All I Want for Christmas

I'm really hoping that Santa was listening when Melissa and I visited the La-z-Boy store up in Cool Springs last night. Every farmer needs a good leather recliner chair to nap in on Sunday afternoon. The model I liked best, the "Dreamweaver" has been forever discontinued and I was sitting in the very last one in the store.





No hints in this post at all.





Nope, nary a one.





:)

A Well Rounded Education Part 2 - Work

I want to talk in a little more detail about some of the ideas I presented in my last post.


I'll start with the idea of work. I'm not sure when society started to assume that it was normal that kids never had to work but even back in the day I had a lot of friends that never had jobs and had no real idea what responsibility was. Kids absolutely need time to play and I don't know that kids today ought to work as hard as I did as early as I did but I see absolutely nothing wrong (and plenty right) with starting and mentoring young people at simple, safe, wholesome and necessary age appropriate farmstead tasks.

All the way through high school we were warned repeatedly that we'd have to buckle down and learn how to go to work when we went to college. Buckle down ? Going to a really, really good college (and passing all my courses with flying colours) was a four year vacation compared to the life I led and the responsibilities I had before I left home. And virtually all the farm kids I went to school with felt the same way. When I graduated from college and got my first full time job I couldn't believe how much free time I had. It was ridiculous. They only wanted me to work forty or forty five hours a week. This also felt suspiciously like a vacation from "real" life, and one of the reasons I started farming part time almost immediately after graduation was to fill up some of the free time I had before and after work by doing something productive instead of spending money. I'm not kidding when I say it must be hard as hell to transition from child to productive adult if all you've ever had to do in life before going to college and getting a job was play and get admonished to do your homework. I'm glad I didn't find out what that was like because I'm pretty sure I'd have made a mess of it. I came pretty close to doing so even with the head start I got !

A Well Rounded Education

I had a very interesting conversation with a friend who was helping me on the farm early this morning. We were talking and laughing about some of the art and language courses we took when we were in ag college to achieve at least the idea of a well rounded education. Twenty years on, I'm kinda glad I took the time to take classes that introduced me to the arts and literature. I AM definitely a more well rounded person because I took the courses.

And then he posed a question that absolutely stopped me in my tracks. How well rounded can an education be when it doesn't address ANY of the practical necessities required to actually look after yourself when you're done being educated ? Where are the mandatory introductory courses for the masses in agriculture, mechanics, and structural engineering and repair ? How about personal finance and money management ? Home economics ?

Exactly. They're nowhere.

How about teaching the value of work ? Is that important ? We get offers from friends all the time that they've got kids who want to work and we've got PLENTY of kid safe and kid friendly work to be done around here. However if they're less than 17 years old it's all but illegal for us to employ them, even doing something as simple and safe as stacking firewood or hoeing corn, even for half a day. That they can legally work in a convenience store or at a fast food restaurant years before they can work at some place as unwholesome as a family run farm speaks volumes about what we value as a society.

Three hundred million Americans pony up to the table to eat every day. Agriculture in the classroom ? You betcha. Every year from 1st grade on up.

Happy Thanksgiving

I've been away from this blog for awhile, mostly because I'm doing more writing on our Paradigm Farms blog (and trying to be a helpful husband for a change), but also partly because....you guessed it.....we've been busy, though lately not so much on farm related stuff. But today it was time to pause and give thanks.

It's this writer's opinion that Thanksgiving is perhaps the most widely celebrated American holiday. With a four day long weekend, most of the celebration feasts get done on Thursday, leaving three days for other pursuits, not least of which is Black Friday shopping which in many cases starts at midnight tonight or before.

I grew up with Thanksgiving in Canada and we always paused to have a good meal, but it was a one day affair (same day as Columbus Day) and most families I knew held their big meal not on Thanksgiving Monday but on the Sunday before it. If I had to pick a comparitive Canadian holiday, I'd choose the Christmas/Boxing Day combination as being most like Thanksgiving/Black Friday here in the US.

