Thoughts without Jack.

We measure poorly.
When you want to build a window in an existing space, you measure the size it should be. If you and your tape are accurate, the window fits.

But, when asked:
How old are you?
and
What is the temperature outside?
we answer with an age in years and we answer with a degree of Farenheight. Neither of those are really the answer. No great revelation there. The thing is, why haven't we made more accurate measuring tapes to properly answer these questions?

Age. I still can't grow a beard. The other day I saw a high school sophomore who was sporting a full-on bushy 'stache. I contend that science could prove that his genes were built to run so much faster than mine that, regardless of an eight year difference in his favor, he is likely to die sooner than I. People say "you look great for being 55," and "he's 49 but you'd swear he's 70-something." Number of revolutions around the sun is not an accurate measure of where you should be. We're just comparing you at a certain numbered age to what we perceive as the average of other people who share that same number. Sure there should be some similarity, but it just isn't an accurate device.

Temperature. This has become so much more real. Living outside changes your perspective. I am skinny and tall. I'm hard to heat. But I'm hardly ever cold out, because I dress properly. How it feels outside is what we want to know. The level of mercury in a tube hardly describes the situation. Barometric pressure, the amount of wet, the amount of direct sun, the color of the ground you'll be on, the wind, how many trees surround you, these are just as important. Most of you don't even need to care what the weather is like, stepping from apartment to car to work to car to gym to bar to apartment. If you are outside you'll be playing an outside sport and working at a certain level. The only thing knowing the degrees is worth is for meeting someone from somewhere else to brag about some unprecedented arrangement in the degrees which you only learned from the weather channel anyway.

Just because we found a way to easily measure it doesn't mean it tells us anything.

note: reading back through on preview, i noticed that i said temperature, which is in fact what we measure as well as what we ask. we hardly never need to know the temperature without anything else, so i think we simply ask and answer the wrong question to no ones improvment of situation.

Weeks go by.

We had fog for Jesusmas.
Christmas night we had the traditional Christmas night game of Axis and Allies.
I would be that guy who lived in a mansion but only uses three of the rooms.
Everyone but me moved the large stuff from our old house to the house I'd been living in. I didn't because I was flinging poo.

Things that have broken since I've been here:
the silage deflector
the wires to the motor of the silage blower
the pulleys to drive the silage auger
the wheel which holds the pulleys to drive the silage auger
the chain which drives the silage auger
the floor of the silage delivery table
the floor of the barn
the floor of the barn in the other spot
the roof of the white bard at my place
the front end of the 4wd tractor
the forward deisel injector on the 4wd tractor
the water pipes under the old house
the cow waterer behind my uncle's place
my computer
the wheel of the hay wagon
bob
the battery on the honda
the small panel gate
darwin's leash
several electric fence insulators

My dog eats Beef.

Darwin is my Pembroke Welsh Corgi puppy. He is infuriatingly hard to take a picture of.

I asked my mom for one thing for Jesusmas, a doggy. She said yeah, I was gonna get you a dog to help herd the cattles anyway. What a waste of a good wish. She had the name of a girl who had a border collie for sale. The day before the dog was supposed to show up the owner called to say she couldn't do it, she couldn't part with him. So, dogless, I went to the Intarwebs to see what I could dig up.
A day later, still dogless, Meghan hit me over the head and told me to stop being dense and not to just look for border collies, as other dogs are herding dogs and a good herding border collie must, by good breeding expectations, be almost completely neurotic. So I wiki-ed herding dogs.

My new dog list read:
1 swedish vallhund.
2 pembroke welsh corgi
3 australian cattle dog (not an australian shepherd)
4 koolie
5 border collie

The vet called on Monday to say some guy south of Mount Vernon had a corgi puppy that he wanted to get rid of. Seeing as swedish vallhunds are really really hard to get and I already had a line on a champion-bred ACD, I wandered over to take a look.

and it was awesome.

so I took it home.

Cult of Clouds.

