A new way to go

 We have decided that it is time to begin activating ourselves in the service of our nation. The current horror show we experience around us requires people of good conscience to act. We are aware of our age and the relatively little difference we can make, but every small act of resistence to evil is part of a bigger picture. 

Today I have closed my Facebook, Twitter (X), Instagram, and other social media accounts because those people running them want to destroy my country in their support of evil doing. I will close my Amazon Prime account too, even though I like it and use it all of the time. We cannot give one more dollar to a company which serves evil. We are not revolutionaries, we hope to save our nation as we have all along. But there needs to be a nation and right now the nations itself is placed on the block by men who have benefitted so much, yet given so little, and now are failing to protect it. Fuck them and anyone who supports them. We are through with staying out of it and there's too much at stake. 

This came to me in a stream of conscious today. I release any copyrights to anyone who wishes to use it.

Ice Out

My muse is so noisy
From God's Lips to my ear.
And now I stand fighting,
without any fear.

For my God is mighty.

I have God's protection.
What you have is simple,
Not a Godly connection.

For my country I fight,
for Red, White, Blue.
For my nation I stand,
and stand against you.

For my nation, my family.
Native born are we all.
Since 1832,
we heeded the call.

We were soldiers then,
as we are soldiers now.
We follow our God.
Never herded like cow.

You follow a madman.
You follow a fool.
You follow him blindly.
You're only his tool.

For he does not love you.
Though he may tell you so.
And when you aren't useful.
He will suddenly go.

For He is not loyal.
And He is not true.
And He's always false.
But expects more from you.

You stand on his bastions.
Carry weapons of hate.
We stand on the streets.
Our numbers more great.

You give him your body.
You give him your soul,
You give him your all,
That's His only goal.

So keep giving freely.
And He'll take it all.
For the shekels he offers
For the shekels you'll fall.

But he lives in safety.
And promises you that.
But he is a devil.
And you wear his hat.

A hat full of troubles.
You wear it all day.
For life you'll wear it.
You can't get away.

You will be known,
for the damage you do.
But you can leave now.
We give this to you.

He offered you shekels.
And now you're a cog.
If your pockets are empty.
Let him send out his dogs.

He gave you hotels
and restaurant bars.
He told you he'd do this.
He tricked you this far.

But when it all stops.
When he grinds to a halt.
Hotels becomes barracks.
And food without salt.

The sweet and the salty
will go from your diet.
But we have a plan
and you might as well try it.

The plan is so simple.

Go home or just join it.

We are fun people
But can be a riot.

And there you will stand,
with eleven and one.
And there we will stand,
without any gun.

And they will say shoot,
and shoot you just may.
Shoot brothers and sisters.
Shoot children they say.

What names we will call you
the word choices horrid.
And you might not like it.
It might make you torrid.

And you just might want this,
for a fight you are spoiling.
You do something stupid.
And we all will start boiling.

And when all that heat
Gets a just bit all too much.
And you are not sleeping.
And feel out of touch.

Think kindly of people.
The one's you disdain.
And wish to rekindle.
Our old friendship flame.

And we will accept you,
and your weak excuses.
Your claims you were fooled then.
You hope for forgiveness.

And we will accept you
but you followed orders.
We'll bring you to judges.
As His cannon fodders.

And if you can't see
what you read here is true.
Pull the trigger and find out
just who protects who.

For our God is mighty
and our God protecting,
our wives and our children.
while yours will be wailing.

For our fight is righteous.
God calling the tune.
Your god an orange man.
But more the fool you.

You follow him blindly.
Lend ear to his orders.
You pull the triggers.
You cause these disorders.

It's you causing riots.
You offered no peace.
And you stand there thinking.
That you are police.

But you are the person.
Whose doing the wrong.
And when you start singing.
We'll love your sad song.

And when your own family
does leave you behind.
You will cry at their doorstep
for your sin of pride.

It all comes from God
and pride's a great sin.
You are responsible
for the trouble you're in.

Your leaders are guilty
of crimes against us.
And they will sit sadly.
On our prison bus.

Or theymight just flee
to resorts full of plenty.
And leave you behind to
face the wraith of almighty.

And they you might follow,
and stand at their door.
They will smile at you.
But won't offer more.

They'll steal all your money
take your soul then forget it.
And leave you behind,
To face truth unprotected.

You'll know what you know
just as you do right now.
You're cattle to them.
To them only cow.

They will eat you or wear you
without any thought.
They will herd you to slaughter.
And sit on their butt.

They will laugh at the carnage.
They themselves have created.
And call out for more cowboys.
Their hunger not sated.

New cowboys may come.
Cows do what Cows do.
Because cows are just cows.
And now so are you.

