Junkmail

I have noticed a difference in the type of junk mail I receive now that I live in a rural area.

Not surprisingly, I have started to receive unsolicited catalogs, brochures and junk mail from farm, livestock, and garden supply companies. Most of this mail is interesting, and I now have supply sources for stuff I never knew existed. For instance, did you know that you can buy rubber gloves that go all the way to your shoulder? I think that’s for shoving your arm up a cow’s ass, but I’m not sure.

Since this is the Bible Belt, I receive the occasional piece of religious junk mail. The most recent one really caught my attention. It is ad inviting me to attend a presentation on “OBIBLECARE—Affordable Health ASSURANCE That Money Can’t Buy.” It guarantees that I will learn “ten simple steps that can reverse hypertension, diabetes, cancer, arthritis, autoimmune diseases, and most other disorders.” I guess that means it will also cure flatulence, hemorrhoids, and the wild eyebrow hairs men get as they grow older.

I suspect the promise of OBIBLECARE is different than the promise of Obamacare. With OBIBLECARE if you like your doctor you can do without him.

The presentation is being given by Pastor Shelem Flemons and his wife, Diane. Pastor Flemons is the Director and Chaplain of the Times of Refreshing Wellness Retreat. I think it’s a safe bet the retreat is not located across from the Mayo Clinic.

Rather impressively, Pastor Flemons is a “Doctor of Biblical Wellness.” I am not familiar with that particular degree or medical discipline, so I did a little internet research. I could not find a school that confers a degree in biblical wellness, but I did find one that gives a degree called a “Doctor of Biblical Medicine.” It’s the New Eden School of Natural Health and Herbal Studies. Here’s a link to New Eden’s website: New Eden.

The New Eden School must be a genuine organization because it is accredited by the PMA according its website. The PMA is the Pastoral Medical Association. That’s comforting.

What I want to know is whether the New Eden School has a school mascot or symbol. Are they the Fighting Prophets or the Healing Herbs? Do they have a school song or a school chant? (New Eden! New Eden! Heal! Heal! Heal!) I’d really like to get a school t-shirt.

I am trying to envision a Doctor of Biblical Medicine in the operating room. Does he hold out his hand and say “Bible” so a nurse can slap a Bible in his hand? When he does house calls does he tell you to say three Hail Marys and call him in the morning?

Now I’m not making fun of religious beliefs or doubting the healing power of faith, but I question the propriety of conferring degrees in Biblical Medicine or calling one’s self a Doctor of Biblical Wellness. My concern is that people with genuine medical problems will confuse a Doctor of Biblical Wellness with a medical doctor. You may think that’s a dim view of humanity, but I’m afraid that in today’s America, you can fool most of the people most of the time. What other conclusion can you come to when sixty percent of the population believes that astrology is a science, and you see advertisements for mediums and the healing power of crystals on television?

But hey, to each his own. All I know is that I would not feel very happy lying on a hospital bed and discovering that the initials “B.D.” on the doctor’s name tag stand for Biblical Doctor. At that point the initials behind my name would be G.M.T.H.O.O.H. (Get Me the Hell Out of Here).

It’s safe to say I won’t be going to the OBIBLECARE presentation.

My Mystical Native American Name

A few posts ago I told you about meeting Dreaming Bear at a Grumpy Old Men beer tasting. To refresh your recollection, Dreaming Bear is a self-professed 71-year-old crusader for gay and lesbian rights who has lived in Fannin County for years. I was jealous of the fact that she had a Native American name, and I didn’t.

I exchanged e-mails with her asking her to confer a good name on me, but she refused. She said that I had to come up with the name myself. As I reported in my post, all I could come up with was Dribbling Turtle, Farting Elk, and Bloated Antelope.

My new friends up here thought Bloated Antelope was a good name, but I was not satisfied so I e-mailed Dreaming Bear again pleading for some hints. She responded that a person’s Native American name represented his or her life’s quest or inner vision.

I meditated on that. I spent close to two-thirds of my life trying to be the best trial attorney I could be. A trial attorney is a person who tries to persuade a jury to rule in a certain way through the deft marshalling of evidence and the power of speech. So my spiritual Native American name may be Man Who Talks and Sways Others. But I’m also aware that many Native American names get shortened in the translation. I’m concerned that Man Who Talks and Sways Others may come out Flapping Lips.

As for my inner vision, like most egotistical, testosterone-driven American males I see myself as a strong, virile, bull elk of a man. Therefore, my inner vision dictates that my true spiritual name should be Stud Muffin.