Farmers with blogs can't not post about the weather.
I came home a month ago. It snowed on my drive home. We had a white thanksgiving. I haven't seen the ground since. We haven't gone above freezing since. Which is quite weird for Ohio. We get snow, but it always turns into ugly brown freezy bits within the week. Really though, I'm not complaining, as it's covering up the ugly.
It has also allowed me to see where things walk and drive. Everyone who has driven off the road in the last month has left a premanent testament to their lack of motor skills. Everyone who can't walk a straight line has been identified and tagged. Where the farm cats go when they aren't begging food on the front porch is no longer a mystery (it's the barn, no one was really mysitified.) I see we have a much larger pack of coyotes harassing the cows than I had thought.
The picture above is cow tracks. Cows can't do the straight line thing. Cities like Boston and Columbus have streets built on old cow paths. It explains a lot.

Hells Yes.

I've got a new dog.

Long Live Zombie Mouse.

I had a mouse in my house. Which was fine with me. He ate the hershey's bar that had been left on the card table. Traded me some mouse poop. I figured they both probably taste the same, so I let him be. But then it was pointed out to me the potential of one mouse to become spontaneously and overnightly many more mouses.
So I gave my mouse a test. Hershey bar or peanut buttered mousetrap that had very recently killed his brother mouse. Being a very health concious mouse, he chose wrongly.
The result you can see.

The eyes of this dead mouse creeped me out. It took my mom to explain that the mousetrap has enough power to pop his little mouse eyes right out the front of his skull. Why they also turned white in the center, I do not know. They were a normal black by the next morning.

Dad is Bored.

My dad is bored.
He is incarcerated at Hocking Hills correctional facility in SouthEastern Ohio. It's probably the easiest prison in Ohio to serve three years, as it's the old man prison. But reading books all day long gets to be rather redundant.
He likes to get mail.

So, seriously consider writing him a letter. Tell him who you are, what you do, what you think about tapioca pudding. Or invent an alter-ego and write him as someone you aren't. Suggest him a book to read. Send him a paper you need written and have him do it for you.
If he has enough envelopes, he will write you back.

Hocking Correctional Facility
David C. McCoy 507890 C-142
P.O. Box 59
Nelsonville, OH 45764

He likes:
farming and flying and theatre and society and people.
if you don't know any of those, write him about something completely different.

Farm Cow.

This is Red. She supports Chairman Moo. She is a radical.
I so far only actively dislike one cow. This is her. I move slower on forming decisions with people than with cows. She is the one skinny cow in the entire herd. I dislike skinny things. Especially skiny girls. Grow some fat, girl!
She is red, which is a welcome relief from all the black cows. But she pooped on her tail and it froze into a lawn-bowling size ball of froze shit that keeps getting knocked inbetween her legs and scaring her. So now she has a complex that frozen shit is out to get her. There is a whole hell of a lot of frozen shit in her field so it keeps her up nights, keeps her from sleeping, keeps her skinny.
Damn your poop, red cow!

Wotokahan Farm.

This is the third time I have written this post.
All computers must die.

I farm Wotokahan Farm. On it I will be raising grass-fed organic Angus and the crop necessary to keep them fed. The idea behind organic grass-fed is to emulate Nature as closely as possible.

Humans have been farming for some 26,000 years. Only in the last sixty have we set out to improve in Nature’s designs. For the most part, our improvements have held consequences that severely negatively outweigh the positive. America has no more small farms. Monoculture corporate and factory. These are the words that have replaced the “family” that once belonged in front of farming. Monoculture is a close second to Global Warming on my end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it scale.
Howard Kunstler is a dick. But he is good at pointing out the evil in things that seem mostly good. His point was that highways, and the resulting suburbs, killed community as we knew it. The problems inherent in modern farming doesn’t yet have it’s Kunstler. Some people care, and they are willing to try to make a difference by paying for our meat, but there is no rallying cry [in America] and it may kill us all.
*end of tirade*

We farm two herds. The brood herd and the to-be-eaten herd. The brood herd is the mother cows and the bulls. The calves spend their first summer as a part of this herd. In the fall we bring this years calves down to live with the eating herd, from which we cull the largest animals.

