Have you ever heard the song, "Who the F*(& is Alice"? Well, I want to know who the hell is Murphy and why is he hanging around my place! What is Murphy's Law? It says that "Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong". There is no known "Murphy", though it is assumed that it may have come from someone in the military during WWII.
2018 has kicked off with a boatload of Murphies happening around Rydyn High and I would like to find him so I can kick him in the crotch! Honestly, our lives could conjure up a pretty damn good country song right now. However, here is how we deal with Murphy around here... Laughter. They say it's the best medicine. I 100% believe this to be true. If you can't laugh, you are usually stuck crying (not that crying doesn't happen on occasion). So, I have heard from a few friends that we aren't the only ones tripping over Murphy to kickstart the new year. This blog's for you.
I thought it would be good to vent my frustration while adding a little humour to it. Sometimes all you need is to get it off your chest. Most of you know that I run an energy healing, equine facilitated learning and personal growth business. Of course, I need to practice what I preach - positive thinking, the law of attraction, meditating for peace, blah blah blah. Just kidding, I do believe in it all. There are days though when I want to say to hell with it and go back to bed and ignore the whole wide world!
So, let's recap some of the good times that have occurred since the first of the year. We will start with the $1100 power bill... Yep, you read that right, $1100. This is a topic that could get me right off the rails. First, there is the BC Hydro thing - the whole government backed BC monopoly phenomenon that literally makes me want to scream at the utter stupidity at the voters who have allowed these monopolies (BC Hydro, ICBC, etc) to stay in "business" screwing the people of the province over for decades. Google ICBC lawsuits - the sheer amount of hits ought to tell its own story. So, why, oh why, oh why, would anyone with a natural gas pipeline running through their property, not 100 meters from the house, not put in a gas furnace? Why? Yet, that's what happened when this house was put onto this place more than a decade ago - electric furnace. So, you can imagine that once we got the bill, hubby picked me up off the floor where I had passed out in anger and shock and we went to town to buy tile to put the woodstove in as it had immediately flown to the top of the priority list. What's funny about this story? The whole laughter is the best medicine thing? Ummmm. Okay, so maybe I can't really find the humour in the raping by BC Hydro... better move onto the next thing.
Let's talk about the horses getting out... First, let me take you back to briefly recap one of the conversations we had a year ago around selling our place in Clive. Wife: "I am tired of half-assing things, everything we are doing on our place is half-assed because we don't have the time or money to do it right, I just want to be able to do things all the way". Husband: "I agree, it will be much easier once we have more time and money in our simplified lifestyle". Fast forward one year... This fall, we did some fencing - quite a lot of fencing. The place we bought here has not been actively farmed for over 8 years, so what was here when we bought was falling down, broken wires and overall needs re-doing. We fenced a bunch in one field so that the horses could winter there and the cows could go there after they calved. There are about 100 feet of fence at the corner that didn't get completed - however, I was assured that the trees and crap would keep the horses from venturing out that corner. And it did, for 5 months. One January morning, wife: "I think we should feed the horses a bale", Husband: "They are fine for a few days", Wife: "But the cows get fed every day", Husband: "But the cows are going to make us money" (wife in her head thinks - after loans and expenses, "making" money is a stretch and we have horses for sale that are going to make us money). Next day: Knock, knock, oh hi neighbour! Hi, did you know your horses are all out and up the road? They have been about 5 miles from home and back to a mile north this morning. No, I didn't know, I guess I will go get them in since hubby is at work and daughter is at school. (If they would have had a bale, they would still be in... Sure they won't get out that corner of the fence)... Needless to say, the horses were put back in. The horses got a bale, and then the assholes escaped again... Now that they know there is a hole, apparently they are going to use it. Add another thing to the "Must get done list".
