Becoming a Man.

Y’ALL I SMOKED A BRISKET.

Lemme walk you through it because it is a lot. 

You exist, Reader.  Right? 
RIGHT?

Ok, so.  Last weekend we did Passover at my house, which I’m sure you know about, Reader, because you totally actually exist and care very deeply about my life and my posts.  

20 people coming over for a big involved dinner, and I decided smoked brisket made sense as a life choice even though I have never smoked anything, I don’t have the equipment, and I could totally have just baked chicken thighs…or honestly scrambled eggs, or ordered take out; so long as people eat they’re happy; the world was my oyster.  And in the oyster of my world, I decided smoking a brisket was definitely the most best choice and also probably going to be fine.

Step one here is that brisket is a traditional Passover dish, but I didn’t want the traditional brisket I’ve eaten at other Passovers.  Smoked brisket is super delicious and for me, there really is no comparison. 

So step two, I turn to the internet.

The internet, it turns out, has a lot of respect for a smoked brisket.  There are upwards of one thousand million website shrines dedicated to the art and science, the spiritual journey, the rite of passage, the magic and mystery of smoking The Perfect Brisket.  Most of them revolve around how manly it is…or at least how part of the pay off is how much of a man you get to feel like when your 

Brisket is the Axe Body Spray
 of the culinary world

tender, juicy brisket melts in the mouths of, I can only assume, hordes of adoring ladies and their suddenly jealous, shaken men.  It appears to be the food of all foods by which your depths of strength, virility, and resolve are tested and found true—or lacking.  It is the culinary equivalent of being calm in a burning house; it is menfolks’s equivalent to the perfect dessert or just hosting the party in the first place.

So the internet told me.  Again, I don’t know how to smoke things.  My grilling experience is limited to the first food service job I had at 14, Nick’s Charcoal Grill, which used a real grill, and….nope, we’re done, really that’s it.  But every time I pan cook a steak I set the fire alarm off, and that’s smoke, so I figured I’m half way there. 

For the second half, as I said, I went to the internet, and v quickly learned of the importance of proper equipment.  This consists of a grill thermometer, which you should buy because apparently built-in ones are garbage.  Also you should have a bad ass grill, which men around the nation already know is as important to have in your house as toilet paper.

 

Garbage                                       Money                              Wizard

We do not have that grill.  We have _a_ grill.  It is not that that grill.  

It is…I think the technical term is dinky, but certainly fine and has been the centerpiece of countless backyard burger frenzies (I mean our grill doesn’t even have a built-in thermometer but I promise you Reader, no one has died yet at a cookout here).  The internet informed me that this lack was surmountable and if successful, my character would def level up, but I’d be at a -5 and I might not make it back from this adventure.

And wood chips and charcoal, and OBVIOUSLY a charcoal chimney, WHO DOESN’T USE A CHARCOAL CHIMNEY, that shouldn’t even need to be listed in equipment because if you’ve made it this far you have 

Are you taking this seriously?

OBVIOUSLY ALREADY GOT A CHARCOAL CHIMNEY.  Also, you shouldn’t even be using charcoal, except to start, because wood smoke tastes better.  But wood chips are fine in a pinch if you really insist on not taking any of this seriously.

And, of course, the brisket itself.  So I go to the Kroger, and, as I mentioned I’m doing all this for Passover, so I need to hit the butcher up anyway because I need a lamb shank bone (if you’re not Jewish, Google it.).  My Kroger, as I have never noticed before, has a really pithy butcher.  I mean, there’s a meat section, but the butcher is more of a suggestion than a practical accessory, and that butcher’s suggestion is, “why don’t you go buy some of our other prepackaged meat?”.

So I go to Publix, and they have a better butcher.  I say, as I have said to every chain grocery butcher since time immemorial except when I was on the remote, rural farm, or in Madagascar, “hey, I need a lamb shank bone.”  Every other grocer has said, “M’kay, cool, here,” and handed me a packaged bone left over from, I assume, deboning a lamb shank and saving the bone because Passover is coming up and for Passover, having a lamb shank bone is totally a thing (Did you Google it?).  The cost has been no monies. 

