Thinking About A New Blog

This is something I’ve been considering for a few days so I thought I’d throw it out there and see what you guys think.  I’m thinking about starting another blog about my relationship with God and my quest to become a better Christian.  Normally, I’m not a big fan of having multiple blogs.  I don’t like having to jump around to follow along.  I definitely don’t need anything else to suck up my time.  Between this blog, many forums, and now Facebook I really feel like the internet already takes up enough of my time.

I really want to write about it though.  And I don’t think I want to do it here.  Let’s get one thing straight, I’m not ashamed to put it out there that I’m a Christian.  The thing is, I wasn’t always.  I know what it’s like to be an atheist and I know how I felt about religious mumbo jumbo back then.  And I know that the way to be a good witness is not to scare people away.  I want my normal readers to be able to enjoy the content here without feeling at all uncomfortable.

I want to be completely comfortable too.  For that reason I’m thinking a new blog might even be restricted, set up so that you have to log in to read it.  I could invite a few people to start and if you’re interested you could let me know and I could add you.  I’m really inspired by many other blogs that I read.  However, mine would be a lot different.  Mine wouldn’t be an inspiring here-are-the-answers type blog.  Instead, I want to talk about what it’s like to join the church as an adult and not know all those things that other people know.  I don’t even know the basics, but I’m determined to learn.

One other note, if I do this, I’m not going to feel any pressure to post regularly.  I’d post when I felt like it, whether that be once a week or once a month.  I’m not going to commit to anything more than that.

What do you think?  Are you feeling it?  Prefer I keep it seperate (like I plan to)?  Want/need to learn along with me?  Care to follow along to offer inspiration?  Will it (or has it already) changed your opinion of me?  How?  I want to know what you’re really thinking here folks. 

Umm, God…

I’m not sure I can handle five…

…if you say I can I’ll try but I’m really not sure.

Once A Year…

You should check your credit report.  It is now free to view your credit report one time each year.  There are three different credit bureaus that report on everyone.  You’ll want to view all three reports, or you should.  Since we can only view the reports one time per year I print ours’ and keep them on file.  That’s probably not necessary but it makes me feel better.  Brian pointed out that it was probably a waste of a lot of paper since each report is 10-20 pages.

The official site to check all 3 reports is www.annualcreditreport.com.

The main thing you’re looking for is any activity that is not accurate.  Everything on ours’ looked good.  I did catch a JCPenney card that Brian opened to get a deal on clothes before we were together.  I remembered exactly what he bought with it because on one of our first dates he told me he went shopping and bought some new clothes.  I even remember the shirt he was wearing that day and that I thought it was so cute that he wore something new to take me out.  Of course he didn’t know what I was talking about.  I guess you can tell who’s the sentimental one.  Anyway, he doesn’t have the card anymore but the account is still open so he’ll have to call and close it.

The free reports don’t give a credit score.  I would be really curious about ours’ although I’m fairly confident they are good.  It won’t matter since we don’t plan on going in debt anymore unless we get the chance to buy more acreage at a good price, which is pretty much not going to happen.

I have noticed that the number of credit card offers we get has really dropped off.  It’s sad that credit card companies target college students so much.  Maybe they are starting to realize that no means no means go away.

In other financial news, we have to pay our property taxes next month.  We’ve been putting aside money for the last few months.  I can’t put into words how good it feels to have the money sitting there instead of having to use up our paychecks and do nothing else next month.  We’ve been putting money aside for our big predictable bills, mostly insurance premiums.  On one hand it’s hard to sock that money aside instead of throwing it towards our current goal.  On the other hand, I have a much slower heartrate now when I open the bills.  There were so many times when we got lucky and got an unexpected check in the mail on the same day that a big bill came.  I like knowing that we’re not leaving it to chance anymore.

I’ll be so glad when we buy this semi trailer and start the debt snowball.  We’ve been talking about it for so long I just want to be there already, I’m tired of doing other things.  I want to see those balances going down down down!

Have you checked your credit?  Will you now?  How are things going on the $$$ homefront?  Do you set aside for big bills or take the pray-it-works-out approach?

Slave to… your job?

Dave Ramsey fans are familiar with the saying, “The borrower is slave to the lender”.  To me that paints a picture of a man hunched over pulling on chains and heavy weights.  I don’t often feel like that.

