It is a mystery

this is the last day we are open for strawberry picking. the season is ending with a sputter, the rain has done the berries in. There is a few out there and will continue to be, but it isn't worth being open. It is currently 85F with 77% humidity, so the real feel is at 90 although there is a good breeze today. Tomorrow and tuesday will be worse. The air is so thick. Raspberries and blueberries are ripening early, the first blueberries have color already even though they weren't ripe, same with the raspberries, so we'll need to be ready to open for those. 

I helped my dad lay plastic in the field this morning and it was still almost too wet to get the machine in the ground, it's wild how much rain we've had. We got extremely lucky, there was a storm that came through just east of us, traveling south east in a line that fully missed us. But it was likely to be a couple inches of rain if it had hit us. 

I have a fan in my little building so I'm fine while I do computer work and wait for the stragglers to come and pick. Bonkers that people are coming to pick right now. Not many but still. 

I'm planning to get up early the next two days, work for a while and take afternoons off to go sit in the creek. 

Yesterday, we closed the strawberries since there wasn't a lot ripe and I went and did a fun thing. I drove up to The Shire of Sterlynge Vayle for the Spring AEthelmearc Academy and had a nice time. It was a very low key and chill event, with classes being decent and I chatted with a bunch of random people. Lunch was delayed for an hour and I'll admit, it was running low by the time I got to line, so it wasn't super filling. I got really tired around mid-day as well, so I spent some of the extra time dozing a little bit. I learned about how viking sails were made, silk spinning and accidentally learned fingerloop braiding. I also was the only person to stop in for the Sign Herald class, and learned a bunch and also that might be a thing I could commit to trying to do. Mistress Gytha taught me and I felt a bit bad for her since she said she was the only one doing sign herald work in the kingdom more or less. So there's a need and I have the basics down. So I might try and brush up on it. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to stay for court to see Mistress Gytha sign. With the lunch delay and how tired I was, I headed home after the fingerloop braiding class and got home around 5:30pm and was so tired. I met some nice people in the kingdom that I might see again at other events. I want to go to the A & S Faire but I suspect it's too soon to get another saturday off farm work unless it rains that day. Which it might given how the weather is going. 

A mistake I made was wearing my binder the whole day. I usually wear it all day and it's fine and I felt fine when I put it on, but I forgot that something about my truck seat makes the binder uncomfortable. Regular seats are fine, standing is fine, just my truck seat. So lingering coughs from the illness were aggravated and my seat irritated my chest. Next time I'll bring something to change into for the drives out and back. 

I'm hoping the Chatelaine for the local group gets back to me soon, but if they don't, I'll need to find some other way to contact them. I would really like to get involved with the local SCA group....

I think the illness I had might have been the new covid strain. My mom tested negative, but it's possible her tests were expired. But it sounds a lot like what I had and also it's lingering in a way that most stuff normally doesn't. The snot continues and the cough is still going although it might be aftereffects. I'm pretty tired still in a dozing off in the evenings before bed. But also there's a lot going on and the weather is hot, so it all might be contributing. 

After we close at 5, I'm going to do some mowing with the little stinker (has a roof) and then go down to the creek to dunk myself. Lots of water and electrolytes. Napping. 

I actually took a nap today which is not a thing I normally do. 

We opened for strawberry picking today for a half day from 8am to 12pm. This meant I was down at the field setting up at 6:45am because there was much to do. Me and dad had moved the RST (rolling selling thingy which is a prototype ice fishing house they got ten years ago now) and plopped it down at the west farm late last night but didn't finish setup because it was already 8pm. I had trouble falling asleep because I ate dinner almost at 9pm.

First customer got there at 7:15am. Sigh. We had lots of pickers and everything ripe pretty much got picked. It's light picking currently, we only have a few early varieties and so they ripen ahead of the main season. We warn people picking is light and they simply don't listen. 

I was On Register the whole time. It's exhausting doing retail stuff. I understand why my mom doesn't want to do it anymore but my god I absolutely 100% don't want to do it. We're getting a worker for half of the days and she's starting next week, so I have to suffer through this weekend. I need to find a farm partner/worker who really likes that shit because it's terrible. I don't mind doing it for a little bit but ugh. Exhausting

While chatting with a customer, I got the idea to make pancakes for lunch with strawberries and whipped cream. So I did that. And then I had a 30 min nap on the couch. 

