Author: Nuttygrass

I'm a nut and grass farmer, EMT, Firefighter, and world traveler. I love a good laugh and a great adventure!

1st Dirty Dozen of Homeownership…

Matt and I got the keys to our new home this past Friday!! The house is nice, the surrounding areas are…well…overgrown to say the least!  It’s has some farmable land, and some timber land, and lot of blackberry and weed land.  But being the young energetic couple that we are, we’re looking forward to the challenge!

We have had the place to work on for about 2.5 days now.  And in this time I’m already amazed at how much I’ve learned…so here my friends are the dirty dozen (so far) of homeownership…

1. Always wear closed toed shoes and long pants with long sleeves!  I know it’s 80 degrees out today, but the cuts from the briars aren’t worth it! Neither are the looks from your future husband saying, “I thought I was marrying a farm girl, why do you have shorts on?!”

2. At some point you have to put a machete into use…just fair warning, always keep an eye on the machete, a real close eye when I’m swinging!  I’m effective, but dangerous!

3. Don’t mention lunch, because afterwards it will be all you can think about.

4. When using the weed wacker, stay away from the plants with burrs.  They turn into bullets and shoot out at you.  Then when you complain and your future husband again gives you the “Let’s buck up a little bit here” look, this time tell him he can do it and laugh when afterwards he looks at you and says, “Woah these things feel like bullets!”

5. Take enough breaks that when you’re tired you still remember how much you love the guy next to you, how exciting this is, and how wonderful it will be in the future!

6. When using a blower to clean the house, those big HUGE spiders that live in corners…they will shoot out at you and give you a heart attack, you will dance around on the front porch like a maniac screaming, and once you calm down enough you will step and kill the gigantic creature!

7. Be aware that when your old place was original the owners liked putting up fences, everywhere!  Wirey fences that will either trip the heck out of you, or catch on your mower.

8. If they get caught on your mower like a booby trap, you can’t pull on it and make it better, you can’t go faster to get out of the mess.  No, no, at that point you resign that it’s now going to take an hour to actually remove the mower blades to get them unstuck…oops!

9. When you’re sent into the green house that is covered in briars so much that we didn’t originally know it was there, just to check out if there is anything “worth saving” inside; no one will blame you when you decide not to go through the 32 thick spider webs with fat spiders in them.  Instead just crane your neck from afar…and give the good old, “looks pretty worthless from here” thumbs up.

10. Never let me use the weed wacker with the actual blade vs. the string, I hit my foot three times and my leg twice!  Each time thanking God that I wasn’t using the blade one, I think I would have been a little less than effective if I had cut off my leg or foot yesterday!

11. When you’re just having a ball and you look at each other and say, “Gosh we should start a landscaping business!” 16 hours later…well let’s just say we’re not in the landscape business as of yet!

12. Good things come to those who wait!  I can’t wait for what is yet to come for us!!

Starting to feel like Fall

A little foggy, a little cool…Fall is just around the corner here in the Pacific Northwest!

It’s not always about Hunting on the Farm…

Awhile back I wrote about how we kill squirrels, ruthlessly, on our farm. So in contrast to that post I would like to also show a softer side of the farm…the saving kittys side. It was a nice sunny afternoon, and after a long time of rain rain rain, we were glad to finally get some work done. Dad and I were out in the shop figuring out a few things when we heard a small “Meow” coming from the wall that is between the shop and our lean two. Then we heard some small paws scratching, very little paws. Sure enough a little kitty had fallen two stories down into the space between the two outbuildings, and not in a very convenient place at all. Dad looked at me, and said, “Brenda we don’t have time to save kittens today, I’m sorry we have too much to do right now!” It sounded so sad in there, and I knew it would die if we didn’t do something (maybe a little Fire Fighter Save the cat out of the tree came over me), so I opted for logic over emotion on this one. “Dad if it dies in there, it’s going to smell so bad, and then we are going to have to tear the wall apart looking for the thing because we wouldn’t be able to hear it. At least right now we know where it is. I’m sure it won’t take long…” Little did I know that two and half hours later the kitty’s fate would be decided…

So what could possibly make this kitty rescue take this long, well because to get the dang thing out we had to first remove a side of the tin from the shop. Tin that has been there for quite a while and was held on by some nails that didn’t really want to go anywhere fast. We had to make time for dad to smash his head into a doorway, and then of course we had to go through about 50 different tools to try to chip away at the wood that was blocking her exit. I’ll tell you what though, the moment we got the tin off and could see that little kitty’s face and tiny little paws something flipped in my not so heartless father, “We’ve got to save that kitty Brenda!!”

So after we realized that our hands and arms were too big to reach we called up one of our worker’s daughters, skinniest arms I have ever seen! She came to mission “Kitty Rescue” right away and we really thought we had a chance. She was tiny, and ready to get out of there, but she was also quite chubby and in a sort of Winnie the pooh fashion kept getting her belly stuck. So we would chip away more wood from the base boards and studs (pretty sure in a big wind storm we may regret ever helping this dang kitty when we see the building go down haha!)

By then my mom had shown up and was the kittty’s cheerleader, “Come on kitty, you can do it!!” She was chanting as we all watched in anticipation! Finally after a long afternoon and with a shop wall just about torn apart, the kitty was free!!! We all high fived and it was like something completely crazy had come over us, we had just saved a life! I know it sounds corny and when you think about it, it really was super corny. But if you had been there, I’ll tell you what, you would have been high fiving and hugging with the rest of us. One of those moments that you just get caught up in I suppose. We’ve since patched the kitty chute hole and hoping this never has to happen again, but glad that in the end, it was a very good afternoon and just another unexpected day on the farm!