Menopause takes the fun out of marriage.

Cloudy, 46/37, Fair to Fair. Winter has finally set in on our place and the weekdays don't offer much in the way of farm work except for the every other day of haying and graining the animals. This year, I don't know whether its from the drought or what, but I'm having to give out more feed to maintain their body weight.
Tomorrow looks like a gorgeous day sunny with the high of 49. A great day to finish up the sickle mower and grease up the old corn picker before we head to church Saturday night.

For years, Kathy and I have been playing a little game of wits (before y’all say it….. yes , she wins most of the time…..). Its kind of like a “lets annoy the spouse kind of thing” and see how far it can go. An example would be I go to bed an hour before she does. When she comes to bed, there I am laying catawampus in the bed. The first elbow she gives me really does wake me up, but its kinda fun listening to her trying to get her 230 lb bag of bones on his own side of the bed.

Now before you think she’s just an innocent victim, she plays the game too. I know this because every Saturday morning we’ve been doing the same thing for a couple of years. I get up early have a couple of cups of coffee. She’s up too. She fiddles around until I get dressed in the overalls and work boots and tell her I’m going to the farm. Then she says in a little kids voice “Your not having breakfast with me???” …. Sigh….. My answer should be “NO!!”, but the torture I’d be subjected to over the next 16 hours is not worth it. So I grab a chair and sit at the table while she pours me a sugary cereal, then when I finish that, she says “Oh, I forgot the grapefruit….”. I end up leaving the house with my lips so twisted and puckered, it takes me an hour to talk again.

She also does it with other meals too. As you probably have figured out by now, I believe the reason that marriages fail in these days and times is because of the invention of the crock pot. You can look it up!! The crock pot was invented in 1960. Since then there has been a sharp increase in the number of separations and divorces. I think I know why. Kathy will get out a bunch of ingredients and lay them on the counter, then go to the crock pot recipe book and decide what to make. Who da thunk that there would be a crockpot recipe for cheese, fish, spinach, and ice cream……. Or as she calls it, “chafishspin cream”. Hey, I’m a guy!! I can live for years off of burgers and pizza. For a little change of pace, I like my chicken in wings. Preferably hot!!

All that background so I can tell you this. Since we heat our house with a woodstove, the best marriage terrorism technique is the ol’ cold hands and feet tricks. These work best in bed after someone (mainly me…) has been in there a while, nothing like a cold hand on the back to send me through the roof. Well this morning it was my turn. I went outside started the truck, and spent a little extra time fiddling around in the toolbox with my metal tools. When my hands had reached the appropriate shade of blue grey. I went back in the house to tell Kathy goodbye. She was laying in bed and I bent over and slid my hands slowly down her upper back (I could keep going here and turn this story in a “Harlequin Romance novel”), and waited for her reaction.

“Oh thank you, thank you!! This is the hot time of the morning for me”

I stood there dumbfounded…... I had failed…… I have no idea where my marriage fun is going to come from now………. MENOPAUSE…..I CURSE YOU!!!!!!

Animal Revenge

Drizzle and snow flurries, 32/27, Fair to change. Not a whole lot happening on the farm right now, so we've went into the farmhouse renovation pretty heavy. We finished the electricity and had the county hook that up, so now we don't have to rely on the 1300 watt generator for all the power. We also finished all of the rough plumbing last week. Now its time for the expensive stuff, so we'll slow down a bit. This weekend,I am going to replace three windows in the house with three of those old weighted windows I took out of a house that was going to be torn down. Some of the weight ropes broke, and I have to replace them first. Should be an interesting project.

As far as the farm goes, winter is usually equipment maintenance, and I've gotten a good start on that. My biggest accomplishment has been fixing up an old sickle mower I found at the auction for $25. This week, I finally hooked up the PTO drive shaft to it. I'll try it out this weekend.

Well, now that the young’un has a little time on his hands from a series of family rule breaking, I thought it would be a good to get him to help with some farmhouse renovation. For those of you who don’t know, Kathy and I bought an old farmhouse a couple of years ago and began fixing up both it and the barn. We tore out all the walls, ceilings, electrical and plumbing and basically just started with the house frame. So far we’ve got the rough electrical in and half of the rough plumbing.

Anyway, one of the jobs was to go under the house and shore up the place our woodstove is going to go. This is not one of the fun jobs because the crawl space is really that; just a crawl space. In fact, this svelte 230 lb frame can’t even make it all the way to the end where the woodstove is supposed to be without the floor beams pressing on my belly like a cork in a wine bottle.

The boy and I have been working down there about a half hour and had moved the blocks and beams into place. I’m pretty tired from watching him crawl all over the place. I got myself as close as possible. Wedged myself into place did what I could and barked orders for him to do what I couldn’t. Well we go to crawl out and guess what………(nooooo not yet…….), some critter let it be known that we were not alone down there.

My son screams out “Holy Moley” (I’m paraphrasing here, I was going to talk to him about his language, but being wedged in a crawl with wild life is neither the time nor the place…) and he goes scurrying for the opening to the house. “What is it?” I asked. He says, “I think it’s a coon!!” I try to scurry too, but there are certain times in a man’s life when he has no advantage over anything else in the wild….. This is definitely one of those times.

Let me set the scene for you now. The boy has successfully made it to the opening and is almost out. I’m about 10 feet away on my back, wiggling my backside like its got a bad itch that needs scratching, and trying to get out. My legs are at about a thirty degree angle to help my boots get some grab. Directly below my feet is some sort of animal that’s taking to hissing and screeching like my wife does when I decorate her carpet with goat poo. This was not a good situation to be in, when all of a sudden, a “man thought” appears…….

Looking back on it, I realize now it was probably just a scared little animal, trying to get away from the threat I was imposing. In my mind though, this animal was going to get even for any and all injustices ever done by humans to animals. The animal below my feet knew exactly where to go to get even and that was right up the 30 degree angle it was looking at. I wasn’t about stick around and allow manland to become some kind of mammal amusement park. I was getting out of there now!!

The first five feet were easy. Then I came to the septic pipe that I usually go around. I wasn’t sure if I could fit under it, but the “man thought” came back. Well, I made it under to just past my chest. That was as far as I was going to go. The animal, whatever it was, I guess decided he had enough fun for one day and skedaddled out a foundation vent.

My son yells down “Dad, you OK?? I think he’s gone”

“Yeah son, I just have to finish up a few things down here…”

Well, what I had to finish up was figuring out how to get unstuck from the sewer pipe without breaking it. In all it took about 15 minutes to get out. I grunted and sighed, then I’d call up and ask my son to throw down a tool every now and again, so he didn’t know what was really going on.

I finally saw the light of day and we never did figure out what the animal was that was down there. On the way home my boy says “Did you break the pipe Dad?”

“No son. why?”

“Well,” he said with a smile, “With all those tools I was throwing down to you, I figured you had to break the pipe to get unstuck…”

I looked at him with that stupid grin on his face…… “Son, I’ve been meaning to talk to you about your language…..”