Redneck Fun.

It’s fair week. The county shuts down and everyone piles into a car and they go to the fairgrounds to eat Porkettes and elephant ears and to mingle with their neighbors and to show off 12 year old ass and to look at antique tractors and to smell the livestock barns and to watch the tractor pulls and to dunk the 4H kids and to listen to 2nd string country singers croon and to get generally dirty.
My college roommate was visiting me so we and Rusty headed in on Wednesday night to catch the Tough Truck competition. And to eat Porkettes. And to mingle…

Tough Truck was at one time regulated to a far corner of the fairgrounds and only a couple twenty trucks ran. But it became too popular and is now in contention with the demolition derby for most mullets in attendance. Tough Truck is now a grandstand event. It’s a dirt course that has 5-6 main obstacles on it. A giant hole that must be driven through, some jumps in succession, offset bumps, and a giant ramp.Your truck is judged on two things, time through and distance launched off the end ramp. This year there were about 80 trucks running. Most were beaters, slapped together just to run the thing. Broncos, Jeeps, Toyotas and Fords. There were about 6 trucks that had serious money and know-how in putting them together. They were no longer recognizable as any brand. Just a fabricated frame with a lightweight body slapped on top. And serious suspension systems. Then there were a couple less likely vehicles. A Ford Explorer. A tuck with the frame on body backwards. A hot rod. A flatbed duelly with two kegs strapped onto the back. And this beauty.

Bet my Wednesday night was more fun than yours.

Unsettled.

It’s been a long strange week.
Various emotionally laced relationships disrupted. It’s hot. People losing their jobs. People failing out of school. Dad was sent to the hole, briefly. People breaking up. It’s been humid and hot. It’s hard to sleep well. It had been a long time since I’d been in any real relationship. Recently I met a local girl. My farm responsibilities are piling up. Fences to mend. Barns to re-roof. Hooves to trim. Storm-felled trees to clean up. Hay to move. A house to paint. Another house the needs to be renter-ready soon. And it’s hot.
Gnarls Barkley tell me there’s a storm coming. But it seems to just be boiling on the horizon. Not coming any closer, just sitting.

Up till now I had been pretty secure in the fact that I’ve been doing well for myself as a farmer. Things are breaking, but I’m not too far behind. The first cutting of hay was completed. I found a car. My beef brought in more money than expected. Less baby calves died this year, than in the previous ones. No hunters had harassed me in the woods. I could do this shit.
Up till now.
My dad called on Monday night. In his last letter he asked how many bales I got out of first cutting. But I had told him in the last letter I wrote. 166.
He had thought that that number was the number of bales I got out of the wheat hay fields. Three of eight fields. This was bad.
I need about 800 - 900 bales of hay entering winter, it turns out. Five to six of those need to come out of first cutting. I don’t even have a third of that. No one knows why.
So here’s my first real problem. And it’s been roiling in my stomach all week on top of all this. My mom tells me that I shouldn’t worry, that it’s not my fault. Firstly, I don’t know that this isn’t my fault. Even if it isn’t, it’s my fucking responsibility. Somehow things went wrong.

Cow Bio - Crazy

We have two cows which look quite similar. One gave birth over a month ago. The other was more recent. The day she did give birth, she did it just minutes before I had shown up to move them to the next paddock. The wet, and none too aware calf was sitting at her feet. When I managed to encourage the rest of the herd to move on, the mother had a visible war going on in her head. Newly found maternal instincts waged on against herd mentality. The herd initially won out and she scampered to follow everyone else.
Which left her little calf. He was unaware enough and small enough that I was going to pick him up and carry him over to her in the next pasture. An easy enough fix. I carried him like a puppy, upside down and legs all aflail. When I got him over to the creek and fence he started to realized that being carried was not natural and started bawling his head off. This brought his mother and twenty other concerned bovines running my way, with the full intent to dismember me and feed me to the crickets. Point being, I saw this calf. I carried this calf. I knew this calf.

The next day, I didn’t notice him with the herd, but I wasn’t concerned, as calves scampering in amongst 45 times four cow legs are easy to miss. The next day, I also did not notice him. And the next. But four days after he was born my cousin calls me up to tell me that one of the two identifiable cows has just had a calf.
But that can’t be. The one had one ages ago. The other gave birth four days earlier. A newborn and a four-day old are very discernable. So, I told him as much. But he stuck by his story, that it was fresh and wet all wobbly-legged.
Indeed the calf was back with the herd. My only guess is that he didn’t like being born and went back inside his mother for a few more days. After she birthed him again she wouldn’t let him back in. This is my theory.
His name is Crazy.

Barn Storm.