In the summer, all the beefs eat grass.
In the winter I feed them hay, which is 700-800lb round bales of grass, and silage, which is fermented pulverized corn (think sour-mash).
This is what I do.

post script:
My dad claimed that Wotokahan was the Indian phrase for “Follower of God, Leader of Men.” He found it at a camp. The camp played pretty fast and loose with the definitions it handed out though. Some Indians had as a concept a “great spirit” which bible-study leaders will tell you is the same thing as god, but it isn’t. The great spirit wasn’t as thing you would follow. So the name is bullshit. Which is probably good because I am going to fail at both attempts, god and man.

If'n I had Broadband.

Before I left 40$ a month internets I surfed a bit.
I found some stuff.
I'll hand out links like candy at times.
And hoard it like things you hoard at others.

This was my favorite wholly unexplainable blog.

BLDG
BLOG

Farm Girl.

sliding down tell me that my topsoil's gone
i'd rather die young than pack up the farm
squattin' down tell me that
my beans won't grow
my plows won't plow and
my hoes won't hoe

i need a farm girl who knows how i feel about
death dirt law sex live birth and free meals
i need a farm girl
i need a farm girl
i need a farm girl

-ike reilly assassination, junkie faithful

I wave to Strangers.

Fredericktown is small. It’s officially a village, population around 2000. It has a school system, a mayor, 3 stoplights, 3 gas stations, a bowling alley and a grocery store.
A number of the “cool” people from high school are still here. Beyond them, most people don’t know me. Yet. I avoided many community things when I was here growing up. Children are just that, children, till they produce offspring, marry, or buy their own house (in that order). Farming also qualifies a person to be a grown-up. I can’t anonymously farm. People want to know who I am. I haven’t yet learned how to not tell them without being a dick. Once they know, they will offer their pre-formed opinion on my dad. And they’ll want to know how my mom is. And they’ll want to A) tell me how not to be like my dad or B) how they think the Amurrican justice system stinks.
*this is a very publicly searchable blog. i’ll be leaving some crap unsaid.

Farmers are expected to wave. They are a roadside attraction when you drive in the country. Our farm is on a medium-traffic road (which kind of baffles me, cause it drives straight into a lake 2 miles north of here) which means I, in support of inarguable tradition, wave to about 10 people a day. How flexible am I?

Farm Dog.

Dingo isn't dead. You will all be informed when Dingo has perished, but don't worry, she won't.
Dingo showed up on the front porch of our house a long time ago, a whipped, malnourished puppy. No one seems to remember which year it was. I was probably in middle school.

Dingo has a story, many of you have heard it. But here I am to repeat it, because the internet needs to know. Dingo started life as a truck chaser. Dingo was hit by a truck and stopped yipping at bumpers. Around the time she was hit my dad put in a small runway in anticipation of putting a small plane out there. In mid-Ohio any windsock/cleared field combination is an open invitation for anyone who thinks they can make it in and out to land there. In the summer 3-4 ultralights would land in any given week. Dingo took up ultralight chasing. She'd hear the drone and race across the field to bite the tailwheel of all aircraft landing or taking off. My dad bought Nine Eight Seirra, a Cessna 150-150 and parked her in the hanger. One winter weekend when I am in high school, I load up a three-wheeler in the back of the truck to take over to Rusty's place to drive like an idiot. My mom tells me that she and my dad are planning to take Brenda (the Cessna) up to an island in Lake Erie for a spot of lunch. About 4 in the afternoon I drive home and park the ATV. When I get near the house, I see Dingo crawling out from under the porch to greet me. Everything normal, except her head is coated in blood from her mangled face and she's limping. I don't dare pet her for fear she lost a battle with a rabid animal. Just then the plane lands so I run out to see if my parents know what's going on. "Oh, she's not dead yet?" asks my dad with a look of surprise.
The explanation I begin to receive goes like this. There was a light breeze that day, out of the east. This is slightly unusual on our farm for the wind is almost always reliably coming from the west. Our plane was almost too big, and too underpowered for the length of the strip, and to get all available power out of the plane you must take off into the wind. Dingo lined up where she usually did, nearer the east end of the runway, facing the eastbound plane. My dad saw her, but figured she was smart enough to get out of the way.
She wasn't.
She killed the engine of the plane by stopping the prop with her face. My parents get out to find their dog has a massive head wound that's gushing blood. They decide the most humane course of action for a dog about to die of blood-loss is to kill said dog. Owning no guns, and finding the shovel-to-the-head to be reserved for less lovable animals, they call a neighbor. He brings a 22. My dad ties dingo to the quonset hut with some twine. From ten feet away our neighbor does the neighborly deed of trying to kill my dog. Shoots her right in the chest. Dingo is now scared, frightened, hurt, and running hard enough to break the twine. She runs to the house, he fires at her again. But, alas, she makes it to the hole under the porch. My parents shrug and leave for a tasteless meal in Erie.
To wrap up: I take dingo to the vet. He does some stuff. We pay him far less then what the work he did was worth. I take dingo home. That was the first and last time dingo ever left our farm since being dropped off. Dingo has no sinuses and still has the bullet floating around in there somewhere but she's fine.
Now she's old. She's stone-deaf, far-sighted, and wholly deprived of a sense of smell. And my mom ran her over with a tractor the other morning. But it didn't seem to hurt her.

