Wisdom Nugget Toolbox – TSL Homestead

Homestead Burnout, didn’t even know there was such a thing. Turns out it’s real. Being an Urban Homesteader (along with my amazing Miss Mercy) we just call Homesteading Burnout regular Life. Sometimes Life just gets you down, things don’t go your way, at times it seems overwhelming. You can put whatever name you like on it, but sometimes little things turn into big things and lots of little things that are aggravating pile up into giant aggravations that seem insurmountable.

If you’ve been following along at all it’s been a wild year for a lot of reasons. Homestead-wise it’s been mostly weather. It’s been one of the wettest years on record, rain in buckets and barrels in short spans of time. Sudden heat waves, then rain again in more sudden quantities over short periods of times. Vine borers in biblical proportions devouring every zucchini plant root and stock as fast as they tried to grow. Oddly, cucumbers in amazing quantities. Shishito Peppers from one plant we bought at a Master Gardener sale producing pepper after pepper. The Tiny Homestead doesn’t even really eat peppers but we wanted to try them because apparently it’s like playing Russian Pepper Roulette, one in every ten or so are flaming hot, the rest are supposedly awesome cooked in oil. We’ll probably find out soon. Tomatoes in our garden haven’t produced because it was so hot at night the fruit couldn’t set, Tomatoes – the Divas of the Garden, right? The Garlic that was planted last fall turned out magnificently. Ups and Downs, can’t predict and not worth trying to.

Anyway, Life isn’t just about the Garden. If it was, that would probably be really awesome, but Life just keeps on pressing in on you sometimes. The Mad Farmer works in a Big Blue Castle as his day job. The Farmer has been working at the Castle for far longer than he ever thought he would be anywhere. Nowadays many people come and go from jobs in months. It’s not unusual to see resumes in our current environment where people are at their previous employers for less than a year, multiple times. The Mad Farmer has been employed for more than twenty-five years at the same place. The Blue Castle has been good to the Farmer in many ways. Provided gainful employment, enabled a standard of living, allowed the Farmer to raise beautiful daughters and eventually marry the Miss Mercy of his dreams. In some ways it’s not the job everyone dreams of. The Farmer fixes problems, something he’s been fairly successful at for a very long time. But the thing about problems is that they never stop. The Farmer’s motto this year is “If it was Easy, Everyone Would do it” (one for the Wisdom Nugget Toolbox – that post is coming soon, I promise). So it’s not always Easy, not every problem has a solution and sometimes, just sometimes, the solution is a choice between Not Great Choice A and Not Great Choice B.

This year has been a lot of things, one after another, that just seem to be coming home to roost. Car repairs, AC issues, water in the basement because the drain spouts had come loose and the Farmer didn’t notice until torrential downfalls pointed it out it the worst way possible – swampy, flooded overflowing cat boxes. You want to have a fair-to-middling-not-so-great-day? Clean up soggy cat litter that’s been sitting underwater for a while. Last year three loads of wood chips, this year, every load requested has been diverted for various reasons and the rain has washed out a lot of the work done last year. The pond we’ve been digging on for more than a year is still muddy and unfinished. The constant rain has washed out new planting, grown an amazing amount of weeds and is still coming. Sinuses are stuffy, the highest pollen counts daily seem to be the new norm and as the Farmer is now pushing closer to sixty then fifty (really middle-aged in our family) things seem to be a lot harder in a lot of ways then they were just a few years ago. Life just seems to go on, and on and on. Then Miss Mercy, in her infinite and amazing wisdom, pointed out that we still are experiencing Blessings on a daily basis.

The Mad Farmer’s oldest daughter got married this year to a wonderful young man. They are very happy by any standard the Farmer cares to apply and are looking to close on their first house. Miss Mercy is still a blessing every day, the Farmer couldn’t be happier to have this amazing woman sharing his life. The Big Blue Castle has been a challenge, but not one the Farmer isn’t up to, and, “If it was Easy, Everyone Would do It”. Health challenges have been a bit of a struggle but the Farmer’s family has been facing worse and those have been working out okay. The Farmer has friends and family who have experienced tragic loss but also wonderful, joyful moments – births, remissions, unexpected blessing from many sides. There is a roof over the Farmer’s head, most of the things that appear to be set-backs are more annoyances than tragedies and overall, things are actually pretty darn good. Dave Ramsey’s signature phrase is “Better Than I Deserve”. The Mad Farmer has been a Dave fan for years, been out of debt except for the mortgage for more than a decade and truly believes that all things do come from God and he (or she, not a time to quibble about gender) does not give you more than you can handle, even if you might not get that at the time.

Life is more about attitude than anything else. The Farmer has known people who have gone through tremendous challenges, way worse than anything he is likely to face, and they still have a positive attitude and a sunny disposition. The Farmer also knows people who have gone through what could be perceived as minor issues and have come away from that with an Eeyore victim mentality. The Mad Farmer knows that he is not wise enough to judge. For some people, with a smaller “toolbox” and that haven’t had positive role models in their life, or been taught coping mechanisms, even minor setbacks can seem overwhelming. The Farmer has also been taught that often you can’t control what happens, but you can control how you react to it. The Farmer chooses to follow the positive and be awed by the Blessings that occur daily in his life. The Mad Farmer hopes that you can also. Be Strong, be Thankful, be Kind and be Blessed.

