#farmkid chronicles

[bomberqueen17]

kids

Yesterday my mother had an in-person board meeting for the nonprofit she volunteers for. It was exactly overlapping with dinnertime.

I volunteered to take all four grandkids, and supervise them at the farm for the afternoon, and then bring them back to Mom’s house in the late afternoon, and then Middle-Little Sister could pick up takeout dinner from the city (where she lives) and bring it up to us, and we’d all have dinner together, and then she’d stay there until Mom came home, and I would leave with Farmkid to get her home to bed at her normal time.

Mom tried to tell me she didn’t need me to do anything until evening, but I managed to convince her to go home, decompress alone in her house, take a few minutes, and maybe even lie down for a bit. So she did that.

It worked out fine; the children made insane amounts of noise, but were very agreeable about things like “please don’t slam that door backwards into the painting on the wall and break it” because I didn’t say “quit tear-assin’ around the house” because honestly if they have that much energy they should work through that.

All of them, even the youngest, are by now to the point where you can have measured discussions on stuff, and maybe they’ll absorb it and maybe they won’t, but I feel like now is my time to really shine as the Weird Aunt. As we were driving, one kid moved seats, and thus had his seatbelt off, and I told him that if the cops saw him without a seatbelt they would immediately arrest me and I would die from the mortification and become a ghost expressly to haunt that child. (He’s eleven, this isn’t going to scar him.) I promised that I’d follow him to college and hide behind the headboard of his bed and whenever he managed to find a special friend he wanted to bring back to his room to get to know better I would take that moment to manifest and terrify them, so he would never ever get to know anybody as well as he wanted to. (I’m fairly certain he’s old enough to know what I meant, but if he isn’t, well then, he’ll figure it out later and this will be funnier. His older brother sure got my meaning.)

We then had another debate, sparked by a confusing advertising slogan on a sign we passed, about whether houses could get married, and if that was a possible way to make new houses, and I posed to them the dilemma of whether a house would lay eggs or give live birth, and if so to either, how,  and we posited that houses give birth via the garage, but that gets confusing in the case of houses with detached garages.

Anyway, these kids are leaving soon to go back to Maryland, but I’ll see them again in August, so in the meantime I gotta think about more weird shit I can do to really cement myself into position as The Weird Aunt. I’m already shitty at buying people birthday presents, so I gotta make up for it somehow by giving them the gift of effortless eccentricity.

Today Farmkid is absolutely obsessed with the thought of getting Minecraft on her tablet, like her cousins have, and I pointed out to her that hours of screen time in a day are bad for you; maybe in the summer it’s okay but when there’s school and homework and things, you wind up not having any time to think with your own mind. So she came up with a whole idea of having alternating Minecraft and TV time, and her mother pointed out that since money for chores hasn’t motivated her at all, maybe additional minutes of screentime as payment for chores *would*, so that’s a thought.

She was under my nominal supervision at the time, and had begun following her parents around to chatter excitedly about this idea, and I decided to distract her by giving her a metal pail and I got a drywall bucket and we went down to the creek and picked up cool rocks to throw in the mud puddles outside the barn door, to try and slow down how much dang mud gets tracked in. It worked a lot better than I thought it would, and we (mostly I) hauled close to 150 pounds of gravel and rocks to dump into that mud puddle. Not bad; the main purpose was to let Farmkid get some of her chatters out, and she spent the whole time lecturing me on dragon-heart rocks and how they make the earth ten times stronger. We placed them very carefully in the permanent mud puddle next to the barn’s heavily-used side door, and she pronounced this the cure to the mud problem.

Well, it won’t hurt. Anything’s better than that perma-puddle.

Yeah I don’t have a punchline. I’m super far behind on writing but that’s fine, those deadlines don’t mean anything anyway. I have so much material it’s just not put together. We’ll see what happens.