More abuses of weather. This summer has been rife with crazed weather. A second, mid-Ohio, grassfed farming blogger has been noticing too.
On Thursday yet another violent storm passed through. Lightning struck the main bank barn up at my Aunt's end of the farm. Hit the disconnected lightning rod, arced across to a 4x6 support beam and exploded. Blew out a sizable chunk of siding. The barn didn't burn down only due to the fact that it was raining buckets at the moment.
Some of you may be wondering why we wouldn't have the lightning rod connected to the ground, you know, to make it work properly. Well, our insurance adjustor wouldn't insure a barn with a properly connected lightning rod, because "lightning rods attract lightning."
Takes all kinds.

Vote With Your Mouth.

One reason we sell our meat as grass-fed organic freezer-beef to people around here who want such things, is that they’re worth more that way. Money. Now, don’t get me wrong, we don’t have high prices, in fact we came up with our prices by going to the local meat-store and fixing them to be the same as other local (but not-grassfed and not-organic) beef. You can have theirs. Or you can have ours which is better for you and safer and tastier. Not that this argument convinces enough people.
See, we have only so much pasture, only so many bales of hay. We must sell as many calves (approximately) as we have born in a year. And currently demand is not such that this is the result. So occasionally I must cull my herd to a more reasonable and manageable size.
There is a weekly livestock auction the next town over. I load my trailer and haul them down. No questions are asked. The auction is purely: what you see is what you get. About noon that same day all the livestock is walked through one at a time and bid upon. Our cows, being healthy and well fed, look very skinny and old when placed next to the grain-finished steroid-huffing beefs from around the county. It’s exactly like those shiny swollen softballs that grocery stores insist are a variety of apple call Red Delicious. I’ve had a Red Delicious. They are small, not all that red, really, and, uh, delicious. Those softballs have a thick wax skin covering some sort of appleish flavored foam. In among this foam are brown deposits of flavorless sugar-water. Mmm. The beef surrounding my beefs at auction are the same way. They are Barry Bond’s turgid biceps. Their heads are shrunken because they are so much younger and practically force-fed, which, as any economics major could tell you, makes perfect sense. The faster you get them big, the less time it takes before they’re marketable.
This is my round-about way of explaining why my cows go for very little on an auction block. They look like slow-growers. They are. They look like they aren’t loaded with fat. They aren’t. No one wants that crap. Or, at least, no one who processes your food for you wants that crap.

Which is why we sell them directly to the public as much as possible. It’s only the informed denizens who deserve our meat. And we can’t make a profit selling them to the meat-purchasers of Knox County.

Lit Dervish.

The last two books I read.
Purple America. One eventful weekend of a family in Connecticut.
The Accidental. One eventful summer of a family in the UK.
Both are recommendable. Both are critically acclaimed beyond what I would say. Which is that they were both somewhere in the range of Middling-Good trending towards Good-Good on my newly invented scale of book.
Strangely, they were both written from multiple perspectives, one per chapter. I hadn’t come across a book capable of handling such a gimmick since Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury.
Sometimes the world throws coincidences at you. Sometimes the coincides are so utterly mundane that you’re wondering why I’d even bring up such a point.

WTF Volume Three

For those of you who missed the first instructions:
This is a Thing Found on the Wotokahan farm. If you are the first, or just eventually the nearest in your guess, you get a prize. If your guess is wrong, but I like it, you get points. Now get you WTF on, mate.

Update
We have a winner. See inside for details.

Learnsings.

My dad holds a low opinion of my ability to wield tools and fix machinery. He came by his opinion quite appropriately, for as a child I would avoid work as much as was possible; on a farm, half the work is wielding wrenches. Of course, now I must get things done. And wrenches I do wield.
Mechanical ability is one part the logical ability to figure out how things come apart and go together in space, one part deciding on and finding the correctest tool to do it, and one tiny part the ability to use the tools. The coming apart and going back together part seems to me to be mostly experience. I usually stop one step short or go too far in my dismantling, both ending with frustration. The tool choosing part is also mostly experience, with a small bit of creativity. If you can imagine a specific tool, someone somewhere makes it. And if you don’t want to go to the trouble of finding it, it’s usually possible to create a crude facsimile from others tools in any well stocked shop. Tools are neat. And, most any monkey could use most of the tools we do.
So if you boil that all down, yeah, I’m of the opinion that mechanical ability is mostly knowledge and experience. Of which I have only so far a little of. But anyone could create their own, given the time, effort and necessity/want. It’s a great skill to have, and anyone could have it, really.

There are two skills I should have as a farmer. The ability to weld and the ability to use a cutting torch. I have neither. Yesterday my friend’s dad introduced me to MIG welding. MIG I like. Which is too bad, because all I have is a stick welding system.

Your Mom.