You may be familiar with the phrase “Perfection is the Enemy of Good Enough”. The Mad Farmer’s father, the Mad Welder, was often heard to say “If you don’t have time to do it right, you will be finding time to do it over” (the first thing I ever added to the Wisdom Nugget Toolbox). In all fairness the Mad Farmer’s dad aka the Mad Welder was also often heard saying things like “not there, move that light to your other right”, “where is my hammer?” and “what the “H-E double hockey sticks (you know the real word) do you think you are doing” and the ever popular, “hold down the brake pedal” (while he was working on the carburetor). So, some of the real pearls did often fall between the cracks while innocents cowered and offenders were taught the life lessons that form the foundation of character.

Anyway, the Mad Farmer has discovered a phrase that will not be joining the Wisdom Nugget Toolbox is “I’ll Fix That Later”. “I’ll Fix That Later” is the enemy of Good Enough, Near Enough, Probably Good Enough and all of their cousins and extended kin, without even bothering to mention Perfection. Last fall at the Tiny Homestead we had a couple of really sad trees that were growing in our easement (what the Australian’s call “the Parking Strip”). In Kansas, at least in Topeka, the Department of Making You Sad gets upset if you remove trees from the easement. It’s technically land that the homeowner owns, is responsible for maintaining and pays taxes on but the city has the right to do anything they like there and the homeowner is not allowed to make major changes without city approval. Pretty sure it’s things like this that are driving the Mad Farmer straight into Voluntaryism (but clearly that’s a post for another day).

Elm, Little Balls of Death Tree and Dying Maple

The trees were a Sweet Gum, also know as “The Terrible Monster Tree that Distributes Small Spiky Balls of Death that Can Kill, Wound or Seriously Annoy When Expelled at High Speed From the Whirling Blades of The Mower”, and a diseased Maple that had been struggling since we purchased the property and was never going to get better. It was suggested by someone that the Farmer call the City Department of Making You Sad about Trees and see if the trees could be removed. In possibly the most surreal sequence of events in the Farmers life, while he was on the phone with the City Department in charge of Tree Sadness requesting that someone come out and look at the trees that were impeding homestead progress Miss Mercy relayed that a city vehicle had just pulled up in front of the homestead and a city worker exited said vehicle with a clipboard and started looking at the aforementioned trees. After thanking the Tree Department of Sadness for the prompt response the Mad Farmer and Miss Mercy went out to talk to the city employee.

The city employee told us he happened to be in the neighborhood when the call came over the radio so he stopped by. Still super surreal. Even more surreal was that the employee agreed with the assessment of the diseased Maple and the imminent danger posed by the Death Ball Tree and told us the Department of Sad Trees would be out to make these Trees Super Sad by removing them. And, in less than a couple of weeks, a large City Truck and several support vehicles arrived on site, workers swarmed and the trees came down and disappeared. So what does this all have to do with Perfection, Good Enough or I’ll Fix That Later? Well, once the Parking Strip trees came down the only obstruction to garden sun and happiness at the homestead was a sickly elm that was also facing the street but was on homestead property, not the Parking Strip, so the Mad Farmer was allowed to remove it if he wished, and he did wish.

So a sunny afternoon, a chainsaw, some well-placed cuts and one not as well placed and the elm tree was no longer an obstruction and instead was in many log-shaped pieces and lots of branches and limbs. Because the Department of Making You Sad does apparently care about things like piles of log-like items in the front of the homestead (and because random strangers kept coming up and asking the Farmer “Do you want those?”), the Farmer tossed everything over the homestead fence. Intending to “Fix That Later”. This is where the Farmer learned that “Fix That Later” is the Enemy of Everything. The Farmer didn’t fix it later. The rains came, the Winter came, the snows fell and everything stayed in piles, against the backside of the fence. Then Spring came, the wettest that Farmer remembers (not that his memory is that great), but also the wettest many other people could remember. The unfinished pond filled up, the rains continued, then, for the first time in years – an actual Spring.

Growing things covered over the piles of limbs, brush and logs that had been thrown over the fence. Birds bringing in strange seeds that grew into vines, stickleburrs, thorny random weeds and cover crops gone berserk. And then the sunshine came out intermittently, the plant life flourished and got higher, denser and more out-of-control. Briefly it looked planned and “meadowy”. Then it looked like something your neighbors would complain about to the Department of Making You Sad, but because it was hidden from prying eyes, no complaints. The only other person who could see the forest primeval attempting to take over the honestead was Miss Mercy. The good news is Miss Mercy is super cool and only mentioned things were getting out-of-control occasionally. The bad news is, it was a mess. So Miss Mercy took a road trip to catch up with her life-long best friend (maybe she will guest blog about that trip someday) and the Mad Farmer did his level best to get the out-of-control meadow under control. The Farmer made some progress, but not nearly enough. Thus was hammered home the lesson that “Fix It Later” doesn’t happen, and, when it doesn’t it makes a mess.

The moral of this story is that people are human and human systems aren’t consistent (Paul Wheaton has a spot-on theory about this). People say that Perfection is the Enemy of Good-Enough because if you overthink or wait for the perfect moment or sequence of events then things never even get started. If you start something and it’s “Good Enough” it means it’s working at least a bit, that means you have the opportunity to tweak it, tune it and correct it – all things that can’t happen if you never started. Those are all good things. If you do things in a hurry, because you think you are going to get “right back to it and tidy it up correctly” it will probably really move you backwards. Not doing things correctly in the first place is going to cost you more time than if you had done it right the first time. Sometimes you might not have a choice, but if you do, take the time to do it right if you can – you’ll be happy you did.

Category: Wisdom Nugget Toolbox

Homestead Burnout

The Enemy of Good Enough