Last weekend I returned from Farm & Grow in La Crosse, Wisconsin, run by the Modern Day Farm Chick, Annaliese Wegner. This was my second time attending this event and I have picked some doozy weather patterns to attend this conference. Last year I drove through tornadoes to the east and west of me but safely made it right through, and this year my drive was preceded by snow and ice storms. As I drove through a large chunk of Iowa, I could see the aftermath as vehicle after vehicle lined the medians and ditches, some backwards, some turned over. I even saw a school bus off the road near Iowa City. They had all been abandoned a day before, but thankfully I was driving through at an opportune time and the highways were clear. I only had my own poor driving skills to deter me. This conference occurred right on time. I was in a winter slump. I could feel the lack of sunshine, outdoor time, alone time, coming down on me like a cloud. I could feel my anxiety on high alert from overwork and over-momming. I needed this conference to recharge my battery. At Farm & Grow, I was able to socialize with other adults. I was reminded that I can be awesome (I'm tooting my own horn here, but multiple ladies told me to my face that I am awesome, so dog gone it, I must be awesome). I needed that because in January, I don't feel awesome. I feel like a lump of poo. During our session time, we were asked to focus on ourselves: our wants, our needs, our skills, and our goals. As a mom, I sometimes have to step away and ask myself those things so I remember that I can take care of myself too. I am the absolute worst at taking care of myself. I do not ask for help. I sacrifice sleep to work, to clean, or just a fret. I don't relax. Since this gave me a boost, I've decided to map out my year of conference or development time. These dates will be for me to do what I need and love to do to get my mind right for the year. So I've covered this quarter of the year, but here's the link in case you are also interested in learning about Anneliese or the Farm & Grow event: https://annaliesewegner.com/ At least check out the webpage. Her picture on the front is soooo Wisconsin and soooo boss. . April - the MASL conference - This is the Missouri Association of School Librarians conference. Technically this is a school event, yes, and there is nothing like being an educator to give you anxiety, but this is different. This conference is a double whammy. It resets me as an educator but also resets me as a writer. I come home with lesson plans, classroom strategies, program ideas, not just for myself but for all the staff in our building, all the things to excite me about my job as an educator, but I also get to meet authors with amazing stories and this motivates me as a writer. I also get a bit of free time in the mornings and evenings to write, which doesn't always happen at home. June - At the end of June I am going on a trip with my sister-in-law to New Orleans. She will be attending the VETgirl U conference while I have the day to write and pamper myself. I attended this conference with her last August and our free time was filled with conversations about what she learned during the day, spa sessions, lots of food, and some day drinking by the pool on flamingo floaties. A fruity drink in the afternoon really gets the humorous writing going. Sometimes it’s just too terrible to share, but I still get a good laugh. This is the Ernest Hemingway route to professional development. September/October - This is yet to be determined since it's so far out, but I have multiple things up my sleeve. I have another school conference I could attend, which like the MASL conference, puts me in the right mindset or, and this is my real hope, that my husband will agree to go on a trip with me as my research assistant for my third book. You see, it’s about agriculture and travel, and I can really nail the travel part, but he has to walk me through the agriculture parts like I’m a 2-year-old. He always has, and he always will. And now I'm back to next January, which hopefully will be another Farm & Grow event. Sometimes the dates change so if it's during another month, I'll still be attending, but I most certainly will not forget to plan something in January. I’m old enough and smart enough to recognize that this just is not my month so I need to plan accordingly. If that means a trip to sunshine, so be it. If that means I’ve already broken the bank on other trips, then I’ll send my kids to Grandma so I can enjoy a quiet house and venture to the salon for a cheap trip in the tanning bed for some fake sunshine to trick my mind into motivation. This is my goal to keep my head in the right place, focused on my writing, and rested enough to be the Captain Underpants version of a superhero mom. Wish me luck and if you have any other conferences you'd like to share, let me know. In June my boys finally got to live a lifelong dream of being the proud owners of some baby chicks. They’ve been begging us for what seems like forever to have chicks of their own. The last time we caved to this demand, the chicks ended up being short lived playmates to our Great Pyrenees when my husband was trying to move their rolling henhouse. Our Pyrenees snuck up on us and with great skill shook five chicks, one at a time, before we could even get to him. He sadly looked at us like, “I was just wrestling.” None survived, so we decided not to get chicks until we had a better set up for the chicks or had a better kennel to lock up the dog. The boys came up with a better set up and our dog has a secure kennel that he likes to chillax in so it was time. Like any good parent, we still waited until the begging became extreme and deals could be made. “Dad, can we get chicks?” “No.” “Dad, can we get chicks? We have made a home for them.” “No.” “Dad, can we get chicks? We have made a home for them, and we’ll do all the chores.” “Maybe.” “Dad, can we get chicks? We have made a home for them, and we’ll do all the chores. We will also buy the chicks with our own money.” “Okay.” John is a genius on how to save money. Little did he know that my oldest, Aiden, is equally