I successfully did a new thing this afternoon: fertigating! Irrigation + fertilizer, it has a whole complicated setup. 

One thing I've been trying to figure out how to manage is my garden. I haven't worked on it at all. Once I'm done for the day, I'm tired enough that I don't want to go back out and do more stuff out there. Part of it is that I thought about my work hours (6 days a week, 8am to 7pm with an hour lunch = 60 hours a week), well duh I'm tired a lot. So I think I'm just going to give it up for now and figure out something for next year. I've got peas and potatoes in the ground and I'll be happy to eat them when they're ready. I think I need to narrow my focus a bunch to maybe some small flowers around the house and then see if I can manage something else at some point. 

I started watching The Repair Shop again and boy howdy it's a delight as always. I also have realized I want to be like Jay, the host. He's so dapper and also a furniture restorer. And I started the next season of Taskmaster which has been a gosh darn delight. 

Thank goodness it won't be as hot for a couple of days coming up. Full body sweating. Ick. 

oops #1 - Sunday, I took the bobcat down the road to my grandpa's partner's farm so we can pick rocks. We will be planting pumpkins in that field, need to plow and there's some big frickin rocks. Dad told me to take it the back way, down across the back of the neighbor's field and across a small creek to get to the field. It is possible to just go down the road, but the bobcat has a top speed of around 1.5mph. I took my chainsaw and safety gear and cleared a tree out from in front of the creek which was easy. The creek is lined with rocks in that spot and it used to be a 4 wheeler riding path until the tree blocked it. It's been raining so much here lately, but the creek wasn't high, only three feet across and shallow. 

I got the bobcat stuck in the bank out of the creek which was quite steep. Sigh. Thankfully, the tractor was already at the farm hooked up to the dump trailer, so I unhooked it, called my employee and had him bring a chain down and he pulled me out. I left some eight inch deep ruts, so that wasn't ideal. 

oops #2 - yesterday, I spent some time mowing the tops of the weeds that are in the strawberry field. This is a thing we do when we've lost control of the weed situation and it isn't going to be done by hand before we open. Plus that section is not super healthy due to last year's lack of weed control. We've been hand weeding the good sections but it takes a very long time because the weeds are large and often curly dock, which we use a shovel to slice through the root and then remove the top of the plant. Huge pain. I was mowing along in the tractor we call the little stinker. It's  a cute little narrow tractor that has fantastic visibility because it's a tiny little thing with a short and narrow cab. Not very tall. I had dropped the deer fence so I could turn around, my tires went into the dip at the edge of the field and I didn't pick up the mower high enough and caught the deer fence in the mower. Spent an hour getting it out of the mower. 

During the rock picking Sunday, my steel toed boots gave up the ghost. They were probably 10 years old and I didn't use them much for my previous job, so they sat and the rubber soles started to disintegrate. One of the soles disconnected from the boot so it was only hanging on by the toe. So I got new boots this morning. Composite toe, so not steel toed, but still safety rated. Steel toe boots are useful but they are quite cold in the winter to work in. I'm using the chainsaw this afternoon, so I wanted new boots ASAP. I'm putting water proofing on them right now. Red wing brand which came recommended by my dad for good waterproofing and durability, so I'm hoping they last.

I also got a new-to-me phone. Unihertz help desk gave up on me. I did receive two groups texts from a random group chat at one point, so they figured it was Verizon's end and said I was beyond help. So I picked up a somewhat rugged verizon phone on ebay for $40, popped the sim card in and that is now my call and text phone with my tank mini doing everything else. I can set aside the motorola power g that has suffered so much at my hands. Disappointing end to that, but pretty clearly verizon is the problem. Really frustrating. My dad has been thinking about switching to US mobile and thought maybe switching carriers might help, but I dunno. I'm not on their plan, so I don't have to and it is cheaper, but I want to say those services that piggyback off of verizon or other big carriers can be a bit more unreliable. 

My potatoes have finally sprouted! Took them long enough. I haven't had a chance to plant more things because of work and non-spot rain, so I'm hoping to seed some things in the next week or so. 

This week was a weird one. We received our raspberry plants in the mail on tuesday so they went into the basement for a day or so. The basement is very nice and cool and it's better to store them unopened in there until planting. I went into Full Planting Mode, so I spent a day getting the trenches dug with the trencher, nice wet wood chips dumped in the bottom of the trench and my least favorite: irrigation work.

