Managing a sixty acre farm with four buildings on it is no small job at any time, especially when you’re a loner on your farm like Jim is. He relies on local guys to fill in what he can’t do, so he’s always got odd jobs he’s farming out.

Jimmy is a local guy who was employed in huge construction projects until the bottom fell out of the economy. He now does freelance work, putting in regular hours for Jim in building the Big House or doing whatever odd jobs might come up.

Over the course of a week or so down at “our” house, Jim and Jimmy spent time cleaning the windows, raking leaves off the roof, moving a big gas barbecue and old refrigerator that had been ensconced in our view, fixing the lights, cleaning fallen logs, stacking split wood, along with whatever else needed doing.

Jim has a high-suspension diesel pick-up, an all-terrain vehicle, and a medium tractor as his farm vehicles. Monday through Friday are busier days, but no day is sacred as a day off for Jim.

We never know when we’ll see the big orange tractor rolling down the hill, see the red of the ATV flashing through the trees as it climbs up the trail from the bottoms, or hear the big diesel rumble as the Ford F350 approaches.

We do know it won’t be after four, as “happy hour” is sacred for Jim. So no matter how early Jim gets started in the mornings, we know we won’t see him after three-thirty or four unless we walk up to the Big House.

For the first few weeks we kept a close eye out for Jim. Who knew what interesting thing he’d be doing next? We wanted to be there taking photos and learning about it.

During those weeks Chelsea learned how to drive the ATV. Her big accomplishment was driving it from the Big House all the way down the hill to the bottoms and back up again.

She also got a chance to drive the tractor when she and Jim transported the seedlings, and one morning Jim co-opted Chelsea into mowing his lawn at the bottoms, using Pat’s driving lawn mower.

In the early days it was too cold to sit outside much, though we’d borrowed two folding wood deck chairs from Pat the very first day. Since we had no couch or comfy chair inside, we used those wood folding chairs as our recliners, reading and watching movies in them. They were so close to the ground we didn’t even need a table.

Hot Tub Move

Then as the weather got nicer we’d squeeze the chairs onto the deck in what space was left after the hot tub took its share of the deck. Early on we’d at least cleaned up the junk on the hot tub cover, then Jim threw the cover away.

While it looked nicer without the cover, we had the mosquito larva capital of the area when it rained and the tub filled with water. Jim kept promising to haul it away, but never promised a time. We’d (well, I would) remind him softly and very infrequently, but the hot tub stayed and we periodically bailed the rain water out.

Then came the glorious day, in fact it was Cinco de Mayo, when Jim showed up early with the tractor. Less than two hours later, with Chelsea snapping endless photos, he’d loaded the hot tub onto the palette forks of the tractor, hauled it up the hill, and deposited it carefully onto a waiting trailer.

Not only did we ride up the hill on the tractor with Jim carefully balancing the hot tub, but I got to sit at the controls of the tractor as Jim readied the trailer, and we had that front porch of ours swept off and our deck chairs out there in a heartbeat after returning home.

Big House

Construction on the main house was off and on. We’d hear men calling back and forth, the sound of loud saws, the clang or thunk as big things hit the floor, the occasional yell of pain or frustration, the radio cranked up loud over the noise.

The work schedule was entirely unpredictable. We might hear work for several days in a row, then it might be a week or more before we heard anything. We always had to assume, however, that someone was up there.

The locals tell us that this area runs on “mountain time”. Tomorrow is always coming; maybe it’ll get done tomorrow. It sounds like “island time” in Florida.

Hanging around Jim is always good for stories, often about the misadventures in building the house, usually with the theme of what the “workers” did lately.

We heard about Jimmy smashing Jim’s fingers, from both Jim and later Jimmy.

We heard about the time Jimmy was feeding the pipe through the wall, not aware that Jim was on the other side ready to help. When Jim didn’t see the pipe coming through he put his eye to the hole.

Unfortunately for both of them, it was just at the moment that Jimmy shoved the pipe through the hole. Jim reported later, “It like to near pinned me against the stud, almost made me a uney-corn”.

