Citygirl/ Farmhand

Citygirl/ Farmhand
Check out those hay bales

The Farm

The Farm
The Farm

Thursday, September 30, 2010

Bug Competition

Tim and I were at the farm part of the day yesterday to meet with the well guy (running water on the horizon, woo hoo!) and I couldn't help but notice how awful the gnats were. It was the first time that bugs have really bothered me down there and it started me thinking about bugs in general and then, more specifically, if I despise the bugs in the city or the country more.

It's funny how a lot of city people claim they hate the country because of the bugs while in reality, there are tons of bugs in the city also. And some pretty disgusting ones. So I decided to start a bug comparison, NYC vs. Frenchtown, in the form of this very scientific list below. I assigned points on a scale of 1-10, 10 being the most disgusting. I found this list quite comforting, in light of the possibility of moving to the country full time, which I think Tim is pushing for once the house is done. I'm still wrestling with that but at least I have my little bug scale to help preoccupy me.

NEW YORK CITY
Cockroaches (large) 9
Mosquitoes 4
Bedbugs 10
Fleas 6
Bees 2
__________________
TOTAL 31

FRENCHTOWN, NEW JERSEY
Mosquitoes 4
Gnats 2
Ticks 8
Termites 2
Daddy long legs 2
Stink bugs 3
Crickets -2 (they're cute)
Butterflies -5 OK, ok, that's not fair. I won't count them.
Grasshoppers -1 (also cute)
Caterpillars 0
Bees 2
Flies 4
Horse flies 5
_________________
TOTAL 29

And just when I was pretty sure that the country was going to win, Tim reminded me about the wolf spider he saw in the trash can. While bedbugs are obviously the most vile bug to ever exist in terms of the way they spread and bite you in your bed, they are not that disgusting to look at. They look disgusting, don't get me wrong, but roaches are way worse. The only thing more terrifying to look at is the wolf spider which unfortunately rates it a 9 (since it's not poisonous and doesn't invade your bedroom), taking Frenchtown's score to 38. So New York wins.

It was a close race though, NYC, and you should be afraid because next up is the Critters Competition and Frenchtown doesn't have rats the size of small dogs.

Check it out, a wolf spider. I got the willies just cutting and pasting that horrible image. uggh

Monday, September 27, 2010

Tales of the Nightmare Campout

As I mentioned last night, we ended up camping out both Friday and Saturday night. Camping out is usually fun but it definitely challenges your ability to keep up your personal hygiene, especially with no running water. Two days was enough to make me feel really dirty.

Here was our little set up with the tent and grill...

We did manage to have two culinary feasts despite our limited cooking capabilities. On Friday, we grilled NY strip steaks and zucchini that were downright incredible. Saturday we basically spent the entire day touring the local farmer's markets and came home with a beautiful rainbow trout which we grilled in white wine, lemon, and garlic in a piece of foil, head and all. It tasted like arctic char which was strange but good-strange. It was also sort of fun (in that caveman way that I'm starting to get used to) to just pick it right off the bone. I also made a salad from a variety of small tomatoes including Amish cherry tomatoes, red hots, mini plums, chocolate cherries, and these little yellow guys called Italian Ice that were really good. They were so sweet they tasted like candy so I tossed them with a bunch of garlic, pepper, and fresh basil. Then we threw in some sea salt and fresh mozzarella. Delish. We also grilled some eggplant and garlic, corked a bottle of a nice dry Italian white and devoured it all wholeheartedly. Even Zelda had a good meal with some of the leftover steak from Friday.

After a meal like that, we were pretty much at the point of Food Coma but before we hit the sleeping bags, we decided to go for a night time ride on the scissor lift which lifted us up 20 feet into the air where we could see the stars. It was a really clear night and I told Tim that I honestly hadn't seen that many stars in years. City life definitely blocks that view a bit.

So you're probably thinking to yourself, that doesn't sound like much of a nightmare. In fact, it sounds sort of nice. Very true. That's because I haven't gotten to the horror yet...

