Within a week of us buying our farm, I was visiting our cabin up north and came to notice that a neighbor who had moved suddenly had left her chickens. I saw them wondering on the road. This was at the end of winter when it was snowing and cold. I went over to inspect and saw there were 6 chickens running all over the place and pecking for food.
I called my friend Erica, and she said I had to take those
chickens and gave me some ideas on what I needed to do immediately. Erica was already a few years into her
chicken mama status.
I ran to Tractor Supply Company, bought a heat lamp, a flock
block for feeding and set about saving these chickens. I put a sign out in case any other interested
parties would want to take them that these chickens were spoken for and would
be moved ASAP. I called a neighbor
friend up there to see if she would mind the girls over the next few days while
I asked the man we were buying the farm from if I could come in a bit early and
set up the house for them and possibly take them there BEFORE we owned the
house. He said YES!!!
Obviously there had not been chickens here in a while but all the elements they needed were there. The hen house at the farm consisted of a room in a pole barn filled literally to the ceiling with clean straw bales, roosting poles, some old heat lamps, feeders and a flat metal thing that I learned was to keep water from freezing so they could always have water to drink. There was a garbage can filled with pine flakes that I knew was bedding, a container of oyster shells which I had no idea what to do with, 4 laying boxes and a chicken run that was connected to the house. The run was in OK shape but would definitely need repairs at some point. Regardless, it was workable!
Over the next few days, Jen came twice a day to feed and water the girls and visit with the, They liked their new heat lamp she reported.
So, how was I going to move these chickens? I figured I could move them in a dog cage but the one I had was small and I had given it to my dad. The universe sometimes listens to prayers and I literally found one left out for trash that was all folded up but seemed whole. I loaded that into my JEEP, got some cardboard from a dumpster and we had an old tarp. Then I headed to the farm and removed about 15 bales of straw and put those under cover. I contacted the electric supplier and got the service turned on in my name. I attached the heat lamps up high for them to roost under, filled waterers, plugged in the little stand that keeps water from freezing, filled the laying boxes with fresh bedding, filled the food bowls and then set off for the cabin. We were all set!
I wasn’t sure how I was going to capture them all. I had handled some of these girls in the past but this was a different story. They were nervous but again the universe was listening and in the span of maybe 30 minutes, I loaded each hen into the cardboard bottom dog cage, threw their flock block of feed in there, shut the gate, covered them with the tarp so they couldn’t see what was going on and set out for the farm 2 ½ hours away. I turned off the radio and listened…. They were silent.
When I got to the farm I hauled out the dog cage and removed
the tarp. They started clucking at me. As
I gazed at my girls I loved them so much and knew they needed names. Female rock stars it would be.
There was one giant white chicken that was a cross breed. She was a roaster who also laid eggs and ordinarily, if you have a roaster, she is only meant to get to be a few months old and then eaten. This girl had been around a while so I am sure she was tough inside and OUT. I dragged the cage inside the chicken run and opened it. They all ran out and immediately started doing what I now know is a dust bath. They had been in mud and muck before and were so happy to have real dirt to clean themselves off in. They were talking and running about. It was a real celebration!!! They seemed to KNOW, they were going to be ok and had a new home!!!!
The original 6 Rockstar hens
After their baths, they explored the whole place, checked
out the food, water and made themselves at home. I was just so in awe of the whole
experience. I was now a chicken mama!!! I named each one.
Free ranging outside their run!
Our Big White was named Mama Cass. She was definitely large and in charge of
this little girl group.
The twins were Ann and Nancy Wilson of Heart, the black one
was Grace Slick, a blonde one was Cheryl Crow and the last one was Pat
Benatar. I vowed to these girls that if
they laid me eggs, I would never eat them and just let them live out their days
here at OUR FARM. The first eggs I
found in their appropriate boxes I literally jumped up and down in celebration. You would have thought I laid those eggs
personally!!!
Those first days of new motherhood were heady. We closed on the farm, started to see the incredible amount of work that needed done inside and outside and in all truth I was a little (a LOT) overwhelmed but I was really excited for what we were embarking on together. We would soon move the two beehives from the cabin to here and with cats, dogs, bees and chickens, we really had something.
