Cathys-Critters Blog

Originally posted December 3, 2007

Winterizing the farm means finding warm places for the animals to sleep. Winterizing the business means taking advantage of the slow months to generate ideas for the next phase of growth.

Well, we’re winterizing the farm. Last winter on the really cold days we would bring rabbit cages inside to share the warmth with us. I think this idea stinks, so Cathy’s take on it was “build me a rabbit barn!” So, away we go…

It took me a long time just to eke out a few weekends to rent a Bobcat and borrow some dirt from one of our pond banks to make a pad on which to build the building. We decided on 16′x36′, of which 1/3 is under a roof, but with a stall front to be used as a temporary corral for the animals that would be working the next day. That’s a lot of dirt when you’re building on a slight incline.

After much trial and error, I decided to hire professionals. I went down to the day labor market in McKinney and found a couple guys that, with my limited Spanish, seemed to be foundation experts. Fortunately, they did indeed know what they were doing, and by 1pm the forms were nailed up and ready, and it was time to get quotes on concrete. I called 5 different concrete places and got 5 different prices per yard. The highest was $125, the lowest $87. I didn’t expect such a range for something that’s basically a commodity, but it does pay to call around.

Next morning I picked up mi amigos and we spent the day finishing a slab. It turned out that I could be the most help by staying out of the way.

Less than a week later, Cathy & I made a day trip up to Oklahoma to pick up the building kit. This was just the additional expense the business needed to operate in the red for 2007. Everything the business earns is plowed right back into it for now. Every year I say next year will be profitable, but every year we find new and creative ways to spend it

The building’s not up yet as of today because I rarely have more than about 2 hours to spend on it. I’m getting there, slowly but surely. After this project, we’ve got another barn to add stalls to, fences, wind shelters and lean-to’s to build. I think we won’t be done winterizing before winter comes in earnest.

The other aspect of winterizing is winterizing our business. We are gradually trying to figure out what Cathy’s Critters is going to look like in 2008, 2012, and beyond. Cathy and I are kicking around ideas like adding party rental services (frozen-drink machines, bounce-houses, etc), on-farm visits (field trips, pumpkin patch, hay rides, seasonal festivals), and even making the farm a year-round entertainment complex where we can host music festivals (think Kerrville North), give tours to home-school groups, encourage would-be small farmers, and generally cause parking problems for our neighbors. We attended a 2-day alternative agriculture conference in Oklahoma in November and we got to see first-hand the successes of other micro-farms selling directly to the public.

One of my reasons for logging all these random thoughts and experiences is for the accountability of having someone else look at them. Once you announce your intentions publicly, you look like a goober if you never follow through. I don’t wanna look like a goober, so I’m begging you to nag me about some of these ideas. If they sound exciting to you and worth pursuing, please let me know. If they sound just plain silly, let me know that as well. It probably won’t stop me, but at least you can say “I told you so”. Our most valuable inputs come from our customers, so thanks for your continued support and referrals.

If you call Cathy to book a party and mention this blog entry (assuming you read this far!), she will make sure that I come to your party personally, guitar in hand and serenade your guests with an assortment of animal songs and “Happy Birthday” (if appropriate). And if *you* don’t tell the kids what a bad singer I am, they’ll never know. No critics, just good times.
–
Keb’m

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Originally published May 11, 2008

Here’s a week in the life of a busy farm executive.

Friday night (our week starts on Saturday): Sort out party schedule for the weekend, decide which crew will be going to which parties, and which animals will be needed for each trailer. Print Mapquest directions from home to party 1, party 1 to party 2, party 2 to party 3, etc, for each crew. To bed by 10:00, if lucky.

Saturday morning:
Alarm is set for 4:30, snooze until about 5:15. Raisin Bran. Yesterday’s pants.

Yell upstairs for kids to come down and help.

Rustle up 8-10 goats, 2 llamas, a lamb or two, rainbow-colored chicks, rabbits, guinea pigs, puppies, 2 ponies. Divide between two trailers. Put a 50-pound bag of feed into each truck, and fill up 5-gallon water jugs.

Notice that trailer light cable is completely severed. Thank goodness for foresight, and repair wires with splices bought just days before on a whim. Electrical tape and sidecutters are standard equipment in the back of the Suburban.

By 8:00, trailers are ready for the day, kids (employees) are sitting with iPods and Gameboys ready for a ride. Depending on the workload for the day, there may be a stop to pick up more workers to help.

Just like the Army - do more work before 8:00 than most people do all day

Pull out!

