A Day in the Life of Jessie

 

The question I get the most from people is “How do you find the time to write?” I’ve also been asked what my day looks like. So, I thought today would be a good day to post this newsletter essay I wrote a couple years ago:

I thought I would just let you know what I did yesterday. It was kind of typical, in that there is no typical, if that makes sense. Although Julia wasn’t home all day, and that’s not exactly normal. Also, I had off from packing eggs.

Well, I slept in and I didn’t get up until after six. Normally my writing hours are from four to six-thirty or so.

I was not completely dressed when my husband sent me a picture of a newborn calf.

 

Okay, so I can tell from that pic that 1) We had a newborn. 2) It’s a bull. 3) It’s up in the pasture field by the feeder, cold and wet and muddy. What you can’t tell from the pic is that it was drizzling and close to freezing, and the calf was shivering.

So, yeah. I had just put clean clothes on, but I knew they weren’t going to stay that way for long.

First, we went over and bedded the barnyard – the part that’s covered. We had a calf that’s sick and two more cows that we’re expecting to calve any day, so we checked them out while we were there.

Also, my daughter-in-law came over with some scraps for our pig.

Now, I know I’ve not talked much about our hog. He’s a friendly fellow, and he enjoys being petted. However, he also, apparently, enjoys eating fingers, and the first time I petted him, he tried to eat mine. This shouldn’t have surprised me, but the pig snapped its head around and had the ring and middle fingers of my left hand clenched between it’s teeth before I could jerk my hand back. I took umbrage at that breech of trust, balled my right fist up, and hooked a hard right on the left side of his snout, just below his eye.

He let go of my fingers and they healed up just fine. I don’t get angry too often, and I wasn’t angry then, but I do have a tendency to hold grudges, I guess.

So, I don’t pet the pig, although sometimes I do go over to his pen, lean against the gate and say, (in a very cheerful and happy tone – because, hey, I don’t want to be bitter) “What’s shakin’ bacon?”

Also, I don’t usually say this to males, but I will sometimes tell him he has some fine looking hams on the backside, too. Just saying.

I guess the point of that story is Jessie gets a little testy when someone tries to eat her fingers.

Anyway, my husband thought he’d call the cows down from the hill and put a bale of hay in the feeder on the bottom side and that would draw the new mama down.

I knew it wouldn’t, but I saw an opportunity to go eat breakfast, so I encouraged him in his endeavor, and took off for the house. Except…

He reminded me that we had a meeting with our accountant later in the morning and he’d (finally) gotten the numbers I needed to finish the P&L and they were on his desk.

So, breakfast was a nice idea, but it didn’t happen quite yet, because I stopped in the office and started working on accounting.

The nice thing about this was I knew I didn’t have to go to the accountant meeting, since Julia had plans with a friend for the day and I was driving her to town.

btw, Julia can drive, and has her license, but she has depth perception issues as well as some visual processing problems, which made homeschooling an interesting challenge for me and an exercise in frustration and perseverance for her.

She can see now, looking back, that those struggles shaped her for the better, but there were some hard years in there.

Anyway, I answered some emails and messages while I was waiting for our computer, which was running slow (because who goes fast that early in the morning, right?) and I could see the cows walking across the hill and down to the barn, although I didn’t see our new mama.

She never walked by, the computer never ran faster and I decided my time would be better spent foraging for breakfast than answering emails, when my husband texted me and asked if I was ready to go get the calf.

Now, it is probably a thousand (muddy, and in some places, deep muddy) yards from where the calf and cow were to our barn. It’s mostly down hill, but when it’s muddy, sometimes that’s a bad thing. And often times newborn calves don’t walk well and need carried.

Anyway, I texted him back that I needed to put my boots and coat on, then I’d be out. One minute. What I left out of the text (for brevity’s sake) was that I was also going to eat breakfast first, too. ? (I know, how does he put up with me, right?)

So, anyway, I was almost to the refrigerator when I saw he was already up on the hill. I knew my butt was going to be in trouble if I didn’t get up there with him, so I open the door and yelled up that I’d be there in a minute (hoping that he’d not notice that I’d already told him one minute ten minutes ago). Somehow that morphed into an argument about how we were going to get the calf down (we were only shouting because we were so far apart).

He wanted to take it down through the pasture (and mud) and I wanted to take it around out of the pasture where there was no mud because I just KNEW we were going to end up carrying it, and where my husband is like a mountain goat and also NEVER gets dirty, I’m basically a klutz and figured I was going to end up on my butt in the mud.

I lost the argument, but I did decide to grab my phone (because I wanted to have great baby calf pics to show you all). Normally I do not take my phone with me to the barn. I think all of us have dropped our phones in the water trough at least once, and some of us (the slow learners, I guess) have done it multiple times.

Anyway, I shoved my phone in my back pocket, put the coat and boots on (again) and hopped over the fence. (Okay, I climbed over the fence, but hopped sounded so much better. : )

This was one of the many times I was wrong because the calf actually did walk the whole way to the barn by itself and I didn’t fall once. It took a while though, because newborns don’t walk fast and the mama didn’t want to go where we wanted her. Finally, after zigzagging around and trudging through the mud, we got them down, under roof and had the gate shut. Perfect time to take a cute calf pic. So, I reach in my back pocket for my phone…but it was gone.

Gotta laugh, right?

So, by this time, the hubs is late for his accounting appointment, I’m not going to have Julia’s friend picked up on time, one of our boys is waiting for us because there was a problem at the (boy’s) chicken barn and our ex-bad boy truck driver is standing in the barnyard with a delivery (and he’s just cooing for all he’s worth over the calf – he’s never seen anything like it)

So, my youngest daughter goes looking for my phone (still laughing over that; this is why there are NO CUTE CALF PICTURES), I throw the numbers in the computer, but can’t get it to print, so I use the hub’s phone to take a pic of the screen and print THAT, then run my daughter to town (never did get breakfast), come home, cook lunch (hot sausage sandwiches with peppers and onions) while I have my laptop on the counter trying to finish the stuff I had to do for the church, and also my phone (which my daughter found) because I have emails and messages to answer still, and I’m almost finished when my husband texts me:  You coming?

Me:  Yes

I have no idea where he’s going.

Okay, so I might take some flack for this, but I try to make my default answer to my husband a “yes.”

Anyway, I finished up the church stuff, delay the emails, got my daughter to finish lunch, and found out that we had a driver who was sick, so I was riding with my hubs to get feed. (On that trip I also ended up looking up some paperwork, emailing it, figuring out what to do about the issues brought up at the accounting meeting and grabbing some 1099s and basically doing my mobile secretary job.) I got home just in time to switch the laundry, put a basket away, clean the kitchen, empty the trash, and take my youngest daughter to pick up a friend who is staying here through Monday. I got home and worked on this newsletter for a half an hour until it was time to go pick up Julia. When we got back, she had a package to open, which kind of took a while, then the hubs wanted me to go over and check the calf and the other cows that are going to freshen, and we also had a goat that was kidding. We didn’t get there in time, and the second baby came out with the placenta wrapped around its head and suffocated. ? My daughter and her friend decided they were going to sleep in the goat barn, so I helped a little with that and told them to please come down if they felt like they were going to freeze to death. (Since I didn’t want to have any awkward conversations with her parents about bodies and funerals, not to mention, they probably wouldn’t let her stay over again.) At this point it’s after ten. I never did get breakfast, and I think I’m just going to put that on my list of things to do tomorrow. : )

I think, when I started this, I was answering the question, when do you find time to write…I don’t know, honestly. Hopefully God doesn’t let me sleep in tomorrow.

 

Thanks so much for spending time with me today!