As I am driving in to watch our daughter play basketball one afternoon, going up the big hill by our place full of twists and turns, somehow, I got over too far and got sucked in by the snow in the berm from the grater and ditched my truck (in the flattest most open part of this crazy hill). Thankfully, by some weird stretch of luck, I actually had cell service and hubby came and pulled me out. Despite planting the side of my truck in the bank of the hill, somehow there was literally not a scratch on it (ha ha Murphy, take that!). However, Murphy came back to finish the job on this task, for a couple days later, it was really icy in all the places where we always park our vehicles, so I moved them around so that the ice could melt off in the warmer weather. Well, hubby forgot that everything was moved around and smashed into one of the ones I had moved around with the tractor and some bales - that DEFINITELY left more than a scratch or two.
What else, I mean, the country song could go on... Hubby cleaned out the one barn so we can start to use it - the former owners had chickens - OODLES of chickens - so he scraped that all out with the tractor and dumped it in the dump pile... Guess what 2 Bernese dogs and a border collie puppy did? They found the pile of 10-year-old chicken bones... And they puked and puked and puked... Inside, outside, everywhere... Dog puke full of chicken bones... Yep, cleaning that up is a gagging good time.
Oh yeah, one of the other neighbours called and said that one of our horses was by the road (actually inside the fence this time) with his foot through a mineral tub - sure enough, there he was, standing there with it wrapped around his leg like a big ol' bell boot. Not a scratch on the lucky bugger. What can you do but laugh?
There are so many things that go wrong on a day to day basis... The bills that come in unexpectedly, the dog that has a heart murmur and requires $400 in bloodwork... the cow mineral at $1400... the power bill at $1100... buying supplies for woodstove installation at $500... it seems never ending some days. But I learned long ago never to say, it can't get worse. Because it can. It can always get worse. And you know what? There is SO much good stuff to offset the bad. We get crazy stories to share that I am sure no one believes. We have our health, all four of my immediate crew are healthy and that is a God-given gift right there as we know people who are too young to be fighting cancer, who have arthritis and diabetes, who are dealing with chronic illness and pain. We aren't and for that, we have to be so grateful. We have a beautiful piece of property, albeit with falling down fences and buildings, escaping horses and cows, enough burdock to choke many many elephants and a to-do list 10 miles long, but we have neighbours that don't even know us that are willing to dog sit, farm sit, help us out when we need to get cows or horses back in. We have people we don't even know volunteer to come out and do chores while we go to Vegas. We have old bachelors who stop by and give us a welcome to the neighbourhood card just because he thought it would be nice. Hubby has a job after a long year of hell working for a company in Alberta and though we definitely miss the income, we don't miss the stress. I don't miss seeing him look like crap every day like the weight of the world is on his shoulders, I have to admit, I do LOVE the new physique he is rocking with all of the physical labour around here and at his job. I am able to stay home and do my university courses and plan my garden and cook healthy food and enjoy being a rancher and a mom and wife and not feel like I have to be at a job (for now).
And we laugh... we laugh at all the stupid crap that happens. Why not? There was a time when it all would have made me completely explode. Now, we laugh. We laugh with the neighbours that the damn horses got out again and pick at Josh for not giving them some hay. We laugh at the fact that of course our damn cows have lice and we have to add making a chute and processing them for that to Josh's one day off this week. We laugh at the fact that it seems like sometimes absolutely nothing goes our way because we know that under it all, we still have it really good. We have our health. We have a piece of land where the opportunity is endless (even though the money very much is not, lol). Our daughter is doing well in school and has friends, lots of friends, more than we can count or ever begin to know all of them. We have truly amazing neighbours. We have cows which makes hubby weirdly ecstatic. I have my schooling which does the same thing for me as his cows do for him. We have a marriage of just months shy of 20 years that is better now than it has likely ever been despite the odd hiccups. So, we laugh. Because it could be worse. It could be so much worse... Money comes and goes, there are always ways to make more of it. The important things are intact - family, health and love - so, therefore, we get to laugh. So put that in your pipe and smoke it, Murphy!
