AN OLD MAN STARTS A NEW CAREER ON THE FINCA – 2024

I am not quite sure if anyone noticed, but I have not been writing for a while. Also, I am not quite sure why this literary “dry spell”, has occurred. In some ways, perhaps, I just got tired of my own bullshit. Maybe, I was having a struggle finding relevance, in what had been dribbling off my pen, in the past year or so. After a period, such as this, where there has been no literary production, even my most loyal of readers have gone elsewhere looking for things to read. My most rabid reader, Ol’ Bubbaloo, no longer asks, “when are you gonna produce another article, eh?” Nor, “come on JimboRed, keep going, you still have plenty left to remember!” She no longer, even, pushes me, back into my writers lair. Where she used to encourage me with, “don’t come outta there, without something real good! You hear?”

So, while she sleeps, here I am again, at 3:19 AM, crouched in front of my typewriter, about to gush out some real crap. I am jumping ahead to a very contemporary memory, that is now taking place in “real time”. If I manage to get this memory on paper, and if it satisfies my need for communication with the outside world, then, I will return to where I left off, in the years after 2010. And then see, what I can do, about patching together the last remaining time of our retirement. Geezus, just thinking of it, makes me just shiver with anticipation. In my mind, I hear a loud collective groan of, “No JimboRed, don’t make a comeback, just leave it now, and go have a nap!”

I guess everyone is aware that Jimbored and Bubbaloo have now been retired for the last 20 years. My God, has the time flown by. I have always said, and I still stick by it, that if you want to “speed time up”, just quit work and find something that you like to do. My God, the years fly by as months. I often think, maybe I should find a job and slow things down again. Well, I don’t really ever think that, but it does set the tone for this article. In the space of the last month, I have went from a life of leisure, to one of full days and early bedtimes. Two main things have happened. One, we decided to try and sell our house. Second, Bubbaloo has volunteered, us, to look after the vegetable production on the Finca.

On top of those two major jobs, JimboRed has decided, to continue his golf career for “one last year”. April 1st came, and after much agonizing, I went in and paid the $XXXX.00 annual fee. It was a huge financial blow. I tried to make Ol’ Bubbaloo feel better by explaining that, although my first round of the year cost $XXXX.00, that, all subsequent rounds, for the year, would be free! As usual, she does not see the humour in my analysis. Instead she snorts, “yeah, and what about the $100.00/week that you spend on beer?” She still knows how to hit you, right where it hurts. I don’t know why I never give up trying my humour on her in stressful situations? Since the day we met, it has, never once, worked.

Ok, now, back to my real time memory. One thing you have to know, is that selling a house causes more work than anything else you have done with your house, up to that time. Every square inch, both inside and out needs to be deep cleaned, fixed and revitalized. Nothing can be overlooked. And apparently “no one can do it like you JimboRed, so just quit whining and get at it!” Bubbaloo always has been the nurturing sort. Once the decision was made to sell, the next three weeks became a living hell for JimboRed. What I experienced has lead me to coin a new mantra, something like this. “Every job creates 3 additional jobs, no matter the insignificance of the first job!” Let me give you an example of this……..

Once we had decided to commence this huge job of selling, it became necessary to identify priority jobs and pick them off. One at a time, something like eating an elephant. “You can’t eat an elephant in one bite…….”. With this in mind, I jump into the first bite. We decide that, there is a small piece of baseboard in the bottom level that is stained and needs cleaning. Armed with my wet rag and cleaners, I am all over this job. I scratch, clean and scrub. I rub, scrape and curse. My God I’m having fun. All of my efforts were to no avail. Nothing I could do would make a difference. In fact, it probably made the piece stand out more.

Every time I went down there, my eyes went to this one area. I just knew that a new job was about to develop, from this one innocent attempt at cleaning a piece of baseboard. And, sure enough, I am at the local DIY store buying a wee can of trim paint and one tiny trim roller. I gather rags, tape, scraper, tray and rubber gloves. I am silently cursing this small piece of baseboard, I don my kneepads. Because getting down on the hard floor is no longer that easy for my old knees. Grumbling away, I manage to finish this job without major disaster striking. Satisfied, I put my gear and my mess away.

Feeling quite proud, I go back down to review my handiwork. “What the hell”, I’m standing there in amazement. The piece I have painted jumps out at me like a neon light. Suddenly everything else looks, tired and dirty. The rest of the baseboards seem to be crying out, “paint me, paint me too!” It can’t be ignored. And by now it is to late too return this piece of baseboard to it’s original, stained state. And sure enough, I’m back at the store, this time buying a big can of trim paint, a bunch of rollers and more tape. Now I’m furious with myself for even thinking of cleaning that one small piece of baseboard.