I was born in the sign of water, and it’s there that I
feel my best. That is a song lyric
from the hit song Cool Change, by the 1970’s group The Little River Band.
Yes, I am a Pisces (water sign) and I do LOVE to take
baths. I like the water HOT. I like to soak, to POACH myself and water
logged toes do not bother me a bit.
Occasionally, I will light a candle and take a cocktail in there, but
usually it is just me and reading material.
I love bathtubs and have literally bought a house because there
was a giant bathtub and wood burning fireplace there, two essential things for
me!
Every place I visit, you can bet I have checked out the tub
or at least set my bottom down in there and tried it out for size imagining
what it might be like to have a bath. If
I am visiting you, I probably have brought or picked up some nice smelling
salts to add to the bath or rooted
around for some in your bathroom. Bathing
is a relaxation ritual for me and getting clean is just a byproduct of the
whole bath experience.
I like to read in the tub.
Every magazine and book that I have read is wrinkled and bent up from
being water logged and that is fine. If
I have loaned you a book or magazine, chances are it has received water at some
point.
I use Magnesium rich salts in EVERY bath that I take. Magnesium is a mineral you can bet you are depleted of in your body. I have to take 3 Magnesium supplements a day (400mg) each time or I get muscle spasms all over and endure brain fog and other odd things. So many systems in the body need magnesium to function properly. I take lots of calcium and other supplements too.
The magnesium baths are so good for your muscles. I buy coarse salt 25 pounds at a time and
sometimes make gifts of bath salts with oils that I infuse and drop other essential
oils too which add a whole other sensory experience to THE BATH!!!!! THE BATH is a sacred thing for me and I think
everyone would benefit from a nice, long hot bath once in a while. Leaning back in the tub, swallowed up by
mineral rich, great smelling water is just HEAVEN! I don’t even need music. The drip drip droplets of water is enough
sound. Four senses are super stimulated during THE BATH!!!!
Maybe someday I will get to float in The Dead Sea which is located in the Jordan Rift Valley, bordered by Israel
to the East and Jordan to the West. Its hyper-salty waters and mineral-rich mud
are known for many health benefits,
and many tourists and locals alike visit the hotels and spas on its beaches for
mud treatments and salt baths. You can
learn more about this magical water here.
One of the joys of travelling for me has always been to
check out the depth and size of the bathtub in my room but alarmingly, hardly
any hotels have bathtubs anymore. Heck,
even houses are doing away with bathtubs in favor of showers with multi heads,
benches to sit on and room for an entire village in there. Where have all the bathtubs gone? I guess they are being broken up and sent to
landfills in great numbers and this makes me so sad. I have actually had to PAY MORE for a room in
a hotel that actually has a bathtub.
REALLY? What a bummer.
Perhaps the bathtub is going the way of other “obsolete” items like typewriters and rotary telephones though I can tell you, recently I NEEDED a rotary telephone. Neighbors had a tree fall on their garage and took their phone out. These little sisters have ONLY their land line as means for communication. They neither have cell phones nor internet and don’t drive so if they have no phone service, they are kind of STUCK. I was trying to help them get their phone service restored and needed to test the phone line that had been “repaired”. They had two electric charged cordless phones which you can NOT plug into the outside phone jack to test but as little ladies can do, they pulled an old 70s Princess phone from a closet and we were able to be certain the phone service had indeed NOT been fixed.
Seeing that old Slimline Princess phone brought back A LOT
of memories. It made me want to be 15
again, and take that super long cord all the way into the bathtub and chat
away! Those were the days!!
Does anyone know of any retro hotels with both of things for me? 😊 Now THAT would be THE BATH to write home about!
