Conference Call Not Holding My Attention

At this exact moment, I am on a conference call that has just completed its third hour, one hour to go. As so often happens, the system doesn't work perfectly. We were struggling with audio, the sound was garbled, people were talking along and we were only hearing some little piece of what they were saying.  My computer is just in spinning, spinning mode trying to retrieve its audio connection so I am listening on the phone.

I am feeling so stuck indoors.  I missed the weekly ritual of meeting the market trucks as they came in -- for the last time of the year for Takoma Park.  This week is usually a much busier and more exciting one than recent weeks as we are coming up to Thanksgiving and we are leaving for the winter.  So I was sad to miss all the reports and the party atmosphere.  I did get to be there while both trucks were loading up this morning, and they were full of carrots, which is just plain exciting.

Yesterday the snow had mostly melted and we knew there were lots of carrots out there in the mud. It felt really compelling to go back out there and pull some more carrots so everyone could have as much as they could possibly want. I put on two pairs of gloves and too many layers and went out to Loudoun to start pulling.  Got about a half an hour ahead of Sam before she came out to start bunching. As the morning wore on, the ground got wetter and wetter as the snow melted. By noon I could barely lift my feet out of the mud. Halfway through the morning, I called Carrie to tell her we needed help, the mud was slowing us down.

We rolled home in the early afternoon, triumphant, with 20 more crates of carrots that were coated with pounds and pounds of mud.  Carrie and I bundled up in aprons and gloves and put our heads down and washed all those carrots in 90 minutes of concentrated effort.

Here are the photos of the two markets today, with dueling carrot displays:



I am having a hard time focusing on this call, clearly.

The other memory that keeps floating through my mind is of the little pig that died last week. It was really cold on Saturday night, the pig was ailing with a terrible sounding cough, and it was certainly in trouble.  On Sunday morning I went to look for it and found it lying in its little food trough, dead.  Out of the corner of my eye I had seen a fox slipping out of the pen, so I knew something was up. I didn't want to leave the little pig in the pen to be eaten, so I just picked up the pan with the pig in it and looked for a place to put it.  I balanced it on the top of the fence, just under the barn roof, hoping no varmints would come to eat it.

And there the pig stayed for five days, surprising people who came to feed the pigs. It was a cold week, sort of like refrigerator temperatures. The pig didn't change.  Finally Michael came in from Loudoun for a meeting and I asked him to do something about that poor dead pig.  He could bury it or he could take it down into the woods. He took it on a golf cart and left it way down in the woods, for anyone to eat.  Since it wasn't a Jewish pig, it didn't get a quick burial, and once it had already had a five day period of viewing, it didn't seem so bad to let it be eaten by appreciative forest dwellers.

The conversation on the phone is about negative cash flow and budgeting and the financial stresses of our regional nonprofit that exists to support sustainable agriculture in the South. It is so much more interesting to think about my own sustainable ag topics.