Can you smell the bacon...

I guess it's time I came out to the closet. I got caught anyway last week, so what's the point? The one thing my dad was most afraid of hearing from one of his boys: "Dad, I wanna raise pigs" BOOM, there it is; the bombshell. Yup, there I was, at Orsheln's Farm and Home store last wed. buying hog panels, and who do I run into? My own parents... I was soooo embarrassed; what are the odds? I should have known to go to a store in a different city, or even a different state!

I know, I know. This probably is wholly unremarkable if you didn't grow up in the same household as me, but I gotta say it out loud: "I like pork!" This is despite my parents best efforts to keep kosher. Not really, actually the conversation went like this: (imagine a squeaky-voiced pre-pubescent little Dan'el speaking here) "why don't we eat pork, Daddy?" Dad: "We don't EAT pork because we don't RAISE pork. We EAT beef because we RAISE beef." Makes sense, I guess, but raising beef is a lot larger project for me to jump into, so for a much smaller amount of money, I can be pretty well set up with a little hog pen, and seeing how hogs are omnivores, much as humans are, only less picky, I can feed them all my zucchini, squash, pumpkins, okra, and table scraps etc, etc, that doesn't get eaten around here, since even the chickens can't keep up with me in the summer months.

I had planned on planting tall, covering grassing in front of my pig-pen, hoping that no one would notice it, but there is no point now. Anyway, the pen is nearly finished and here is a picture of it.

Everyone that I have talked to says that pigs are nearly impossible to keep in, so I tried for a piggy-proof fence, but we will just see I guess. I buried the bond-beam blocks halfway into the ground, then set the panels into the "well" of the block, then drove the T-post through the bottom of the block. I dunno... Its my own design, maybe it will, maybe it won't. ALL of my knowledge of swine came from books, which is the worst possible kind of knowledge, as it leads to a false sense of acumen.

I had one friend describe to me in great detail what he predicted would happen. He claimed that before my 2 pigs achieved 50 #'s that I would shoot them both after chasing them around the yard after they escaped, (he had spent some time chasing pigs as a youth, and claims knowledge of my general temperament...) which brings me to another point: I am interested in pig stories; if any of you have them; funny is good, but not required. I don't know very many people who have pigs, or had them growing up, but a lot of people had grandparents that had them, so if you have stories, just click on the "comments" button and share. (Dad, I wanna hear your sow/chicken story too!)

In other news around the Foster Farmlet/Soon-to-be-RANCHLET, construction of my shed is crawling along at a snail's pace, mostly due to inclimate weather, and perhaps, some slothfulness on my part. However, I am pleased that we got the south half of the roof on Saturday.

Here is a before shot:

and after Saturday:

But anyway, if you have pig stories, I would like to hear them... Can you smell the bacon? I know I can! Oh- and I asked Emma what she thought about butchering our pigs. Her response? "Kinda sad, but REALLY yummy!!" giggle...

One of many reasons I'm glad I know Jesus...

So I had an interesting experience in customer relations today; there was a guy for whom we guttered a very large hay shed that was a very aggressive, foul-mouthed, belligerent fellow who complained greatly about everyone involved in the process of building his shed. I was a little worried about working for someone who so easily found fault in apparently everyone that walks onto his farm, but as the cold winter waxes on, I become less picky.
Anyway, we gutter his building last week, and then I send him a bill. He calls Tuesday and wants to talk to me, right? He tells Marcine that she wont do, he HAS to talk to Dan, so she leaves me the message. I'm very busy, and it's quite easy to duck returning his phone call, even though she tells me that he sounded irate-maybe because he sounded irate. Generally, I have a policy about not being a coward when it comes to belligerent jerks on the phone, but I did have a lot of irons in the fire at the time (more on that in an upcoming blog, I hope- "Can You Smell The Bacon?") Anyway, I didn't call him back yesterday; so he is persistent; he calls again when I wasn't in the office. So, defeated, I call him back this morning and he really opened up on me right off the bat:
Him: (I'm doing a lot of editing out of very obscene language here-even if it doesn't look like it) "You don't answer phone calls worth a ****, do you?"
Me: "Very sorry, Ive been quite busy, sir"
Him: "You know, dumb-***, you could give the phone to yer secretary and and she could punch the numbers for you if you ain't smart enough to figure it out on yer own..."
Me: (pinking up considerably) "yes, she's quite clever enough for that-she's a big help"
Him: "Everyone else in the world likes to call you and complain about how crappy your work is and I'm no different so I wanted you to listen to me for a bit while I tell you how it is..."
Me: (quite red by now, I'm sure -and I can actually see my own pulse in little shock-waves around my peripheral vision, not to mention how well I can hear it in my ears) "What can I do for you today, sir?"
Him: "My wife asked me what I thought about the gutter job you did for me and I'm gonna tell you the same blankity-blank thing I told my blankity-blank wife: Since day one of this whole building process, I feel like every contractor out here has lied to me, tried to cheat me, and just done crappy work in general and I am just sick and tired of taking it!!!"
Me: (to myself: "Lord help me not say something I will instantly, soonly, or eventually regret" but out loud:) "YES?"
Him: "until you guys came out here and did your guttering... that's the first time I felt like someone did what they said they would, how they said they would, when they said they would!"
Me: "Um..."
Him: "You there?"
Me: "Um, yes... And?
Him: "that's all I wanted to say; Bye" -Click

