Challenges

This week has been one where you roll with the punches, because that's all you can do.

Brief synopsis:

--Blown tractor tire.  DH ran over a buried 'stump' of a t-post out on the edge of the woods.  Evidently it wasn't buried enough.  Had to take off the tire and get it patched and tubed.  Anyone who thinks that sounds easy enough, it wasn't.

--Big storms pretty much all night Wednesday that took out our power (and only our power--guess lightning hit something on our power pole, which is the last one on the line.)

--Six inches of rain Wednesday night from the big storms.  Yep, you read that right SIX inches!!  Good thing I don't have any tomatoes nearing ripeness or they would all be burst from the sudden extreme overabundance of water.

--High heat and humidity, and no electricity to power fans or pump water from the well.   Trying to stay hydrated with room temp water that we had stored in the cellar for times such as this.  Oh, and keep the animals hydrated too.  (Thinking of drilling shallow well with hand pump out by the barn, very seriously contemplating this).

--Not being able to finish baking my farmers' market goods for Thursday's market since I had no electricity.  So I hauled to market what I had baked on Wednesday, and did a lot of apologizing for not having french bread, banana bread, zucchini bread, or the cookies (20 dozen cookies!) I normally have for my loyal customers.  Next week is Fair Week, so many of them will be over at the fairgrounds having their kids show 4-H projects next Thursday.  That means two low-sales markets in a row for me now.

--Getting woke up at 2:20 Friday morning to find not one, but two repair trucks from the electric company out in my driveway.  The dog was barking like mad, the trucks were attempting to backup a 400 foot driveway in the dark--I found the ruts where they missed once the sun came up Friday.  Backup signals shrieking like sirens in the night (*sigh*), and another storm with multitudinous lightning had rolled in.

--Those brave souls out working on the transformer on my electric pole in the midst of the storm got me hooked back to the power grid, and things in the house started running.   The sump pump going off every couple minutes (somehow, miraculously, despite 6" of rain the night before and no electricity to run the pump for over 24 hours, no water came up into the basement at all), the fridges running to cool themselves back down and the temperature alarm going off on the deep freeze were a barrage of noise.  Another hour of wakefulness due to the noise disturbing what had been an extremely silent night, if you discounted the thunder that shook the house.  Another wonder--when I cracked open the doors on the fridges and freezers once the power was back on and stuck my hand in to feel for squishy stuff and temperature, all were fine.  The ice cream was a bit soft, like a thick malt, but every package of meat I touched in the freezer still felt like a rock.  So, no losses there.  Not having opened them at all from bedtime Wednesday until the power came back on at 3:00 a.m. Friday (and wrapping the deep freeze in quilts) definitely helped keep the temps down.

--More rain, to the tune of 2-3 inches more, from the storm Thursday night.  We have standing water in the field.  The yard is like a saturated sponge, it squishes when you walk on it. We have standing water in the garden.  My tomato plants look like they are drowning.  Add more heat and humidity on Friday, and  my garden smells like a swamp.  The broiler chicks were supposed to come out of the brooder in the barn this weekend and into the portable pens outdoors for their final 3-6 weeks of life.  There's nowhere high and dry (that I want to put chickens) for them to go.  Guess they will have to stay in the barn a bit longer, at a higher cost of feed since they won't have access to bugs, grass, and clover like they would in the portable pens.

If this sounds less than uplifting, well, yeah.  I'm having one of those times where you question why you ever wanted to do things the way you do.  Rolling with the punches is exhausting.  Hope next week is more joy and less punch-dodging.