clever. “Dad, I’m going to buy the chicks with my money, and if you buy the feed, I’ll sell you the chickens for half price when they are ready to butcher.” He managed to convince his investor to spend more money than he did, using all the investor’s supplies as well, to sell that product back to the investor for what will no doubt be a premium (because half price of what), and he doesn’t even have to butcher them, which is really the worst part. He’s the next Zuckerberg. Luckily, we just had to go to the local MFA for Chick Days. It was advertised well and it was a very popular event. Cackle Hatchery from Lebanon, Missouri, had a Chick Truck set up outside the MFA, and as my husband said, “MFA made a good sales move today having that Chick Truck because there was a long line of people picking out chicks, and I bet they’d never been to the MFA before in their lives, and now they are there buying feed and chick supplies.” The local MFA also grilled for the crowds of people, knowing that little cranky kids would be waiting in line impatiently and needed a distraction so hot dogs were readily available. It was a fun event and my boys were very excited. It was equally exciting to me because I didn’t go. My husband took them and I had a quiet hour at home, but I know it was exciting because the boys arrived home, hanging out of the car windows down the driveway, yelling to me to come out and see their chicks. They were so cute! Owen named them and spent the next few days trying to figure out which chick was “the pirate chick” and which chick was Spot, and on and on. For the first couple of days, the chicks actually stayed in the basement so we could regulate their temperature and make sure the heating lamp was working properly. It hadn’t been used in a while and no one wanted to go out and check them in the middle of the night outside in the shed. Also, Owen wanted to be very near them, so he slept on a cot right beside them. Like a new mom, he got up to check on them repeatedly, and like an old mom, I also did too. Also, like an old mom, I forgot how you turn into a zombie when you get up repeatedly in the middle of the night, and I was thankful that I had stopped at two children. You might remember that these chicks technically belonged to Aiden, but he slept soundly through the night, highlighting the difference between my boys. Owen gets the job done immediately and Aiden will stall. It seems destined that two children from the same parents are going to be completely different. John's grandparents once told him that they would tell two of their daughters to do a chore and one would say yes, and then just not do it, and the other would argue and argue, but she'd actually do it. It never fails. Since we have gotten the chicks, Owen gets up early and checks on them, feeds them, waters them, cleaned out their box when they were still in a box, all before Aiden was even awake in the morning. This is how Owen works in general. If he has chores, he’s going to do them, and do them as soon as possible. Aiden, on the other hand, gets reminded over and over, goes to start, gets distracted, does something else, gets yelled at, does more of the chore, doesn’t finish, and then, at the last moment before he’s really in trouble or it absolutely has to be done, finishes the chore in the two minutes that it should have taken instead of the two hours that it took him. It also helps that Owen just really loves chicks. The last time we had chicks, Owen was three. Shortly after we got them, Owen disappeared from the house. I searched all over the house, the yard, and started to panic before deciding to check the shed. Owen was there, crouched inside the stock tank, talking quietly to the chicks and petting them, in his underwear. . This time the boys offered up their clubhouse that they built with John a while ago. It wasn’t used much and was the perfect place for the chicks. Once they were outside in the clubhouse, the boys set up electric netting to give them safe space from the dog and cat to wander around in the grass too and it was a hoot to “herd” the chicks into the clubhouse each night. Even John and I went out to watch it. Once one went in, they all followed, just like our sheep and sometimes the cows if they’re not being too crazy. The chicks are doing great, and Owen is still doing most of the work. We’ll insist that Aiden gives him an “agriculture manager” fee and hopefully we can teach Owen how to work with his brother without doing all the work for nothing. The absent-minded professor always has someone to keep him in line. I honestly don’t think we are pigeon-holing our children into these stereotypical roles of opposite siblings, but maybe a long line of little things made them this way. It is entertaining to watch, and I do have hopes that they are not opposites, but more of compliments to each other. The county we live in has been in a severe to extreme drought for the summer into the fall. We have recently had enough rain to lessen our fears about the conditions as far as fires go, but we did have some close calls. The town of Wooldridge, Missouri, a little over thirty miles from us, was almost wiped out by a wildfire that started with combine equipment and quickly spread from a farm to the small town, taking out over 3000 acres of land and over 20 structures were damaged or destroyed. The interstate was even closed because of visibility issues. It was frightening and the haze the next day even near us was definitely something new to us. We were all on high alert because it was just as dry near our home. The day after the Wooldridge fire, we had our own encounters with fire. It was a windy day and my husband got a call that a fire was spreading near his grandfather’s farm where he keeps some of his own animals. It was near the highway and the fire department’s best guess was that someone threw out a cigarette butt because the fire started right off the roadway and headed for the city lake, and just past that was the farm. Thankfully, our local fire department was able to put the fire out quickly and monitored it for the evening to prevent more spread. It was a close call. That evening, John