Musable

I know, it’s been awhile. But the summer months are filled top to bottom with work, both on the ranch and at the company.

A typical day begins at around 5:30. The dogs, all of whom sleep with me, start rustling around, and Newton - a creature of habit - has to go out. So, we all get up, I let the dogs out, check their food and water, check Gandalf’s food and water, grab some tea, and sit down to look over what’s going on: sort some helpdesk tickets, kill off spam, pull up the weather report, see if we have any servers inbound that will need to be set up, and so on.

Then, it’s outside to check on everything that’s growing out there: harvest whatever is ready, watch for bugs and damage that might indicate there are critters to deal with, pull weeds, see if any of the existing plants have given everything they have and need to be pulled, plan out the next rotation of seedlings, get everything watered and/or fertilized (seabird guano for the corn - very high in nitrogen).

Inside, it’s now about time for lunch and a review of what’s going on with the business again: most tickets, a bite to eat, some coffee, and a cooldown from outside. The NOC is a good place to be during the heat of the day if there’s something that needs to be done there. Otherwise, more work, then…

Back outside for more weed pulling, more watering for the things that really need it (cukes, watermelons in particular), making trellises for anything that needs it, planning for the things that will need support down the road, checking the flats to see what has popped up.

On days like today, I might have some bread dough going, which needs to be kneaded, risen, shaped, proofed, and then baked - that will bring me in and out during the day. At times, there’s a special request (cookies, my brother asks, as they head out to my aunt’s place). Usually, I’m also planning and making dinner at the tail end of the day as well. On any given day, there may also be a trip to the doctor or dentist in there somewhere. I’ve been visiting the dentist quite a bit, as oral cancer and the associated treatments are hellish on the teeth. That’s one of the reasons many oral cancer patients simply have their teeth pulled before they start treatment. The aftereffects are horrid, and when you consider that people like me can barely open their mouths afterwards, you can imagine having a dentist and an assistant trying to do anything inside that limited space. So far, I’ve had several root canals, replaced fillings, filled new cavities, already have a couple of crowns with a couple more on the way, and in general should probably just set up a cot at the dentist’s office to save time.

In the evening, more work: maintenance items, handling the occasional ticket, heading off to the NOC for setups if I didn’t get to them during the day. If mom happens to be gone, at dusk it’s also time to round up the chickens and make sure they’re in the coop, ready to bed down for the night.

My days ends somewhere between midnight and 3 AM, at which time it’s off for a nap. Then we start all over again a few hours later.

Most days, I’d say, are fairly normal, happy days, and no douchebags puncture things by being…well, douchebags. The worst are those who take zero responsibility for anything: like the ass who requested that we transfer a domain in. We told him it would have to be unlocked, and never received a followup from him that he’d unlocked it and it was ready to transfer. Fast forward a year: now he’s bitching at us because the domain is expired. Well, we tell him - nicely, I might add - you need to go renew it at the existing location because it was never transferred. He quotes our own ticket responses to us, for some reason, as if a) we don’t have access to them already or b) it says anything other than it says, and then follows up a couple of days later with a pompous directive that we are “hereby informed” that their account is terminated effective immediately, when a simple “please cancel” will do. The topper? We’re apparently nasty and have poor service because we didn’t read his mind, and we’re not to “grace” him with any further replies. No problem: into the filters you go, just to make sure that no mail ever is received from you (and sets off the autoack for the helpdesk) and that no mail ever goes out from here to you. But we’d like to thank you for demonstrating why techs everywhere wind up despising people.

I don’t recall people being total jackasses when I was younger, and I certainly don’t recall the sheer level of ducking responsibility that seems to invade just about every human being these days. When we screw up, at least we have the decency to say so, and then fix whatever it is. When it’s something as stupid as a domain that you didn’t bother to follow through on that you’re being idiotic about now, I’m going to have a hard time finding any sympathy and I’m certainly not shouldering your failure for you. I try not to rant about work on ye olde blog here, but it slips out from time to time. Apologies to my handful of readers.