But this guy, he says, “….What?” 

He tried to sell me these.
These are not what I want.

This begins a whole back and forth where I realize how nonexistent the Jewish population is in the area of town where I live, and also that I’m going to have to buy a lamb shank.  Like, a real one, that you would get for dinner.  They have a $23 version but I don’t need a leg of lamb, I need a bone. So I get the $5 version and honestly, I don’t know or care enough to tell you if it is like more of a lamb ankle?  Or maybe the shank is the ankle?  Or maybe it’s like a sad disabled lamb?  Or whatever.  Five bucks.  I’ll eat some lamb, I think I’ll make it.

Then I say, I need a brisket.  The briskets that they have are only the flat, not the point.  (If you don’t know what that means, Reader, I will explain: It means “go google how to smoke a brisket and you will learn an amount of meat lore you were not prepared for that will enrich your life in ways you can’t even imagine or in fact care very much about.)  So I have to buy 2 because I need ten pounds of meat to feed the absurd number of people I am having over, plus a lamb….something, it has a bone in it…and I’m ready to go.

This post is so long.
I mean seriously, Reader, we're not even half way there.

Ten pounds of flat brisket is large, and I have a passing thought for how big the grill itself actually is and if this is even feasible, but I basically decide we’ve gone too far so we are just going to have to figure this out, I’m sure you can stack them, it’s fine.  I buy all of the meat.

So the day before Passover, I’m looking at all my spoils.  I need to eat that lamb, because I need that bone.  I am going to smoke two square feet of brisket on a two-and-a-liiiiiitle square foot grill.  “Andy” is gone, I’m in this by myself, and everyone arrives in about 30 hours.  Deep breath time.

I decide to practice run smoking something in our grill- and I mean, I gotta cook that lamb so—smoked lamb it is!  I have, by this time, purchased the wood chips, the charcoal (boooo, hisssss, use wooooood) and the grill thermometer.  Smoking the lamb seemed like a good choice for the day before my brisket event—and it was.  I will not run you though all the steps, because if you are here, you also have the internet, but I will highlight some important learning moments. 

...the internal temperature
....is declining....

First, everything takes forever longer than it should.  I assume once you are a Wizard, your built up wisdom and lore helps you to truly know your grill, fire, and meat on a molecular level I can only begin to imagine.  But seriously, if you ever do this, give yourself more time than you think—like allll the more time.

Second, def get the grill thermometer, I am not a wizard, how else could mere mortal people know what temp the inside of their smokey, smokey grill is?

Third, I apologize for my snide tone about the charcoal chimney—I get it now.  The fire needs to burn, as mentioned above, foreeeeevvvvvver.  That means your charcoal burns out way before the meat is done and you need to add more to maintain the heat.  All the websites (that I 

Science!

assume you have open in other tabs by this point) are very loud about how your Grill Integrity is critical, you keep it closed as much as possible to retain the heat and smoke.  The temp needs to be as consistent as possible (so leave it closed) and throwing new charcoal on it is bad.  New charcoal catches fire, which is necessary for getting from the charcoal you start with to the charcoal you want.  But the fire process creates more immediate heat, and much higher temperatures.  So it’s bad.  It takes like 15-20 minutes to get to the ashy red delicious charcoal of your dreams (more consistent heat). 

Enter the charcoal chimney—you can just make the charcoal you want, before you need it and more efficiently, in a contained space, and add it when it should go in.  You should do this.  It’s better.

It's better!

I do not own a charcoal chimney, and did not buy one in my prep—but in my practice run, I came to respect it’s value.

