The Weekend and Voting !

For as sucky as last week finished, we sure had a nice weekend to make up for it. This includes both perfect weather (sunny 75) and great company as we had several clients in town to visit their respective charges (and us), as well as a new horse on Saturday evening/Sunday morning. I think the best part is that there was exactly no drama while unloading this horse; he came off the trailer about 10 feet away from the barn which is perfect, IMO !

In other news, I've dusted off my voter registration card and DL in preparation for my inaugural first vote as a new American tomorrow !

The rule in my house growing up was that you couldn't complain about politics if you didn't exercise your right to vote, so I'm pretty excited about tomorrow because for the first time in six years, I'll be able to attack actual people and their policies again ! :)

Poor Melissa

She has had one hell of a week, and it's still got a couple of days to go. So far this week;

1. The truck died on her way home from Lynnville, and she had a heck of a time getting AAA to send her a tow truck, which is ridiculous.

2. We had a lot of drama with a commercial shipper who insisted that we meet him at a truck stop 30 miles away from home to transfer a horse from their trailer to ours...at midnight...when the owner had paid for door to door service.

Being married to me is often a trial (and yes, I'm admitting it !), but this week has been particularly so thanks to an ongoing bit of drama with my back that has left me at about 10 % capacity regarding sitting (which you have to do when driving) and walking (necessary when feeding horses). So in addition to everything else, her workload has doubled.

To top it all off, about the time my back went out I seem to have contracted some sort of stomach virus that makes my insides sound like I swallowed a set of drums and which in my enfeebled state means I had better be within eyesight of a toilet.

Blech !

I know factually that it could be plenty worse, but I'm about ready for some better days !

TV Weather Drama

I don't know when weather forecasts changed in this country. What I mean by that is that when I was a child, weather forecasts (even American ones) didn't seem to be full of the sort of campy high drama one might expect to find on afternoon soap operas. But they sure are in 2010, on every channel you'd care to name, including especially the Weather Channel !

Given the number of clients who called and emailed to check up on our well being this afternoon, I'd say the national weather folk had middle TN in their cross hairs and were probably forecasting imminent death and massive destruction. I know all the local stations were because I was listening to some of them as I drove into Franklin early this afternoon ! While it was plenty entertaining, all the media attention kind of lends itself to more drama than the situation calls for most of the time and certainly more than it called for today.

The problem is that even if you live here and are looking out your window, eventually you begin to believe what you hear over what you see. Even I thought for awhile about heading for home and battening the hatches, but I'm kind of glad I didn't. As is often the case, it wasn't half as bad as all that. It got a bit windy for awhile this morning. Not death and destruction kind of windy, just breezy, like it gets right before a front's going to go through. About noon the wind died down and it rained for an hour, dropping the temperature from 85 to 65. And then the sun came out and it was over with. No lightening. No thunder. And no death and destruction raining down from the sky. Once again, we came through completely unscathed ! But I'm thinkin' that sort of weather non-event doesn't sell many commercials !

Hope everyone else had the same sort of drama free day that existed here in middle TN !

Rain !

After nearly two months with no real rainfall, last night the spigot finally got turned on and we accumulated a hair over three inches of rain. It's too late for the warm season grasses, and the trees are pretty well fried for the year too, but I noticed a whole bunch of green cool season grass shoots all over every pasture this morning. It won't take very long for it to grow if it keeps raining ! Our 4 inch soil temperatures are running in the low to mid 70's; perfect for germinating grass seed ! I think the best part is that more rain is predicted the next couple of days !

I was going to spend today applying and harrowing in manure, but it's too wet to do that and I will happily find another task if it means MORE RAIN !

In other news....

Have you ever thought to yourself, "Boy, it'd sure be nice to just lay down for a day or two and let everything sort itself out."

Well, I can now tell you from experience that it isn't nearly as much fun as it might at first appear. Somehow, I managed to twang my back out of alignment on Saturday morning and over the course of working through the day everything got tighter and tighter to where I could hardly move. Turns out the only halfway comfortable position I could find was flat on my back, so that's how I stayed from Saturday afternoon until this morning. After a little medical aid and chiropractic stuff, I'm happy to report I can move again, but I don't think I'm going to be running any marathons or lifting anything extraordinarily heavy the next couple of days.

Hope everyone has a great Monday !

Unreasonable Requests

Melissa and I do a lot of checking before a horse gets to step off the trailer at our farm, and our "pre-vetting" helps assure us that both the client and the horse are a good fit for our way of doing things. Because we are pretty fussy on the front end, we usually deal with nothing but great clients and great horses.

That said, we have dealt with our share of unreasonable requests during the "get to know you" phase with potential clients. Here are few examples !

