Man Plans. Weatherman Laughs

~ sanebishop ~ 5 Comments

On the Tuesday before the storm, I called my wife to begin the necessary bureaucratic process. We make each other jump through hoops to justify big purchases, if for no other reason than one of us–usually her–can say “I told you so” once the purchase proves imprudent. 

“I think we need to buy a generator,” I said, sneaking the comment nonchalantly into a conversation that started as inquiry into our dinner plans for the night. 

“A generator!?–where did that come from?” she asked. 

“They’re calling for a big snowstorm this weekend.”

“Weren’t they calling for snow last week too–and we didn’t get anything?” 

“Yeah, but this one is different. They’re saying it’s going to be bad–even catastrophic.” 

“Generators are dangerous–my dad burnt up a refrigerator with a generator when I was a kid.” 

“Well, how else are we going to stay warm if the power goes out?” Although our old farmhouse has three fireplaces, the unstable fieldstone chimneys have been cut down. The fireplaces are now defunct, and we have no alternate heat source if our heat pump is without power. “Remember how bad it was when we lost power during Helene–and that was when it was warm,” I continued. 

“Let me think about it,” she said. At that point, I knew she would acquiesce, but the problem with our bureaucratic process is that it takes time.  By the next morning, when she verbally rubber stamped my acquisition request, saying “I guess you can get a generator,” there were no generators left to acquire. I had done my research overnight and had hoped to buy a small gas generator in the $500 to $600 dollar range but Lowes was completely wiped out, not a single generator remained in the store. 

I was left to hurry home and scour Amazon in search of any generator that could be delivered before the storm hit on Saturday. The cheapest one I could find was $1000, but supposedly it could be delivered by Friday afternoon. I don’t think I’ve been so nervous about a delivery since the birth of my son. 

“Why are you so wound up?” my wife asked. 

“I’m worried the generator won’t get here in time.”

“We’ll survive if it doesn’t.”

Sure enough, on Friday, I got a notification from UPS that my delivery was delayed. Had the original forecast proved accurate, we would have been doomed to shiver, but the storm had slowed and the generator was delivered Saturday afternoon, right before the first sleet pellets began to fall. 

Sleet was actually good news. Meteorologists had been waffling back and forth on sleet versus freezing rain, warning that freezing rain would be the worst case scenario in terms of power outages. But the freezing rain held off until the tail end of the storm on Sunday evening–and, of course, the power never went out. 

“I told ya we didn’t need a generator,” my wife said, though she did sprinkle her “I told you so” with some pity, “but at least we have one now if we ever need it.” 

Despite being secretly disappointed the power didn’t go out so I could justify my big purchase and prevent the marital “I told you so,” I am glad it wasn’t all freezing rain. Thomas got to go sledding for the first time!

Down the hill, he goes!

Spring is Coming: Dust Off Your Dollar Bills

~ sanebishop ~ 2 Comments

Last week, I had to set up a booth at a farming conference. It was my first time in a den of vice–well, technically, my second. The day before, I had gone to the wrong den of vice, thinking it was the right den of vice. 

“I’m here to check in for the conference,” I said. “My name is Stephen Bishop.”

“Conference?” the front desk clerk asked. “I don’t think we have any conferences booked for this weekend.” 

“This is Harrah’s Cherokee Casino, right? 

“Yes, it is, but we don’t have any conferences scheduled. Do you remember the address for your conference?” 

“I think it was like 777 Casino Drive.” 

“I’m sorry. This happens all the time, but you’re at the wrong casino. This is Harrah’s Cherokee Casino in Murphy at 777 Casino Parkway. You need to be at Harrah’s Cherokee Casino in Cherokee, which is 777 Casino Drive.  It’s about an hour away, back through the gorge.”

I can tell you as someone who has traversed the gorge, in different directions on the same evening, that nightfall imbues all the normal hazards–falling rocks, blind curves, and the raging Nantahala River running beside the road–with a slightly menacing sense of abject terror. You’d think not being able to see the hazards might reduce the sensation, but it does not. 