I ran these suggestions by Dreaming Bear in my last e-mail, but so far I have not gotten a response. This makes me wonder whether her Native American name for me is Man Who I Wish I’d Never Met.

So the quest to discover my spiritual name continues. I’m open to suggestions.

Potatoes and Easter Eggs

Oh yes, we have no bananas, we have no bananas today. But we got taters, spuds, pommes de terre, or murphies, otherwise collectively known as potatoes. 

 

Okay, so I don’t have potatoes yet, but I’ve got plenty of potato sprouts from the seed potatoes I planted almost a month ago, and I’m pretty excited about that. My garden is starting to look like a garden.

 

Here I am getting worked up over potato sprouts. It’s a sure sign you’re retired and out of the big time when you start getting excited over potatoes sprouting. 

Imaginary scene in a bar

(A loose, attractive woman with a low cut dress is looking for some action. She is talking to two men.)

Loose Woman: Say there, tell me something exciting.

First Man: I’m a lawyer, and I just won a big case in court.

Loose Woman: And you, the big guy in the bib overalls, what got you excited today?

Second Man: My potatoes sprouted.

I bet studies show that women are more attracted to men who win big cases in court than to men who get excited over potatoes. That probably explains two things: (a) why most attractive women leave Fannin County the minute they reach the age of majority, and (b) why I’ve been seeing advertisements for a farmer’s dating service on television.

 

It won’t be long before I’ll be like Don Corleone stumbling around in the garden waiting for the big stroke to take me. And it’s all because I planted two rows of potatoes.

 

Turning to other matters, St. Luke's Episcopal Church of Blue Ridge has held an Easter Egg hunt for the children of Fannin County for the last 19 years, and this year was no exception. Meredith and I volunteered to lend a hand, and that's how I ended up hard boiling a thousand eggs on the Friday before Easter.

 

I thought that all it took to hard boil an egg was to dip one into boiling water for three minutes and presto—one hard boiled egg. So when I volunteered to help, I didn’t think it would take too much time to hard boil a thousand eggs in large batches. I figured I would be at the church two hours at the most.

 

You can bet I was surprised when I showed up at the church, and the ladies told me that the way you hard boil an egg is to put it into cold water, bring the water to a boil, turn off the heat and let the egg sit in the hot water for at least 10 minutes. I believe my actual words were, “You’re shitting me. Really?”

 

Suffice it to say that I was at the church boiling eggs a lot longer than two hours. I was there so long that I got dragged into going to the noon Good Friday service. I’m sorry to say that the service was completely unintelligible to me.

 

To understand why the service was incomprehensible, you need to know two things. First, Episcopals use the King James Bible. The King James Bible was published in 1611 which is the same time that Shakespeare wrote his plays. It is written in the archaic language of Elizabethan England which is often hard to understand. If you’ve ever tried to read a play by Shakespeare, you know what I mean. For example, if I had been speaking Elizabethan English when I discovered how long it takes to hard boil a egg, I would have said, “Thou shitteth me. Verily?”

 

Second, there is a lot of litany during an Episcopal service. Litany is where the minister says something and the congregation responds. When the minister strays from the familiar litanies used in the regular Sunday service and starts digging into the Old Testament for special occasions like Good Friday, the congregation can end up reciting things like "Many oxen are come about me; fat bulls of Bashan close me in on every side” and "Deliver my soul from the sword; my darling from the power of the dog." The one that really lost me was “They called upon thee, and were holpen…” Not only do I not know what “holpen” means, I’m not even sure what part of speech it is.

 

Our minister really dug deep into the Old Testament for the Good Friday service. I’m pretty sure the Psalms we recited were on the B side of the record. Since I'm not a biblical scholar or an expert on Elizabethan speech, I had no idea what I was saying during the service. Which leads to another interesting question: Do you have to comprehend a church service to get the benefit of it or is it like a tanning booth where the length of exposure is all that matters?

 

Episcopals are also big on the congregation reciting lengthy passages from the prayer book in unison. I don’t know what it is about the congregation at St. Luke’s, but they have a problem with the “in unison” part. No one recites the passage at the same speed. If the passage is over two sentences long, it ends up sounding like the babble at a large cocktail party. I made a suggestion to the minister that we get a Karaoke machine so everyone can follow the bouncing ball. He wasn’t taken with the idea.

 

Anyway, on Saturday morning church volunteers hid a little over 1,400 boiled and plastic eggs on the church grounds. The eggs weren’t exactly hidden. The church grounds, including a small cemetery in back, are probably half an acre in size, and there are only so many hiding places. When I arrived at the church there were eggs lying out in the open everywhere. It looked like the church had been hit with an Easter Egg cluster bomb.

