New Life Old Farmers

Number Two Son is coming home!  His family is delighted!  His older brother is almost giddy with excitement thinking of the fun he knows they will have together.  (Number One Son still cannot quite believe that we live in a place where I actually ask him to burn stuff up and shoot nasty pigeons.)  My Loving Spouse cannot wait to hear our piano playing again.  The Teen plans for them to start an Improv group together and his mother…. just happy down to the tips of my muddy boots.

Number Two was at a ‘Cinderella’ school on the East coast.  He was singing, writing plays, acting in plays and finishing up his sophomore year.  Life was good until the school actually turned into the ‘ugly step-sister’ school, by doubling his tuition, whereby he said… “I don’t think so…”  He has been in Brooklyn since, working, paying his own bills, feeding himself and figuring out what he should do next.  We are proud of the way he has handled this set back.

One of our rooms upstairs is his room.  It was important to us that he felt he had a ‘home’.  I reminded him often that, “Home is where your mother is” (and I even saw it on a sign, so I know it is true).  He has visited, but not lived here until now…  There is an old black lab that will be very happy to have his boy home, the horses will get ridden more, there will be fewer eggs to share with others, there will be more singing in the house and more hugs.  I have done my best to be supportive, encouraging and occasionally patient while he was figuring out his next move.  I am excited to see what God has in store for him next and that at least for a time it includes Glory Farm.

Glory Farm is getting a ‘new’ farm truck.   It is a bit older than I am, but otherwise, we have a lot in common.  It doesn’t run, has most of her original parts, could use an overhaul, but My Loving Spouse thinks it is special.

She doesn’t have a name (yet), but is a 1952 International Pick Up.  I can see her all fixed up with a beautiful red paint job looking very cute and we’ll drive into town for an ice cream (some day).  

If you’re wondering what on earth we are doing buying another project???  And don’t we have our hands full???  And do we need to have our heads examined??? The answers are… what, yes and maybe, but sometimes in life timing is everything.  Often the timing is messy, (if you live here then it seems to always be messy).  The truck was bought because it is a project.  It was purchased for the farm, but with the kids in mind, especially Number Three Son, who will be here this summer.  Number Three is mechanically inclined and we wanted him to have the opportunity to bend some wrenches with his Dad.  My Loving Spouse is hoping a bunch of the off-spring will join in the rebuilding/refurbishing of the truck…. so come on by as the party is in the workshop.

My Loving Spouse had a three-day weekend, so we promptly crammed three days of work into the first two days.  Sunday was to be 55 degrees and still (which means – not windy, to those of you who live where the wind does not blow), so we eagerly looked forward to our first ride down the trail (with perfect weather) on our horses and a luxurious, relaxing day.

We opened the shades in our bedroom and looked out on our beautiful surroundings, like we do every morning.  Except this time, the job of moving the dog run fence caught (someone’s eye, okay it caught my eye).  When we built the dog yard, we built it a bit too short and the gate worked poorly so an adjustment has been on the ‘to-do’ list for a while.  After all, all we had to do was dig 8 new post holes, move the fence 5 feet, add two ends, re-do the gate and move the wire netting we put under the pickets to keep the digging dogs from digging out.

“How long do you think it would take to move the dog run fence?”  I asked quite innocently.

“Oh, it will be easy, just 2 hours”, My Loving Spouse assured me.

“Well, the weather is going to be 55 and still.  Should we just get it done this morning?”

Moving the dog run fence, when you already have dogs is one of those projects that once started, must be finished.  It is sort of like putting in a new toilet, you cannot stop in the middle of the job and get back to it when you feel like it, you must keep going no matter the desire or the weather.

So suffice it to say that the weather was 55 and still for about 13 minutes at around 3:00 in the afternoon.  Otherwise it was cold and the wind blew, making it… colder.  It didn’t take 2 hours, it took 8 and by the end of the day we were cold, tired, and achy with both of us declaring we were never ever-moving this dog fence again in any way shape or form.  Time to stock up on Advil, because Spring has sprung…. so today it snowed.

