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It’s that time of year again for the first time. Farm Retribution is our first Retribution held at the new place. Sam Goodenough, the excellent contractor doing the roof and siding, has been delayed by rain lately, so the siding won’t be quite done by Saturday’s big bash. I personally have been waylaid by poison ivy and a summer cold so the grounds won’t quite be finished, but then life progresses in fits and starts.

For those unfamiliar with the Retribution tradition, the name has long roots among our circle of friends going all the way back to 1995 (or 96, depending on who you ask).  We started with Ribs in March (always a great time to barbeque in Chicago!) and added Steak in November (always a great time to barbeque in Chicago!) a year or so later. Like the slow tolling of a church bell, our lives have been punctuated by a wonderful gathering of friends every six months for the last 12 years.

Thus, this year we launch Farm Retribution. We moved the date up from November so that folks could travel over from Chicago and not have to hurry back. Also, I don’t expect to be able to accomodate everyone indoors until I finish the back two rooms of the house, so we need to have nice weather for the party. We’ll still give out lousy doorprizes. We’ll still thank the women who love and tolerate us. We just won’t say that we’re “closing out the barbeque season.”

In a diconnected digital age, sometimes it’s good to do something simple and analog. Eat good food. Drink good drinks. Have a conversation with an old friend around the grill. Watch the sunset. Go home with a glow on your face and a silly doorprize in your coat pocket.

Have a great Labor Day! Remember that unless you own a company, you are Labor, so hoist a drink to yourself, the working schmo. We’ll hoist one for you, too. And then I’ve gotta get back to the grill and turn the chicken.

I normally save the deep stuff for Sunday posts when I theoretically have more time to expound, but we have a big party to plan for an dI have to rip out carpet, haul firewood, and all sorts of other fun tasks. At the end of these endeavors, I probably won’t be up for a lot of expounding.

Which is a thought that has me chasing my own tail a lot this week. I’m so busy doing that I don’t have time to reflect on the meaning. My good friend Steve says, “Welcome to the agrarian lifestyle.” Thanks, Steve. Think of me walking the fence in 101 degree heat and and I promise to think of you fighting with actuaries over the I.T. department’s quarterly goals.

Of course, he’s implying that the labor itensive lifestyle I’ve chosen has lack of self-reflection as an inherent drawback/feature. He may be right, but it’s not just farm life. I remember being single and wondering how married people stayed married. I had so much time to contemplate my navel when I was single that I figured that married people must be able to turn off part of their brains. Otherwise, how could they stay with one person FOREVER? How could they not analyze the faults of the other person ad nauseum.
Ha ha. Hi Cath. Glad you’re not reading this over my shoulder. The truth though is that married people don’t shut off part of their brains, they’re just not staring at their navels asking themselves what’s next? Or, am I happy? (Note: I’m generalizing. If you’re unhappily married, write a letter to Dear Abby or Dan Savage.) You just don’t have the time. Later, once you’ve adjusted to this, you have kids. You rarely pause and think about the grand strategy of raising your children or the colossal changes you’re going through. You just do it. No time to think. Birth. School. Work. Death, don’tcha know?

You can tell I had to much time alone in the car coming back from GenCon.

Now that I’m married- with Kids… and a farm… I have pared back hobbies and things like cable television to a minimum and I still find it hard to find time to reflect on the massive changes I’m putting myself and my family through. Maybe that’s a good thing. The way mothers seem to blot out the pain memory of child birth. Cath remembers though. I hear about it all the time. Maybe she’s not busy enough.

In any case, if you’re too busy working to think about where that work is taking you, is that acceptable? Sometimes, yes. I thought about this year on the treadmill at the Irving Park YMCA for the last 6 months of last year. Alot. Maybe once we commit to a course its ok not to constantly examine whether its the right one. I knew that moving to the country and learning to farm would be a multiyear project.
I’m a big believer in taking time out to sharpen your axe (or lawn mower blades, as the case may be). After I write this I’m going to kick back and read rules for BattleTech. I won’t play it for 2 years, but if I read one more thing about chickens I’ll go batty. The point is that you if you’re always sharpening your axe you don’t get any chopping done. Sometimes, maybe a long time between the ages of 30 and 60, you spend alot of time chopping.

Think about that the next time you have 5 hours alone in the car.

This is Yaro. She’s looking a bit bedraggled because of the rain and her hooves need a trim but she’s a real sweetie. Being unregistered she is, alas, a member of the cow proletariat, doomed to produce calves for beef only. Blossom, as befits her demeanor, is cow royalty – registered and with papers to prove her bloodline.

