March 12, 2011 · 12:48 pm

LOST… Goat Style!

FINALLY…

After 16 years of living in our house, this past Sunday, we’ve officially become part of the neighborhood… and how exciting a milestone is that? When I say the neighborhood, of course, I don’t mean a neighborhood where the houses sit right next to each other. Our closest neighbors are about ½ mile away. I mean the ten or so square mile area where everyone seems to know each other. It’s funny how people who live in a rural community still call it a neighborhood. I don’t know how else you’d describe it, though, so I guess I don’t blame them.

So how, you ask, did we officially become part of our neighborhood?

Well the answer is simple of course… you officially become part of the neighborhood when you have a farm animal… in our case, goats… discovered wandering far from your home, and through a phone-chain, the neighbors are able to figure out who the farm animal… in our case, goats… belongs to. Yes, you heard it hear first… Naughty and Heath the now world-famous Brown Road Goats in Coats, who had not once, in five months of living with us, ever left the property, roamed away and were discovered about three miles away by a nice lady who was able to round them up, lock them in her fenced pasture, and wait until their delinquent owners came to retrieve them. Being concerned country folk, she asked her husband to start making phone calls and after several links in the phone chain it was determined that they belonged to us.

This particular Sunday was one of those lazy days when not a lot was accomplished around our house. About 5:00 p.m. after having already taken one nap during the day, I went upstairs to lie down in our room. My son was in our bed watching a movie and I figured I’d just relax there with him. Just as I was falling asleep for nap #2, my wife comes running upstairs and says “we have to go get the goats, a couple of neighbors just stopped by and they are over at a farm on the corner of Buckhorn and Cotherman Lake roads.” “What?” I replied, “how in the hell can they be all the way over there?”

We got in our van, drove over to this farm and saw Naughty and Heath grazing in one of their fields. We parked along the side of the road, got out and the moment they recognized us, they started bleating like crazy and running towards us. Yes, apparently goats are quite smart and can recognize their owners.  I suspect they were saying something like “oh, thank god you guys found us, we got lost and we couldn’t find our way back home and we thought we were going the right direction but we just kept getting more lost and then there were cars flying by us and then this lady came out of her house and locked us in this fenced area and we thought we were going to have to move again.” A frightening moment in the life of a goat for sure! We threw them in the back of the van, drove up to the beautiful old farm house on the property, knocked on the door and a very nice, sixty-ish woman answered.  We thanked her for rescuing our goats, chatted for a few minutes, then left and drove back home.

That’s the nice thing about living where we do… people are friendly and look out for each other. If we had been living in say, Chicago and our goats had roamed away from our apartment building, perhaps gotten on a subway, or started walking down Lake Shore Drive… boy, I hesitate to think what might have happened to them! Surely we would never have seen or heard from them again… and that would have been a sad day. But no, we live in a place where farm animals can roam away and neighborly folks will figure out who they belong to and how to get them back home. We have not been able to determine how exactly they were able to walk that far away. Our initial theory is that they got through a small opening in the fencing that lines the back side of our property, and not being able to figure out how to get back in they continued to roam in the opposite direction. One of our neighbors suspects maybe they followed a guy that was jogging in the area, and once they got far enough away they could no longer find their way back. Since our goats don’t speak, I guess we’ll never know.

In any case, we are happy our goats were found and safely retrieved and all is well again in the neighborhood. The shiny new I.D. tags for their collars are on the way!

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March 6, 2011 · 10:28 am

Sheen-ism’s

Okay, it’s time to climb on the Charlie Sheen bandwagon.

This post got Freshly Pressed the other day:

The Charlie Sheen Guide to Passing a Job Interview

It’s a great post and I think the author deserved the recognition. Until I read it though I hadn’t even really been following the Sheen saga, I’m not much of a TV watcher, but after reading the quotes, I gotta admit I think I kinda like the guy even though he’s acting pretty screwy right now. I like his attitude and his mojo… seriously! I hope he can figure his life out and get back to work.

But until then, I thought I would compare his quotes to what I would have said if I had been asked the same questions. It’s amazing how similar and different we are… at the same time.  Here ya go…

Sheen-ism: I’m bi-winning. I win here. I win there.

Steve-ism: I’m bi-awesome. I’m awesome here and I’m awesome there… and maybe a little bi-polar.

Sheen-ism: I’m proud of what I created. It was radical. I exposed people to magic. I exposed them to something they’re never going to see in their boring normal lives.

Steve-ism: I’m proud of what I created. My blog is radically hysterical. I expose people to goat shit and BOOBS and talking horses. I just need to make shit up to help me work through my boring, normal life.