With the list of never ending blessings that make up my life, it'd honestly be easier to craft a list of stuff I'm NOT thankful for than to attempt to do the opposite. Through the blessings of health, luck, hard work and thrift we've created a good, secure living for ourselves and in the process we've created an enviable life to go along with it. If that's not something to be thankful for, I don't know what would be.

Blessings to you and yours on this Thanksgiving.

Time Travel

I was leafing through an old friend's recently posted Facebook album a few minutes ago when I ran across an outdoor birthday party photo that really got me nostalgic. It hit me that I went to grade school with everyone in the photo; if they weren't in my class then they were within a year or two on one side or the other. I have literally known them all my life. The backdrop behind the smiling faces, mixed drinks and party favours was the concession road on which I grew up, four miles west of our place, and behind the road sat a farm that bordered our grade school. Although much has changed in the intervening years, the camera shot showed nothing of it. The photo could as easily have been taken thirty years ago as today and all the the people in the photo could have been the kids I remember instead of the adults they have since become.

On a day to day basis, I'm not a part of that world any more, and a few years ago I'd most likely have never known the party took place no matter how good my social networking skills were. It's important to live in the world that's in front of you, and I try hard to do that, but it's also kind of nice for those of us who have moved away to be able to keep in some kind of near real time touch with friends, neighbours and home folks. If nothing else, it serves to keep me honest. There is much truth in the statement that it's hard to pull the wool over someone's eyes that was standing in the room watching your diaper get changed ! :)

Distractions

There is a mouse making scratching noises in the wall beside my computer as I type this and the noise is quickly working at fraying my very last nerve. Or maybe it's not a mouse. In the last minute the volume has gone way up. It's almost impossibly loud. Rat, chipmunk, giraffe, camel...dunno, but there's something behind the wallboard and it's not happy, no doubt. Oh well, that makes two of us. I'm completely off track right now. What I'm supposed to be doing is being productive, whatever that means, but the damn scratching noise keeps escalating and it's like fingernails on a chalkboard to me. I can't concentrate a bit.

In the world of distractions, I'm not normally a very distractable person. Melissa jokes that if I'm in the middle of something that has my attention I block everything else out. It's nearly impossible to get me off task until whatever I'm doing is complete.


I have a head that's crammed full of useless information. Among many other things, I can tell you all about leaching tannins from oak bark or planting by the signs, but among the banalities that exist between my ears I've got NOTHING on how to quickly shut these damn rodents up. Oh, don't get me wrong, I've had thoughts on how to get the job done. Lots of them. But as my FB friends have counselled, anything that involves guns and/or matches isn't likely worth the long term consequences.

So here I sit, quietly and benignly frustrated because there's nothing I can do to make it stop short of turning out the light and vacating the room. How long can a rodent scratch ? At least one second longer than I can sit here. See you in the morning, everyone.

Welding

For all my manly skills, from felling trees to building barns and other complicated things to fixing broken equipment and farming for a living, I have a few skills that I need to hone and one of them is welding. I can cut steel with the best of them....that's easy, but even my very best welds (according to most of my kin and friends) look like chickens--t !

The reason behind my lack of welding ability isn't related to technical knowledge. I've got that down pat. The problem is that a good welder needs every bit as steady a hand as a good surgeon. I confess it. I have wobbly hands and very poor hand/finger dexterity. According to Melissa, watching me try to thread a small bolt/nut combination is like watching a normal person attempting to do the same while they are wearing ski gloves.

My wobbly hands are biting me in the rear right now. I snapped a stud off when I was tightening a wheel lug on the tractor yesterday and I don't posess enough enough steadiness in my hands to hold a nut in place long enough to spark up an arc and weld the damn thing in place to extract the remainder of the stud. So I'm going to have to pay somebody fifty bucks or more to drive to my farm to do thirty seconds worth of work which is very frustrating.

Oh well, could be worse I guess. At least I've got extremely pretty weather to stand around and wait for someone to show up to "rescue" me. :)