Well, Snowy has disappeared.
I think in my heart when he didn't come home this morning, I knew something was amiss.
He was such a good cat. I will miss him. Just when I finally got him to start being a lap cat, too!
December 31, 2012 - January 4, 2017 is when I found him and when he stopped coming home.
We lost Grandma Smith, Aunt Elizabeth White, Aunt Ruth Skinner, and two local farming community members, Shirley Thurston and Merrill *Pinky* Sheets. Quite overwhelming at times.
In September, the Ohio Country Journal published a piece about Hardscrabble Farms, and Gary wrote a significant portion of Matt Reese's article. Below is a short video that accompanied the article:
Zane played on his 8th grade football team and is thinking about joining the wrestling team. It has been good for him to be more active and also increase his friendships at school. He is still growing like a weed and is now in a size 13 shoe, hopefully for a little while longer.
The guys started harvest on September 2nd, but finished on October 18th just in time for Grandma Smith's funeral. God does have a plan for everything and even in this time of loss, we were able to see His hand in so many areas of our lives.
School has been unsettling and I am trying to still get my footing. Too many changes to keep up with and we are all under the hammer. It will be interesting to see how this new school actually comes out, but I don't have my hopes up too much. Found the HS auditorium's VCR tape and I still can't believe it has almost been twenty years ago. Let Barry borrow it for viewing over the winter break. He didn't know I played clarinet. It wasn't too bad. Boy, was that opening an undertaking. We really do need to start planning now for West's closing ceremony!
Looking forward to 2017 with hope. Everything still seems to be going too fast, but I am learning to enjoy the journey and process a little better.
So, down for the count with sore throat. Concert week too, of course.
Hopefully, Rosemary and Christina will be able to make this trip happen for us before we turn another year older, wiser, and happier! Looking forward to going with them to the moon:)
Goats are going to be selected late March, again near another concert.
School timing includes SLO testing, concert, grade cards, and more!
One day at a time, breathe in, breathe out . . . it is all part of the educational system. This too shall be completed!
Saw this today and needed to copy to remind myself later of it's true value. This article has some great features and words of wisdom!
Everybody wants what feels good. Everyone wants to live a carefree, happy and easy life, to fall in love and have amazing sex and relationships, to look perfect and make money and be popular and well-respected and admired and a total baller to the point that people part like the Red Sea when you walk into the room.
Everyone would like that—it’s easy to like that.
If I ask you, “What do you want out of life?” and you say something like, “I want to be happy and have a great family and a job I like,” it’s so ubiquitous that it doesn’t even mean anything.
A more interesting question, a question that perhaps you’ve never considered before, is what pain do you want in your life? What are you willing to struggle for? Because that seems to be a greater determinant of how our lives turn out.
Everybody wants to have great sex and an awesome relationship—but not everyone is willing to go through the tough conversations, the awkward silences, the hurt feelings and the emotional psychodrama to get there. And so they settle. They settle and wonder “What if?” for years and years and until the question morphs from “What if?” into “Was that it?” And when the lawyers go home and the alimony check is in the mail they say, “What was that for?” if not for their lowered standards and expectations 20 years prior, then what for?
Because happiness requires struggle. The positive is the side effect of handling the negative. You can only avoid negative experiences for so long before they come roaring back to life.
At the core of all human behavior, our needs are more or less similar. Positive experience is easy to handle. It’s negative experience that we all, by definition, struggle with. Therefore, what we get out of life is not determined by the good feelings we desire but by what bad feelings we’re willing and able to sustain to get us to those good feelings.
People want an amazing physique. But you don’t end up with one unless you legitimately appreciate the pain and physical stress that comes with living inside a gym for hour upon hour, unless you love calculating and calibrating the food you eat, planning your life out in tiny plate-sized portions.
People want to start their own business or become financially independent. But you don’t end up a successful entrepreneur unless you find a way to appreciate the risk, the uncertainty, the repeated failures, and working insane hours on something you have no idea whether will be successful or not.
