The Wayfaring Wordhack

 ...take and post a lot of photos.

Just scrolling through, looking for a photo I posted during our Mayotte days of our coconut grater--which I couldn't find--keenly reminded me of that.

I must do better.  For my sake, for the sake of my kids. 

Like these New Year's Eve photos from a year ago (2019):

My post about the song in support of parents' right to decide on their children's education is a bit long, so I did not want to add to it.  However, I was thinking about how one nation's problems seem foreign, unimportant, and impossible to address to citizens of other countries.  Especially when each of us is already under some kind of "home country" stress, more true now than ever with elections, social injustice, corruption, a virus that has shut down the world*...

Yet, haven't many horrific situations in history started in just such a way?  A blind-eye to misgovernment here, a tiny revocation of freedom there, little by little habituating people to give up without a fight? To keep our eyes on our own problems so that we cannot be bothered to help others?  For my part, I hate talking about politics.  You can count on one hand--and maybe not use all of your fingers--the posts I have made in the almost-15 years I have been blogging.  And even writing this now, I have the feeling that I am bothering people, will be taken as a fanatic.  But I realize that my head-in-the-sand approach is part of the problem. :(

In France, education was obligatory for children 6 to 16 until a year and a half ago.  Not school:  education.  However, ask the general public and they will tell you it is school that is mandatory because that is the way the media presents "back to school" every year on TV and in the papers: "L'école est obligatiore de 6 à 16 ans" and no one corrects them.  Then the government lowered the obligatory age to 3. I told our inspector I thought it was a bad idea, but I didn't protest. I didn't contact our government representatives... 

Little by little, freedom by freedom.

Now this new law is attempting to make school and not education obligatory.  So, children, three years old, are going to be forced to pass the majority of their day in a school whether the children or parents want it or not.  If your three-year-old is not ready for school, it doesn't matter.  There are already so many problems in schools that need to be addressed, and now they want to add to the load of poor teachers who are already overworked in schools that are over-populated. (A sad corollary to this is that there is plenty of room in rural schools and yet the government makes it hard for people to live in the country, preferring to have everyone in easier-to-control/observe cities.)  

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* These thoughts were prompted by a question from queenoftheskies  who asked if kids are going to school here.  The answer is, now, yes.  However, in the spring, the government sent all of them home; families had to adapt, and guess what?  Many of them loved it, loved connecting with their kids and helping with their learning.  So the number of families who decided to home-school for this school year skyrocketed, which, as you probably guessed, caused a panic in the national educational system.  So now, we are in our second lockdown but kids are required to go to school, despite the fact that teachers cannot keep them safe, meaning the families are not safe either.  On the one hand, they shut down all sorts of services, small shops, restaurants, etc. but primary schools, enormous vectors of illness, are still up and running. 

What follows will be long and quite possibly uninteresting for anyone not into growing food, but I wish to get a copy of my thoughts and observations of this growing season (as well as a few comparisons to others) in one place where I can refer back to it.  I mentioned before that I have not really allowed myself the joy of all the work we have accomplished so far because I am always looking into the future of "when it will be more like it 'should' be," and that can get pretty depressing.

(Funny side note, the above lines were written weeks ago. Alas. That is the way things go)

To battle the depression, I thought I would post some before and now pictures to truly get a grasp on just how much has changed. However, now the garden has changed even more and I need new photos. :P

(Extra Funny Side Note:  The above lines were written almost two months ago)

Let's skip the long and blather and just post some photos because I have another post I want to make.

Garden when we moved in (view from the house):

( Photos under the cut )


Busy bees we've been.  I guess i fibbed because that was pretty long....

Forgive the hodgepodge nature of this entry, but there has been so much going on this week

- It seems wrong to include this first category in an entry with more trivial stuff, but it has shaped my week and affected me more than the rest, so:

This week, we have been notified of three deaths : the doula who helped bring Farmer Boy and Ti'Loup into the world lost her husband. He died in the night in Cairo, we know not of what. A friend's son, who had been paralyzed and in a coma last year after falling from a roof, made a miraculous recovery only to die a few days ago of a brain aneurysm. Another friend's 20-year-old daughter was in a fatal car wreck on Thursday.  So much grief. So many questions about how well are we loving those around us when we have no idea when our lives on this earth will come to an end. So much anger at myself every time I lose my temper with my own lively, hyper-alive kids.