One of the things I love about our home is that it ‘evolved’.  Major ‘additions’ to the house came over time and probably came about less due to planning and more due to simple opportunity.   Our pantry/fat room/dog room space is quite wonderful and I love it’s very usefulness, however there was probably more ‘hopefulness’ than ‘planning’ when it was added on without a foundation.  Even I could tell it was sort of ‘pulling away from the house’ and when you went inside, it didn’t take an engineer to sense that the room was sinking down in the corner, in fact it felt like you were walking aboard a ship that was listing.  No worries, My Loving Spouse can fix anything!

Someday the pantry/dog room will turn into a proper mud room/laundry room/pantry – thought out space, but for now shoring it up was the goal.  We got a head start from the Grand-dogs who decided to do a bit of excavating under the rotting siding corner piece.  With the job begun, it was time to get busy and unearth the dept of the problem.  My Loving Spouse started by attaching two 2×6 beams to the side of the house, as there was a fair amount of rotting wood and we needed to be able to lift against something solid, then he broke out every jack he owned (4) and we went about the process of jacking up our house, okay not the whole house, just one end.

I was very impressed with our progress, until My Loving Spouse started saying things like… ‘watch out in case these jacks don’t hold’.  I was the brick fetcher, big jack cranker, trash picker-upper and saw-dust mover.  The walls are about 12 inches thick and filled with saw-dust, which was the age-old solution to insulation.  Every time we raised the walls up more saw-dust came down, and I mean a LOT of saw dust.

Snickers, best dog ever, watched the proceedings without worry.

 My Loving Spouse lifted the house walls up 9 inches, which is a lot of inches for a house!  It even looks level!

Out of the walls fell stuff!  5 old burlap sacks, old newspaper and an old pair of overalls.  We hauled approximately 12 wheel-barrow loads of saw dust out to the front garden, the wind took care of some of more, and I’ve washed a fair amount of it in the laundry.

The interior wall of the dog room has crumpled a bit due to the lifting of the outer walls, so more saw dust has fallen into their stinky dog haven.  Unfortunately, we have one little glitch, as the outer walls went up, the floor in the dog room did not, so there is a gap, a hole, a parting of the ways which needs some more attention.  The other evening the dogs were inside having their after dinner sleep by the fire when we all heard some noises coming from the dog room, but all the ‘inside’ animals were account for.  Barn Cats!!  Cats that had never been inside before were prancing into the kitchen from the hole in the dog room floor/wall.  We had cats everywhere and more sawdust and dogs..  I’m just glad it wasn’t skunks.  The hole/floor/wall thing needs fixing/finishing, so the right animals stay in or out, the wall boards put back, the jacks returned to the shop, but My Loving Spouse can fix anything and so for tomorrow’s project.. I am just hoping he will.

One of our blessings here is that we have been growing our family and acquired what we think of as a 4th son.  He is already grown, which is sort of a bonus, we didn’t actually have to go through child-birth, braces or college tuition.  Number Four came by on Saturday to see if we needed any help at the farm.  He’d read about all the digging I’d been doing and was concerned that we needed assistance.  I think he might have also been double checking that we hadn’t broken down and rented another backhoe for him to play with, I mean work with.  Number Four took one look at all the trenches that I’d dug and said, “Wow!  Your pictures do not do justice to the work you did”.  Yep, I love this guy.

(Number Four, The Bride, My Loving Spouse

The Teen, Number One Son, Me)

It might have started with My Loving Spouse buying another saddle.  Well, he’d gotten a great deal on it, but still we only had one horse that can be ridden.  Dixie is too young and she gets really upset when the rest of her herd (Dolly) goes off down the trail without her.  Maybe we are just herd people too. We don’t really like going off down the trail without some of our herd/family coming along as well, so only one horse to ride is not that fun.  So, when we were offered a great ‘care-lease’, we jumped at the opportunity to grow the horse herd, besides we already had the saddle!