And, unlike a real tradesman, I cannot “freehand” the painting. Because I vibrate so badly, from the family “shakes”, I cannot get close to anything with a loaded paintbrush in my hand. I admit I did try a little piece and quickly had paint on the baseboard, walls, floor and myself. Rather, I must tape out both sides of the baseboard in every square inch of the bottom floor, before starting. There are 100’s of feet of baseboard on one floor. The bottom line is that it took hours to get a full roll of tape on everything. And then it took 30 minutes to paint it all. Another couple hours stripping tape and cleaning up and the bottom floor was done. Geezus!

Of course now the other two floors look tired and dirty. Bubbaloo, then sidles up and in her sweetest voice says, “wow that looks so good maybe we should do the other floors also.” Unquestionably, I knew who “we” meant. I feel sick! where’s my gun? I open my mouth to tell her to go ahead and paint whatever she wants, that I am now going golfing. What comes out is a weak, “sure, whatever you want.” That is how my next week went. Dawn to dusk taping, cursing, painting, cleaning and repeat. All this while Bubbaloo is searching around for the next job to do. I guarantee, that, not once did I do one job, that was only one job. Every job I touched morphed into three jobs. Now I jump on job number two and on and on it went. Finally, the house is ready to show.

And NOW, I am coming to the point of this whole post. One fine day, Bubbaloo announces that she has volunteered to assume responsibility for Ron’s vegetable patch at the Finca. And further that she has also volunteered my services. Great, I’m thinking, I can squeeze in one or two hours a week, to sprinkle a little water around. The next thing I know, I’m up to my ass in weeds, dirt and bugs. Soon, I’m digging, pulling, cursing and otherwise feeling sorry for myself. After all, wasn’t there enough weeds in our own yard to satisfy us? My next three weeks were consumed with my new job. Quickly, I found out that gardening was not just about sprinkling a few seeds around, like Johnny Appleseed. Rather it was a full-time job, just getting the soil ready to receive seeds.

Once the weeding, tilling and soil hauling are done, I am ready for the fun part. We start with potatoes. That wasn’t too bad of work. You find a potato that is already growing sprouts. Then you cut it into pieces with one sprout or eye in each piece. Stick a few pieces in each planter or hill, cover with dirt and wait for nature to make it’s magic. At least you can see what you are dealing with, even though I remain a bit skeptical of anything ever growing. That done it was into the fine work. The first packet of seeds I open doesn’t appear to have anything in it except for some tiny particles at the bottom. I’m about to crumple it up and throw it away, when Bubbaloo says, “hold it, those are the seeds!” This is not what I would call seeds! You need a magnifying glass to even see them, let alone picking one individual seed out of the pack.

I can’t hold them, because I vibrate to violently. So we make a plan. I, on my knees, dig a small trench, then Bubbaloo hands me one individual seed. I place it in the ground and lightly cover it with dirt. Let me say there were hundreds of seeds and by the time I get to the end of one row, I am tired, my knees hurt and Bubbaloo is pushing me around. She has assumed the role of head gardener, and for me the role of Mexican field labourer. Things like, “keep the row straight, not to deep, not to close together!” All the while, I’m not even sure that I even saw one seed go into the ground. I realize that this is not gardening as I remember it.

Back in my teenage years, I remember Dad taking me out to the garden to help him. He grew much of what we ate all year round. He would grow it, Mom would can it. So my memories of him planting were this. He would take only a hoe with him and some pouches of seeds saved from the year before. With his hoe on edge, he would scratch a V-shaped row in the ground. There were no survey line laid out for straightness. There were no rules about depth. He just hoed along in somewhat of a straight line. At the end of a row, he would pull out his pouch of seeds and walking along would drop them into his row. I don’t ever remember him kneeling down. Once he had a few seeds spread out along the row, he would turn his hoe flat and push back in the dirt from the sides of his trenches. Then he would flatten out his hoe and go along the row, tamping down the earth that he had just pushed back in. Done!

Never, ever did I see him add water to his garden, and we lived right on the prairies of Alberta. It was as dry there as the Atacama Desert in Peru. And always, a couple of months later, his garden was in full bloom, ready for Mom to harvest and preserve them for winter. You might ask, what did he take me along for, if it was that easy? Let me tell you. I believe it was punishment for me having too much fun on the Friday night with my friends. He would say I was there for picking weeds and rocks out of his garden before he planted. He would give me a one row head start, and I had to stay out in front of his relentless hoe and bag of seeds. Never once did I let him catch up to me. I would have rather eaten a garden slug, than let him hoe up behind me and then stand there looking down at me.