- Our broody duck is down from 4 duck eggs and 3 goose eggs to one duck egg and 2 goose eggs. I thought the drake was stealing them from her because I saw him in the nest with her. We were prepared to harvest him because we can't have an animal that eats the eggs or young and it woluld be too hard to house him alone and only let him with the others for breeding purposes. So, we separated them and then discovered it was the mother duck eating the eggs. :( She is still on the three, and I don't know whether to take them from her and put them in the incubator (which I detest)or just leave them and see what happens. Sprout is devasted because it is her duck, and of course, what is good for the gander...or drake, in this case, is good for the duck. 

The reason I haven't just moved them to the incubator---besides hating the thing--is that it is still occupied by one egg, which leads me to my next topic:

--Mr. Crude (as I call the man from whom J bought the duck eggs because of his penchant for sexual innuendo, which i often overhear) is either dishonest or not at all careful of his duck breeding. J asked him for Khaki Campbell eggs, and instead of saying he didn't know what that was or saying that he has a mixed flock, he sold J a dozen eggs, only 4 of which were viable.  ( Granted, he was not selling them as hatching eggs, but J was very clear that that is what he meant to do with them.)  Two ducklings hatched on the 11th, one hatched today, and the other should hatch tomorrow (it didn't make it out of the shell) from the look of things, and so far, of the three, none of them appear to be KC ducks.  Two could be Rouen or Rouen crosses, and one could either be a Cayuga or a Swedish cross...or something else entirely. Looks like if I want Khaki Campbells, we are going to have to drive an hour and a half one way and pay 2euros per egg for them.

- Just when I told rimturse  that our hens were doing great on the hatching front, our latest clutch only produced 4 chicks out of 9 eggs. Two chicks were crushed under the mom, two mysteriously disappeared (no sign of them or their shells), and one egg never developped. Then  the mom pretty much rejected them for the first day. The kids babysat the chicks in the warm greenhouse until we could convice the hen to mother  them. All is well now. 

- We finally got some rain, brought in on those lovely dark clouds looming over our daisy-studded field,

 Not my sons, mind you. My poultry dads' sons.

As you might (or probably don't) remember, we had some trouble with our first rooster, Rico. His aggressive nature earned him a one-way ticket to the soup pot, but not before he sired a son, our first chick to hatch here on our little farm. "Miracle" we named him because the brood hen abandoned the nest just before he hatched, and I found his cold, stiff body in a corner of the box. Lots of prayers and warm breath over his little body in my cupped hands were rewarded by a tiny cheep, so I quickly restored him to his suddenly attentive mother. Against all odds, Miracle made it and is now our alpha rooster.
 

...or ten. :P

When I saw these oblong stones at the lake this summer, I thought of you, pjthompson, and those cute feet you posted, so this is for you:

When we arrived in France last week, I was struck by all the flowers in bloom. My first thought was of how different places have different spring colors. The very next day, asakiyume posted about the very same thing.

Here is a sampling of spring on this side of the Black Mountains:

...or at least I imagine there could be a frightful tale attached to the place I'm about to share, and share now I must, for frigg is being a very impatient, pushy pea to learn where yesterday's gate leads.

Turn the knob and push. Pay no mind to the squealing hinges. Their noise is not foreshadowing. Or is it?


( Enter )


Anyone have any suppositions to make about who might be buried here and why in such a fashion? (I don't have a clue.) Please share if your fancy has been tickled.

What I listened to while posting:
Joe Pug: Hymn 101
Joe Purdy: Why You
The White Buffalo: Oh Darling, What Have I Done?
Black Rebel Motorcycle Club: Beat the Devil's Tattoo