A day in the Life

Yesterday was a pretty eventful day. It started out quietly enough. We got up fairly late-around 6am for me and 7am for Eugene, drank coffee and looked at the Morning news and most importantly weather reports and it looked as though it was going to be a cool wet morning but the reports were dead wrong. Instead it turned into a sunny and warm morning-perfect for going out to the market garden and harvesting items for this Saturday's Winter Market (the Thanksgiving Market!).

So we donned our boots (it was wet from overnight rains), quickly opened the store and headed up to the garden to harvest for the weekend. I cut spring mix, arugula, cilantro, parsley, sage-something I rarely cut but Thanksgiving is one time that sage sells well (turkey and dressing both need it), heirloom lettuces while Eugene dug carrots and picked strawberries. I was nice being out in sunshine and balmy breezes. It makes harvesting with knives a whole lot more pleasant. When it is cold my hands get numb and I have been known to hit my left hand with a knife blade and not even feel it and only notice that I have cut myself when I actually look at my hands and see the blood. By the way we do not sell greens that have been contaminated with blood. That stuff gets put with the not for sale items either in our fridge or in the compost.

I got done with harvesting greens and herbs and ran the produce into the barn to get it all out of the sun. I went into the house and discovered we had had several calls while we were out (we do not do cell phones at Boulder Belt, we are a land line farm). One was from Lowman's the operation that is putting a furnace in the house (we have been without central heat pretty much since we moved in. Look at the October/November 2005 blog posts for more info about that). They had a worker who could come out that morning and tear the old furnace out. So I called them back and said we were ready to go and within minutes Scott the furnace guy was at the house and started working. By 1:30 he had the old unit out and went to get a helper and the new furnace and by 3:45 he had the new unit pretty much set up. There are a few things they have to do this morning to get the unit all ready to go. The big thing is our gas line has to be hooked back up and that apparently is a BIG deal. Yesterday there was a crew from N. Carolina marking gas lines all over the place. They marked where our line is than went across the street and marked out the mainline and the tributary lines. Than they went up the road a half mile and marked more lines there. I have a feeling the fact we had a line replacement got Vectren to look at all the gas lines in the area and perhaps they will be replacing them soon.

Eugene and I met doing archaeological impact surveys for the gas lines owned by texas eastern gas transmission Corporation, the folks that own the lines around here. So we look at such activity perhaps with more attention than the average person.

Anyhoo this guy was walking all over the place either with the gizmo that tells him where the lines are or with a gizmo that put down orange or yellow paint lines. Most of the time it was raining on him, trucks were spraying water on him and it was getting steadily colder (the weather around 1pm took a definite turn for the worse). And I believe all this activity was done for us, dang we are special!

We spent most of the afternoon going through tomatoes. I was not expecting Tomato hell to strike in November but there we were tossing out some really nasty smelling rotting maters from the hoophouse. We had about 7 crates in different areas of the farm. 2 were in the kitchen, several were in the barn and a 4 were in the store front and all of them had dripping stinking maters in them along with a lot of beautiful huge red, orange persimmon and pink brandywine maters. Around 4pm things quieted down. The furnace guy poked his head in the barn to tell us he was done and marveled that we were still sorting produce I said this is what we do. Than he left to go down to Florida to see the last NEXTEL Cup race at Homestead motor Speedway (I wish I could go along. I have never been to a NEXTEL Cup race but that is on my life list of things to do). I was done bagging up the greens and herbs so we can sell them, Eugene was done with mater sorting (and dumping the compost bucket as that was way to stinky to keep inside the barn) so we went into the house to kick back for a bit and revel in having the house all to ourselves again.

An hour before dark (that would 4:45pm) Eugene went out to close up hoophouses and row covers and I started in on dinner which was bruchetta and sweet taters. I had to figure out something that takes a lot of tomatoes because we have a good sized pile of maters that need to be used ASAP. The Bruchetta made a small dent in that pile. Perhaps today I will make some salsa. This also used up sweet onions that are beginning to sprout and sweet peppers that are about done for the season (we picked these about 3 weeks ago right before the cold weather took out the hoophouse peppers).

While I was making dinner we heard a strange sound and looked out the window and there was a semi pulled off the road right in front of our signs. It was drizzling and traffic was pretty heavy and the truck was causing people to go a bit left of center right where the road turns and goes down a hill. We both thought of calling the Sheriff but about the time we had that thought one appeared and hung out with the truck for about an hour. Than the truck was gone suddenly and than a few minutes later it was back but this time on Kayler Rd. It stayed there for about 2 hours and we noted a lot of traffic going out Kayler, stopping, people getting out of their vehicles and going up to the truck. I am wondering if we did not see a drug drop of some sort. Though perhaps the folks stopping were just seeing if the driver was okay or out of simple curiosity.

The truck finally left and went north, we ate dinner and watched the NBC Thursday nigh comedy line up (I an a fan of both My Name Is Earl and The Office. 30 Rock, I dunno. I guess it has potential) and went to bed.

This morning we are waiting for the person who will be installing the gas line to come out. He is also supposed to put in a water line so we will in the future have water out in the garden instead of having to run hundreds of feet of hose out there for irrigation. And we ought to have central heat by noon. Yay!