Is My Sickness a Life Sentence?

Homestead mama right there, getting more shipments ready. Got a little mishap. We got these new labels, but they're smearing. I guess they were cheaper than the old ones. Heather, she's always saving us a dime, isn't she? She does good. Yes, this time it backfired though, but mama to the rescue. We had some labels in stock.

Whoops.

And we've had these for years. Lily, what are you doing?

Looking at this weird map.

All right, so you need to help Mr. Henry or I'm gonna take him with me. Shut the computer. Pay attention to Henry. Good. Looks like it's rained. That's good, we needed that. Our goal today— sometimes it's simple goals— is to— we all have a chiropractor appointment. We want to get there on time. Hopefully, maybe we'll have time to harvest our big pumpkins. I think it's good to have goals, keeps us focused no matter how small or trivial they might be. A little gap here. It's off, I imagine. They're down there milking. Well, they're supposed to be milking, but Jonah forgot to put the cap up last night and there's no milk. It happens. Hi! You act like you want me to pet you, but you won't let me pet you. Maybe you will, only a little bit. You're like a cat. You kind of let me pet you. You come acting like you're gonna let me pet you, but Don't look at this. They love this bank. Cows stay off of it, but the sheep just love it. Look at, look at what he's eating right there. She—

sorry about that, I really am.

What happened?

I forgot to put the calf up.

I got so caught up— forget—

I got caught up in foraging.

Look at Stud Muffin rubbing his neck. Notice nobody else is rubbing their neck. He's the itchiest cow. Jonah forgot to calf separate. Okay, so there's no milk. Okay, so we're gonna go harvest pumpkins. Okay, are you gonna go make shipments?

I was going to.

Okay, I guess we'll meet you over there after pumpkins. This garden's stressing me out because it's gone to weeds. Of course it's going to go to seeds and we're gonna have more weeds next year, so I want to get these— everything that we can out. You think the, the watermelons are ready? It's not going to grow anymore with a rotten stem. See this? There's no way.

It's dead.

So it's done. So it's as dead as it's gonna be. All right, load it up. And then we've got these decorative pumpkins. That's a nice one, Josiah. And then the only other thing is these sweet potatoes, but I don't know if they're ready or not, but we could cover everything else. Boy, there's some potatoes over here too. This is kind of reflective of our life for the last 3 months, overrun with weeds. That means things fell through the crack major when I went down. But I am feeling so much better. It feels like I'm getting better by the day now. At least I'm getting better by the week. Before, it was like maybe I was getting better by the month, maybe. We are 3 months into this reactive arthritis, and they say 3 to 5 months, and so I can totally see me getting back to normal. We've cleared through, which is good. It made me nervous going through that because it just was so slow healing. And with my Lyme, I'm like, is this, is this a new life sentence? Is my Lyme causing a lot of this or holding me back? Is this going to be something permanent? Because my Lyme's not going anywhere. Did you crack it though?

Watermelon that is cracking, it's super ready.

Okay, since Gideon busted it What we can do is at least crack it open to see if these are ready, just so we know. That's not terrible for such a small one. Why'd you rip that one open?

It was cracked. I ripped it in half.

That one's a little bigger and it's actually a little— seemingly a little better.

I'm gonna go wash it.

Is it all right? Okay, well, you guys have to wash this real good. That's a load of watermelon and pumpkins. You gonna throw the bad watermelons in there? Okay, we got a lot of watermelons to eat in the next 2 weeks. I know, pretty much one a day. Put one in the cooler for today, man. Look at our score, Beck. We're gonna be eating watermelon every night for the next 2 weeks. They're gonna wash them off before putting them in the cool room because the watermelon won't last that long.

Look at that pumpkin.

Are you laughing at this one? I bet it's some sort of hybrid, huh? Did you get the labels figured out?

I did. I'm just cleaning the printer.

That's a lot of work for that little cheap printer.

So I see why Heather likes it, and it has some good value. Those labels that she ordered was the ones she's ordered from those people for 4 years, and they changed it.

Uh-oh.

I know. So we're gonna— I'm cleaning the printer stuff to see if that helps it, and then I will— we'll reassess if we need to.

