Category: General living

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Wet and Cold

These are the worst of weather days here at the farm, below freezing with the rain and snow is on the way later in the evening. Waking up in the early a.m. to a damp and cold day makes the morning hard to face, and manuver around, but it has to be done. My milking cows aren’t in the most pleasant of moods either on mornings like this, cold hands on their utters make the daily task of milking a most unpleasant experience for them and me both.

A good day to be near a hot fire with a good hot meal in hand.

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Pancake Restaurant Was Nasty

This morning I went to a pancake restaurant in a town that I don’t usually go to.  I met a friend there for brunch.  I ordered what I usually order at “my” local pancake house – fried potatoes, and poached eggs.  I asked that the potatoes be fried without any onions, because I don’t like onions!  Well, this place just could not seem to get it right!  It was awful.  Poached eggs are supposed to be soft and runny in the middle, and these were like hard boiled eggs.  The potatoes came out with more onions in them than potatoes, and the coffee and toast were stone cold!

When I complained to the waitress, she sent the breakfast back but still nothing was right.  She brought it back a piece at a time, and the potatoes still tasted strongly of onion, the coffee was still cold, and so were the eggs.  I was totally disgusted and left without eating any breakfast at all.  I won’t be going back to THAT place again!

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Pause and Reflect

Well, even though I have a little tree, I haven’t finished decorating it yet.  I ran into a little bit of a snag when I opened the boxes of ornaments.  These are the same ornaments that have decorated the family tree for many decades; perhaps even generations.  I found that every ornament that I saw brought back powerful memories of my family, and the sense of loss from having both of my parents taken from me so early in my life, such a short time ago, made it difficult to actually decorate the tree.

I know I’ll get through it, and the tree WILL get decorated, but it is going to take a long time to do it!  I think now I have a better understanding of how emotional my mother would get at Christmas time, when she would decorate the tree.  Her mother had made many of the ornaments, and so has she.  It truly IS a family tree, and right now there isn’t much family around to enjoy it.  Maybe it’s time I started thinking about taking on a family of my own and stop rattling around by myself in this big old farmhouse.

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Where Does The Time Go?

I cannot believe that it is December already!  Life on the farm has kept me so busy that the days seem to stretch on forever but they fly by.  I know that doesn’t make any sense at all.  Its just that I am so busy every day, doing really hard work that it just seems to never end, and I go to bed exhausted almost every day.  The alarm goes off in the morning way too early and before you know it another month has gone by!  I cannot believe that I turned the calendar page to December this morning!  I have mixed feelings about winter, some of the work of farming slows down, but tending the livestock in cold weather isn’t much fun!  At least I know how to dress for the cold weather, and I can spend a little bit more time relaxing a little bit here and there!

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Herd animals detecting magnetic field

I was reading that there was a study done about animals detecting the earth’s magnetic field.  The study showed that cows and deer tend to align their bodies in a north-south direction.  The scientists say they are surprised that hunters and herdsmen and farmers didn’t notice it.  Who says farmers didn’t notice it?  Did they ask any farmers?  Maybe farmers noticed it but were too busy farming to care about something like that and get all excited about it and report it to a scientific community.  I mean really, why would a farmer even think that anyone would care about something like that?  Big whoop!

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Mending fences

Well yesterday was a little more work than I had planned on.  Some drunk lost control of his truck and ran off the road and through one of my fences.  Some of the cattle escaped the pasture.  So I had to spend several hours rounding up the escapees and moving them to a different pasture while I mended the broken fence.  This happens from time to time, so I always have the materials on hand to mend the fences, but it is always an aggravation when it happens.  I wish all cars and trucks had a meter in them that tested the breath of the driver and if they register as having too much alcohol in them the vehicle wouldn’t start.  It was a drunk driver that caused the accident that killed my parents, so I don’t have a lot of patience or empathy for any of them.

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Charity Comes From the Heart

My sister’s husband and his co-workers are always getting involved with some sort of community service or a fundraising activity. Like at Christmas, they all pitched in and adopted a local low income family to supply all kinds of goods to help them get through the Holiday Season easier and they say that you can always find a booklet or two or pamphlets in the break room for people to order things for some type of fundraising for their kids from school, church, or sports.

I think that it is a very good positive attitude to have when there are so many people out there that need help. Their latest approach is in a lupus fundraising attempt, in which they have gone “high tech” and have enlisted the assistance of the World Wide Web through a company called Firstgiving, the link to their home page being Firstgiving.com. Firstgiving makes it possible for anybody to raise money on-line for any cause that they see fit to. You actually go on-line and make your own on-line fundraising page that can then be emailed to people to enlist them into giving an on-line donation. I find this whole idea fascinating and couldn’t wait to bring it up on our PC at home. And when I did bring up the site I really was impressed with what I saw, and I would encourage anybody to check it out also, it is a site that is full of good positive things, we need more of these, don’t you agree.

The reason for choosing this horrible disease by the name of Lupus, apparently is because one of the top management guys has a teen-age daughter inflicted with this health issue and he is very popular with all of the workers and they want to show him their respect by coordinating this fundraiser because of his daughter. I wish them all the luck in the world and give them nothing less than respect that they so highly deserve for their efforts.

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That’s a BIG Burger!

burger

This burger is the biggest grilled ground beef on a bun that I have ever seen. I can just imagine going to a restaurant and ordering “the biggest burger you can make,” and then having the server walk up to my table with THIS! I would definitely need a doggie bag with this order!

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Honda Shopping

Talking with my buddy, Dean, about the high cost of repairing cars and even just keeping up with the maintenance on older cars. It seems like every time I have to take my car in for service work it costs me between $800 and $2,500 – and that is killing my budget. At some point I have to quit spending on this money on repairs and just go get a new car. I have been shopping online for a new Honda and I think that’s what I am going to buy.

Dean was telling me that he talked with a local Honda dealer and couldn’t get a good deal working with that salesman, so he went online and started searching for a Honda Dealer that had a good inventory of new and used cars, ho wanted to set a fair price and give him a good deal on the car. It’s not that hard to save some serious money if you are willing to put in the time shopping around and asking questions of the right people.

I might end up with a late model, used Honda before the summer is over. I just need to get a good price on the car and a fair allowance on a trade in and I will buy a car this year. It’s just a matter of how much and when it all works out to my advantage.

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Always Learning

Read an article that called a man LTU and I had no idea what they meant. Turns out it means “Long Term Unemployed.” This is one more casualty of America’s economic crisis. In addition to people losing their homes to foreclosure, many people are unemployed for a very long time. It used to be that you should allow one month of job searching for every ten thousand dollars in expected salary. So if you need to make $50,000 a year in salary, you should allow 5 months for serious job hunting.

But in today’s world, it can take over2 years for that person to find a $50,000 a year job. These are the long term unemployed that need at some point to get more education or get retrained to acquire new skills. It is not hard to find help with taking more college level courses. The WaldenU.edu web site has scholarship and financial aid information on their site.

People who have internet access and the desire to learn more at the college level can enroll in Walden University and work on their studies at home – without having to drive and send money to get to a college campus every day. This make great sense to me.