Anyway back to my new summer job. With Bubbaloo supervising, and me planting, we did manage to put a large amount to seeds into the ground. In addition to the packages of seeds, Ron had also been busy in her downstairs incubator, growing all sorts of seedlings for us to plant. The thing about seedlings is that you can see them poking thru the soil in their tiny little pots. At least you have some hope that something will grow. The other method, which consisted of placing microscopic seeds directly in the ground, from packages, left me with absolutely zero confidence of anything ever growing. However, after about two or three more weeks of knee breaking work. And, with constant verbal and physical abuse from Bubbaloo, we managed to fill every square inch of the garden area.

We planted potatoes, tomatoes, turnips, pumpkins, as well as cucumbers, beets, radish and carrots. Then we added lettuce, broccoli, and cauliflower for good measure. We topped it of with asparagus, hot peppers, cucamelons, climbing beans, a variety of herbs and god only knows how many other things. At that point I let out a great sigh of relief. “Ah, now to sit back and watch shit happen!” You know I’m kidding, right? I did not even get one day of respite and I am back on my knees at the original starting point, pulling all the weeds that grew in to replace the ones I picked earlier, Geezus.

Bubbaloo, in the meantime, has assigned herself the job of garden waterer. I tried to reason with her, explaining that we should each have a turn at every job. To this she replies, “hmmmph, I already know how to pick weeds.” And besides, watering is far too technical for you at this point!” “Now get back over there and pull those nasty weeds!” “Don’t make me go cut a bamboo switch for your butt, HEAR ME?” There I go, slinking away, back to my never ending job. On a positive note, one day, when I came back for some more weed pulling, lo and behold, there are tiny shoots poking thru the ground in lots of places. I am gobsmacked! It appeared that we were either growing something or that I had a whole new set of weeds to deal with.

In the past couple of weeks, the garden has exploded. We have crap growing everywhere. Now it’s impossible to determine what are weeds and what are veggies. All I can tell is that if they are growing in any semblance of a straight line, then I am to leave them alone. If they appear to be random, then I am to call Bubbaloo or Ron before pulling anything out. It’s humiliating! After all, I’m probably the only one here that has legitimate direct roots to farmers. Both Mom and Dad were raised on farms. However I soon found out that their credentials did not get me one thing. I started this job pulling weeds, and at this point it appears I will spend then rest of my time, without any promotion.

You would think, well at least you can now relax, right? Let me tell you, this growing of foodstuff is a never ending job. A few days after finishing the bulk of the planting, Bubbaloo finds about half of the cucumbers with no leaves, or at least chewed off leaves. Upon further inspection she determines that the culprit is some cute little, armadillo shaped bugs. I think the Peruvian name for them is Chanchitos. Out here I think they are roly-poly bugs. Bubbaloo is pissed! How dare they eat her plants! A solution must be found. Like with every other problem in life, these days, out comes the Google eye (phone) for the answer. Quickly she determines that you place beer in small cups in the ground. Apparently the role-poly bugs climb in, to see what the delicious aroma is all about. They then drink their share and are too drunk to get back out of the cup. At which point you swoop in and capture them.

Well I wouldn’t have bet on it working, however, I was willing to donate a few beer to the cause. Personally, I would have went down to the store and bought some good old fashioned, petroleum based, bug and pest killer. However, knowing that the chemical extermination of bugs or weeds was prohibited on the Finca, I was happy to let bubbaloo work her magic. Amazingly, a few hundred of these critters, did indeed, jump in for a drink and were laying there belly up in the morning. Bubbaloo went along with her strainer and pot, so she could separate the beer from the bugs. Jimbored’s job was to find a nice new home for the little drunk bastards. And that he did.

Surprisingly, within a couple days Bubbaloo’s bugs drank 4 beer. Now I’m starting to worry about this. When she asked for 4 more, I told her I was out, and she would have to get them from JMW. Which she did. It took about a week and Bubbaloo had captured thousands of roly-poly’s. Jimbored relocated each and everyone of them. I must admit, I spent a bit of time looking to see if we could make jam, relish or some sort of snack out of them. Unfortunately I had no luck. Perhaps, I will invent one of my own. Beware what you eat if you come for dinner and I offer you something you are not sure of. Especially if it is called “roly-poly delight”.