If we’ve scheduled things well, we’ll have a birthday party in (say) Flower Mound from 10-11, a little time for a drive-thru lunch, a birthday party in Frisco from 1-2, and a Spring Festival at a church in Allen from 3:30-5:30 with ponies to walk and lots of attendants to protect the week-old chicks from over-zealous 3-year-olds.

This time, Cathy has 3 parties and Kevin has two, separated by a span of about 3 hours. That’s enough time to park at a table at Sonny Bryan’s barbecue during lunch and catch up on paperwork. I call 8-10 customers and book parties for May and June, leaving messages like “yes, we can bring a pig to the pony rides for the kids to play with while waiting to ride”, or “no, our donkey is not big enough to ride”, or “sorry, this weekend is completely booked. You’ll need to give us a little more notice!”.

By 6:00, both teams are somewhere on opposite sides of the Metroplex from each other and make contact by cellphone to meet for dinner. Cheap or good? I ask? Cheap means Arby’s, good means Chili’s. We can’t afford to be gourmands when we’re feeding 6 kids. We’ll share something…

By the time we get home, it’s usually 8-9pm and the animals need to be fed. After that, we may switch a load of laundry over so we’ll have clean polo shirts to wear in the morning.

Sleep, wonderful sleep.

Sunday morning (Easter):

Alarm set for 5:00, snooze until 5:30. Raisin Bran. Yesterday’s pants.

Yell for kids.

Repeat of Saturday: goats, sheep, rabbits, ponies. This time my event is a 4-hour party on Easter Sunday at Sneaky Pete’s, restaurant/bar on Lake Lewisville. I’ve got three helpers to pick up, so need to leave an extra half-hour early.

Two of my helpers are new kids, and so need my standard pep talk:
“Our job is to protect the animals from the children, and protect the children from the animals. Teach the kids how to hold the bunnies without getting scratched, and to hold the chicks without separating their heads from their bodies.”

We’re set up early, so I run to a local donut shop and get $30 worth of kolaches, donuts, orange juice and milk. I’m their hero.

Misty’s novicular (hoof pain) is acting up halfway through so we have to give her a short break and a mouthful of pain reliever (’bute). The new kids do great. Typical first day on the job is one of wonder and amazement spent holding bunnies and petting goats like they are guests instead of employees. That’s ok, you want them to be business-like but not jaded and cynical. In this business you can’t grow up completely.

2:00 comes quickly. We break down the fences, trailer the animals, and the kids go to the car. I go in to say goodbye and we’re invited back in for lunch. We enjoy a fabulous brunch buffet of sausage, eggs, potatoes, salmon, asparagus, 10 kinds of dessert, and juice. The annual Sneaky Pete’s Easter gig is my favorite event on the calendar.

After dropping off the hired help, we get home and release the critters. I make arrangements to head down to Scott’s house to continue working my daughter’s car. Did I mention we’re replacing an engine this week? Brittany goes with me because this is the day we’re scheduled to finish it and drive the sucker home. After tightening up the last motor mounts, replacing the cross-members, and filling up the fluids, the Escort passes the test drive with flying colors. Brittany is elated, and promises to take Scott and me out to dinner. Soon. Really. I’ll hold her to it

Monday morning comes and I decide that staying home to work on the barn sounds like a better use of my time than going to work. I call in lazy and head out to get some welding done. I get the old stalls cleared of grain from broken feed bags, old pallets, and moldy hay. By 5:00, we have a wall up, separating one end of the barn into two soon-to-be stalls. This change has been long in coming, but now that we have a gasoline-powered welder, a plan, and a little money in the bank (thanks, Cathy), we should be able to make incremental progress. I’ll get another wall up next weekend.

Tuesday morning comes early. I’ve got to go to work and Cathy has an early gig at a day-care center. After doing the standard goat-rustling (the little ones are really hard to catch!) We’re both pulling out of the driveway at 8:00 sharp. She with a trailer full of animals, and I’m in my khakis and loafers. After 6 miles, she flags me down at a stop sign and says, panicked, “My truck’s overheating and steaming!”. We had noticed that the water pump had a slow drip, but we thought it might hold off until we had a little time to fix it. No such luck. We pulled in at the first gas station and had a Chinese Fire Drill. I switched her trailer to my Suburban and she moved all the equipment (tin tubs, 50 pounds of feed, puppies, piglets, rake and pooper-scooper) from her truck to mine. I sent her off with a kiss and a “vaya con dios”. I call in to work with an “I know you won’t believe this, but…” My morning is spent replacing a water pump.