These fences you build.
Will soon become walls.
The walls will contain you
if any of us falls.

They rope you and brand you
and put you in stalls
Our God sees our peace.
And break down your walls.

For our judges all know
from where power's derived.
And who is the righteous.
And who must be fried.

You do Satan's bidding
You shit smelling pup.
And we will stand peaceful.
Then cover you up.

And forget who you were.
You're not worth remembering.
And your name will be lost
Your family forgetting.

That they gave you a life.
And a good life no doubt.
They offered you all.
Then you sold us all out.

February 2, 2026 Moving forward again

 We have made some minor progress this year so far. Our plans to do some work in the kitchen has gone forward, but slower than we planned. A typical thing here, the farm has its own schedule and ignores ours.   Lots going on anyway.

Pixie had her pups two days ago, ten beautiful little Basset babies. But toward the end of her pregnancy she got so big that we had to spend quite a bit more time with her. We started taking shifts to cover her care 24/7 and got very little sleep for about a week. Her whelping was pretty quick without any troubles at all. Now we take shifts watching the pups and keeping them cleaned up and safe. Two pups already have a home and the rest usually go pretty quick. We'll have them until at least early April and we can begin sleeping regular schedules in about a week.

The arrival of puppies may allow us the money to finally put in the parking lot project. We gleaned fence fabric for the project years ago and hope to get the fence posts and gates in during April. This graveled and fenced area will finally allow us to get our cars off the street and provide a place for segregating dogs when we need to. Between puppies and dog boarding we spend quite a bit of time on the dog business. Having a parking area will help with having people come around more often as our customer base of visiting Hounds gets a bit bigger. 

This coming week we hope to find time to finish the tile backsplash and then go on to some minor cabinet fixes before painting everything. Some things had to wait after we built the house and finishing the kitchen will take until late Winter at least. But it will be a welcome change.

Our egg sales are brisk. The flock is laying around a dozen eggs a day and we sell almost half of them and we eat the rest. Just as before the eggs sold pay for all the eggs produced. I just wish the business would scale up and add to our income. But it doesn't. Costs rise as quickly as production and the time needed to do the job take time from other projects, so there isn't anything extra to be gained by having a  bigger flock. Small enough to manage, big enough to have really good eggs . . . We'll take it. 

The chickens and ducks are free ranging and their scratching has opened up holes at the bottom of the fence keeping dogs and birds in, so we have had a few escapes in the past month. We have a fix for the problem and fix the holes almost as quikly as they find them. Hounds are good at finding holes in the fence, but easy enough to catch.  Luckily for us there's not too much traffic on the road out front. 

Life goes on apace through a farily warm Winter. There's plenty of rain and plenty of work to do. It seems the world outside is not nearly so nice we want to go out into it much right now, but things will improve. We are hopeful for the future. Today however is something of a drag on the spirit.

January 6, 2026 Creekside in the New Year

Creekside Farm stopped trying to sell produce last Summer and stopped selling eggs a bit earlier in the year because investment increases didn't produce sales increases. But we are still planting in the Spring and spent quite a bit of time building a new greenhouse and garden space last year to get restarted in a smaller format. What we are planning is to use the growing plan we had, scaled down to the crops we can make the best use of ourselves. So, many of the same plants, in ones and twos will be planted instead of the fifties and hundreds we did a while ago.  We also rebuilt our flock this past Summer, twelve instead of forty, and so our free ranging girls are giving us about a Dozen eggs a day.

The new greenhouse is about ready for the planting months between March and May. Nothing really grows in our cold dirt until June so our plants will live confortable lives in the new Greenhouse until we can get them into the ground in late May. We will be tilling again this year. No-till gardening works well for making good soil fertility but our soil condition is a bit wild right now. Lots of grass out there.Our soils are every bit as good for composition as they were two years ago and we have perhaps sixty yards of compost for use to get things going. We'll till a bunch of our leaf mold and mature compost into our rows sometime on April and the soils will be very ready in late May.   This year we'll take more steps to put down weed blocking between rows to keep the weeding workload down a bit. We've plenty to do. 

My dream plan is to put in a wooden porch floor this Summer if time and money permit it. We had always envisioned a concrete floor under our wrap around porch roof but the little bit of concrete work we did wasn't really good enough to want a lot more of it. Paying for concrete workers was always out of reach and dry mix concrete is much more expensive now, so we're looking at a wooden porch floor. Wood is quicker and far easier to work with. Until Summer comes we are keeping busy on Winter house projects and it looks like we'll be working in the kitchen this month. This afternoon we found the tile for putting in a backspash over all the counter spaces. We might get to painting in the Kitchen this month, but things here seem to follow their own schedule, and always have. There's always more to do and too little time or money to do them. We only have a few weeks to get things done.