had gone to bed early after a busy day. I was cleaning in the basement and thought I’d heard a siren, but it’s hard to hear noises from outside in the basement and didn’t think anything of it. A few minutes later I was heading upstairs to go to bed, and could definitely hear sirens this time, and as I rounded the corner on our staircase and could see into the first floor, I noticed an orange glow through the windows. My heart immediately dropped into my stomach. It was too late for a sunset. It had to be a fire. I sprinted up the stairs and looked out to see a fire just over some trees at the bottom of a hill in our pasture. It looked so close. I yelled for John and he woke up quickly and ran in. He could immediately tell what farm it was, and it wasn’t ours. It was a neighbor's farm, and he called immediately. They were safe but the fire department was trying to control it as it was heading for another neighbor's house. They had left already, so they were safe, but the wind was not a friend, and it looked so big from our window. I looked at John and asked, “Do I need to pack anything? Do we need to leave?” “I don’t think it’s coming this way. The wind is moving in the other direction. But…if they can’t control it and if the wind changes, it could come this way.” “So should I get a bag?” He thought for a moment. “Yes.” I jumped into action. I ran downstairs, grabbed our large suitcase, and grabbed extra clothes, shoes and boots for John, me, and the boys. Then the travel toiletries bag. Then I grabbed the footprints John had made of our boys when they were babies as Mother’s Day gifts. They were made from wood from the farm with the boy’s little tiny baby footprints on them, and they are precious to me. After that I ran upstairs and grabbed my wedding ring, which I usually don’t wear because I’m not a jewelry person, but it’s also precious to me. The suitcase was only half full. Then…then…then… Passports. It took me a while to think of this, but we’ve always said that if a natural disaster took our home, we’d rent the farm out and buy a house in Ireland. At this moment, cool, wet weather seemed glorious, and I was ready. While I was at it, I grabbed all the other important papers. Then…then…then… “What in the world do I pack next?” I had no idea what to take. Nothing mattered much besides my few very precious items. It dawned on me that we, along with most people in America, have too much stuff that doesn’t mean anything to us. Luckily, after about an hour, we could see the fire was dying down and we could see multiple fire trucks out in fields fighting the fire. They had done another amazing job of stopping the fires under the worst circumstances. So my luggage was unnecessary (although I stayed up most of the night in the anxiety that it would roar up again in our sleep). After that day, I had some new energy to get rid of stuff in our home. I spent hours cleaning, giving away, and selling a lot of stuff, but I was busy and never finished up. Now that we are in another drought, it reminded me of that mission. I want to continue to focus on clearing out items from our house. We have so much stuff that I’m positive it takes away time from our experiences, and I want more experiences. I have limits though. I can’t 100% Marie Kondo it because I am a pack rat, I have children, and I love books, so there will never be just three books on my nightstand. There will be 30 books on my nightstand, but I will weed some of them. I have to remember that night and think about what I would pack as I scan our home. I hope you get to do the same this summer, or I hope you’re able to ignore the clutter in your home and just enjoy the outdoors. Hopefully, some of that time outdoors will be spent in the rain, some very much needed rain. I’d be so very willing to do multiple loads of muddy laundry from a little boy mud fight just to get some rain about now. Lord, let there be rain. My husband and I have decided that our days of adventure are over. We will no longer be doing things on date nights that are similar to adventures you might see on a Bass Pro ad like hiking, camping, or kayaking. We will now be downgraded to AARP kind of dates with dinner and a movie. We will be sitting at all times during our date nights from this point on because of one recent date night gone wrong. It all started because we were overly excited about our children being gone for the weekend. They went to Oklahoma with their grandparents to visit other family members and we had been talking about our big plans for weeks. We’d have the whole weekend off from entertaining them and shipping them to all their events! To the grandparents, we’d say, “Sayonara, suckers!” and we’d have a great time to ourselves, but then again, we’d be watching their farm too. It’s funny what trade offs you’ll take for some peace and quiet from two growing, and constantly boxing, little boys. We would have our own free time to do whatever we wanted and it sounded glorious. It started off small - discussions about going out to eat - but then it grew, because I make things bigger and better than they ever have to be. I suggested to my husband that we go kayaking. I had been checking out Google Maps and there was a numbered gravel road that went very close to the river right across from Arrow Rock, a local historic site with lots of restaurants. Arrow Rock is usually a 30-40 minute drive, but from previous excursions with the boys, I knew that a path to Arrow Rock came right out to the river where we could park the kayaks. It was a wonderful plan and I was excited about it. It seemed so simple! On the Saturday that the boys were gone, we left the house at 1:00 P.M. after my husband had already been doing chores all morning. We loaded the kayaks from my in-law’s house. They were in an open shed and the life jackets were sitting on top, still slightly wet and muddy from the last time they were used, which would add to our general homeless appearance later on in the evening, and we road tripped to the spot I had chosen. It takes some time to get an old ‘85 Chevrolet Silverado from point A to point B, especially on old gravel roads or your brains will be