Down on the farm

Philothea, Ohio - June 15, 2007

(More pictures can be found here)

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7 days down on on the farm with the whole family. What's not to like? The boys love to go to Ohio since they have so many cousins to play with and besides, what little boy doesn't like to play farm? And see real live farm animals? And go on real tractor rides that are doing real farm work? Anyway, we also had had a wedding to attend. Julie's cousin Kurt was getting married and the reception was going to be outdoors at the Elks Club. That's the same place that Julie and I held our wedding reception almost 10 years ago. Has it been 10 years already? Man how time flies.

We were staying at Grandma (Jan) and Grandpa's (Don) house in Philothea, Ohio. This is their (relatively) new house that they built just about a mile down the road from their old house. More on that later. Did I mention that Don is a hog farmer (read: pigs). Ever been on a pig farm? No? Well, there's is a special smell created as a byproduct of raising pigs. It's hard to describe. It's harder to have to smell it. The easiest way to describe it is to say that it is VERY powerful and seems to be everywhere. It sticks to you. It follows you home. It hits you in the face like a load of bricks. The pigs don't do much. The eat. They sleep. They crap. They eat some more. they crap some more. There's lots of snorting and rooting. And crapping. The boys like to go down to the barn and feed the pigs table scraps. They'll eat just about anything (the pigs that is) and everything.

In addition to raising pigs, Don sometimes has steer. The steer are kept at a separate barn, actually, on a separate farm which is now run by Julie's youngest brother Doug. Doug and his wife Jacqui and their two kids Jack and Olivia now live in the house that Julie grew up in. It's down the road from where Don and Jan now live. The steer smell much nicer than the pigs. Is it just me, or do these guys look like Gateway computers?

The house that Julie grew up in is also just down the road from the church that Julie and I got married in. You can see the church's steeple from Doug and Jacqui's house.

For the cat lover, there are cats too. Lots of cats. They hang out mostly by the steer but that's probably because that's where the feed bin is (or the cat's don't like the smell of pig poo either) and where there's feed around there's mice around. Hence the cats. They're wild cats and they just seem to show up uninvited all on their own. They keep the mice away, or at least help control the population, so that's a good thing. The boys like to feed the cats, well - not Jason, he's afraid of all things with four legs right now. Even little kitty cats.

Don also has acres of field corn, soybeans and wheat. If you've never seen a corn field it's kinda cool. Watching the corn sway in the breeze reminds me a little of being out on the ocean. Except the ocean doesn't smell like pig shit. The corn grows pretty rapidly, on the 7 days that we were there I noticed that they grew several inches. Field corn is different from what we eat - that is sweet corn. Field corn is not for human consumption, rather it is used for feed for the livestock.

Don also keeps an electric golf cart that he uses to travel between the two farms sometimes. The kids love it (the parents, not so much) . Cory loves to drive the golf cart. It's always the first thing he asks about when we get there. He does pretty well, when he's paying attention. Yes -

an adult always rides with the kids.