The correct casino was many scales of magnitude larger than the incorrect casino. And, much to my surprise, my room was big and clean and nicely decorated, the service was outstanding, and the food wasn’t half bad–it’s almost as if they wanted you to stay awhile. I ate twice at Gordon Ramsay’s food court, and his fish and chips and street tacos were quite scrumptious. I doubt Gordon even knows he has a food court in Cherokee, North Carolina, but who knows, maybe he was slaving away in the back?

Admittedly, my only other point of reference for gambling facilities dates back to my childhood. Back then, video poker parlors were everywhere in South Carolina, kinda like Dollar Generals nowadays. The parlors were about the same size as Dollar Generals, but they had the eye-catching design aesthetic of a bouncy house. Parlors were often super concentrated on the state line so North Carolinians (living in an uppity state where politicians prohibited gambling) could easily cross over the line and try their luck at games of chance. Usually, right next to the parlors were fireworks stands. In South Carolina, you could buy the big stuff, like rockets with warning labels about downing satellites. If you happened to win the jackpot, you could just walk next door and spend all your winnings on an arsenal of pyrotechnics. I believe economists call this “burn-it-up economics.” 

Surprisingly, most farmers seemed to be in good spirits. Nobody won the jackpot that I know of, but spring is coming. In the spring, despite the odds, farmers always think this could be the year–the year of great weather, bumper crops, and premium prices. Six months later, we all wonder if we lit our money on fire, but that’s farming. 

But maybe, just maybe, this could be my lucky year. If I hit profitability, I will inevitably spend it all on more farming stuff, which is better than spending it on rockets, right?

From Conception to Cow on a Billboard

~ sanebishop ~ 4 Comments

I’m not sure exactly at which meeting the idea was hatched, but I know who hatched it: Myron.

I first met Myron years ago at an Ag Advisory Board meeting. Our county has a Farmland Preservation Ordinance, which is mostly a feel-good ordinance meant to recognize farms in the county, but the ordinance also created a seven member Ag Advisory Board whose purpose is to advise county commissioners on issues pertaining to cows and corn and such. Back then, one of my job responsibilities was to be the staff liaison for the Ag Advisory Board. Liaison is a high falutin word for complaint herder. 

Some farmers could be pretty bitter and acidic in their complaints (who can blame them), but Myron never took that approach. He was more of a positive lamentor. “It’s a comin’,” Myron would tell me, “maybe not in my lifetime, but in yours. We cain’t do nothing but try to slow it down.” 

The “it” he referred to was development, the bogeyman of farmers in North Carolina. Mryon has indeed lived long enough to see another surge of widespread farmland loss and the subsequent loss of farms and farmers in the county, especially in the last five years due to our proximity to Charlotte. People are now moving to the rural ring of counties outside of Charlotte. The only thing popping up faster than housing developments here are fire ant hills, and the latter are probably better constructed. 

But when agriculture depends on global markets and when rampant development is a response to a national shortage for affordable housing, what can you do at a local level to make a large scale difference, or any difference? 

A lost cause has never stopped Myron. At a board meeting, Myron hatched a new idea. “I was a thinkin,” Myron said, “it’s a shame our community college doesn’t have an ag degree.” 

That thought grew into a mission for our Ag Advisory Board. Three out of our four high schools in the county have ag programs, so the board got proactive and surveyed the local high school ag students to gauge interest in continuing their ag education at the community college. Armed with statistics, the board invited a college administrator to attend an Ag Advisory Board meeting, which may have been a culture shock for the ultra professional and sophisticated Dean of Academic Affairs, but she returned time and time again and helped guide the board through the process and red tape of creating a new degree and the board helped guide her on what classes might be most applicable and beneficial for students in the county. 

Three years later, after many meetings, the Cleveland Community College Animal Science degree was officially hatched and the college unveiled a billboard advertising the program. One board member (there is always one) was upset because the billboard featured a holstein instead of an angus cow. 

“Fiddle sticks,” Myron said, “I don’t care if it’s a longhorn, there’s are cows on a billboard. We ought to be happy about that.”

The college then hired a bright young go-getter to build the program, and she has done a great job of increasing enrollment every year. I’ve even taught a few classes and have enjoyed passing along my extensive knowledge of what not to do when it comes to farming. This semester, I’m teaching basic farm maintenance–and my primary learning objective is for students to learn how to maintain farm stuff while also maintaining all ten fingers.