By this time I was left holding a phone without a connection with a pulse at about 200 and all kinds of adrenaline and a red face still to boot. Its easy to laugh about now, but that old Vietnam vet/farmer knew just exactly how far to push me, apparently; cause he took me right to the edge, then yanked me back again. I think of how things might have wound up if I went ahead and spoke my mind from the start, but whatever.

Here are a few words from Solomon that we have been studying:

"...I know that it will be well for those who fear God, and fear Him openly" http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=ec%208:12&version=NASB, which is the only reason for me to hold my tongue, since for a while I figured that there was no way I was going to get paid.

and even though that may not have been it his point exactly, it held true in this one case for me.
Oh, and by the way; don't get the idea that I think i am a righteous man who never sins ... Ec 7:20: "Indeed, there is not a righteous man on earth who continually does good and who never sins".
It just happened to work out this time that I thought of the verse: Ec 7:9: "Do not be eager in your heart to be angry, For anger resides in the bosom of fools."

The point is this: in my own life, I definitely see the immediate positive aspect of being a believer, because I tried it without; and it wasn't pretty.

Note: My wife suspects that all the quiet hours on a tractor causes farmers to dream up ways to irritate gutter guys. I drove all the way to 4 miles north of Lyons to "remeasure" an estimate because his calculations were different than mine. He was right... it saved him $7.00, and cost me an extra $50.00 worth of gas. I wanna be a farmer when I grow up...

Stu-Jack (as we call him, for some unknown reason) is always looking for the answers to life's persistent questions... I'm sure that with his dizzying intellect and analytical mind, he'll be a great philosopher some day, no doubt teaching ethics in some Ivy League college. Either that, or he will just grow up to be construction trash like his daddy.

on fecklessness...

so there is this old joke it goes like this (most of you have heard it, I'm sure, but it does bear a point):

Small town cafe, same crowd sitting around every day, and a regular brings in a friend from out of town. Everyone is sitting around talking, when someone speaks up and says loudly, "Number 27!" Everyone laughs uproariously. The stranger looks perplexed. Pretty soon someone else speaks up and says, "Number 104!" Again, everyone laughs. Finally the stranger asks his friend who is a local what the deal is. He replies: "The jokes around here are so old that we just give them numbers, so it saves a lot of time telling them. Everybody knows the joke by the number". The out-of-towner thinks he will give it a shot. He calls out, "number 87!" All you can hear are crickets chirping; no one laughs. He whispers, "is #87 not a very funny joke?" His embarrassed friend replies, "Its not the joke; its how you tell it!"

Which brings me to my point this morning. I was in the boys' room the other morning as Isaiah was doing his daily "chores" which pretty much consist of cleaning up his room. He asked me if I had chores when I was a boy, and I told him that I did. He says "did you have to clean up your room?" I told him no, and as I was gathering my thoughts about how to best describe all the terrible hardships of the gruesome chores that I was required to do, (nearly from birth, of course) and how to describe the burden of carrying up to 30 5 gallon buckets heaping with feed to the calves, morning and night, every day, mostly in the dark, he interrupted my thoughts and said, "Oh, well if you did have to clean up your room when you were boy, I bet it would have been a really, really, really, REALLY big room, with lots of toys, so it would have been REALLY hard, huh, dad?"

