Still Life with Chicken

I started reading it, and I got about 20 pages into it before the depression hit.

Everyone told me that I should read Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver.  In this book, Kingsolver and her family move away from Arizona and head to Virginia to live on a farm and try to have a more sustainable existence.  So, obviously, it would make sense that I might enjoy reading this book, since that’s exactly what we have done. I resisted reading it up till now, because I was afraid I’d read it and get really sad.  I was right.  See, the big difference between me and Barbara, is that I’m not a best selling author, and I can’t take a year off work and be a full time farmer.  Or even a half time farmer.  Last year I spent nearly every weekend during the growing season in the garden, and was just able to keep up with it.  This year if I get 2 days a month I’ll be lucky.  So I figured if I read the book, it would just exacerbate my feeling of job-burnt-outed-ness which has been growing steadily the past year or so.  See – if it were up to me, I’d raise vegetables, chickens, start a goat dairy, make cheese, bread and generally focus on the slow life for a while.  It’s hard to describe how much more in balance I feel when I am weeding the garden verses, say, sitting in front of a computer in a poorly lit windowless cube with no natural light.  Working at home improves things marginally, but still you are glued to a glowing monitor all day producing nothing but “software”.  Don’t get me wrong – I like programming, and I like working on the computer.  I’d just like my hobby (farming) and my job (programming) to switch places.

Our last hen bit the dust yesterday morning. Something got her – it was either a coyote that for some reason decided to chow down on her right next to the pond, or it was an owl. There was signs of a massive struggle – I couldn’t tell if there were any owl feathers since our hen had black feathers too. Patches of feathers all over the yard. Dead body floating on the bank of the pond. Poor Tom spent the day calling for her. His days are probably numbered as well. I could buy more at the hatchery, but it seems silly. While there’s not much we can do against the owl, I could at least wait till I’ve got a better fence around the property before sacrificing more turkeys.

In brighter news, we are done painting the ceiling and walls in the upstairs of the shop, and get to move on to installing the laminate flooring. Then it’s just trim and final electric and we are ready to move our stuff up there. We are going to move the offices first, then use the rest of the room as storage for our furniture during our impending remodel