I am a woman. I think as a woman for whatever reason, be it advertising or social media pressures or whatever, we set ridiculous standards for ourselves. We all want to be perfect and this is simply not obtainable. We are HUMANS. Perhaps men feel the same pressures, but I’m going to talk about my personal experience here and I’m betting women reading this, will agree with me. We are all nuts! We put too much pressure on ourselves to be young, thin, great spouses, parents, caregivers, employees, (fill in the blank) and to look like a supermodel while doing all those things. We rarely or never think we are good enough. ☹
For women, we definitely focus on our weight and the whole
body image thing. For most of my adult
life I weighed 119 pounds. I got really
sick my first year in college and at the peak of that illness weighed 99
pounds. I felt like crap but was elated
at that number on the scale. WHAT AN
IDIOT. Of course once I got over the
mono, I resumed my normal teenage eating which consisted of free cheeseburgers
and fries (perk from my job) and soon regained the weight and went on my merry
way. I can say that I felt pretty good
about myself at that nubile age and didn’t do much comparing of myself to
others. I was pretty healthy in mind and
body in my teenage to post college years.
Looking back on that girl, I am grateful for the years I felt that I
looked ok! I was SATISFIED and didn’t self-hate myself when I ordered dessert.
Then in my early and then again in my late 30s, I experienced REAL debilitating anxiety and
simply could not eat or function much at all and I got down to 110 from my
“normal” 119. I was too anxious to be
excited about that number but remember afterwards when I felt like me again, I
longed for that number. AGAIN what an
IDIOT. Focusing on weight as a number and
not good mental and physical health is a societal problem that will never stop
I guess.
In my late 30s, I was living in this “adult dormitory”
luxury loft apartment complex in the Strip District of Pittsburgh. That move started a really unhealthy part of
my adult life. Being in an environment
of total over consumption of food, alcohol and witnessing some really
interesting lifestyles, I was in a bad place personally. First off, I gained weight which had NEVER
happened, I remember attending one of
the many parties (nightly someone had one) and weighing myself in this lady’s
bathroom on her scale and seeing 131.4.
I was devastated. I HATED myself. I left the party, went home and said I needed
to STOP all this consumption. So I
DID. Back to the gym for me, I cut down
the wine consumption, stopped eating
bread and butter at every meal and put my mind into it. I did lose the weight, people NOTICED and
commented so up went my self-esteem and I felt a bit better about my body
image.
Even when I was a perfectly acceptable weight for a 5 foot 2
inch woman, I admit now that I wasn’t REALLY happy with myself. I would say to myself, you are ok but you are
10 pounds from perfect. Don’t you want
to be perfect? FIX IT.
At 51, looking back at pictures of myself from my 20s, 30s,
40s, I think at ALL OF THOSE AGES AND WEIGHTS, I was amazing. I certainly was
more youthful than I am today.
I wish I could have really loved myself more when I was
young and mostly line-free. If I can
espouse advice to the young girls of the world, I would say appreciate who and where you are every step of the way
because sadly I have learned that today is probably the best looking and
youthful as I will ever be…. A new line
or crease appears magically all the time and the pounds are harder to keep
control over. We women need to start appreciating ourselves
TODAY, tomorrow and the next day. I work
on this. I really do. Usually I fail but I am trying!!!
When I discovered the Ketogenic diet one year ago in May
2018, I thought well this is revolutionary.
Though, apparently, this diet has been around since the 1930s and
designed for diabetics, it truly is a way to train your body to burn fat for
fuel instead of living on sugar. I will
write a future blog about this diet but suffice it to say that with eating keto
I was able to get under my old perfect weight and really feel most of the time
that I look pretty good. Again, I am
mostly satisfied with my weight and the doctor is happy with the
bloodwork. With a year pretty much
straight keto, my cholesterol is fine, triglycerides and everything, sugar is
good so I will keto on and continue to exercise, take supplements, eat natural,
real food and still occasionally treat myself to a forbidden item. I am not lying to myself when I say, life is
short, eat the piece of cake and ENJOY IT but no one needs cake every day or
ice cream or a candy bar or whatever.
So, let’s now take our focus to wrinkles In my 30s, I had a doctor and I liked him
and I thought he had my best interests in mind.