Now we have one white and one red cow. This is so city folks can tell them apart without working too hard.

I’m cutting firewood and repairing electric fence while Cath lounges about in air conditioned IMAX theaters watching beaver movies. Probably not the kind I’d want to see, but she’s still getting the better end of the deal. Maybe I can talk her into getting me some Long John Silver’s on the way back from Cinci… Have a good weekend.

Come for the cow pix, stay for the rant about Nature below!

I heard about a T-shirt the other day that posed the question, “What Would Nature Do?”. It occured to me that Nature would kick my ass and not think twice about it and that maybe this wasn’t a question I’d want most people to ask themselves on most daily matters. If Nature saw a wallet lying on the pavement, it’d take all the cash and credit cards, then wear the rest of it as a hat. The first is because Nature is quick to seize an easy opportunity. The second because how else do you explain the platypus?

Nature is an insanely complex system. In the end though, despite a list of variables that would make a sane programmer cry, it’s an amazingly consistent, self regulating system. You can say what you want about James Lovelock, but the planet’s ecosystem is an amazing example of a self-regulating system.

Which is why I drive a diesel sedan, a 5.7 liter V8 pickup truck, and burn wood and propane to heat my house. I mean, who wouldn’t want to dick about with a system like that? It’ll sure be cool to watch when the wheels come off THAT trolley! Ask any first year Georgia Tech student: heat in gets you heat out; garbage in garbage out; I don’t feel well after eating at the Varsity. The last one doesn’t help us here, but you ask a first year Techie, and you’ll get that answer at least once.

Remember when you were a kid (parents: remember last weekend) when you (or your kids) would play with something til you broke it? How far will this rubber band stretch before it snaps and takes my eye out? How hard can I squeeze this balloon? Or maybe you were the type to stir up an ant hill just to see if they rebuilt it. How bad will nature react to our stirring of the anthill? Will it rebuild the anthill like it was? Will I be alive to care? All good questions.

What Would Nature Do if you pumped a zillion tons of warming gasses into the atmosphere? My guess is that it would heat up. Just a thought there. I didn’t need the National Academy of Sciences to work that out. If you’re a pagan follower of Gaia Theory you might say that Gaia was creating a fever to rid itself of an infection, like any living being. I’d say that’s bad science, but a great analogy.

Nature doesn’t turn the other cheek. It’s a system. It reacts to input like any other system. It takes massive inputs to get a reaction. Maybe it wasn’t you Chester Johnson of 1398 Line Drive who’s morning commute caused Hurricane Katrina, but 200 years of inputs surely seems to be adding up. It’s like a kid with a balloon. He can squeeze all he wants – up to a point. Then the balloon explodes and makes him cry. The system absorbed as much input as it could then reacted logically.

So lets not ask what nature would do as a daily moral compass. There’s a long list of people/beings you might ask instead. Budda, Jesus, Jim Foley. Asking nature might be like asking Dick Cheney. You’d get a snarl, a profanity, and a drunken shotgun blast to the face.

(Note: While Ben recovers from his visit to GenCon, Cath is posting some thoughts on cows. Once Ben recovers from his game convention induced catatonia, he’ll be posting about cows. Just can’t get enough cow posts around here, eh?)

Last Friday night I went to feed the chickens our dinner scraps before I washed the dishes. The coop is in the cow pasture, and Buttercup thought I had a treat for HER. It was a bit intimidating to have this huge animal (what’s she weigh, Ben? A ton? (About 750 lbs. Not a ton, but enough to respect! -Ben)) with large horns watch me expectantly. She approached the door of the coop with me still in it and blocked the door. Suddenly the gate to the yard seemed a looong way off. I called to the Chicago friends of ours who were visiting to get Ben to rescue me. He came out and took control of Buttercup’s (the vulture!) harness and led her away, telling her there was no food for her. Alpha male. My he-ro.

As our pals left, Emma, the 12-year-old and a former student, called me “Ms. Hellmann,” as usual. I replied,”Emma, it’s time you called me Cath. Not only am I not your teacher anymore, tonight you witnessed me trapped by a hungry cow in a chicken coop. We’ve bonded.”

Ben did refer to one the cows as “McQueen.” I keep imagining a “Far Side” cartoon with our cows on their hind legs, one lifting up the bottom fence line for the other and whispering, “Hurry! Move your fat udder!”

I regaled my lunchtable with our tale of country adventure today. My pasta was cold by the time I finished. They were all very amused. I sent two women to our web page, and they read it during the afternoon session (I guess others are bored, too) and told me how much they enjoyed it.