fail

I talked about summer goals. I made reading the book Catch 22 one of them. I failed. It was due back to the library on June 21 and I decided I would give myself until that date to determine if I would finish it or not, and I determined that I would not. So back it went.

Over 400 pages

I talked to my mom, who I consider to be a model reader, and she said she no longer forces herself to finish books. It's not worth it. She wants only to read for pleasure nowadays.

And I was forcing it. I found myself spacing out and going back to reread parts, and spacing out again. I think I have an attention problem. I know it's probably like running, you have to train. Just because I admire people who run marathons doesn't mean I can just go out and do it without training. And this is seriously kind of a marathon book.

I wanted to read it because I accidentally found out one day that it was considered one of the most significant novels of the twentieth century. And the phrase "catch 22", referring to no-win situations, made it's way into the English language from this book. I was interested in knowing more, and I do know more now. Because I cheated, of course. I found notes summarizing every chapter of the book online and I read those. Much faster way of learning. It's actually what I used to do in high school and college if I needed to read a big book.

Wanting not to cheat this time though, I tried learning a bit about speed reading. I know that I am too detail oriented and I fixate while reading. I have actually turned back a few pages to reread details of what a character was wearing at times. I need a good visual of what is going on for the story to work in my head. The speed reading methods I looked at all said not to concern yourself with comprehension at all. And I tried the methods and I comprehended nothing when I did.

I tried to pick and choose what parts I was going to read. Skimmed over parts, trying to pick out what is probably important. I read someone's review of the book, who said chapter 18, The soldier who saw everything twice, was an important chapter. So I read it. Skipped a whole lot of other chapters.

If I were on Jeopardy today, and the book came up as a category, I might be able to get some of those. Which was what I was interested in in the first place. Because I read a whole bunch of reviews and analysis of the book. But don't let my knowledge of anything ever fool you. Chances are I didn't come by it honestly. I'm about half full of crap.

However, the quest to find books that I like to read is still on.

Class of 1987

This year I have been out of high school for 30 years. I had the opportunity to meet with some of my classmates from the class of 1987 last weekend at a fellow classmate's house. It was Girard's reunion weekend and this was a casual get together. But another fellow classmate brought his band, so it was a great casual get together with great music! Why is it so fun to visit with people from your past?

There really is something to the feeling you have around the people that you've known the longest. In the case of a high school reunion, it doesn't matter after 30 years how well you knew each other back then, you have ONE thing in common that gives you mutual interest in seeing each other happy, healthy, and doing well: you started out in the same place together. We all launched our adult lives from the same place. It really is a family of sort.

I didn't get any pictures, myself, but someone took this one of a few of us when we were looking at our senior yearbook. There were 79 of us in the class of 1987. We have only lost a couple in the past 30 years, so that is a pretty good thing!

Troy and I started dating the same year I graduated. Again, 30 years ago. 

We were baby adults, that's how I look at it today. I feel like that gives our marriage an advantage in the "will it last?" department. Why? 

Well, have you ever said to someone "I am really surprised the two of you are such good friends, you don't seem to have anything in common." And they responded with "Yeah, well, we were raised together, so....."

That's it. That's often all it takes to form a really strong bond. 

Sometimes Troy will start to tell me a story about when he was young, which I have already heard, of course. And I will remind him that we have lived MOST of our 50 year and 48 year lives together and I have had 30 years to hear the stories about the first 20 years.

When you've known somebody for that long, grown up with them in a sense, they get a free pass on a lot of aggravation you don't put up with from your more recently formed relationships. It's just the way it is. There is an investment there that you don't walk away from.

The older you get, the more important relationships become. If you get a chance to visit with someone who knew you back when, don't pass it up. Never let the notion that you won't have much in common set in. You already have enough in common to give you a warm, fuzzy feeling when you get to talking, guaranteed!

I'm not an angry person

I do get angry, everyone does.

But I know people....perhaps even live with some.....who run with that anger when they feel it. They explode, throw fits, yell. My personality doesn't deal with anger that way. I don't really want anything to do with anger. My response to it, when I feel it, is to find a positive way to channel it. And I usually do a pretty good job. I realize that I am in control of how I react to things that happen, even when those things are out of my control. I think about what I can do differently to prevent things from happening in a particular way that causes me anger.

I find silver linings in grey clouds.

So you think I'm bragging about myself, but I'm not. Because I realized something about myself today that isn't very pretty. I do let my mind go to dark places. I have very negative thoughts while I am push mowing.