In high school I had a smart friend. One of those summers Karl was sent to smart-kid camp. The most rewarding of the smart kids to dos was the creation of a game. Each camper came up with their own and then they tested it out.. Karl’s game never made it home. It was probably an uninspired and hokey thing. But he was a smart kid, like I said, so he brought home the best game created by a fellow camper. This fellow camper, it is rumored, was even smarters than the Karl. She called the game was Shingles. We call it Your Mom.

Your Mom is mostly derived from the categories card of King’s Cup.
Three (four is better) or more players sit in a circle. All the cards from a deck are dealt evenly. Use two decks if there is an excessively large number of players.
Every player chooses a category. Every other player at the table has absolute veto power over every other players choice.
Category examples: Teams. Shoe brands. Things found in the bush. Things found in a truck-stop bathroom. STDs. Curse words. Racial slurs. Animal noises. Parts of a plane. Things Rusty has groped. Smells. 80s Bands. Catchphrases. Hairstyles. Things that land soft. Sexual positions. Assassins. Wars. Nations. States. Places to pierce your body. Famous gays. Names for a penis. Drugs. Things that melt. Night sounds. People who have made the world worse. Famous horses. Show tunes. Russian authors. World leaders. Things you pet.

Once everyone has settled on a category, You go around the circle twice and clearly state your category. Here play starts and you are no longer allowed to mention anyone’s (or your own) category aloud. Someone plays a card in front of themselves, from their facedown deck. The next person plays their card in front of themselves. And so on. You play your next card on top of your last, making a pile of face-up cards in front of yourself.
When a face-up card is paired, the two players with matching cards must name something from the other person’s category. Whoever is first with a correct and yet unused answer is the winner of the match and gives his/her face-up pile to the loser, who places these new cards at the bottom of his/her facedown deck. Once you have played your last card on your face-up pile, you leave it down and wait for a match to appear. Whoever is completely out of cards first is the winner of the game.

Extra rule: When a player at the table plays a match on themselves (they play an 8 and their last card showing was an 8) it is everyone at the table versus the person with the pair. The category for both sides is the paired person’s. If the person with the pair wins, they give their played cards to whomever they wish. If anyone else wins, they must pick up their own cards. In both instances the pair is broken up within the deck.

I wanted these rules online. Now they are.
If you have played and remember some awesomtastic categories, please put them in the comments. If you’ve never played and think you have a genius category contribution, do the same.

Fin.

First cutting hay two thousand six is in the books barn.
I’m on someone’s good list, as everything that broke waited until the very last bale to do so.
Big Johnny cut through her battery wire and shorted out a pair of mind-bogglingly expensive batteries. And her starter kicked it.
The baler snapped it’s PTO shaft and I’m not too certain if it’s going to be possible to weld it back together.
Little Johnny has been running exceedingly hot and I need to find out why. I usually have a water bottle with me on the tractors and the only place available to store stuff on LJ is in the battery compartment. If you combine a hot day with running LJ hard your water comes close to boiling. Quaffing unflavored hot tea does not quench one’s thirst. Yesterday morning as I was tedding the last field I could smell rubber burning, but I couldn’t see any neighbor’s burning their tires. A minute later a giant plume of white smoke came pouring from the battery compartment. I killed the tractor and threw open the cover to see that the grease gun that I had stuck in had passed it’s combustion point.

But nothing real exciting in farming has happened. Just a small grease fire. So here’s a rant.

<>
Anger issues run in my genes. Mostly I just simmer. Recently I’ve discerned one particular thing that rankles me to no end. It’s insincere commiseration. Or maybe not even insincere, but more when the person can’t, whether they’d like to or not, understand.
My mom likes to know how my day went. I don’t like to tell her. She wants to know if thing went as planned, or if I broke down. My answers are as monosyllabic as I can manage. If it did go well, I don’t need her small noises of happiness to cheer me on. If it didn’t go well, there is no way she could understand what that means, and there’s no way to explain it to her. She cares, but not enough to pay attention to that. It would be easier if it was just me getting frustrated with problems or being thrilled when I get something fixed or finished.
The other night my mom told the rest of the fam that I had successfully gone through two heavy hay days with zero problems. Everyone made little murmurs of congratulations(?). Not that I outwardly reacted, but it burned me.
Maybe it’s wrong of me to feel this way. But I don’t think it’s to be helped.
<>

How a Bill Becomes a Law.

The oral arguments of my fathers appeal were heard today by the panel of three appeals judges.

