The End of "TN Tattlers"

I used to write stories about life here on the farm called “TN Tattlers”, a sort of update on the latest happenings with our family and on the farm. I sent them to several friends and family members, but I eventually stopped. Why? Well, let me write a mini-Tattler, then I can better explain the problem.

Monday Jess, Jonathan and I rounded up the sheep we had left, and sorted out the four we needed to deliver to a farm about an hour away. That’s a long story in itself, but suffice it to say the round-up did NOT go well, and we had a lot of trouble getting all the sheep into the shed. By the time we got the four we needed on the truck, stopped by the vet’s office, and finally made it to the farm where we were delivering the sheep and unloaded them, the morning was pretty well shot.

Fortunately it was easier unloading the sheep than it was getting them loaded in the first place. The summer heat was making itself felt, but we took time to look at the lambs, sheep and Great Pyrenees there. We didn’t get home until mid-afternoon.
A Cotswold lamb with some other sheep at our friend's farm.

Yesterday Jonathan and I went grocery shopping. We generally go fairly early in the morning before it gets too crowded. It takes a while, since we are getting food and household supplies for the entire week. When we get back home, Jonathan unloads the groceries from the car and I put them away in the kitchen.

I spent the rest of the afternoon sorting through peafowl eggs in the incubators to see which were developing, and which weren’t. I also checked the water in the buckets for the critters outside, fixed supper, and various other chores.

Today I’m baking. I just took a couple loaves of Sourdough Oatmeal-Walnut Bread out of the oven, and put in a couple of loaves of Cinnamon-Raisin Bread. I also baked a batch of Birdie Bread, which consists of leftover bits of fruit and veggies, eggs and cornmeal baked in a rectangular cake pan. I cut it in cubes, bag it up and freeze part of it, then feed a few cubes to Baby the parrot each day. What she doesn’t eat gets thrown to the peafowl.

In the middle of all this baking, I got a phone call from a neighbor saying one of the goats had her head stuck in the fence, and had to go take care of that. Naturally, she was at the furthest end of the pasture, so it was a long walk in the mid-day heat. Also naturally, she was contrary and instead of helping, she hindered getting her head and horns back through the hole in the fence.

Okay, that’s a sample of what I used to put in TN Tattlers. So what’s wrong with it? Well, as Paul Harvey would say, here’s “The Rest of the Story.”

As in all the TN Tattlers, I only wrote about the things we did, and didn’t mention the impact any of the activities had on me. But the truth is, after each bout of physical activity, I need time to recover. I didn’t mention how often I had to rest, or how much the pain levels increased after each physical exertion. Because I didn’t talk about those things, many people reading my stories figured I could do anything I wanted, so why wasn’t I doing more of the things I used to do?

I got tired of the unrealistic expectations my stories unfortunately engendered, but neither did I want to give a blow-by-blow account that included the effect activities had on me.

Thus, I wrote no more, and that was the end of the TN Tattlers.