That was until he started practicing BOTOX and during a visit for some
issue, told me “for $500 I could fix your whole face.” That is a DIRECT quote. I had never even thought about my face but
then I started really looking. I
examined the forehead lines, the smile crinkles, the neck wrinkles, the lines
around my lips. Maybe he was
right…. I WAS aging….. maybe I should get some injections. I consulted friends and realized several of
my friends of the same age and some older had already been doing a little this
or that for YEARS. Really? Hmmm…..
so I started lying to myself about how spending $500 on BOTOX could help
me feel better, look younger and still turn heads.
I tried it once. I
was indeed wrinkle free on my forehead for about 5 months but the wrinkles go
somewhere so my eyes were droopy and I hated that way worse than the forehead
wrinkles. When it wore off and the
wrinkles returned I decided I can just wear hats. I am a hat girl and wear them well.
The lip wrinkles and smile lines, well, it is what it
is. I have earned those lines! I will own them.
So, I am going to try and stop telling myself ridiculous
lies about how changing this, adding that or losing 5 pounds is really going to
change my life and make me happier.
Happiness starts on the inside! I
am TRYING to live that kind of authentic life.
I have my struggles for sure, but can say, when an 18 year old beautiful
and REALLY skinny girl told me in January while on Key West waiting to rent a
moped that she wished she had arms like mine I told her I AM A FARMER! Hauling 50 pound bags of chicken feed really
gets you strong! And I smiled the rest
of the vacation about that….. I may have
wrinkles but my arms are KILLER!
During the summer when I was about 8 or 9 years old in the
mid 70s, I was picking blackberries way out in a rural part of Southwestern PA,
about an hour from where I live today. I
happened to step upon a bed of yellowjackets and they attacked me. In a panic I was swatting and jumping up and
down on their abode which irritated them more and they stung the heck out of
me. I had about 30 stings that day and
had I been allergic then, I probably would have died. We were pretty far out in the country, miles
away from any hospital.
A phone call to a neighboring doctor brought this
advice… Find 3 different kinds of leaves
(not poison ivy of course) and rub each sting with each leaf to make sure the
stingers are out. Then make a paste with
baking soda and water to relieve the pending itch and apply. I lived.
That was my first memorable experience with “natural” cures
and my 51 years have been full of many different cures and treatments for the
everyday issues we humans face.
I
still pick blackberries but these days I am covered head to toe with hat with a net, long sleeves, brush pants and boots. Blackberries and black raspberries are ripe deep in the summer so it is HOT but it is way safer being totally covered when I go picking. The “jaggers” (Western PA term) are really bad on blackberry bushes and less severe on the raspberries and there is poison ivy everywhere not to mention the mosquitoes who devour me (type o blood). Picking berries is hard and messy work (hands coated in berries an bleeding from scratches) and don’t forget the occasional snake, but getting all those free HEALTHY berries is worth it to me!
I am VERY allergic to poison ivy but that didn’t happen till
I was in my late 20s. I have read your body
changes and you can become allergic and vice versa as we age. That seems true
for me!
You may not know this, but pretty much right next to poison
ivy (and ALL OVER wooded areas) grows something called Jewelweed also known as “Touch
me nots”. You have seen these yellow and
orange flowered “weeds” with little pods on them late in summer and when you
touch the pods, they open and spread out seeds… natures way of keeping the
species growing. Well, jewelweed is a
natural antidote for poison ivy. You can
use the leaves to rub the urishriol oil after poison ivy exposure or easily
make a tincture, soap or even a salve. I
do this EVERY YEAR! It WORKS really
REALLY well and if you buy EXPENSIVE poison ivy remedy products I GUARANTEE you
they have this wild weed in there.
Nature can heal you in many cases, that is a FACT.
Another healing plant that grows outside your door is
Hawthorn shown here which provides a remedy for hypertension not to mention has
seen many people through lean winters.
Their berries and leaves are completely edible.
Dandelions are edible and the leaves make for a nice salad
ingredient. Medicinally,
dandelion is
used for loss of appetite, upset stomach, intestinal gas, gallstones, joint
pain, muscle aches, eczema, and bruises.