It takes me about 45 minutes to push mow my lawn, but I have to do it with a PUSH MOWER and I hate it. I see people smiling and waving on riding mowers and my mind sarcastically says "Good for you!"

I feel guilty about resenting this activity because it's an outside activity, it's good for me, my legs still work, my heart pumps just fine. And I'm off from work every week day in the summer to do it! I should be grateful that I am physically able to do it and have plenty of time for it.

But I just can't help myself from feeling sorry for myself. As I'm pushing the mower with one hand, and pushing back a tree branch with the other so I can get underneath it... and then have to let go so that I can brush away the worm or caterpillar or whatever it was that fell out of the tree and landed behind my ear.... which is dripping with sweat, I let myself rant silently about everything I'm not enjoying about my life right now. And as I'm pushing that mower down into the steep ditch and pulling it back up about 20 times along the west edge of our property, trying to keep my balance and wiping my brow with my shirt sleeve after every heave up the hill, I go over all the conversations I've had with people in the past week that I felt could have gone better. What I should have said to someone, why I feel like I wasn't treated fairly in some situation, why haven't I heard from some person in a while? Why do I have so many problems? All the negativity just comes out. 

I realized today that it's all angry feelings throughout the whole time I'm mowing. And then when I'm finished, I'm proud of myself. And I take a shower and I feel like I've accomplished something. 

Maybe it's kind of like therapy.

Maybe it is a good thing.

And also, I realized this today, because I think I may be guilty of taking positive people for granted in my life.  Maybe when you think about someone you haven't talked to in a while but you think everything is good with them because they are pretty good natured.....it's possible that they are out angrily mowing their lawn and wondering if you still care about them. It's something to think about!

Where does fried chicken come from?

If anything about this post sounds like it was written by a person who didn't grow up around chickens, it's because it was. At least my mom knew how to cut up a whole chicken that she bought at the store, I did not even know how to do that most of my adult life.

My kitchen and farm skills have improved over recent years, though. I have come to appreciate very much growing or raising your own food, and these days I participate in raising chickens of our own and butchering them when it's time. It is time again for the butchering, and my mother-in-law, Helen, and I started yesterday.

This is how the yearly process goes: Troy, his mom, and his brother James pick out chickens that they want to order from a catalog in the spring and the baby chicks are delivered in a box to a local post office for us to pick up. We keep them in a stock tank up at Troy's shop with lights on them to keep them warm. We feed and water them there for a while, until they are big enough to keep in a pen at the farm, it only takes a couple weeks.

The kind of chicken that we raise to butcher are called Cornish Crosses and they grow big quickly. These we ordered in April, and it is June now, so they were ready in two months' time.

They eat and drink a lot, they are just little growth machines. And they are cute, Alina takes pictures of them and wants to name them when we go to feed them and refresh their water. But once they stop looking like fluffy little chicks and they are taken to the farm with all the other chickens, names are forgotten and feeding and watering them is just an evening chore.

Now, I don't think anything that I am posting is gross, though I know there are varying levels of squeamishness in people. I have heard people say that simply handling raw meat from the package from the grocery store makes them a little queazy, and if that is the case, then this process is too much for you. I have also heard people say that they prefer to have no knowledge of how the meat gets to their plate, which I just don't relate to.

I want to be actively involved in how the meat I eat is raised. Is that weird?

I will name this one "Fluffy"

Helen says that her mom would go out and butcher and process 15 chickens in a day, all by herself. She remembers having a friend over one time and her mom asking them what they would like for lunch. When they answered "Fried Chicken", she went out, killed a chicken, cleaned it, and fried it up for them.

Helen and I decided six chickens is enough in a morning, so we did six yesterday morning and six more this morning. We will need to get together three more mornings to finish up. Troy is usually involved in this process, and he is extremely efficient in catching the chickens, killing them, and cutting them up. But he is working during the day, and right now in some stage of the haying process, along with other farm duties. Helen has been butchering chickens for years. She tells me she taught herself. As efficient and skilled as her mom was with the task, she never taught Helen how to do it.

The picture above is of Helen fetching chickens from the pen. She caught three of them to kill. She just grabs them by the feet, she's very quick for a woman her age.  I didn't take pictures of her killing them, in fact I don't even watch that part. But she and Troy do it the old fashioned way. They use a long metal bar, lay the chicken down on the ground, face down, place the bar down over the back of the chicken's neck, hold the bar down and pull the chicken's body up. It takes a second. Yes, the bodies flop around, it's part of it.