 

Children and their parents began showing up for the Easter Egg hunt 45 minutes before the start of the hunt. As the start time grew close, there were over 200 kids lined up on the church driveway. The fact that there were hundreds of Easter Eggs lying out in the open only served to work the assembled children into a greedy frenzy. Some of the kids had been to another Easter egg hunt earlier that morning and had consumed so much sugar they were out of their minds. I was tempted to drop kick one obnoxious little brat over to the Methodist church on the other side of town.

 

When the church bell finally rang to signal that the hunt was on, it was like the start of the Oklahoma land rush. The children spread out like a virulent disease as they scurried around grabbing eggs left and right. It was like watching a hoard of starving rats. Kids were knocking each other over to get to the eggs. It was the Episcopal version of the Hunger Games. In 12 minutes every freaking egg had been gathered.

 

It may have been the scariest experience of my adult life. I’ll have to think twice if I’m asked to volunteer to help with the church’s Easter Egg hunt next year. But right now I think I’d rather wrestle with the devil than face 200 crazed kids again.

The Dogwoods Bloom

I’m sorry this post is a day or two late. Among other things, I was busy studying for my Master Gardener final exam which happened on April 15. 

 

I passed the test with a respectable 95 out of 100, so now I am a Master Gardener Trainee. As a trainee I don’t get a nice plastic badge like the Master Gardeners wear. All I get is a flimsy paper badge that identifies me as a trainee. I don’t get the plastic badge until I finish my 50 hours of service. 

 

The Georgia Cooperative Extension rules require me to wear my trainee badge whenever I’m working on a Master Gardener project. I guess that’s so everyone knows that I’m not a full-fledged Master Gardener, but a half-assed version of a Master Gardener. That seems appropriate in my case. For some reason I feel like I’m in pledge training for my fraternity in college. I half expect the Master Gardeners to require me to shout: “Sir, a pledge is lower than whale shit in the deepest part of the deepest ocean and looks up at the bellies of snakes, sir.”

 

I have to admit that I did not study for the final exam near as much as I did for the mid-term. For one thing, most of the subject matter in the second half of the course did not interest me. There were classes on landscape design, leadership and communications, and water gardens, among others. 

 

The landscape design and leadership classes were absolute bullshit. One of the things I learned in the landscape design class is that you can build a patio too big or too small. The secret is to build it just right. What is this—Goldilocks and the Three Bears? Patio, my ass—I’m still trying to get a lawn.

 

I have no idea what I was supposed to get out of the leadership class. Really, I have no idea what I was supposed to learn in the class. The leadership chapter of the text book informed me that the five stages of group development are forming, storming, norming, performing, and adjourning. What does that mean? What about all the negative rhyming words like nonconforming, nonperforming, and misinforming? 

 

The book also said that a great leader always has an agenda and always sticks to it. I’m sure Alexander the Great, Napoleon, Washington, and Patton always abided by that rule.

 

As for the water garden class, I doubt seriously that I’ll be raising Koi anytime soon, but it’s always good to know that they can grow to 36 inches and they crap like a hippopotamus if you overfeed them. Who knows, that might be a question in Trivial Pursuit.

 

But the real reason I didn’t study as much this time is because it dawned on me that I’m retired. Who gives a rat’s ass whether I graduate summa cum laude from the Master Gardener’s course? It’s not like I’m trying to get a job after I graduate. The way I figure it, the Fannin County Master Gardeners should be happy to have me no matter what grade I got. I’m loud, I’m proud, I’m bad, I’m nationwide. Well, let’s just rip off James Brown and ZZ Top.

 

Another thing that interfered with my studies is that I’ve been really busy. Meredith and I have become involved in a group called Feed Fannin. It’s a local group that raises funds and grows vegetables to feed the needy in Fannin County. I’m on the publicity committee, and my job is to write press releases and articles for the newspapers. That means I have to go to events, take photos and write some copy to ship off to the newspapers. I’m a real Jimmy Olsen. I’m also helping at the group’s five acre farm. I helped plant potatoes last week. 

 

I have some concern that this Feed Fannin thing could lead to me becoming a community organizer and being like you know who. You have my permission to shoot me if that ever happens.

