Endorphins Make You Happy

After I spent fifteen minutes exercising last night, I woke up today in such a cheerful frame of mind, I couldn't help but think, "Exercise gives you endorphins. Endorphins make you happy. Happy people just don't shoot their husbands. They just don't!" (from the marvelous Legally Blonde, in case you missed the reference)

I was pleased that my first T-Tapp "Basic Workout Plus" was not as brutal as I remembered; the shaky legs of past first workouts didn't materialize. I love that I get a comprehensive workout in fifteen minutes. And I'm especially pleased that I felt like I had fifteen minutes to dedicate to my own health and well-being.

That was good.

What is not so good is that I've been missing promptings lately. I would say they are from the Holy Spirit, but Phil thinks that might be a bit much, so maybe I should just say intuition. Like on Monday: I called to place my feed order for the month, so that it would be delivered near our house on Tuesday morning. As we finished the conversation, I thought, "I should ask him to repeat the order." But I didn't, and we'd never had a problem before.

Tuesday morning, I woke up and noticed that my phone was dead. I thought, "I should really plug that in," but I wanted to read my Bible, and the charger was in the motor home. I didn't really want to leave the house with sleeping boys, and couldn't think of any compelling reason to plug the phone in. Who would call before 8am anyway?

Sadly, our delivery guy was running an hour early, and did call before 8am, and again a bit after 8. By the time my phone was working, he had made our delivery at the regular drop point: not a short 8 minutes to the top of the drive, but a good twenty, in the next town up.

And the most important of all feeds somehow got dropped. The five bags of pig feed simply didn't make the invoice. I asked for them, but my phone reception isn't always great (someone wondered if it was the tree foliage, blocking the signal), so I didn't fully communicate what I needed. Which meant that Phil had an extra hour of drive time today. So he had to drive all that way, and we paid $20 for the delivery. What a waste.

I hate it when I'm not listening to the Holy Spirit (or my intuition)! I hate it! It makes a bad situation seem so much worse, because I could have prevented it. Bah!

And poor Phil. We'd bought ice cream at Whole Foods for my Dad's visit (which we didn't actually eat while he was here—sorry, Dad). Phil had a moderate amount on Monday and woke on Tuesday just not feeling so great. But by the evening, it wore off, and he had another moderate amount. By this morning, he was pretty sick. No more ice cream for him. (And the ingredient list wasn't even a bad one: the Tara gum and natural vanilla flavor were the only things somewhat questionable, although I suppose the cream and milk was not hormone-free, and the sugar may have come from GM beets; still, it didn't have corn products. I wouldn't have thought he would get sick.)

Despite not feeling well, he managed to build lovely shelves in our metal barn, using scrap wood from a friend's construction site. The unopened bags of feed have a handy place to rest, and we have gained a bit more floor space with the new, floor-to-ceiling shelves.

Also, our chickens had dropped production by half the last two weeks: rather than two dozen a day, we were getting maybe 12 or 13. I figured they were hiding their eggs in the woods, but after Abraham and I looked and didn't even see much evidence of chicken scratching, let alone 12 dozen eggs, I wondered if Phil's hypothesis (too hot to lay) was correct.

It certainly may be: after a second day, yesterday, in the 80s, we had 20 eggs.

Finally, perhaps a note best skipped by the squeamish. On Monday night, we processed Chrystal until a bit after 1am: gutting, skinning, and so on. She had the most incredible layer of yellow fat I've ever seen on a ruminant. (I know where all our hay was going!) We filled two five-gallon buckets with her innards, and at that point, we weren't sure that what was left was worth keeping. There wasn't much. She certainly wasn't a meat goat.

The next morning, we gave one bucket of entrails to the pigs. They went for the fat right away. (I would have, too. Wow, was it a beautiful yellow!) The second bucket, though, the one with liver and kidneys and other such "high vitamin" organs, they weren't interested in. I'm a bit mystified by that. Oh, well. Our compost pile will happily accept whatever they don't eat.