However.  I’m not going to buy a charcoal chimney, because I am a stubborn jerk and I don’t understand why I can’t build one out of tin foil.  I Googled—no one else had uploaded a successful aluminum foil chimney project, or even a failed project, or a 'lessons learned', or a 'reasons why not'….apparently it just is not done.  This is probably related to how easy it is to just go buy the thing itself.  Ok, not foil, fine (though I am still sure it would work if you really committed…).  But there were many posts on how it’s really just a tin can and those are cheap.

(Reader, YES, I know chimneys themselves are also cheap.  I know!  I KNOW.  They’re not expensive…but that’s dumb.  Idk, it just is.  It’s just a tin can.  Sure, it’s got a fancy handle and a lever and there are probably simple ones, but not at my local Home Depot day-of-my-disastrous-delicious-idea, and also it feels like buying an ergonomic $20 bagel slicer when you already have one, it’s called a knife.  Anyway, I didn’t buy one.) 

So I, in my infinite wisdom, went to Food Depot to find the biggest tin can I could find, for the least monies.  This turned out to be full of field peas, fine, who doesn’t want a side of canned field peas at their fancy brisket dinner?  Nobody.  Everyone agrees canned field peas and brisket go together like bananas and peanut butter.  Perfect.  I take that home, can-open the ends off, and get my drill.  It’s not just a tin can I need to create, it’s a tin can with ventilation holes.   (This is the point that you remind me yet again that I could also just buy this thing for, again, not very many monies, and also by the way why don’t we just own a church key can opener that can put the holes I need in the bottom of the tin can?  But we don’t.  So the drill.  Plus then I get to use a power tool, extra points for me.)

Drilling holes in the side of a tin can is not as easy as one (me) might expect, but it is also perfectly doable when you have gone this far and are a stubborn jerk and are this committed.  It gets done.  I own a charcoal chimney now.

Nailed it.

Also worth mentioning about the practice run on lamb: there are all theses little holes?  In our grill??  All the websites are very clear, you leave your top ventilation holes wide open to let the smoke out, but you closely monitor the vent holes on the side of the grill that let the air in.  They exist so that you can regulate temperature and create meat perfection.  Control of these vent holes is paramount; control of air flow into the grill is paramount.  It is the true test, Grill Integrity itself.  It is how you achieve brisket and prove your value as a man and a person breathing the air of this earth.  You can not low-and-slow without tightly controlled ventilation.

But our (sweet, dinky, pithy) grill was made more for burgers and less for next-level smoking

Nailed it again!

adventures.  There are all these holes in the grill that no one has ever noticed before (because who cares) that are screwing up my capacity to control Grill Integrity (IT TURNS OUT I CARE).  I discovered them over the course of the lamb afternoon, and plugged them very professionally with the aluminum foil I didn’t use to build a charcoal chimney. It works, it’s fine.

So I eat ok lamb (yum), learn a few things, I have a drink to get through the realization of the path I have committed to, and I go to bed.  Wake up, Sat morning, Dinner-minus-ten-hours. 

Eight am I dry rub (don’t you effing yell at me, internet, about not dry rubbing earlier.  Brisket is supposed to be delicious all by itself and an hour is rumored to be fine for dry rubbing.  I’m tired, I also

I refer you to my above picture.

made all the sides and stuff in the midst of trying to smoke lamb yesterday, I cleaned the bathroom so my guests would be happy, I hid the shame of our pile of junk mail, and I dry rubbed at eight am.  If you’re mad, die mad about it). Fire starts at 9 am.  Meat slabs, that I (size-wise) have eyeballed and strategized over how I make it work on our tiny grill without just stacking them, goes on at 10.  My chimney is perfect and I challenge you to say something against it. 

