Texas

Time flies

/ steve

Wow. It’s really been almost two years since I posted. I had plans for this site. Then I changed them. And changed them again. And again.

My effort to move to Texas has been … complicated. After I got screwed on the job offer in 2021, I got a trucking job and did that for just over a year. I made a few more trips to Texas during that time and I bought a 75-acre ranch with my mom and stepfather. I’m in the process of moving there. This will be a family property, not just mine, though it will be just mine at some point. That day can wait as long as possible; I’m very happy to be sharing it.

I’ve been delayed by the mechanic ‘fixing’ my truck and the resulting financial issues. I’m basically splitting my time between South Texas and the PNW, loving one and increasingly hating the other. I was also delayed by breeding season and the weather. I don’t want to move my animals from the cool northwest directly into 100° temps and high humidity, though I’m less concerned about that than I am the conditions they’d be exposed to in transit. This is especially an issue for the pig. And on top of that, I have ducks, geese, and turkeys nesting, which I am allowing partly because it’s hard to stop them and partly because when I get to Texas I might take an initial hit from predators while I’m getting my dog program in gear, and I don’t want to lose my genetics. I also haven’t put up my barn or pigeon lofts in Texas yet, or put in the new fencing I need.

I bought a 16’ moving van. It’s at a shop in southwest Colorado awaiting repairs — almost made it. I have my car, a non-running truck that I bought for parts at an auction in Houston, and a brand new livestock trailer in Texas. My pickup still needs work but I’m driving it, in the NW. My cargo van is at the mechanic’s shop but I’m not having any work done because I’m out of money and I’m not happy with his other work. I will trailer it out of there soon.

I have at least four more trips to make to Texas. On the last trip I started planting the permaculture garden, a project that will be ongoing, the plan being to use it as a corridor between the existing house and a new one that I will build. Before I returned to the NW I set up a makeshift watering system that I hope will keep everything alive while I’m away. Future plans include lots more trees, hugels, and a couple small ponds — one for koi and one where I’ll try my hand at growing rice.

The garden will be a mix of food plants and ornamentals. Right now I have a navel orange and a Meyer lemon tree, a couple avocados, some figs, a strawberry tree, a magnolia, some sago palms (cycads), Washingtonia palms, chaste trees, Esperanza, Ixora, hardy hibiscus, an ice cream banana, an azalea, and various ice plants and sedums. I’m sure I’m forgetting some things. I still have a bunch of potted dogwoods and redbuds that I got from Arbor Day and vowed that they would stay potted until they were in Texas, and I took some monkey puzzle seedlings down to see how they like the heat and humidity. They nearly doubled in size in the two weeks I was there, but I wouldn’t take their vigor as seedlings as an indication that they’ll thrive there as mature trees. Time will tell.

The property is crawling with wildlife, which I’m working out how to preserve while still raising my livestock. Compromises will have to be made. Hopefully the deer will stay. The coyotes, cougars, bobcats, and raccoons should stay next door. The scorpions are free to leave, or at least stay out of my bed and shoes. The javelina are welcome, but I’m not sure how they’ll get past my new fences once they’re up; I don’t think they’re great climbers. I’ve set up a bait station for feral hogs, but it’s been a few weeks and no takers. If they do show up and start taking the bait, I will construct a trap. If they don’t ever come, I’ll put a sorting pen in that location and try baiting a lower, more wooded area.

I was feeding a feral cat on my porch on my last trip down. He was getting pretty bold and if he’s still around when I go back, I’ll continue to feed him, eventually trap him, get him neutered, and probably move him into the house. (I think its a male because it has a fat head.) I have another feral cat here that I’ll be taking with me — she’s been getting less fearful as well, though it’s taking her longer. She had kittens in my barn; I trapped all of them and got them into rescue, and got the mother cat spayed. She’s been a great rat killer for me here, but I’m nervous about having her outside in a new place, and I don’t want her wiping out the bird life on the ranch.

This site is going away. I’m working on a few different things to replace it: a blog about hot sauce and spicy food; a podcast where I can spout off about whatever; other things I’m not ready to discuss. It’ll be a little bit before I get any of that up and running so for whoever reads this, it’ll be here for at least another month, but I’m probably not going to post anymore until I get the new site up. I might use this same site/template and just replace what’s here now — I started working on it with Squarespace but I’m not liking the templates even a little bit. Every one of them crops my banner for the mobile version, and I don’t want my goddamn banner cropped.

Well shit.

/ steve

I’m sure this has happened to all of you. You post an ad online because unemployment says you have to start looking for a job, and you’re surprised when a bunch of people respond. One of them really gets your attention because he’s doing something very similar to what you want to do, so you talk, you click, and he offers you a job and use of his farm in Texas. So you book a trip to go see the property and finalize the deal, but he immediately withdraws the offer because of a misunderstanding, which you clear up, and then he seems to get very excited again about hiring you. So you have your elderly mother and your even more elderly stepfather come to town to take care of your animals for you while you’re on your trip. This costs a few thousand dollars because you don’t have a decent place for them to stay and it’s peak tourist season, but it’s worth it for this opportunity. So they arrive and they take you to the airport, but you miss your flight because a bridge is closed, adding an hour to your drive. You rebook and it costs you four times as much. Shit.

