Far Beyond Pearls

I’m getting another cow.  I know what you’re thinking.  It was barely two weeks ago that she was overwhelmed by too much milk.  Now she’s getting another cow?! You probably think I’m crazy.  Well, maybe this is something you should know about me: just as soon as I figure out how to manage whatever it is I think I can’t manage, I kick it up a notch, take on a little more.  This is maybe why my stress levels are so high.  But this is it!  I promise!  Just this one more cow and then I’ll quit.   At least with the cows.

What do you think about sheep?

“Wealth must be seen as a responsibility, not as a privilege. The responsibility is to create more wealth. It’s like having an orchard; you have to give away the fruit, but not the trees.”  Carlos Slim is now the world’s richest man. His wealth angers his fellow citizens in a country known for its poverty,  but I love this quote and he’s as much a philantropist as he is a businessman.

We all have been given gifts that we are stewards of.  For some, like Mr. Slim, that gift is money, but most of us are “differently blessed”.  We have skills that others can benefit from, or some material good that comes to us in abundance (like eggs ), or even just the simple gift of time.  They are gifts given to us by God, not something owed us, and it is our responsibility to use them to bless others, to tend our orchards, to give away the fruit while nurturing the trees.

What are you blessed with and how do you share that?

The children are in charge of sweeping after meals, but they are not very thorough, so I always run the vacuum over the kitchen before I mop.  Today, I noticed that there were hardly any crumbs or food bits to vacuum up.  In fact, I could have skipped the vacuuming altoghether.  At lunch, I offered praise to my little sweepers for the good job they’ve been doing.

“Jonny, Meggie, you’ve been doing a really good job on the sweeping.  The floor was very clean this morning!”

They looked at each other in surprise.  Brenna laughed.  “Mommy,” she said, “it’s not them; it’s the dog.”

Oh, yeah.  The dog.  Well, I’m glad somebody takes his work seriously.  Good job, Max!

Maybelle was kind of ornery this morning.  She must have had a bee in her bonnet.  They’ve been buzzing around the past few days.  Must be spring!  (If it’s not, don’t burst my bubble, ‘kay?)

A couple of weeks ago, my physical therapist suspended my sessions pending the results of an MRI to see what was really going on in my back.  We weren’t making any progress at all, and it might actually have been getting worse.  So I made an appointment with my doctor, who issued an order for the MRI, and I went to post to schedule it.  This all took about two weeks, in which time my back actually made some small improvement on its own.  The MRI is scheduled for the end of March.

Four weeks! I thought to myself.  Four weeks till the MRI, then another one to get the results from my doctor, then more physical therapy….   I’d read my own xray reports and there didn’t seem to be a major problem.  Just a pinched nerve.  Just pain and numbness and decreased mobility.  Just the thing a chiropractor can help with.  So I called one, and he saw me right away.  He, too, looked at my xrays and read the report and confirmed what I thought: no major problems and no disc issues, just obviously misaligned bones from bending and lifting.

I was relieved, until I laid down on his table.  He’s not one of those gently chiropractors.  It hurt, his adjustments, and he gave me ice and said what he did may cause soreness, but I should notice a change in the morning.  He actually called late last night to make sure I was icing and taking it easy.  And I did.  As I climbed into bed, I noticed my foot wasn’t numb.  I read a book and iced my back and when I rolled over to go to sleep, I found it easier to find a comfortable position.

It’s morning now, and it still hurts and I still can’t take a full step, but I can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel, and that’s all I really need to keep going.

Well, my cow finally gave up and gave in.  We get four gallons of milk a day now, or close to it.  One gallon goes to the calf by way of a bottle, but the other three are all for us.  We only drink one.  That means I spend all my free time trying to come up with new and useful ways to use those other two gallons before they sour in the fridge.   It’s so bad that I gave up on our Lenten dessert fast and made pudding.  There is a cheesecake in our very near future.

But friends, there are problems with trying to use up all this milk as anything other than milk.  For instance: I made a kind of french cream cheese last night called fromage blanc.  I haven’t tasted it yet, but it smells wonderful, like regular cream cheese, but sweeter and tangier all at the same time.  Luckily, it’s not made out of cream, either; I have no trouble using cream.  Fromage blanc is made out of whole milk.  A whole gallon of it.  (Yes!)  The problem with making cheese, though, is that when it’s all done, I have a lot of whey to use up, too.  Sometimes, I just give it to the chickens.  Sometimes, I pretend I’m going to use it for a couple of days and THEN I give it to the chickens.  The whey from this fromage blanc was so delicious, though, it went into the breakfast pancakes and the lunch pizza and tomorrow’s bread.  Then I made bagels to eat the cheese on.  Hard cheese is even worse, as it takes a whole day of attention, too.