Food

Meanwhile we figured out how to go food shopping and cook our meals. We are at least eight miles away from the nearest town which is down a steep hill on a busy local main highway.

There is, however, a new Dollar General about three miles away, useful for emergencies. It’s so well stocked the locals call it “the mall”.

Since we always had to catch a ride, we learned to stock up and have a strict menu plan. If we ran out, we weren’t going to replace things easily. I had a master shopping list and could have it ready to go quicker n’ a wink if need be.

As always in situations like this we came up with some wonderful additions to our repertoire. We found incredible breads down at Ingles, the major store in Walhalla. We made trips to Wal-Mart in Seneca or Clayton, Georgia when we got the chance.

We cooked everything from scratch. Breakfast was something simple like our protein shakes with Ingles bread, toasted with garlic. When our protein powder ran out, we had coffee and Silk double-chocolate almond milk. It became a ritual with us, bringing back memories of having coffee and biscuits with Miss JoAnn in Oak Grove.

We made our spaghetti sauce and casseroles and stews from scratch. We soaked and cooked our beans from scratch. We made our own tamari almonds and added a handful them to our coffee-and-toast breakfasts.

We had so few dishes that cooking and cleanup was easy. The kitchen was spotless every night.

Ingles really shocked us. So many factors about this area scream “isolated and remote”, but the stores belie that. We think it’s the influx of influence from the major cities nearby like Atlanta, Georgia and Asheville and Charlotte in North Carolina.

Ingles is a combination of Whole Foods, Albertson’s and Publix. The bakery was good, the produce was excellent, and how often can you find a thirty-two ounce bottle of Bragg’s amino acids in the local grocery store? Okay, maybe in Oregon and Washington, but not in most of the South.

Lots of farm-fresh and organic choices were offered, the international section was excellent, and the beer/wine/juices area was well stocked with a wide range of offerings.

We’ll really miss their sun dried tomato bread. Unfortunately for our budget, their prices reflected the premium offerings.

Keeping Up, Spiders and Scorpions

We kept up with photo records of our activities, I kept up with notes for the blogs, and we got our gear and clothes situation moved forward.

Though we’d been on a beautiful ride in Gueydan, we hadn’t spent much time on the bikes, so Chelsea spent a day getting the bikes ready to ride. It felt great to be ready.

Chelsea ordered an inexpensive set of UV filters and macro filters for her camera. She’s had a ball practicing different shots and getting to know how they work.

We learned that we have wolf spiders and that they may be in our clothes or in our towels. We found a four-incher on our toiletries kit in the bathroom the second day we were here.

We’ve killed six scorpions so far. They are long suckers, at least three inches, and it’s a bit unnerving to get close enough to smack it with it a shoe when the stinger is up and cocked for action. Chelsea is thrilled that they don’t fly.

I can handle them when I can see them cross the floor, but I got a bad startle one morning as I shook out our dirty clothes prepping them for laundry. I checked pockets and zippers and ties, and as I did so, something dark hit the floor under me. I bent to get it and discovered it was a large black angry scorpion.

I took a few deep breaths and held the clothes farther away from me every time I prepped laundry after that.

Chickens

We have eight chickens to care for daily. Caring for them means feeding and watering them once a day, collecting their eggs daily, and letting them up out of the coop shortly before dusk to roam for an hour, then making sure all eight are back in the coop safely by dark.

We save leftovers for them. We feed and water them. We let them roam. They give us eggs.

For awhile there we were getting overwhelmed with eggs. Jim wasn’t taking them from us as fast as we were collecting them, and no way could we ever eat that many eggs. We had to sort them into cartons and we didn’t have cartons.

Finally after asking for help we got our backlog of eggs decreased mightily and our stock of egg cartons increased successfully.

From then on we got smart and put whatever full cartons we had in Jim’s laundry basket downstairs. Since he faithfully came over to do laundry twice a week at least, we stayed on top of things.

Collecting the eggs was an experience. Chelsea loved getting the still-warm eggs. She was always entertained by where she’d find them.

She did not enjoy dealing with the chicken coop. Chickens are very dusty creatures in my observations, and since they poop prodigiously it seemed to us that the cage should be cleaned more frequently than it was.