rattled from the lack of shocks, so we were already eating up a lot of time, and when we arrived at the gravel I had pointed out, we were met with a private gate. Apparently, since the last time Google had checked on this particular gravel road, which V’ed off in two directions, a flood had taken one part of the gravel, and the other had been gated off as private property, more than a half mile from the river. Even if we wanted to risk hopping the fence and getting shot, my husband doubted that I would have been able to carry my kayak that far. He was absolutely correct! I have no stamina. We cruised around for a while trying to find another spot, even coming to a spot down river a bit that had a steep embankment that we could climb down to get to the river, but we were concerned we wouldn’t be able to get back up with the kayaks after dinner. Little did we know that we would be doing this later on in the evening when we were much more tired in a different spot for sheer expediency. At this point we gave up on the idea of a quick cross of the river and decided to make a day of it and get in the river at a point upstream where we had been before, and we called my mom to pick us up downstream later in the day when we were done. Getting in was a piece of cake. The only issue was the dirty life jackets, but we dusted them off as best we could. John was wearing a white button up shirt, and I had wondered about that when we left the house, but I didn’t say anything. It was sunny out and it kept him covered but not hot. We floated down the river using GPS and looking for the path that I had been on before. It seemed simple. Surely it would be recognizable, but the river is a changing thing and this path had changed. The last time I had been on this path it had been well maintained out to the river with a sand landing area. It had to have been recently built at the time because there were no weeds growing on it. At that time, my boys had played on it and easily reached the creek beside the river because it had been cleared off. This was during COVID, and a lot of time had passed. I didn’t realize I was looking for a weedy area that didn’t look like a path at all. Had my husband not seen people looking out from the path, we would have missed it completely, but we only missed it by 200 yards. 200 yards paddling upstream was 199 yards too many. We realized this quickly, so John decided we would get out and he would carry the kayaks over rocks on a jetty to an easier place to paddle. The whole time he was doing this, I was thinking he was going to get bit by a snake napping in between some rocks, and apparently so was he, but he was determined. At the point that was calmer at the top of the jetty, there was another obstacle of logs that we would have to do something about, so John put me in first and we slowly but surely pushed the logs out of the way. “There’s a sandal!” I laughed, as I dug through the sticks and logs, pushing them through the water, making a path. John was still standing on the jetty, pushing logs with a paddle and using his foot to push me out farther to get momentum into the logs. It was funny at this point, kind of. Really, it was gross. Now we only had 100 yards to go in between two jetties, so the current wasn’t as fast. It looked easy but it was not. I quickly realized that my kayak was not built for this. It’s a kayak made for the idiot kayaker like myself. It’s not made for speed or tricks, it was made to not tip over, which it never did, but could I steer it? Absolutely not. It went in its own direction at all times, especially while I was trying to go upstream. This last 100 yards was absolutely miserable. John was cheerleading, yelling, “You’ve got this! We’re almost there! You can do it!” I was screaming obscenities. To make it the 200 yards upstream took a whole hour. We were eating daylight like nobody’s business but I don’t think we were aware of that at the time. We were just extremely hungry, so we loaded our kayaks on the shore in a safe spot and walked the trail into nearby Arrow Rock. We were all smiles at this point. We did it! We made it across the river and now we can say we boated to our date night and had dinner. For some reason we were so very proud of ourselves for having saved the gas money from not driving the 30 mile distance to Arrow Rock, but looking back, we definitely spent more gas money driving the gravel roads with the large farm truck hauling kayaks rather than the gas-saving Pontiac Vibe straight to Arrow Rock. Let’s not even get started on the time we spent traveling. We’ll get to that later. We hiked to town hand in hand, commenting on the grotesque number of millipedes on the trail, like thousands, and discussing what kind of beer they’d have at the restaurant because we certainly deserved it after that ordeal. Ha! It was yet to come! As we walked to town I realized I had stepped in mud when I originally climbed in the kayak, spreading it all over my seat, and now that mud was nicely spread across my butt on my black shorts. “It looks like I pooped my pants!” “Yep!” John laughed because he’s no help at all, but he did take the chance to wipe my butt off for me because, you know, any chance to cop a feel. I did have a long sleeve shirt with me, so I tied it around my waste to cover my poopy butt but nothing was to be done about my muddy tennis shoes and my husband’s very large pit stains on his white shirt and the mud he had smeared across his pants and shirt while dragging the kayaks around. We arrived at J. Huston Tavern in Arrow Rock at 5:30 P.M. and immediately ordered beers. We had a wonderful meal and had another beer as we mapped out our return journey. At the rate of the river current (according to “omitted expletive” Google) we could get to a ramp and have my mom pick us up just before dark. We were all set! We ate all we could knowing that we would not be carrying any leftovers on a kayak with us and rushed the short ¾ of a mile back to our kayaks at the river. We even stopped for pictures. What a bunch of idiots! Thankfully, I didn’t notice that I had also left my credit card at the restaurant or we would have even gone