They support natural detoxification. Of course, if you spray your yard
with chemicals, you would NOT want to ingest anything that you find growing
there.
I have become allergic to bees which can be troublesome
considering I am a beekeeper. Many
people get less allergic over time and number of stings but that was not my
experience. As I didn’t want to give up the bees, I saw an allergist and now
get bee venom therapy which has really helped.
I regularly get injections with all kinds of venom from honeybees,
yellow jackets, wasps and mixed vespids and my system is getting better at
handling the incidental stings. I find
this SO interesting. The docs are using
real bee venom to cure my allergy.
BRILLIANT. They are doing the
same things with children who are allergic to peanuts and other allergens. Minute doses over time increasing the amounts
is helping the children’s bodies accept what it rejected before!!!
A good friend of mine from high school lives in Southern
Florida where they have many different flora and fauna than we do back
north. Where I am dealing with
mosquitoes, snakes, spiders and such her family deals with jellyfish, crocodiles, fire ants and SCORPIONS. Her son got stung by a scorpion and his knee
swelled up to gigantic proportions. As a
great mom, she did all the normal things and made sure he had a tetanus
shot. The next day in school, the nurse
asked her if she could apply meat tenderizer to the young man’s knee, the kind with papaya
extract in it. She added a little water
to a scant handful of tenderizer and put the paste on the sting. It worked
IMMEDIATELY to relieve him! So, keep
some on hand for bee stings, scorpions and fire ants. I guess I could have used that too years ago
with those yellow jackets!!!
I
have one more healing thing for you today and this one is truly a favorite of
mine. As someone who cooks pretty much
every day, I often get burned. I read
about lavender oil and how it is used in burn wards all over the world. I have vials of this for an atomizer that I
use and the bath salts, candles and lip balms that I make. I set one tiny bottle next to my oils and
vinegars and use it on the spot as soon as I get a burn and IT WORKS. It also smells amazing! So, there you
go!!! Try it yourself!
You can Google natural healing plants, buy books and read
them and look for instructional how-to videos on making your own natural
healing products, on YouTube. That is
how I got started with my little natural pharmacy work.
So, go get a book on the buffet you can find in your own backyard and do some research on nature’s FREE treatments. It is truly amazing!!! Contact me if you want some good book recommendations and tell me all about what you have discovered.
Winter into early spring is a time when a farmer girl like me gets impatient. I have caught up on my reading and bookmarked several new project ideas for the coming year. The greenhouse is readied to grow the seeds we have purchased. An organized planting schedule has been made. Hundreds of little pots and trays are waiting to be put to work. Water barrels are in place and starter soil is all lined up. Fertilizer is at the ready!
There are no baby chickies to tend to this year. I have decided my flock is fine as it is so besides the daily care for the existing animals, I putter around.
Because we have dogs, we don’t hibernate as many do. We are outside every day hiking, exploring, picking up tree branches and dried grass debris, so we really know what is happening on the farm. The dogs and I really like rooting around the property. We continue to discover things the previous owner’s dogs buried that get unearthed by rain and time. To date, we have found 5 pairs of giant men’s rubber shoes, but never a pair at a time. We have also dug up a t-shirt and shorts, lots of garden tools, two chicken waterers and various parts of machinery and hardware along with odd things like CDs, coffee tins and lots of little ceramic tiles. I’m sure there will be lots of hidden treasures still to discover.
Of late, the winters have been full of freezes and uncharacteristic thaws in January and February. Those warm ups give us a little taste of the coming warmth which is great but there are still MONTHS until things start growing. The cold and snow always returns but come my birthday in late February, I have something fun to look forward to.
While the ground is still brown and dormant, we get the great reprieve of winter boredom which is the tapping of maple trees for sap to make syrup. You can actually tap any kind of Maple tree. It doesn’t need to only be a Sugar Maple tree. There are various kinds of Maples and other trees like Birch and Walnut can also make for an amazing syrup.