After our ride, we came back down and sat in the dark, finishing our wine. It was at this point that Tim decided to talk about The Trespassers again. We have a bit of a trespassing problem, you see. Somebody has been driving around our property in a big truck at night, presumably to joy ride since there's nothing to steal. We keep thinking it's probably just some dumb teenagers
who think it's fun to ride around in our fields in their monster trucks or something. Not scary, right? And yet, the idea of waking up to drunk teenagers running around our property, possibly with guns, is a scary one. It makes me think of that movie The Strangers, a movie that actually scared me and I see tons of horror movies.

The Strangers coupled with my unfortunately vivid imagination led to a night of tossing and turning and thinking that every sound was a killer perched outside the tent with a sledgehammer, just waiting to bash my head in. I also kept thinking about that horrific home invasion story in CT that's in the news every day and was alternatively thinking how sad that poor man must be who lost his wife and daughters, then thinking about how much easier it would be for killers to rape and kill people who aren't even inside a home and are actually just sitting there, totally exposed. Once I calmed myself with the idea that we had a slight advantage over potential killers because we would certainly hear them sneaking up on us by being out in the open, my mind started to drift to fishers.

I'm not sure you know what a fisher is. I didn't until Tim's mom was nice enough to fill me in. They are these nasty creatures that are like part weasel/ part wolf/ part Satan's spawn that are, and I quote, "the only species in the animal kingdom that attack its prey in the face." I love my mother-in-law to death but I really wish she never would have told me that because that phrase kept echoing in my head over and over and over....
the only species in the animal kingdom that attack its prey in the face the only species in the animal kingdom that attack its prey in the face the only species in the animal kingdom that attack its prey in the face

Once I was finally able to let go of that mantra, I found my mind plagued with visuals that were even worse. I even made up this entire horror scenario in my head in which a fisher came and attacked Zelda in the face and I ran out of the tent screaming and crying because my dog's face was all bloody and ripped off and then the fisher jumped at my face and ripped it off and then Tim came out to see what all the noise was about and it ripped his face off as well. Then the three of us were running around blindly in circles screaming and crying and barking with our faces sliding off and oh, it was horrible. I really wish I didn't have thoughts like these.
Needless to say, I didn't sleep a wink the rest of the night. It didn't help when Zelda all of sudden started growling and and then barked her Defensive Bark when she thinks that we are in danger and ran out into the field to chase something. I assume it was not a fisher because she returned with her face fully intact, but whatever it was, it was unsettling.

When the sun finally rose, I think I did a little dance of joy. Daylight is just not scary. And it was back to work! I even climbed up the side of that machine in order to help the team move that cross beam around. And the second I had heavy beams in my hands again, all the nightmares from the night before were forgotten.

Sunday, September 26, 2010

The Table Picture...finally

So, pretty much right after we got on I-78 Friday night, I lost all connection to modern technology and haven't been able to get to this picture until now. Okay, while you can use some technology on the farm, you can't if you forgot to charge your electronics before you leave because as I may have mentioned before, there is NO ELECTRICITY. In case I haven't mentioned that like 700 times. And- we camped out there TWO NIGHTS IN A ROW. Crazy right? I just showered for the first time since Friday morning. Disgusting. But I will go into the campout description, or Tales of the Nightmare Campout as it shall be known, first thing tomorrow morning, don't you worry.

Until then, enjoy the pic of the desk that launched Tim into the finals for Husband of the Year. Please note that the desk will have a glass top but it's currently being cut down to size in Chinatown. It's about 5 feet long. Imagine. And while you're at it, check out Tim's giant Louise Bourgeois-esque Spider sculpture in the background.

G'night

Friday, September 24, 2010

Husband of the Year Nomination

If there is an actual contest for HUSBAND of the YEAR, I would officially like to nominate my husband Tim. Despite the fact that he's generally just a good working and supportive guy, he surprised me with an amazing gift yesterday. I did not deserve nor expect said gift which makes it even more impressive. The background: because I am currently now working from home,as we newly unemployed like to call it,I was offhandedly moaning about how much it sucks to work at the kitchen table- I find myself snacking compulsively and unknowingly. All of a sudden you're writing or on the phone and you find your hand in a bag of pretzels and you're not even sure how you even got to the cupboard.
Irritating thing nĂºmero dos is that the ol' cell service is patchy in the kitchen. I can't take another "what? Lost you there". I really can't. And then there's the dog who I do love having around but all she does when I'm working is mope and sigh and make me feel guilty for not taking her outside every second of the day. Needless to say, I don't get a lot of work done. So I of course blamed the kitchen and said that I was going to buy a desk to put in the spare room. Before I could even get on the bus to Ikea,Tim built me a desk. And an amazing one at that. Check this thing out. Ok I can't figure out how to upload the pic from this stupid new phone. Will do it soon I promise. Til then, you can imagine...