back for that. That would be another trip the following weekend to retrieve. Every second was going to count at this moment and we didn’t even realize it. We quickly realized it once we got on the river. Before we got in though, John switched me kayaks insisting that I take the easier one, a decision that he would later regret and probably wouldn’t make a difference on my part. I’m certain that he thought that my kayak travails were all in my head. They were only 49% in my head and they were 51% the kayak. Once we were out on the river we kept trying to find the best current, and we quickly realized that the current was much slower than we had calculated. There were parts of the river that were at a standstill almost. We were watching the trees on the banks barely move by. We have been in a D2-D3 drought in our area, which is severe to extreme drought conditions, so the river was exceptionally slow, and we had not factored that into our equation. We were used to the river looking like a beast and running wildly. Not the case, not the case in the least on this day. At this point we started paddling wildly and moving as fast as our poor arms could take us. We were still in good spirits, joking occasionally, so at one point we came around a corner and I sang out to my husband, “Just around the riverbend!” in my best Vanessa Williams voice and he laughed shortly and he said, “Not funny!” He was beginning to realize his switched kayak was like riding a bike in the mud. It was slow and turning was difficult. It especially wasn’t funny because just around the riverbend was not the town we were expecting and the sun was going down. At this point a couple of boats went by and we were debating on whether to flag them down or not, but they went by quickly and seemed to want nothing to do with kayakers. They were too good for us with their motored boats and we were very jealous. “Wouldn’t it be funny if Nick was out tonight?” my husband said about one of his friends who is frequently on the river and who would have saved us. Really, it was wishful thinking. The panic was starting to build. We took one last picture before the sun went down and called my mom to alert her it was going to be awhile and it was definitely going to be dark. None of us were happy about this. We tried paddling quickly again, but it had now gotten dark. We could see the lights of the town we were heading for, but they were not lighting our way. Once I could hear the water running over a jetty in front of us at the last second, and I alerted my husband to stop paddling. We realized we were heading straight for it and frantically paddled out of the way. It took another hour before we got to the town with lights and although this was helpful, it now seemed the river was going too fast around all the bridge and jetty obstacles. We were near the ramp, but we had to make a decision. At this point we decided that we better get out now while we were so close to a road and my mom might be able to find us. It was too scary to risk it. Really, we were too scared to go any farther. Darkness in kayaks is not fun! It’s frightening. Someone asked later why we didn’t have headlamps and I explained to them that we thought our trip was going to be a few hours long, not 11 hours long. We left the house at 1 P.M. and by the time we were home it was almost midnight. But before getting home we had to figure out how to get our kayaks to the road in some dense undergrowth in an area that was private business property with a gated area around it. I was silently hoping that some camera would alert them that we were on their property and police would come help us and silently hope that that wouldn’t happen so no one would find us in the state we were in. I was certain a beaver or fox or something even larger would jump out from it’s home in the undergrowth as I pulled a kayak through and immediately deciding I was rabies material, but we luckily made it through to a road and drug our kayaks out. My mom picked us up at the gate after we chucked the kayaks over and left them to pick up our truck, to then come back to load them and head home. This was the trip that never ends. We arrived at home ready to sleep. It was three hours past our bedtime and apparently 10 years or more past our adventure days. We have decided from this point on, we are going to have easy date nights, ones that involve dinner and a movie, and quite possibly, just take out and Netflix. We are much safer at home. I’m just thankful for my husband’s help. He is amazing in situations like this when I just want to cuss and cry and scream, like that will help at all. He’s there to do the heavy lifting and the much harder job of cheerleading me on to survival. Dear John, I promise that our date nights from this moment on will be pieces of cake, literally, in front of our TV watching Ted Lasso. The most adventure we’ll see is Rainn Wilson traveling to other countries and we can live vicariously through his show Rainn Wilson and the Geography of Bliss. John and I returned from a conference last month that I mentioned in my last post, a cattle marketing school focused on a sell-buy approach. I learned a lot of new things, and I’m glad I went. I'm a nerd and enjoy learning new things. I was always the kid with pencils, paper, and my highlighter ready for class, sitting in the front row. Everybody hated me, but everybody wanted to sit next to me. We did attempt to sit in the back row at this conference just because we were a tad late, but the instructor called us out and we promptly moved to the first table. It was a great experience to be with my husband, learn more about his industry, and show off my math skills. Yes, the librarian has mad math skills, well, until trigonometry rolls around, and then I'm in tears, but thankfully, trig was not on the agenda. At the conference, my husband and I were known as “The Honeymooners” by Doug, AKA Mr. Cattlemaster. He's a friend of my husband and frequently holds a cattle marketing school, teaching a sell/buy approach. He called us “The Honeymooners” because I posted about our suite with a jetted tub at the Holiday Inn before we arrived. We were