Don’t let anyone tell you what to do on Saturday.  It is a day to set your own agenda, do the things you haven’t been able to do all week, and spend a little time recovering from the week that was without thinking of what is coming next.  Leave your anxiety about next week for that dreaded epiphany Sunday night when you notice the weekend is over…

Today my wife and I will be going to the town of Verona south of Madison.  There is a knitting shop there that she wants to visit and I would just like to go walking around town.  Its supposed to be a little cold but it will be fun to spend time together visiting someplace different.

I blame it all on the extension of Daylight Savings Time.  I think it has everyone screwed up.  In southern Wisconsin, the week before DST changed it was very warm and felt like it was still August.  Then, almost the exact same day as they rolled the clocks back, the temp dropped off the mat.  All the sudden it was cold, dark, and felt like we should be going to a holiday party.

So my wife is all cheery in the Christmas spirit which is great as long as it lasts through the whole season.  That is a tall task for anyone when you start in mid-November.  But it is nice to see the happiness that the Christmas season brings just a little earlier this year.

This morning is the first morning where I might say it is really gettin cold.  I normally ride my bike to work in the morning, but I think the bus has my name on it today.  I am starting to wrap up my work for my Master’s thesis in agronomy, so that means a lot of hours in front of a computer, and I have been working a lot of early morning hours to see that through.  But with a couple months of that to go, I think I need to take the advice I just gave my wife about Christmas and make sure I dont get “Thesised “out.  I think the latter is much more likely to happen than the former, so I don’t know why I am the one giving advice anyway.

It won’t be long until we get a good snow here which will surely kick the Christmas spirit into high gear.  We are ringing the bells for Salvation Army at the local grocery store in a couple weekends as well which will surely bring out the jolly feelings as well.  I love this time of year where it almost seems mandatory to make an effort to brighten other people’s days so that they can enjoy this time of year as well.  Thanksgiving officially kicks off the Christmas season in my mind, but if you would like to get a head start, go to a department store, listen to the Christmas tunes and take in the decorations.  Then go out and spread a little early season Christmas goodwill!

But no, seriously.  Farming is somewhere in our future.  We don’t know how, we honestly don’t know why, but it feels like it is in our bones and that makes it pretty tough to shake.  All of our relatives with experience farming tell us we are crazy.  We tell each other we are crazy.  Yet it always seems to come up.

People always say it is a waste of our intelligence to farm.  Is that the case?  Is it that farmers must be too dumb to do anything else or smart people are to smart to want to farm?  I think neither.  I personally think it is that people have a tendency to be lazy, and what is smart to a lazy person is to do less work.

Odds are we will probably settle someday for a hobby farm of some sort.  I would love to farm my dad’s dairy later on, but careerwise, timewise, and wifewise, I have a feeling that won’t be in the cards unless I find a better way to stack the deck.  My wife loves goats, I want to have a huge garden and would like to work with sheep and poultry.  Don’t let me forget to tell my turkey story from FFA (Needless to say, I hope the next time around I can keep the dog out of the cage).

My wife and I both look back fondly on our growing up around animals and desire for our kids to have the same experience (FYI no kids yet).  But our longing to farm goes deeper than our hopes for our children.  Our grandparents on both sides farmed, our parents farmed, and we fear we are part of a generation where the homestead farm will dissapear altogether.  Maybe it is an antiquated part of American culture, but it is (was?) a good part of American culture.  Sure, there were struggles on the homestead farm that dwarf todays worries of 401ks, endless emails, and traffic gridlock, but there was a deep seeded sense of pride and accomplishment in overcoming these obstacles as a matter of necessity, not luxury.

So whether or not we end up on a hobby farm or a production farm, who knows.  But what I do know deep in my heart is this: people who have a passion to farm need to have a way to do so.  Our communities and governments need to help them along, pairing them up with experienced assistiance and the means to get a good start.  We already depend on the rest of the world for energy, and if we don’t change the way we see the desperate shortage of willing American farmers, we will depend on the world for our food as well.

As a fundamental cornerstone of democracy, we all have a right to our own opinions and we all have a duty to respectfully listen to others opinions (within reason…I think we can all agree there are some pretty wacked out ideas out there).  Certainly President Bush has underpeformed here, as have the leaders of Congress and the Senate the past few years.  Obama is the kind of person who can, and I hope will, bring both sides of the aisle together, and it is the duty of Congressional conservatives as representatives of the people to do all that is within their power to responsibly meet him there.  Congratulations to Obama and his team for winning a hard fought election, and good luck and God bless as he steps into the role as President of our United States of America.

I think this passage has interesting parallels to the financial crisis we find ourselves in today around the world.  Not that I think investment in the future is a bad thing, in fact, I find individual private investment to be a wonderful part of modern capitalism and our ability to secure our own financial futures.  But I begin to wonder if worrying so much about investment in the future has led us to forget about the comfort of the blessings of today.

I bought my wife an embroidered piece of art a while back that has a message I try to remember every day: “The will of God will not lead you where the grace of God cannot keep you.”  It doesn’t say God won’t lead you to places you can’t get yourself out of.  What this saying is reflecting upon is God’s providence in our lives.  Because of the abundance in our modern societies, most of us have the wonderful blessing of not needing to worry about our basic needs from day to day.  But this has led us to the complacency of thinking that our abundance is of our own accord.  It is undoubtedly the will of God for us to be materially fulfilled, but only if we respond by giving thanks, sharing with those less fortunate, and living each day to tighten our bond to Him.