Mr. Beau-jangles or Beau is a 19 year old gelding that needed a good home.  He has been a consistent 4-H winner (under the name Bones) and is easy to handle, great with kids and loves a trail ride, a perfect match!  We are so delighted to have two horses to ride and take off down the trail together!  When we told Number Four that we were getting another horse, he said “I thought you said, ‘no more animals’.”

Yes… well I did say that, but it was a long time ago and besides, what I really meant was no more cats!

We are all so aware that it was one year ago this weekend, when we’d finally made it to Ellensburg.  Holed up at the Hampton Inn, awaiting our ‘stuff’ and the access to our new home.  My Loving Spouse had made the 1100 mile trip with a loaded truck, two dogs and towing a car all in 21 hours.  The same journey took The Teen and I three days, but of course we were traveling with the Damn Cat.

Good bye to our sweet little house and my beloved garden…  hello New Life Old Farm.  Wow, what a year it has been!  Thank you for joining us on the adventure…you do bless us so!

And to my really old (or rather ‘long term’) dear friends, remember my first short lived blog?  The one about dating in mid-life.  Mostly about internet dating?  It was fairly funny and you encouraged me to keep writing, except then I met My Loving Spouse and so the best part of my material dried up.  I didn’t have much to write about anymore and you were glad for me, but sad for you.

I’m sure you really, dear old friends, my faithful fans, my wonderful encouragers are saying to yourself, what will happen to this blog?  What if she (which is me) runs out of material?  What if I get use to the country, the weather, the animals, the poop and we finish all our work on the house?  Then what???

All I can say is….

hahahahahahahahahahahaha

The irrigation water is being turned back on this Monday.  The pond will be full again, which will be nice to see and will provide ready water for a lot of our animals.  It also means that the water problem we have behind the barn will rear its ugly, wet head again.  We’ve only a few more days to try to figure it out.  We assume we have an old pipe leak or old drain leak from the fields around us and we need to find the leak and divert the water back into the irrigation ditch.  All we could do last spring was move the water away from the barns by digging a trench to run the water back to the ditch.  We never really figured out where it was coming from and we’d all had different stabs at it and gotten different results.  My Loving Spouse had stuck his arm in where there were bubbles and felt some sort of round object that seemed like a pipe of sorts, so he went out the other day before work, stuck a shovel in the ground, hit something and said, “Dig there, I think I found the broken pipe”.

And so I did…. I dug and dug and dug…. There was no ‘pipe’ but there was some wood, so I dug some more.  I remembered Our Friend the Farmer saying that a lot of the old drainage ‘pipes’ were actually made of wood, so I was hopeful that I had found ‘it’, the problem, the leak, the issue, etc.  I dug 3 feet down, 2 feet wide and about 4 1/2 feet long, which equals to a lot of digging, a lot of moving dirt, during which Dixie tried to assist me and I received numerous texts from My Loving Spouse inquiring as to my progress.  I kept digging and then, it happened, I found ‘it’!  A hole in the top of the wooden box, just about where we had the beginning of the ‘leak’ or rather the beginning of the Barn Bog.  I was feeling very proud of myself and I was feeling very sore.  I was more than ready for the “atta girl”, I expected when My Loving Spouse got home, because I had found ‘it’!  Except, I got a “Why did you dig there?”  and “That is not a round pipe?”  Which my sore muscles and I did not actually appreciate very much.  We had what one might call a bit of a disgruntled evening.

With only two more days before the water goes back on, the issue needed more attention.  We worked out a game plan, which included more digging on my part.  It was not lost on me, that last spring when we did our digging we had not only more man power, but a rented back hoe as well!  This time we had, me and my two favorite shovels.

I was just setting up for my big dig, when My Loving Spouse called.

“Why don’t you wait to dig?”, he sweetly inquired.

“We can’t…we don’t have enough time before the water goes on.  Do you know what to say, when you get home?”  (We didn’t want any more disgruntled evenings).