1. I'd really like to send my horse but your rates are too high. Your farm is very elitist, and I don't see how you sleep at night charging as much as you do (no bull...someone really said this to Melissa on the phone).

Our emailed response went something like this.

Unfortunately we don't have a money tree in the backyard. We charge what we charge in order to make a fair living and pay for our overhead and (large) capital investments. We're full with a waiting list (this blew the caller away). There are lots and lots of cheaper options out there and you probably ought to check some of them out (we even recommended a couple).

Unbelievably, the SAME caller called back six months later, and this time she condescended to paying our asking price, minus ten percent.

Let's review.

No.

End of review.

Sorry. Still full. For you, honey, we're ALWAYS going to be full !

2. When we come visit for four or five days, we'll bring the kids, our camping stuff, their dirtbikes, and all our pets and extended family. You won't mind, will you ?

Hell NO ! C'mon over ! Would YOU mind if I boarded my [insert animal of choice] at your house and I showed up in your backyard for a long weekend unannounced with twenty of my closest friends and family, a keg of beer and my 4-wheelers ? Get a life, get a new brain, and find yourself another boarding facility !

Well, honestly.

Hope ya'll have a great weekend !

Ethanol Production

The main headline in this week's edition of Feedstuffs magazine claims/cautions that the EPA has partially approved E15 ethanol blends for 2007 and newer model cars. Why this headline trumped a whole lot of other interesting feed industry news is that the whole ethanol situation has huge implications in animal agriculture if we choose to maintain the status quo.

Although using corn to create motor vehicle fuel is fantastically inefficient, we aren't literally on the verge of taking food out of someones mouth because we choose to use corn to produce ethanol. I think a more accurate assessment is that we are using some of our "cheap" grain supply to feed cars instead of cattle, and BOTH are fantastically inefficient uses of corn.

Given that ethanol production AND feed corn production are heavily subsidized by the federal government, we are currently in a situation where thanks to government intervention the market for corn has been severely and artificially manipulated. Since the acreage dedicated to corn is maxed out and pretty static from year to year, I'd say the price of corn is likely to stay high, at least relative to the long term average, until one or both of these industries lose their federal corn subsidies.

Unlike hogs and chickens, beef cattle aren't designed by nature to eat corn. At the end of the day, beef cattle always make sense in places that can't grow much grain. Unless it is fantastically cheap because it has been massively overproduced (as it has been my entire life), it makes no economic sense to feed corn to beef cattle. To grow a pound of beef requires 6 to 10 lbs of corn at a minimum.

As we move toward an election and a new farm bill, keep your ears and eyes on beef subsidies. I'd wager that somewhere in Washington, lobbyists for the cattle industry are proposing a series of subsidies for beef producers to counteract and overcome the current massive federal subsidies on corn.

Didn't we used to call government manipulation of free markets socialism ?

Canadian Words....

I am told that when I came south I had a "cute" but fairly thick eastern Ontario speech pattern ...so says my spouse anyway. I hesitate to identify what I had as an accent....as far as I am concerned I had no accent then and I still don't, but others around me seem to disagree with that, sometimes vehemently. However, there is no doubt I use differing pronunciations and inflections than folks do down here. In some cases, I use different words to describe the same item or situation than would be normal in the south.

A (totally made up) example of this, " I sat down on the chesterfield to pull on my toque and mukluks before braving the trip across the frozen muskeg. Eh, while you're up, can you bring me a double double ?"

In spite of my sentence, I'm (mostly) a pretty easy guy to understand. About the only word that HAS led me astray way down here in Dixie is, "hydro". In Ontario, the provincial electricity provider before deregulation (ie. for most of my life) was Ontario Hydro. Given this bit of background, it's a fairly easy leap to understanding why over the last hundred years or so everyone in my part of Ontario uses "hydro" in place of "electric" (ie. hydro bill, hydro pole, hydro line, and, all by itself "hydro" or "the hydro").


Hydro is a versatile kind of word, and it continues to slip into my everyday usage without any thought on my part. If you add swear words to it, it becomes even more versatile ! :) The problem is that without the bit of background I gave, nobody down here has the faintest idea what I'm talking about when I use it in conversation which can lead to some interesting impasses during lulls. At various times, I've been asked whether hydro meant pole dancing (?), operating a space ship (??), losing control of one's car on water (at least this makes some sense...ie. hydroplaning...though why I'd leave planing out is beyond me) or poling a canoe through a dam (???). Some folks at a party even thought I was referring to myself when I said that the hydro had been out ! :/

At any rate, one word seldom matters all that much, unless it's referring to something I got up to in my youth with someones daughter when her father burst into the room, and then it matters a very great deal, but that, my friends, is another story. :)