Sheen-ism: Sometimes sleep is for infants. I don’t sleep. I wait. When I can’t sleep I don’t fight it. I just figure that there’s a higher calling.

Steve-ism: I wish I could sleep like an infant, like every couple of hours lie down and sleep for a while… you know, wrap up in a bunch of blankets, drool on shit…yeah, that would kick some serious ass. Plus throw in a good 8-10 at night… yeah,  seriously… serious ass.

Sheen-ism: I am on a drug. It’s called ‘Charlie Sheen!’ It’s not available because if you try it once you will die. Your face will melt off and your children will weep over your exploded body.

Steve-ism: I’m on a drug. It’s called ‘Steve Warner!’ You can buy it cheap at the corner of Brown Road. Sometimes it’s a stimulant and sometimes it’s depressive. Mostly it makes you think you’re much more talented than you really are.  Sometimes it makes me think “I’m so handsome, I hope I never die.”

Sheen-ism: I’m a high priest vatican assassin warlock. I don’t know. All these words just sound cool together. They come from my grand wizard master.

Steve-ism: I’m a metrosexual goat keeper psuedo farmer. I don’t know. All these words just sound cool together. It’s what happens when you move from Long Island to Michigan.

Sheen-ism: When you’ve got tiger blood and Adonis DNA, it’s like, get with the program dude.

Steve-ism: When you’ve got Irish blood and English DNA, it’s like, get with the program dude, you don’t need that eighth drink!

Sheen-ism:  I’ve been the aw-shucks guy with this bitchin’ rockstar life, so now I’m going to completely embrace it. I’m going to wrap both arms around it and love it violently, and defend it violently, through violent hatred.

Steve-ism:  I’ve been the bitchin’ rockstar guy with this aw-shucks life, so now I’ve got to just accept that’s the way it is. That kinda sucks, but I guess I’ll just wrap my arms around it and violently try to get over the disappointment.

Sheen-ism:  I’m not [broke] but I was kind of counting on some of that money to get me through the summer. Now I’ve got to like work. But that’s alright. Work’s good. Work fuels the soul.”

Steve-ism:  I make a great living, but if I could just say fuck-it and go all homesteader on y’all, grow a friggin’ unabomber beard, stop showering… yeah that would be good for the soul. But instead I’ve got to like work… that friggin’ blows!

Sheen-ism: You borrow my brain for five seconds and just be like dude, can’t handle it, unplug this bastard. It fires in a way that is, I don’t know, maybe not from this terrestrial realm.

Steve-ism: You borrow my brain for five seconds and just be like dude, stop swearing so fucking much, I can’t handle it, unplug this bastard. It fires in a way that is, I don’t know, like dude, shut the fuck up… your kids are in the room!

Sheen-ism: The past couple weeks has been me cresting on a mercury surfboard, a tsunami toward “THEM”

Steve-ism: The past couple months has me cresting on a blogging rocket ship, hurtling towards INFAMY!

I’ll be checking into rehab shortly….

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March 4, 2011 · 6:03 pm

My Conversation with Chief

It was just about a year ago in late March 2010, my kid’s Spring Break was coming up in the first week of April and my wife and I being good, solid parents… well, we hadn’t planned anything fun to do. No trips to Disney, nothing… barely even any time off from work. It was looking like these poor mistreated kids would have to be home for a week, sleeping in and playing video games… basically just being total slackers all day long for a week. Hey, that sounded pretty good to me, but alas, that is not what family memories are made of! So with the pressure on us parents to come up with something fun to do for at least a portion of the week, my wife organized a trip for us to drive down to Kentucky for a few days, tour around the areas where all the beautiful horse farms are located and specifically to visit the Kentucky Horse Park which is a giant educational theme park/horse farm that celebrates the vast history of horses and horse racing in Kentucky.

Have I mentioned that my daughter wants a horse?

Anyhow, so when the time came, we packed the car, drove down to Lexington, found a nice hotel to stay in and had just an absolute great time making memories that my wife and I and the kids will remember for a long time. While there, we saw a horse race, visited the Park and spent many hours just driving around. Kentucky, if you have never visited, is a stunningly beautiful place, just like what you hear about, rolling hills of green grass, and miles and miles of horse farms lined with white fences, grazing horses and beautiful homes and barns. It is a place we had wanted to visit for a long time and we finally got the opportunity.

