Nose to the Grindstone

The husband told me when he got home Friday that he poured 120 yards of concrete last week. That may not mean much unless you’ve watched a concrete pour and seen the work that goes into it, but I can assure you that it’s not an insignificant amount. This time of year, the crews like to pour early in the day to avoid the heat, which meant that he was getting up at 4 a.m. with me some mornings. The problem is that our animals like to stay up partying. It doesn’t get dark until 10 p.m. here, and the chickens and pigs don’t want to come in until then. He was operating on an average of five hours of sleep a night. The poor guy was so sleep deprived that he literally could not carry on a conversation with me and fell into bed around 8 p.m. Friday night.

We have four employees. None of them works a full 40 hours a week. The guy who has been with us the longest has two kids and a wife with a job outside the home. He sometimes has to drop off or pick up kids from daycare. Another guy is single, but he was having vehicle problems and then his truck broke down completely. The one guy who works the most hours per week (an average of 35) is dependable and works hard, but tends to move more slowly than the husband would like. (That is true of just about everyone.) And the young kid who works for us also has a job at a pizza place—making half of what he makes working for us—so he only works for us a couple of days a week.

I find this behavior baffling. We pay far, far above minimum wage, and although the work is strenuous, my 54-year-old husband is out there doing it. He’s the first one on the job and the last one to leave. We’re not stingy. We’d be more than happy to pay overtime—especially this time of year, when we are so busy—but putting in the minimum amount of work required seems to be the trend these days. We hear this from everyone we know who has employees. And now that the government has increased the unemployment benefit, there is an actual disincentive to work.

This whole unemployment benefit thing chaps my hide. It is always framed as money generously bestowed by the state and federal governments onto people who have been forced out of work. Nowhere is it ever explained that it’s funded by a tax on employers. We pay several thousands of dollars every year into the Montana unemployment fund and a smaller amount to the federal government. I have no problem doing that so that our regular employees have something to draw on during the winter when their hours get cut. Workers who have left our employ voluntarily, though, are not supposed to be eligible for unemployment benefits, but I can just about guarantee that every guy who has ever left us when we still had plenty of work available will try to file for them.

Here’s the kicker, though: Every time benefits are paid out to someone, they get charged back to the employer’s account. If we exceed the payout amount in a given year, our rate goes up and we have to pay more into the fund the next year. We had one guy who told the husband that he was going back to Michigan to work for his uncle. However, he made the mistake of telling another one of our employees that he was actually going to file for unemployment and then spend the next couple of months hunting. Word got back to us. Hell, no, he was not going to vacation on our dime. I fought that one with the state and he was denied anything.

Like a lot of other people, I wonder how the federal government is going to pay for all this free stuff it is handing out to people, but then I remember that they will come back to the productive people, the employers, the people who actually show up and work, and they will expect us to pick up the slack.

Atlas Shrugged isn’t fiction in our little corner of the world.

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I was out in the garden by 6 a.m. yesterday, trying to get ahead of the heat. I started the sprinkler, did some weeding, and was going through the pea patch when the husband came out to join me. I am going to make one last pass through the peas this week and then I think we’re done. We have enough in the freezer for this winter.

We brought in a few raspberries:

There will be many, many more in the next week or two. These get laid out on cookie sheets and frozen, then bagged up.

Pruning is a paradox. You would think that cutting plants way back would diminish their ability to produce fruit. Not so. I cut those raspberries back to within an inch of their lives this spring and now they are getting revenge. Same thing with the grapes. The apples decided to take a year off. Only the Red Wealthy and the Golden Delicious have fruit on them, and not much. That’s fine with me.

The blueberries are starting to ripen:

So sweet.

The turkey mamas seem to have lost one of their poults. They show up every afternoon for scratch grains and have had only three babies with them lately. The husband says that sometimes he sees them roosting on the rafters of the chicken yard when he goes out to close up the coop.

The baby Brahma roo got brave enough to eat out of my hand yesterday. We’re making progress. I don’t want to spoil the roos too much, but they need some socialization with humans. I now have three confirmed roos, all of whom were trying to impress me with their crowing skills when I was in the coop.