legends for our swanky room. Only the best for me! Doug also knows I'm a teacher, so I was called out a bit for that, in fact, right as the conference started. Doug said I would judge him for his grammatical errors on a slideshow, and he would be correct. I would have if I had found any, but he either had a very good editor or I was distracted by the math problems he set before us. His wife was there, behind the scenes, running the show (he'll admit to that), so she might have also been his editor. I was an apt pupil though. I had my pencil, pen, and highlighter ready, and Doug provided us with a workbook. He focused on showing us a formula that included supplies, time, and profit into each sale and purchase, and we practiced that to figure out specific prices that we should buy cattle, so we could go home, figure out our own numbers for our farm, and market accordingly. I saw it as a way to remind ourselves that it's all math, to take the guesswork out, and narrow down what we can make a profit on, and numbers don't lie. Doug also focused on something that I've seen in teaching and writing workshops, but he's been criticized for including in cattle marketing, and that's a psychology lesson. The first hour or so of the workshop focused on building confidence and breaking down some of the hang-ups farmers may face. It's necessary for me, as an educator, to hear these words and pass on this kind of lesson to my students, and as a writer these motivational speeches are a good way to keep up the pace when sometimes you don’t have a finished product for months or even years, so, of course, even a farmer needs this kind of encouragement. It’s a job that’s going to have good and bad years, not just good and bad days. It was a good start to the workshop because the rest was hard work, but also fulfilling. I learned a lot about my husband and my husband got a lot out of it and has been working hard practicing it at home. If you are interested in attending Doug’s marketing school, I highly recommend it. Look for him on Facebook and Twitter as Mr. Cattlemaster. He often writes for Beef magazine as well. The rest of the conference was work, but we did socialize a bit and enjoyed a few days without the kids. Since the days were full, we even enjoyed a swim each morning at 6:00 A.M. before breakfast. If a pool is available, I do not skip a swim, no matter how early I have to get up or how late it makes me as I try to rush to the back seats in the conference. Another highlight was the rental car, which was much nicer than ours. Also, I got some good laughs listening to the cattlemen gossip, and Doug's wife said they're the worst, and it sounded about right when Doug said she compared them to junior high students in their drama. It was entertaining. “The Honeymooners” went home refreshed and ready to conquer the world. That's just what you need from a good conference. It was motivational and educational. If you're interested in Doug's conference, the links are below and his next one will be hosted in June in Beatrice, Nebraska. Tell him “The Honeymooners” sent you. Doug’s website - https://mrcattlemaster.com/ Marketing School Info and Registration - https://mrcattlemaster.com/marketing-school/ My husband asked me to join him on a conference at the end of the month, a cattle marketing school, so needless to say, not my forte. I agreed readily to spend time with him, but also because there’s a jetted tub in our hotel room, and it's the third quarter at school, and I need a moment to walk away if I’m going to survive the school year. The third quarter burnout is just as strong as it is being a librarian as it was being a high school English teacher. It’s rough! AND…we haven’t had one darn snow day! I’ll do anything to get a day off. I will not be attending just for moral support though or selfish reasons. My husband signed me up for the conference and would like me to learn a few things to help him out. We’re a good team! He likes the farm and physical aspect, but I like the math and any technological aspect of things, so I think he’s hoping that whatever is beyond him, I can help with. I sure hope so because he just spent a lot of money on a course to finally teach me something about the cattle industry. EEK! So like any good librarian, I decided it was time to do some reading on the subject to prep for this course. I was always the student pre-reading before a class so I’d know what I was getting into. I’m not smart; I’m well prepared. I will never be the bull in a china shop, running in and learning by mistakes. Whatever grace you see is a lot of prep work because I don’t like to look like an ass. I went straight to the source to learn about the conference and about cattle marketing. The conference is going to be in Beatrice, Nebraska, run by Doug Ferguson, Mr. Cattlemaster. I went to his website and read his first blog listed on the site and I do intend to work my way through all the blogs, but I had to stop on the very first one, titled “Traits of a Great Farm Spouse.” As you know, I do not consider myself a great farm spouse, but I’m going to use this blog as a boost to my confidence because maybe I’m not so bad after all. The #1 trait is to be supportive and that I am. Like I said, we are a team, and my husband often comes to me for advice. Most of the time, it is beyond my learning, but I tell him what I would do based on instinct, and in return, he listens to me vent about the struggles of being a public school educator EVERY SINGLE DAY after school, and a lot of times, he puts me to bed early when it’s been too mentally and physically draining. If he needs an extra hand, I’m there for it. If I need a glass of wine at 4 P.M., he’s there to pour happy hour cocktails. After writing that paragraph, he may be more supportive than I am, but maybe I just complain more. I also think we have #8 in hand - humor. We like to make each other laugh. Even at the worst times, we bring the jokes. Laughter is the best medicine! I mean, what man would let me write a whole humorous book about him if he didn’t have a sense of humor. My goal now is to work on what I don’t know, and I will admit, as you probably