As long as I’m ranting though, I have to make a comment about one of these Nutrisystem commercials that annoys me to no end. It’s the one with Jillian Barberie, the one wearing so much eye makeup she looks like a raccoon. She’s blathering on about the things she loves, like football. A football is tossed to her, and she catches it. “Football,” she says, tucking the ball under her arm. “How many girls could do that?

That little piece pisses me off. Every girl I know could catch a softly tossed football. A lot of them can catch one that’s being thrown at them while running a pattern and while being defended by the other team. This ties in with Nutrisystem’s pimping out of all those retired football players, I suppose, and is apparently supposed to appeal to some rundown housewife in Podunk, IA, who never played sports at all when she was younger, but damn, could they be more condescending about the implication that girls just can’t do that stuff?

Pictures of stuff coming, promise. Food, garden, chickens. For real.

Last year’s corn experiment was derailed by various things, including either a dog or a deer crashing through the plot. We’ll be redoing that plot again this year, but decided to also try a little experiment.

These frames were set and then seeded on April 20. The photo above is from May 4. So far, so good. These frames were placed in an area where I had planted watermelon and canteloupe last year. We didn’t get anything from those plantings, although there were several watermelons that showed up to get chewed by the ants. We left the fruits and the plants to die off in that area, because as everyone who reads this knows, the soil can use all the help it can get.

Given that, I expected to see some volunteer watermelons show up this year. What I did not expect was to count 41 of them between the frames, and two in the frame above - how they got there, I’ll never know. Most or all of these will need to be relocated, as we’ll need the space between the frames to walk. What we’ll do with all this watermelon, assuming any of it comes in, I don’t know, but I’m sure the people and the animals around here (including the chickens) will take care of a good portion of it.

I’ve also decided to plant part of the front of the property in corn. We’re going to till up a plot in the front and put in a variety called maple sweet. It’s also highly likely that we’ll be putting frames around the front of the property. This all occurred to me as I was cutting the grass at the road side of the property, and before I ran out of gas in the tractor along the fenceline. I don’t mind using the tractor to mow, but growing cool stuff to eat is much more fun and if we ever go the CSA route - something we’ve been discussing more seriously than “one day, we should…” - we’ll have areas already started to hold more goodies.

Going to be a busy season around here. I’m already thinking ahead to winter (greenhouse, wiring the barn for seeding racks, keeping the chickens warm, and so on) and next year (bees, hopefully). I’m also thinking about tomorrow, which will find me at the dentist having two crowns put in my face. No doubt I will not be as chipper as usual after that particular activity, although I hope to be in minor enough pain that I can single line trellis the sungold tomatoes, which are beginning to fruit and need a bit of support.

Life on Lazy Dog Ranch.

My cat is dying.

She’s been dying for awhile, of course, just as we all are at our own varying speeds.

Her time is simply coming to an end sooner than that same end is coming for the rest of us.

For now, she occasionally gets outside to sun her old bones, but mostly she sleeps. She eats a little here and there, drinks a bit from time to time, but not much and not a lot. She’s still affectionate, and her motor still runs harder and louder than you’d expect from such a small cat.

And she still has her buddies to keep her company until she’s finally ready to move on.

OK, so it isn’t -4F here like it was at Lambeau Sunday night. It’s still cold to someone like me. I don’t like the cold and never have, which made our living in the northern reaches of the country interesting when I was younger. Then, it was just an annoyance because I’m a summer kind of gal. These days it’s actually annoying and painful, because while I’ve never had much bodyfat, since the whole cancer dance, my bodyfat is even lower than it was. A nice problem to have, no?

No.

When the weather cools off and the days only go into the 50s with the nights somewhere in the 30s, my feet never seem to be warm. My hands are cold all the time, making for interesting typing on the computer, and while everyone else is fine in a sweatshirt to combat what to them is a chill, I have a shirt, a flannel shirt, and two pairs of socks on, with my heater going under my desk to try and warm my feet. Going outside on a day like today in particular is rather heinous, as it was also very windy out there. I know my little cat (the one with the wrap around her waist in the photos) feels the same way, since she herself has a tumor that can’t be removed as she’s too old to be put under and she’s dropped down to virtually no bodyfat as well. She spends her days either in the window with the sunlight concentrated on her small frame, or curled up, leaning right against the other heater near my desk.