(Yes, I’m sitting here nominally supervising Farmkid; she’s now “setting things up” in the side yard-- a kindly friend came to haul all the kids’ toys out of the basement and clean them off after the flood, and now they’re all out there bright and shiny and dry, and mostly too  young for Farmkid, but of course she’s happy to play with them since they’re novel. It’s sort of cute to see several far-too-large children sitting at a toddler picnic table.

I can’t see her but I can hear the satisfied little clicky noises she’s making with her tongue as she plays. It’s not hard to keep tabs on that kid.)

[bomberqueen17]

new toy

Farmkid’s best friend bought herself a new toy with her allowance. Farmkid is aflame with jealousy, but then decided to handle it this afternoon by going and finding one of her stuffed toys she hasn’t played with in a while, packing it up in a box, and pretending to receive it in the mail. She opened it up with great enthusiasm and instantly set about transforming the box she’d packed it in into a habitat for it, with much coloring and punching through of windows, and now has taken her “new” toy in to watch TV with her until dinnertime.

This is a better way to deal with jealousy than the methods many adults of my acquaintance use, so I’m rather impressed.

[bomberqueen17]

a remote farmkid update

her mother just texted the family groupchat

“So i left the room for ten minutes after dinner, and when I came back for dessert, [BIL] had shown [Farmkid] the Abbot and Costello skit about who's on first, and they proceeded to perform it for me for the entirety of dessert. I can't decide if I'm glad he's giving her culture or bemused that he's teaching her fresh ways to be irritating..“

I answered “what is fatherhood if not endlessly finding new ways to teach your kid to annoy her mom“

I told my dude, who immediately launched into the Cheech and Chong routine of Dave’s Not Here. I mentinoed this to my mom and she was like...

“I can’t wait for the Thanksgiving floor show,” my mom commented drily.

[bomberqueen17]

oh my gosh this is goofy but cute.

so there’s a great bookstore down in Troy, and the proprietor (or someone, I’m actually not sure who organized it) put together an event where they hid Waldo figures in a bunch of different businesses downtown in the city, and the deal was that you could get like a little passport thing, and go around, and at each location if you found Waldo there, the clerk of that business could then give you a stamp in your passport, and once you’d filled up the passport with however many stamps (I don’t know if you just had to get a certain number or if you had to get all of them or what), you’d turn the passport in at the bookstore to get entered in a drawing to win a bunch of Where’s Waldo books.

And my grandmother, who is extremely competitive, and my niece Farmkid, who is extremely focused when she wants to be, together went all through downtown Troy and got twenty stamps, and turned in the passport and the guy just called and Farmkid won!

I have no idea how many people filled their passports, but Farmkid sure as hell did. She’s very excited, although she was convinced she’d already won. 

[bomberqueen17]

Talked about this over on pillowfort, but

I did a double-header of two slaughter days in a row. 

First for my sister’s farm, and it was fine-- 260 chickens, a few more than normal but not too many. I stood in the spot at the pass-through window at the finish pluck table, and squeezed and rinsed the carcasses (to get as much poop as possible out) before plopping them into the bucket for the eviscerators to take from. Veg Manager stood on the other side of the window and kept tabs on the bucket, making sure the oldest carcasses got passed on down the line first. Between the two of us, we controlled the speed of the line; I tended to hold carcasses on my table a moment longer if I noticed the bucket getting full, and he’d pull carcasses out of the bucket and stack them neatly on the table in order so that they’d be passed down to the other eviscerators first. If I saw more than six carcasses sitting on the table, I’d hold two or three on the table while I kept working. That meant that there wasn’t much room for them to come out of the plucker, so they’d keep them clipped into the scalder, and the kill cones wouldn’t be able to be emptied.

And B-I-L, who was killing, would asked concerned questions now and then, but I’d wait just a moment and then pass through the carcasses I’d been holding, one at a time as I saw eviscerators take the backlog away to work on, and the backup would clear, and the next ones would come through, and we were getting through maybe 60 in an hour so that’s really not bad.

We had a big crew, 13-- so, a full six eviscerators, shoulder to shoulder all along the counter, plus my sister delunging, checking temperatures, keeping the birds organized into the chill tanks.