Apparently, he has heard some semblance of the tale of my youth. He really took the wind out of my sails, I just said "yup" and left it at that... from now on, I'll just refer to the story of my chores as "Story #1"

dallas

So Wifey and I went to Dallas a week or so ago for a long weekend to celebrate our 10th anniversary, and to see friends Jeremy and Grace Goering. We had a great time, but I have to say that the highlight of the trip wasn't eating out at fun new places, nor was it seeing old friends, nor was it any of the many exciting things that people generally do in Dallas; it was seeing the quite flustered faces of ALL the employees of the quite swanky hotel (the Stoneleigh Hotel) we stayed at, where the valet parking is mandatory (snobs) when they finally broke down and admitted that they could not find my truck keys. Aaaa-hahahahaha!

I had no idea that this place had the mandatory valet service when I booked it through expedia; using my credit card miles, nor was I aware that they would charge me 21.00 a night for the privilege of not having to walk 20' outside the hotel and open my own door. Money well spent, I'm sure. But after I casually dropped it to the hotel manager that the poor chumps couldn't find my keys, (I wish I had video of the blank look, the widening of the eyes, then the flush coming to his cheeks) he solicitously offered us a ride, then a hotel car, then to buy us breakfast at the also very swanky restaurant, and then tore off to presumably chew some butt, vowing "to bring in the guys working late last night and search through every vehicle, one by one" . We gracefully accepted breakfast; (even the wait-staff at breakfast were profusely apologizing, as if they personally felt guilty) that's all we were gonna go do anyway, and the short way of finishing the story is that they finally found them- 2 hours later! And man, were there some red faces! I wasn't mad, I wasn't even upset- they knocked off 2 nights of the Valet charges, we got a free $50.00 breakfast, and I wasn't ever even worried that one of the night shift valets decided to make off with my '07 GMC pickup, rather than steal one of the many Mercedes, Caddies, or Bentleys.

They never did tell me where they had been, or what happened to them; even when I directly asked, but I did put my hand on the shoulder of the guy who lost my keys and asked kinda quiet like: "So level with me- what kind of tip does it take to get my keys back the next morning?" I had to rub it in just a little... Here are a few pictures of some fun we had:

The Girlz: doin' what they love most- LOOKING at stuff

Uncle Dan and Cutie-Cakes-Caris

Brynn admiring an original Mary Cassat painting, one of her favorite artists; we have several of these at our house (um, rather prints, actually, of course)

i'mmmm baaaackkkkk!

For those of you who knew that we were gone, we're back now. If you didn't know that we were gone, we loaded up truck and camper trailer and went to Colorado Springs for a long weekend and also to Denver for me to get LASICs surgery, since it is less than half the price that the monopoly of Greene vision charges in Wichita. Anyway, after watching the hot-air balloon races early this morning, and driving about 9 hours (in 1.5 hour intervals between shouts of "Daddy I got to go potty BAAADDDD!") my fixed eyeballs are about shot, so this may be the shortest blog ever... Goodnight!
P.S. everything went well, but I did dislike the snapping and crackling of the lasers, followed by the smell of burning flesh. Other than that, it was a piece of cake. I do have to tell that they gave me a stuffed animal in the shape of a pig to hold during the surgery, and I asked the surgeon if it was kosher, 'cause I was an Orthodox Jew. After about 5 seconds of awkward silence, I chickened out and told him I was kidding. He breathed a sigh of relief and told me that he at least had it dry-cleaned weekly, but was unsure if that qualified as kosher; so since it was Friday, I threw it on the floor; its getting washed anyway, right?

one last Ozark Adventure posting

I really waffled back and forth about using this, but I really can't help myself, maybe the realization that I am now "socially disadvantaged" made me do it, but this is gonna be a real short one. I just can't figure it out; I've never seen anything like this in Kansas. Maybe the culling process was out of order at the Missouri Department of Tags, or maybe unlike here at the Reno County Courthouse, someone actually has something of a sense of humor.

Anyway, you should have seen the hubbub in the pickup when I saw this in front of me, desperately trying to claw the camera out while staying on the road. I would stand in line all day if I thought I could get this tag: it was my nickname from my family for most of my formative years (might explain a lot) So here it is: