I've been enjoying my spring break holiday, although I miss Aimee, and want her back safely, especially as we heard of a student's mountaineering accident on a different spring break trip with a different organization. The student is in hospital, but her instructor was killed. Knowing something about mountaineering accidents, it now worries me even more that my wife is backpacking in the Nicaraguan jungle, but at least there's no rockfall and avalanche in the jungle.
But I get pretty tried of 10 and 12 hour days during term time, so the break has been great, despite the lack of wifey. Mostly it's the dearth of exercise when you work in an office or classroom. I've been known to get up to some fairly strenuous high jinks to get the student's attention, like illustrating the 1st and 2nd Laws of Thermodynamics by climbing on the table and jumping off! (When the fat professor jumps of the table and lands on the floor, where does the energy go to then?)
But table jumping aside, even the grottiest day around the farm, with lots of stomping around in muddy boots in the rain or snow to get chores done, is better than the best day at work. And the several large hikes I've had have made me feel better than I have felt in years, physically speaking. I wish I could keep up the routine.
The downside of all this is that of several big jobs that needed to be done before Monday, two remain undone, one not even started yet.
I remain defiant. Screw them! I work too bloody hard. And I have dogs to walk and lambs to watch!
Still, yesterday I worked all day, and no hike, and today I have to travel to scope out more anemometry sites for possible community-owned wind turbines. That leaves four days to hike before the end of spring break and the onslaught: Thursday, Friday (Aimee comes back late that night), Saturday and Sunday.
In case you're feeling sorry for me, don't. Remember, we don't teach all summer, although I do community service and research work, especially wind assessment, and Aimee does her crab research.
And in the fall, I get to spend two afternoons a week getting paid to hike, and several other long sessions getting paid to be in the outdoors teaching barn-building and carpentry. Not to mention the wind assessment seminar with all the outdoor work and field trips.
It's a fairly varied and interesting job I have, with a lot of outdoor work, this one I complain about so much.
It's just the mid-winter period where exercise is so elusive and valuable. From early December to spring break, and even on to the end of term in May, I essentially have to fight with my schedule, my bosses, my students, and sometimes even my wife, to make room for exercise. And I always lose. It gets a little easier after spring break because the snow melts and so I can walk for a half hour in the campus woods, but not much better, because you still have to make time for that walk.
I find it hard to believe that I permit this, considering how much better I feel about myself when I get time to exercise. This is all my own fault, of course. If I hadn't spent all that time as a youth climbing mountains with the RAF, I could be a happy fat slob and never know the difference.
Our college president, also an exercise nut, has a better time of it, I think, probably because his preferred forms of exercise, basketball and cycling, can be fit into a work schedule. Mine, farm work and long walks, require a half day at least.
Anyway, the upshot of all this whining and rambling is, I guess I have to choose between finishing up my spring break jobs, or taking some more hikes, and then I have to go back to those 12 hour days.
I think I've settled on unmitigated defiance. Screw the work. I'm taking a hike tomorrow!
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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.
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