We have a pot of scalding water ready to dip the chickens in to help make the feathers easy to pick. They are actually very easy to pick, the feathers pull right out. It doesn't take long to have them ready to clean and cut up. Helen likes to do the rest inside at the kitchen sink to avoid having to deal with flies outside. Troy and I usually do the whole thing outside with big pots of water for cleaning.

54 piece bucket of chicken!

This is what they look like after we pick the feathers and cut off the feet. The dogs get the feet, we don't make chicken feet stew with them.

Me eating chicken feet stew in Peru.

Then we clean them off a little better in the process of cutting them up. Here is one ready to be gutted and cut into pieces. I got to practice today with the first part, as Helen does it, cutting off the wings, and the legs and thighs. Then there is the process of cutting the body cavity open at the ribs to gut the chicken, which I will need to practice in these next three mornings that we meet. Everything (gut wise) is intact in there, really, it's just a lot of pulling and tearing to get it all out. We save the heart, the livers and gizzards. Though I personally think the gizzards are pretty gross to deal with and also, the texture is like rubber to eat. If I had it my way it would just go in the bucket with the guts. The neck too. But Helen likes to keep it for stewing.

We cut the breast in two pieces, the top part Helen calls the "Pully Bone" the rest of us call it the "Wish Bone". (but of course you have to pull it to make the wish) And the back is cut as well. 

Then I put each chicken at a time in a ziplock freezer baggie and they go in the freezer, except for the one I take home immediately and marinate in sour milk to fry.

I never used to be confident enough to fry chicken at home. But last summer I decided to teach myself how to fry the perfect fried chicken and I did with the help of the internet. This is the link to the recipe. I follow it to the letter. I hope you try it and enjoy!

http://allrecipes.com/recipe/8805/crispy-fried-chicken/?internalSource=hub%20recipe&referringContentType=search%20results&clickId=cardslot%204

Hello!!! Hey, I have 71 published posts on this blog, so it's worth keeping around. I sure did have a hard time getting to it tonight. I couldn't remember the process. Kalyn has started a blog to document her stay in Spain this summer and it inspired me to revisit mine.

Actually, I have some hard goals this summer. Not hard as in difficult to accomplish, but solid goals that I really want to meet. Blogging and journaling more, like daily, is one of them. I want to become good at writing. And you know, the least that can come of it is me becoming sort of a rock star to future generations of my family. I'll be their favorite ancestor, because I was all over the place, blogging and facebooking and also paper journaling and scrapbooking! Not digital scrapbooking, actual paper and photographs bound in albums. Those will be very cool if they make it to future generations. My actual handwriting is everywhere. That kind of thing is important to me. Future generations will know a lot about my life, if they choose to go back to it.

Reading more is another goal. Smart people read. My mother and my daughter, Kalyn, are readers. They are very smart people, and they are in the habit of going to the library. I am not. I don't read for pleasure, unless it's articles on the internet that interest me. I browse recipes all the time. Well, this week I went to the library.

One day Troy and I were riding in the truck together and he asked me where I thought the expression "Catch 22" came from. I looked it up, because I had no idea. Google took me to Wikipedia, which said it was a book by Joseph Heller and it's often cited as one of the most significant novels of the twentieth century. And I didn't know about it or recall ever hearing about it. I have never thought that I would be a good contestant on Jeopardy, but this information pretty much confirmed for me that I would not be. I want to be a smart person, I admire smart people. Maybe I can start by reading some of the classics. That was just the first one to pop up, so it's the book I checked out. I tried to read some today while waiting in the hay field for Troy.

 Which brings me another goal, making myself more useful and helpful for Troy with the farm stuff. He has so much to do, so much on his plate, he is overwhelmed and I have more time in the summer. I just need to jump in and do it. I will begin by going out to the farm in the morning and help Helen butcher chickens. That will be a blog post.

The last big goal is getting rid of stuff. Kalyn is wanting to move out of our house when she returns from Spain, so I can send some things out with her. I went through cabinets in the kitchen tonight and took out things that I don't use often. I put a pile of stuff on the patio outside to deal with tomorrow sometime....storage? Give away? I don't know yet. But out of my kitchen.

Notice I have left off "getting in shape" or "exercising more" because yada, yada, yada, blah, blah, blah.

I'll be updating.