What is it about March and mud, anyway? It rains all winter long and there’s no problem, then March comes along and the ground turns to soppy, soupy mud wherever the turf isn’t super-thick. Why is that? I’m mystified.
It’s so bad this year that some of the hens actually have dirty feathers. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen this before. Normally they look sharp in all weather.
This, too, shall pass, as the weather warms up, the rain slackens, and the grass suddenly leaps into insane rates of growth. In a month I’ll probably be complaining that I can’t keep up with the mowing, even though I use a tractor.
Helpful hint: Wear an old pair of overalls over your other clothes when it’s muddy, even if your other clothes are another pair of overalls. That mud gets everywhere!
We discovered years ago that our best chance of keeping our record-keeping and advance orders straight was to have a laptop with us at the farmer’s market. But most laptops can’t be used in bright daylight, let lone rain. What to do?
One solution we hit upon was to take the record-keeping PC with us to the market. For this, we turned to the Panasonic ToughBook. These are ruggedized PCs that can be tossed around, rained on, and generally treated like farm equipment. Spill-resistant, dust-proof, with shock-mounted disk drives and daylight-readable screens, they’re the bee’s knees for outdoor use.
We’ve been using a ToughBook CF-27 for years, but are upgrading to a faster and more modern (but used) ToughBook 29. Used ToughBooks are plentiful, since just about every cop car in the country has one, and the military uses tons of them, too.
Our CF-27 was slow but not too bad with QuickBooks 2005, and can run Web browsers and Microsoft Word and so on adequately. It only has an 800×600 screen, which is a nuisance, but livable. I forget what I paid for the CF-27, but they’re practically giving them away on eBay — most going for less than $100.
Putting Microsoft Live Mesh on the CF-27 (in a possibly-vain attempt to make all our computers sync their data effortlessly) was the final straw. It’s now so slow that we avoid using it, which is bad. Hence the ToughBook 29. These are going for $600 or so. (New ToughBooks cost a couple of grand, which is not something I can afford to bankroll out of farmer’s market sales.)
If you want to play around with the concept, you might consider blowing $100 on a nice CF-27 and seeing if it’s perfect except for being slow and having a low-resolution screen. You might discover that you never use it, or that its seven-pound weight is a turn-off, or that ruggedized PCs just aren’t your cup of tea, at which point you’ll be glad you didn’t spend more money. When you don’t need the CF-27 anymore, sell it on eBay, which will cut your total cost of ownership to almost nothing.
You have to be careful when selecting a model, because Panasonic has allowed their product line to become bloated, with many semi-rugged models that aren’t outdoor-rated. You want a model that says it has a daylight-readable screen and is moisture-resistant.
If you buy a used ToughBook, get one that has all its part, port covers, etc. Lots of these units have various pieces missing, including both the hard drive and the shock-mounted hard-drive carrier. Get one with the correct operating system already installed (almost always Windows XP Professional). You can ignore this advice if you want — parts and driver disks and such are readily available on eBay — but you’ll be happier if this doesn’t balloon into a big project.
[Update, 3/22/2009: My CF-29 has arrived, and it’s even nicer than I expected in every way — screen brightness and clarity, speed,weather-tightness, and overall condition. Though its 1.2 GHz processor isn’t up to modern standards, I maxed it out on memory (1.5 GB), and it seems very snappy. Highly recommended]
Ah, daylight savings time. What was the point of it again? Oh yeah … it doesn’t work, but Congress look concerned and attentive. This isn’t easy for them, so they’ll clutch at any straw.
Anyway, I have a lot of “atomic clocks,” which are really radio-synchronized clocks that get their signal from the super-low-frequency transmitter at WWVB in Fort Collins, Colorado. I like these because you can forget about your timepieces except when you need to replace the batteries five years later. They set themselves to the radio signal.
The bad news is that the radio signal doesn’t actually get through all the time. Mostly it doesn’t matter, since once a week is plenty, but it’s a pain around the daylight savings time transition. Half my clocks have updated themselves and the others haven’t. Worse, these “zero-config” clocks are very inconvenient to set manually, maybe impossible. And because resetting these clocks is something you do twice a year at most, it’s hard to remember the steps.
Once again, a promising technology gets messed up by sloppy implementation. Where’s the button to push that says, “don’t try to synch up just once per night, keep trying continuously, damn it!” Where’s the “synch over WiFi” feature? Failing that, where are the set of, “never mind, I’ll set it myself” buttons?
People talk as if timekeeping was a mature market, but clocks and watches are designed by idiots. There’s probably good money out there waiting for a designer with half a brain, provided he isn’t saddled instantly with a pointy-haired boss who prevents all progress.
The Corvallis area is suffering from its highest jobless rate in 33 years. In the midst of all this woe, the last time I visited the Corvallis Winter Farmer’s Market, it was so packed with happy customers with their wallets out that I could hardly squeeze in.
This always happens. A recession means that more people are having financial trouble than usual. It doesn’t meant that everyone is having trouble. It doesn’t even mean that the people having trouble have stopped buying fresh food. Even as people tighten their belts in some areas (for example, eating out), they loosen them in others (say, home cooking).
The mass media gives a dumbed-down, homogenized, crisis-rich view of the world that is completely useless in decision-making. The idea of newspapers has always been that, by reading along, you feel engaged — without actually doing anything. As entertainment that’s fine, but otherwise it doesn’t accomplish much.
Last year Karen and I talked it over and decided to expand our book offerings, partly to recession-proof our lives and partly because we are constantly amazed at how few of the best books are still in print. It doesn’t seem right. So we started putting more of them into print. We had been holding steady at four books for years, but we expanded to twelve in a few months (that’s what I did with my Christmas vacation).
It turned out to be a good idea, since we’ve broken book-sales records every month for the last four months, and have been getting positive feedback besides.
Admittedly, our publishing business is not so huge that setting a new sales record is going to have us lighting cigars with thousand-dollar-bills, or even with matches. But what I’ve seen in our little publishing business and the Farmer’s Market renews my faith in the concepts that (a) watching the news basically serves as anti-Prozac, and should only be done by folks who are way too happy, and (b) even in bad times, there are opportunities — especially small ones — everywhere.
The Poultry Industries class from Oregon State University will be dropping by on Thursday to see our old-timey operation. How the heck did our pasture get so cluttered with bits of old lumber, rusted-through feeders, and other detritus? Time for a little spring cleaning!
This is not a great time of year to show off one’s pastured layer operation. Next month, the grass will reclaim all the muddy patches, but not yet.
The hens are laying very well, which is good, because the Corvallis Winter Market (held alternate Saturdays indoors at the fairgrounds) is doing a land-office business, and sales are much stronger than we expected.
The New Hampshire chicks we got from Oregon State University are doing very well and have been moved onto pasture. The girls (pullets) will be kept for egg-laying and the boys (cockerels) will be butchered and sold as “old-fashioned spring chickens” at the Winter Market. They’ll probably be the best-tasting chickens we’ll have all year, since slow-growing old-fashioned breeds raised on early spring pasture are hard to beat.
