Cathy's Farm Blog

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