You get to Texas, you meet the guy, you get along, and he offers you $50,000 a year to manage his business and run his farm. So of course you take it, and you start making plans to move. He’s in touch in the meantime. You book another trip for your mom to come take care of the animals again while you go back to Texas to build pens for them. You book her a nice place to stay, but the next morning your new boss withdraws the job, stating that he can’t afford what he’s offered you and he has a bunch of other concerns, most of which you could allay, but this has happened twice now, and there’s not going to be a third time. Thankfully you’re still within Airbnb’s 24-hour cancelation window, and you can still cancel the plane tickets, too, so you’re not losing another $1200. You’ve only told a few people about the job, so you don’t look like too much of an asshole, but there’s still a tinge of humiliation. The much stronger feeling, though, is that no one can be relied upon, with the sole exception of your 72-year-old mother. You don’t feel so much embarrassed or betrayed as you do isolated. If you’re going to make this move, you’re going to have to find a way to do it without any help, except maybe from your mom. We’ve all been there, right?

The guy who offered me this job is not a bad guy. I liked him and I liked his wife and his kids, and I liked what he had planned for his property. One thing that frustrates me is that some of the concerns he cited when he withdrew the job were not things I had even asked for — they were things he offered me, and in every instance I had suggested a cheaper alternative that I would actually have preferred. Well, cheaper except for the $50,000 a year — I didn’t ask for that either, but once it was offered I wasn’t about to try to talk him down.

I had my own share of concerns — this was going to be a good job, but there were plenty of less-than-ideal circumstances that came with it. It was always going to be a stepping stone, but I made that clear from day one. I think ultimately that may have been the problem — I have my own ambitions. Maybe you can’t have two visionaries on the same project, though I’ve always been able to take a supporting role when it’s appropriate, as it would have been in this case.

I just had the rug pulled out from under me not even two hours ago, so this is still fresh, but here’s what I’m thinking and feeling in this moment:

First, I’m anxious to do something — anything. I’m wound up, fidgeting, mind awhirl. I’m back in puzzle-solving mode.

Second, I’m not going to entertain this kind of offer from anyone else — I do have a number of similar offers lined up, but I see no reason why they should end any differently than this one. What I’ve realized from this experience is that it makes me too vulnerable.

Third, I think my days of being in supporting roles are over. I need to pursue my own vision.

Finally, this drives home for me the need for a different way of doing things when it comes to how we obtain, hold, and profit from real estate. The current system, which is basically ‘have money already’, isn’t a very good fit for me, or for many millions of other people, and it becomes increasingly untenable as the rich get ever-richer and the rest of us sink ever-deeper into the mire they create for us with all their shit.

I said a few entries ago that I had cracked it. I have. I will start working on getting the details of my vision — which is not uniquely mine, by the way — published, but in the meantime, if you want a taste, look into real estate purchasers co-ops. I believe we can pool the borrowing power of a large number of buyers to drive down costs and overcome other obstacles to real estate ownership, and there is already a system in place to do it. More to come.

I messed with Texas and I liked it.

/ steve

My apologies to my several million readers — in my last entry I promised that I had cracked the code, solved the great mystery of the universe, created a unified theory of physics, found the G-spot, etc. All that is true, but I also said I would be taking down this site and replacing it with something else, and I am going to do that, but first, an update.

I just got back from Texas, and I’m still processing, but it was a very productive trip in that: 1) I drove all over the eastern two thirds of the state (plus half a day in Louisiana just for the hell of it) and got a really good feel for the lay of the land; and 2) I got a good-paying job managing a small farm.

The San Marcos River the morning after a rainstorm

So I’ll be moving in a few months, timing my move to minimize heat stress for my animals. This will give me the foothold I need to get established in Texas while I look for my own place. My new employer understands that my goal is to set up my own farm, as opposed to running his for the rest of my life, and he’s good with that. It’s a rare opportunity brought to you (well, to me) by a massive nationwide labor shortage that I don’t fully understand, but I guess with anything that doesn’t make sense these days you just say ‘Covid’ and everybody accepts that as a viable explanation. These are strange times — a tad dystopian, even. Still, I have job offers all over the country, having made almost no effort to find prospective employers. I never even made a proper résumé. So for anyone reading this who needs work or wants a better job — now’s the time. I can’t think of any time in my life when it has been easier to find work.

Having said that, nothing is ever set in stone, and I haven’t started the job yet. Things could get screwed up — things often do — but if that happens I’ll still move. It might just take a little longer. And now I have a short list of places I’d really like to go, and a much longer list of places I’ll settle for.

The aptly named American Beautyberry; if only it tasted as nice as it looks.