Then begins the all day wrestling match with trying to keep the temperature where it is supposed to be.  This is the part of the struggle that real people who smoke meat can relate to.  Because it is a struggle.  I mean….over 220 is bad, under 200 is also bad.  That is a very specific window.  Then a piece of charcoal or a wood chip flares up, and you don’t know it’s life, you don’t know it’s goals, you don’t (I don’t) know what it’s trying to do, but everything gets hotter in a way that makes you think “the fire is still going” but then actually means “HA HA SCREW YOU I do what I want and then I DIE!!!”.  Then you put more charcoal in cuz the temp is too low …and then it gets way high.  And then you notice the grill leaks smoke (not from the vent holes, from the lid) so you bring a 10 lb barbell out to put on the lid to weigh it down because…Idk, that seems right.  Then you notice there are more tiny holes you didn’t plug because who the hell even puts that many tiny holes in the side of a grill, nothing should be screwed in there, what is happening?  Then there is no smoke because all your plugging put the fire out…so you add your carefully chimneyed charcoal in, but then you realize the charcoal and wood already there wasn’t done it was just sleeping and now everything is at a super high temp so you pour some water on it…and Jesus God are there more tiny holes you didn’t even notice yet?! (There are.)

This went on for a while.

I just...need...to rest.

Then people came over, I decided we were as there as we were going to be, and I wrapped the meat up and put it in the microwave to “rest”.

Resting is this mythic thing that is apparently as necessary as bees to life on earth when it comes to smoking brisket.  It involves keeping the cooked brisket at an almost-but-not cooking temperature for like…no kidding two hours.  But it is different, somehow, from just keeping it cooking for two more hours at the same or slightly lesser temperature.  Why?  Because “rest”.  It is the brisket’s self-care moment, and people who know way more than me say to definitely do it, and it sounds super dumb to me but, sure, fine, whatever.  You were right about the chimney.  I’ll try it.

We ate the brisket.  A brisket I smoked, in my crappy grill, for like one hundred hours.  It was…delicious.  It was not, Reader, a brisket that a True Meat Smoking Apostle would have loved—it was tougher than it should have been.  But not too tough…and the flavor was delicious.  I even had bark (google it, non-smokers). It tasted great, the dry rub was great, the mix of dry rub and vinegar and brown beer I swabbed on it whenever I opened the grill was great.  It was lovely, everyone ate it all and had seconds, and I absolutely leveled up.  I am a wizard and a sage.  A worthy adversary.  A national treasure.  A…novice smoker, who defeated a dragon and knows (just a little bit) more than nothing and now I get to sit at the big kids table and I have Become a Man.  BOOM.

We have so many leftover field peas.

I MADE A BRISKET!!!!

Throwing a dinner party

I will absolutely sing to you
if you come to dinner.

I love having dinner parties.  I love hosting, making food for loved ones, having pseudo-structured-but-basically-hang-out-time, and inviting people I care about into my home. 

My favorite dinner party, which I have been doing for years and years now, is Passover.  I didn’t grow up with Passover, but when my dad married my step-mom, we started doing it.  It is now my favorite holiday.  There’s a big yummy dinner, there are songs and games, it’s interactive, god tells you to get drunk, and the basis of the holiday is the fight for freedom and against injustice.  It is everything I want in a holiday. 

I am step-Jewish, so it’s a little fast and loose at my house in terms of what we eat and when we actually have the Seder.  The hagguddah itself is basically a mix of things I found in other ones that I liked—I mean it’s mostly all there but if you’re super into the rules of it, this is not the Passover for you.  Also, and I don’t know if you knew this Reader, but I’m a pretty casual person.  That doesn’t mean it’s not a fancy dinner with tablecloths and flowers and all that, but the things I care about in these situations, by other people’s standards, may seem not to have the most rhyme or reason.

For example:

I know I am supposed to be the host but this is turning into a fully interactive experience with all guests being called on to support the whole.  See, I have a lot of trouble not inviting everyone to Passover.  I mean, surely there’s room, we’ll work it out, it’s fine.  I start with the assumption that 

How many people can fit in la guagua?  At least one more!
This is also true of my living room.

everyone is going to cancel anyway, and then sometimes (this time) they don’t, or do but then un-cancel, or unexpectedly have guests in town and can they come too?, and now I am having a BYO dishes and forks party.  There is a serious potential space issue happening in my house this weekend. 