 

Last week I reported that I unwittingly ended up in one of the top three destinations for gays and lesbians in Georgia. I have no problem with that. Now I find out that Feed Fannin is the favorite charity of all the liberals in Fannin County. Some of the people in the group actually drive hybrid cars that sport Obama and Coexist stickers. I didn’t think it was safe to do that in these parts. My pickup with its NRA decal and faded Romney/Ryan sticker is more the norm around here.

 

Well, I have no problem being surrounded by liberals when it comes to the Feed Fannin group. Maybe they don’t realize it, but the group represents the best of the conservative American tradition dating back to the founding of the Republic—local people solving local problems. Neighbors helping neighbors without the intrusive hand of government has been a characteristic of this country from its early days. In the 1830s Alexis deTocqueville traveled our young country and observed: 

The citizen of the United States is taught from infancy to rely on his own exertions in order to resist the evils and the difficulties of life; he looks upon the social authority with an eye of mistrust and anxiety, and he claims its assistance only when he is unable to do without it. 

I wish that was as true now as it was then. But at least here in Fannin County they try to solve their own problems without a handout from Big Brother. So I don’t mind helping Feed Fannin, even if they are a bunch of card-carrying liberals. Who knows, maybe I can show them the error of their ways eventually.

 

Meanwhile, the weather here continues to amaze me. The weather has been mild over the last two weeks. We even had a day when the afternoon temperature was in the low 80’s. The grass in the fields has greened up, the spring flowering shrubs are showing their blossoms, and the apple trees are beginning to bud and flower. Even the dogwoods have burst into bloom.

 

I always wondered about using the word “burst” to describe how flowering shrubs come into blossom, but that’s the only way to describe it. One day they’re just bushes, and the very next day they are covered with bright blossoms. The wonder is that they all do it at the same time.

 

I was waiting for the dogwoods to bloom. If you will recall, I was told at the farmer’s coop that I should plant my buckwheat and soybeans as a cover crop when the dogwoods bloom. I assumed that was because the dogwoods knew when the worst of the bad weather was over.

 

Unfortunately, I have to report that the temperature outside is currently 28 degrees. Yesterday afternoon we had flurries of rain mixed with snow and sleet. The concern around here is that a hard freeze will kill all the apple blossoms. It’s obviously too cold to plant soybeans and buckwheat. So why in the hell are do they rely on the dogwood trees to tell them when to plant?

 

In Pinellas County we had a much better way of knowing when spring was here. It was called spring break. It’s a lot more enjoyable watching for young college girls in small bikinis then it is waiting for the dogwoods to bloom, but I guess that’s the sacrifice I must make for the joy of living in the country.

I Meet Dreaming Bear

Blue Ridge and Fannin County continue to amaze me. This place is like that commercial: characters welcome. Last Saturday I was introduced to one of the local characters. Her name is Dreaming Bear.

It happened at the monthly beer tasting at Grumpy Old Men Brewing Company in Blue Ridge. Grumpy Old Men is a nano-brewery formed by a couple of, well, old guys. Here’s a link to its website: Grumpy Old Men. Grumpy Old Men’s idea of a beer tasting is to charge ten bucks for a Grumpy Old Men beer glass and let you drink all the beer you want. Typically there are 40 or 50 people milling around out front having fun.

I was introduced to Dreaming Bear by a new friend. Dreaming Bear is a 71-year-old woman who lives on 70 acres on a mountain top in Fannin County. When I first met her she was pouring down glasses of beer with impressive gusto (as was I). Intrigued, I sat down and talked with her.

The first thing I wanted to know is how she got her name. (The entire time I was talking to her I could not get the old song Running Bear Loves Little White Dove out of my mind.) She said she got her name through a personal experience, but was reticent to give more details. The thought occurred to me that maybe she is in a federal witness protection program, and her case agent was a Native American who gave her the name as a joke.

I wanted to know whether Bear was her last name. If I entered her name in my phone, last name first, would it be Bear, Dreaming? If I wrote her a letter would the proper salutation be “Dear Ms. Bear”? I knew the answer, of course. You would never refer to Bull, Sitting or Horse, Crazy. I think she appreciated that my questions were in good humor and that I was well on my way to getting drunk.

She proceeded to tell me part of her life story. She is a lesbian, and her long-time partner died two years ago. She moved to Fannin County 33 years ago. I’ll give her credit. I bet it took some balls (well, not balls, but you know what I mean) to be openly lesbian in north Georgia 33 years ago.

She said that in the early days she was harassed by the county sheriff. Among other indignities, he would raid her property and take her “plants” and then sell them rather than arrest her and destroy the plants. I guess that means she was growing marijuana in the early 80’s. Thirty years of pot smoking may go a long way in explaining how she acquired the name Dreaming Bear. I didn’t ask her whether she’s still growing it.

