I have writer's jam; and it don't taste like strawberries.

I’m completely jammed on the book today. Got to a point last night where whatever I’d done before just flat didn’t work. So I’ve spent the day trying to get unjammed, revisiting past plot points, etc.

Frustrating.

But after some severe rewrites and a beer or six, I’m sure I’ll get back on track. Tay and I just need to reconnect (yeah, hippy-dippy-sunshine shit, but it works).

It’s been snowing all day and they’re calling for snow from here ‘til March. So far the calves all seem fine. I was worried about sickness in all this cold and damp, but they seem fine. The bull keeps romancing the cows and the horses got their feetsies trimmed today. So far they’re wintering fine on the pond across the road along with the young bull and his two ladies.

Maybe I need a night out. I’ve been really going at the book for several days. Maybe some time off would help. Clean the house, cook, knit, let my brain rest a little. All work and no play is, well, Axie-like.

Save the World: Plant a Tomato

Today I’m plugging Michael Pollen. Dad saw his interview with Bill Moyer and told me about it so I downloaded the transcript and read the interview after supper tonight. This man makes way too much sense to ever hold public office, such as Secretary of Agriculture. His whole premise is not invest billions of dollars in ag, but a grassroots movement on the part of people who eat to grow their own food, support farmer’s markets, and rediscover, as a nation, how to grow our own food. Like Dad and I discussed, in his lifetime, since the 1940s, we have lost the ability as a nation to feed ourselves. It’s gone from small farms and eating locally to the average piece of food traveling 2,500 miles from its place of origin to our tables. Not only is this expensive for the consumer, it’s unhealthy. All the food additives, which make the agribusiness corporations multibillions of dollars, are the leading causes of cancers, type 2 diabetes, and heart disease, according to Michael Pollen.

How empowering would it be to organize, as a nation, without largely relying on top-down enforcement, to make the switch from eating globally, to eating food grown within 200-300 miles from our homes? And I’m not just talking produce, but meat, eggs, butter, milk, bread, all of it. We’d be reclaiming our health, our environment, our food freedoms. Agriculture right now, as an industrialized model, accounts for a huge amount of pollution and global warming. As a farmer, it weighs heavily on my conscience that my actions, meant to care for the earth and nourish food from it, actually cause harm. But we don’t farm because we love it; we farm for the same reason most do, it makes money. At least it’s supposed to. And that’s the problem with centralized agriculture, the small, diverse farmer cannot compete with corporate farms. Not only that, but, again according to Pollen, centralized agriculture provides a huge opportunity for persons to stage acts of terrorism by poisoning our food supply.

Since Pollen says it all a lot better than I do (and so you all can get on with your day and stop listening to me rant) the transcript is here and the video can be found here. Let me know if it doesn't work right. Thanks for hanging out this long. And plant a damn tomato, people, jeeze.

Winter Driving and Factory Farmed Pandas

I loathe winter driving. For one thing, I’m a wimp about it. For two, I suck at it. Put wimp together with lack of skill and it’s a frickin’ mess.

I cleaned my room yesterday. Yeah, I know, alert the media. I’m the type of person who normally lives in quasi-organized chaos until it makes me crazy enough that I start organizing and, more importantly, throwing shit out. Haven’t used it? Pitch it. Zip really didn’t like going in that garbage bag. (Joke.) So the world feels all nice and streamlined today. For the moment. I’m sure when I go to write later, I’ll be tearing the place apart for that stack of notes that I know I just had.

We’re doing writing/reading group today. It feels weird not to go shopping and get a coffee, but there ya go. It is fun to set aside some time once in awhile to read someone else’s stuff and discuss a mutual reading assignment. And with there being no penalties for failing to do any of it, the whole system just rocks.

The snow has really piled up over the day. But the cows don’t seem to mind, all a bunch of big butts at the hay feeder. The calves look healthy so far too, no sniffles or sneezes or leaky butts. Well, I better try to get my pages for the day. All the running around this morning and writing/reading group this afternoon really cut into the day. Then Dad and I had this idea for factory farming pandas… don’t ask.

It's a farmer thing.

I fucking hate Thanksgiving. I think my family is too normal for true appreciation of the national dysfunction holiday. No one gets drunk. No one shoots anyone else because they thought he was a deer. See? Boring. No trips to jail or the emergency room. Other than the raccoon that popped out at me in the barn when I went to pee, everything was pretty low key. (Yes, we have an indoor bathroom, but six people in my grandma’s house for a weekend and bathroom access is limited. It’s like Jeff Foxworthy says, you spend the weekend askin’ “Is someone in the bathroom right now? I ain’t peed since Tuesday, y’all know that?”)

But really, Thanksgiving was pretty low-key. Just holidays aren’t my thing. And since most of my family is pretty sober, there’s not a lot of drink-talk afterwards. So it’s weird because we eat early, then sober up by five o’clock. But I can still get some work and a workout in tonight, so it’s cool. Counteract all that stuffing. I couldn’t do turkey. After the evil encounter with the chicken a couple weeks ago, poultry and I are not friends. Maybe when we get some chickens in the spring and Dad and I butcher them out, I’ll be able to eat chicken again. Weird, I know. That’s why when I find a guy who thinks I’m hot in Carhardts and rubber boots, I’ll never let him go. It’s a farmer thing.