I’m not lying when I say I love my life.  Sure, a lot of days I’m frazzled or frustrated about the latest bout of dog nausea or unexpected bills.  Still, the fact that I have a comfortable home and a loving husband is not lost on me.  I’m the first to say I love where we live and treasure the memories we’re making.

If I whine about one thing very often it’s having to go to work.  Now, let me put up a disclaimer here, and not just because my co-workers might stop in: my job is pretty darn good.  I work with girls that are my friends and we actually have quite a bit of fun together.  I only have a 10-15 minutes drive and I only work about 35 hours each week.  For the most part our clients are great to work with.  I get to educate people, most of whom actually want to hear what I have to say so they can be better caretakers.  Plus, after starting out in my career not that long ago I’ve finally reached a point where I feel like I’m good at my job.  And I do feel appreciated.  My particular job is not the problem.

What gets me is that feeling I get on Sunday night when I’m in the basement hanging laundry up to dry and I’m so into peeking at the chicks hatching that I can’t imagine going to work and missing one.  When the hay is just dry enough to bale and it’s going to rain and we’re both at work because we’re scheduled there until 5 or 6 even though the storm is coming in at 4.  When the horses are out and the neighbors call and I have to go to my boss and say, “soo…”, which I also had to do that day I got to work and realized I didn’t turn off the hose that was filling the stock tank.  Or how about the 15 farm meetings we can’t go to because they’re all on Tuesday mornings.

What gets me is not that I can’t do any one of those things because my employer is really great about being flexible when things are important.  What gets me… is that I HAVE to go.  It’s not like I can just stop going.  I’m no different than most people – we usually don’t have a choice.  Graduate, graduate again, get a job, work work work, retire and draw a pension (ha!).  It is not for me.  I’m not a princess and I’m not spoiled.  I don’t have a complex.  I just don’t think that’s how it should be.

I’ll pull out the blame-my-parents card on this one.  My Dad hated his job when I was little so he quit and started his own business.  That’s how it was for most of my childhood.  He could schedule around us and during the summer I could go to work with him if I wanted.  It was fun.  Granted, I was a kid, but I think my Dad liked it too.  My Mom had a normal job working for someone else but she only worked weekends so she was home with us all week.  There was none of this 9 to 5 crap for me growing up.

Did anyone else read Little House on the Prairie as a kid and think it warped them?  I can’t help but feel like THAT is the way life should be.  I’d rather grow my food and take care of my family directly than go to work to earn $$$ to pay for groceries with ingredients that I can’t pronounce.  I know not everyone shares my thoughts on this.  Some people are passionate it about their jobs, love being there, would hate to do anything else.  That’s great for them, and I’m certainly glad we have people like that out there working.

In case this post isn’t very clear, let me give you another example of that feeling I get about work that I’m trying to describe.  I used to drive horse carriages in Frankenmuth.  At the end of the night we fed all the horses and swept up the barn.  I couldn’t wait to get the heck out of there and go to bed!  Tonight Brian and I were out in the barn doing chores.  We doled out hay and grain to everyone.  I collected eggs (we got 9!) and hung around watching the sheep eat, checking their udders.  Even though I was still in my scrubs and my shoes were wet I didn’t want to go in.  I guess it’s just different when it’s your project.

Where do you stand?  Are you good with where you are and what you’re doing or do you dream of something else?

Menu Plan Monday

You know something works when your husband asks you to do it, i.e. Brian has been saying all week, “Will you plllleassee make a menu plan!?”  He likes it because he gets home first and it helps to get dinner going.  So here goes… this time I made up the plan for part of next week too.  Brian will be gone the end of next week so the plan stops when he leaves.  I can totally slip into cereal for dinner if it’s just me.

Monday: Baked Tilapia w/ fried rice (something like this tilapia recipe)

Tuesday: Chicken Fingers w/ homemade mac n’ cheese

Wednesday: Cowboy Calzones

Thursday: Garlic Chicken in the crockpot w/ noodles

Friday: Pizza w/ breadsticks (using leftover calzone dough)

Saturday: Chicken Sandwiches w/ chips

Sunday: Tilapia in crockpot w/ mashed potatoes

Monday: Porcupines (I change up the recipe but that gives you the idea)

Tuesday: Ham slices w/ potato balls

Alot of my recipes this week came from Tiffany’s Eat at Home.  She’s always full of good ideas.  Also visit Menu Plan Monday for more inspiration!

