But yet I still try to fool myself into thinking that the next time will be different.

After being delayed 2 DAYS, you’d think I would be cautious. Nope.

I woke-up Friday morning thinking I’d begin my hide at 2pm, after taking the two kids to the library.

Wrong. I forgot that at 3pm I had an appointment to pick-up more brains from the slaughter house to stock in the freezer. This meant working the hide in the morning.

I pulled it out at 9:30, and realized there were two more holes yet to sew, so a half hour later I had that done. I began stringing it up into the frame. I got half-way done when I realized it was too big for the frame.

I had two choices. Make my frame larger or find a metal cable. With a metal cable I can pull the hide back and forth to work it (a popular method).

I decided to run to the barn. Erik had a come-along with steel cable, and I figured I could attach it between the beams on my stretching  frame. I would cable the hide instead.

Excited, I came back with the cabling. But I couldn’t unravel the unruley cable, and after an hour of fighting with it, I had finally managed to get it long enough to hang top to bottom. Then I got to work.

Fail.

The hide was too sticky and kept wrapping around the cable.

By now I was panicking as the edges of the hide were rapidly drying. Erik had come home for lunch by this point, and we decided to make my frame larger (luckily the drill was in the house!). Then I re-strung it up (this takes a long time). After I’d gotten it all strung up (30 minutes later), I realized it was backwards! It had to face the opposite way (or so I’d thought).

No problem, I’ll just flip the frame over. Wrong. I began working the hide, but the string pushed off the nails. It just wouldn’t stay attached.

At this point I am crying. It’s 12:30 and Nuriel will be home in half an hour. I reluctantly un-string the whole hide, then re-string it the opposite way and FINALLY began working my stick across it.

By 1:30 I am realizing that I am screwed. BOTH kids are harassing me about going to the library, PLUS I gotta put Earen down for a nap and THEN go get my brains from the butcher at 3pm. I reluctantly UNSTRING the hide, roll it up and put it into a plastic bag to stay wet.

I finish everything by 4:15pm, and decide to run out to feed the critters. By 4:45 I am finally re-stringing it and working it by 5pm. By 8pm I’d given up on the frame and went back to the cable.

. . . . . . . . . . . . it was still midnight when I came to the conclusion I was completely screwed since half my hide was still wet, and the other half hard like paper.

BUT. . . . . . you’ll be happy to know that the thinnest areas (thin areas go through the liquid solutions faster, soak up brains faster, and dry faster) came out like the softest flannel. It was sooo super buttery soft you are thinking, if only the whole thing could be like this!

Upon re-refrencing my book, BOTH sides are actually supposed to be worked. It was one tiny sentence in the whole book. Ugh.

I ‘m not sure exactly what went wrong, could still be a solution issue, or maybe not in the brains long enough. I followed directions 100%.

The worst part? Erik reminding me of why I didn’t attempt this in the last 5 years: “You know how much firework you could have chopped in the amount of time you’ve spent on this?” Yes. Sadly, yes I know.

Otherwise, hey — I warned ya!

Most days, weeks (heck, even months) life out here feels like a big fat “F”. This week was no exception. I received two rejections from agents, one for each book, and hide tanning seems to steadily get worse as I go.

After deciding to turn my lovely fur into buckskin, even that seems to be going downhill. I had little issue getting all the hair/grain off, but afterward, it appeared I had scraped it too much!

Now please understand, in every article I have read, everyone says YOU CANNOT SCRAPE TOO DEEP. It just doesn’t work. Your only concern is using too sharp a tool and slicing the hide.

So I scraped good and hard!

However, my skin is so thin, I can see right through it! Not everywhere, just some places. I don’t know how or why, but it appeared that when I fleshed it, I must have scraped too deep (hence why the hair began falling out).

And here lies the very reason why tanning is so difficult to learn. Like I said before, the steps are simple, but completing each step is inherently complex!

Making matters still worse, the book flat out says “Suzanne Cook, your life is too crazy, don’t even attempt this!”

Ok, so it didn’t really say that, but it was pretty close! Something like, “Do not attempt to tan hides if other life commitments such as kids constantly surround you.” Sigh. Yep. That’s me.