We didn’t stop to take a break, and so the last 60 or so birds, we slowed down and it took us more like an hour and a half, as everyone was getting tired. The plucker had to take a break, a couple of the eviscerators swapped out and got coffees and such. We’d had to clean out the line after the first 60, because we were processing them for another farmer and it’s imperative to keep the two groups separate-- we even sterilized the line in between. But we didn’t stop. B-I-L hates stopping for some reason. 

We started at 8 and finished at 11:30, and it wasn’t bad. We had to package them too, and of the 60 birds for the other farmer, he wanted 20 cut for parts, and 20 cut in half, and then the last 20 bagged whole. 

Cutting up birds takes a long time, so we’d completely finished bagging all the whole birds by the time they came to cut up the birds for our own farm’s sales. But they cut those birds while we cleaned and then dispersed the other workers to do all the afternoon livestock-care chores, and they’d finished just as the rest of us finished, and everybody got to leave at the same time. 

The next day, I started off by taking the two biggest coolers on the farm and filling them with ice. (We’d had to use them to temporarily hold the other farmer’s processed birds, so I’d had to scrub and sterilize them both before and after that-- so they were clean and sterile and ready to go.) I’d left the ice machine on, and after we’d filled our chill tanks, the machine had made what turned out to be exactly two big coolers full of ice. So I got those filled, and Sister helped me get them into my car, and I drove up over the Petersburgh Pass with the car feeling kind of heavy, behind. (I don’t know that it was, but it handled funny. Can’t have been that many pounds, if I could lift half the cooler, but it was enough that I noticed it in the steering.)

Got to Square Roots over in Old Cheshire, MA (it’s 23 miles away, but a 45-minute drive because of Extreme Topography)-- the scenery was fucking amazing, with little shreds of clouds covering bits of mountains and such-- and used that ice to start off their stock tanks. They don’t have an ice machine that works, so the rest all had to be bagged ice from the grocery store, and there’s never enough of that!

They’d just started; I pulled in just before 8, and they catch their chickens the night before so they start at 7:30. 

I washed up and got my boots on and hopped in, and spent the day eviscerating. The woman of the house was intending to help, but the baby’s only 4 weeks old now and he was having some tummy problems, and was fussy, so she kept having to hold him, and go feed him, and take him inside, and also her back was bothering her a lot so she couldn’t bend much, and it was all very hard on her. So I was glad I was there to help keep up the pace. 

There were two new people there-- one woman was a former intern from the farm, and she was getting married soon, so we spent a long time discussing whether it was acceptable to have a potluck wedding. We thought so. It sounds insipid, to talk about wedding plans so long, but it was actually really funny; the woman in question is an artist, and quite foul-mouthed and of a very earthy sense of humor. She had some poignant notes too-- her parents are both dead, so she was asking how on earth she could have a ceremony where it wasn’t a thing that she had no father to walk her down the aisle. I recommended that she look around and find an officiant she clicked with, and that person would probably have some great ideas for how to make that not be a big thing. It’s surely not unheard-of. And her husband-to-be has no relationship with his father. We said, well then, subvert the whole thing, and have his mother walk him down the aisle and give him away to you, since that’s the only parent any of them has. She wasn’t sure about this, but it gave her something to think about.

The other new person is the new intern they’d hired at the farm, and she said basically no words all morning, because she was concentrating so hard on what she was doing. But at lunch she got about 10 ounces of coffee into her and then everything was hilarious and amazing and we all laughed a lot.

Lunch was also improved by the farmer guy and his mother (the farm’s owned by a married couple, and his parents live right down the road and help out a lot), collaboratively giving a dramatic recitation of The Owl And The Pussycat. There was a bit where they stopped, and the guy was like, “I won’t say this next part because [About To Be Married Lady] has such a filthy mind, she’ll take it the wrong way,” and she was like “What! I can be a grown up! What is it!” and they went back and forth, and finally he went on and it’s the part where the owl addresses the pussycat as “Pussy” a bunch of times in a row. He’s kind of a stern-looking guy, often, so it was unutterably hilarious to have him just saying the word “pussy” a whole bunch of times, and so [Soon To Be Married Lady] and [Quiet New Intern] and farm guy’s mother and his wife and I were all laughing so hard we were crying, and meanwhile, his dad and his daughter (who is three) were staring stone-faced across the table at one another, like “what is wrong with these people”. 