Cull cattle: a reminder of why farmers don't carry sidearms.

Dad and I loaded up five cull animals today and took them to the stockyards. Good times. It was all that truck wanted to do to pull that trailer with a 1400 lb cow and four 800-900 pound feeder calves. That’s at least the very approximate eyeball figures Dad and I guesstimated on the way over. It was sad to see one of my older cows go, she was, I think, a third generation of mine out of the first two cows I bought back in 1998 or 1999. But she lost a calf two or three years in a row and we just flat didn’t have enough hay to feed her fat ass again. She eats more than the nursing mommas do and is twice as mouthy. I usually feel worse about selling them right after than I do when I get home and look at whose left and realize how much better the herd (and we!) are without the culls. And after this year with freezer beef, plus the eight (count ‘em eight!) up and coming feeder calves for 2010-11, the last thing we needed was those three annoying steers eating us out of the house and busting gates. Hopefully we can build up some beef clientele over the next few years and sell directly to buyers instead of sending calves across the scales. Anyone interested in grass-fed freezer beef feel free to contact me! :-) Gotta get my plugs in where I can, right?

I’ve been down kinda sick today, stomach thing again. This is getting really old. It would at least chap my ass a little less if I could get some work done while I feel like shit. Hopefully I can get some pages tonight. I started A Lick of Frost by Laurell K. Hamilton two nights ago. It’s really good. Of course, can we expect less? Dana is encountering Anita Blake for the first time (second time?) in The Laughing Corpse. So far, the anti-horror girl is entranced. One thing about Hamilton, it might seem gross to those of us not into horror, but the characters keep ya comin’ back for more. I’ve kinda got a weird backlog of half-started books right now. Since the writing is going so piss poor, I ought to take some time and give one or two a decent start. We’ll see if I can concentrate better tonight now that I’m no longer writhing on the couch wimpering. (Yes, I’m well aware that that deserves a good (cough) pussy! Bite me. And have a nice day.)

Pages, knitting, and cow vaccine

Thursday
I got my pages early today. 2,500 words by 4 p.m. Usually it’s that by 1 a.m. At least I’m productive between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m. Next week is Thanksgiving, which I didn’t realize until about yesterday. Fuck I hate holidays. Not the food so much as all the Christmas music and tinsel. But we don’t decorate for any holidays, unless extra beer cans on the counter count, so the clean up factor is zero and awesome. No take down if you don’t put it up. Gram totally gets off on the whole decorating thing. I’d rather drink a glass of wine and chill with some good Kid Rock or Eminem and fuck Christmas. There’s some holiday cheer for you.

Maxine’s vet appointment went without incident yesterday. She’s all distemper free and Zip gets to go in with her next time. Yey. Two heelers at the vet on a Friday morning. Isn’t that a country song? Should be.

I’ve been reading an article in Smithsonian about Bernini. He was brilliant, it seems, and his father, when asked if jealous that his son would surpass him in sculpting, said “It doesn’t bother me, for as you know, in that case the loser wins.” Daddy Bernini had a good point.

Sunday
I got 5,000 words on Thursday, nothing on Friday and nothing yesterday. We worked cattle, vaccinating and sorting, on Friday and by the time we did supper and I worked out, it was sleepy time. Saturday was shopping, writing and reading group, then hooking up both tvs to the HD converter boxes and lots of knitting. We did the last of our culling and sorting today. Now its housecleaning and laundry. Hopefully I can get some pages tonight. Zip wouldn’t come home with me, so I took Maxine, who’s sleeping on the couch, and left my recalcitrant dog with Dad.

I’ve been reading A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson lately. It’s hard to say if it’s more funny or more informational. I’ve started on Lolita by Nabokov. Not too far in yet so no words of wisdom to report. Right now my mind’s all bound up on cattle and who the bull is romancing.

The difference between sex and love - love is a tragedy.

Okay, to catch up. Richard and I had dinner on Friday and discussed the book some. He’s an old friend of my Dad’s and has known me since I was grasshopper sized. So the sex in the book took him a little by surprise, but he was full of good feedback and helped me think about character motivation, etc. I spent the weekend in a kind of haze, stuck on the book and watching movies. I drew some. I brooded much. And after we did book club/writing group on Monday, I was ready to jump back into the book with both feet. And I got pages last night.

Zip has had a nervous belly lately and keeps, uhm, well, shitting in the house. Maxine, on the other hand, is going most of the night without incident. Damn dogs anyway. It’s a good thing they’re cute. I’ve been in the process of getting all the vaccinations and wormers around to dose the cows, sort off the culls, and turn the bulls in for breeding. At least we only have to do the whole herd once a year. Maxine has a vet appointment for this afternoon, just a checkup, and hopefully they can tell me she’s perfect in every way again. After dealing with Zip this week, she seems more like it.

Well, the cattle drugs just came, so we’re all set for that, and I had to call Dad to remind him about Maxine’s appointment. She is getting so big. And smart. She hears everything. All right, I better quit before I start gushing like a proud heeler mom. (I am.)