know, I don’t help much around the farm, so obviously, I don’t know much about the farm. Doug’s #2 of what makes a good farm wife is initiative, an awareness of how things run. I am failing in this aspect, so my goal is to improve. I’m not going to learn it all. I have a full time job and about three other jobs on top of that so it’s not my job to learn my husband’s whole career. Well, unless he wants to learn how to teach a couple of my classes, then we’ll see. We’re to an age though, that if I break a hip, he can do the laundry, and if he throws his back out, I should know at least where the animals are. In the next couple of weeks I’ll be doing my homework. Hopefully by the conference I will know what to expect and how I can assist with initiative. At the bare minimum, I’ll be supportive, but let’s hope that my husband didn’t just invest in something that my brain is too full to comprehend. School’s out for summer! I will never say that without singing it like Alice Cooper, which is weird. This school year was messy, fun, hard, chaotic, full of laughs, sometimes tears, basically, all the things, and technically, for me, it’s not really over because I have lots of work to do in my library to close up shop and to prepare for next school year. But today, I left the school building to have a writing day with my writing group. I went into school early to get some last second things done for summer school students and teachers, but ran out the door at 9 A.M. to be an hour late to my writing session. I did not mean to be an hour late, but that’s just how the cookie crumbles in my world. My writing group is used to it and were glad to see me after such a long absence of only hearing from me in our group chats online for quite a while. They are the reason that I have kept writing this school year, little bits at a time, but I never gave up because I knew that they would be writing too, finding time in their busy schedules and getting it done. It’s been months since I’ve joined them in person and nothing compares to writing with them in a group. We don’t even talk much when we meet. It’s a power session of writing, editing, and submitting materials with a few short breaks as members of our group enter and leave to say hello and goodbye. It must be the working vibe going on around me, the words being blended in my vicinity, that the proximity to such writing efforts being made around me get me to write to the point of mental exhaustion. And I definitely need to build up my stamina after a school year of stolen five minutes here or there, and occasionally a thirty minute break in brotherly competition at home when I shamefully load up some Disney+ so I can get a short time to write when inspiration breaks over my head. Honestly, that is not very often during the busy school year. I had hoped that working close to home with a four day school week would offer the time to keep writing as much as possible, but I have never had a year working in education when I didn’t find a free moment that I didn’t use to improve my lessons, find something for my students that would improve their learning environment, or take up a task that would help my colleagues. Education is not a career for the faint-hearted so sometimes creativity of my own would be swept up in the never ending tasks and worries of a public school employee and be put in third place by the never ending tasks of a helicopter mom. I’m here today though, working at the coffee shop with five other ladies, powering through a marathon when I haven’t been going the distance for quite awhile. And it feels amazing. Glad to be back at the table for a while. “That’s weird, but it’s good” is a direct quote from my brother about a simple Italian pork recipe that I made for a family dinner years ago, and I sometimes feel like I’ve taken that as a challenge to see what I can get my family to eat.
It’s really not that hard to create something exotic for my family of meat and potato lovers. When I was growing up, five days a week my family had a gravy with every meal. The other two nights were tacos and a drive-thru dinner, sometimes KFC, making the gravy tally up to six. My olive-stuffed appetizers and sweet pepper-infused concoctions get overlooked for a cheese ball. My brother suggested Mexican food for Easter this year. That may seem exotic in itself, but we do this at family dinners when we’ve already attended a lot of turkey and ham filled meals already and need to switch it up. When someone suggests a Mexican themed meal, my mind goes straight to big ideas like pickled carrots, corn tortillas, and lots and lots of cilantro. My family goes straight to walking tacos. We’re on different wavelengths. With my usual gusto, I went straight for a recipe that had ingredients I’d never be able to find because we technically live in a food desert. The Feasting at Home site has the most amazing pictures of the food and it sold me immediately. Skipping the dramatics, I’ll tell you it was delicious. The link is below: https://www.feastingathome.com/oaxacan-lamb-barbacoa/ Honestly, I improvised on a couple ingredients. I searched high and low for ancho chilies and found none. But I had one ingredient that was definitely farm fresh. If you didn’t notice, it’s a lamb recipe, which was going to be a stretch for my walking taco family, so instead of telling them it was lamb, I just said it was barbacoa because they’ve all been to Chipotle and that would go over better. Again, it was delicious, but I left the oranges in it, which I think deterred those wary family members from it. Too much vitamin C! My mom did try it, and although she didn’t appreciate the spice as I would, she did like it. At least I think she did because then John told her it was lamb and she screamed. But I promise it was delicious. I was going to freeze some to save for another dinner, but then we ate it all. Happy Cinco de Mayo! Try a lamb recipe to celebrate! My school year is just about over and I can smell it in the air. I can taste the glory of it. I spent all last week running a Scholastic Book Fair and it….was….exhausting. If you’ve never helped with one of these events, you should