Tag: homestead

The Conundrum of Ease

~ sanebishop ~ 12 Comments

Ah, yesterday I was searching for Paw Patrol on the TV, when I was momentarily swept up in nostalgia, remembering the good ole days when tasks contained a smattering of difficulty. For example, when I was a child, it was relatively difficult to change a channel on the TV. You had to get up and walk to the TV set, fiddle with knobs and switches, and realign the rabbit ears. And back then you never knew if changing the channel would be worth it because you were at the mercy of the weather and whatever the broadcasters were broadcasting. On a cloudy day, forget it. In the evening, if you were looking for cartoons, forget it–just the nightly news.

Now, with a la carte streaming, your four-year-old has endless choices at his fingertips. He knows nothing of the risk and sacrifice once involved in changing the channels–and, thus, he makes his dad’s life difficult, by constantly pleading with me to change the channel. Ease is creating a tiny monster. 

And if I look in my email inbox for work, I again see the conundrum of ease–people shooting me emails till my brain is riddled with holes. Thirty years ago, people had to put pen to paper, put the paper in an envelope, take the envelope to the post office, and wait weeks for a reply. Correspondence was a big commitment–which is why my second-grade pen pal and I only exchanged a couple of letters before we realized our correspondence was too burdensome and hardly worth the effort. Now, people fire off emails with no commitment or consequences, which make my life hard. Right when I think my brain has recovered, it’s peppered with digital birdshot.

And fast food–well, it makes life easy until it causes you to croak. Truly, I respect vegetarians–not because they abstain from eating higher life forms, but because they abstain from eating fast food. In my rural county, there are no vegetarian restaurants, fast or otherwise. 

Thus, people who can pass a Chick-Fil-A at breakfast and resist the tractor beam emanating from a chicken biscuit earn street cred in my book. Over the last few years, my cholesterol has crept up as has my pants size. Recently, I’ve been trying to pass Chick-Fil-A without stopping in the morning. I’m proud to say last week I successfully resisted putting on my turn signal, and this week I plan to work on not turning. But it is so easy to turn. 

And I think we’d all be better off if we couldn’t buy stuff so easily. In the old days, people had to go to the bank and withdraw money (if they had any) to buy stuff or either remember where they buried their money and dig up a jar filled with coins. Would a Chick-Fil-A biscuit really be worth all the trouble it would take to dig up a jar full of coins? Alas, now all we have to do is swipe a little plastic card or click once online to buy anything we can possibly imagine, at least within the max limits of our credit cards. 

So my new theory is that we should all pretend to live thirty years behind our technological means. Got a cell phone? Well, unless it is an emergency situation, stop using it as a computer, stop using it as a cell phone. Instead, use it as a phone thirty years ago: tie a string to it and tether it to the wall. Suddenly, you’ve got to sacrifice mobility for communication. You can’t talk on the go, you can’t text on the go. If you really want to talk to someone, you must talk to them in one spot. It makes you prioritize what’s important, walking or talking. 

If you want to send an email, go ahead, but pretend you only get to send five emails per day on account of your slow dial up connection. Want a chicken biscuit, go ahead and get one if you’re willing to drive forty miles because most small towns didn’t have a Chic-Fil-A back then? 

Sometimes it feels like technological progress makes tasks easier, but lives harder. Many so-called time-saving devices don’t really save time, but merely divide our attention–and it feels like my brain is a prime denominator that can’t be fractionalized anymore. I’m not ready to go full Amish yet, but thirty years back seems like a good starting point.

Man vs. Stump

~ sanebishop ~ 7 Comments

There comes a point in every man’s life when he undertakes burning a stump. Man versus stump–it is a rite of passage, a tale as old as time, and a prime business opportunity for makeup artists specializing in eyebrows. Many a man has tried to hasten the combustion of stump by squirting lighter fluid onto a pile of smoldering embers. Many a man has provided a blank canvas for artistic representations of coarse, tangled arches. Some makeup artists will offer special group rates and throw in an eyebrow for free, depending on how many men were standing around the stump at the time of the flare up. 