As of Tuesday at noon the water pump is in, and the radiator’s full of antifreeze. I drive down to Dallas to the Princeton Review offices to pick up the materials for the SAT class I’m teaching, which starts tonight, stop at Racetrac to gas up the truck and have lunch (2 chicken taquitos for only $1.99!) before heading in to the office to see what I’ve missed. Turns out I’ve missed a lot. I’m called into an emergency meeting to discuss why the board we’re designing is going to be late and how we can meet the overall project schedule if it’s not coming until mid-June instead of early May, as originally planned. We brainstorm and find a solution involving hardware we already have, and report our findings. This provokes another sandstorm (and I don’t mean sand) protesting the proposed changes to the board, which we bravely weather until the wind dies down.

5:00 seems to come very fast. My SAT class is in Irving at 6:00 at a hotel meeting room. I head over to get some peace and quiet for a few minutes to work on prepping out my teaching materials for the night. This is my first classroom experience since my training, so I’m a little nervous. The nervousness dissipates as soon as I meet my students and we go throught the introductions. They seem to have instant confidence. I do my best to keep that confidence, and by the end of the night they seem convinced that I can teach them how to improve their SAT scores, get into the colleges of their choice, and live happily ever after. Idealists are so cute.

Home by 10:00. Bed by 11:00.

Wednesday:
No petting zoos today. I’m up by 6:30 to do some bookkeeping. Our bank accounts are left a mess by the recent hullaballoo after having Cathy’s wallet lost and reopening new accounts. I discover that they issued us a debit card for the wrong business account, so she’s been spending money from the account reserved for future party deposits instead of the one for day-to-day use. No overdraft issues, just an accounting nightmare.

Make it to work by 9:15 or so to prepare for a 10:00 meeting. Cathy has some paperwork to catch up on and an orthodontist appointment to get her braces tightened. Asks if I’d like to have lunch with her before her mouth hurts too much to eat. I’d love to, so we meet for pasta at Café Roma. Her next stop is Oklahoma to pick up a ton (yes, 40 bags) of feed for a month of critter diet. I’ve got SAT tutoring at the Allen public library from 6-9, so I won’t see her again until late tonight.

Back at work after lunch I spend most of my afternoon fighting the carb-induced urge to sleep with my forehead on my keyboard, typing things like dfghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

By 4:00 I have my second wind and try to get a little work done on my specifications document before I have to take off for the library.

Tutoring goes well. Cathy has put all the feed away in the barn by the time I get home, and has mercifully whipped up some dirty rice and ground beef. It’s all I need, and I’m in bed.

Thursday morning:

Petting zoo at Beary Best Academy in Forney. Forney is an hour from Princeton, and they start at 9am. This means Cathy has to leave by about 7:30. This means I have to round up goats starting at around 6:45. April is up early as well, so she helps with the llama, and goats, as well as feeding the horses. Cathy cages up the rabbits and guinea pigs. I’ve got her coffee in her hand and she’s out the door, just 10 minutes behind schedule. If traffic’s not too bad she should make it on time.

At work, things are cooling off. We’re getting nagged by a vendor to send back a loaner product we’ve had for several months. The software group is mad at us because we were not able to deliver a working system (despite our best efforts) in time. The weekly report is due to management (done). The deadline for one of our emulation platforms is looming and we need to start sitting in on another group’s meetings because we’ll depend on their output to get ours done. Our weekly meeting is today at 2:30.

I receive a call from one of Cathy’s customers looking for an invoice so they can pay the deposit for their May party. I keep an Excel spreadsheet at work formatted as a Critters invoice, and send it to her.

At 5:00 I head over to Irving for night two of the SAT class. My brakes are squealing badly and I’m going to have to replace the pads on Friday evening after work. It’s bad enough to listen to that noise with just the truck, but you don’t want your brakes failing when you’re pulling a 4,000-pound trailer and riding with your kids and possibly someone else’s kids.

Friday:
Work at TI by day, pick up brake pads at lunch time. Casey and I stay up late installing brake pads, doing oil and air filter change. Bed by midnight. Alarm set early. Saturday always comes early.

Love,
Kevin & Cathy

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Originally posted March 23, 2007

When we first started this business, the idea was to *maybe* get the animals to earn *some* of their keep. Perhaps earn enough money doing occasional weekend work to help pay for food, a modest goal. Two years ago, when we launched it, they were literally eating us out of house and home (although we weren’t as keenly aware of it then as we are now). We had moved out here as a hobby, which had become a lifestyle, and eventually a money drain.

All it took was for Cathy to say “Why don’t we start a petting zoo to get these guys to start earning their keep?” for me, ever the entrepreneur, to say “Sure!”. We financed the first few months from some TI stock options we sold, had business cards made from the logo drawn by our dear (and departed - another story) friend, Gail DeLay, and ran an ad in Dallas Child magazine. We were only willing to sign a 3-month contract at first, because we really didn’t know how long the business would last, or whether it would pay for advertising.