People want a partner, a spouse. But you don’t end up attractingsomeone amazing without appreciating the emotional turbulence that comes with weathering rejections, building the sexual tension that never gets released, and staring blankly at a phone that never rings. It’s part of the game of love. You can’t win if you don’t play.
What determines your success isn’t “What do you want to enjoy?” The question is, “What pain do you want to sustain?” The quality of your life is not determined by the quality of your positive experiences but the quality of your negative experiences. And to get good at dealing with negative experiences is to get good at dealing with life.
There’s a lot of crappy advice out there that says, “You’ve just got to want it enough!”
Everybody wants something. And everybody wants something enough. They just aren’t aware of what it is they want, or rather, what they want “enough.”
Because if you want the benefits of something in life, you have to also want the costs. If you want the beach body, you have to want the sweat, the soreness, the early mornings, and the hunger pangs. If you want the yacht, you have to also want the late nights, the risky business moves, and the possibility of pissing off a person or ten thousand.
If you find yourself wanting something month after month, year after year, yet nothing happens and you never come any closer to it, then maybe what you actually want is a fantasy, an idealization, an image and a false promise. Maybe what you want isn’t what you want, you just enjoy wanting. Maybe you don’t actually want it at all.
Sometimes I ask people, “How do you choose to suffer?” These people tilt their heads and look at me like I have twelve noses. But I ask because that tells me far more about you than your desires and fantasies. Because you have to choose something. You can’t have a pain-free life. It can’t all be roses and unicorns. And ultimately that’s the hard question that matters. Pleasure is an easy question. And pretty much all of us have similar answers. The more interesting question is the pain. What is the pain that you want to sustain?
That answer will actually get you somewhere. It’s the question that can change your life. It’s what makes me me and you you. It’s what defines us and separates us and ultimately brings us together.
For most of my adolescence and young adulthood, I fantasized about being a musician — a rock star, in particular. Any badass guitar song I heard, I would always close my eyes and envision myself up on stage playing it to the screams of the crowd, people absolutely losing their minds to my sweet finger-noodling. This fantasy could keep me occupied for hours on end. The fantasizing continued up through college, even after I dropped out of music school and stopped playing seriously. But even then it was never a question of if I’d ever be up playing in front of screaming crowds, but when. I was biding my time before I could invest the proper amount of time and effort into getting out there and making it work. First, I needed to finish school. Then, I needed to make money. Then, I needed to find the time. Then … and then nothing.
Despite fantasizing about this for over half of my life, the reality never came. And it took me a long time and a lot of negative experiences to finally figure out why: I didn’t actually want it.
I was in love with the result—the image of me on stage, people cheering, me rocking out, pouring my heart into what I’m playing—but I wasn’t in love with the process. And because of that, I failed at it. Repeatedly. Hell, I didn’t even try hard enough to fail at it. I hardly tried at all.
The daily drudgery of practicing, the logistics of finding a group and rehearsing, the pain of finding gigs and actually getting people to show up and give a shit. The broken strings, the blown tube amp, hauling 40 pounds of gear to and from rehearsals with no car. It’s a mountain of a dream and a mile-high climb to the top. And what it took me a long time to discover is that I didn’t like to climb much. I just liked to imagine the top.
Our culture would tell me that I’ve somehow failed myself, that I’m a quitter or a loser. Self-help would say that I either wasn’t courageous enough, determined enough or I didn’t believe in myself enough. The entrepreneurial/start-up crowd would tell me that I chickened out on my dream and gave in to my conventional social conditioning. I’d be told to do affirmations or join a mastermind group or manifest or something.
But the truth is far less interesting than that: I thought I wanted something, but it turns out I didn’t. End of story.
I wanted the reward and not the struggle. I wanted the result and not the process. I was in love not with the fight but only the victory. And life doesn’t work that way.
Who you are is defined by the values you are willing to struggle for. People who enjoy the struggles of a gym are the ones who get in good shape. People who enjoy long workweeks and the politics of the corporate ladder are the ones who move up it. People who enjoy the stresses and uncertainty of the starving artist lifestyle are ultimately the ones who live it and make it.
This is not a call for willpower or “grit.” This is not another admonishment of “no pain, no gain.”