I stayed for packaging, which they do differently because you can’t sell birds that have been cut up for parts in Massachusetts. I didn’t get back on the road until around 6pm. It was a long day. I didn’t think I was that tired, but I got myself together and went out to the yurt and zonked the fuck out, and this morning I cannot concentrate or plan or do anything. (And when I left, I was given three quite nice steaks, and a farm t-shirt for my troubles, which I quite enjoyed. Everyone else got chickens, but they agreed it was kind of silly to give me a chicken. I got back and Farmsister was like, “You should get a chicken, we could do a side-by-side comparison!” Listen, they raise the same variety we do, in almost the same kind of operation? The difference would be so subtle. First, their chickens do free range, and are kept alive by a livestock guardian dog, but is that going to make a flavor difference? Second, they process a week early, to try to keep the size down-- but it’s one week! And third, they cut the necks out of theirs and package them separately, while we just leave them attached. I feel like any difference in flavor would really come mostly from them being on the east side of a mountain in MA and ours being on the west side of a mountain in NY. I doubt proximity to a Maremma dog is going to alter the nature of a chicken very much.)

Fortunately, my task for this morning is to entertain Farmkid while Sister and B-I-L move literally every animal that needs moving. (The hens! the broilers. The small pigs! the large pigs. All of them need fresh pasture because it is not only Thursday, it is Hell Thursday. This is why pasture-raised meat is expensive, by the way: moving the pastures is a fucking pain in the goddamn ass.) Extremely fortunately for me, Farmkid is so sated with attention from every other day of the week when somebody more dedicated and attentive than I watches her, and so she’s mostly playing by herself, and only occasionally asking me to contribute.

Farmkid has just shown up and is asking me to type things for her, so:

HOW DO YOU WALK A CAR : YOU PUT A LEASH ON IT AND TURN IT AROUND.

Thanks, Farmkid! 

She also said, of her parents going up to move the small pigs (who are like, 75 pounds each at this point, the size of large dogs), “Those guys? Give me a break! They can be boiled in a minute, in a big pot of ducks!”

(She is quite enamored of her own command of nonsense.)

[bomberqueen17]

farmkid chronicles part 4,937.5

We were just over at my mom and dad’s for Dad’s 75th birthday.

(He gave all of us checks for $75 each because he’s so delighted to have lived to be seventy-five. it’s extremely cute and also #relatable. I would like to live to be old enough to give out checks for the amount of my birthday to everyone at my party. that’s a new life goal. My dad is freaking adorable. Also, his littlest sister (who is like... 67?) sent him a card with several clippings inside from their mother’s “precious things” box, which she inherited like fifteen years ago when Grandma died, and one of the clippings was about Dad winning a Bronze Star for valor in Vietnam in 1969 and another was a Mother’s Day card he made his mother circa 1953 and signed with the identical handwriting he uses in his signature today, which was a little jarring.)

Anyhow, we put Farmkid to bed for a sleepover, and I read to her, and then we turned the lights out, and left, and about a half hour later my mom just texted me and Farmsister and informed us that as she was singing quiet good-night songs to Farmkid, Farmkid pops up and says, “Grandma, what’s five minus six?”

And then proceeded to ask a number of questions to which the answer would all be -1. Mom was finally like, kid, you learn negative numbers in high school, so you’ve got like literally ten years to think this over, go to sleep.

I wrote back, “[Farmsister], thank god you married into some math genes,” because lord knows, we don’t have them, she gets that from her dad. 

(The humorous sub-punchline to this is that I’m in the farmhouse guest room and sister is in the bathroom and had just complained of having hiccups, so I could hear her laugh-hiccup as she read the text message.)