The Year Without a Summer?

It has been a lot cooler and wetter here than normal, according to my friends around the picnic table at the town's pot luck supper last night. Good for grass, corn, hay, wheat, and plants - not so good for some things. Pat's sons were tucked up under blankets yesterday, as the day was cold and wet and rainy all day until just before the picnic.

My potatoes are really taking off. Pat told Mike yesterday that I could come get all the old tires I needed for them. The kids don't use them for their paintball wars any more, and they are just sitting in their field on the hill behind the house.

I had to go into work all last week; lots of things to get out for the school year already. Physicals for the kids who want to take part in athletics are a week before registration, so we had to get the forms to them. Part of the Co-op order came in and I had to separate that out for everyone. Neat little piles in the gym, all with their names on them; elementary and High school teachers alike. Had to close out the computer program year for the food service billing, and re-open it for this year. Had to print all the registration stuff and put it in folders to be ready. Still waiting for the Board to approve the Student Manual, and Kate to approve the Staff Manual. I loaded all of the new year's registration paperwork onto a disk, because many of the forms they needed I had to regenerate. For some reason they were not saved - except as blank hardcopies in a file. Some folks still apparently think that a computer is like a big typewriter, and don't understand the uses!

I suggested that we get a scanner and scan in all of the records we have to keep so that we can throw away all of the huge binders of hardcopies everywhere. I am puzzled that no one ever thought of it before. If you need the records, why not have them were you can download them and print them - or keep them out of the way when you don't?

So I have been in "work mode" all week, not "farm mode". I have a couple of days this week of freedom, but will definitely have to go in this Thursday for a class. Rocky, Terri, Kate and I will all be attending a class in Valentine on PowerSchool, the student record-keeping program. We have started a file of questions to ask. The program is so unwieldy, but I'm thinking that if we just get with the programmers and DO the things we want, we can find out what we don't know that is making our lives so difficult. It's dumb for me to have to keep handwritten records of attendance because the program isn't accurate... or isn't being used to its fullest capacity. I'll find out which on Thursday!

Here on the farm, the roosters are learning to crow - the BIG guy in the rooster coop finally has it down. He is so showy I almost don't want to kill him; big and cocky and with a HUGE comb and wattle. Thinking about changing him out with one of the smaller roosters in the tractors; whatever genes he has I may want to keep and promulgate, not lose in the pan. It's all about the breeding and the future.

I DID protest our huge increase in taxes, and got a concession from the Assessor's office. They didn't drop it as much as I asked for, and of course I didn't expect them to - but they DID knock off over $6,000 on the assessment. I gave them pictures and an 8-point set-up as to WHY it should be dropped - including their errors in property assessment all over town. They actually sent an assessor out last week to evaluate the parts I noted where they had made grievous errors. I didn't raise hell and wasn't nasty - just presented facts. What I'm not telling folk is that, if we get approved for the tax loophole for Mike's disability, the property will come in well under the $75,000 limit set by the state for that forgiveness. So we will only have to pay taxes on the "extra" farm property - assessed at $7,000. Which should lower our house payments by about half, since the taxes are paid into an escrow held by the mortgage bank.

It is 55 degrees and I am gong out to clean out the chicken tractors and put in fresh hay, then mix up the poop and hay with more horse manure and dirt and build up the potatoes in the tires. Then I have to weed the gardens. I wish the pumpkins would start flowering - the watermelons are, and I am waiting, waiting... even have canteloupes coming up, but they are not flowering either. The onions are going gangbusters and I am really excited about them - never had so many GOOD onions coming out. The grasshoppers are starting to be a problem and I will have to fix that, though. I found heads on my oats yesterday, so THEY are actually producing, as is the wheat. So much to do...