She claims she was a crusader for gay rights in Georgia for years. She told me that Blue Ridge is one of the top three places for gays and lesbians in Georgia and that gays and lesbians are largely responsible for the transformation of Blue Ridge from a backward hillbilly town to the charming place it is now. She said (and I’m paraphrasing) that gays and lesbians have turned Blue Ridge into quite an artsy-fartsy community. I don’t remember reading anything about that in the tourist brochures.

Well, I couldn’t top that. I’m just a retired lawyer from Clearwater who’s been married for 35 years and has two kids. I did tell her that I have met at least one artist in my life while working as the city attorney for Tarpon Springs.

She said she wanted to start a raised bed garden on her property and that she was going to invite a bunch of her friends to help her. She intended to make a party of it by serving large quantities of alcohol. I volunteered to help. The offer of assistance was not pure altruism on my part. I suspect that an evening with Dreaming Bear and her friends will provide plenty of fodder for this blog.

When I was writing this post I googled “Dreaming Bear Georgia” just for the hell of it. I’ll be damned if she doesn’t have website: Dreaming Bear. I won’t comment on the website other than to say that it may be proof that she’s done a lot of hallucinogenic drugs in her life.

When it was time for Meredith to drive me home, I told Dreaming Bear that I wanted to have a Native American name too, and I wanted her to bestow it on me. She said that a Native American name was not something that someone gave you, but something that must come from within. After I sobered up I concluded that it was a good thing that Dreaming Bear did not give me a name. I might have ended up being called Prancing Beaver or Pink Buffalo.

So I’ve been thinking about it. The only names I’ve come up with are Dribbling Turtle, Farting Elk, and Bloated Antelope. It looks like I will have to go on a vision quest to discover my true and, hopefully, better Native American name. I’m thinking the next grumpy Old Men beer tasting would be a good time for a vision quest.

Now that I think about it, I may have a little artist in me. I've become the poet laureate of the Master Gardener groups in Fannin, Union and Towns County.

I was bored one day in my Master Gardener class and wrote a parody of the song “I am a Modern Major General” from Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance. The first verse goes like this:

I am the very model of a modern Master Gardener.
I’ve read the very latest in the scientific lit-rit-ture.
I know of flower gardening and matters horticultural,
I’m cautious with my pesticides and inorganic chemicals.
With a quick perceptive glance I know your leafy specimen
Suffers from the type of wilt that we call Fusarium.
When others freeze in panic and succumb to mass hysteria
I can calmly recommend a spray for your wisteria.
Whether perennial or annual or woody ornamental,
To me the proper planting steps are simply elemental.
I know the basic function of your xylem and your phloem.
Regardless of the type of plants—you name ‘em, I can grow ‘em.

I will be the first to admit this verse shows no talent whatsoever and is at best sophomoric doggerel. Even so, the Towns/Union County Master Gardeners thought enough of it to post it on their website. I am reminded of an old McDonald’s commercial that had the line: Gee, you’re easily amused.

Most of you will recognize that I am following the old adage well known to trial attorneys that if you can’t dazzle them with your brilliance, befuddle them with your bullshit. Maybe they won’t notice that I can’t identify more than five flowers and shrubs.

Now that the Master Gardener course is winding down, I am thinking about what I can do next to amuse myself.

Georgia has a Georgia Master Naturalist course. Becoming a Master Naturalist has some appeal to me. It would be interesting to see if there is a difference between the type of person who becomes a Master Gardener and the type of person who becomes a Master Naturalist. If Master Gardeners are aging hippies, then Master Naturalists would be what? Aging Euell Gibbons? Aging Eco-terrorists?

I was toying with the idea of becoming a certified arborist, but I learned that one of the requirements is that you must have full-time work experience in a tree-related field. I’m not going to spend the next two years of my life working full time at anything, much less in a tree-related field, so becoming a certified arborist is out.

That’s too bad. An extension agent who taught one of the Master Gardener courses said that there are almost no certified arborists in north Georgia. Not only would it be interesting to learn how to care for trees, but if I became a certified arborist I could have opened a little business on the side.

I had even given some thought to how I would advertise the business. I would run ads with me standing naked with my private parts covered by a bush under the caption “Got Wood?”

Meanwhile, spring keeps creeping up on north Georgia. Some of the trees are starting to show leaves, dandelions are popping up on lawns, and a number of shrubs and bushes have flowered. It won’t be long before its time to put my seeds into the ground. Man, that sounds like something Prancing Beaver would say. On that note I’ll end this post.

