Self-sufficiency

I can frequently out-shoot at least the young hunters, which gives me some internal praise. As daughters of narcissists, we need to learn to get validation from sources other than people. We need internal validation. We need to do things we can feel proud of even if other people tell us we're crazy for trying to do it.

I have no idea why, when I was raised in suburbia, I would have the urge to move to the country and raise my own food. It is a matter of self-sufficiency I suppose, seeing as I figured out pretty early that I couldn't depend on anyone else to take care of me. I didn't want to have to rely on anyone else to take care of me, they always let me down, so I learned to change electrical outlets, grow and freeze vegetables and make jam and pickles. I actually can't stand to have anything from the garden go to waste. I don't have a lot of time to do this Suzie homemaker stuff, so I have learned how much to plant and what I can actually use.

I had thought I wanted to have a hobby farm and raise my own meat, but reality and time constraints brought me to my senses. I only have an acre and a half of land, which really isn't enough to grow an animal. I tried rabbits, but spent more time chasing them around when they got out of their pen. I knew that large animals probably weren't a good idea when I bought a pony for the kids when they were young. Electrical fencing was the only thing I could afford, and the pony, being lonely, would close it's eyes, brace itself and race the fence. I would get a call from someone miles away asking me if I'd lost a pony. Poor Misty would be off somewhere visiting another horse. I felt sorry for her so I sold her to someone who raised POA ponies and would give her the time, space and equine company she seemed to crave. The kids didn't seem to care less. I learned to run a Skil saw, hammer a nail, put down flooring, hang drywall, and the largest project we completed was putting in a new septic system. My older son Chris and I did that. The toilets were backing up into the lawn so I made some calls and got some prices. There was no way I could afford $14,000 to replace the septic system. I started out from the house with a trowel, where I saw where the plumbing pipes left the house in the basement. I found the septic tank, and then kept digging. Beyond the septic tank, which is pretty much just a large cement holding tank, I dug with my trowel looking for the septic system. I found a few broken tiles, but there was really nothing else there. I had hoped for a plugged pipe somewhere, but there were no pipes. Either there had never been a tile bed, or it had disintegrated away in the 100 some-odd years the house has been standing here. The shovel seemed like a good idea at that point, but it was too strenuous and time consuming, so we rented a mini-hoe from the local Rent-All. Surprisingly, they will allow anyone to have one of those for the weekend. They don't seem to think they need to tell you how to use it, they just drop it off and away you go. My son Chris was about 13 at the time, so he was able to manage it quite nicely after playing with it for a few minutes. Like wanting the window seat in an airplane, we took turns running the mini hoe and dug up the front lawn. It was fun! I had read a few articles on how to put in a tile bed and it didn't seem too difficult, certainly not $14,000 worth of work or materials. We dug trenches, put down straw, newspaper and gravel, then the actual tiles, which are just plastic pipes with holes in them, then more stuff on top. It cost us $1300 all together, including all the materials, including a dump truck full of soil to go back on the top of the lawn. My son is now 27 and the septic system has never given us a bit of trouble in all that time, not even needing the septic tank pumped out.

We were pretty handy at running the little back hoe by that time, so we took out a bunch of stumps while we were at it. There were a few tricky moments when a stump and the mini-hoe were about equal in weight and it looked like the stump might win, but we managed to keep the mini-hoe out of the hole under the huge roots and eventually won the battle.

I am back from my trip on October 17, hopefully with some meat for the freezer. It will all be packaged in little brown paper and labelled as to the cut, so it becomes much more civilized once it has been to the butcher. I will start going through the book then, the one this blog is about. I don't think it is such a bad idea in the meantime for you to get an idea of who I am, or perhaps I should say, who I have become.