knock, knock

Not too long ago, the boys’ cousins had an endless thirst for ‘knock, knock’ jokes, namely the ‘interrupting…(fill in the blank)’ series of jokes. One particular week last fall was so filled with instances of something poo related being interrupted by something else poo related, that I decided my life had become one big interrupting poop joke.

It’s as though my boys sync their proverbial bowel watches just to see how complicated things can get for me. There’s the ‘sneak attack’ – when you’ve just taken the diaper off the baby in mid air to load him in the bath, only to discover there’s a surprise in there at the exact moment the big one has to jump out of the bath to get himself on the toilet you’re sitting on holding the baby. It’s one of those moments when I just have to take a deep breath (not too deep) and accept that this is my life – interrupting poop.

I had three dump truck loads of manure brought to the field (the Subaru has hauled some stuff, but I had to draw the line here). The driver dumped the manure along the edge closest to the road, which meant a lot of shoveling and wheelbarrow loads to get the black gold distributed across the field. This particular day, shortly after walking over to the field and beginning to move manure T bursts out, “I have to go poo!” I think I responded, “Seriously?!” which probably wasn’t the best reaction but we were in a bit of a pickle. I knew eventually I would have to figure out a toilet set-up at the field, but I just wasn’t prepared. We trudged off into the woods where I dug a hole with a stick and… you know the rest of the story. It’s funny how I’d rather shovel three dump loads of manure than deal with human feces. I just remember thinking, can I get back to shoveling now?

Serious business

And then there’s the pièce de résistance of that week: I decided that mulching the field would be a good idea – to conserve water, keep down weeds, etc. so I would drive around town picking up people’s bagged leaves to chip and mix with grass clippings from the field to have ready in the spring. I was getting a pretty decent pile going, which just fueled this mission even more. By the end of the week, I had about 25 bags of leaves piled up in front of my garage and I was sure I was saving the world by keeping these things out of the landfill. I dug out our chipper and fired it up and dumped in the first bag. Ka-chunk. Dead. I couldn’t turn it over, so I had to take it apart to see what was the matter. When what to my wondering eyes did appear? Why, it was a grocery bag full of dog poo and a t-shirt that I had thrown into the chipper, of course!  It was now completely entwined / shredded / concreted into the chute and chipper blades of the machine. Now I can’t even describe just how horrifically disgusting this was. Maybe this photo can better describe my reaction (or this may have been my reaction to E’s intense desire to photograph my predicament):

Yes, safety glasses. I don’t want poop in my eye!

It probably took more than an hour of cleaning to get the tiller back up and running. Every time I would pull the engine over, it would extrude this hell’s concoction like play-dough. Then more washing, more taking apart, more pulling it over. So angry, so frustrated, so bummed that the world I was trying to save just sharded in my chipper.

Don’t drink the water

Of course, I disposed of everything I had already chipped or that had come into contact with that forsaken bag, and I couldn’t take another risk like that so I proceeded to empty the rest of the bags onto the grass to make sure there weren’t any more surprises. And of course, there weren’t. So then I had to deal with raking up the giant mess I had just made.

By this time it was almost dinner time on that Saturday night, when the tenants in our Denver house called to say that the plumbing was backed up and the plumber couldn’t fix the problem. I had missed several of their calls and so they finally called E. E talked with the plumber, and he said he thought we needed a new main sewer line. Three second-opinions, three days, and several thousand dollars later, we had the main sewer line replaced. E didn’t photograph my reaction to that situation, but I think it was identical to the poo chipping except I wasn’t wearing safety glasses.

I can only wonder what next week’s joke will be.

 

Two weeks, two months, eh…

So much for my lofty goal of regular writing!

Just thought I’d throw up some photos of the latest. The field is filling up nicely, and we had our first market at Douglass Loop on May 10. So these last few week have been like cramming before finals: get the 400+ tomato plants in the ground, the peppers, celery, etc. And set T-tape, mulch and weed…um, before Friday. Oh, and don’t forget the greenhouse! And actually getting ready for market. If you threw all of Manhattan’s to-do lists into a blender with some Elmer’s, the gooey ball that results is my brain.

First market

The field is entering that exciting growth stage and with a few amazing rain storms I have been off the hook as far as watering. Which is a good thing, because I just ran over my header line with the tiller the other day and it took me about 15 minutes to unwind the tangled mess out of the tines. I have been scared to turn the water on, because I’m certain I turned the header line into drip line with that crazy move. Anyway, I just take a few hundred plants to the field the night before a storm, get them in the ground, and cross my fingers the meteorologists weren’t messing with me about the impending rain. It’s worked so far. Mother Nature is really the best sprinkler around.

The straw fort

Tree Hugger aka Tomato Strangler

I’ve taken to putting my peppers and tomatoes into 18oz Solo cups because they are a pretty handy size, affordable, and easy to drill drain holes in [enter million dollar sponsorship here]. And so, it would be easy for one to mistake the aftermath of transplant day for that of a wild kegger with these cups strewn about the field – like the picture below from pepper transplant day. Unfortunately, my capacity to consume large amounts of beer has dwindled to the point where just the thought of a kegger invokes whimsical memories of my youth. Any anytime you start doing that, I’m pretty sure it means you’ve entered the next phase of life.

I put the mess in progmess

Last week, while running the tiller to prep the celery bed I thought I’d quickly check my phone to see if Ms. A had texted since she was with the boys. And so I was the cool kid running the tiller with one hand and my cell phone in the other (like a kid who might have a kegger to go to on a Friday night). I somehow knew this was a bad idea immediately, and it was at that precise moment that I hit a troll of a grass clod that kicked the tiller sideways, slightly downhill, and into the soft already-tilled dirt. And so, I literally rolled my tiller while checking my phone for a text. It crashed into the fence on its side and died because, of course, carburetors don’t like being upside down. I guess you could add this newfound modifier to the slogan “Don’t text and drive (a tiller).” It’ll be like adding (in bed) to the end of your fortune cookie. Looky there, I just invented a thing.