Mephistos

An aside to begin with – the spell checker actually has the word farrier in it and accepts it as a spelled correctly word. You realize I have been using that word in various documents since at least around 2000, maybe slightly longer and none, not even the Microsoft Word dictionary, has contained that word. So my hats off to the folks doing this open source dictionary that I am using.

What I really wanted to touch base on was my weekend this past. It was hot. Saying that is such an understatement, using only three words and eight characters. It should have something like thirty characters to really emphasis just how hot it was. Anyway, I digress. I spent Saturday morning early AM doing a bit of tidying around the house, before heading over to mow my Grandmothers yard. It is a small yard and that was a nice thing done. I then headed over to my Mom’s, where I have the horses.

It was too hot to do much that afternoon, especially with the lack of shade short of the shed, where there is little breeze. So I lounged a bit in a the pool. Yes, I was lazy bum. The important thing to note during all of the day on Saturday is I spent maybe 15 minutes late in the day checking my personal email and nothing more.

Sunday I awoke fairly early (though not as early as I usually do) after spending the night there. I immediately got my tools and went to field and started with feet trimming – or farrier work.

For those not aware, horses hooves grow and are very similar to humans finger nails, except of course they are much thicker. Horses in the wild tend to keep the hoof wore down, but they move a lot more than a domestic horse, so we have to help them out and give them a trim on occasion. The basic process is nip off with a tool that is about eighteen long and looks a little like pliers with a cutting edge, file smooth on the flat and shape the outside of the hoof. Oh and I left out dig out dirt, manure, and muck from the rest of sole and take down the flat with a hoof knife.

It is probably the hardest job on the farm, and especially as jobs relating to horses go. I would ten times over rather put up hay all day then trim two or three horses feet. During the process a well-trained perfect horse will stand there, lifting each foot almost before you ask (and some actually do), holding it until you are done. Even with a well-trained horse though it is time spent bent over, knees bent against themselves, and in motion the entire time on your part.

Now the reality is younger, less trained horses tend to want to dance around a bit and see just what they can get away with. Older horses get lazy and instead of holding up the foot for you, lean 1/4 or more of their weight over on your already bent over form. And one horse I have likes to nibble at your back, hair, or shoulders whenever she can – and if she is luck she will grab something like a tool or apron strap and pull it out or loose.

It gets worse though. If you recall I have 7 miniature horses that needed to be trimmed. Good news – They have much smaller feet so much less trimming to be done. Bad news – They only stand on average 29 inches tall hence their feet can’t come up nearly as much off the ground, so you have to bend down even more to work with them. Even worse – three of these little guys are young or just have not been handled that much and they throw a fit when you getting a trim done.

So, if I am making it sound bad – well it was hard sweating honest work, that was very tiring. It left my shoulders, neck, knees, thighs, back, and arms tired and sore through even today (Tuesday). In just over four hours I trimmed eight horses feet, some of which were just rank.

So the rambling here leads to this thought. It was so incredibly nice to be out in the hot sun doing such work. Living and breathing horses for the time. No cell phone and no computer email and nothing that was otherwise interfering with the task at hand. My pure enjoyment of working with my hands, and while utilizing my brain, it was on a subject that was much lower caliber and enjoyable. It was just a breath of freedom that was much enjoyed and much-needed.

I am looking forward to the next bit of time I will get to spend time out like that with the horses with no computers around for a short time.

I am sure if you are alive, eat anything from the grocery store or from a food establishment that prepares it for you, unless you are currently under a rock you have heard about the suspected tomato salmonella scare. Just in case you have not a brief bit of background. There were a bunch of cases of salmonella, over the weekend I believe. The FDA (though I believe the CDC was involved too) released warnings and recommendations to not consume certain kinds of tomatoes, specifically beef steak and Roma or plum types. Since then the tomatoes have disappeared from fast food chains like McDonald’s, Burger King, Taco Bell and others, as well from the shelves at Wal-Mart, Winn-Dixie, Kroger, and so on. Today at some point the recommendation has been determined that it is safe now to eat tomatoes from 19 states of origin but you should still hold off from other states.