The irrigation is all set up with 2 inch plastic tubing with plastic corners and connectors and the drip tape is punched into the lines and fed from there. Plastic connectors are very easy to run over with a tractor or mower. They go crunch. So I got a bunch of stuff laid out and the main line for hte taspberries hooked up and ready to go when we set up the irrigation pump. Two of our pumps are down in the city being serviced. We kept the one that worked when put away. I tried starting it the other day and it wouldn't start, so I will try cleaning the carburetor as per which_chick 's recent post.

It was getting very very dry here, a combo of no rain plus lots of wind, and the raspberries needed water. So I set up a little irrigation line just for the rows that needed it and used Physics! My parents have 250 gallon water totes for their maple sap collection. So I grabbed one of those, filled it with 125 gallons and took it down and plopped it on three stacked pallets. Then we planted! Just over 200 raspberry plants, we got four of the rows done that night, turning on the water for each row as we went. Since it seemed like the pressure dropped a lot, we did two rows rotating as we planted. Once we finished that evening, I filled a second tote with 200 gallons and then realized the 5410 absolutely couldn't pick that tote up. The 5410 is a great tractor to have the forks on, it's fast and maneuverable. But it's got a light front end and no weights. When dad gets the full tote of sap, he uses the forks on the E, which is one of our chonky plow tractors.

So I let 50 gallons out of the tote. Driving was....interesting. Dad explained that you could drive the 5410 with a load too heavy with it, so long as the front wheels were mostly on the ground and you could brake steer. You might need to drive backwards, especially when crossing the road because you pop wheelies otherwise. So I backed over the road with the tote and popped a wheelie on the far side, which I hadn't expected for some reason and it scared the crap out of me and the people who came driving out of town really fast. I wasn't carrying the tote high, so it was a very small wheelie.

In the end, I had to get the tote to around 140 gallons because the tractor couldn't pick the tote up high enough to get it on the pallets otherwise. so all my wheelies were for naught. I hooked up all four drip lines and let it run overnight.

The next morning, we planted the other two rows which were further down the field, so I got the little water tank with the hose (we use it to put campfires out in the fall and it's strapped to a pallet) and watered them in by hand using Physics Round 2. Then I spent some time putting more woodchips on things. In the end, the irrigation didn't get fully set up because of the pump failure and also someone needs to clean the filters (on my to do this week) and blow all the lines out, but saturday we were due for an inch of rain, which would get us another week without irrigating.

I spent Friday evening working alongside one employee picking rock. It's fine. It's rock picking. The bobcat makes it easier at least. Especially the big honkers. We only got one big honker out of the field but it was the size of my torso and thick enough that we couldn't physically move it by hand. So I levered it out of it's hole with the bobcat and scooped it. At this point, it's started absolutely pouring rain, so I sent the employee home, swapped the bobcat to forks and moved the fertilizer pallets that my dad left out under cover and then jammed the bobcat and 7040 under cover.

I'm sure I did some other stuff but I don't remember what.

Saturday and today (Sunday), I took a chainsaw course! The Game of Logging Level 1 and 2, which covers safety, chainsaw basics, techniques for cutting down the tree and then we felled some trees. There was one person cutting at a time with the instructor right there with them, but it was really helpful to watch the other people cut down trees because the trees were all different. My first tree, I had to wedge it down because it had a backbend in it which was kinda fun. Second tree done today, I had to do two bore cuts since the tree was too big for the saw. I was very pleased with my aiming. There was also a half day on chainsaw maintenance which was very valuable. I'm so pleased with the course, definitely a slightly different cutting technique than the typical, we started with a 70 degree notch, bore behind the notch so the hinge is a specific width and then finish out the tree on the good side. I liked the way it worked and I can see why loggers would do it because it leaves a very clean stump with basically no fiber pull, which would lose board feet.

It was extremely windy today and the instructor said normally he wouldn't cut on a day like this, but we'd just go as safe as possible, so we wedged every tree. There still was one tree that got wild, it was actually dead but you couldn't tell, so when the guy cut almost all the way through, the wind pushed the tree right over the wedge. The good news is that it fell on the bad side (wedge always gets placed in the bad side to help balance it while we finish the cut), so they weren't working on that side and the rest of us weren't standing on that side either. It didn't hit anything either. Just about 100 degrees away from where they were aiming. The instructor also had a lot of horror stories about logging. He's been a logger for 40 years and has known people die in so many ways. But he used it as a teaching lesson on safety. Use chainsaw chaps and helmet, work on the inside if something is under pressure, if unsure, don't do it, use a wedge, always go away from the tree at a 45 towards the good side.

