-Posted by Isaac

This week I’ve got a couple videos for you. One at the beginning, one at the end. In the first, Maizy practices her bucket filling:

Yes, we’re completely finished with the fall honey. And it feels good.

The last few frames have to be pushed through because there’s nothing coming from behind.

Every year I have a pretend race with the grain farmers. Who will finish first? Judging from the amount of corn still standing in the fields, I’m guessing we beat most of them. My brother Justin ran the combine late into the night and finished his last field an hour before the rain this morning.

Now we both enjoy our respective tasks. As he moves grain from field to semi truck to grain bins to elevator, we move honey from hives to barrels to bottling tanks to grocery stores.

And at the honey house there’s a lot of shifting. A couple big loads of supers go out and into storage…

…the very next day, a big load of bottling supplies gets moved in.

While the farmers start thinking about Florida, we start thinking about the Christmas rush.

But before anything can really be accomplished, the place needs a good cleaning. All the equipment, the pumps, the lines, the tanks and the floors. This takes at least a week.

But the honey harvest is finished and the pressure is off. The cleaning could take a month for all I care. It gives a small feeling of accomplishment to clean just one thing then move on to something else, something different. Whatever the day has in store. There’s no rush here. In fact, it could be something totally unrelated.

Like one day this week- Jayne and I were invited to hobnob with the politicos. Someone must’ve been reading this blog and pegged me for the radical leftist that I am. We were invited to a small gathering, listening to Beth Workman and her endeavors in running for an Ohio House seat here in District 92. Workman is a Democrat.

A Democrat! Would this little soiree be dictated by mob rule? Violence? The activist screaming of snowflake/hipster/entitled millennial mobsters? Driving there, I anticipated we’d soon be smoking joints and burning flags, donning the pussyhats, staging protests, reading up on Marx.

You can imagine my utter dismay in finding only quiet and reasonable middle-aged people. They served us Texas sheet cake and there was a lot of yammering about education and health care. Certainly not the Democrats of Fox News lore. Is this really what Democrats are about? Education and health care?? What a complete and total disappointment. What a letdown. (It wasn’t even pot Texas sheet cake.)

Hey Beth Workman, how ’bout we work on a real solution for society’s ills?…

Another day of slacking this week- Kristen Baughman’s famous apple butter party.

I blogged about this last year, and just a few weeks ago Jayne did a bit about Kristen’s business- Curly Girl Farm.

Kristen’s party gets a star on the calendar. In recent years it has become one of those ‘must attend’ events. She and Doug, her apple farmer boyfriend, take about nine bushels of apples and turn them into sauce. Then on the big day, they light the fires, hang the big copper kettle, add a bunch of sugar and grab a bunch of help. The cauldron needs continually stirred for about eight hours.

During those eight hours, we eat and drink and play.

Plenty of entertainment for the children.

But it’s not all play. Once the apple butter gets jarred up, everyone must grab a freshly baked roll and help clean the big kettle. My kind of cleaning.

It’s a satisfying task. As I filled my already bursting stomach, I couldn’t help but recognize that same feeling of accomplishment I get after cleaning the extractor or honey sump. A job well done.

The usual reward for our accomplishment is more food and more beer. But this year, compliments of Doug and via some deer hunters from Maine, we were treated to something special:

An awesome day followed by a gut buster evening. Carpe Diem.

Ok, your second promised video- Jayne and Kristen at the head of the line.