probably remember to never volunteer for it. I spent the week lifting heavy boxes, delegating all the jobs, calming overly excited children, explaining over and over that it’s buy one, get one free, and running the register while little kids who don’t know how to count change argued with me about the worth of a dollar versus the worth of change (they are all certain the change is more because it’s shiny). They handed me sticky money, wet money, money that wasn’t theirs that I then had to figure out its rightful owner. They were so happy and so close. I went a whole school year wearing a mask and now I have hundreds of littles in my face asking me over and over how much a book is, in my bubble, demanding to know why buy one, get one free doesn’t mean the expensive book is the free one. It was nonstop. All day, so much so that I ran out of extra books to restock the shelves with. I love their joy of reading, but man, do my feet hurt! I repeat, it was exhausting. During that time I was also pretending to teach, fix devices, and check out books, and to be honest, I was pretending to mom and wife it at home too. I say pretending because I was stalling on all things hoping I could try again after the book fair was over. It’s all consuming. But now it’s been packed up, forms are all filled out, and it’s all been picked up. The library looks back to normal and I’m back to my normal lesson plans and schedule, which I didn’t appreciate until I had to run the book fair on top of it. There are only 14 days of school left. I’m at the point now that I can finally see that it’ll get done when it gets done, and some things just won’t get done because 14 days isn’t a lot and I’m fine with that. I feel like I can relax a bit and use some of my time to get back to my love of writing. Expect a flood of posts this summer if this feeling continues. It was a very rough year, and now I need to be creative to heal from it. Also, it’s teacher appreciation week, so don’t forget to send that apple to school with your child along with an encouraging note. We don’t ask for much, but a little encouragement during crunch time can go a long way. When someone on the news says, “Don’t panic-buy,” well, we all naturally panic- buy. Just like when you tell your toddler, “Don’t eat that,” they immediately grab a handful of whatever they aren’t supposed to and jam it all in their mouth. We’re all a bunch of toddlers. I’m the worst. I have not yet panic-bought yeast, flour, sugar, any of the basics that were disappearing at the beginning of the pandemic. It looks like I am hoarding toilet paper, but I just normally buy the biggest package available, and just happened to grab two giant ones recently when my kids weren’t shopping with me. We currently have over 60-some rolls of toilet paper in our bathroom because I was doing kids-free shopping. That’s two free seats in the back seat of the car and giant packages of toilet paper fill in those spots equally. I feel like every mom understands that. Knowing kids-free shopping only happens once in a blue moon, I jam-packed my car with non-perishable, jumbo sized of every staple in my house. But when I heard on the news that Halloween costumes and Halloween candy may be in short supply, I immediately ordered costumes for a ninja and an Air Force fighter pilot. John is going to be the fighter pilot and you guessed it, I’m the ninja. Just kidding, they are for the boys. John will go as a cranky old man, and I plan on being his trophy wife for Halloween. He has been perfecting his costume and act for years, as have I, but he's been more successful. I may look young, but I picture a trophy wife as getting mani-pedis everyday and instructing the nanny on how to do things. I'm not quite there yet. After ordering the boys their costumes, I also immediately grabbed a handful of Halloween candies and snacks at Aldi. A giant bag of assorted candy bars and a box of Halloween-themed Rice Krispie treats made it into my cart because I was worried they'd all be gone if I waited too long and because I'm simply a glutton. There's absolutely no reason that I need any candy and treats at all. No one trick or treats out here. We leave this house to go trick or treating in town. Basically, I just bought 10,000 calories for no reason other than gorging myself, which I have done. I have a serious addiction to Rice Krispie treats - always have, always will. My mom used to make them all the time, and they're even better homemade because you use butter to coat your hands to lay it flat in the pan so it doesn't stick to you and nothing is better than something coated in butter. Lots of butter! After a while, I think she just stopped cutting them up because I'd walk by every five minutes with a fork, get a bite, and be on my merry way... for five minutes, until I'd walk by for more. It was a breakfast cereal so I often took a giant square, like a third of the 9 X 13 pan on my way out the door for school. Breakfast of champions! We lived in town, just a few blocks from school, so one time during junior high track practice, a friend and I took a detour through my house to get some Rice Krispie treats while the rest of the team jogged around the next block. We just got behind everyone when they ran back by after circling the block, with cheeks full of marshmallowy sweetness. What I'm saying is that I should not be the parent who purchases a large box of 60 Rice Krispie treats.
So I urge you not to panic-buy Halloween treats. You will regret it if you have no discipline. You will also find yourself having a conversation with your spouse about their day and unknowingly, like a robot, proceed to eat one after another as your spouse shares their woes for the day, then asks, “Do you know that you've just eaten seven of those in a row?” And it will be true. And he didn't see you eat two before he started talking to you. Just wait until the day before Halloween to buy the treats. Yes, you may be left with Tootsie Rolls and Werther's, but it may save you some marshmallowy shame. |
AuthorThis is my therapeutic release for all the things that annoy me about living on a farm. If I can make it humorous, I can survive it. |