Preparing For Cold, Ove
Last Saturday was our biggest meat delivery day of the month with herd share drops to both Abingdon and Marion. Thanks again to all who made an extra trip out in the cold to do your local grocery shopping. I miscalculated our transit van’s hauling capacity. We filled coolers on Friday, but when I went to load Amy’s coolers in the transit Saturday morning for Abingdon, they wouldn’t all fit. So I went ahead and loaded the remaining coolers onto the truck along with coolers for my Marion delivery, then followed Amy down to Abingdon. Hallie and Hasten stayed in Abingdon to help with herd share pick up at the market while Carter and Wren rode up to Marion with me. After making our delivery, it was back to Abingdon to help with the latter half of the market and get everything loaded back up to go home. To feed cows, pigs, and chickens.
Amy and the girls took off for Knoxville on Monday for another meat delivery while Hasten and I stayed back in the valley for farming and Hasten’s wrestling match that evening. Nothing too exciting the rest of the week. Airbnb cabin rentals have slowed this winter, probably more so than past winters. Amy and I replaced a microwave in one of the cabin’s that had been giving us trouble. The hot tub at the other cabin has also been giving us trouble, but that repair is beyond my pay grade. Hopefully the hot tub service crew can get it straightened out soon.
This coming Monday was supposed to be our last meat delivery of the month, but with the wintry weekend forecast, we decided to move it up and ended up making the delivery to Chilhowie and Abingdon yesterday afternoon, requiring a lot more emailing on Amy’s end.
Not sure what to expect this weekend. Not nearly as much snow predicted as in the original forecast, but it looks like a good bit of ice. Which to me is worse than the snow. The frigid temperatures in the following days have me a little nervous as well. A lot of potential problems to try to be prepared for. Power outage and water freezing are among our highest ranked concerns. Prayers for all in the days ahead.
Lots of hay feeding means lots of time to listen to audiobooks while on the tractor. A MAN CALLED OVE by Fredrik Backman has been one of the more enjoyable books I’ve listened to in a while. Though it carries a heavy theme concerning the changing times and the will to go on living, Backman delivers the novel with consistent doses of dry humor which caused me to chuckle out loud a few times so far.
“It’s all loans nowadays; everyone knows the way people carry on. Ove has paid his mortgage, done his duty, gone to work, never taken a day of sick leave, shouldered his share of the burden, taken a bit of responsibility. No one does that anymore. No one takes responsibility. Now it’s just computers and consultants and council big wigs going to strip clubs and selling apartment leases under the table, tax havens and share portfolios. No one wants to work. A country full of people who just want to have lunch all day.”
“Reverse radar and parking sensors and cameras and crap like that. A man who needs all that to back up with a trailer shouldn’t be bloody doing it in the first place… A lot of 31 year old show offs working with computers and refusing to drink normal coffee, an entire society where no one knows how to back up with a trailer.”
“People also called him anti-social. Ove assumed this meant he wasn’t overly keen on people, and in this instance he could totally agree with them. More often than not, people were out of their minds. Ove wasn’t one to engage in small talk. He had come to realize that, these days at least, this was a serious character flaw. Now, one had to be able to blabber on about anything with any old sod who happened to stray within an arms length of you, purely because it was ‘nice’. Ove didn’t know how to do it. Perhaps it was the way he had been raised. Maybe men of his generation had never been sufficiently prepared for a world where everyone spoke about doing things even though it no longer seemed worth doing them.”
“‘Men are what they are because of what they do, not what they say,’ said Ove.”
Have a good week.
Will