Instead of using a petroleum-based accelerant, it is best to slowly and diligently build a bonfire over the stump with natural substances, like twigs and sticks, branches and logs, boards and dimensional lumber–anything larger than a 6 x 6 is hardly necessary, though it does provide a stable base for a long-lasting conflagration. 

How large should your bonfire be to adequately burn the stump? In my opinion, you should trust your gut, which usually pipes up at about the same time you hear the sirens approaching. Most firemen are required, by their terms of employment, to discourage you from building mammoth bonfires over stumps. However, once off duty, they will likely join you to watch the stump burn, all while providing some scientific tips and tricks to spark up a little fiery whirlwind. If they are volunteer firefighters, they may even try to create a larger fiery tornado. 

Much of the pleasure in burning a stump is staring at it. This probably has something to do with primal instincts and likely dates back to when cave men stared at stumps. Back then, men didn’t have TVs to stare at, so stumps were the most exciting thing around. Likely, cave women also stared at stumps, though they may have preferred watching different stumps. This could have caused bickering over who controlled the flint. 

When we bought the old farmstead, I tried, over many months and years, to burn the stump of the giant oak tree that once stood behind our house. The stump won. It is still there. Maybe one day I will go back to burning it–my eyebrows still haven’t fully recovered from the first attempt, so I have little to lose.

Bon Appetit, Your Pipe Repair is Served

~ sanebishop ~ 12 Comments

I know most people are tired of masks, but they do come in handy in times of crisis, like when you smell like a sewer and need to purchase miscellaneous items for an emergency pipe repair. Under normal circumstances, after digging up the oozing drain pipe, I would have at least taken a few seconds to spritz myself in Febreze before departing for Lowes. In Covid times, when people’s nostrils are covered, I figure I can save a few seconds and go straight to Lowes smelling like a swamp rat and not bring shame and disgrace on my household. 

My wife is not a big fan of malodorousness. In fact, one of her major weaknesses is sensitivity to smells, mainly those that adhere to and emanate from my person. Sometimes she says I smell like the barn, calves, pigs, or moldy hay. The fact that she can distinguish each of the aromas is proof that her petite nose is fertile ground for olfactory receptors. Meanwhile, the large acreage inside my nostrils is mostly barren wasteland, incapable of growing much but mucus. Of course, if an overactive nose was her worst feature, then I’d be just fine. Wearing deodorant mostly everyday is a small sacrifice to make, and everybody has flaws. But the fact that she also has a weak stomach compounds the problem.

“That smell makes me feel queasy,” she says one day.

“That stench is nauseating,” she claims, as I walk through the door.

“You smell like a trash can. I’m going to throw up,” she warns.

“What smell?” I  ask.

To help me understand the subtleties of my aromas, she often resorts to food analogies. Stale means I’m past my expiration date for a shower. Sour means the sweat on my body is fermenting and rising. Burnt means I smell like the charred inside of my bee smoker and need to be hosed down before the fire spreads. Fishy means I protrude the smell of freshly-caught bass, hopefully of the wall-hanging variety. 

Anyway, I made it in and out of Lowes without leaving a trail of dry-heaving and gagging people in my wake, successfully completed the repair, and then (after all that work, in the misting rain no less) was barred from entering my house by my very own wife. She stood guard at the back door and made me strip off my clothes and put them in a trash bag. I was only allowed entry on the condition that I would go straight to the shower and scrub real good. 

“You smell like rotten eggs,” she said. 

an oozing burst drain pipe

How to Achieve Complete Mindfulness and Live to Tell About It

~ sanebishop ~ 14 Comments

I have a suspicion that most people who practice mindfulness, or living in the present, don’t drive jalopies. If they did drive a rust-bucket that at any moment could disintegrate and/or implode, they would already be masters at living in the present and could proceed to practicing other stuff. Their bodies would be finely tuned instruments, with hands sensitive to the slightest vibrations (specifically those in the steering wheel), ears perked (listening for the frayed serpentine belt to snap), nostrils flared (to detect even the faintest whiff of burnt oil), and tongues hanging out (to cool what the air conditioner couldn’t). 