Very good training. Super worth the price. I'm helping my parents pack up a bunch of supplies of stuff in a few minutes since they are taking a canopy, chairs and tables down to my brother's tomorrow for the wedding in a few weeks. I'm so sleepy and thankful that I have tomorrow off and my parents will be out of the house all day tomorrow.

I still feel like I'm settling in, or I'm in a weird limbo of life. Like I'm waiting for reality to come get me, I'm having a really nice time working on the farm. It's deeply weird. Not helped by my messed up sleep schedule, staying up late reading and not getting up as early as I mean to but lots of long hours and hard work. And the world is out there on fire.

I got my new drivers license tuesday, getting a bunch of farm work done including catching up with some things that have been typically neglected. As I'm spending more time here, I'm more and more baffled on how the farm is still running with how much time my dad spends on his computer work. How did he do it? 

Today was weeding and spreading woodchips with the mill creek mulcher, a delightful machine that spreads mulch in a 18 inch wide swath on a 400ft row of blueberries in about five minutes with more time spent loading the dang thing and driving to the rows than actual spreading. Then I spent a lot of time on the bobcat skidsteer moving woodchips from one place to another. First was consolidating the pile currently being dropped off. Dad has a local tree guy empty his trailer in two or three different places and it's hard to get good piles with dump trailers, so the chips end up in piles of around 5 feet high across a 100 ft by 50 ft area. So I spent two hours or so taking those piles, creating a ramp up and making a 40x40ft pile that is 12 or 15 feet high. Good fun. Then I took the bobcat and loaded our dump trailer with the aged chips from the other pile and brought two loads down to the blueberries to be spread tomorrow.

One deeply weird thing I'm encountering is that I'm now much stronger than my dad. He's always been incredibly strong but between getting older and his back issues, he no longer can carry the stuff he used to, or muscle the equipment in the same way. And I'm back on the farm full time, so getting stronk as fuck plus the testosterone is making things go faster, plus I think the hormonal birth control I was on before was causing issues. We carried trash out of the church basement late last night and I took two bags up that he couldn't lift and one of them wasn't all that heavy in my opinion. But maybe I've changed too.

I'm doing a hybrid garden, growing some things I want in with the PYO farm stuff, like paste tomatoes and jalapenos and some stuff will be in a separate garden for just me, like the 7.5 lbs potato seed that shipped today. I'm hoping to have the garden field rototilled by the end of the weekend so I can seed peas and some other spring things. We have been having weather whiplash with some days barely reaching 40F with some strong winds and saturday is supposed to be 70F. The peppers finally germinated, the little jerks, and I seeded tomatoes today. Farm raspberries are coming next week, strawberries the week after.

Monday I made so much mac and cheese that it required two cassarole dishes (my nice 9x13 glass baking dishes are in storage. somewhere) and I should have enough to last me through sunday night even when eating some of it for lunches. Having access to my chest freezer and bulk goods is helping immensely with eating enough food. Monday, I also repaired my Unihertz Tank Mini of its bricked screen, which I broke back in December. I was so pleased with myself at fixing it, worked great except....the MMS receiving problem. It didn't have this issue back in December but it does now so I'm still using my backup phone since I can't get group texts at all. I've tried some stuff but so far nothing has fixed it. Deeply annoying.

I'm going to a trans meetup group on saturday hopefully to start meeting people. I like my parents but honestly, I need to spent time with people that aren't them or employees. Crafting night has been deeply helpful with this as well

Yesterday was busy. I asked my mom to spend a little time cleaning out my room so I could get my dresser in. First thing I did was take the big truck over and start unloading my stuff out of it. Turns out it was the fish run, where the state releases fish in to the creek, so there was five vehicles parked over by the church. So I had to chat with the neighbors. I was waiting on dad to help with the two big items in the truck, but the neighbors ended up coming over and helping which was really nice of them. I went and pruned blueberries after that.

Came back to the house and omg my mom got the room so cleaned! There's still two big shelves and some boxes, but I can fit a lot more stuff in there. I exchanged the mattress of the bed for mine and discovered why the old bed had a bunky board instead of a box spring with that bed frame. My bed is So Tall. I unloaded my truck into the house and sorted out the less important things that could be stored in the shed.