If we ask God to provide for us, He ALWAYS will out of his boundless mercy and love.  It is our compensitory duty to give thanks and share this love with others.  When we get greedy, the manna spoils.  The Bible is full of the consequences when we treat his blessings as our own doing, and several passages about storing up financial treasures can be found throughout the Bible.

So especially in this time of economic stress, we should not forget to give thanks for God’s gifts in our lives and ask for his continual blessing as we work to further His kingdom.

Its supposed to snow today here in the Mad City.  It won’t be long until it looks like this!

I work in the corn silage breeding program at the University of Wisconsin.  Here is a link to our website.  We also work on corn for biofuels.  I will surely have posts about the biofuels issue coming up later.

Keeping in line with the rather potpourri nature of this post, I want to recommend a podcast I have started listening to.  It is called Geek Farm Life and is done by two computer programmers who moved from California to a hobby farm in Indiana. For anyone who has a hobby farm or is interested in one, it is a lighthearted podcast full of farm, life, and general information about life on a small farm.  If you can get past their computer geekiness, I think it is a pretty valuable podcast.  They update once a week and have an expansive archive that would take you a long time to catch up..

I guess I will end this post with a picture of our dinner the other night.  My wife made me cabbage and vegetable stew just like my grandma used to make and we filled some roasted acorn squash with bacon and cheesy goodness…

So this gets me thinking about the order of the universe (How about that transition?!)  Every single day I think I’ve got it all figured out.  I mosey around acting as if I am an expert at my research, work out as if I am some professional athlete, write on my blog as if this world needs a blog like mine.  All these things, some things I do well, some not, I act as if I do under complete control of the situtation.

Then the fabric totally unravels when I do something completely absent-minded like losing my keys.  And whenever something like this happens it brings me back to earth about how little I am actually in control.  While this may seem like a bad thing in our control happy, me first world today,  I am convinced we get the better end of this deal.

Because I think that God is in control.  God gives us the power to make choices every day, but if we have the faith in him to realize that he understands the missteps we make and has forgiven them through his grace, we can realize that mundane, temporary problems like losing keys are not a big deal compared to the immensity of the cosmos that God holds into balance every day.  Just imagine if we humans were truly the masters of the universe we pretend to be.  Instead of losing things like keys we would probably be crashing planets into each other and forgeting which way solar systems rotate.

But seriously, losing my keys has helped me to chill out and take my life a little less seriously.  It is suprising when bad events can have a good effect like this, and when it happens, I like to give all the credit to God’s wonderful grace, an indescribable gift.

But Madagascar 2 takes this to a whole new level.  Sasha Baron Cohen provides the voice for a ring-tailed lemur who is constantly providing one liners that no kid in their right mind had any idea they were supposed to laugh at.  I was crying my eyes out at the ridiculous things coming out of that lemur’s mouth and all the kids around me were looking back at me wondering what was going on.

I like this new movie genre, but we have to come up with some way to let parents know they are big kid movies, not little kid movies.  The days of the Little Mermaid and Mickey Mouse have given way to wacky characters voiced by the likes of Mike Meyers and Chris Rock.  I seriously would like to know what those kids thought who left by my side after Madagascar 2, but the only way they were laughing was if they were laughing at the kooky guy in the back row who laughed at all the not funny parts in the movie.

Go see this movie, it is as funny as anything else you can see.  Just leave your kids to their game systems and Hannah Montana concerts.

I am sure I am being too critical.  After all, managing baseball seems to be a lot more about the X’s and O’s than inspiring the players.  But, please, give the fans a reason to believe.  They aren’t going to get fans fired up with this managerial choice so they better hit with a bang in the free agent/trade market.

For the Brewers to gain the capital to increase payroll at least to a level that would marginally allow them to compete with bigger markets, they have to draw fans and excite them to spend their money on visits to Miller Park as well as the latest Brewer merchandise.

Let’s not fall into the trap of being ok with second best.  With the crew of players the Brewers have, I still see one or two more years to make a run at the World Series.  To do this, fans will need to support the team, but the owner, general manager, and the rest of the organization need to give the fans a carrot to chase.

But I have issues with Pollan’s solutions.  Over and over again, Pollan begs for government intervention.  First it must be noted that poorly placed government intervention in agriculture in the form of farm subsidies has led us into the corn/soybeans/feedlot mess we have today.

Second, we sure are quick to blame corporations and the big farmers for the mess we have entered into.  But I pose the following question, “Mirror, mirror on the wall. Whose the biggest glutton of all?”  The consumers insatiable appetite for cheap food influences policy decisions and subsequently the market niches filled by farmers and business.  Consumer desire for cheap oil also influences policy decisions in energy, and until we realize that our politicians just want to get elected and will appease the desires of the middle class just to get into office, there really is no way to change the system.

Do not accept this political merry-go-round.  The ride goes up and down, seems fun, and while the scenery looks new at first, when you have gone around a few times you realize you are just going in circles.  When the ride stops, you have to pay again just to go in the same circle.  There is nice music and you can even pick a different horse the next time if you want, but the merry-go-round is one and the same.

We have a choice to make.  Not many choices.  Just one.  Fight for what is right.  It is that simple.  You are not stuck as part of the system.  Learn more about our current food policy.  Find out where your food comes from.  Difficulty in these measures is no excuse.  We are not stuck in this system, we have just been to lazy to get out.