On our last day there we visited the park and while planning out our day we decided to purchase a trail ride… seriously, you can’t visit Kentucky without getting on the back of a horse and taking a trail ride. We bought our tickets and scheduled the ride for about 4:00 in the afternoon, so we could spend the majority of our time touring the park and then finish the day with a relaxing ride, letting the horses do the work. When 4:00 rolled around we lined up with all the other folks, the staff assigned us all our horses and we hopped on and got ready to go.

My horse was named Chief. He was a big horse and I thought that was a fitting name for him. He looked like a Chief! The guy that was helping me get on him told me Chief had been a race horse and had won a bunch of money on the Kentucky race circuit, and now he was retired and enjoying a good life here at the park.

“Cool”, I thought!

A few minutes later, everybody was settled into the saddles and like clockwork all these horses, probably 30 or so of them, started plodding along out to the trail, nose to ass and ass to nose… they all knew where to go and they were pretty well-trained to follow the horse in front of them.  As we were walking along and everyone was starting to spread out a little, I looked down at Chief and he just looked tired out. “Poor horse”, I thought, “has to do the same shit over and over again every day.” As none of the other riders were really within hearing distance, I looked down once again at Chief and I said, “Chief buddy, you’re looking pretty tired out, are you okay my friend?”

You will never believe what happened next… seriously, I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP… Chief friggin’ turns his head to me and says, “Yeah dude, I’m pretty tired out… I’m kinda sick of this trail riding shit… hey, no offense to you or anything… I’ve just been doing this for a long time. Plus I spent like 10 years racing, working my ass off day after day. It beat me up man, wore down my poor legs and my back. I gotta admit this trail riding has been a pretty good gig for me. I have a good life here, they feed me well and I have a nice place to live… I’m just tired out…you know… maybe it’s time to try something else… or maybe just ride off into the sunset… do you know where I’m coming from?”

Holy FUCKINGIDIDNOTJUSTHEARTHATHORSETALKTOME…

After a few seconds of stun and disbelief, I gathered my composure and replied back, “Chief buddy, yeah I can totally get where you’re coming from. I’m kinda in the same place… I’m tired too… I’ve been doing the same job for almost 20 years, it’s a retail job and it has beat the shit out of me as well, my legs always hurt, my back hurts when I try to sleep, I’m always worrying about it… yeah dude, I get ya… must be fate that you ended up being my horse today.

“Yeah, fate… that’s pretty cool… fate, I like that” Chief replied.

We walked in silence for a few minutes and I started thinking I should ask him if he had any thoughts about us getting a horse for our daughter. “Hey Chief”, I said, “my daughter wants us to get her a horse. You got any thoughts about that? Do you think we should? She’s been taking riding lessons and I think she might be ready.”

“You know buddy, owning a horse is a big commitment”, Chief said.

“Yeah, I know”, I replied, “but I think she could handle it… I mean sure, my wife and I are gonna have to help out… I know that, but I’m starting to think it might be a good idea. We have the barns and the stalls and everything already there on the property. So it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to get it all pulled together. We’d actually probably get two horses… you know, one for my daughter and one for my wife.”

“Two would be good”, said Chief. Then he paused for a few moments before starting to speak again. “You know, I think it might be a good idea”, he finally said. “That’s the kind of stuff that family memories are made of.”

We walked for a while longer and after a few moments I said. “Hey Chief, you know… I’m always dreaming about some kind of crazy shit I want to do, finding some kind of idyllic life as a writer or a musician or brewing craft beer in my basement… or whatever… you know… just crazy, unrealistic shit. I’m kind of in one of those places where I just don’t feel like I’m in the spot where I should be at my age… you know… everything that has happened to me is just average. Sometimes I think I should have maybe followed some different paths… you had a crazy-successful life as a race horse… do you ever have any regrets?”

“Hmmmmm… “, Chief mumbled, then paused for a minute or two.

Finally he continued. “Let me tell you something, my friend. When I was a young horse, I had a fucking rock-star life. Dude, we were traveling around to races, hanging with the other race horses, eating and drinking like kings, making money, big money. It was totally bitchin! Seriously… and I thought I had it made… fame and fortune baby. But you know what? Now that I look back, it wasn’t that great… it wore me down, always being in the limelight, never having any privacy. People think that so-called rock-star life is so great, but it’s not really… I would have killed to have a normal life on a small farm with a little girl like your daughter loving me and riding me and taking care of me every day… man, that would have been a dream-come-true… you know what I’m saying? It’s all about life and family, my friend, life and family… you know? You gotta enjoy what you got.”

“You sound like my wife”, I responded. “She’s always preaching that shit to me. I’m always off in la-la-land… and she’s you know… real level-headed.”

“She must be a smart lady”, Chief replied.