From February through April we will be very busy with a litter of puppies. Pricilla Pixie Stix is having her first litter and is doing very well. We spend a lot of time with our girls, trying to make them comfortable and their pregnancy as easy as we can, but it is still quite a big thing for a dog with such short legs. Lucy had three pups in her first litter and it was fairly easy on her, but most of the time a litter is around eight pups and can go higher. It's a lot of work for everyone and there's only so much you can do to make things easier.

I have always used New Year's Resolutions. Last year I resolved to lose thirty of the pounds I had packed on being depressed. I achieved the goal in August and then went back to eating normally for a few months. This year the goal is another thirty pounds. Weight loss isn't a difficult formula, it's simply not eating when you aren't hungry and eating less when you are. Lots of rice cakes, fewer cookies, hungry all the time, that's the plan. 

Life goes on at Creekside Farm. If anyone needs a garden space to grow food this year, or eggs, give us a call and we'll get you growing.  

October 14th, 2025 Ten Years Later . . .

 It was ten years ago, September 30th of 2015, when we went to the County Tax Office with Collette Kramer to pay off the property tax lein and then contracted the purchase of what would become Creekside Farm. So much has happened and time is still flying. Ten years where we noticed each day and counted this place among our many blessings. Ten years of toil, love, and more blood than we expected. 

Up until last year I had kept a fairly complete journal of the history of Creekside Farm on this BLOG. I told the story as it happened and all those words remain here, published for the world to see. The story documented our bringing the land back from the lifeless and trash strewn landscaping nightmare, through the two years of hard work it took just to remove the trash. This BLOG journaled our home building effort as we first came to live in a tiny home and then built a place to call home. And since we were building a farm I told the story, as best I could, of our learning about plants and organic agriculture.

We have good soils today even if we are no longer trying to run a profitable farm which sells produce. All of this changed in mid-Summer of 2024 when I slipped out of my regular manic depressive cycles, which were more fun that anything worrisome, into a proper depression. I have mostly come through it and returned to smiling once more. But there is still much work to do.

 I was always a manic depressive sort, it was a large part of my creativity and endless optimism. But the above is enough said on the issue so I am going to leave this open discussion of my state of mind here. To be concise: the depression continues, as does our lives. I find my creative work in writing and art and the game Fallout 4 are the places I go to stave off dark thoughts when they come. Returning to a more communicative public persona is not in the immediate future. This is not to say things are at a dead stop here. I will talk on the positives when I find them. And there are a few to talk about today.

We are putting the finishing touches on a new greenhouse workspace so that we can sprout plants for our kitchen garden and work indoors on some other projects. The new building is twenty by eight feet with framed walls and an up-cycled roof. We used eighteen recycled storm windows for windows and the south facing wall is essntially glass from the floor to its ten foot ceiling. We get Winter sun at a fifty-three degree angle  so the greenhouse will be in full sun the whole year around. In Summer the high heat of mid-day will be well shaded by an eight inch thick foam and aluminum roof  we repurposed from Craig's List. The east and west ends also have large windows and a door which has been a part of all of our other greenhouses. The trailer we built the greenhouse on was damaged while building the house and no longer road worthy, so it has a new life as a foundation rather than being scrapped. The siding is also recycled so there will be no more film greenhouses to fix and no more all night snow vigils. We electrified the new greenhouse for lights and heat, then built a new chicken run right up close to it. There are fifteen new chickens and four new ducks living in there now.

There's been two litters of puppies since the Summer of 2024 so our income plans are still in place. We added one new female to our pack of hounds to extend the breeding project a few years. Today we have eight Bassets, four of which are still in our breeding program. This weekend the last puppy of the most recent litter goes to her new home.

While there is not an excess of cash in our living budget we bought a newer BMW. The newer car is an X1 with the big motor and all the buttons and bells. Higher off the ground is better since our bodies have begun to age a bit and gravity is not our freind anymore. Our older BMW was the low slung rocket coupe we bought to drive down to Las Vegas and meet Elvis at the alter. This Vegas trip was the beginning of our Creekside Farm Project. Both the car and the goals we made are over. New goals are needed. We already have the car.

Work on a new book progressed as far as 185 pages (an anime inspired saga based on the Fallout game). But I lost the muse so the half book has done in the half a book filed for the time being. Another book I started twenty-five years ago is front of mind right now. A compendium of stories I have wriitten through the years with new transitions. Writing gives me joy when the word come easily. 

Life continues. 

December 23rd, 2024 Our Christmas Letter

 

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