Work

When I was younger I remember thinking that if I wanted my life to be over all I'd have to do was work all of the time and get rid of facebook. I called this "social suicide" because without a virtual connection to all of my friends and without any real time to spend with them my social life would come to an end. I usually thought of this when I was throwing a pity party for myself, most likely because I was thinking I already worked too much and didn't get to see my friends often enough...

Life has a funny way of turning your worst nightmares into reality.

As you know I've been off facebook for a while already, and lately I've been working all of the time (or what seems like all of the time). For a few weeks this past month my brothers, Chan and Pat, and I worked for a friend gathering and boxing pine tip bundles and also cutting pine trees up and baling them. Some days we'd wake up with just enough time for breakfast, go out and do our regular chores as fast as we could, have 10 minutes to get ready. We'd eat our lunch during our commute and then work until 6pm with only a short time to rest and eat dinner before we had to go outside and do our farm work once again. All of our work put together came out to about 11 hours a day.

Here are some pictures I took at the tree farm we were working at. It was a beautiful, hilly location and unfortunately my camera phone doesn't do it justice.

Baling pine branches with Channing and Patrick.

Hills... layers and layers of hills to the North East.

A wheat field was growing next to the stand of trees to the North.

Looking down at the trees from the wheat field, with more beautiful hills in the background.

The sun setting behind the wispy, white pines.

I took this picture while riding on top of pine bales in a skidsteer basket. It was sort of like riding a horse except for our boss had the bucket way up high a lot of the time so I could see the scenery really well! It was incredibly fun!

Trees to the East.

Here's Channing and Paddy resting on the only break we took the whole time we were working. This was on our first day doing pine bales by ourselves so we hadn't quite gotten the routine down and were a tad bit exhausted. ;)

Sap dripping from a pine tree.

One evening as we were getting ready to leave the tree farm the sunset was beautiful so we ran up to the top of the hill and I snapped a few shots of the magnificent view.

Here are stacks of our pine bales that we'd made. Each stack has 25 bales in it. On average we made 125 bales in 6 hours.

The hills to the North East of the pine trees on a cold and rain day. Those days were the worst to work on because we'd be soaking wet by the time we'd head for home. The landscape was lovely, even still.

Almost a month ago our hired hand, Zach, finally quit after milking for us for two years because his family moved. He'd been milking at least two milkings a week, and in the Summer he'd milk three or even more if I was going on vacation or something. Since he left I've been doing all of the milking. I'm thinking that I'll get a few milkings off here and there in the near future once my Dad is done working his seasonal job (once the snow flies), but Channing can't relieve me since he's just as busy as I am (if not moreso) with raising calves, feeding cows and doing all of the other jobs the farm requires.... and hunting. ;)

Zach learned to milk really fast and was very reliable. He was also extremely punctual (which was always fascinating to those of us who are rather lackadaisical about timeliness). In fact, he was so punctual that the few times that he happened to be two or three minutes late for work I'd start to get worried!

Now that Zach is gone I feel like I've turned a new chapter in responsibility. I am having to be more of a grown up about work. Not getting upset because I don't have a night off... or any time off for that matter. Not fretting about working on a holiday or my birthday. It's really good for me, I think.

As always, I continue to have people milk with me whenever I find willing volunteers. This past weekend it happened to be my girl cousins: Annabel, Noel and Violet, and my sister Nellie helped too!
I told the girls before we started milking, "Do not scream or yell, and stay calm around the cows. If you don't they will poop a really lot!"
There are two things I have learned about milking with young girls:
1. If you say "don't scream or yell" you might as well be speaking a foreign language.
2. To them, being calm means talking a really lot in loud, excited voices.
The youngest, Violet, was the most excited! While I was setting up the barn she kept saying, "When are we going to milk the cows, for Pete's sake?!" It was so funny! Then when I did get the cows in there she hopped right in the pit and I taught her how to spray & wipe the cows clean and put milkers on (a lot of adults don't like wiping the cows off since the cows get a little kicky, so I was quite impressed)!!! She'd get some poop on her arm or something, pause to think about what to do for a second, and then exclaim, "I just LOVE getting dirty! I don't know why Annabel doesn't like getting dirty! I LOVE milking cows!!" After a while Annabel and Noel decided it might not be too scary to get in the pit and help out too. Noel said very seriously, "You guys are SO lucky to have a farm." :) It was a blast having them milk with me, but I dare say their dad wasn't too impressed when they came in from chores covered from head to toe in cow manure. Oh my!!!

Annabel, Tanner and Noel (being dramatic for the picture!)

Violet gettin' things done!

Here's my motley crew!

The best part was when I taught the girls how to squeeze milk from the teats and drink it fresh! SOOOOO FUNNY!!! They spent quite a bit of time working on perfecting this skill. ;)

Right as the job doing pine trees was coming to an end another job offer came up. 
The farmer down the road stopped by one morning to ask if either Channing or I would be interested in doing some milking on his farm. The problem was that he needed someone to do the night milkings (8:30-10:30), which is right when Channing and I are busy on our farm doing milking and feeding. I told the farmer that I would love to milk his 12:30-2:30 milking (he milks three times a day) if he ever needs someone to do that shift. It seemed unlikely that he'd need a milker at that time so I forgot about it. Less than a week later Tyler, the farmer, contacted us saying that his PM milker had a heart attack and that if we still wanted to work the 12:30 shift he would appreciate the help since he was doing all of the milkings now. I was pretty excited! ...well, not that the guy had a heart attack, but that the job opened up! 

So lately I've been milking three times a day!
It's a fun milking in a different style barn, and meeting new cows. I love cows. :) and I'm really thankful for the opportunity. The best part is that Tyler's farm is less than a mile away from my farm, so it only takes a minute to get there. :)

If you were to follow the road that you can see from his cow yard, it would take you to my house. Actually if it wasn't for the hill you'd be able to see our farm from his! :)

Here's a not-so-quality shot of Tyler's barn and cows. Definitely a different set-up from a swing parlor:

Last Friday I asked Tyler, "Aren't you excited that it's Friday?!" He laughed and replied, "Yeah, I see people posting on Facebook, "TGIF" and other stuff about the weekend... but it's all the same to me." The weekend means little to us farmers... We'd have to agree with Si,

All in all, I guess "social suicide" isn't as bad as I thought it would be. ;)