This is the most simple and basic component of life: our struggles determine our successes. So choose your struggles wisely, my friend.
Zane helped clean out the goat pen at the Delaware County Fair tonight. The goat was put in a special pen for the market truck. I picked him up due to much homework, which he finished what he had, since he left some of it at school. He did really well not getting upset about Skipper going to the market. I am glad he isn't grieving too much. He seems OK, but a little down, not bad overall. He got fourth in his weight class as Skipper was acting up, since Grant's goat, Fred IV, wasn't right with him. Grant received reserved grand champion! Brooke's steer, Cookie, received third place in his weight class.
Started harvest the Tuesday before the fair started and have been going strong ever since. Late nights, early mornings. At least the guys took off for the shows and the auction! Snags here and there, an OK bushel/acre, so hopefully it will continue.
Well, spring break is almost over and the only thing I have done is stay as low key as possible.
As soon as I woke up on Saturday, I realized I was sick with a sinus infection of some sort. Have been living with Aleve Cold and Sinus for almost ten days now. While last night was probably a better night than most, I am still blowing my nose and coughing. UGH. Plus, nothing that I wanted to get done, got done.
I was able to sort through some old pictures of the Schalk family to send for Mary Lou's celebration of life this coming Friday. What a shock to know of her passing. I am still processing her loss. I really hope that Chuck will accept the pictures and short note. How can it be? From what I understand, at least she is with the Lord and isn't suffering anymore. Between losing Pam and now Mary Lou to cancer, it remains a wicked disease that needs to have a cure found for those who are still fighting it.
Christ is risen. He is risen indeed!
May Chuck know how many folks admired, learned, and were touched by Mary Lou and their family over the years. I will always miss them, especially Mary Lou.
In Memory of
Mary Lou (Mary Lou Ebert) Schalk
July 29, 1962 - March 23, 2015
SABATTUS: Mary Lou (Ebert) Schalk of Sabattus, Maine, lately of Columbus, Ohio, died of complications from cancer on March 23, 2015, at her home in Sabattus, Maine. Mary was 52 years old. Mary was born on July 29, 1962, to Frank and Lucille (Ruehrmund) Ebert of Cardington, Ohio. She graduated from Cardington-Lincoln High School (1980) and the Ohio State University (1985). She was married to her husband Charles Schalk in Columbus, Ohio, in 1986, where they lived in the Northland area until moving to Maine in 2003. Mary was a Christian indeed, serving her Lord Jesus Christ and testifying to His saving and keeping power throughout her lifetime. Her words led many others to deeper relationships with Jesus Christ, and her works of compassion and kindness are remembered by all who were touched by her. For all of her growing-up years, life revolved around Holsteins. Mary was a farm girl through and through. As a mother, she was fully vested in the education of her children. Mary's was a cheerful and welcoming face at the Lisbon Library for the years she worked there. Mary is survived by her husband Charles; son Luther, daughter-in-law Victoria, and granddaughter Lucille, all of Maine; daughters Meredith, Renata, Victoria, and Emma, all of Maine; mother Lucille, of Cardington, Ohio; brothers Gary and Daniel, of Ohio; sisters Jean, Susan, and Julie, of Ohio; many nieces and nephews, cousins, and aunts and uncles; and the wonderful family of God, her church family. Mary was preceded in death by her father, Frank Ebert. Mary will be missed by all. Condolences may be shared with the family atwww.crosmanfuneralhome.com
A Celebration of Life Memorial Service will be held at the Church of the Living Word located at 1210 Main Street, Bowdoin with the Pastor Eric James officiating on Friday April 10, 2015 at 7pm. Interment will take place in the spring. Those wishing, in lieu of flowers, may make a charitable contribution in Mary's memory to: Androscoggin Home Care and Hospice 15 Strawberry Ave. Lewiston, Maine 04240 or at www.ahch.org for the staff and volunteers who made her last days as comfortable as they could be. Arrangements are under the care of Crosman Funeral Home, Cremation and Monument Services 40 Main St. Lisbon Falls, 353-4951
