More Thurwood

January 8, 1874

Foggy and warm and it rained a little and I went up to Dunckels and in the afternoon it rained and got windy and cold and that is all.
3 eggs for today

Here in 2008 at Northview Farm the weather fellas are also predicting a warm day. I am predicting more grey hair, as I take Becky out driving every day, praying as we go. She needs her driver's license. I need a tranquilizer.


When that is done there is the work on the Census of Agriculture, which we are required to fill out. It is where all those NASS numbers come from but it is HARD (warning pdf file) and it makes me whiny. It says that it takes fifty minutes per response. I don't know if that means per question...there are pages and pages, per page, yep, a lot of them, or for the whole questionnaire. All I know it that I worked on it all afternoon yesterday and it isn't done yet. Wish the government didn't expect us to do their bookkeeping for them.

We also got news that our USPH inspection is coming up, which requires that we offer for consideration a barn that is somewhere near as clean as the set of ER. (Check that link out and imagine complying in a 200 year old barn full of unhousebroken animals, and run by men of the "drop it where you use it" school of tool care. Thank God for Liz is all I gotta say.) We knew that was in the offing and have been working on it, but it is no fun at all.

And then there is the Top Scan thing from Homeland Security. Farm Bureau has been frantically working to get farms exempted from having to fill one out (we have fertilizer and propane and such on hand and may be terrorists or terrorist targets). Even with the information they are sending me in almost daily emails, I have no clue whether we have to fill one out or not. Or how.This sort of snuck in under my farm politics and regulation radar (I get perhaps fifty or sixty emails and newsletters a week on farm policy, agricultural news and commentary and visit many sites that compile such data. Never heard of this one until last week. Since the deadline for compliance, once you figure out whether you have to comply is January 22 that is cutting it pretty close.)

Tax time looms. (Numberwise I need you....He-e-e-e-el-l-pppppp!!!!!) The books must be put in order. New files set up for 2008. All my mistakes of 2007 found and fixed. Arggghhhh!!!

I envy Charlie. I don't exactly want to live without electricity. I would miss my computer. However, I already take care of farm animals every day and I already have to keep warm with wood and hard work. We already grow a lot of our own food, and I do know how to live without modern conveniences having once resided in an itty bitty cabin in the woods, minus most of them.
I would love to forgo all the above government intrusion into our lives and business in trade for the ability to just do the work....you know, feed the cows, milk the cows, grow the food. I'll bet nobody told Charlie how tight his milkhouse door had to be or how to turn his calf buckets upside down.