I don’t know, maybe I have a sick obsession with crashing and burning. Throwing everything I have into something, only to come back empty-handed. Isn’t that why I began writing? I spent a whole year dragging myself up early to squeeze-in a tiny bit of time to write, and GET MY BOOK PUBLISHED.

How’s that going for me?

Erik likes to ask about that one. “Hun, I thought you said you’d get your book published by now?”

He’s also the one that said I’m never going to get anything published, and certainly no one would buy it anyhow.

But he’s right. My goal had been to get published by Christmas. My Mom had died just 2 days after Christmas 6 years ago. It was the day anniversary of her death this year (2016). Right before she died, I stayed up all night printing her a copy of my book Soldier’s Child. I had told her my whole life I wanted to be an author, and she always told me it wasn’t a realistic goal. I wanted to prove her wrong that night. I don’t know if she even read it. She was probably too far gone.

Remembering that, I wanted to change the tone of Christmas forever, and let it be the celebration God made it to be. I wanted my life to come full circle. 2017 would be the year for Suzanne! Agents! Publishing deals! Soft deer hides and buckskins!

No, so far it’s looking like the year of the “F”. Failed. There will most likely be lots of days scurrying off to the hay loft to cry and feel sorry for myself.

But I’ve got the transparent buckskin I’m still working on . . . todays project. My day has already been set-up to fail since my 3 yr old will be home all day — no school for him on early release Fridays. I was supposed to string it up last night, but between dealing with house/family all evening and taking an hour to sew holes (there were way too many), it was 10pm before I could begin stringing it up on the frame. Expecting at least 2 hours of work, that would leave me at midnight. Again. No thanks. I’ll just have to take my chance during naptime.

IF he takes a nap. I’ve got to run the kids to the library RIGHT when my oldest gets home, so normal naptime at 1pm will get bumped to 2pm.

Hopefully tomorrow’s post will be one of excitement and triumph with a lovely tanned buckskin. Being realistic though, I’m pretty sure it won’t be.

I’m usually right about most things. As a writer, I play out all possible life scenarios in my head, so it’s very hard to take me by surprise.

If you happen to take me by surprise, it’s not that you’ve surprised me, but more that one scenario actually did play out.

I try not to be caught off guard, but it does happen on occasion! Last year, while out in the back region of our woods tapping trees for maple syrup season, our neighbors suddenly appeared on horseback.

Surprised, but not surprised. I had often thought to myself, “what if I was out in the woods and suddenly the neighbors appeared on their horses?”. It literally happened! They live down the street, and it had been a trek to get down there.

So while many things in life can surprise me, they really don’t 😉

PS- My previous post was also correct about the expected e-mail, ha!

5am is not exactly the best time to plop your thoughts down for any sort of meaningful impression. And of course most of my more meaningful ponderings happens while, well, farming.

11am would be great, heck even 2pm (usually by 1pm my early wake-up time has caught up to me and I pass out for 10 minutes while Earen goes down for his own nap). But 5am in the only time NO ONE requires my assistance with anything (until 7:41am when I have to make Erik breakfast before work).

So while I was out yesterday, scraping down my deer hide, and trying NOT to think about what I was doing at that exact moment, I realized how similar everything is.

As a new farmer trying to survive, you have little experience. You read all you can, but ultimately, you just have to jump in and give it a go. You are pretty much destined to fail. Yep, that’s the way it is. You know you will fail, but you try to focus on what you are doing AT THAT EXACT MOMENT and pray that maybe you will be wrong. And sometimes you are wrong. But usually not! Some things can ONLY be gained and taught through failure.

While we haven’t failed too miserably at farming (my failures are typically an inability to attach certain farm implements, or do something in a timely manner), deer hide tanning is another story.

When I was a kid, there were two things I dreamed of doing. One, becoming an author, and two, making clothing out of deer skins. I have no idea why, lol.

When we first started hunting 5 years ago, I saved every deer skin. They were like gold. Unfortunately, much like farming, I had no idea what I was doing, and just took the advice of random articles on the internet. I cut the hide off the deer carcass rather than pulling it, and threw it into a bag and into the freezer. There they accumulated, and then scattered from freezer to freezer while we moved.

