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I was going to write a big “think piece” about the last year (well, 18 months) since we’ve moved here. However, I’m so insanely busy that I only have time for the bullet point version. I’ve always said that “Wherever you go, there you are.” Of course, I didn’t always say that. I’ve only said it since I heard it in the cult classic “Buckaroo Banzai”. In any case, I have gone to Michigan and here I am with all the same faults and features I had elsewhere. Thus, I am totally swamped with programming for work, a house that needs attention, important duties left undone and a taxed, but understanding wife.

Such then is the situation from which I bring you a quickie list in review:

Swamped with work (at work) Ben misses most of the Spring planting season. Cath’s garden is saved from oblivion by our neighbor Tom and his tractor attached rototiller.

Uptown is born. The Great White Calf. Huge, beautiful and sadly, unregistered. She’s a bovine Cinderella, she is. Miraculously, both Blossom and Yaro gave birth totally unassisted. This is one of the reasons I started with Highlands, but I am eternally grateful nonetheless. For one thing, I don’t have any really long rubber gloves.

I purchase my first tractor implement – a brush hog. Well, it’s technically a “rotary cutter”, but that’s like saying you bought “facial tissue” instead of Kleenex. Last week, I bought my second implement – a clamp on bucket bale spear. After almost tipping the tractor twice with a 6-700 lb bale on the end of it, I am lucky I still had the brush hog attached to the back to act as a counterweight!

I book my first “farm revenue” by selling a batch of roasters to our friend Essie. Luckily, she does the butchering.

August and September bring our first cattle shows. I am pretty inept, but they’re good animals, so it goes well. Our kids love it.

By Thanksgiving I’m almost caught up with splitting firewood. Thank you global warming. We trek over to Chicago with a load of frozen turkeys wedged into the trunk of Cath’s Honda. No one wants the gigantic 33 lb Toms, but I luck out and sell them to work for the Holiday party. More farm income. It almost covers the cost of feeding the turkeys and driving to Chicago.

By Christmas I wonder if I have enough wood to last the winter, but I’m way ahead of last year.

Horses arrive just after Thanksgiving. A real mixed blessing. I’m losing my shirt, but it’s been a decent experience so far. Rent-to-own, as it were. That reminds me, I have to go order some more hay.

I get a Log Jack for Christmas and don’t even know what it is. After having it explained to me, I decide that is my absolute favorite Christmas gift in recent memory.

That’s the bullet point version. No big psychic insights or anything. Watching the real estate market finally crater unmistakably, I’m glad we sold when we did. I see a recession coming and I don’t see gas getting any cheaper. Wheat is over $10 a bushel and Congress just passed an inane spending bill with even more corn ethanol subsidies. All of which reaffirms (I think) my decision to get back to the land. Have a wonderful New Year’s!

So…I’ve got these horses I’m “boarding”. They’re eating me out of house and home – much more than the cattle. We took them in for someone on the premise that we’d only charge for hay and that the owner would arrange to have it delivered. So far, only one lone round bale has shown up, like a giant 400 lb tumbleweed, in the front yard. I’m beginning to get concerned that our good deed isn’t going to go unpunished. One of the reasons that we haven’t bought horses is that they are expensive to buy, feed, and maintain (supplements, gear, shoes). Now I have three of them out there shooing the cattle away from the bale feeder like aggressive cousins at a wedding buffet.

There is a lesson to be learned here. An ethical one at that. That lesson is that while Michigan law states that after 30 days it is considered abandonment and the boarder can legally take possession (so to speak, the boarder already has the animal), but that isn’t necessarily the neighborly thing to do to someone down on their luck. I figure the ethical line gets crossed somewhere between 30 days and 6 months. This is simply NOT the kind of thing that happens to you in the city. For one thing, you can’t really park a horse on a city street without a parade permit. For another, you probably don’t have room in your city lot yard for all the hay you’d need even if you could get the parade permit. I’d love to see someone down at the alderman’s office trying to get a fistful of temporary parking permits for their friend’s horse.

The kids love having the horses around and they’re definitely more friendly than the cattle. At least, the horses let you pat their nose even if you aren’t holding a bucket of grain. Kids love Disneyworld though, but its expensive and you can’t really live there. We’ll see how this turns out. I’ll keep you posted.

Last night at 11:45 there were 2″ long icicles hanging off the picnic table. By 7AM they were gone, a victim of the bizarre fast moving warm front that brought snow, ice, and then rain. The temperature popped up so fast that we missed the worst of the effects of the ice storm. Tonight might be a different story. The wind has shifted and the temperature is dropping below freezing again. 50mph gusts of wind, too. It’ll be interesting to see what the roads are like tomorrow morning.

It’s that time of year again in Western Michigan. I say that like some kind of old pro when its actually only winter number 2 here for me. Feh. Chances are you live somewhere else, so between the two of us, I guess I *am* an expert on the weather around here. In any case, it’s time to start paying attention to the weather before planning your day. I forgot until yesterday that I need to get out the tank heater for the cattle and horses. Hope they weren’t too thirsty. I will put the heater in the small tank tomorrow after work.

I’m having trouble finding a routine with the horses. With the cattle last winter, I threw them 2 bales a day and 3 bales about every 3rd day. This was for 3 Highlands. Now, I have 3 adult highlands, a yearling bull, a heifer calf and 3 horses, one of whom is the size of a school bus. Tossing out a couple squares before work was ok. Trying to toss out 6-8 bales is  a very different experience. For one thing, I don’t have the bale feeder right behind the barn this time. I need the tractor to carry that much hay to the bale feeder and I need someone to open the gate for me so I can get the tractor through without letting the nosy animals out. Its gotten to be quite a production.

This means round bales are coming soon to a farm near me. I don’t have the same storage for them that I do with the squares, but we’ll figure it out. Oy.

Note to self: Don’t take on horse boarding the same fall that you’re trying to catch up on working on the house. We have upstairs lights again (it only took 9 months), but I won’t have time to work on anything else until…Christmas? Later? In the meantime, we’re working on Christmas cards and enjoying tasty BLF turkey sandwiches for lunch.