But I know that soon enough, my kind of temperatures will return, the sun will be out instead of taking the day off as it has this past week, and we’ll have colorful things growing out in the garden and yard. I may still get chilled when I come back in since everyone else likes the inside temp at around 72 (too chilly for me), but at least outside, my bones will be warm again. I can’t wait for summer.

That is a partial quote from this article. The full quote:

“We know who gets head and neck cancer — people who smoke and drink a lot and tend to be at an older age. The problem is that it’s sometimes difficult to diagnose until it’s at its late stages and difficult to treat and cure,” researcher Dr. Joseph Califano of the Johns Hopkins department of head and neck surgery said in a phone interview.”

I’d say it’s even more difficult to diagnose in people who don’t actually smoke, don’t drink a lot, and who are not of an older age. I’m all for things like this where a large number of people who potentially be aided, and all for making known the primary causes of this sort of cancer. But it also pisses me off a little bit: this is exactly the reason the first question I get from people is “Are you a smoker?” and the reason some of them look at me as if they don’t believe me when I tell them I am not and never was.

Once again, here we are at the end of one year and the beginning of another. Once again, it will be time for people to make a list of resolutions the cynic in me says they will never keep. Ironically, although I have never really been prone to making such lists, I had started one the other day, and one of the items on that list was to be less cynical about people and their motives. Another is to be calmer in the face of abject stupidity - I suspect that these two actually go hand in hand. Years ago - and this is many years, since it was two exes ago - I had a fairly profound interest in Zen Buddhism. Not to the extent that I am a particularly spiritual person. I am not. I am also not a religious person, much to the dismay of my sister, who is, and who finally settled on Catholicism as her religion of choice. Most of my interest in this is for the human factor, and to me it’s a lot like any other stress-reducing pursuit. As I was reviewing the past couple of years and all the assorted activities that have occurred, I told myself it would be worth my while to take up that interest again, and so I have. I expect this will help immensely in dealing with the people we have to deal with every day, and also help with the anxiety that every day brings as a result of that one singular day when the biopsy came back positive and the snowball that developed from there.

I also told myself that getting back out in the yard and working around the property will help, both physically and mentally. Getting the greenhouse built - what, you didn’t know that was planned? - will enable some experimentation with growing things out of season, inasmuch as anything really is out of season down here. This is Florida, after all. Plus, I’ve decided to take up another hobby: soap and candle making. Not very complicated (or, rather, only as complicated as you make it), relaxing, and in the end, a useful product, all of which satisfies both the left and right brain requirements. Who knows, that might be another side to the business here as well, but we’ll need a snappy name for it. My lack of sleep combined with one side of that (the soapmaking) may bring about echoes of something else entirely, but I think leaving out the underground fighting and general mayhem won’t be a real issue to overcome.

With all of that, plus two additional brands to finally launch, 2008 should be very active indeed. Here’s hoping it will also be happy, prosperous, safe, and healthy for everyone.

“Where are yooooouuuuuu?” asks one of my loyal, even if slightly deranged, handful of readers.

Well.

I’ve been busy with work-related stuff, trying to get some things done for the end of the year. I’ve also been dealing with a couple of the absolutely, without a doubt, unquestionably dumbest, rudest people I have ever had the misfortune of encountering. Let’s face it, if you call me by something other than my own name, when my name is in the dozens of ticket responses you’ve received, including the very one you’re quoting, then you are indeed a rude jackass. If you also can’t read plain English and suggest that we’re lying about something, you’re just ratcheting down our already low opinion of you. By the way: if your domain expires, and you don’t notice the fact that it doesn’t go anywhere for three entire months, don’t whine to us about how important it was to you, and that you were “busy” getting married and working. I’ve been dealing with cancer-related crap for over two years now, and I’m guessing that my employees, the state, and the feds wouldn’t accept that as an excuse if I neglected to pay them or file paperwork because I was “busy”.

