Happy Thanksgiving

11/22/07 Thursday
Happy Thanksgiving. It is 1:52 in the morning right now. The temp is to go down to about 30 degrees tonight and stay in the thirties all day long so I got up to put more wood on the fire after Carman Kitty woke me. So I figured that while I was up I would finish yesterday’s post. Last night I was just too tired to do it. I worked on planting rye seed from 1:00 to sundown at 5:40.

First I pull the broadcast fertilizer/seeder till it’s gone through fifty pounds of seed. Then I drag this rake with the twenty pound bag of dirt on top over the area I just seeded. That covers a lot of the seeds with dirt. Hopefully that keeps the birds from eating them all. Plus they germinate better when covered with dirt.

It’s a lot of exercise. Unfortunately I discovered that the tiller I paid five hundred dollars to rent didn’t do a good job. When the guy came out to fix it the second time he replaced the PTO shaft which has a clutch on it. Seems that the old one was slipping. This left areas where the surface grass was disturbed making it look tilled but that was only maybe three inches down, not the full foot it should have been. There are still lots of bunches of grass still rooted. However on the areas the tiller worked properly it was like walking through the sand on a beach only harder because I’m dragging a four foot wide rake with twenty pounds on top of it that is digging in. I could go about two hundred feet before I had to stop and catch my breath and rest.





The puppies were something else. They would walk right along with me and when I stopped to rest would go play, running at full speed chasing and tackling each other. Then as soon as I got up and started trudging down the row they would stop playing and come walk beside me again. It’s kind of touching, at least for me.






I was able to lay down one hundred and fifty pounds yesterday. I still have another hundred and fifty to go. It only looks like I’ve seeded half of the five acres we have. That makes two and a half acres in two weeks. (we got the seed November 10) All five acres could have all been done in one day with a tractor but I’m only halfway there. On the bright side I’m getting lots of good exercise. You know, people pay good money to get this kind of workout in a gym and I can do it for free. It does bring the pain level up but that’s ok cause the pain is always there anyway.

So Amy left a comment on Tuesday’s post with a link http://potw.news.yahoo.com/s/potw/55334/rolling-in-cash to a news story about a lady who makes over $40,000 selling tumbleweeds. I just had to dig up these pictures of tumbleweeds we’ve gotten rid of. At twenty five dollars a weed I figure this pile must have been worth nearly a grand. And it’s just a drop in the bucket. Even if I had the customers I couldn’t grow tumbleweeds on this farm. It’s a violation of the CRP contract for one thing but more significant is tumbleweeds are a bane to farmers. They compete with the cotton and mess up their machinery. Hell, they would probably pay me to remove them from their fields. They pay to take them out anyway.


I just went back in this journal to see what we did last year for thanksgiving. Wow. It doesn’t say anything about that day but Cherie tells me we painted one of the rooms and had Subway sandwiches for our thanksgiving dinner. (am I supposed to capitalize “Thanksgiving”?) Just going back and reading was something. As I state in the header at the top, this journal serves as my memory. Last November was when we first moved here. We had stayed at a hotel for just a few days before moving into the house. Virginia was still talking to us, we discovered there would be no gas for heat or cooking, and lots of other stuff. Another great picture of a sunset as well.

So this Thanksgiving will be another quiet one. That’s pretty much what we prefer, at least for now. Holidays in general aren’t times of good memories for either of us. Chuck and Lillian invited us over for dinner but we didn’t take them up on that. Janie gave us a HUGE ham so that’s what we will have. Sounds better than turkey to me right now anyway. Cooking a turkey is too much work for just the two of us. Besides all that I still have a hundred and fifty pounds of seed to put down and the rain/snow is coming tomorrow evening so I’m under the gun there. I’ll just take the pain pills like I’m supposed to and that will help me keep going. I don’t like them but they sure do help.

So it’s 3:20 now. I probably should get back to bed so will post this and try to get some sleep.