Furthermore, I can’t remember the last time I saw someone doing yoga or meditating at a junkyard. People who pull their own parts already know how to contort their bodies to relieve stress, namely the stress of getting their cars back running. Early in our marriage, my wife and I got a yoga DVD and did yoga together once or twice to help me quit worrying. Admittedly, I could “worry a copperhead out of a copper cent.” That’s a common saying around these parts because we have lots of copperheads (plus lots of people with mere pennies, hence the worry). But the main thing I learned from doing yoga is warrior pose is nothing compared to “remove-the-water-pump pose.” 

The older I get, the more I find junkyards and scrapyards and even landfills to be oddly serene places. Wandering around a scrapyard looking for the perfect pieces of metal to weld together is a fine way to spend an afternoon. Watching giant bulldozers sail by at the landfill, with seagulls diving overhead and earth trembling underneath, could be as romantic as watching boats come and go in a marina, if only someone would put a bench at the dump site. 

And junkyards are great places for quiet reflection. Just last week, I visited our local U-Pull It and did some soul searching. A few days prior, I had experienced a moment of complete presentness when my 1996 Chrysler Sebring lost power going seventy miles per hour down the interstate. Because this phenomenon had happened before on less traveled thoroughfares, I knew nothing was wrong with the car mechanically–just that stupid sensor, the crankshaft sensor, had gone haywire again and decided to power down the vehicle with tractor trailers at warp speed all around me. I’m proud to report I kept my composure. I focused thoroughly on the present and piloted the Sebring safely to the roadside, only stopping to hyperventilate after the handbrake was engaged. 

So, a few days later I went to the junkyard hoping to pull a crankshaft sensor and ended up selling my Sebring for scrap. Having mastered mindfulness, it was time to practice letting go and moving on, specifically to a 2008 Toyota Camry with only 150,000 miles. 

We had some good times, the Sebring and I.

Farmers, the Original Homebodies

~ sanebishop ~ 20 Comments

A while back, after taking a personality test, I wrote a post about farmer personality types. My personality type, an INFJ, isn’t a natural fit for farming, except for possibly the agricultural position of cult leader. Still, despite what the test results say, I doubt I could lead a cult, even just a little farm cult. I mean, yes, most INFJs are a few worms short of a full bait cup, but we don’t like spreading our worms with others. We like to keep them to ourselves. We’re private people. 

In that regard, INFJs–despite being generally unfit to wield a sharp hoe–may be drawn to the farming ideal, specifically the part about having a small corner of earth to call their hiding place. It wouldn’t surprise me if the first farmer was an INFJ. He was probably sick and tired of chasing woolly mammoths across the continent with his band of obnoxious hunter-gatherer buddies and just wanted some alone time. Thus, he decided to get out of the mammoth race, stay in one cave, and grow stuff. The first nomad became a farmer not because he was good at farming, but because he was tired of traveling and enjoyed being at a cave called “home.” Likely, because he was a terrible farmer, he starved to death and his skeleton still rests on the floor of that forgotten cave. Nevertheless, his idea about home caught on, and eventually people with more tactile abilities started growing stuff and built a civilization.

If you look closely you can see the INFJ in the back.

Fast forward thousands of years to 2020.  To cobble together enough acreage to make a living, grain farmers here are driving mammoth combines down narrow country roads, dodging mailboxes and logging trucks, to tracts all the way on the other side of the county. They don’t particularly enjoy traveling so far just to find land to work, but they do take a certain pride in extending their territorial planting range. Today’s farmer has evolved from chasing mammoths to driving them. By 2100, however, there will likely be no local farmers because our crop production will be outsourced to tech specialists in India, driving mega-combines and tractors remotely by joystick. 

All this sounds swell enough and is likely inevitable as farms grow bigger and bigger and farmers work land farther and farther away from home. But there is a certain irony in the decree to “get big or go home.” Going home used to be the whole point of farming, at least back when people chased mastodons.