Here’s how an appeal works, from my understanding. The lawyer for the losing side finds legal minutiae from the trial itself which could possibly have swayed the outcome of the trial. He sweeps all these tiddly bits into a little pile and writes a paper proclaiming “My client deserves a hearing!” The winning lawyer write a paper that says “Naw he doesn’t, and shaddup you.”
The god of Justice comes down and disapproves less to one of these lawyers. In our case, the lawyer and his “shaddup you”ings was the more disapproved of.
At that point the onus is upon the losing side’s lawyer to write many a paper asking and begging for more time. And when whoever he is writing is finally fed up with the procrastinating, the lawyer must finally produce a brief. In this brief he a) regales the reader with the “facts of the trial” in the most ridiculously biased a way possible b) argues the main points of improper or flawed legal maneuverings from the trial and c) includes a bibliography of cases which agree with him.
Now is the time for the winning lawyer to dream up reasons for postponing his rebuttal. Months go by. After the increasingly shrill requests for more time have been denied, he too must produce a brief which includes mostly the same stuff. a) But his facts don’t bear even a passing resemblance to the loser’s facts. In fact, passers-by may be forgiven for not recognizing them as originating from the same trial. b) His central thrust will be that everything, even if not exactly properly done, was fine. c) He will include also a bibliography of cases which agree with him.
These two briefs are sent to the appellate court system, more specifically, to the three judge panel (Ohio) which will oversee said case.
And then we all sit and wait and wait and wait for the judges to come around the circuit to hear the oral arguments. More lawyers request even more postponements. The purpose of the oral arguments is beyond me. Those same two lawyers who have taken the time and effort to write down their arguments are asked to stand in front of the panel to, uh, state their argument.
Then the panel has up to six months to decide anything.

Up until today, my entire courtroom experience had been sitting in the visitors section watching my dad’s (badly mangled) trial. Today I went back for the cliff notes version of the same damn thing. It was a good thing that it lasted far less than an hours time, for my body didn’t handle it well. My heart was k-thuddering and my hands were shaking. The whole ordeal just pisses me off without providing anything to lash out at. Watching the prosecutor lie, baldly and calmly is not something I can just sit and watch. Unless of course I’m in a position where all I can do is sit and watch.

Good news is, it went quite well. The judges had some snarky questions for the prosecutor and he fumbled them badly. Our new lawyer hit all the points he needed to hit was smooth, and made sense. My family left the courthouse with small hopes of a re-trial rekindled.

Viruses Cultivated in Brain Tissue.

This is why I need access to The O.E.D.

The entirely too puny dictionary.com’s feeble offerings paired with the estimable Synonym Finder does not yield me enough meat with which to make a clever start to this post. I wanted to compare your ability, oft used, to enhance the bounds of your mind with my recent acts of clearing the corn fields of weeds by working the ground.
Etymology is a terrific beast, yielding much knowledge. The word cultivate comes from the past participle of the Latin word to till. Or at least, so says the American Heritage Dictionary, which is a pile of poop. It’s probably right, yes, but still.
English is a terrible language. But it is also awesome. It’s a beautiful kinda pretty if you look at her from the right angle thing to be able to twist ‘the act of clearing croplands to produce a better yield’ to mean to better your mental discrimination. That’s a solid leap of language logic.

To sum up. You improved yourself in some way. I did but drag some metal through the dirt. Yet we were both cultivating.

My corn crops require many passes of my tractor to allow the corn to grow without too much competition from everything else that would be growing there. Once with the plow, twice with the harrow, and hopefully multiple times with both the spider-hoe and cultivator. Most farmers nowadays prefer the no-till variety of row crop growth. Which cuts out most all of that [effort, labor, work, machinery] and replaces much of the weed destruction with chemical applications. But being organic and no-till is almost unheard of. Once again we do it the old tried and tested way.
A couple weeks after planting is the time for the spider-hoe. This machine sits on the back of the largest tractor and numerous groupings of metal wheels ride on the very top of the soil in-between the corn rows. If turning at a fast enough rate, the wheels rip up all the tiny plant roots and strew them across the surface where the sun dehydrates them to death before nightfall. The tractor is put into road-speed gear and I fly across the field at 25 mph trying my damndest to keep the wheels from hitting the corn. It’s a white-knuckle ride on a rickety wooden roller-coaster that only lacks up and downs and turns. Because the corn is hardly visible when I’m doing this, I look like a crazy hell-bent for speed hick joy riding his tractor back and forth across the fields.

Cultivating is similar in that I’m driving a tractor with a machine behind it trying desperately to keep from killing the corn. But this is done at the silly-slowest speeds imaginable because the tolerance between hitting corn and not is about two inches in either direction. And I’m digging up far more established plants with tiny little plows.
After cultivating you have improved your judgment and end up with superior taste and motives. The post-cultivating me has a field that look brown in-between the green.

Dillinger's Eyes.

For the first time in my life, I own my car. For the first time in my life, I chose my car. Floyd is my 1984 Celica GT-S RA65L.

Meet the sexy sexy Floyd.