  “Andy” can’t be here because he has a conference, and this is very sad but also then he doesn’t have to hyperventilate when I put all the living room furniture in the dining room and every table in the house plus 2 or 3 folding tables that friends are bringing (BYO-table and chairs too…) in the living room because it’s the only space large enough that we can all sit in.  So our fancy dinner party is going to be in the living room on folding chairs, patio furniture, and card tables…but we will totally have tablecloths. 

Homegrown carrot pictured here,
with Monster for scale.

I have these visions of crafting food out of base ingredients—like you can just make sour cream and that goes in kugel and how cool is that!   Why use the bullion cube when you can make homemade chicken stock for matzo ball soup? I grew carrots and spring onions in the garden; I am focusing on recipes that use the same.  

But also boxed wine.  I mean, lots of people are coming and you’re all supposed to have 4 glasses each, and lord knows we’re going to blow right by that little divine recommendation.  TJ’s makes a perfectly acceptable wine.  In a box.  That I will be serving.  Next to my home-grown hand crafted side dishes, served with mismatched spoons on mismatched plates but we will have fresh flowers on those tables that I made my guests bring!

Pick your battles is I guess what I am saying (loudly, and often, directly to my guests, who have so far chosen “the battle over not bringing five soup bowls is not worth the battle over suggesting paper plates,” which I have an almost pathological aversion to because: this is supposed to be a fancy dinner).

Additionally, because I make bad choices, I want to make a brisket.  Not the regular traditional Jewish brisket, which is probably traditional because once everyone sits down to seder, there’s like an hour and a half of Passover stuff before you actually eat.  So food that can be in the oven until you get to it is really ideal for this holiday.  

But I don't wanna.  I want to make a bbq smoked brisket.  People who know how to smoke things, especially a brisket, insert your sardonic laughter here.  I *don’t* know how to smoke things.  

Ima do it, though.

We have a grill, a simple dinky little not-proving-anyone’s-suburban-manhood grill, and rumor has it that can be used.  By “rumor” I mean “the internet”, which has informed me that smoking a brisket is some next level ish, a right of passage for any real man, will make common mortals into wizards and sages, and so on and so on.  So…yeah, def try that for the first time before 20 people come to your house and you’re hosting a massive, interactive event.  Perfect!

I'm the one at the top.  Obviously.                                                

At the end of the day, with the mismatched tables, tablecloths, plates, wine glasses (BYO that too), flowers stolen from the abandoned area next to the Dollar Tree or plucked out of the front yard to spruce up the place, and ample boxed wine, I get to do my favorite holiday event with a lot of wonderful people.  It’ll all be fine.  If we end up ordering pizza it’ll just be all the more memorable.  

Happy Spring everyone!!

 

Things that live in my house

"Andy"

I live with my boyf, let’s call him “Andy.”  

When we decided to move in together there was a bit of situation in that he is a human person who comes with cat allergies, and I am a human person that comes with cats, an obsessive devotion to the same, and presumably a cat-loving brain parasite that, I assume, should go on this list because all evidence suggests she lives here too.  Modern medicine can work miracles, it turns out, so the situation is resolved.  It was resolved thus: I am perfectly content surrounded by so many heartbeats I love, and he only sneezes and eye-bleeds sometimes, and takes a 24 hour pill 2x a day, and they’ve only 

Look at these precious monsters!!

destroyed some of his carpet.  So it’s all good!  Also his dog lives here, who is sweet and earnest and doesn’t understand why his whole life got turned upside down and he has to suffer through demeaning nose swats and he’s not supposed to chase anything smaller than him, but he’s trying real hard to be a Good Boy.   The cats are fine; they don’t care; they’re cats. 

This is probably real.  Source: the internet.