Love love. Husband of the Year, I'm telling you. At least a nominee anyway.

And I just wanted to share that HOTY and I are currently sitting in the most heinous traffic of all time on Broome St on our way to the farm. If I were in the driver's seat like HOTY is right now, I would be road raging and close to murdering an innocent person or traffic cop. He's damn calm though. Just throwing that out there so I can lock down that nom.

Here's to getting to the farm before 3am...

Tuesday, September 21, 2010

Progress Report: A+

I didn’t end up going to the farm at all this weekend because I had to go to a friend’s bachelorette party in the Hamptons. "Had to", I just said. Ha! It was ridiculously fun. We stayed in a giant mansion in Wainscott and did some vineyard tours. Ridiculous. What can I say? I’m lucky. The only thing better than having great friends is having great friends who know extremely rich people.

The long and short of that story is not to brag about my awesome friends but to tell you that when I sat down with Tim last night for dinner, he told me I was way overdue for a blog post. I was like well what the eff am I supposed to blog about? I haven’t been to the farm in two weeks and I really doubt that people want to hear about my weekend of leisure in a 20 million dollar mansion spent laying by the pool(s) and drinking gallons of wine and vodka. And even if they do, I’m not going to go into it because all of my mom’s friends now read this blog and while they drink more than I do on any given celebratory weekend and certainly will not judge, I will lose the ability to call my mom a lush. And that is really important to me.

So we came to the idea of doing a broad stroke progress report. It has been almost a year since we closed on the farm and we thought it would be nice to do a recap of what we’ve accomplished in that time.

Or, if in our findings, it turned out to be disappointing rather than “nice”, we figured it would encourage us to work harder and spend less time in the Hamptons next summer.

We started looking at the gazillions of farm photos on my laptop and realized that our accomplishments actually transcended our expectations. And while we are behind the arbitrary schedule that Tim had set forth last year- he thought we would be done with the first building by September- ha!!!! – it’s not for lack of trying. I think the goal was a tad unrealistic, considering that we went from a pile of mud and trash to an impressive steel structure in 11 months. As a reminder, in said 11 months, we were only working weekends, and with a core crew consisting of weak ol’ me, Tim, and Tim’s parents. So I think we’re doing okay.

On with the show, which I thought would be easiest to demonstrate best in pictures...

This was the beginning. I give us props for being visionaries who were able to see beyond the piles of slop and nastiness. There's a very fine line between being a visionary and being crazy, I realized along the way but I prefer to stick with the latter.

This phase I call the Holy Shit, Whatdidwegetourselvesinto Phase. I’ll never forget one of my father’s first comments as he furrowed his brow and said “I really hope you guys didn’t get yourselves a money pit.” Silly Dad. Money Pit? Ha! Never.



After the building was torn down, we experienced that which I recall most fondly as The Mud Phase. We even had to sweep the mud as you can see here. You may also notice how much Zelda truly despises brooms. (It's one of the many unique features that they didn't mention when we got her.)




Post-Mud Phase came the Draining the 20-Billion Gallons of Mud Phase. I’m not sure that any photo can clearly capture what a pain in the ass it was to dig those drainage holes and put those annoying tubes in them and then cover them with gravel. So I’ll just tell you: it fucking sucked. And I only partook in like ¼ of it.


(Please try to keep the obvious comments about Tim holding a giant dong-like tube between his legs to a minimum. I know it’s not easy.)