By mid afternoon, everyone had left the church (I guess fish aren't interesting in the afternoon?) and dad pulled the trailer over and I took my truck and unloaded almost everything by myself. The only thing I needed help with was the desk. Turns out I can lift a lot more stuff than I expected. Got it all neatly jammed into the shed, with a lot more space available, so I need to actually move my box stacks onto and below the table and move some things over to where they are.

I got my dresser into my room, yay! and just left everything in piles. Then went out to split wood. I love the skidsteer wood processor. It's so cool. Chugged through a bunch of that since dad said he had one more tote of sap to boil (he boiled all day), and I finished up my splitting, headed across the road and dad said omg why didn't you see my phone call, we're almost out of sap and you can't let the pans get too low. He needed the bobcat to lift the new sap tote up that high and I'd been using it. He ran off to get the bobcat and the new tote while I fed the boiler and watched the water level.

Turns out the sap was no good, smelled like vinegar and my phone had been trying to connect to the wifi and didn't allow me to get the calls. In the end, dad hooked up the water and made it in time. But that's the end of the maple syrup season, the buds are finally pushing here. It was 75F yesterday, very hot. The boiler was incredibly hot when it was time to load, so much that my bare arms were pinkish the rest of the night like a light sunburn.

I ate tamales and went to bed.

This morning, I spent time working on the farm website, which we switched to wordpress since it's easy enough. I also organized my room a bit, so I could actually find my sheets and I can sleep with my blankets tonight instead of my sleeping bag. Then I helped mom and dad carry all of the syrup over to the church for bottling. 13 gallons plus another 3 that still needed to be filtered which is pretty solid for one boiling.

Then dad and I went into the church belfry. This requires going up a 20 ft ladder placed against the wall of the church up into a trap door. I am scared of high ladders. Absolutely terrified. It took me two tries but I got up there and I'm glad I did. It was really neat! The stained glass is pretty and there's an actual bell up there that can be rung even if the bells that ring on a regular basis are electrical with speakers. We're going to try and date the bell and find out who made it, there's a mostly readable imprint that says "name" Bell Foundry Co. We also got some measurements for the louvers because currently the birds come in them were the screens are broken and have nests on the ones that aren't broken. I did successfully climb back down the ladder but I was so terrified that I was involuntarily whimpering the whole time and made my dad uncomfortable.



The bell still can be rung, there's a manual ringer in the bottom left of the corner and the rope still passes into the stairwell below it. The plywood ring behind the bell is a modification since the rope would apparently jump off the wheel when pulled.

After that, I went and pruned another two rows of blueberries, the last in the big block and scouted the farm fields to get a sense of what needs to be done in the next week or two.

Dad needed help with unloading the flooring into the house, so I helped with that after a brief break to hang out with my mom as she cleaned up from bottling and before my dad came over with the trailer of flooring. It took us a bit to figure out where to stack all the flooring because there's quite a bit of it but we did it with lots of breaks for dad's back.

My mom finished up her stuff and went to make dinner, which she threw some french fries in the oven for me (they got fishsticks) and I made cream dried beef which I poured over french fries and was absolutely stick to the ribs delicious. I'm off farm work tomorrow since Mondays will be my day off plus it's raining tomorrow. I have Plans. Risotto Plans.

Mid week, the deeds arrived to my parents' attorney's office. My dad got them filed at the courthouse on Friday so I feel safe posting the whole story.

Back in 1895, the original owner of the farm property donated a small parcel of land for a methodist church to be built. Later, in the 1970s, the owners of that same property also donated the pine grove behind the church and another small parcel for a parsonage to be built. These two parcels had reversion clauses in their deeds that if the congregation shut down and the properties weren't going to be used for church purposes, they would revert back to the original properties owners or their heirs. The owners of the farm property died and my parents bought it from their niece who was their only remaining relative. The property came with the reversion rights.

After a pretty popular minister was moved away from the church and a very mediocre one brought in by the higher up church organization and the pandemic, the local church congregation (the regulars were about 12 people, the youngest is 67 years old) was winding down. The big organization was planning to split the parcel so they could sell off the pine grove and parsonage to make some money and just see if anyone wanted to buy the church. My great uncle mentioned off hand to my dad that he should check the deeds on those properties because there might be reversion rights. (this came up because they church owned a chunk of land across the creek that was directly next to my great uncles property that they originally thought was theirs). Dad had been trying to buy the pine grove for ages since it fit in well with the farm business group outings and it had a pavilion in it (and an outhouse lol). This was around....June or July last year.