I also brought a love of hobbies with me, and recently those have involved bringing other things to life in the house.  Not heartbeats, but alive none the less. 

This started with kombucha.  Do you remember, Reader, that my farm-mates

Yum!!

 made kombucha, and it totally blew my mind?  I didn’t drink much of it but hey, seems fun!  If you know anything about making kombucha, you know that it requires a kombucha mother to turn boring old sweet tea into fizzy yum juice.  ("Andy": But I like sweet tea...) Theoretically these mothers can spontaneously occur—I mean, they must, right? Or how did this whole process start?—but you have to create a whole mood.  An ambiance.  An environment in which tiny random baby bacterriettes and yeastlings are more likely to stumble together into the loving arms of the luxurious pre-kombucha tea mix you have created, set up shop, and grow into a weird Symbiotic Culture Of Bacteria and Yeast that makes old tea delicious.  It’s like putting up a bat box—right box, right height, right season, then you just hope they find it. 

Except, again, the boyf lives here too and since we ostensibly share our spaces I thought setting up a enticing bacterial lounge club-slash-uterus might push the envelope a little so being a good live-in-girlfriend, I looked up other options.  They go like this:

• Buy one
• Get one from someone who has one
• Nope, we’re back to growing your own, but with a kombucha starter!

I’m too stubborn to do the first one and lack the hook up on the second one, so I went with the third.  I found some raw unfiltered kombucha and let it sit in its happy jar uterus, and fed it and loved it and sang it lullabies, and now there’s a slimy mama living under the sink in the upstairs bathroom where she’s nice and warm and “Andy” doesn’t have to look at her.

Behold the douchey-est t shirt.

Not that “Andy” doesn’t have plenty else to look at, because now I am also the proud mother of lactofermenting pickles, a kefir culture, a yogurt culture, sauerkraut, and (almost) a vinegar mother!

All of those lovely items have their own bacterial yeasty colonies, that are living and growing and making food into other, tangier food.  The difference, I have learned, between lactofermented pickles 

Fun fact:
Yeast looks like tiny kiwi fruits!

and the vinegar brined pickles of my previous life is that these suckers get yummy because they are 

(spoiler alert) fermenting.  That means there’s this whole process of life happening, where tiny bacterial locusts are swarming over all the veggies and eating the natural sugars or whatever and I don’t really understand the whole thing but it’s supposed to be healthier and also, dude, it’s alive.  In a jar, on my kitchen counter, just living its chill, smelly, pre-digestive life.  Pre-digestive both in the sense that this process pre-digests part of the food for you so you’re kiiiiiind of eating bacterial vomit, and also in the sense that this is the part of their lives before I eat them alive and digest them myself—making this their pre-digestive life.  Growing things in your kitchen is awesome.

I am most excited about the vinegar because YOU CAN JUST MAKE THAT and it blows my mind.  A couple of relevant points on this:  You can also just buy it and it cost about $0.99 a gallon and then you just take it home and use it.  Making it costs whatever apples cost, and takes like 2 months.  Plus it smells a little vomity right now.  Maybe I’m doing something wrong.  Point is, totally worth it.  When it gets going it gets a mother in it too, but it’s not the same as a kombucha mother—apparently they’re cousins or something.  Idk, google it.  I don’t have a mother yet but, Reader, you’ll be the first to know.

The kefir is new, I just got the seeds (I had to give in and order these because if I created the environment in which rotting milk becomes alive I would have to move out and I really do love “Andy”).  I don’t even know if I like Kefir, but I do know I’m about to start drinking a cup every day and I’m pretty jazzed. 