By fall of 2016, I had 9 hides in the freezer, taking up too much space. I realized I’d better get going on tanning them if I was ever going to do it, so I pulled them all out, set them in the sun to thaw, and began the CORRECT process of wet-salting them for storage in an air-tight container.

Like farming, I knew I would most likely fail at tanning. Who knew what kind of shape the hides would be in? If bacteria start thriving on a hide the hair will slip (fall out). Then all you have left is a buckskin!

Some things can only be gleaned with experience, so I set to work on my first batch this winter (the total number of hides grew to 12). While I did get a book on making buckskins, info on tanning hides with fur-on is limited, and because of this my first set were a failure. One hide kept the fur on perfectly, while the second had a spot of slippage. While my liquid solutions were probably spot-on, my timing wasn’t, and while hide tanning is simple in the steps to be taken, it’s exceptionally complex within each step!

The first hide I decided to soften by hand after running it through all the soakings and then smearing brains all over it. I worked it for 14 hours straight, until finally at midnight, with it still lightly damp and no where near soft, I collapsed into an exhausted heap on the floor, to worn out to even cry.

The next hide of that batch I decided to put into a frame and use a stick to soften it. But I could still see that this one wasn’t going to soften properly either, so I saved myself the agony of working it.

After combing back through tidbits of random articles and trying to correlate the buckskin book instructions to work for my fur-on tanning, I figured-out what I thought the problem was.

-On a side note, no my two hides are not ruined. They can always be re-tanned!-

So I dug through my bin of wet, salted hides and found a stunning pelt that I knew I wanted to tan next. It didn’t look like a deer, but more of a fox. The fur was 2-3 inches long and touched with a soft rosy glow. Wet-salted, it weighed 40-50 lbs! I quickly checked the fur in a few spots, and it seemed to be holding well, so into a new pickle bath it went!

Sadly, the fur had not been holding everywhere, and soon chunks began falling out while I stirred it. Eventually I knew it was doomed. The thought of losing such a beautiful hide made me physically ill, but there was nothing I could do except turn it into buckskin.

So as I woefully sat on my deck scraping hair and grain off the once beautiful hide, trying NOT to think about anything other than scraping, I realized that’s how writing is starting out.

You have something with fantastic potential and you know you want to accomplish something with it. You read all sorts of articles online about getting published. But ultimately, you just have to dive-in and hope for the best. You know you will most likely fail, but you pray you won’t.

But when you do fail, you buckle down and re-evaluate your methods. You don’t think about failing, you try to focus on re-drafting that manuscript, or seeking out new agents, but it always sits at the back of your mind . . . it tries to creep into your thoughts and you begin to get depressed until you kick it back into the recesses of your brain and push harder toward your goal.

Because really, failure is when you stop trying. Giving up is failing. Everything else is simply a mistake to learn from.

At least with farming, it’s pretty easy-going (usually). Sending-out queries to agents, then sitting and waiting for a response, is nerve-wracking. There’s a nice little site called Query Tracker that allows you to see where your e-mail sits in a line with others waiting for an agent response. Apparently one of my e-mails is up next in line. It was one of eight for my memoir. So either today or tomorrow I’ll get a nice little e-mail thanking me for my submission, but they are considering other work . . .

I’ll most likely go back through and re-draft it again (not excited since it takes several months to do a re-draft!).

But the painful one is my children’s book. I absolutely have no idea how to change it to make it better at this point. That’s the one that hurts the most (also the one I want to see published the most). That’s the one that keeps me up at night. It’s lurking on the website in an area I’d forgotten about . . .

If you’ve got a good eye you can find it, lol, until I hide that section away for agents only. I don’t have it listed directly on the site since it’s not published yet, and well, you paying to read it is my paycheck!

As you know by now, we live in the country. And is such, once in a while the neighbors get a bit feisty and decide to fire-off guns. Heck, so do we.

There’s a big difference though.

When we shoot, we stand near the edge of our property, firing into targets no where near the other property line, making sure all bullets STAY WELL WITHIN OUR PROPERTY. Rifles, shot guns, hand guns, high powered semi-automatics, all follow the same rules. We don’t want ANY destruction from a bullet other than a 2 liter or a watermelon exploding.