Now a little review. Salmonella does not come from salmon the fish. It is a bacteria that is usually transmitted initially through contact with feces. Hence why it is so easy to it happening in the more common culprit – chicken. Tomatoes another story – but perhaps water in irrigation or washing was contaminated. Regardless, if you tomato was not grown in one the 19 approved states or something you grew yourself or from a reputable local farmer you better be safe and throw it out.

Why is this new here? First is that if you grew it yourself – your fine. No need to really worry. You pretty much know if you exposed your tomato crop to human feces or not. Beyond that, you could get them from a reputable local farmer. Now realistically in our climate we are still a few weeks away from the earliest tomatoes in our region – if they didn’t grow them in a greenhouse they still came from a truck out-of-state.

This how things leads me to a couple of issues I have had for a few years. Our food is so much better when acquired in its proper season. After all, those things they call tomatoes during the winter are hard and tasteless. Further, when we are touch with where our food came from, especially locally, we can feel better about it. Especially if we know the care and concern that a farmer may have put into making it happen instead of some industrial farmer that is about minimizing cost and hence maximizing profits. Of course the flip side of this is, we have to expect that there is some possible losses due to lack large-scale process and hence there will be some increase in the price of such food. A small price to pay for knowing reasonably well that your food is bursting with the best of flavor and its peak and most likely the safest of foods you have been exposed too in a long time.

Anyway, this thought then leads to a concept called Slow Food. The basic ideas are that we slow down and enjoy food for what it is. We also slow down and have food in season. And lastly – and this is the big one that I am such a strong advocate of – we move our food a lot less – after all the food less traveled has a lot less chance of exposure to things such as salmonella.

I could go on about how food traveling less would help our current crunch on fossil fuels or how I think that incidents like this (of which we have had more of with vegetables then meats) points to the need to have better identification on fruits and vegetables or how the concept of NAID for animals is really the wrong place to be looking (and for the record – I am vehemently opposed to NAID). But I will instead save those for later upcoming blogs.

Instead, just thinking eating slow-moving food that travels small distances and let that be some food for thought. If that is not enough, think about, when tomatoes come into season in a few more weeks no need to worry about salmonella from the local ones – give that some thought instead.

Another big change to the look of the blog in less than four days? What is up with that? No, I am not a woman. I really did have my mind made up on that last one and was pleased with the over all look and feel of it, except that one small green smudge, which I was willing to live with until I got around to altering it.

However, I realized that it wasn’t that everyone had abandoned reading my blog or that it was too nice a weekend to be in front of a computer (after all it was HOT here and A/C or a fan felt good with a cold drink). It was indeed the theme that was causing a problem with the WordPress statistics tool. Despite whatever hits may have occurred to the blog – the WordPress statistics tool was reporting zero. After going on four days I got suspicious and checked the actual web flow and while it could have all been me, I don’t think so – as I was outside working and playing most of the weekend.

So, I did a little test this morning, not logged in, and sure enough nothing on the stats increased – still a big zero. So, I changed back to an old theme – granted it was messed up due to being two columns – but sure enough I got a hit on the stats as soon as I went to the page not logged in.

Rather then trying to figure out the problem or waiting on the designer (French I believe) to fix something they may not care about, I search out some other themes. Fully tested the stats on this one and believe it looks pretty good. Also the black darkened wood reminds me of the tobacco, hay, and livestock barns of central Kentucky where I spent so much of my younger years. I have another in the wings just in case, but I think this one is going to stick around for a while unless it develops some issue or another then I have not though through to this point.

Now that I have that little worry out-of-the-way, it is back to blogging… Coming soon a rant about the tomato scare and local food, another about fuel prices, truckers, and going green, and maybe something about the death bell tolling for internet auctions.

PS: I also decided that I am too on the fence about the MORE tag. So I have for the time being removed those and instead limited the front page to showing 5 blogs to combat scrolling forever. This is one that I am being a bit non-committal toward and may change back to again later.