Somewhere in the winter, things began to put us all to the mental test. Perhaps for the health of our marriage, we split up zones for a little while when Tim and his father did their own thing down in the mud and I tackled many projects of my own that all turned out to be useless but kept me busy in the freezing cold winter where your options were to either a) do work or b) freeze to death. I call this phase Annie Got Weird with Herself WhileTim Ignored Her. Some of the things that I did that are now either covered with more overgrowth or completely destroyed: weeding, cleaning up the front yard, and moving rocks that may or not be actually classified as boulders.

**Just a friendly reminder that we had no heat, water or electricity during the winter. Just a reminder.

Once winter finally passed, we had a nice pile of rubble to show for all our hard work in the bitter cold. We’ll call it Phase Rubble. Btw, melted snow makes more mud so you may notice that Phase Rubble was framed by the Mud Phase Redux.




And somewhere in the midst of Phase Rubble, we noticed that Tim had a really bad haircut going on. And why was he wearing a XXXXL t-shirt? Good God.

I was laughing really hard at him until I found this picture of myself. Nice dress but what the hell is that thick yellow mop doing on my head? And where is my face? We like to call this phase the Bad Looking Phase. Hopefully we will not revisit it any time soon, but it’s one of those things you don’t realize at the time and then one day you look at an old photo and are like, oh. My. God. Did I even look in the mirror?

If you were somehow able to overlook that mop on my head, you may have noticed the floor. This was the era of the Floor that Changed Everything. The day that floor was finally poured was a momentous one. The floor was white and smooth and gorgeous and it finally felt like, yeah, there could be a building here. I think I even shed a tear.

And then the biggest step of all; the phase I endearingly refer to as The Steel Erection. The first day of erecting steel was the most exciting day of progress on the farm by far. It wasn’t just because there were cranes and half-naked men running around, it was because by the end of the day, we had a structure for a building. Since that day, Tim and I have secretly enjoyed playing House and we walk around it and say here is the kitchen, here is your office, here is the bathroom, etc like total nerds. We also run around and give each other cooties.

And while it’s true that we have been stuck for what seems like months in the Ol’ Filler-In Phase in which we fill in all the cross bars and girders and beams and crap, Tim finally came to his senses and brought his crew down last Friday. They accomplished a great deal of work, including adding on the entire front section as you can see here.

Let’s just say when you bring young, strong men who are accustomed to working with steel and big machines to the site, the process moves a little bit faster than it does when you have the Old Man and the Wife on the job. Shocking, I know.

As I stop and look back at all that we have done, I’m impressed again and again by the fact that Tim even knew how to do all this stuff. I mean, I definitely wouldn’t have known about all that stuff like drainage and pouring concrete and crap. True that while it’s within the realm of what he does for work, this is his first time doing an actual building on his own. Even though I bust on him all the time, I do so with love because my husband is quite something. He really is.


Mad props also to Tim’s father who we nicknamed The Bull because he just works and works and works and doesn’t stop, sometimes with a tad too much tunnel vision. Like a bull in a china shop, he doesn’t notice the fragile stuff around him and totally destroys it quite frequently. Sure, he’s set us back a day or two but he’s set us forward like 20,000 so we just have to zip it and let The Bull be The Bull.




But perhaps most impressive of all, please note how nicely my biceps have come along. That definition is a direct result of lifting steel and digging holes and moving boulders. Coming soon: The Farmgirl Workout


I’m just kidding. No, I'm not.





While my arms do look nice and all, the real hero here is Tim. He didn’t just say he was going to do something, he is doing it and he is doing it not just for himself but for us and for our future. If we weren’t already married, I’d ask him to marry me. I’d be the luckiest girl in the world if he said yes.

Thursday, September 16, 2010

The Wolf Strikes Back

Zelda (we call her The Wolf since she sort of looks like one and we constantly get asked "is that a wolf?") is up to her old tricks again.

A simple, innocent game of fetch turned into a mauled and bloody death war. Okay, not really but look at my bloody finger:



She just gets so excited when she sees a stick that everything else just disappears and she chomps on that thing like there's no tomorrow- if your hand happens to be in the way, too bad...

Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Innings = Chukkers



Tim and I did not do an iota of work on the farm this past weekend. Perhaps that is why I'm so late for the weekend update? The shame has gotten me down? Perhaps, but even though we didn't do any work, we did support a local charity by attending the Bucks County Wine & Polo event on Saturday. And while technically, Pennsylvania is a rival state to New Jersey (*more on that in a minute), Bucks County and Frenchtown, home of the The Farm, are friends. They are good friends indeed.

The Wine & Polo event was held at Tinicum Park in Bucks County, PA where they hold polo matches every Saturday during the summer until mid-October. This particular match was a special one, however, and by special, I mean expensive. 65 bucks per person. Before you choke on your Tuesday night cocktail, let me clarify that by saying that it included a fancy lunch, all the wine you could drink, those nifty wine glasses above, a polo match, and the rest of the money went to the SPCA so it was for a good cause. Oh, and as a special bonus, we were graced with the presence of the incomparable Dianne Wiest, who Tim kept referring to as "the mom from The Lost Boys." I was like, she's also amazing in many other movies including a lot of Woody Allen ones like Hanna and Her Sisters but he was really hooked on The Lost Boys and actually kept referring to her as Mom. Although you can't tell from this picture (too
shy to get any closer), she is a very pretty lady and at age 62, looks like a million bucks. She also seemed like the epitome of normality which is a relief when you meet a lot of fucked up and disappointing-in-real-life actors which I've had the unfortunate opportunity of doing.

But enough about miserable actors and on to the game. It was my very first time attending a polo match and it was incredibly fun. Sure, it's possible that the wine enhanced my excitement, but I am honestly a fan of any sport that not only moves quickly, but requires serious athleticism. I always imagined that polo must be a difficult sport when you consider that before you can even think about hitting that tiny ball, you have to control an animal twice as large as yourself and even if you can control that animal well, there are other large animals running around that you also have to reckon with. Not to mention those mallets are surprisingly small and you can only use your right hand to hold them. It's like playing field hockey on a horse and I sucked really bad at field hockey so I give mad props to those polo players. I can totally see why Ralph Lauren made a logo out of them. Respect.

Some of my favorite things about the game, other than my awe over the physicality of the sport itself, were the fun names and traditions associated with it. As you can see from my heading, those things we call innings in a lot of other sports are called "chukkers" which I definitely thought I misheard the first time the announcer said it. The other thing that was surprisingly fun and something I'd only ever seen in made for British TV movies or read about in Vanity Fair articles, was that whole halftime thing called "stamping the divots" where you go out on the field and push the divots back into the soil.
Tim and I ran out onto the field and stamped like mad. I'm not sure how much I really helped in my high heels, and in looking around at all the little kids out there, I couldn't help but wonder if we didn't actually do more damage than good, but heck, it was fun. (The twisted part of my mind started wondering if anyone ever sabotaged a game by making the divots worse or by putting explosives in the divots but then I remembered that I do not live in a Bruckheimer movie or even something more realistic like Saving Private Ryan and I took it down a notch.)

Under the tent, there was food and wine and white people. We enjoyed many glasses of sauvignon blanc from Cupcake Vineyards and chardonnay from Barefoot Vineyards as well as these delicious mini-cupcakes with icing bones on them. BCSPCA in da house! Also under the tent were a few other random rug merchants pushing their wares. My favorite was the real estate broker with a table set up on behalf of Lisa James Otto, one of the foremost real estate agents in NJ and PA. This gets us to the NJ/ PA rivalry; as I was perusing through some of the LJO catalogues and trying to see if the real estate dude would believe that I could actually afford a home that cost $5 - 10 million (I think he did, sucker), any time he would point to a home that was in New Jersey, he'd be like, "this one is really nice, BUT....it's in New Jersey" and he'd say "New Jersey" as though he were taking a bite out of a shit sandwich. I almost told him that we own a place in New Jersey but decided it would be more fun to just pretend to be rich and shopping for a mansion in Pennsylvania.

Thankfully, right around the same time that the white wine started to taste like headache-inducing syrup, we were in the final chukker and the match was coming to a close. I can't even tell you who won but I think it was the local Tinicum team because there was a lot of cheering but I also think that it was a polite (and drunk) crowd so they would have cheered either way.

