A Great Farm Diary: Womerlippi Homestead Annals: Spurting

Sunday, January 18, 2015

Spurting

Aimee's photo: Roo helps with the dish-washing.

Our little bundle of joy has been anything but these last two days: cranky, windy, always hungry, wants to play constantly, but then is also always tired. I don't quite know how she achieves so many mood swings in such short space of time. It's a bit like the current weather, which is also going from January thaw to deep freeze and back again with alarming regularity.

Aimee says that it's a "growth spurt", a diagnosis I am easily prepared to believe, considering I weighed just her last weekend and she came in just under fourteen pounds and is now closer to fourteen-and-a-half. Our scale, donated by a colleague at work, has seen better days and is somewhat uncertain, so these are unscientific estimates. But, best I can tell, based on the average of the needle swing, she's put on a half pound or so in a very short time frame.

In other news, we survived our first week of work as two fully-employed parents. Last semester I worked full-time, but with flexible hours. Aimee had about half the semester off, thanks to the various forms of maternity leave available at our small college, but then was back to work, with somewhat flexible hours. This semester we have a normal workload each, and an inflexible schedule, but no overlaps, meaning that one of us can be with Roo most of the time. This is necessary because she's still way too young for daycare.

Trying to make this work was interesting, to say the least. For my part, I had to work a lot of very early morning hours, Skype in to meetings, and go to work on part of Saturday to succeed in this endeavor, but I'm now done until Tuesday, thanks to the MLK holiday. Aimee had to work a lot of evening hours and still has things to do today and during tomorrow's holiday, but plans to watch the football today. This, despite her being up almost all night with Roo. I'd say she's getting the worst of it, and will continue to do so as long as Roo needs to be breastfed in the middle of the night.

There remains virtually no time for house, farm, or mechanical projects. Luckily it's too cold to do mechanics. The Lister engine has been removed from it's trailer and sits cold and neglected on the shop floor. Its generator is in a hundred pieces and I despair of ever remembering how they all fit back together. The farm work is ticking over on a low "idle" -- all I do is make sure the sheep and chickies have lots of food, and unfrozen water to drink, and as well keep the heat lamp running. It takes less than twenty minutes a day. The dogs are lucky if they get even a half-mile walk once a day. I did start the job of cleaning out my den, but was only able to give it twenty minutes at a time. After about two weeks I got it done.

I did manage to host these renewable energy students at the house the other day to study energy retrofits, of which the house is of course a great example, and Roo was good enough to sit on my knee and let me talk to them without too many interruptions. That was remarkable, but it also reminded me that I still have a serious career in renewable energy and climate policy to tend to, if I somehow can.

Roo, for her part, now four-and-a-half months old, has been working on important projects: learning to roll over, and trying to crawl. She is beginning to be a little more mobile, and can squirm herself around a little bit, especially when gravity is on her side. She'll be sitting on your knee, see something she wants, a favorite toy, say, a foot away on the couch, then execute a kind of controlled fall in that direction, and sometimes almost get there.

I expect that she'll get to crawling an a few weeks or months. We hope to start her on solid food soon too. But this is not any big, intense kind of a project. We're just taking things one day, one hour at a time.

Mostly we just hope to get more sleep, especially Aimee, before we begin another week of school work. Our semesters are fifteen weeks long, except that one week of that is exams, so basically we have to survive another twelve weeks after this one and we will have not only summer, but a seven-month-old baby to spend it with. We hope we make it. That's about the limit of our time horizon.

I'm reminded of Bob the Builder, my new favorite philosopher:

"We can do it! Yes we can!"

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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.

Spammers -- don't bother writing -- there's no way I will post your spam to my blog. Just go away.

The Farm

The "Womerlippi Farm" is actually a homestead or smallholding where most of the food is grown for our own consumption and that of our friends and family. We raise Corriedale/Romney-cross sheep, feeder pigs in season, and Golden Comet, Aruacuna, Black Laced Wyandotte, Brahma, and Buff Orpington hens. We have wooded pasture, old apple trees, and a large kitchen garden. We build and maintain our own energy-efficient buildings, service and fix our own vehicles and farm equipment, and generally live a thoroughly self-reliant lifestyle. Our farm goals are less economic and more psychological/spiritual and lifestyle oriented. We like an independent, quiet home life with a lot of interaction with animals and the earth. Farming, building and energy-related engineering were also part of our education work at the former Unity College. Having said all that, we're practical people and grow a lot of pretty solid food and fiber. We're also happy to sell you some eggs or yarn or lambs.