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I have scouted out the Maples that look promising and marked them with a ribbon around their trunks. When it is time and that means, when the night temperatures are below freezing, but the days are over 32 degrees, it is time to put in the taps! We started tapping trees 4 years ago at our cabin up North. We ordered these lovely little metal buckets online and they were so cute and completely impractical. They only held maybe a gallon of sap so you would have to empty them constantly or the sap would flow onto the ground. Since we were only spending weekends there, that was a challenge. We quickly learned we needed longer tubing and five gallon buckets. The 5 gallon buckets could get emptied into 10 gallon food grade buckets and carried to the boiling area. The first year we set up a grate on cement blocks and burned wood that we had cut. Amateurs!!!! One needs a LOT of wood as this burning must keep going for a two to three DAYS and required constant feeding of new logs. It was dirty, smoky and frustrating. We had collected about 40 gallons of sap that first year. The ratio is about 40 or 50 -1 depending on sugar content so that 40 gallons of sap needs to boil and boil and evaporate until you get a nice amber color and it is a bit thicker. When you reach this point, then you can take that final gallon or so inside your house and do the final boil. I had heard of Sugar Shacks and as we researched what the Big Guns do, we realized this small operation is nothing more than an expensive endeavor that reaps sweet rewards and garners looks of awe from friends.
We do not have 1000 trees to tap and can stand in amazement and watch some of those operations. There is one up in Pymatuning state park and another over near Andover Ohio. The folks who actually make a living from maple syrup tapping have all the equipment and it is indeed impressive.
We have graduated to a propane griddle that we can place a gigantic pot on the burner on the back deck and fill it as needed which is honestly only once or twice a day. I love the smell of the sap as it cooks. When the wind blows, you can smell it all around the house. We go through 3 or 4 full canisters of propane a season so you can add up that cost. It takes all that time and money but I have nothing but time during late winter so I enjoy the whole process. I can think of lots of things I could be doing to waste that same $$ and time, but this is a very fulfilling and entertaining activity and I recommend it for everyone.
Even if you don’t personally own land that has a maple or two, ask around. I bet in exchange for some lip smacking syrup, your neighbors would allow you to tap their trees!
So now, that is done, my seeds are potted and some are starting to pop their heads out of the soil. I am treasuring this time when everything is quite manageable and I have control over everything. I give the plants what they need in light and water. Only an occasional weed starts growing in those pots too but there is very little WORK to do. As of now, I can ready my herb garden and check on emerging buds on all the fruit trees and bushes. I don’t have grass to cut, nor vines to prune. I honestly don’t have much to do but watch these seeds grow. I do like the peace before it all breaks loose but who am I kidding, BRING IT ON. I rested all winter. Now, it is time to get to WORK!
When I was young and had all the time in the world, I so
wish I had learned some things. I should
have learned to play the guitar and how to knit and probably 100 other useful
things.
The fact is, I am now 51 years old and over the course of
this life, I have found some hobbies and often thought oh man, I wish I had
learned to…….. (I bet we can all fill in the blank with 10 different things)
Time is probably running short. No one knows how long of a life we will have
nor if those years will be healthy ones.
We can only hope to be productive for a whole life and be able to look
back at a life well lived when it is all over!
Occasionally, I look back at what I have done for profession
and wonder what if……..
When I discovered group exercise, I LOVED it. I went to as many different classes as I
could to see what was out there and combining that with learning to really eat
healthily, I thought… hmmm if I had majored in exercise physiology and
nutrition, what a cool career I could have had….. that was my late 20s and early thirties. I took so many Step classes that I developed
heel spurs and subsequently could barely walk downstairs. That taught me there is too much of a good
thing. Moderation……
Every job I ever had lasted 7 years. There is perhaps something astrologically
important about that number to me! I
started out at the Brighton Hot Dog Shoppe because it was close enough to walk
to and seemed like a good place to learn how to WORK. I stayed there from the time I was 16 till
the last semester of college. I learned
a lot about serving people, the importance of time management, how to make a
killer milkshake and so much more. That
job showed me that I am a real go getter and my superiors admired my work ethic
and were happy to show me more and more responsibility which I DUG. I credit that job and my first boss, Andy
Amygdalos, with really opening my eyes to a lot of things including Greek
culture and some language. That job
taught me a very important PRACTICAL thing too.