Chick Pics and Setting More

The chicks are doing great.  I moved them to the brooder after about 38 hours in the bator (for the oldest ones).  They are super vigorous and healthy, I am thrilled!

I don’t know if you can see it in the pics at all but they are already getting some little feather on the tips of their wings.  One had a little poop stuck to it’s butt so I soaked it with a warm, wet wash cloth and pulled most of that off.  All six are healthy, eating and drinking, and sleeping a lot.  I raised their heat lamp a little bit because they were crowded at the far end and obviously too hot.  Now they are moving around comfortably although a thermometer right under the lamp is only reading just over 90 degrees F.  I usually start them at 99 and go down gradually but if they’re happy, I’m happy.

I set 24 more eggs in the bator tonight!  This could definitely be addicting.  I’m hoping for a better hatch rate this time since I stored all the eggs at room temperature, in egg cartons, and tipped them a couple times each day by putting a canning jar ring under one side of the cartons.

Oh, I almost forgot… I let the bator run with the last 4 eggs in it until late last night.  When I took the chicks out I let the eggs go for another 8 hours or so then I figured they were duds so I candled them.  One of the eggs peeped at me.  I put them all back in the bator right away and hoped he would hatch.  He never even pipped the shell so I finally opened up all 4 eggs last night.  2 eggs just had yolks and maybe some very early development.  The other 2 had fully developed chicks inside but they were both dead.  I think they must have gotten stuck from the loss of humidity when I opened the bator and took the chicks out and then opened it and candled them.  I guess next time I’ll wait longer if the chicks are doing okay in there, and I’ll grab them out quick and then not open the bator again for a few days.  I really thought the eggs all had plenty of time to hatch but I guess not.  It was so sad to see those two chicks that never got to come out but I’m glad to have the 6 that did.  I guess incubating is a learning experience just like anything else!

We’ve Got Chicks!

I’m sorry the picture quality is so poor – it’s hard to get good pictures inside the incubator.  Yesterday 4 eggs had pipped before I went to bed.  Pipping is when they peck at the inside of the shell a bit and you can see a crack in that spot.  Brian got called in to work at 4:30 this morning and woke me up to tell me that we had 2 chicks!  When I got up again at 7 there were 3!  Then, when I came home from work tonight we had a total of 5.  Now I’m sitting next to the incubator typing this and watching #6 hatch.  So far I don’t see any pips from the remaining 4 eggs so this might be it.

If you’re serious about wanting to hatch chicks I suggest you check out the BYC forum (it’s on my sidebar).  That’s were I learned everything I know about the topic, and only in the last month or so.  Right now I can see a logistics problem.  This time I didn’t have many hatch out of the original 24.  I’m hoping that’s because so many of the eggs came out of the refrigerator.  However, if I had even 15 or 20 eggs hatch I think they would be pretty crowded in the Brinsea incubator.  It holds 24 eggs fine but when they start hatching they would be all over each other.  You aren’t supposed to open the bator until all the chicks are hatched so I couldn’t remove them as they hatched.

I am very happy with the incubator and still think it was the best choice for me.  I’m thinking if this works out and I start hatching a lot that maybe another bator would be good to use for hatching.  That way I could put in new eggs every 3 days if I wanted, in the Brinsea, and then just pull out the ones ready for hatching and move them to the other one.  I’ll have to see what I can find.

#6 is almost out now!  It is pretty amazing – oh now he’s out!  What a cute little bugger.  He’s peep-peep-peeping.  His butt is stuck in his egg.  Picture someone falling in a toilet, for lack of a better description.  Aww, I think I’m in love. <3

We’ll wait and see if anymore show signs of hatching.  If not I’ll take the chicks out tomorrow after work and move them to the brooder.  More (and better) pics coming soon!

I’m still here, and a list of excuses

They’re not really excuses I guess,  just the truth about what’s been taking up all my time lately!

My routine is all messed up. I usually get up a little before 7, clean the house  and do my general housework until about 8:30 or so, eat breakfast while blogging, then do chores and go to work.  This is the second week now that the builder and the electrician have both been here.  The builder shows up about 8 so I’ve been trying to do chores early – I don’t mind the builder but I miss my alone time in the barn.  It is a nice way to start the day.  Then the electrician shows up at 8:30 ish so I lose my privacy in the house and usually my power too, i.e. my ability to make breakfast and blog.  Plus, I’ve spent a good chunk of each morning rearranging whatever room they are going to wire next so they can get to the walls.  That leads me too…

I decided to paint. Our office is the only room downstairs that I haven’t painted and it was pretty drab.  Since I had all the furniture pulled to the middle of the room already I bought paint.  I did the ceiling last night and am going to start the walls this morning.  More about this in a seperate post.