In any case, I finally unloaded the camera the other day, and was shocked to discover about 500 pictures on the thing. That’s a lot of review and selective editing to be done. First, though, the goal is to complete the rollout of our gift to our clients before Santa shoves his butt down the chimney (what? no chimney?) so I can move on to other things. And since it’s just me on the job today - everyone else is at the football game or off having other fun - and since it’s quiet, I’m hoping to use today to bang out quite a number of things on my todo list, if only to see if there’s any hope of shrinking that before the new year rolls around.

Hope everyone is well and enjoying their holiday. Be safe, be well, be happy.

There is something about baking that is tremendously satisfying. I’m not talking necessarily about the eating of whatever has been made - since that whole cancer thing, I can’t eat half of what I make for everyone else anyway - but rather taking disparate ingredients and turning them into something greater than the sum of their parts. When you cook, say, a chicken, in the end it’s still a chicken. Delicious though it may be, or prettied up for those people who complain that chicken tastes like chicken, it’s still fairly recognizable as it once was even though it is what it is now.

But baking, oh baking: a pile of flour, some ripe bananas, chopped nuts, and a few other things (including, I might add, that homemade vanilla extract that is ready after some months) turn into something else entirely. Like this.

I figured we would freeze some of the mini loaves, so made a double batch.

Six loaves later, there was still batter left. Muffins it was. Big ones, as there was slightly too much batter for the six-cup pan.

What does it look like, with a dab of organic butter? This.

Mom also got in the kitchen and made some peanut butter cookies. Another wonderful combination of ingredients. The only regret I have is that it’s yet another instance of something quite difficult for me to eat.

I managed one, though.

In the past, I’d have eaten a handful. Now I leave that to others.

So, say my handful of readers, faithful although I am not: where’s the food, already?

With a test run of a roasted butternut squash dip already deemed suitable for the feast that is to come, I had picked up another squash and was deciding what to do with it. Given the horrible tooth pain I’d been experiencing - I thought that it would simply be an issue of digging out the existing filling and replacing it, as it had been on the lower left (and how wrong I was about that) - and given that it’s finally feeling like fall around here, another soup.

There was no real recipe for this. I took stock of what was in the kitchen, what needed to be used in addition to the squash, which was sitting forlornly on the countertop, and started throwing things together.

But first, the onion harvest.

This is a mixture of mini reds and mini sweets that I finally pulled out of the ground completely. The onions, much to my surprise, managed to grow respectably in the poor soil conditions. And there’s nothing better than a fresh onion you’ve yanked out of the ground yourself after planting and coddling it. Especially when you combine it with a little carrot.

Add an apple, that squash, some garlic…

Everything in the pot before the broth and seasonings are added.

Simmer for a bit, then use that handy immersion blender and add a touch of cream.

Soup’s on.

I had some of this for lunch after my two hour visit with the dentist, when the novocaine was wearing off and the pain meds had to be taken. They were kind enough to work me in today and do a root canal - something I was not expecting but which both my mom and one of my employees tells me they knew would be happening. And neither of them bothered to share that guess with me.

When it all comes down to it, life is just a series of small steps on the way to somewhere else. It’s never as simple as, say, telling someone you’ve bought a house. What you’ve really done is saved up the money for it, decided what you want, scouted properties, negotiated the deal, signed a thousand pieces of paper, taken the keys, packed and unpacked, sorted things over, and then started the things you want to do. But it’s much easier to say “I bought a house.”

In the same way, it’s easier to say you’re improving the soil on the property. What has actually happened is that you’ve looked over the soil, discovered that fill dirt and sand from other lots was dumped on yours, dug down a foot or so in various places looking for the real soil you know is there, tested the soil, brought in a ton of topsoil and compost, and sweated your way into what is the beginning of returning the top layers of nothing to a form that is rich and loamy and beautiful for growing Stuff.

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