PS: "Womerlippi" is a combination of our last names, "Womersley" and "Phillippi." The one is broad Yorkshire, the other Greek, although Aimee's ancestry and home culture is Pennsylvania Dutch/Shenandoah Valley Church of the Brethren. When Aimee and I married, she didn't take my name. She said she "wasn't trading up."

Why is this "A Great Farm Diary?"

Because the setting for the events recorded here is the "Great Farm" of Jackson, Maine, that's why. (Not because this is such a great farm, although we like it.)

Started by privateer and financier Israel Thorndike in 1806 as a vacation home, the famous Great Farm of Jackson was an agricultural showcase for this area of Maine, and Thorndike used it as such, an advertisement for his private land office business, as he disposed of the famous Waldo Patent, in which he was a part owner. Land purchasers could work off their mortgages as laborers on the Great Farm. Most deeds in Waldo County trace back to Israel Thorndike.

Thorndike, born to a family of modest means, went to sea to make his fortune. He captained a privateering vessel during the Revolutionary War, and tweaked the nose of the great Royal Navy more than once. He then settled to a life as a financier, merchant, and captain of industry in Boston. He remains listed as one of the fifty richest Americans of all time. He was the author, with Eldridge Gerry, of the first recorded gerrymander, and so his name went down in history for that peculiarly undemocratic deed too.

He was, in short, a rich, arrogant, unrequited arse, whose primary redeeming feature was impressive ambition. If you are such a person, you should feel ashamed. My work in academia has introduced me to many such wealthy people, and frankly, I'm tired of them. The world doesn't revolve around you and your silly ideas of what is important. Grow up.

Our own much smaller farm sits on a few acres of the original 2,000 that Thorndike developed as an agricultural showcase. As he was a famous Federalist, while Aimee and I are obvious neo-Jeffersonians, of sorts, I doubt he'd be pleased with what we've done with the place. But we don't give a rat's wotsit. As I said, we like it this way.

Read the very last posts in the archive for more details, or use search terms like Israel Thorndike or "Great Farm history" in the Google Blogger search engine (above, on the left).

How this Diary is Arranged:

From Mick:

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 below, click on the link provided, and read backwards from there to get it all in chronological order.

To find out what is happening right now, read the first post first.

Other blogs by Mick: UC SAR, UC Sustainability, Farm Diary

Enjoy.

Farm Produce

Purchasing Womerlippi Farm produce in season can be done by email arrangement, and/or by shopping at the Marsh River Coop in Brooks.

We sell yarn, fleece, lamb, and livestock for meat or breeding.

The yarn is Bartlett Yarn's 4-ply, a medium-thick yarn, in natural gray and brown, as well as natural dyes. It is soft and bulky, and makes nice old-fashioned knitwear. You can buy it for $7.50 a skein by emailing womersleymick8984@gmail.com. We ship priority mail, minimum four skeins at a time. The shipping is extra. We also have raw white and brown (natural colored) fleece in large quantities each spring, unwashed, untreated. Email us at mwomersley@unity.edu and name your price. Expect to pay shipping or pick up in person. Coming to the farm itself without prior appointment is not recommended. We have a child. We also have a dog who bites. We like that he bites, because we have a child we want to protect. If you come unexpectedly to the farm, stay behind any temporary hot-wire gate or fence, or park in the driveway, until someone comes. We'll know you're there because the dog will tell us. Loudly. Annoyingly. They will wake us or our kid, if we are asleep. We will be mad about this.

If no-one comes, we're not home. Go Away.

If you are yet more foolish and try to get out of your car and/or cross a gate or fence, expect to get bitten by a shepherd dog, rammed by a ram, or chewed out by a shepherd.

A Great Farm Diary: Womerlippi Homestead Annals