The Womerlippis are back at work. Any second now, Aimee's alarm will go off, summoning her for another day. I've been awake for hours.
The college term has been going for a week and a half, and as always, farm activities take a back seat. It was a slow start to college, what with the weather and the MLK holiday. But it's picking up pace, and will keep on going until the day after graduation, when all the stress and labor will come shuddering to a halt, and we'll wonder what we were doing all those months. Like a bad war.
Being a college professor has its rewards. An annual schedule that permits farm activities is one. We could, and sometimes do, seek other employment during our long summer break. Most recently I became a college administrator for a couple of years. Aimee, whose research life is more scientifically formal than mine, has ongoing marine biology research, and so she tends to spend her summer littorally (bad scientist pun) turning over rocks on the coast of Maine. My reading and research is more regular. I tend to spend my weekday and weekend mornings reading news articles and policy documents, trying desperately to stay current in the world of sustainability and climate change mitigation. I do this whether I'm at work that day or not.
My approach, combined with my early-rising habits works well for farm work, since in winter and fall I can do my reading in the wee hours before the sun rises. If it's a teaching day, I then go to school and work for 7-8 hours, coming home in time to do chores in the daylight. If it's a home day, I go do farm projects for 6-7 hours. In summer, the sun has risen, so there's pressure to get out and get work done, but respect for our neighbor's sleep schedule usually restricts me to a 7am start, especially for jobs involving noisy power tools.
After my farm project work I often take a nap. For me, because I tend only to sleep for 6 hours a night, naps are essential top-up sleep. Aimee sleeps for 8-9 hours a night. She thinks naps are laziness.
Go figure.
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Welcome to our Farm Blog.
The purpose of this blog is for Aimee and I to communicate with friends and family, with those of our students, and other folks in general who are interested in homesteading and farming activities.
The earliest posts, at the very end of the blog, tell the story of the Great Farm, our purchase of a fragment of that farm, the renovation of the homestead and its populating with people and animals. Go all the way to the last post in the archive and read backwards from there to get it in chronological order.
After getting tired of spam comments (up to a dozen or more per day), I required commentators to be Google "registered users". You can write me at mwomersley@unity.edu if you have a serious comment or question and are not a registered user.
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