However, not all of our neighbors follow such strict safety codes.

The first incident, was on a nice, sunny day. I was getting ready to leave to get my son from preschool when I heard shots go off. Nothing unusual about that, but it REALLY sounded like someone was firing ONTO my property!

Thinking the sound was simply bouncing off the barn and the house, I ran down the path to our back hay field. Sure enough, I could hear shots coming from behind the field. I marched across the field trying to see what was going on. I was 2/3rds of the way across when I heard shouting, and an SUV suddenly began driving up to our fence near the property line. I continued walking until I was within talking range.

“Whatcha guys up to?” I asked.

“Oh, just firing-off some guns with some friends for fun,” one of the guys replied. “We didn’t think anyone was out here, and we didn’t see any animals.”

I nodded. “Look, I understand wanting to shoot guns and have a good time, but PLEASE make sure your bullets STAY on your property. At any given moment there could be a kid on a quad, or a horse, or me, wandering about back here. This is a FAMILY FARM, not a vacant field.”

“Ok, we’ll make our target larger then.”

Now if you think I’m being overly dramatic about their target being only 10 feet from the property line, let me say this. My neighbor down the road HAD THE VERY SAME PROBLEM. Unfortunately for her, bullets HAD entered her property and shot several items she owned. Items not too far from her grazing horses!

And then there was the time I was nearly shot myself.

Because our property zig-zags here and there, we have lots of different neighbors and property lines.

It was early afternoon in late October, early November and I had decided to go hunting. The weather was nice, so I decided to trek out on foot into the buck bedding area. I would sit and wait for something to go by (sounds crazy, but last year I sat on a in the woods and had a 6 pt. walk just 15 feet away from me!).

The area of our scrappy field borders our neighbor’s farm fields, and the area is so scrappy we can’t even attach game cams because there are so few trees, only bushes and thorns. However, there are several heavy deer paths through there, so that’s where I decided to lay wait.

I’d been sitting quietly for maybe 30 minutes (I probably fell asleep sitting up) when all of a sudden a gunshot rang out just feet away! It startled me so much I probably would have peed had I just drank coffee!

While I struggled to regain full awareness of what was going on, the shots continued to blast-off right in front of me. What did I do? Were the neighbors mad I was out hunting and now were trying to shoot me? They were literally firing RIGHT AT ME! The bushes hid everything from view, so I had no idea what was going on. After 15 minutes I figured-out that they must have a target directly in front of me . . . but how close to the property line was it, and what if they missed?

I quickly texted my daughter that if I wasn’t home by dark to come look for my dead body, then crawled-off into a buck bed and fell asleep for an hour while I waited for things to settle down. I really didn’t think a bullet would hit me if I was ground-level anyway.

I never did see any deer, although on my way home I DID scare a few out that were sitting just 30 feet away from my buck bed.

Just goes to show, that just because there’s no house behind your shooting path, doesn’t mean its clear, so stay smart with your target practice!

If you’ve ever driven through the countryside, you’ve probably noticed them — farms with stuff EVERYWHERE. Actually, if you really paid attention, you’d notice that ALL fully operational farms have stuff everywhere.

Random buckets, large containers, tractors, equipment . . . they lay scattered about the property. It looks, well, dumpy! What’s up with these lazy farmers not cleaning things up? Why can’t they take a few minutes to get everything in order like everyone else does?

If you really stop to look at EACH farm, you might get an idea of why. Retired farms are usually the tidiest. The farmer is no longer pushing crops out of the ground on hundreds of acres, maybe just a few to keep him occupied. The wife isn’t chasing kids, or cows, and they spend their extra time in the garden and farming their lush lawns (case in point, my own grandparents).

You have the farms where they farm part-time. At least one person is working full-time and they farm only part of the day/week. They might argue a case for ATTEMPTING to keep the place tidy since they do work other jobs nd have certain expectations placed on them by their co-workers and family. You might see a farm implement out, or a few random trash articles.

The full-time farmer, however, is a mess. He’s working relentlessly to try to earn his living. Animals require feeding, cleaning, birthing, slaughtering. He has more animals to care for. He has more land he farms to feed those animals. He’s always trying to fix something that’s broken, or chase down an animal that escaped. He has no time to clean, let alone care about the state of how things appear (although his wife might spend time fretting and looking about at the mess while she works).