“Yeah, she is”, I said. “She’s pretty amazing.”

“Count your blessings my friend”, Chief said.

Once again, we walked quietly for several minutes. Soon we were approaching the stables where we started and the end of our ride. Chief turned to me one more time and said, “hey buddy, I never got your name.”

“I’m Steve”, I said.

“Well, Steve”, he continued. “I hope you figure it all out. You seem like a pretty smart guy, I’m confident you’ll find whatever it is you’re looking for.”

“Yeah I will”, I answered. “You know, life always has a way of working itself out. I wish the same for you Chief… I hope you get your day to ride off into the sunset.”

“Yeah, I will too”, he said. “But I’m okay for now… you know, it’s people like you that keep me grounded.”

We stopped at the stables and I hopped off into the mud. “Thanks for the ride Chief”, I said and patted him on the neck.

“Thank you for visiting the park, he replied. “You know Steve, if you ever come back and I’m still here maybe we can share a little bourbon together… I love good Kentucky bourbon!”

I felt a big smile form on my face.  “Will do my friend… that sounds great”, I replied… and I walked away into the sunset.

Disclaimer:  All names have been changed to protect the identity and privacy of the participants in the story… well except mine, of course… y’all already know who I am… so I guess it’s just Chief’s name that has been changed… and that picture up there at the top… that’s not Chief, that’s just a really bitchin’ good-lookin’ horse.

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March 2, 2011 · 8:57 am

Guilty or Not Guilty?

This post is part of the Write On Project.  Topic:  GUILT

I was asked by Jared Karol and the folks at the Write On Project to write a piece on their latest topic: GUILT. I tried hard to think of things that I have felt guilty about in my life, and thankfully, as I have led a relatively honest and trustworthy lifestyle, I was not able to come up with anything terribly significant (yeah… really… seriously… ). Lately, however, on a personal level, I have felt guilty about not following some of the creative pursuits that I was deeply passionate about as a younger person. I felt that I wasn’t practicing what I am constantly preaching to my kids… it’s part of the reason I started writing this blog.  So I took on the challenge, sat down to write, and at first I had these grand delusions that I would write something all… you know… profound and serious-like.  But hey, y’all know by now… that’s not me… so this is what I came up with. I hope you enjoy the story!

 

BAILIFF: Welcome to the Court of Dreams, Honorable Judge I. Emma Dreamer presiding. Today’s case is the State of Unhappiness vs. Mr. B. R. Chronicles.

Counsel for the Prosecution is the Attorney General for the State of Unhappiness, Mr. Stu Latetachange

Counsel for the Defendant from the law firm Allweez, Fallow, Yerpassion & Ambishon will be Attorney Mr. Chase Yerpassion

JUDGE: Welcome all to my Court of Dreams. Mr. Chronicles you are being accused today of abandoning your dreams, how do you plead?

ME:  Well, NOT GUILTY, of course, Your Honor

JUDGE:  Members of the jury, please note that the defendant has pleaded NOT GUILTY to the charges.  Mr. Latetachange, you may begin by presenting your opening statements.

LATETACHANGE:  Thank you, Your Honor.  Hello members of the jury, let me thank you today for your services to our fine community.  Today we have a very serious charge against the defendant, Mr. Chronicles. It is my belief that the defendant is GUILTY… in fact SERIOUSLY GUILTY of abandoning his dreams and not pursuing the creative outlets that so inspired him as a young man.  I will provide significant and compelling evidence today to prove that to you and I am convinced that when this trial comes to a conclusion you will agree with me and render a GUILTY verdict.  Thank you.

JUDGE:  Thank you Mr. Latetachange.  Mr. Yerpassion would you like to present a counter statement.

YERPASSION:  Yes, Your Honor… thank you maam.  Hello, my friends in the jury.  Let me also thank you for your time today and for performing your civic duty.  You have heard what my colleague, Mr. Latetachange has presented about the defendant, Mr. Chronicles.  I am here to convince you otherwise, that Mr. Chronicles is NOT GUILTY of these charges rendered against him today.  That although he has possibly let some dreams sneak by without pursuing them to the fullest, he has actively followed his passions throughout his life and especially, in the last several years, has made a concerted effort to bring those passions back into his everyday pursuits.  At the conclusion of this trial today, when you have heard and digested all of the evidence, I will ask that you find Mr. Chronicles NOT GUILTY of the charges against him today.  Thank you.

JUDGE:  Thank you both for your opening statements.  Mr. Latetachange, would you like to call your first witness……..

Intrigued?  Read more of this post here at the Write On Project…

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