It was farm day again yesterday. I know - it was Wednesday, and farm day is supposed to be on Thursday. BUT Prince Farming got done at the office early, and my plans postponed, and the weather forecast predicted rain for today, so we decided to farm. Out of necessity, I assure you. See, the cows (the post of which you’re STILL waiting for) keep escaping from their lovely TWO fields. They have two huge and glorious fields in which they have free roam. But NO - they want to go into ANOTHER field. So they keep escaping. It is too cold, wet, busy, and inconvenient to chase cows this month. They need another field. We seem to accomplish the fencing of fields in spurts - I suppose as needed. This time the barn field fence needed to be completed. It was mostly done, but . . . I won’t go into those details here. It’s a skywatch post afterall. I didn’t bring my regular camera with me. I did have my iPhone, and couldn’t resist these shots.
I know planes fly over us frequently, but I’ve never seen the traffic in such a grid pattern before. It was really cool. I couldn’t capture the smallest contrails - they added a unique dimension. But that’s okay. Here’s a different view:
It seems like no matter what direction I looked, there were contrails. It was amazing. BTW - the gate in the foreground - right at the bottom left half of the picture is one we just hung - temporarily - till we can buy new gates. This gate is too short - it is supposed to be able to open across this lane and touch the fence on the right - and the gate from that field opens and touches this fence - creating a passage through which the cows can pass from one field to the other. Pretty nifty, huh? I would not have thought of that - which is why I’m just the apprentice in this set up.
The day before yesterday (that would make it Tuesday, I suppose) the sky was amazing. Again - no camera. This is another iPhone shot - which just blows me away. It was snowing on and off - nothing of note stuck, but the clouds and sky seemed very restless.
You can’t see as much of the orange as was present, but still - the differences in color in this small window were truly inspiring. It reminded me of the verse:
"The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament sheweth His handiwork"
-Psalm 19 : 1
You can see more amazing evidence of God’s handiwork by visiting the Skywatch site here, where hundreds of people share pictures of their skies every week.
When a person lives on a farm, there is a LOT of work to do. One might think that it is all work that lends itself to the production and maintenance of something worthy of selling, or growing, or . . .whatever farms are supposed to do. Today I realized that the things I categorize as farm work actually sometimes have ZERO to do with the farm and it’s intent, and more to do with what Prince Farming would like to do, or what he perceives I would like to have done. I have previously referred to work as "Farm Work" only because a tractor (or other farm implement of torture) is utilized. Today is a prime example. Let me preface this post by saying that I didn’t spend huge amounts of time doing farm work. But I did get called out at regular intervals throughout the day to do said work (hold things, read and call out numbers for signal strength. . . but I’m getting ahead of myself).
The first item on the to do list was to find a way to get a TV signal. I might have mentioned in the past that we never got around to hooking up TV when we first moved to TN 5 years ago. This was not by intent or design (of mine). It just never got done. And that was fine. There’s NO TIME for TV in this town. Doesn’t matter how small it is, and how lazy a person thinks small town living might be. There is really notime. The reason for this sudden burst of industry in order to get TV is . . . the OLYMPICS. I love watching the Olympics. Now you have to wonder where I’ve been for 5 years. I thought about it last night. How is it that I’ve lived for 5 years and not seen any Olympics. Did I miss the memo? Do I have amnesia? Probably it’s a conspiracy. I honestly don’t know anything about the last 2 (or three?) Olympic Games. Which is terrible. I started early this time - logged on to www.nbcolympics.com and watched swimming and gymnastics trials. And diving. And watched several other sporting events - BMX being the newest Olympic event. And I decided that since I didn’t have TV, computer would work out just fine. On demand (just the way I live). Prince Farming caught the bug early too. We decided that for his July birthday we’d get a new TV so we could watch the Olympics on it. Obviously that didn’t happen - but that will be the topic of another post on another day (if I remember it for that long - more likely I’ll read this and wonder "Why didn’t we go ahead and get that TV? What was more important? What was I referring to that would be blog-worthy?")
While I was on my trip, Prince Farming did some research and ordered an antennae (internet shopping). Then on Friday (that wonderful 08-08-08 day), we ran down to the big city and he purchased some sort of digital scanner/tuning thingy box (he knows about all this stuff, which totally blows me away - HOW does he know?)
So today was the day to get it all figured out. We put the antenna up on the electric post, and got a quality reading of 60% on 4 channels (none of which were NBC).
We live on the side of a mountain, so Prince Farming decided that if part way up is 60%, all the way up would be better. So we took DOWN the antenna and he went down to the barn and brought up a 16 foot 6" x 6" post. He attached the antenna to that and we hoisted it (with the help of the tractor) up against the electric post. There is no picture of this part - I am adding this photo to show how bloody tall that 16′ post was - it was equal to to top of this electrical post - and then the antenna went above that. I am not a fan of heights. I am not a fan of watching other people at heights. Except safely from my sofa when I’m watching the Olympics.
Then I had to haul him up to a level where he could adjust it on the tractor forks (a tractor is a wonderful thing). Guess what? The quality went way down - to like 20%. Who knew!??! Very disappointing. After we came in to eat (corn on the cob), we went back out and took that stupid 16′ beam down again (much easier taking it down than putting it up). And reattached the antenna to the original post. Back to better reception - maybe even 70% for some reason - including NBC. YIPPEE!!!!
After the whole crazy nonsense of putting up the antenna (how is that related to farm work again? - oh yes. We used a tractor. So it qualifies) we had to put in some fence posts we had dragged out. We dragged them out so Prince Farming could fix a drainage issue we had at the entrance to the farm. This truly does qualify as farm work. 1) we used a tractor, and 2) it will ultimately help to keep the cows in the field and off the railroad tracks (and neighbors hay fields) when we finish the job.
We pulled it out as carefully as we could, so as not to have to reconstruct the whole thing. Before today, this fence was lying on the road. Today we tried to put it in as gently as we could. I was in charge of digging the holes.
I did them all by myself. Well, me and JD. We work well together.
Prince Farming measured and put his foot right where the hole needed to be, and I carefully avoided his foot and drilled - I’m SO grateful for post-hole diggers and for farmers next door who own post-hold diggers so we can borrow them (it).
Now Prince Farming just needs to nail up the rest of those boards and we’ll be good to go. Good to go on to fixing the rest of the exterior fencing that STILL needs to be up. It won’t be a board fence, though. Barbed wire is looking pretty good. That’s another farm day.
