2013 Missouri Vacation

Earlier this summer, Herself came out of the house while I'm building the fence around the "back 40" and tells me she wants a pop up camper so that we can go camping.  She makes a convincing argument; togetherness time for our "tween" girls and younger boys, and both of us really feeling like we have this really brief window in time with these kids- and that window was wide open, but wouldn't be for long.  (Since this conversation we have really had some paradigm shifts in parenting- maybe more on that later)  Herself thought that camping trips would be a good way of doing that.  Neither of us are wild about sleeping on the ground or a tent, so that is what I wound up getting. An older, used Pop-up camper.

 So, we left Sunday morning and headed to The Lake of the Ozarks for a little summer vacation.   We had never been before; Herself, of course, did her usual vast amount of research and preparation, ready to eat meals, agenda, itinerary, scheduling, etc, etc.  So maybe I feel a little guilty about it, but my preparations involving this vacation can be boiled down to this: I bought the camper, then I hooked up to the camper when it was time to leave.  Oh, and yeah, I carried some stuff to the truck...  It is such a blessing to be married to a VERY well organized person!  We lacked nothing, save her camera, which seems to be her only Achilles Heel.  So all camera shots are with phone camera. (It always makes mad to not have her camera)

Anyway, we made it safely with camper trailer to Lake of the Ozarks State Park, on the East and southish side of the lake.  If you haven't ever seen it, Google it, its kind of amazing.  Of course it isn't natural, it was a river dammed up in the late 20's, covering up and destroying dozens of tiny towns, and according to one local, 720 different cemeteries. It powers a hydro electric plant, so of course we had to go check that out!

It wasn't all just field trip for daddy, though.  We did fun stuff for everybody.  We visited some amazing Ozark caverns, (couldn't take our camera in; dumb bats!) We did some shopping at some tourist traps,

and we went to a movie (at the theater!!!) Monster's University, the prequel to Monsters inc.

And of course, we did a lot of swimming, the water was great! refreshing but not too cold.

And we spend a lot of time at the camp, cooking, eating, etc.

One other high-light was we went over these 2 "swinging bridges".  They were really old; the first one was made with 2x6's with 1x12's laid down where the tires were supposed to go.  It was really scary and intense, I told the kids that I wouldn't have done that in any other country but the USA, as it looked totally unreliable.    It was also quite noisy; the growling and groaning of the boards was quite disconcerting.  The second one was way worse; it was shorter and gave the appearance of looking stouter.  As I began to drive across it, I said "oh, this one is steel structured", but nope!  It just had roofing panels laid perpendicularly across it!  That one really popped and squawked!! It was soo loud outside the truck, but inside?  Deathly quiet!!

That was our trip in a nutshell. It was a quick one, and it does seem like it was quite abbreviated, but I need to ease into these changes slowly.  I don't get off the farmlet very often, and its kind of hard to get away from my livestock.

Here are some more random pictures:

LOTS of pictures of Mr. Take My Picture Daddy, Please.

Take my Picture, Daddy Please, again.

Summertime is upon us.

So Herself was busting my chops yesterday about not blogging; like so much of my life, I do it in bursts, rather than slow and steadily. We have had  quite a few changes around here since I blogged last, and I do need to catch up with chronicling some things.  Right before Jonathon and Michaela returned to China, Jonathon and I decided that I just needed to take the plunge and get some sheep.  That's fine and all, but what are sheep without fence? Somebody else's sheep, that's what.  So Jonathon and I proceed to create fence around the "back 40" of our place.  It was really fun to show Jonathon all the details of building fence that I learned as a boy: making (the visible part at least) really straight, posts uniform distance apart, and the same height, and actual fencing nice and tight. Oh, and corner posts really strong.  All of this was pretty foreign to him culturally, but made perfect sense to his personality.  He really got into it.  Unfortunately, we only got about 1/10th of it done while he was here; unfortunately for him, and unfortunately for me, as well.

Anyway, I got it done by myself; well, I had a lot of help from my kids.  Wifey encouraged me to take the kids with me, and I sort of thought that they wouldn't be that much help to build fence, but I was really amazed at how much help they really were to just have around.  That, and I have always found my own company exceedingly boring, so its always nice to have company.  But I got it completed after several weeks of obsessing about it every evening and all weekend long, and brought home 2 meat sheep that I bought from a friend.  I just bought what she had; one Katahdin, and one Dorper, both ewes. Then last week I threw the family in the truck and ran down to Ark City and bought a pair of lambs, one ewe lamb, and one Ram lamb; they are called Painted Desert Sheep. Here is a picture of my lamb's sire:

The coloration is different; mine is nearly all black, but the horn structure is what is impressive, so I thought I should show a picture of what he will look like rather than what he does look like.  The DPS's are also a hair sheep, so they don't need sheared, same as my other sheep. They are a meat sheep as well.

This weekend, I put a small gate into the back pasture area from the chicken pen so that the chickens could get out and forage in the pasture.  I always liked the idea of free range chickens, because it truly changes the taste and color of the eggs, but Herself has always been opposed to chicken poop all over the sidewalks and porches, (me too, actually) but couldn't bring myself to build pasture fence just for chickens, now they have it! They are really tearing up the bugs and greenery and loving it!

