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<\/a><\/p>\nPlus there are many times when I enter the grocery store and only shop from the discounted bakery and close out product shelves.<\/p>\n
The other day when I checked out at Lowe\u2019s Foods the clerk kept turning my box of pasta around and around, looking for the red discount sticker. She knows me.\u00a0 Finally she asked,<\/p>\n \u201cDo you know how much this was marked?\u00a0 I can\u2019t find the sticker.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cOh,\u201d I said \u201cIt\u2019s not off the cheap rack.\u201d<\/p>\n She paused and looked confused.<\/p>\n \u201cBecause I have a coupon,\u201d I declared, handing it over.<\/p>\n She smiled and nodded, \u201cOf course you do, sweetie.\u201d<\/p>\n That\u2019s the way I roll at the grocery store.<\/p>\n In addition, I have recently taken up knitting.\u00a0 Or perhaps I should call it wrestling-with-yarn.\u00a0 It’s not exactly knitting yet.<\/p>\n And if all that\u2019s not enough, I just added glucosamine to the alarming number of vitamins and supplements kept on top of the fridge.\u00a0 I remember when the top of the fridge was just used for keeping liquor bottles and mixers.<\/p>\n But most of all, I noticed that it takes a whole lot to get me excited or upset nowadays.\u00a0 Spilled drinks have to be the super staining kind in order to get a reaction.\u00a0 Like cherry KoolAid instead of plain old sweet tea.\u00a0 Lunchboxes left behind just go in the fridge to be used the next day instead of rushed off to school.\u00a0 Dead chickens, picked off by owls at night or loose dogs in the afternoon, are just an an excuse to buy a new variety of hen.\u00a0 Wormy tomatoes are just another encouragement to make homemade pasta sauce.<\/p>\n The other morning when I drove past Hawfields General Store, I glanced at the old men gathering on the front porch for their daily congregation.<\/p>\n “That’ll probably be me in a few weeks,” I sighed to myself in the mirror.\u00a0 Then I cringed.\u00a0 Because I think talking out loud to yourself is another bad sign.<\/p>\n But as I sat at the stoplight, watching those men in their feed company caps and work boots, I realized I wasn’t that old at all.\u00a0 I just have been a farmer long enough that I have almost perfected that sit-on-the-porch-and-watch-trouble-slide-by attitude.\u00a0 Finally, after years of bursting into tears at massacred flocks and ripping up wilted and mildewed crops in a furious rage, having spent sleepless nights wondering if I should get up and check on a kidding doe again and furtively crinkling feed store receipts and burying them on the bottom of the trash can so I don’t know how much money I’ve lost in the pursuit of free range eggs and hormone free milk, I have finally accepted it.<\/p>\n It is what it is, people.\u00a0 All the ranting and raving in the world isn’t going to change it.<\/p>\n I spent 45 minutes waiting for my eye appointment last week.\u00a0 Ho hum.\u00a0 Sitting in the waiting room, flipping through my Mother Earth magazine cover-to-cover, and waiting on the eye doctor.\u00a0 The same eye doctor that would kick my butt to the curb and charge me $35 for a missed appointment if I showed up 45 minutes late.\u00a0 But the upside was that since I was so late getting out of the doctor’s office, I got to have lunch with dad who had been watching the boys for me.<\/p>\n One morning The Other Half and I headed out to do the morning chores and found CC laying on her side in the barn.\u00a0 Since she didn’t hop up for breakfast, we had to settle for dragging her to her feet and all our morning plans were nixed in order to keep her moving around.\u00a0 Taking turns walking a colicky pony in the rain wasn’t on my To Do list.\u00a0 But I had to smile at the sight of The Other Half jogging her up and down the driveway.<\/p>\n Is there anything sexier than a man taking care of his little girl’s pony?<\/p>\n And when it was my turn, CC and I trudged slowly up and down the road.\u00a0\u00a0 Ho hum.\u00a0 Looking at birds eating berries in the dogwoods.<\/p>\n Admiring the neighbor’s persimmons.<\/p>\n And some morning glory brightening up a brush pile.<\/p>\n Until she finally perked up so much at the sight of the neighbor’s geldings, I figured she was safe to put back in the barn yard.<\/p>\n I went the wrong way on a trip to a friend’s house to borrow her tiller and drop off some female guineas.\u00a0 But as we turned around and backtracked for 8 miles, Ghostbusters <\/a>came on the radio. Ho hum.\u00a0 Singing along to Ghostbusters with the kids as we drove through the country.<\/p>\n The farrier left a message saying he was going to be an hour late.\u00a0 Which gave me an hour to spend mucking the barn.\u00a0 Ho hum.\u00a0 Mucking the barn, watching the goat kids gallivanting in the hay roll.<\/p>\n On the way to pick the kids up from school, discovered a storm brought down a tree on a section of fence.\u00a0 Couldn’t lift the tree so had to slide it over just enough that the car could drive by.\u00a0 Couldn’t pull up the squashed fence so had to attach a leftover cattle panel to it.\u00a0 Ho hum.\u00a0 Driving around that tree for days until The Other Half took the ax to it.\u00a0 The cattle panel is still there.\u00a0 I’m getting used to it.<\/p>\n Ran out of time to make sugar cookies with Middle so we settled for caramel apples instead.\u00a0 Ho hum.\u00a0 Stretching caramel over apples.<\/p>\n Only getting 3 eggs a day from 2 dozen hens due to the molt.\u00a0 Ho hum.\u00a0 Time to break out all that Papa Noel sausage for breakfast instead of eggs.<\/p>\n But I am not quite ready for the bench at the general store yet.\u00a0 Because there was a day last week when one of our ducks was hit and killed on the road.\u00a0 When I got home from the work, the kids told me Cookie Dough was dead.<\/p>\n “Oh, that’s a shame,” I said as I poured my coffee.\u00a0 “She should really have stopped taking her ducklings across the road.” Ho hum.\u00a0 Where’s the creamer?\u00a0 After breakfast I went down and tossed her body off the side of the road and into the ditch.\u00a0 Because vultures have to eat, too.<\/p>\n Only a few days later we were headed down the driveway, when Cookie Dough crossed in front of us with her brood of ducklings.<\/p>\n Fresh off a month of revival at church and the previews of Frankenweenie<\/a>, the kids began jumping around in the car.<\/p>\n “Cookie Dough came back from the dead!!\u00a0 Cookie Dough’s alive!\u00a0 She’s back from the dead!!”<\/p>\n I slammed on the brakes and peered at her through the window.\u00a0 My heart was pounding wildly and my mouth went dry.\u00a0 It took me a minute to catch my breath.<\/p>\n “Stop it!”\u00a0 I hollered. “Ducks don’t come back from the dead!”<\/p>\n I repeated it quietly to myself as I got out of the car and headed for the ditch to check for her body.<\/p>\n “Ducks do NOT come back from the dead.\u00a0 Ducks do NOT come back from the dead.\u00a0 Ducks do NOT come back from the dead.”<\/p>\n I’d like to say that I felt positive about that.\u00a0 But between 7 years of farming where anything can happen and 2 readings of Pet Sematary<\/a> in my teens, I was pretty nervous.\u00a0 I reviewed the duck CPR I had completed on Cookie Dough in my head:<\/p>\n 1.\u00a0 C<\/strong>heck for death by gently nudging the body with your foot.<\/p>\n 2.\u00a0 P<\/strong>ick up duck by tip of wing or tail feathers and see if it moves while being dangled.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n