Farm Life
1 July 2007
I had a really good story written for this week. It was all about
Kona coffee too. But I lost it. I hope I can find it later
but I can't find it now. It's been a long week and I'm feeling
grumpy and tired, or maybe I'm just hungry, but whatever the case I'm
not really in the mood to write anything clever or interesting.
Instead, here's a collection of recent photos.
This is a picture of me. It was taken by a very talented
photographer who also lives on the island. He has a
Flickr photo stream
that I browse almost every morning while sipping my delicious
Kona coffee. On a recent visit to our farm, he wore his fancy
Wal-Mart outfit
and kindly refrained from adding any
barb softeners
to my cattle fence.
As you can see in this picture, now that I live and work on my own coffee farm I
don't have to shave as often as I did in the corporate world. I did however
shave shortly after this photo was taken. We were on our way to a luau so I
decided a shower and shave were probably appropriate. I put on a nicer shirt
too, I think I've owned that dirty old t-shirt for nearly a decade now. My
brother tried to steal it once. He said he found it... in my dresser drawer.
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In a previous post about our electric fence
I thought I might mention how useless the fence really is. It can
be a psychological barrier but certainly isn't a physical barrier.
The wild pigs run right through it, sometimes letting out a sharp squeal as
they run past, sometimes not. The neighbor's cattle jump right over
it as if it isn't even there (yes, cows can jump). Parts of the fence
will keep the goats in but other parts won't. I was taking this first
picture to show how easily the goats can jump out. Five seconds later,
Cosmo jumped right over the fence to see if my camera was as tasty as it
looked. I wish we had a better fence.
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Living on a farm means living with animals. Goats, chickens,
rabbits, dogs, cats and of course, part of every farm, the occasional
mouse. Luckily our cats are pretty good mousers. The
problem is that occasionally they like to bring their new toy into the
house to share with everyone. We found this particular victim
hiding between the sliding glass door and the screen door. The
cats had made quite the ruckus playing with it all night long but come
morning, when their new friend finally found a safe place to hide, the
cats lost interest. The dog wanted to play but couldn't reach
that high. You can see that the white cat, Mercedes, decided she
was tired from a long night and was only interested in finding a quiet
spot where she could curl up and take a nap.
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Back in February and again in
April, we acquired some baby chicks.
The brightly colored Easter chicks were fun to watch but now they're all
grown up and most of them are roosters. I know it's supposed to be
impossible but it sure seems like someone knew how to select only the eggs
that contained roosters. Out of the six colorful chicks, five of them
are rooster. They have all learned to crow and they do it
constantly. They crow in the morning, they crow at night, they
crow when they're hungry, the crow when they're bored, they crow to
each other, they crow just to hear themselves crow. If anybody
wants a free rooster, come and get it, we have plenty.
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We've had visitors recently. That means we've found plenty of excuses
to go to the beach. Emily finally figured out how to snorkel and got a
new set of mask and fins. They're still a little big for her but that
doesn't stop her from trying.
Of course after an active day at the beach we have to go out to lunch to
replenish all the calories we burned. Chili + a red hot dog + rice +
potato mac = Chili Loco Plate, one of the local favorites.
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