Timmy the Whizz surprisingly didn't make an appearance until the very end and we closed out the day with a trip to the port-a-john.





Friday, September 10, 2010

NRA Wine Club update. Great news.


Tim was kind enough to forward me the email from the NRA announcing their wine sale. It's true not only that Timothy loves a good deal, but that NRA members really love wine.

Dear Timothy,

Do you love a good deal? Do you love good wine? If so, this is an offer too good to pass up. Believe it or not, NRA members love wine and we have a great offer for you.

You could stand in front of a wall of confusing wine labels and search for a special selection...

Or you could take me up on my exclusive NRA Wine Club new customer offer (within the next 10 days, please).

A guaranteed-to-please, easy way to enjoy new wines while you blast your shotgun.




Tuesday, September 7, 2010

Labor, Interrupted

I should have known things weren't going to be as bright and sunny as a Tony, Toni, Tone song when I set off to work camp yesterday morning. So naive. You'd think I would know better by now.

Things started off okay as we unpacked and unloaded the machines but when we started trying to figure out how to put up this next set of beams, things started getting tricky. Seems the ol' beam weighed 250 lbs and also didn't seem to fit into the location it was cut for. This led to a bit of tension. And with tension comes irritation. And if you let the irritation grow, next you have bickering. The bickering eventually led to one girl leaving the worksite completely, headed for the hills, destined to never return. She would instead start a life on the road, alone, eventuallly ending up on a beautiful deserted tropical island where she could spend the second half of her life discovering edible flowers and making skirts out of dried seaweed and crabgrass. The key word here being alone. She was very excited at the prospect of never having to talk to another human ever again except possibly through her blog which she would somehow find a way to continue, perhaps by carving posts into the side of a tree with a conch shell. What would drive a girl to want to leave society altogether, you might be wondering? A grinding wheel is the answer.

We were having a hard time fitting this heavy piece of steel into the slot that it was designed to fit into. If you've ever had to move out of your home or apt and opted to do it the cheap way (i.e. yourself), it was like trying to fit a sofa through a doorway that is just too small, but there is no way in hell you're giving up because that sofa was expensive and you just know it will fit if you turn it at the right angle. I can tell you right now that there is no way this metaphorical sofa was going to fit. And I expressed that to Cheech and Chong who chose to just ignore me for an hour while turning it this way and that way as the hot sun beat down on us. After an hour of these shenanigans, Chong finally suggested exactly what I had been suggesting all along which was to cut a hole in one of the non-structural beams so that they could slide it in. This was the only way it would work and that was clear from the beginning but some times people think that girls are stupid and they just ignore them. A mistake since the beginning of time really.

In order to cut the beam, Chong, needed a machine with a sharp blade. He had the machine nearby but asked me to go get the blade out of the barn. Chong is usally very bad about his instructions but this time he was actually very specific and said "it's in the Metabo box. I need a grinding blade, larger than this one [shows me blade] but the same shape. A grinding blade." I was like okay and headed off to the barn where I found the Metabo box and the blades. The blades were labeled and it was weird but none of the grinding blades looked anything like the blade he showed me, so I grabbed a few of them, thinking that it had to be one of them and brought them back down to the site. Oh boy, let me just tell you about the verbal explosions. Chong went off on this tangent about how I never listen and he knew I would get the wrong blade and he didn't ask for a grinding blade, he asked for a cutting blade (not true) until the point that I just lost and said F you, I don't want to help any more and walked away.

I grabbed my backpack, stuffed my money and a Vitamin Water Zero into it, and headed off on the 10 mile walk to town. It was on this walk that I came up with my elaborate deserted island fantasy. I was totally immeresed in that world when my phone rang, 3-4 miles in, interrupting my dreams and happiness. I knew it was Chong calling so I didn't answer. But then it rang again and again and again and I finally accepted that my island trip was going to be ruined by my husband who wanted me to come back. I finally answered and said "I'm not turning back" and hung up but then he just drove after me and found me on the side of Route 519, sweating. I didn't want to go back at all but he made me feel guilty because his mom and dad and a close family friend bought us lunch so I reluctantly got in. I made sure that Chong knew that I wasn't doing it for him though. He said, I know. I'm sorry. I said "I'm sitting in the back seat" and I watched my island dreams float away into farm land and I found my way back home, like it or not. That Chong can be such a jerk some times.