Other life in our house includes the seedlings under the grow light in the guest room/room where I hide things from  the boyf and the cats. Those are pretty contained, though, and they’ll go outside once this weather decides to quit being moody.  Also in the

One day Claire will write a memoir
about her many brushes with death
 and none of us will be heroes.

 guest room is a plant that I don’t know what she is.  She was apparently part of a Valentine’s bouquet that a friend of mine got, and when all the flowers were done and she went to throw them out, she noticed that this dramatic, vine-y thing had rooted in the water.  Far be it from her (or me) to murder something trying so hard to live—it’s in a vase in a window now, and growing leaves, and for all I know it’s invasive and poisonous but her name is Claire and I hope she lives forever.  However, if you are reading Claire, it would be helpful if you’d sprout enough for me to identify you so that I know where to put you to give you your best shot.  Reader, I am definitely the hero of this story.  

Life around-but-not-in our house includes the asshole dogs next door, the moths that swarm the back door and I occasionally feed to our cats, and the family of lizards who live under the door jamb to the patio.  They are hilarious, mostly because I swear they are chill AF as they sun themselves just outside the glass, casually shooting the bird at the cats and dog.  

(I am rooting for you, lizard friends, but the cats are rooting for you taking a left instead of a right in your door-jamb-house and them showing you a thing or two about the circle of life.)

It’s a full house over here.

I give nery one f*ck.

Transition to City Life

Well.

It's been mmmmmmmmm a long time since I did any blogging, and I don't live on a farm anymore (though Forever Farm will always live in my heart).  But I've been thinking about this blog thing for a while recently, and while my life isn't that exciting and my surroundings aren't as beautiful anymore, sure, why not, let's write some more.  I do things, some might call them ridiculous, potentially interesting things.  Besides, I think my readership is like 3 people (hey, sis!).  So with the boldness of obscurity, I'm back in the game.

I google-imaged "obscurity" and this is what came up and we are definitely using it.
I apologize, whoever actually owns this image, and also I think you are amazing. 

I EAT OPPRESSION.
I POOP FREEDOM.

The farm taught me a bunch of important lessons, like how to shave a pig, and that some people call mason jars "ball" jars (is this a Yankee thing? Or what?), and that bald eagles are sea birds but they will totally eat a chicken.  The most important thing the farm taught me, though, is that you can put things in your days that, at the end of the day, can make you happy of yourself and your choices and the time you spent on your trip around the sun. 

Also, sure, the true meaning of friendship.

The true meaning of friendship!

You're welcome.

FOR EXAMPLE, Reader, when making plans for your day or week, you can totally just create a scavenger hunt for your roommates that involves some next level clue hiding and puzzle solving.  Or you can decide today is the day you are making homemade magnets to shamelessly give to all your friends and loved ones because while you want to make them, no one actually wants to have 15 low-quality, weirdly-decorated, as-though-done-by-an-infant magnets, so let someone else cherish that mess (or throw it out, or whatever-- point is, you can still make them).  

Or create a complicated target course involving drawings of angry farm animals and overripe musk melons swinging from the trees.  This one is a little harder when not on 40 private acres surrounded by national forest, sure, but you get the idea!  Seize the day!  Do the thing! Go to bed a little proud of yourself!

Tiny Potato is also proud of you,

Having realized my agency, I'll still be the first to admit that sometimes, the exact thing I want to do is watch trash on my phone or scroll forever on facebook.  That's a choice too, and a perfectly acceptable one-- the point isn't that we should all be off doing marvelous things all the time (are you kidding me?  This is real life, people), it's that I realized you do get to choose, and started asking myself, well, what do I want to do?  

How I woke up this morning.

Sometimes (last night) that choice is watching my goal bedtime, and then my actual bedtime, and then my are-you-kidding-me-you're-too-old-for-this bedtime just sliiiiiiide by because I am mad at a book I don’t even like that much and I don’t want to surrender yet.  That moment of, "I really should blah blah blah" withering before the "NOPE I HAVE DECIDED AND WE ARE DOING THIS NOW DON'T TELL ME WHAT TO DO" of realizing you are the one steering the boat, and you’ll be tired but survive, and that is a trade off you get to make if you want to. 