“All you can do is try,” Myron likes to say. Indeed, you never know what can happen when one person starts thinking and a group of people start trying. In the grand scheme of things, the creation of an ag degree at a community college may not seem like much, but it’s not nothing. It has already made a difference–one of the first graduates from the program now works down the hall from me in the Extension office.

Here is a great video about Myron that highlights his love devotion to farmland preservation. I make an appearance on the tailgate.

Boy Rides Again

~ sanebishop ~ 3 Comments

“I bet you can’t run over Dad,” my wife said, sacrificing me.

Earlier in the day, we had taken Thomas to the park to practice riding his bike. It was a beautiful winter day, warm enough that you didn’t need a coat, and since school was out for Christmas break, the park was full of moral support. 

“You’ve got this!” said a man walking his dog, as we pleaded with Thomas to try riding his bike one more time. I’m not exactly sure to whom the man was directing his comment, but I appreciated the sentiment nonetheless.

“My helmet is too itchy! This is too hard! I don’t like bikes!” Thomas lamented. 

Santa Clause brought Thomas a “big boy” bike with no training wheels, and we thought it would be the centerpiece of his Christmas, but it quickly became the centerpiece of parent-child conflict. Thomas barely showed any interest in the bike, preferring his toy monster trucks and Legos. We had hoped taking him to the park would give him a chance to focus on the bike, but mostly he just wanted to join the other kids on the playground. 

“You have to make one loop around the park on your bike before you can go play on the playground,” we said, not realizing that we had just committed ourselves to a thirty minute journey that felt one second short of eternity. So it is no wonder when we got home that day, when my wife desperately challenged Thomas to run me over in the yard, that he finally straddled the seat with a sense of determination on his face–and grinned. At the very least, this was progress. An hour or so earlier at the park, he was kicking the bike in frustration and we were kicking ourselves as parents. 

“Just coast down the hill, don’t even try to peddle,” my wife said, giving him a hopeful push. But in his desire to flatten his dear ole Dad, he not only coasted but naturally pedaled to pick up speed. Finally, it clicked. Thomas was not only controlling the direction of his bike but providing locomotion for it. He made it to me, I fell over for dramatic flair, and now he wanted to ride, again and again. 

Here is a video of one of his subsequent rides.

A burgeoning bike rider

Blest Be the Bricks that Bind

~ sanebishop ~ 7 Comments

My first memory of legos dates back to Mrs. Baird. She was an old church lady who used to keep me from time to time. She had white hair and kept a plastic pail of the big legos in her closet. When she died many years ago, the pail of legos was bequeathed to me, and I kept it reverently like an urn, at least until Thomas got old enough to dump out the contents and all reverence was discarded. Her legos were once again in the hands of a child. 

I’ve also kept a big plastic tote of my legos, mostly a jumbled mix of pirate Legos circa the 1990s in storage, waiting for Thomas to get big enough to graduate from the pail of big legos to my tote of little Legos. I gave it to him a few months ago, and have secretly found myself enjoying recreating my lego ships of olden times. We also got Thomas some small sets for Christmas, which, after building, he summarily destroyed with a monster truck and all the blocks made their way into my old plastic tote, young and old blocks intermingling. He rummages through this tote, makes his own creations, smashes them again, so on and so forth.  

My wife finds pleasure not in building or smashing but in sorting. It is the strangest thing, but she is the type of person who doesn’t like peas to mix with corn or butter beans on a plate. I’m lucky because she generally brings order to my disorderly life, but occasionally she can go a little overboard, at which point she commandeers the whole dining room for three days in an effort to bring order to the jumbled mix of legos she has spread out over the table.

She had the look of a person obsessed so I didn’t say much. But she also had the look of a person who was enjoying her task, like she was putting together a puzzle (or deconstructing a puzzle?). In any event, she created a Dewey Decimal system for the lego bricks in our house, based on sets, like Pirates or Jurassic Park, and then miscellaneous bricks based on color. They are now all organized in Ziploc bags, in small plastic containers, and stacked on a shelf.

Personally, I don’t think I would have picked color to classify the bricks by–I think I would have chosen brick type–but let’s be honest, I would have never classified or brought order to anything, hence the jumbled mix of legos to begin with. 

Building, smashing, sorting–it takes all kinds. We’re a family of lego lovers, each in our own way.