The chicks are due to hatch. Does anyone remember me writing about sitting in my closet watching my seedlings grow, and Brian making fun of me?  Yeah, an incubator in your basement is sort of like that.  Since my incubator comes back up to temperature super quick I have let myself candle the eggs a few times.  Candling is where you shine a flashlight through them to see how they look inside.  This last weekend I broke open 14 eggs that looked empty – and they were.  I’m not surprised considering I pulled about 2/3 of the eggs for this hatch out of the fridge, not the ideal storage environment.  The good news is that 10 eggs are still cooking and all have some sort of dark mass in them.  I even saw movement in a few of them which thrilled me.  They’re due to hatch tomorrow so we’ll see if any do!

I filed the madness. Remember my great basket system for dealing with paperwork?  It does work great except once in awhile I should actually file the “to be filed” basket.  I haven’t done it in so long that we had 2 paper grocery bags crammed in the office with papers to be filed plus another basket full.  It took me all day on Saturday to get that organized.  Everything from previous years is put away and the file cabinet is all ready for 2010 papers.  Plus I balanced the checkbook again and moved some things around.  I found our “doing business as” (dba) paperwork so I’m going to take that to the bank and open a business checking account.  It will cost us about $6 a month which doesn’t thrill me but it will help us seperate business and personal stuff a little bit.  Plus, when we starting selling chickens and hay this summer we can finally accept checks written to “Becker Farms”.

I guess that’s enough to let me off the hook, eh?  I’ve still been sneaking around reading most of your blogs so I can stay in the loop.  I’ll be around a little more once this crazy week is over!

2010 Seed Order

• Old Homestead Bean (Kentucky Wonder Pole)
• Tendercrisp Celery
• Black Aztec Sweet Corn
• True Gold Sweet Corn
• Long Purple Eggplant
• Yellow of Parma Onion
• Tall Telephone Garden Pea (2)
• Big Month Tomato
• Amish Paste Tomato
• Jersey Giant Tomato
• Rutgers Tomato
• Purple Podded Pole Bean
• Arikara Sunflower

All ordered through Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds at rareseeds.com.

We’re in the Foothills

That’s the best way I can describe our current financial situation.  A lot of people compare getting out of debt to climbing a mountain.  As of Tuesday’s paycheck we will only have one more thing to save up and pay for before we can tackle that mountain.  I am so excited to be at this place!

I tried to explain things in our money story.  We have two sources of income: regular income from our jobs, and irregular income from the farm.  When the farm gets random checks it is so tempting to throw them at our debt.  However, that would be a really bad idea.  When bills come in for seed, fertilizer, or land rent we need to have the cash to pay them so we don’t take on more debt.  So a lot of the farm income needs to be set aside for those things.

Besides predictable expenses we also needed to cash flow any improvements.  The electrician starts on our house rewire tomorrow morning (he had to reschedule last week due to an injury) and the builder plans to have our new barn finished this week or next.  We were very fortunate to have Brian’s Mom gift us some money to use on the rewiring project, we just have to cover the difference.  That’s what Tuesday’s paycheck will do: finish paying those guys.  It feels so good to pull in the driveway and see that new barn out there and know it’s completely paid for.

The next and final improvement we’re saving for is a semi trailer.  We got a once in a lifetime deal on the semi tractor and last year we were lucky enough to have a friend loan us trailers to pull behind it.  Having our own trailer(s) is very important because we need them in the fall when everyone else is using their own.  If we can’t find any to borrow we’ll be stuck relying on friends to haul our grain.  Starting this week any extra income will go straight in the bank for a trailer.  Our goal is to purchase one by early to midsummer for the wheat harvest, or by fall at the latest.

The sooner we knock out the trailer the sooner we start paying extra on our debt.  Depending on how the harvest goes we might, just MIGHT, be debt free before 2011.  I’m going to drift off and dream about being in that place…

How are things going in your financial life?  Do you feel like you’re in control and heading in a good direction?  Any encouraging words?  Any specific questions or information that would help you?