With regard to my trip, here are the broad takeaways:

• There are some places in Texas that I really like, maybe a bit more than I expected to. I’m always hesitant to share specifics online because the last thing I need is all you people going there and buying up all the property and driving up the prices.

• The food is better than I expected. I’ve generally had decent food in Texas, but on this trip I had some really good Mexican, German, and barbecue. I also went to the ubiquitous Whataburger and it’s thoroughly mediocre, even as fast food goes.

The beach on South Padre Island is… a bit plain.

• The motels were, on the whole, the worst I’ve ever stayed in. A few were OK; a few were quite bad. I did not have a restful trip. In general, nationwide, the quality of affordable motels has gone into the shitter. A few of the issues I had on this trip were black mold, rotten drywall and flooring in bathrooms, bad water pressure, faulty door locks, inoperable lights, dirty air conditioners, noisy air conditioners, hard mattresses, insufficient bedding, bugs in the room, and one night, a small toad. I caught him and put him outside. Also, on my first night, the hotel had two, identical, framed posters on the wall. It didn’t affect my comfort, it just showed a general laziness and lack of attention to detail.

• It was 100 degrees all but one of the days I was in Texas, and it was bearable. Not comfortable, but bearable. And I’ve discovered I like cold milk on a hot day.

Along one stretch of highway in west Texas I found thousands of ripe prickly pears; I wish I could have harvested them, but instead I just ate one on the roadside while being attacked by bugs.

• People drive like shit in Texas. They’re some of the worst goddamn drivers anywhere in the country. I could go into great detail but I’ll just get mad.

• There are colleges and universities everywhere in Texas, and A&M extensions all over the place. There are a lot of reasons it can be handy to have a college nearby, so I was happy to see this. I visited several campuses without making any effort to find them.

• There are tiny little ants that crawl up your legs and bite you. They are assholes.

• Buc-ee’s is all at once wonderful, awful, fun, creepy, convenient, and unnecessary. It feels like the setting of a quirky indie film that can’t possibly be a real place, but it is real and I went there a lot. For some reason I never bought gas there or used their restroom, but I did get some rhino tacos, which, to be clear, are just called that — they don’t contain any actual rhinoceros meat.

• Texas ranchers are very set in their ways, and their ways don’t exactly warrant being set in. I find it very odd that in the birthplace of arguably the world’s most famous landrace livestock breed, the Texas longhorn, an animal that thrived on native forage for centuries, everyone is trying, at considerable expense, to cultivate pastures of non-native grasses. (I’m fortunate that my new boss feels the same way I do about this and has already converted all his pastures back to native forage.)

• And last but not least, Austin hipsters are some goofy fuckers.

These wild muscadines tasted kind of like grape drink; their flesh was white and didn’t really come apart in the mouth, plus skins too thick to eat and lots of seeds, but some people make wine out of these. There’s definitely enough sugar.

Finally, I do have to mention this… Setting politics aside, when it comes to Covid, the situation in Texas is dire on paper, but being there, things felt as close to ‘normal’ as they’ve been since the pandemic began. It’s pretty much business as usual there, and I didn’t see the kind of problems I’m seeing here in Washington. Here, things look better on paper, but our grocery store shelves are bare, restaurants are closed again, and people are being turned away from hospitals due to lack of staffing. Some kids aren’t starting school because of staffing problems.

I don’t want to downplay what’s happening in Texas — clearly people are dying, and it’s happening in hospitals, not in restaurants and grocery stores, so of course I’m not going to see it. I also don’t want to shit on Washington leaders’ efforts to protect people, but I do believe that as well intentioned as it may be, it’s all too little, too late. To put it a bit crudely, I think we’re trying to unfuck the prom queen on her baby’s first birthday. We should have given her contraception before the big night, but we didn’t. We should have given her a morning after pill, but we didn’t do that either. We had three months to take her to Planned Parenthood, but we didn’t do that. If I extend this metaphor any farther it’s going to get really despicable (if you’re of a certain religious persuasion you think I already crossed the line), so I’ll just say that little Covid is here now, and he’s not going anywhere.

It’s basically a shit show here — not the big conspiracy some people think it is, and it’s not “tyranny” — we still have elections for fuck’s sake — it’s just a lot of inconsistency and overreach that makes living here, for the moment, untenable. I wish I could leave sooner. I wish I could take the people I care about with me. Buuuut I can’t, so I’m sticking to the plan and getting ready to leave in maybe late November. The rest will fall into place in good time.

Next time I will share the secrets of the universe, I promise.

Update: After doing some research it appears that the little asshole ants I mentioned were fire ants, and I managed to get attacked by them three times in one week. The ants didn’t bite me, they stung. I had always thought that fire ant attacks were far more severe, but I’m reading that many people find them fairly mild. I also thought the ants themselves would be bigger. While I certainly didn’t enjoy the sensation, it felt nothing like the bites from large red ants that I used to get as a kid in California — those hurt so badly they made your ears ring. Hopefully my chickens will eat lots of fire ants.