So dad got his attorney moving on looking things over and had him start contacting the big org saying, hey, you can't split the properties and sell them to a non-church entity, otherwise they revert to us, the deed would be contested. The big org said, huh you're not wrong. Now, at this point, if the big org had gone out and found another church to buy the properties, they could have sold all the parcels no problem and my parents would have been SOL. But they didn't because there's closing churches all over the place around here. There used to be four churches (all different flavors of christian but I don't really know the differences) in this town alone and now there's one left.

Messages went back and forth, there was lots of meetings between dad and the leaders of the local congregation (one is the guy across the creek who helps my dad out and another is my grandpa's partner, it's very local), about what would happen going forward. In Sept 2024, the local congregation leaders filed to close. Once that happened, the big org started all their closing procedures, where leftover money went, there had to be notices sent out to all the congregation members, there had to be a congregation vote (18 people showed up to that), all the little stuff to be done. Then in November, dad's attorney reached out again and spoke with big org's legal people and then it all just took time.

My parents started taking care of the parsonage, making sure the heat as on and working, all that stuff even if it wasn't official. The church has a ton of people who just stop by and turn off lights and things (changing that soon), so they didn't worry too much about it. Back in the fall, some folks did rent the parsonage for a bit to live in, so it wasn't as urgent to keep an eye on at that point. In late December, someone from the big org came by to clean out the important things, mostly bibles and some other religious related things. No financial records or anything like that because it wasn't important to them (or something). There was some amount of taking things that might be valuable and stashing them away in my parents barn so the representative wasn't tempted to come back with a truck and load more things up. Not sure it was needed, but there's multiple large printers and a snowblower in my parents barn right now.

The rep said they were the president of big org (my dad thought they were a retired minister haha), and needed to meet with another person to sign the papers and then they would mail them. And thus. My parents now own a whole ass church, a house and the pine grove for the cost of the real estate transfer tax. Now to be fair, there is a lot of upkeep cost to keeping the church heated and lights on. So we're hoping to get it up and running as an events venue within two months or so. Hopefully, this is a more passive sort of income for my parents as I take over the farm business.

So I'm at my parents this week. Helping them renovate the parsonage because they are going to move in there and I'm going to move into the farm house in march or april.

I drove in Friday afternoon with a load of mostly crafting stuff boxed up. Unloaded some of it before dark but not much.

Saturday, we went over to the parsonage and formulated a plan of attack. The big things are flooring and painting. It's a house built in the 70s, it's in decent shape, no major issues. There may be big wall removing plans in the future, but for a March/April move, flooring and painting. Once we went over that, I got to work. I ripped up the carpet and padding in the living room, dining room and hallway, got the big pieces rolled up and moved to the garage onto pallets. They might use it in the basement since there are plans to make a rec room/train layout/whatever in the basement since it's mostly solid. Not finished but not a nasty basement.

I did discover there was an old leak at some point and some of the dining room particle board subfloor will need to be replaced but it's minor and means we need to look over the shower carefully.

Yesterday, I labeled and pulled all the trim from those areas, we moved the fridge out of the house, brought in a fridge candidate to be evaluated, moved the stove and I started ripping up the kitchen floor. That sucked. The carpet tear out was pretty enjoyable work. Kitchen floor is a layer of glued laminate tiling over 1/4 inch plywood over some kind of ugly plastic thin tiling (original floor) over particle board. I need to get down to the particle board and they put so many nails in the plywood. I only got a sheet and a half of the plywood up, I need to come up with a way to do it that doesn't destroy the heating unit. I might score a line along it so the plywood cracks there and I can then carefully pry it up in one long strip.

Today I need to do my actual job for part of the day (brought my work laptop) and then I will work on more renovation stuff. Stuff cleanout is going middling. The parsonage is almost empty of stuff (they had the church office in there), and tomorrow a bunch of the old local congregation will be coming to sort through stuff in the church. We are putting things out on tables and at some point, the rest of the group will come by, take things and probably throw most of the rest away.

We have a game plan for the upstairs of the church, which will be the event hall once we figure out how to get all the pews moved in and out easily and remove most of the overtly religious stuff. We did find a big old bible from 1937 that was pretty cool.

Originally we were aiming for a wedding venue, but our next door neighbors are putting up a building and know a lot about the wedding business, so we may rent our facility to them so they can do more weddings. It would be nice not to deal with the wedding stuff in particular. We'll see, much to do! 