By the time we left, the chickens were wandering on a two-foot high shelf of poop mixed in with two hay bales that had been added over time. Jim knew it was time to clean the cage when we were boxing up eggs daily covered with poop.

He got Jimmy and the tractor over one afternoon and by happy hour they had dug the nitrogen-rich poop-fertilizer down to reasonable levels and carried it in the tractor bucket off to the Big House. Jimmy did the digging and Jim did the tractoring.

After we checked out the results that night (and locked up the egg-collecting door the guys had left open), Chelsea commented, “Look Mom, the chickens shrank!” Instead of being perched up on a two-foot mound, only their heads were now visible over the coop’s door.

My office and our bedroom overlook the chicken shed so I saw the chickens for hours every day. Every day they’d get going for an often lengthy and always loud cackling session, sometimes more than once. Chelsea called my office a front row seat to the chicken symphony.

We thoroughly enjoyed watching the chickens. They each had a distinct personality. Watching them run, hop and skip across the yard was hilarious.

One evening every one of the eight suddenly scattered like a shot, running frantically for the bushes. When fifteen minutes or more went by with no sightings, I alerted Chelsea and we headed out on a chicken hunt.

Clearly something had frightened them. Within minutes we found them huddling under heavy brush, all eight of them clustered together silent as could be. With just a few encouraging “chick-chicks”, they wandered out.

I was astonished, but the chickens managed to escape only twice while Chelsea was feeding them or putting them away. We learned early that they’d always go in by themselves at eight-thirty or just before, so generally things were easy at night.

The mornings were the dodgy time when Chelsea was feeding and watering them. She could never get them in by herself if they escaped, so I resignedly got my shoes on and headed out when they’d evade her persuasions.

Now I can add corralling escaped chickens to my resume.

Cell Phone, No Internet

Chelsea wasn’t kidding when she said we’d walked through the looking glass and cell phone reception wasn’t great here.

I cannot possibly talk about our time here without bringing up the cell phone and internet signal, or rather the lack of it. Remember I said that Gueydan was our first level of disconnect from the twenty-four/seven high-speed DSL environment?

Being here has been like pulling the plug.

There’s no internet at all up here and cell phone signal is iffy. A local guy reputedly does day-trading on a dial-up internet connection.

Pat stepped into the breach for us and got us set up with some kind of cell phone signal booster on a very tall tower above the porch at our house. It saved our lives, at least until the clouds would roll in with the daily storms. Then all bets were off.

If I sat in one spot in the bedroom I could carry on a phone conversation, but the minute I’d move, the signal would be chopped up.

Loading the weather channel on our Droids took so long we’d finish a chapter on the Kindle before we’d get to the home page. I’m not making that up.

Loading something high-graphics like the weather map page took a lot of time, a lot of cell phone battery, and lot of patience.

We could get texts and emails out with reasonable speed, but couldn’t get any attachments like photos.

That was the good news.

The bad news was that we had no internet at all, other than the paltry bit we could occasionally get from our Droids. Pat’s internet was iffy at best and Jim is almost violently against the electronic age, so he was out as a source.

After a month or so, Pat finally bit the bullet and found a good satellite provider that offered reasonable speeds at okay prices.

Now all we need to do to get internet is pack up all our cables, plugs, mice (mouses?), laptops, pen drives, mouse pads, external hard drives, keyboards, notebooks and pens with to-do lists, Kindles, snacks, water bottles, and whatever else we need for that day.

We have a backpack system, so we throw the backpacks over our shoulders and head down that rutted dirt road I told you about, the one with the steep hill and rain-induced furrows, the one that runs through the woods down to the bottoms.

On arrival we set up our laptops in Pat’s man cave/computer room. When we are finished we pack everything up again and hike up the hill this time, careful not to slip on the packed leaves and often muddy dirt.

I’ll bet you’re not surprised that we are ruthlessly organized when we head down, and that our “internet days” are lengthy and oh so tiring.

Did I mention the great cardio and calf exercise we get hiking the hills?