Monday, September 6, 2010

Labor, Labour, Labre

You like that title? It's in honor of Tony, Toni, Tone although much like the third Tone with the accent over the "e", I don't think that the third spelling of labor is a widely recognized one. 
Wait, no this post was supposed to be in honor of Labor Day. That's right. I mean, "labor" is in the title of the blog and is the bane of my existence and it's Labor Day, and in the absence of actually having a job (also labor related), I figured I had plenty of time to reflect on the meanings of labor. It was all triggered last week when I was at the dentist's office (using up my last chance at affordable health care since my insurance expires at the end of the month- also labor related), and my chatty hygienist went into a long shpiel about how Labor Day got its name. She explained that back when New York City was just a lot of open land, the children stayed home from school to help their parents prep for the fall harvest so Labor Day was actually day of working the fields, planting, and crap. I couldn't find any actual proof to back this up as historically accurate, but it certainly sounds like a reasonable story so I chose to believe it. 

I really enjoyed her story because it made me feel good to know that there were children out suffering out on their farms, breaking their backs, much like I will in just a few minutes. (Tim is literally reading this over my shoulder and trying to rush me. What? You are!) Although we won't be planting stuff, but I will be doing a lot of hard labor which brings me to the latest recap. 

Yesterday we put up all those steel cross beam thingees. 
I believe they are called girders. The process basically entails lifting those beams off the ground and up over onto the platform. From there, we load them onto that blue machine, and then lift them up into the air and line them up over the little pieces they fit into, then bolt them in. It's a lot harder than I just made that sound and the fact that our little ragtag team did an entire row yesterday is sort of impressive, especially when you're considering how weak I am and how old Tim's Dad is (haha, I love you Dean). 
As you can see in this photo, the real foreman is Zelda. Seriously, she never leaves Tim's side. It's almost sort of sad. We have 24 acres of land for her to run around on but she just sits there, doting. Anyway, I am literally getting yelled at right now so I have to go. We have a lot of pole thingees to put up.

Thursday, September 2, 2010

Mail Keeps Gettin Stranger


From COUNTRY WOMAN magazine to the handwritten Kitten Murderer note to the NRA catalogue, ever since we bought the farm, the mail just keeps getting stranger. And now it has even started to hit our Manhattan apartment. I just checked the mailbox downstairs and in addition to the usual mix of parking tickets and bills, I found SCHNEIDERS: VALUE PRICED HORSE SUPPLIES SINCE 1948. Thank God it finally arrived! I haven't been able to sleep knowing that the annual Dura-nylon Ocala Legstrap Blankets sale was coming up. (The cover really does boast "Warm Winter Fashion".)

Ok, I shouldn't poke fun because I'm sure that dura-nylon and ocala mean something important to somebody, somewhere. I just never expected a magazine that specializes in horse attire to ever be addressed to me.
It's not like it was a generic catalog that could have been passed off to "current resident". Nope, it is a very specific catalogue with my name on it. I mean, I like horses as much as the next guy. They're nice to look at and seem like pleasant creatures. I've just never really had anything to do with them so it's baffling to me that I have officially been recognized by the leading carrier of horse supplies and the US Postal Service as a person who likes horses enough to want catalogs full of mane brushes and equine bathing systems. I'm sorry, but I'd rather get the fall Saks catalog (for humans).


Wednesday, September 1, 2010

Zelda: First Blood

Zelda drew first blood last night when we were playing fetch. I really shouldn't be surprised since she has razorsharp teeth like a werewolf but I was still surprised when I saw the blood oozing out of my pointer finger and then, ouch, under my pinkie nail which had turned red with blood. Guess a tooth got under it somehow. Oh yeah, it hurts. In fact, typing this is semi painful but it's a momentous occasion that I survived and will learn from: you don't play fetch with a crazy German Shepherd whilst chatting on the phone to your friend otherwise your hand might get ripped off.

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