Recap for the Townies.

Introductions out of the way.
I've been home for a week and three days.

My dad is in old-man prison in Chillicothe. So I'm home to farm. And to maybe to raise a little cain, but that's second to not killing the herd.

The location is 16169 Old Mansfield Rd, F'town. It's three houses on some number of acres (in the low hundreds). Two families live in these three houses. We'll call it all the homestead, or Tara.

The cast of characters includes my mother, my aunt, my uncle, my cousin, my brother, my sister, my nana, my dingo (dog), 200 bovine shit machines, and four orange cats.

My vehicles are a honda, a small toyota SUV with 4-wheel drive for my mom, a beat-to-hell farm truck (6-7 mpg), my nissan, a 3-wheeler, and three john-deere tractors.

My good friend from high school still lives here. He has a name more usually given to a dog, Rusty.

Life as I knew it is over. People tell me I'm doing the good, the honorable thing by coming home to be here. Don't believe them. I couldn't not come home. It was no decision, it's just the way it is. When this is all said and done we will probably lose the farm to the bank to pay off some low-life rednecks. It is then that I return to the city and to advertising. You already wouldn't recognize me. I wear carharts, trucker hats, and shit kickers like I was born to. Not that farming is coming naturally to me, it certainly isn't. I'm ok when things are up and running, but I don't know where to go to fix things.

Here's a list of how things stand as of now:
My older brother is re-enlisting in the Air Force. Making him wholly unavailable to pester me.
My younger sister is attending the U of Toledo. She's the bible-banger.
My cousin is attending Oxford (the real one) to get a bigger degree. He'll be home to help.
My mom had a hysterectomy yesterday. Making her effectively a vegtable for the next month plus.
My aunt is a guidance counselor at a nearby scary-backwoods high school where I might find employment.
My uncle is handy and drives buses sometimes.
I am responsible for feeding the beefs, keeping things running generally, getting the silage set up to feed, taking care of pink-eye, fixing trailers, taking the steers to the producers, selling more steers, keeping water lines unfrozen, cutting wood, cutting brush, not losing appendages and not getting shot.

the beefs go like this:
Male with testicles - Bull
Female who has had a calf - Cow
Male with no testicles - Steer
Female unbred - Heifer
Steers and Heifers together - The Calves

Now that I've started, I shall try to post all regular like with pictures and such.

There he goes.

Welcome to my Blog. I don't want to try to keep in contact with people in a way which requires much effort from me. I know that when Guacena left Mpls we waited for him to contact us, per his instructions. In a month you might wonder where that Drew-fellow went, but by then, with no contact, I will surely be lost to the farm. I have a history of losing contact. I now only know three of the hundred plus people I was in Up With People with. And that's stretching it.
Most of you reading this will have only the most vauge idea as to what farming entails. Me too. This is the second reason for this journal.
Please do post comments. I only have dail-up out here in the sticks, and tie up the phone line to be online, to boot. So it's highly likely that my email replies will be few an far between.