It's Worse Than We Hoped...

Colonel’s Blog, Earthdate 11 October 2024…

Hey Y’all!

Good evening and happy Fast-jet Friday from Air2Ground Farms! The fast jet today is the Mighty-Mighty F-15E Strike Eagle. I decided to show you a different angle today. Welcome to the business side of things! The weather is DRY and unseasonably warm. The grass is not growing and we are feeding hay regularly at this point. Unfortunately, this is our winter hay. Hopefully it rains soon! The big farm news this week is that we finally made it to the Sports Medicine orthopedic folks to get Shelley checked out. They immediately put her in for an MRI, which happened within a couple of hours and they read it within another hour. It is worse than we hoped. She has a completely torn in half ACL and MCL with a fracture at the top of her shin bone. Our government Tricare insurance is rooted in standard government bureaucracy so we had to pay out of pocket to get her knee immobilizing brace because we didn’t have a referral to the place that provides the knee brace since it takes 3 weeks and we found out we needed it about 3 hours prior. We’re now waiting on the referral from our primary care doc to get through to the orthopedic surgeon so she can get a consult to find out when we can schedule surgery. The break requires her knee to be immobile for 6-8 weeks. The MCL surgery typically is a 4-6 week recovery and the ACL surgery is typically a 4-6 month recovery with 9-12 months before being good as new. We were not surprised by the diagnosis, given the gruesome sight when it happened but we were certainly hoping for something a bit less severe. Needless to say, we’ve been doing some deep thinking about where to go with things with the farm and store. We’ve been very careful to scale things at the farm so that the 2 of us can get everything done. When we added the store 5 days a week, that stretched us really thin. So, where does that leave us? My parents have an RV at the end of our barn and come over to visit and help from time to time throughout the year. They let us know that they will be forwarding their mail to our house and will be spending most of their time here while Shelley is down. Our oldest daughter, Rebekah, just happened to schedule her last day of work at Walmart for today. She is going to sell Mary Kay and manage our store, as well as take over the dairy portion of the farm. Also, Makaylah has stepped up and is a HUGE help getting things done. Our YouTube video for this coming up Sunday will be about resilience and friends and family helping out when things get rough.

The second pic is Tex, the registered pure Berkshire boar hog with a few of the piglets bravely eating Tex’s food. The next 2 pics are our new Jersey calf. Artie had a boy and they both are doing very well. We’ve decided to name him Griz since Griz named Artie! We also received 60 new layer chicks in the mail today. Makaylah, dad, and I set one of the brooders back up and got them settled. We got them now so that by spring they will be old enough to start laying. We bought a white breed that lays extra-large brown eggs. Last year’s layers are red so we will be able to sort out who we need to cull next fall. Dad and I worked with a few of the piglets today. We separated the oldest 5 from the breeder herd, castrated the male, and put them in a weaning/training pen. Shelley has been going to the store this week and either mom or Makaylah has gone with her to help carry things. Bottom line, it’s worse than we hoped, but it’s going to be ok.

Last Sunday’s video was a nostalgic look at my meme’s homemade ice cream recipe and how we adjusted it to be a sugar-free ketogenic recipe. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fh24SHt9wg

Thursday’s Dust’er Mud Podcast was about McDonald’s suing the big 4 beef producers for price-fixing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkdLR_0fGuQ

Cheers!


Psycho & Shelley