Fall Fodder

This weekend is the annual 4H / FFA auction at the county fair, which has me in a bit of a state. How it can possibly be that not only an entire year, but a year-plus-a-couple-months, has gone by since last I was clutching a ludicrously bright buyer card in my hot little hands…is beyond me.

I went out to the garage last weekend to get a feel for what-all kind of mayhem this was going to wreak on me, expecting that I would find a “nearly full” freezer and be all, “AH! AH! OH NO! I’M A BAD INVENTORY MANAGER AND ALSO I DON’T WANT TO DISAPPOINT THE KIDS BUT SERIOUSLY, I’M NOT GONNA BUY ANOTHER WHOLE STEER JUST BECAUSE S/HE LOOKS AT ME WITH THOSE BIG, HOPEFUL EYES…” (<= the kid, not the steer…the steer mostly looks at me like, eh, whatever because, well, he’s a STEER, not a sales-cow)

But it was remarkably empty. So later-but-not-too-much-later this afternoon, I’m going to empty out the chest freezer, move everything that’s left into the upright, and turn it off to defrost so I can clean it.

Which is something I actually meant to do from the beginning. Well. Not from the beginning beginning, when I had 42,067,092 pounds of meat and all, but rather that I had meant to practice much more…attentive…inventory management, such that when the overall amount of stuff left was little enough to fit in “just” the one (1) freezer, I’d move everything to just one (1) freezer, turn off, clean, and leave off because they cost money to run and all the other freezer. But I didn’t. Because Life happened. And Work happened. And Too Tired To Deal With That Right Now happened. Which has become something of a trend with me of late, and not a particularly good trend, either. Although I suppose I could pretend that any trend makes me “trendy” and that’s supposed to be a good thing, right? Right. So, there’s that.

{pauses to contemplate how complicated that paragraph got…is it just me, or does it read kind of like “blah blah crazy-crazy blah blah something about peanut butter which reminds me that I like pickles and I wonder if kangaroos have these problems probably not, huh…”?!}

MEANWHILE IN OTHER NEWS…luffa plants. (Yes. I know. This transition does not bode well for this post suddenly getting any less incoherent. Just be glad you weren’t around this morning, when I was literally on two phone calls at the same time and then forgot to go on mute for the one when I switched over to arguing about whether we wanted row level compression, or page level compression on a given table on the other line. Not only was I talking right over the top of the other group, but it was such a completely different topic that it must have been really confusing for them. Nice.)

So, I decided to grow some luffa (loofah, lufah, take your pick) this year, because so obviously need another hobby thought it would be cool.

When I bought the seeds, I was given a ton of advice around how to tenderly, lovingly, with great care and other words meaning “these babies are going to be very finicky and hard to grow, so you’ll have to practically sing them lullabies and tuck them in at night.”

Which I promptly ignored for the most part, because I sort of planted them and then went to work for the next three months straight.

Every so often, I’d think to go back there and squint at them, and they seemed to be doing OK without constant petting / singing to them / ensuring they had such-and-so balance of pH blah blah blah.

Yup, doing just fine. No {luffa, loofah, lufah} yet, but pretty soon, they started putting out Big! Showy! Yellow! Blooms, which the enormously fat wanna-bees love to climb into so they can jump out and scare me out of my socks.

Aww! So pretty! So delicate!

Fast forward about two weeks aaaaaaaaaaaand…

AAAAAAAAAAH! RUN FOR YOUR LIVES! THE {LUFFA, LOOFAH, LUFAH} ARE TAKING OVER THE WORLD!!!!!

But, still no {luffa, loofah, lufah}. Oh. Wait. Yes there are some, they’re just…wow. Really? Cause, that’s pretty…tiny and while there are probably somewhere like sixteen THOUSAND of them, it’s starting to get kinda cold at night, so y’all really don’t have, you know, a thousand days and nights to finish growing…

(IMMATURE COMMENTARY ALERT: Yes, it DOES look like a Certain Part Of The Male Anatomy. And yes, that realization made me snicker way harder than it had any right to.)

THEN, as I was turning around shaking my head and wondering if perhaps I should have sung to it more, or if my lack of pH-strip-wielding had brought it to this lowly state…

“OH HAI, I’M A GINORMOUS {LUFFA, LOOFAH, LUFAH}, JUST HANGING RIGHT HERE IN PLAIN SIGHT, RIGHT UNDER YOUR NOSE!”

Thank $DEITY it wasn’t a rattlesnake, right?!

There’s still a lot of action out there in the garden, really; green beans, onions, carrots, newly-planted peas coming up, okra and peanuts and the last of the watermelons.

peek-a-boo!

I can’t wait to see how many actual tubers there are underneath the mat of yam vines in the back bed; it always seems to be something of a crap-shoot, really, with those root-crops. Sometimes you have robust plants but no potatoes, sometimes you have scrawny plants and lots of potatoes…but then, just when you think you’ve got it figured out and are rolling your eyes because the plants are so vigorous that it must mean there’s no potatoes under them…

Jackpot.

And, oooookay. I think I have avoided the freezer task long enough. I’m off to get frostbite and a sore back – have a great weekend, everybody, and may only the cows you want around come home.