“Oh, yes”, he said, “I’ve got it this time.  I will say, ‘You’ve done a wonderful job digging My dear, would you like some Advil?”  Exactly!

I proceeded to dig, with plenty of help from the chickens and a cat or two…

So I commenced digging from the hole to the old trench so we could add a pipe to divert the water.  About a half hour into the trench deepening project (which equals a lot of shovelfuls of dirt), I found a pipe… a round one… more what My Loving Spouse had expected.  Our ‘ah-ha’ moment  we had not one problem, but two, which is why we had so much water in so many different places baffling us all about the source and the problem.

We now need a two-pronged attack.  At least the trench is dug, we know where the pipe is, which direction it is going and we have plenty of Advil.

It is spring and everyone is busy, especially the farmers.  Our Friend the Farmer is very, very busy getting his fields ready, which means the final bred cows need a bit of ‘watching’.  I am on it!  I have been upgraded to actually ‘helpful cow watcher’ as opposed to my previous description of just plain ‘humorous cow watcher’.  I got ‘the call’ that he was busy and the creamy colored cow looked to be in labor, could I keep an eye on her?

Could I?  You bet!

Some cows like a bit of ‘space’ when they are calving.  I don’t blame them, if I was pushing out 65 pounds of calf, I’d want more than just some space!  Luckily, I have just the tool for keeping my cow watching eye on her and giving her space… my cow-noculars!  These gems work great, so I was able to see the cute little calf born, give her some space, report in to Our Friend the Farmer that all arrived well and able to bring my friend The Preacher’s wife and daughter over in time to see the little heifer get to her feet.

I had predicted the Shifty-Eyed Hereford would be the last to calf, but I was wrong.  She snuck off during the night to calf without the benefit of cow watchers or their cow-noculars.  However, she did have one of the cutest little calves to date.  I went to ‘check’ on the cows and found the little calf on the wrong side of the fence.  I called the situation into Our Friend the Farmer, who then upgraded me from Cow Watcher to Calf Wrangler.  I’d like to say I did an amazing calf wrangling job, but really what happened is that as I approached the calf, she stood up, looked around for her Mama Cow and went… “Mooo”, which translates into… “Oh…(British Bad Word)”.  She then turned and tried to go through the smallest part of the feeding gate to return to mom, getting her back-end stuck.  It was up to me to give her back-end a lift… story of my life!

We went over the hill for an Easter weekend with the cousins.  The Seattle weather was unusually co-operative with sunny, blue skies and warm weather!  Woo and Hoo!!  We spent a very relaxing afternoon out on Lake Washington in the power boat, boating, visiting, looking at houses and zipping around with no other purpose than to have fun.  It was a great break, especially for My Loving Spouse who loves, loves, loves the water.

We met up with the whole herd (nice farm reference) of cousins for dinner in town near the police station, which was rather humorous  as we had some… ‘trades’ to be made.  Cousin R was loaning Number One Son a family shot-gun and My Loving Spouse was practically giddy to get his hands on  it.  We pulled our cars near one another,

“Did you bring the gun?”

“Yes, did you bring the eggs?”

“Yes, all fresh.”

“Okay, good, let’s make the trade.”

Easter dinner, Easter Egg hunts and cousins…  Especially, nice for The Teen who has brothers and 19 boy cousins, that with second cousins come some girls.  A girl cousin, nail polish, whispering, music listening, homework done together… it was wonderful.

Easily the most precious to me was a full family pew for the Easter service.  Raised by a non-practicing Lutheran and a non-practicing Jew, my parents could usually be found most Sundays at Our Lady of the Fairways, with golf clubs in hand, possibly praying, but mostly over a difficult shot.  As a small child, they went to church on Easter, but when I asked why, my mother explained that it was so the Easter bunny could come, which is fairly poor theology…just saying.  How I came to love the Lord, is a different story, but suffice it to say, I do.  I cherish anytime I get to fill a pew with family.  Topping off the service by joining the choir for the Hallelujah chorus and cajoling my cousin to join me… practically perfect!