Homesteading Works Better With Two People

The husband has been in Colorado for the past several days. His father passed away a few months ago and the house needs to be sold. We got the go-ahead from the lawyer to list it, so he drove down there to fix a few things and meet with the realtor. He should be home this afternoon.

Solo homesteading is doable, but it’s much easier with two people. He feels the same way when I am traveling. And I haven’t been handling it with as much grace and humor as I ought, mostly because I am tired of the hot weather. The pigs were supposed to go to the processor at the end of August, but both the husband and the processor wanted to push that date back, so the pigs are here for another week yet. We’re buying bags of feed for them instead of 1000-pound totes so that we don’t have feed left over. They ate through all the bags of feed I bought before the husband left. (We thought it would be enough.) I went to the supplier to get more, but the supplier is out of bags of pig finisher and is only selling pig finisher in bulk. I could take the tote up there in the plow truck and have it filled, but I have no way to get a tote of feed off the back of the truck and over to the pasture. The husband does it with the forklift, and my forklift skills are not up to that task. Instead of pig finisher, the pigs are getting ground barley, which is the only feed the supplier has left in bags.

So I am hauling 40-pound bags of ground barley over to the pasture in the golf cart and emptying them, scoop by scoop, into the feeders until the bags are light enough for me to lift up and dump the rest in. It’s hot. And smelly. And there are flies. Thankfully, I don’t have to go into the pasture with 1200 pounds of pig, which is good. The feeders can be filled from outside the Piggy Palace.

Whine, whine, whine. As I used to tell my girls, “This builds character.” The worst part is that I have to keep changing my clothes, because I don’t want to do chores in good clothes and I can’t go to town (or sew) in my chore clothes, not when they smell like pig.

We’re under a wind advisory for today, too, because of a back-door cold front. The winds from the northeast just started picking up when I woke up this morning. I am hoping no trees come down. I can start the generator if the power goes out, but if a tree takes out the fence to the pig pasture, we may have pigs wandering the neighborhood. 😮 I am stocked up on marshmallows just in case. Pigs love marshmallows.

And while I’m grousing, I am going to complain about the US Postal Service. “Service” is a misnomer. We were expecting an Express Mail envelope last Friday. It contained some things the husband needed before he left for Colorado on Saturday. The envelope arrived on Saturday afternoon. Fortunately, the husband had a contingency plan and he managed without them.

I was also expecting an accessory for my new Bernina 700 PRO embroidery machine. The tracking info indicated that it, too, was supposed to be delivered Friday. I was hoping to get it so I could work on a project while the husband was away. The package never showed up. It didn’t come on Saturday. Sunday has no mail delivery. I got an e-mail saying it would be delivered on Monday—odd, because that was a holiday, but we do occasionally get packages on Sundays and holidays. About fifteen minutes after I saw the USPS mail van drive past my house on Monday, I got another e-mail saying the package couldn’t be delivered because “the driver couldn’t access the delivery location.” Huh. As far as I know, nothing was blocking our driveway.

We got no mail at all on Tuesday. Apparently, our regular mail lady was on vacation and her substitute didn’t deliver the mail. I had given up hoping the machine part would arrive because all the tracking information showed was that it was stuck at the post office in Kalispell. As of 5 pm yesterday, we still had no mail. Amazingly, though, the package finally arrived around 7 pm, delivered not by the mail lady but by someone helping her:

It looks like they slowed down and tossed it out like a newspaper. Fortunately, it was packaged well.

I do have to give props to our mail lady, who finally delivered Tuesday and Wednesday’s mail at 9 pm last night. None of this is her fault, and I am sure she stayed out late last night so she wouldn’t have three days’ worth of mail to deliver today.

Somehow, in 2025, I didn’t think we’d have so much friction in our lives. Progress is supposed to mean that things get easier, not more difficult. The US Postal Service seems to be a metaphor for much of what is wrong these days.

If you made it this far, thank you for listening to me whine. I will leave you with a photo of a new project, but you’ll have to wait to find out what it is:

Isn’t that fabric pretty?