The last big farm weekend is done and now there is only one tiny weekend left of the season.  

I drove in friday morning and didn't jump right in as normal. I did some personal printing on their printers since I'm now ignoring mine. I printed labels for the items I'm submitting to the weavers guild show and sale and also did some fiddling with pdf editors and then was able to print a sewing pattern on their 24x36 inch roll printer which worked super well. The copy shop pdf is 36x48 inches, so I just had to figure out how to rotate and split the pages. I have some trimming of margins to do, but overall the patterns look great and saves me a ton of time cutting and taping together 8.5x11 sheets of paper. 

Friday night we only had one group so we used the time to get ahead for saturday. Sunny weather forecasted both days and we had 9 groups coming saturday. 

Saturday was sunny but also incredibly windy. It hasn't rained in weeks, so I set up our woods worker with an extra helper, a 30 gal tank of water with a hose, a rake and a shovel. I had them clean the areas around the campfire rings of leaves, light the fires closer to the start of the outings than normal, stay down in the woods with them until the groups got there and put the fires out if there was more than a half hour between outings going into the same site. Dad and B briefed the outing folks on what to do with the fires and we made it through the day without a single issue! We have lightly set the woods on fire in the past, so I didn't want that to happen this weekend when we were so busy and a fire would throw things off schedule. 

I jammed my thumb at some point Friday or Saturday and spent the day dealing with it hurting on and off which was surprisingly annoying. It still feels a little odd today as I type this but not hurting anymore. 

We were busy! Lots of people came out and bought pumpkins and other things. We were starting to run low on some things, so during the day, I had my stockers consolidate some of the squash displays. We finally harvested the hulless seeded pumpkins, so I put those out in the place where all the honey/maple syrup had been since we sold almost all of those. The jams/jellies fully sold out so I replaced them with the goosenecks/bird house gourds. 

Sunday was less busy with groups and a little more chilly, so we set up a fire ring up by the selling area for the workers/us. We set out hot dogs/marshmallows for the workers to eat through the day. We were still decently busy with the public so I didn't get a ton of time to hang out by the fire during the day, but once it got dark and only the groups were left in the woods, I got to sit by the fire. Very nice. Love fires. 

It was a late night, I got to bed around 11pm and slept in until 7 or so. Got up and got around, then immediately had to help with the monday morning school group outings. Setting up sites (no fires for kiddos), then had to drive a tractor at one point because the groups got all screwy of course. Partially because my mom didn't really do any group coordination and I wasn't really involved with the groups during the week because I wouldn't be there. So it goes. which is why she shouldn't be involved much more, she just doesn't want to manage. 

I did get my data entry and money reconcile done and then packed and hit the road by noon. Got home, unloaded and then laid in bed for an hour and a half until crafting time. 

Mom is open for last minute pumpkin sales this week, so I think dad restocked the display and they texted they were surprised how many people came out yesterday afternoon to get things. Since we bought so many pumpkins, it was easy to tell what we had left. We emptied all the bins of weird and unusuals, mini pumpkins, gourds. For carving pumpkins, when I left there was all the pumpkins on the displays, two partial bins near the displays and I think four more bins in the storage area. Which is wildly good guess on how many pumpkins we needed when we were buying them. 

I did finally figure out the thing that made a good pumpkin display and it's that the pumpkins must be an inch or less apart on the display. So if it's more than an inch, wiggle the pumpkins all over until there's enough room for another and voila, good display. I trained my stocker on this and the displays look better than ever. I can't be out there stocking anymore, so the displays would look a little sad by the end of the day, but now they look great the whole time. I did tell G what a good job he did stocking (once I taught him this) because I simply don't have time to do that with all the things I'm doing in the selling area. 

This coming weekend, we aren't really open to the public but we have three groups over the whole weekend, so it should be cleanup and debrief on what worked and didn't work. Almost almost done!

