers to the axles and the axles to this new big axle.

Only one wheel needed trimming after a slight mis-measuring…

practically a record.

The Teen receives her tutorial and tries welding the trailer attachment.

The final attachment is hardest to weld, as the metal is so thin.  My Loving Spouse and I  both take a stab at it and all we do is burn two small holes in the wheelbarrow or what I like to call a trailer vent.

It is decided to just bolt the piece to the wheelbarrow.

The old workshop stool was used to hold up the wheelbarrow/trailer during this final stage.

The stool took the most ‘hits’

getting just a tad singed, with a hole drilled through it as well!

The stories this old stool could tell….

However, we did reach our ‘Ta-Da” moment!

SWEET!

Now, not only can I stop coveting the trailers at the local hardware store,

but I can do some serious gardening clean up,

as well as giving my loved ones a lift!