My point is, I spend a lot of time using up milk or using the whey left over from using up milk or scouring recipe books for new ways to use milk.  I was down to three gallons for a minute this morning, but now there are five.  I’m getting desperate.

It takes half a gallon to make yogurt and a whole gallon to make soft cheese.  Pudding only takes four cups.  Do you have any other ideas for using milk?  Any great recipes featuring soft cheeses?

If this keeps up for much longer, I’ll just start bathing in it.  I hear it’s really good for the skin.

The other day, I had a six year old guest for the morning.  We don’t have many snow days around here, so when it was time for Rosie’s reading lesson, our little guest wanted to join in, too.  I handed her the book opened to the page just before Rosie’s because it had a simple list of short-i words.  I just wanted to see where she was at.  She had no trouble with any of the consonant sounds, except for the very confusing b and d.  But then she made me laugh when she read “pin”.

“P-I-N.  PIN,” she sounded out.  “Like, ‘I write with a pin.’”

I tried correcting her, but she’s a Kentucky girl, and PIN and PEN sound exactly alike to her.  My question for you Southern homeschoolers and teachers is:  How do you teach a child the difference between words like “pin” and “pen”, or “sit” and “set”, when she doesn’t speak the difference and very likely doesn’t even hear the difference? Just for curiosity’s sake. 

I worry that what I’m about to tell you may tarnish my image, but I must confess: I hate sewing. All the measuring and the cutting and the piecing and the pinning and the ironing – to me, there is nothing more tedious, nothing more drudging. I do like the results, though, and some things can only be had by sewing them yourself, so now and then, after weeks, months, sometimes even years of procrastination, I break down and sew something. Like this:

Snow Birds

Oh, I should have done this months ago. You see, the roosters have favorite hens and they tend to over-utilize them, if you know what I mean, which leaves the hens with bald spots on their backs where the roosters mount them. Without feathers, a hen has no protection from a rooster’s amorous activities, which can result in more serious injury the next time he gets that certain look in his eye. The solution to this problem is to dress the affected hens in little protective aprons.

Now let me just tell you that this particular hen did not appreciate my efforts on her behalf at all. She’s crazy to escape that little blue bit of fabric, and she’s terrorizing the other hens right now, the way she’s running around like a… a… a chicken with a new apron. I’m sure she’ll settle down. Eventually. I hope so, anyway, because there are a dozen other hens out there who could use aprons of their own. I don’t want them to get a phobia.

Delaney is a stamp collector, so she always checks the mail for new and interesting additions. A few days ago, she found one that was printed right onto the envelope. “Mommy,” she asked, “why would somebody want an envelope with the stamp already on it?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess it saves a little bit of time licking stamps.”

Surprised, she asked, “Why would anybody want to lick a stamp?!”

Oh. The post office changed over to sticker stamps years ago, and none of my children have ever had to lick a stamp or even thought that such a thing was ever done. I still think of them as “new”. For just a minute, I felt… old. It was quite a blow, since I had recently been pondering the link between babies and eternal youth. I suppose children are more apt to provide opportunities to grow in humility, though.

So, yes. Once upon a time, long, long ago, we had to lick our stamps. Barbaric, I know, but there you have it.

This new news feed is awful. It’s all out of order, and people are missing. I heard you are guessing who my real friends are by noting whose updates I leave comments on. I really don’t think that’s your place. I can hide the friends I prefer not to read all by myself. Also, I prefer to see only status updates. There was an option for that before, but now, it takes two clicks EVERY TIME to get that view. And if I don’t bother? I have to see that so-and-so just saved a baby panda or found a lucky horseshoe or is going to die in 2043. You should know I don’t care. I just want status updates and I want them easy and I want them for ALL of my friends, not just the ones you think are important.

This “upgrade” may cost you some friends of your own, Facebook. You’re very close to losing me. Because as soon as this ceases to be fun, it ceases to be useful. Already, I click through to this site less often and I stay for less time. That’s bad for business, Facebook. You’re chasing away your own customers. But I’m frustrated with the constant changes, and I’m not the only one. I’ve never seen a site so frequently alter the way users have to interact with it on the most basic level. You should know that I’m a creature of habit. Anytime you force me out of my comfortable rut, you risk losing me altogether.

I’m ultimately a blogger, anyway. This was just a place to toss the one-liners and maybe connect with a few more readers. Leaving won’t break my heart, Facebook. That might be your fatal flaw: you think you are indispensable and can therefore get away with abuses no other major website would contemplate. But you’re not the only social network out there. You’re not the only way to connect.

Time is short, Facebook. My patience is at its end. Please reconsider your actions before it’s too late.

Sincerely,
A disenchanted “friend”.