I was thinking about how hands off the sheep are; I don't need to feed them at all, when I got to thinking that I will have to feed them over the winter when all the weeds and grasses are dormant.  So I was considering planting a little area of wheat so that they can pasture it off in the winter and reduce my out-of-pocket expenses.  I had about given up on the idea, because I don't have the equipment to till the soil of that large of an area, nor do I have the motivation to till it with my rototiller or shovel, when I remembered that I have 5 little tilling machines!

They don't look like super motivated farm workers; I realize that.  But when I had them in my garden prior to planting it, they were sure little tilling machines! I've sectioned an area off and fenced it; but I really feel like I need a super duper good fencer to make sure they don't wander off into the neighbor's pasture, so I'm waiting to heal up a little from buying all the sheep before I make another farm oriented purchase before I turn them loose in my new little area. I think it will work out well; one doesn't plant wheat or rye until the fall, and I usually butcher the hogs around October, so it seems like it will work out swimmingly.  I am really interested in this concept of pasturing hogs, I could see this going somewhere.

The oldest boy is interested in turkeys; tonight we're going to do a little research to see which breed would be best fitted for our farmlet.

Oh, and by the way, the last batch of Root Beer turned out great!

burn out

The strangest thing happened to me this morning; I woke up about 3:00 am (this is not the strange part) and was thinking about what I was going to do around the farm today. Then I realized that I was mistaken and that I thought today was Saturday, but was actually Friday.  When I realized that, I really was discouraged about going in to work.  That is the strange part.  I never don't want to go in to work.  Its not that I always want to do everything that I do at work, and its not like I don't love my time off, but over all, I love what I do.  I think that this was the first time that I actually did not want to go to work just as an over all feeling in the nearly 5 years that I have owned my own business (or businesses).
In my Sunday School class, we have been talking about Christian disciplines.  Oddly enough, writing a journal was the first on the list.  That seems strange to me; I guess I can see the merit in it, but when I think of Christian disciplines, I think of things listed in the Bible like fasting, regular prayer, meeting regularly with the saints, etc.  But whatever, my blog needs some attention anyway, and I can't stand to pick up a pen and move it around at a snails pace, so I guess this morning I will use this as my format, and journal about my work discouragement.  So here is my analysis:

Work:
I push myself pretty hard. That's how things get done, is by me pushing. I don't push hard all the time, all day long, and I don't feel like a work-a-holic or anything; in 5 years, I've only worked one or two Saturday mornings, never on Sunday, and I'm home by 5:30 or my wife knows about it by 5:00. Its true that I go in pretty early some days, and catch up on office stuff, but I figure on days like today that I am up anyway, it doesn't even count as time away from my family.  If they are all asleep, what difference does it make?  But anyway, it feels like I seldom turn down a job or a responsibility.  I am not at all opposed to delegating, and have excellent people to delegate to; but feel like if I have a few days that all my responsibilities come home at once to roost, it is really over whelming!  I guess that was what yesterday was about.  Thursday, I personally dealt with: gutters, gutter covers, fascia repair soffit covers, window well covers, siding, screen replacement, patio covers, bidding large commercial awnings, pouring small concrete footings, window replacements, and then on the roofing end of it we had to deal with a standing seam metal roof, asphalt shingles, structural metal panels skylight panels, and perhaps worst of all: helpless, hapless insurance adjusters that want to argue about details of an upper-end "designer" metal shingle that they admittedly don't know anything about, but still argue when you answer their questions of "how did you come up with this number" with the statement "I know this because I was on the roof the LAST TIME THIS STINKING ROOF WAS DONE!!!" THAT'S HOW I KNOW IT, how many of these $900.00 per square roofs have you installed?  Its a little different when you're standing on the roof doing it than reading about it." (I didn't really say all that last part). Anyway, the list goes on: then body shop stuff, whether to advertise or not, and a firearm transfer... is that all? Man, I'm already tired.  I guess on top of all this is maybe since Gary has been gone so much lately.  I kind of feel like he doesn't have that much involvement in anything but his newest business, but maybe in his absence I've come to the realization that he does more than I think?

Home:
Home is generally much simpler, much easier.  However in the last couple of weeks, I've been pushing pretty hard here too.  I've been building fence like a fiend, cause the sheep were coming, whether the fence was done or not.  Evenings and all weekends, after doing all the chores of the existing livestock (I don't do the rabbits); the good part of this is that thanks to Wifey, I've realized how much help my kids can be; if they are just outside with me and willing to help.  So building fence a planning the next project,  the back porch or deck area.  We have live here for around 7 years using a rickety trailer house style portable stairs to access the back door.  Well, mama's gonna get a new deck!  Maybe.  We will see how much it costs.  I bought a pop up camper to go on vacation, I need to take the time to mess with it and see what needs done to it before we leave with it.

The main thing is this; none of this normally feels like work to me.  I don't feel really ambitious or like I want to take over the world or anything (necessarily, I mean, I would be fine with that...) its just that, firstly, I thrill at getting things done, finishing things, and taking on new challenges, and secondly, have really been forced to diversify my company/companies in order to keep things going as our economy drooped and insurance work dried up.