Hard Work and Cow Farts

Some people read this blog because they are attracted to the idea of moving to the country and living the simple life—having a big garden, canning vegetables, raising chickens and goats, making cheese, baking bread, and otherwise dwelling in idyllic pastoral splendor. Gee, that sounds like me.

Apparently there enough people who dream of country living to have spawned a number of magazines devoted to living La Vita Rural. These magazines are slick and glossy and usually paint an overly romanticized and sanitized version of rural life.

For instance, a typical story might be about the joys of raising miniature Nubian goats. The accompanying photographs show an attractive middle-aged couple leaning against a white painted fence gazing at their flock frolicking in a green clover-filled pasture. The woman is wearing freshly shined boots, gleaming white jodhpurs, and a white linen blouse. The man looks like he stepped out of an L.L. Bean catalog. You get the impression that they spend much of their time sitting on the veranda sipping gin and tonics as they enjoy their slice of heaven.

It was hard work putting in these posts for my composting bins.

Based on what I’ve seen here in Fannin County, living the simple country life is not like that at all. If you really want to get back to nature, be prepared for hard work, long hours, and dirt.

Take the joys of raising goats. I have met a number of people who raise goats. That seems to be a popular thing to do around here. (That and raising llamas and alpacas. Go figure.)

I even know a couple that is breeding miniature Nubian goats. They do not look like they stepped out of Better Homes and Gardens magazine. Rather, they look like they stepped out of a National Geographic article about peasant life in East Buttcrackistan.

What the rural glamour magazines do not depict is getting up at 5:30 in the morning when the temperature is 20 degrees to milk your nanny goats and having to sanitize their teats with your freezing hands. They do not tell you about the joys of shoveling goat poop, carrying heavy containers of goat’s milk for pasteurization, and all the other gritty work required. The goat farmers I’ve met do not wear shiny leather boots. They wear big rubber boots to keep their pants out of the mud and goat shit—usually unsuccessfully.

Back in my day, there was one magazine devoted to country living: Mother Earth News. The great thing about the old Mother Earth News was that it never gave you the impression that country living was like living in a high-priced gated community. How could you get possibly get that impression when the articles were about building a house out of straw bales, heating your dwelling with composting cow manure, and the joys of living in a yurt?

Living in a yurt, for God’s sake. Mongols live in yurts. If living in a yurt is so great why did the Mongols try to conquer the known world in the 13th Century? It’s because living in a yurt sucked. They envied the lifestyle of the civilized world and wanted to live better. Living better did not include living in a yurt.

I aspire to live the simple country life. I want to have a big garden, can my own food, make cheese and sausage, and maybe one day have chickens and rabbits. Who knows, I may even have a goat or two one day.

I draw the line on alpaca and llamas, however. I do not want to own an animal that spits on me. If I raise a farm animal I want to be able to eat it. As far as I know, there is no such thing as alpaca burgers or country fried llama. Finally, alpacas and llamas are related to camels, and I’ll be damned if I’ll give anyone the opportunity to refer to me as a camel jockey. But I digress.

In the last eight months I’ve made great progress towards country living. I’ve also done more physical work and been consistently dirtier than at any time in my life with the exception of basic training at Fort Benning, Georgia, when I was 20 years old. I do not look like I stepped out of an L.L. Bean catalog. Most days I look like I stepped out of a movie about the Hatfields and McCoys.

My point is this: don’t be fooled by slick magazines into thinking that living the simple life in the country is easy. Be prepared for hard work and dirt.

Methane and cow farts.  I heard on the news that the EPA is going to investigate the amount of methane released by oil and gas drilling. Apparently someone in Washington thinks this might be a problem that may need regulating.

Now I haven’t done any research into this, but I’ll bet that cow farts release more methane into the atmosphere in one day than the oil and gas industry does in one year.

Furthermore, I once read that farmers fart more than most people because their diet is typically rich in complex carbohydrates, and that of all the farmers, the Amish fart the most. I can’t prove this, but it makes sense to me. If you’ve ever been around a farm you know that there are certain odors associated with them. It could be the livestock, but it could also be the farmer and his family.

If the EPA is going to investigate methane released by the oil and gas industry, I think it’s only fair that it look into farmers and cows.

I don’t think the EPA can do much about bovine flatulence, but if it turns out that farmer farting is a problem and the EPA decides to regulate it, I’m buying some stock in the company that makes Beano.