While there undoubtedly are those that ARE too lazy to tidy their areas, understand that farm life is a crazy life, and you are always jumping from chore to chore. If you see a tidy farm, they obviously have a bit more free time!

I’m never sure if this is a quiet air of judgement, or if they are genuinely curious what life on a farm looks like.

I can tell you that for ME, life on THIS farm is 80% crisis management. Yesterday, I walked outside to feed the animals with plans to go grocery shopping and maybe begin work on FINALLY cleaning the house.

Wrong.

I came to the horse pasture (of course), and found that not only had they ripped out half their inner electric (non-electrified) rope fencing, they had also chewed it up. Now while I didn’t know how the fencing had managed to come down in so many places, I DID know WHO had been chewing on it!

Moisie (short for Moissanite) loves to chew on things. He loves picking things up and playing with them. In this photo he is holding a “carrot stick” training wand. He likes to walk in a circle trying to train ME with it.

I knew most likely Moisie had chewed-up the line.

Now I had to get the fencing fixed before Moisie chewed it even more. Groceries would get bumped to later in the afternoon. The kids were home anyway and could watch Earen while I shopped.

I managed to get the line back up just as Erik came home for lunch. Hopefully the horses would leave it alone until I could run electric to it later.

I ran off to get groceries. As I left, I noticed the snow beginning to drift into the driveway from the heavy winds. There hadn’t been much snow on the ground, but the wind was scooping up what little bit there was and driving it back up into the air. The driveway had only drifted maybe an inch. I noted to myself that I’d probably need to plow later tonight.

I drive a Toyota Matrix, 2WD. It handles all aspects of winter poorly. By the time I came back 2 hours later, the 1 inch appeared to have grown to 3 inches. I could drive through 3 inches, right?

Nope. The 3 inches had settled to 5 near the road. The car sank right into the drift and was stuck. I called Nuriel to bring the side by side UTV out to me. She sat in the car while I tried to push it out with the side by side. Quads and side by sides work great if you are stuck in mud. Apparently, they don’t work to pull you out in snow.

As I sat there trying to figure out if we needed to go get the snow shovel, a neighbor pulled up in his truck and asked if we needed help. I only knew this man from talking to him once at Tractor Supply. He’d bought several bags of dog food and I made a comment about all the food, and we got to talking about high-energy dog food (he raises hunting dogs, and we raise boxers). I have no idea where he lived, other than “nearby”, and I’d see his truck go by often and stop to give a friendly wave.

He pulled-up behind my car, and gently pushed her out of the drift onto higher ground, then he left before I could run to the house and get him a jar of syrup.

I’ll figure out where he lives, and run a bottle of syrup to him. It’s not often other people help US. Usually we are loners, problem solving everything ourself. It’s good to know that there are people nearby willing to lend a hand!

I got all the groceries put away before diving back out into the roaring winds. It was warmer, but the winds were whipping up the snow and driving it across the fields, exposing long lengths of green grass and piling the snow into hidden drifts of unknown depths.

The horses hadn’t touched their fencing. They were at the back of the pasture in a group, eating their hay.

I silently went to work clipping a length of insulated electric line that still sat on the ground, left over from wiring the cow fence — Erik never cut the line down to size and it sat in sneaky coiled rounds on the grass waiting for someone to trip over it. I re-wired the cut line into the fence charger then I dragged the long length of wire and my tools to a junction in the horse fence from a previous fence line.

The horses were still eating their hay, ignoring me.

This would be the hard part. If a horse suddenly decided to come walking up, they’d catch the wire and rip everything out. I kept a careful eye on the group as I first attached my wire to the main fence, then ran it along the ground and up to the rope fence and cut it to size. I attached it with a metal bracket, then ran to the barn for a large board. A board across the line would keep the horses from tripping on it. Later I could pick ax a trench for it.

I ran back with my board. It was too short! I was out of time — the horses were beginning to squabble and move away from the hay. I threw the board down and packed snow over the exposed areas of wire cable. Then I ran down and plugged the fence in.

Someone’s going to find out pretty quick that chewing on the fence means a mouthful of electric!