Another weekend down. I drove in friday morning during the team meeting and hit the ground running. We had an outing that night, so my worker was busy with that and watching the register while I whipped the displays into shape. I added another pumpkin display, put out all the false bottom bins that we had supplies to build and reorganized things a ton. I also started putting out the things that we bought at auction last week, sorting some things into proper price categories, putting them near other things at a similar price that sort of thing.
( rambles about displays )

This morning the heater/boiler got serviced and when I got home, F had turned the heat on, so now it's a balmy 63F in the house. delightful.

last week I don't remember much but I spent a lot of time cleaning seed. boring but fun somehow. put the seeds in the seed wiggler, listen to podcasts. I'm a little sad I found out way to late about the Draft Animal Power Days happening relatively near me this weekend but farm :( Someday

It drizzled all day Saturday, with the very outer edges of the hurricane just misting us all day. You could tell it was the hurricane because of the shape of the rain patterns and the movement. None of our groups cancelled which I was surprised about and only one group got rained on in any significant way. In a way, it was good to have a quiet weekend to start, we are just about ready for more crowds, all our new workers got some training time, especially the three folks we are training on tractors (two to be future drivers and one who is afraid of the farm truck but does the picnic site setup, so we put her on the Little Stinker which is a tiny international tractor that is very small and cute but easy to drive) 

Sunday was quieter, we had less groups and more time on our hands since it was overcast so I had the workers do all sorts of misc tasks.

Things we got done: displays all done and stocked, hayfort built, outing setup and execution figured out, group bin packing done. String maze done although it needs fixing. Tables moved. General stuff gathered. Drinks and food stocked. New picnic site set up and review gathered from an honest group on what changes we should make (bathroom needs to be closer which is fair). Many corn stalks cut. New display built for the Zucca gourds (I gave a newer worker the option of cutting more cornstalks or being creative and coming up with a good display, and he was very good and creative and did a great job once I got him all the tools he needed). Second group picking area setup.

I was having fun and while my feet were sore, I was full of energy for most of the day. Mom brought me and dad food which was great, because that kept me going. She made chili and it was so tasty. Friday was 7 hours after driving down. Saturday was 15 hours, sunday was 13 hours. I started drinking the Skratch Labs hydration stuff anytime I went in the RST to my desk which helped a lot too. I had success with the cash register cash in/cash out situation and while we were $25 off the first day (probably counting error on my part, I was really tired by the time I counted it out), we were 7 cents off the second day which was due to my mom rounding something. Success! 

I tried to hit the road between 9 and 10 yesterday morning, but then we had the farm meeting and talked through all the road work needed on the farm roads that the rain made nice and mucky. Then there was a group outing that we super weren't prepared for, so I ran down and started the campfires and all that. Left around 11:30 in the end. Got home and did the nutrient management reporting that I had been neglecting, given it was due yesterday, it had to get done so I did. Crafting was nice and I finished another tablet woven band. I ate taquitos for dinner.

I'm really tired today, I had a minute when I woke up in the middle of the night and couldn't figure out where I was. I thought I was in the adirondacks in a cabin for some reason. Must have been a dream/waking up situation. The hours are a lot. One of my future hopes is that we can bring enough competent people to the farm that we can split the fall weekends so no one person is working 15 hours. my vague thought on it is we have two people start at 8am, to get picking crew going, display stocking and selling area prep ready, pumpkins spread and the two managers work until 4 or 5pm. And two more people start at 12 noon when we open for business, one person managing selling area, the other managing drivers/picking crew until the last outing is done at 9pm. Or maybe 1pm to 10pm. Something like that. So that way, there's overlap during the busiest part of the day which is noon to 5pm but things are still getting done and no one feels this wretched. Monday morning, I was actively sore when i got up. Pogo told me I walked 6km each day.

I did get new rain boots and I'm so glad I did. XtraTuf brand, much lighter than Muck boots, less insulation. The soles are comfy if a little differently shaped than I'm used to but they seemed to need a little break-in time since I don't notice it anymore. My feet didn't sweat too much, not like Muck boots make my feet sweat. They are tight around my calf which I dislike since it's hard to get my pants to tuck into them. I'll need to pick up winter boots though, these are way too light to be dual purpose like the mucks.

I have spent a bunch of time working and managing the reservations for the group outings and the system. A lot of half hour here and there. At some point, I'll get paid for my time, they told me to track it and I have been. Kinda. Not the half hour stuff mostly but definitely the long weekends. I'm back on facebook to make posts which I have discovered is a nigh unusable website now. impossible.

I'm eating a lot of frozen food right now, which is saving my butt. Nothing better than taquitos from the freezer when you're tired. I also stopped by chipotle today since I was dropping a work package at the ups next to it and got today's lunch/dinner. feels like a splurge but I'm hungry and tired and it's hot and filling food.

more busy things this week with work bleh. will write about afterwards.