Best thing I got out of Forever Farm.  Agency, and the realization that for all the things you cannot choose about life, there are things you can.  And making those choices makes me, at least, a little happier about my day and myself.  I mean I dropped everything and moved to a farm, so…I guess this is the lesson I was there to learn?

To me, you are perfect.....

We did do fun things, and then I came back, and then I got a regular job, and then life, with its sometimes abrupt and very hard hitting ups and downs, happened.  It’s easy in the rough and tumble wear and tear of every day life to decide that even deciding what you want to do takes too much effort, so can we just put Archer on.

The lesson is still there, though, and in the last year I’ve had the bandwidth to incorporate it a little more in my days.  I got some fabulous tiny monster friends.  We had a Goblin Ball.  I joined a gym (gigglesnort).  I make some weird stuff in my house.  I watched the first 5 seasons of Supernatural.  I do things, Reader, big things.

So here we are!  That’s where we fade back in on this adventure…let’s see where it goes.

I'm back!  Or still here!  Or whatever!

Geeking out as a fear response.

If I were bit by a radioactive spider on my farm, and turned into a me-version of Spider-Man, it would go like this:

In the absence of my need for
real glasses, I could totes rock
 fake hipster glasses like the Beebs.

I would get to personally live that cool scene where I suddenly realize I don’t need to wear contacts anymore.  This would be the BOMB.  I just picture me putting the contacts in, realizing everything got blurry, taking them out, and then strutting outside to look at actual leaves on trees, and identify people from more than 20 feet away, NOT run into things, and generally do things that I, in my non-super-powered life, could never do.

I would also never worry about how heavy eggplant is ever again.  Reader, eggplant is HEAVY.  You fill a basket up and then you look at how far it has to go to reach the cart, and you realize filling a basket up was the dumbest thing you ever did.  This would no longer be an issue.  

If I could do this I would.

Not only does Spider-Man have super strength, but he’s also way flexible—so none of that lower back pain that results in all kinds of made up yoga contortions while picking peppers.  Never again!

In fact, the whole nature of the harvest would be dramatically changed.  Instead of going out and picking everything, I could just shoot it with my way-cool wrist webbing.  A quick jerk, and then all veggies would come to me where I would be reclining comfortably at the end of the row.

My Spidey-Sense tells me that these cows

are a bunch of jerks, hanging out in the

chicken pen, feasting on chicken feed.

Again.

Or maybe on top of the pole barn.  As a Me-Spider-Man, I would have the uncanny ability to climb and stick to all kinds of surfaces.  From my perch on top of the pole barn, I could also watch out for escapee cows and sheep.  

That is, ALL cows and sheep. 

I see it looking more
 like this.

For that matter, through industrious use of super strong webbing, I could just create fences that they can’t get out of.  Other non-super-hero farmers have come up with their own solutions to this problem, but we scoff at those systems on my farm.  Spidey-webbing it is.

Collecting eggs would also be quick and easy in the same way as the veggie harvest—though it would undermine the bonds of trust I am trying to develop with the hens.   I would have to use a gentle touch.  Reader, you know me.  Gentle?  With the comic book equivalent of a power tool?  Hm.

The mosquitoes would never be a bother again, as I would have a sweet costume including mask and gloves that would be totally mosquito proof.  Even if I took a day off from my rocking secret identity, I would have all that hyped up metabolism and imperviousness to drugs, toxins, and venom that would make their bites a total nonissue.

C'mon, Bro, I'll make you dinner.

I am a humanitarian by nature, though, so for the benefit of my fellow farm hands I’d probably just call my buddy the Batman and have him and his peeps come eat all the bloody demon spawn.

There’s probably a really developed seedy underground in my sleepy town that I could eradicate in my free time, too.

All this was going through my head today in the sweet potato fields when we ran into the Black Widows.  Who live there.  Where we were.  For hours.  Digging up their homes and basically doing things that, if I were an arachnid, I might have strong opinions on.

I am totally going to be a super hero.