We knew we ought to get liability insurance in our overly litigious society, but finding insurance for a niche business is not easy. We had to call about 10 agents before we found one that served the “Petting zoo/pony rides” market. We had to get coverage based on our expected annual sales. They asked what we expected - and realized we had not even given it a second thought. We had to back it out like so: “Well, let’s see - if we’re lucky we might get 2-3 parties a month, at $125-$175 per party - probably $5,000-$6,000 per year”. Looking back, I understand why the agent looked at us funny. He was thinking “Why start a business that’s going to make less than most part-time jobs?”

Our first party was in April, 2005, and was done for our friend’s daughter. We had no idea what we were doing, but we had animals and a horse trailer. I spent the whole week before our inaugural event building fences for containing the kids and critters. They were built with PVC frames and some kind of plastic mesh material. That lasted for about a month before we knew we had to build something sturdy and reliable. We switched to metal. We got the first few from a friend in McKinney who runs a sort of retirement home for big cats. She has lions, tigers, even a camel or two. Since then, we’ve had more built and I’ve learned how to weld to do the occasional repair or modification of them.

The summer of ‘05 was pretty slow, but the calls trickled in. I built a small static web site which I was proud of at he time, but later knew *had* to be updated. Most of our business came from the Dallas Child ad, and even a few referrals. By fall, we were working every weekend. We had multiple bookings on Halloween night and the week leading up to it. We were, of course, spending it as fast as we could make it, but we could see this transforming into a “real” business.

The winter months were pretty dead. I think in our first December we made about $1000. We had to turn away a lot of business because everyone wanted a donkey, which we didn’t have, for nativity scenes. When I was a kid, nativity scenes were plastic and had lights inside. What did I know from donkeys? It picked up again in Spring and we got our first big corporate gig with Sneaky Pete’s at Lake Lewisville. A 4-hour party with a large petting zoo and two ponies. Holy Cow! We didn’t even have enough trailers to transport that many animals! We bought an old rusty horse trailer for $1500, had it sand blasted, painted it, replaced all the interior wood, and took our whole caravan up Hwy 35 to Lewisville for our most exciting event so far. We couldn’t believe we were getting paid to have so much fun.

Now it’s 2007. We’ve got our 2nd annual Sneaky Pete’s Easter Sunday event coming up (it’s advertised on the radio - 105.3 - when you hear the bit about the petting zoo and pony rides, that’s us!), and I imagine they’ll have us back for the their Mother’s Day outing as well. We’ve automated our contract submission process to allow parties to be reserved via an online form, we have taken to using the second horse trailer to be enable us to perform two parties at once, and most weekends we have 2-3 parties … per day … per trailer.

We’ve had to start devising graphical systems to help us schedule events, track wages, plan which animals go with which crew, etc. In short, it’s *much* more difficult, but it’s so rewarding when you get the warm thank-you notes and hand-drawn pictures from kids that you entertained the previous weekend. I don’t know if it’ll ever replace my full-time job, but it sure is a lot more fun.

I’ve been meaning to write a brief history of Cathy’s Critters, and I guess this is fairly brief. I’ve left out a lot of the “lessons learned the hard way” and screwups, both minor and major, that we’ve had on the way to where we are. I’m sure we’ve got much more to learn, but being too busy at something you love is a good problem to have.

Thanks until next time,
–
Kevin and Cathy

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Originally posted February 11, 2007

Today we learned how to castrate a calf. Trigger was born about in October, and his mother died during calving. That was how we came to raise him. A friend knew we wanted to bottle-raise a calf so we were on call when there was an orphan. You have never seen anything as cute as a baby calf (unless you’ve seen one). They are extremely clumsy, and not just when they’re a few days old and their legs are wobbly. This poor fellow sometimes falls down if you look at him cross-ways. He’s got long top and bottom eyelashes, a soft nose, and likes to be petted on the throat and cheeks.

Since his career will be to delight kids, he needs to be as gentle and docile as possible. Needless to say, we couldn’t let him grow up a bull, and he’d have to be de-horned to be safe. The best time to do each of these minor operations is a few days to a couple weeks after birth. Unfortunately, we were a little late on the draw and decided to do it today, at about 4 months of age. His horns are just starting to peek out of his skin and are currently about 1/2″ in diameter, just on the big side for the “hot iron” method of de-horning, and too small to cut off. We plugged the dehorning iron in to start warming up, and meanwhile decided to do the castration first.