I know how to count change. I never thought that was amazing or anything
but today’s workers really seem to struggle with the whole concept. God forbid you deal in actual Federal Reserve
Notes and give someone a piece or more of change. Blink blink go the eyes and considerable
looks of consternation accompany that action.
In the old days, we did not have
a cash register that told us how much change to return to a customer. We had a total and that was it. Andy kept an eye on the register and made
sure we didn’t make mistakes and corrected them as soon as they happened. He watched over me personally too and became
a real mentor to me. I have thought of
him hundreds of times over the years. He
was a good man! I am GRATEFUL my first real work experience was a good one.
After college I took a job that again I stayed at for 7
really unhappy years. If I could go back
and do that over, I would have stayed maybe two years and then moved on to
something more creative, challenging and DIFFERENT. Financial services is a place where a young
entry level person becomes a prisoner at a desk with a phone and computer,
perhaps an IBM Select typewriter. I can
sum up that job by saying WEARING mandatory PANTYHOSE was horrible. The people for the most part were great but I
wasted some really good youthful years in a job that would never have taken me
places. I look back at that and want to
kick myself in the behind. ☹
I had nightmares about that job for at least 10 years after I left where I was
working there again and avidly wondering in the dream WHAT HAPPENED TO MY
LIFE???? To their credit, I could be in
the minority as so many people I worked with decades ago are STILL there and
have literally made a career of it. God
Bless them for their stamina on that one!!!
I do still maintain my investments there but have a hard time even
walking into THE OFFICE. Doing that
brings one of those dreams IMMEDIATELY back that very night. ☹ Perhaps I
should go to counseling about those unresolved unhappy feelings!!!
When I see kids (high school to recent college grads) bounce
around from job to job within a few months, I wonder if that is the right idea
or was I better off, proving I can be counted upon for many years. The things that mattered to employers way
back when the dinosaurs roamed the earth (my younger days) may not be the same
thing. Technology, the internet, online
education and so many other new inventions have changed the way we work. I didn’t get to work from home until I became
an agent for Motivational Speakers, my job after leaving Mother Merrill. Nowadays, it seems like many young people
have that unbelievable good fortune to work from home- no pantyhose, no boss
checking in to your cubicle. I hope at
least these kids have to work for a year or two in a real brick and mortar office
under intense supervision so they can really appreciate the flexibility and
freedom of working from home. It is
truly one of the BEST things ever and I appreciate every day I can be home and do
a few things to try to make some income!
Anyway, so these days I am trying to make this farm of mine
a business, while still trying to do some marketing for these speakers, yet
have my eye firmly on the idea of being a personal “for hire” chef. I could be completely bananas for thinking
all this will actually happen. Believe
me, as I start 1000 seeds or so for the farm “crops” this year and make my
calendar for direct sow planting and putting those growing plants into the
ground, I am exhausted and it is only EARLY spring!!!
On my mind this week is formulating a plan on how to get a
root cellar built into the ground underneath our dome home and wondering if my chickens
need a playground to keep them mentally stimulated. I saw some discarded playground equipment
that a neighbor a few miles away is tossing out. Should I pull over and grab those???
I just finished boiling sap into syrup, I need to clear the
herb garden, we repaired fencing to keep the farm secure but there is still a
ton of debris along those fence lines that needs cleared and burned, and oh..
did I pull a chicken from the freezer to begin thawing for Sunday? It takes two days so we must plan ahead for
the meals.
So, that is what I am doing for the most part in what I
imagine are the final decades of thinking What
Will I Be When I Grow up? Am I grown
up yet? I still really want to be a
Rockstar and every time we go out to karaoke I think it could have been…
maybe…. ya never know…. There is no age
limit to auditioning for the Voice, maybe I should give it a try!!!
Perhaps we should always continue to dream and thank WHAT IF….. perhaps that longing for something more fulfilling keeps us young and perhaps will lead us to the perfect profession! Have fun growing up. Keep moving and learning and if you can make a few bucks by doing things you enjoy, DO IT!
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