Down the Rabbit Hole

 Last week's blog... yuck.

The part I think I should feel penitent about, well, I don't. The part I feel bad about is confessing my sins. Not the sins themselves. I don't know. That's not quite accurate either. It's complicated? Living with the ADHD mind.  

I am in a place where I know I need help learning to navigate my finances. I don't make enough on SSDI alone to live. But with my supplemental incomes I do. I can live. And we should be able to pay our bills and eat food without strife or worry. But there's not enough to be spendy or to pursue the American dream.  And certainly not enough to "farm." Any kind of farming involves risk. If you are an agricultural farmer you have to take a giant risk that your investment and hard work will yield you enough to balance not only your initial expenditures but the disasters that come along in the mean time (hail, tornadoes, drought, flooding, freeze, etc.). With livestock, in our case goats and poultry, you risk that your does will get pregnant and produce, which we're experiencing the "oh crap she didn't take" side of that right now. You're believing that you are capable and will be successful at keeping your does from your bucks when you don't want them to produce. Chickens won't get sour crop or egg bound. Or any other horrible things you get to gamble on when you read those social media pages about all the terrible things that will befall your fowl. Fowlpox. Coccidia. Marek's. To name a few. Lice and mites. ewwww. Anyway, it's a risk. No matter what. But to be a farmer is a risk that is heavy on the "it takes money to make money" side of business. I need to invest in this high dollar billy in order to create a line of goats that is worthy of the prices we are asking for when we have kids. We need to keep chickens that lay the eggs we want for our rainbow flock. We need to keep buying outgoing, social animals that engage with people if we want to pursue the dream we have of a petting zoo type of experience. 

Feeling remorseful... or not. So having jumped in and admitting that yes, I do need help learning to reign in my spending or more accurately to learn to be financially responsible, I have instant feelings of hopelessness and failure. I often refer to someone I love and say, "she's &$ years old and not getting any younger, she's always done it this way, and I know better than to think that she is going to change now." So what makes me think that I am going to be able to drum up some sort of backbone/will power and some kind of ability to learn, retain and put into practice new ways of thinking in regard to money?! It seems kind of audacious in the sense that it seems rash and reckless and maybe even an tad insolent. Is there any real chance I can change and retain the change and still be a relatively happy human? Because this human is happiest when she's acquiring animals. 

So it's crazy to think I can go on living like I do. Less than paycheck to paycheck. Hoping and waiting for things to work out. But it seems crazy to think that I can change my frame of mind in regard to spending and to be able to see long term costs involved with say... acquiring animals. It's not just an $8 pig. It's an ongoing expense of food pellets. And someone said that potbellies don't need to be given grain pellets because they can free range.  But nothing, and I do mean NOTHING, makes Cupcake happier than her daily ration of grain. She gets very happy. There's the cost of maintaining a pen for her and creating and maintaining a pen for other critters since she occupies that "extra" pen now. There could be vet costs. And I do not know about pig feet. Do they need their feet trimmed? 

On another note.... Cupcake is quite the addition. She is vocal, and she is hilarious. I really enjoy her. She talks to me a lot. Yesterday she lay her head on my foot because she was happy to see me. When I come out the door she comes running from wherever she is. Well, in the short day and a half since I started letting her free-range during the day. She's happy to go into her pen at night, that is where her feed is. Oh yeah.... 

 

Cupcake with Charlotte. Don't be surprised if we have a web that says "Some Pig"