Now, Cathy has many years of vet-tech work in her past and we have never taken a male cat to the bet to be neutered, yet all of our male cats are “sans ouefs”. In theory, a mammal’s a mammal, and a scrotum’s a scrotum. We tied his feet together (like we’d seen at the rodeo) so he’d lay patiently on his side, collected our iodine, gauze, and a razor blade, and started in. For starters, 4-month–old calves are much stronger than cats, and you can’t just wrap them up in a towel. To make a long story short, we got one testicle out and a testicular artery severed (sawed, not sliced, to minimize bleeding), but it was so traumatic for the amateur surgeons that we decided to make an emergency Sunday call to our vet, Dr. Rick Garner.

We carried Trigger on a blanket to the trailer (a Jersey guernsey), and I rode in the back with him, holding gauze to his messy scrotum. It was the first time I’d ridden in the trailer, and I must say, it gives you an appreciation for what the animals endure on the way to events every weekend. I will definitely watch the bumps from now on. We arrived at the vet clinic a few minutes before the doctor and Trigger was showing no signs of shock or distress. I personally would have checked out long before this point. Perhaps when my hands and feet were tied and I saw a razor blade. We explained to the good doctor that we were half done and panicked, opting for professional help. He looked at our work with patient understanding, fetched a couple medieval-looking tools from the back of his truck, and removed the other testicle in about 40 seconds with a quick scalpel swipe, a squeeze, a clamp, and a cut. Trigger only jumped a little, thankful for the speedy surgery compared to our digging and swearing.

This is where having a great vet is key. A good large animal veterinarian knows that his customers can’t afford to pay a vet to do every shot or simple procedure that’s needed when they run a farm. Most folks give their own shots, assist in birthings, perform wormings, and a few even do sutures when a clumsy horse gets cut on a barbed-wire fence. Country vets know this, and know that we love our animals and want to do right for them. Thus, they are “teaching doctors”, helping educate their customers. They don’t feel threatened by a pet owner that can learn how to give injections. They aren’t concerned about “turf” when a knowledgeable customer brings info from the internet to help diagnose an animal’s condition.

We asked if we would need to carry him in to an operating table, and he just said “Nah, we can do it right out here”. We asked about sewing up the incisions and he advised leaving them alone to drain and avoid infection. He said that when you do a castration it’s best to cut the slit big enough to allow drainage, minimizing the risk of infection.

In case you were wondering about the de-horning iron, we decided that Trigger had had enough excitement for the day, and that we’d put it off for a few days to let him relax. He is resting quietly tonight in the straw. He has a private room for recovery from a traumatic day. I don’t think he’ll even miss them tomorrow, but we’ll never forget the experience.

Thanks for visiting!

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Originally posted February 3, 2007

I remember years ago seeing the title of a book by the Foxfire publishers called “I wish I could give my son a baby raccoon”. I was too young to “get it” then, probably about 15, browsing in a book store at the mall. I had some vague sense that it was anti-establishment, or just nostalgic for a time when a larger percentage of young people had a chance to split wood, milk goats, drive a tractor, and see stars. Ok, maybe that’s just me, superimposing my own anti-establishment bias on a casual spotting of a funny book title I had seen as a kid.

Foxfire books are collections of stories about families in the Appalachians living in a world little changed over 100 years of technological progress. We take our high-speed internet, air conditioning, hot water, hell, running water, and relative immunity from mother nature for granted. Life is easy. For most of us, we can have what we want, when we want it, and we feel like we might be guilty of child neglect if our kids don’t get what they want, when they want it.

When all of our needs are met in abundance, our biggest priority becomes how to stay entertained. We watch hours of TV, per day, and spend more time planning our Superbowl party than how we want to be remembered. We spend hours analyzing what options we want on our new car, but almost none talking with our kids about what they want to be when they grow up. We buy MP3 players on credit and take them with us on vacation (also paid with credit) with our family so we don’t have to listen to each other. We are a culture of narcissists, each wrapped up in our own amusements, avoiding self-examination.

Four years ago our family of 5 moved from a comfy home in the suburbs to 18 acres with an old pole barn and a borrowed camper to start building our dream home on a farm. It’s been a hard experience and we learned how little we knew about so many things, but we haven’t given up. In this space I intend to share some of our experiences, from losing everything we own in a massive fire, to building our home with our bare hands and a few great friends. We even have a pet raccoon. They don’t make great pets, by the way. Maybe our purpose in life is to be a warning to others. Maybe someone will be inspired to do something similar. I hope to hear from you, either way.

Thanks for tuning into our first entry.

Kevin & Cathy

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We are happy to say that our blog is back on line.

 

Thank you for your patience.

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