What happened to TWO years?

I can't believe it is summer of 2019! AND I haven't posted since May of 2017? I know it's been busy, but good golly . . . time flies, priorities change, and life is still moving forward.

So, in a nutshell, here is some of our goings ons:

• 2017 looked like this:
• There were quite a few funerals, but the one that struck me was Rosemary's mom. Joyce had stage four lung cancer and only survived four months from the diagnosis. She and David were remarkable folks and have left a giant hole. Rosemary is the first of us to lose, not only her dad, but her mom as well. 
• The 4th of July was different as Darin volunteered to drive a wagon for the football team. I played with the Alumni band and then we went to the Delaware County parade with the farm wagon in the afternoon. Fun day before fireworks in bed!
• We went to the Outer Banks in July for my birthday. It was the first time I had gone with them on vacation during my birthday, and I must say, it was a wonderful way to celebrate. Nothing like being on the beach on the day you were born.
• Zane entered high school and was on the freshman football team, occasionally getting on JV. He did letter in wrestling during the winter. The coaches were just fantastic! We really liked the Cornell coaches, but they were let go, unfortunately. It was the start of a new phase for all of us. He and Grant started working on getting their driver's license in February 2018. Took classes at ACE Town & Country for three hours at a time, plus started driving with instructor during the summer. 
• Darin stays the same. He looks the same, except for losing hair, and having to go on high blood pressure medicine. Still trying to balance that out as doctor keeps changing the types. 
• 2018 was another story:
• Snowy met  his maker for good on June 2nd. He was eaten by coyotes. He went out one night and never came back. I scoured the farm for him and finally after two days saw some buzzards in the soybean field behind the house. Asked Darin to go investigate, thinking it was something else, but he called and said I needed to come identify the remains. I only found his ear, and some fur, as I couldn't go further, but it was definitely Snowy. I couldn't imagine going the entire summer without a cat, so after getting the courage to go look at the Humane Society, I found a small female cat, only eight pounds, who was a mix of Six and Snowy. White underneath and feet, and tiger on top and tail. She has a white nose too. She was definitely an indoor cat as I spent the rest of the summer trying to acclimate her to going outside. I named her Mini, since she is literally the smallest cat I have ever had. Sometimes I call her Mini Lotta since Lotta was her shelter name. She is a lap cat for sure and started sleeping at the foot of Zane's bed at night. No accidents, completely housebroken, and spoiled with wet cat food!
• Zane got his driver's license on August 22nd, and drives to school when he has practices or games. For football and wrestling! It was so helpful, especially later in the year for me. It was difficult during September for him to get 4H and football games juggled, but he did it. The coaches put him on the freshman team again, JV, and varsity. It was a wild season, but I think it helped him overall. He ran into a metal cabinet during woodshop and Darin took him to get seven stitches, since it was during the school day. Then, during wrestling practice, sports trainer called and said Zane was complaining that his chest hurt, so he had to go to the doctor and get an EKG to get reinstated. Turns out it wasn't his heart (thankfully), but he tore the AC in his right shoulder. This kept him off the mats for most of the season. I think he only had four or five events for the entire season. He still likes both sports, and with new coaches in wrestling, Darin and I were pleased overall. Zane needs to work on his grades his junior year to keep himself eligible in both sports too. 
• Darin and I both had HS reunions. I didn't go this year, although R & C did. It just didn't interest me to go for the 35th. I think I will only do decades. We did go to Darin's 30th at All Occasions. It was fun as usual and glad to see him enjoy himself. He received award for most unchanged male! Worth going just for that!
• Darin drove the wagon for the football team on the 4th of July. I played with the Alumni band and then we went with Darin's brother's family and the Wolfe's to Hocking Hills. We had rented a cabin for a couple of days. It was a lot of fun! Went canoeing and saw the fireworks at Fairfield County Fairgrounds. Great show and we are planning on doing it again next year. Win for sure!
• Which brings us to 2019: 
• Lots of changes. School changed locations to a brand new building. Very stressful. We all did the best we could and tried to go with the flow. Lowest test scores for me, ever. It may require a change in the test when Jen comes on board as I just couldn't get all of it covered. No excuses, just poor planning. Still have things that are to be fixed or completed this summer, so I am looking forward to a blank slate in August.
• Zane ended up having hand, foot, and mouth disease after wrestling finished. That did not help his end of the year grades, but he passed everything, but barely. He really has to buckle down or he will not be participating his senior year. His weight is off the charts. He has got to stop eating everything he sees. We already got his physical completed for his junior year and it wasn't pretty. I will probably still have a complete physical done by his doctor in the fall with blood tests to make sure he isn't off in other areas. If he doesn't start losing the weight, he won't be able to wrestle this year either. Zane still hasn't started his woodworking project for 4H. He is not doing the goat, so that is off the table. He has been really good about going to football conditioning and wrestling this summer. 
• Planting did not go well, although they got all the beans planted, and some replanted. Terrible amount of rain. Already ten inches above the yearly average and it's only June. Darin finally was able to start spraying again, and hoping he gets done soon and maybe we can take a small vacation.

Thus, we are sort of caught up to the present. I left a lot out, specifically all the folks who have passed away. This year we have already lost Carlos and Chuck. Dwight is ill with stage four lung cancer as well, but so far, is fighting it. Has side effects from the radiation, but he appears to be holding his own. I hope he is in remission.

Snowy showed up!

It's a little late, but good news is always welcome!

Snowy arrived home on Thursday, January 5, 2017, in the evening, when we were eating at the dining room table. He just popped up in the window well on the front porch.  Meowing his head off and looking like a drowned rat.  He was covered in mud, and had some minor cuts and scratches.  I would have given anything for him to be able to tell me what happened and where in the world he was!

I put him immediately in the garage, with food, water, and a new towel.  I made him staying the garage all night and all day on Friday.  He ventured in Friday evening and slept on the towel after cleaning himself.  It took all weekend, but he managed to get all the mud off and is doing great.

I know it is five months later, but he has been catching birds, a couple of mice, and all in all, has no ill effects from his adventure.  Darin wishes he hadn't come back, but I am thrilled!  Snowy continues to be a great cat and is ranking up there with Six. He just doesn't have her sweet temperment.

Snowy

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.

Better Late Than Never . . . .

Fall 2016 was one like no other.

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:

Hardscrabble Farms 2016

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.

How time flies!

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!

What do you want?

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 an amazing job and financial independence—but not everyone wants to suffer through 60-hour work weeks, long commutes, obnoxious paperwork, to navigate arbitrary corporate hierarchies and the blasé confines of an infinite cubicle hell. People want to be rich without the risk, without the sacrifice, without the delayed gratification necessary to accumulate wealth.

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.

This post originally appeared on MarkManson.net. Follow@iammarkmanson on Twitter.

Fair Days 2015

Lots going on.

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.