Life on the Farm

Life on the farm sucks. The End.
Only kidding :)
Did you know there is a board game called life on the farm? There is. You go around the board hoping to land on cattle auction and avoid the farm expense cards. Every now and then you'll land on lightning strikes loose one cow, or cows get out pay each neighbor 10$ per cow, or sell machinery shake one die and collect 100$ x ____. As long as you don't land on taxes you're usually okay.
Life on the REAL farm is a tad bit different. Cows do get out. I remember as a kid always having to chase the cows back into the pasture or running and sitting on a pile of dirt with a tree growing out of it in our yard for safety so you wouldn't get trampled by the cows. If you want a cow to go somewhere it will most definitely go in the opposite direction. I've never heard of a cow being struck by lightning but my aunt's apartment and car were. If the cows get out and trample onto one of the neighbors land it's a good idea to give the neighbor a couple packages of meat (either deer meat or steer/cow meat). Cows can be butchered for meat. Some city boy tried telling me once that only steers were butchered for meat. That is false. Typically you butcher steers for meat, because that's what they're solely raised for. But it is also very common to butcher cows. Particularly if the cow has a hurt leg and is limping a lot or if it's really old. A completely random side fact: farmer's file their taxes at a different time of the year than everyone else. Out on the farm in the country, animals are everywhere. It is not uncommon to see a skunk or a raccoon wandering around, bats flying overhead, or hear coyotes and baby raccoons making racket in the night. In the summer my family plays baseball in the hayfield, that way we have more room. If you ever want to go hiking, there are woods everywhere. My family usually takes a fall walk in the woods when all of the trees change color and we go walking all afternoon so we take a bag lunch with us. People can have parties deep in the woods at a clearing so no uninvited person (or police officers trying to break up parties) can get there (easily or by road). (I don't do this, nor does my family, but one of my neighbors used to all the time). Summers are always filled with field work: picking rock out of the fields, chopping thistles and baling hay. Camping in the woods is very cool. On the farm you can name all of the baby calves! One summer we named each calf a name starting with each letter of the alphabet. Often times a couple calves will be born with birth defects in a breeding year. Youngstock get their horns burned off. When I was younger, the farmer who lived down the road would always move his cattle to a different pasture in the spring and so he and a bunch of other people would ride on horses and herd the cattle to the other pasture. They had to run right past our house and sometime cattle would come in the yard. It was always very exciting and scary. When working out on the farm one must have barn clothes, clothes to wear to the barn, and anywhere else outside, where it will not matter if they rip or get covered in poop, muddy water or dirt. Now you know about the farm.
Why am I sharing all of this frivolous information about my life on the farm? I have absolutley no idea. Maybe it will come in handy one day, probably not though.

What if's and Fate

We all know the 'what if' scenarios. What if this happened? What if that happened? My mother and I today were using the 'what if' concept and applying it to fate. What if our lives really were mapped out for us and we had no escape of our fate? What if when it was your time to go, it meant you really had to go.
What brought on these questions was a terrible accident. A boy that was going to be a senior in my high school this year was swimming in a gravel pit. He dove into the water and hit his head and broke his neck. Everyone who knew him and even those who don't are saying prayers for him and his family. He currently is not showing any brain activity. All we can do is hope for a miracle in the next 24 to 36 hours before they have to call it. One thing that seemed to send a shiver down one's spine, just minutes before he left to go swimming he posted a status on facebook saying "I hate how one day you feel like your on top of the world and one thing goes wrong and you couldn't go any lower..." One thing goes wrong and suddenly you've crossed a line in which there is no return. One thing like a swimming accident, like being sidetracked for a second to keep you from realizing how shallow the water might be, one thing that can have so many results. I cannot possibly imagine what his mother is going through right now. Another girl I knew, she was 3 years older than me, when she was a junior in high school she was in a car accident and was killed. Just before she left her house she left a note on the table for her parents the last part said: I should be back around (a certain time, I don't what what it was), Love you always, Nikki. Should was underlined several times. It just really struck a person, the way it was worded. Why should the word should be underlined? What made it important enough to draw attention to? Why shouldn't she be home at that time? And why on this note did she put "love you always"? However you can analyze words to get any meaning you want out of it. My mother then told me how there was a man down the road, and there was an explosion in his house. He barely made it out and really shouldn't have lived. The next day he was killed in a car accident. He barely survived only to be killed the next day. Why? There was another individual who was standing on a bridge, a car drove by and one of the wheels flew off the vehicle and killed them. It is the only time I have ever heard of an incident like it. It makes one wonder...it's as if it was those individual's time to go.. I'm not saying all of this to depress anyone, I just think that it's something to think about (hypothetically). It's really beautiful to know how people come together to show support whenever someone's in trouble or something goes wrong.

People & Grass

So, no one has posted in a while… and I had one, all typed up and ready for posting in mid-June, but I didn’t post it due to what is probably just whiney-ness & laziness. It kind of complained about some stuff, without actually suggesting any remedies or witty insights about anything. So I decided not to waste my time posting it, as well as your time reading it.

Instead, you can read my thoughts about people and grass!

Last week I was taking a lunch break from lab on the campus of the U. I was sitting at a picnic table in front of the student union—an area frequented by many pedestrians. I strategically placed myself at the table so I could easily people watch. And this is what I saw…

The majority of people would walk completely around a house-sized area of well-groomed grass, choosing to stay on the sidewalk, instead of cutting across the grass, which would clearly be a shorter path. Why? Are they afraid they’re going to hurt the grass? Because, I can assure you, grass will survive if you step on it. Do they not want to disturb the “well-groomed” foliage because an old geezer might come out and tell them to get off his lawn? Because that will not happen—it is a school campus. Do they just want to use the sidewalk for the supposed reason it was put there? Maybe. Do they think others (or themselves) find it more respectful to walk “appropriately”? Maybe. Did it never occur to them to walk on something other than what they were told? Maybe. Are any of these proposed explanations correct? Probably not.

Well, I thought that this was an interesting observation. Maybe you will, too?

Someone should probably take this guy for a walk.