Homestead Hill Farm: Sunday Walkabout 10-7

It’s October---

although you would never know it by the temperature! It has been well into the eighties all week. That’s certainly not normal.

By October, we’re generally gearing up (or down) for the first killing frost of the season and preparing for much cooler weather. That certainly is not the scenario this year.

Everything seems a little off this year. And, I do mean EVERYthing.

But, I’m tired of talking/writing about how strange and uncertain things are. About how it seems like we’re in a holding pattern, or how I am just not “feelin’ the love” for a number of things anymore. That only sounds whiny and sad while doing nothing to solve the situation.

So…

If there is any sort of upside to the weird weather that precludes outdoor work, the ongoing injury-recovery that hampers endurance and the socio-political news that has me wanting to hide under the covers, it is this: I’ve done a whole lot of reading lately and found some super-inspiring things in some rather unlikely places.

Since I’m pretty sure someone out there somewhere finds themselves in a similar situation, read on. Maybe you’ll find inspiration, too.

We didn’t do any amazing things here on the hill this week. We’re in that annoying, uncomfortable stuck-in-the-middle and try to find the strength to endure place that I wrote about last week. But, the Boss cleaned out hoophouse #1 in anticipation of next season. The green garlic arrived and will be planted the first of the week. He began work to dismantle one of the greenhouses that is no longer in use. Progress, be it ever so slight, is being made.

For my part, I found the chance to get to some cleaning/organizing that has been on the back-burner far too long. Two freezers got cleaned out. Not only was it nice to finally get that job off the list, the hens truly enjoyed a smorgasbord of all sorts of slightly freezer-burned “goodies”. Not to mention Karma enjoyed eating (and laying in) all the chunks of ice.

Ice on a hot day
makes for a happy dog!

The big news from the garden was that there was actually BROCCOLI to harvest. I had about given up on this. There isn’t as much as there should have been, could have been…but, at least there is something. There was far more (of everything) than expected for Market.

And, that’s a good thing.

BROCCOLI
finally!

Good thing… that’s a nice segue.

In my escapist reading, I’ve plowed through a pile of books of all sorts of genres. Memoirs, classics, how-to, self-help, and yes, chick-lit. And, amazingly, that is where I have found perhaps the deepest bits of inspiration.

Happiness for Beginners by Katherine Center was suggested to me by the author after I told her how much I liked, no loved, one of her other books. When an author actually takes the time to respond to a fan, the fan definitely takes the advice.

I won’t give away the storyline, but the protagonist goes on one of those wilderness survival courses to “find herself”. Along the way, she finds a whole lot more. While on this trip, someone suggests that she find 3 Good Things each day. This is drawn from the book Happy at Last: The Thinking Person’s Guide to finding Joy by Richard O’Connor. Ms. Center (the author) utilizes this framework for her own newsletter and you can sense this in her other writings.

That can be a revolutionary way of looking at things, changing our thinking and our outlook for the future. Personally, I tend to get caught up in the negative stuff and the problems that look insurmountable. Mindfulness and gratitude would go a long way to changing a lot of things in this world.

Now, I will grant you that trying to see good things can be difficult. But, it can be done. For example, I realized when I found myself saying “hey, it is a GOOD THING that I found the cat puke on the carpet” that my perspective might be changing. While I wasn’t really happy to find the mess, I was glad I found it before the Boss did. Especially since it was entirely possible he could have stepped on it…in the dark. Ugh! I might still be hearing about that one. So, good thing. Definitely.

And, yes, while I am fairly certain that's not exactly what she meant, sometimes I have had to dig that deep for something good.

Here, in no particular order are a few more good things (far more than three!) :