All right, Gideon's drying them off before we put them in the cool room. Gideon, you've been working so hard lately. Thank you.

And I think that one had a hole.

We'll have to eat that one first. Maybe that one's tonight. Put the pumpkins on the porch to cure. Put this Put the watermelons in the cold room, dry it off, please. Ben Holler taught the boys a little bit how to forge over the weekend. Well, enough to do this. Jonas built his first useful forging tool. This is a hoe. Are you sure that wasn't a plant? No, that was that Mama wanted.

These are weeds.

Let me see this thing. So this is— is this an old rebar? How'd you get it to stay in the handle? Let me see that handle. Bring it up here. I see a little tin foil.

I just accidentally made the hole too big, so I just put tin metal tape around the bar and then pushed it in.

Well, that's pretty cool, man. Good job. This table is going to be full of another load of shipment. This barn has come in super handy, not just for fellowships and hanging out and workshops, but shipping stations now. It's the Sharpie over here. I'll, I'll, uh sign some random ones right here. Okay. To me, I just feel like a regular person. It feels weird that it's special that I sign it.

Yeah, that's all it is.

Is that— there you go. So we got some random bonuses. I'll sign a few. Some folks have been asking, I guess, is where I come up with the idea. And so can't do them all, but you can do some.

You cannot do them all.

I was thinking about that, and then Heather was like Are you sure with your reactive arthritis? Well, you want to commit 4,200 signatures?

Told me that Joel had agreed to sign all of the polyface design. Yeah, I was like, does he know what he's getting into?

It took days. It took—

it was weeks.

Yeah, that's why Joe's not signing this round. At least we can do is sign some, right? My hand will hold up enough for that. Hey, got some labels. I'll shout them out. Cindy, Nicole, Cindy and Nicole. Hey, and Amanda, big virtual Papa, Uncle Papa bear hug. Brother Papa. Okay, who else we got? Uh, let's tell them their life is about to change for the better. This is their epiphany moment. Chris, Phillip and Chris. I'm serious, I'm just gonna go ahead. You don't always know when your epiphany is. This is it. This is a turning point in your life right here. You'll read this book and then do it. You're definitely gonna have a turning point, just like it turned our life around. Well, not around. Okay, our life just— we were on a good trajectory. It just went, it went in a different direction.

It was, it was a good, um It was just good to learn how to do this.

Weren't we fortunate? Guys, we were fortunate to find Joel Salatin when we were just starting out. Like, how did we just hop upon Salatin? Well, Mentor told me about him, right? And then you found Elliott Coleman. We were like finding all the right people.

I think I knew that I wanted to do this from the beginning.

We've been doing it.

I don't know if I— if I don't know how I found the people that I did. There was a lot less books out there.

Oh, I know that too. So thank you, you pioneers. Joel Salatin, Elliot Coleman. We've been from day one doing it Salatin style. We've been— I moved cows as soon as we got— they were moving as soon as they got here every day. Now it wasn't nearly as smooth as it is now. I remember moving the water trough every day. I had just a hose that I would fill up. I just had, um, one strand of rebar posts All right, give me, give me two more names.

Sylvia.

Sylvia, we love you. Albert. Oh my goodness, Albert. I'm so happy for you guys, and thank you so much for, for being a customer and getting this book from us. Thank you. All right, we got pretty far. We got a break, go to the chiropractor. The room— Jonah and Josiah will stay. This is a lot. Oh, one of those was Scott Burton's. Thank you so much, Scott Burton, a member. Um, we appreciate all that you do. Look, we've got 2 pallets gone. 2 pallets are out here, guys. There's only 4 pallets, so we've already packaged up half of these. 4,200 books in total, and we haven't even officially launched yet. This is like the pre-launch. This is get free chapters, 3 free chapters. 3 free classes from the master class. You can homestead, guys. We can help. Uh, that's for free. Link in the description on Polyface Micro. Well, how are we selling all these books? Well, there's also a special link there to our sales page, and you can get the book, you can get Abundance Plus. We do have a problem though. We're running out of boxes because you can't put as many books back in it as came. Henry, you gonna stay here with Uncle Arun? Look, it's making noise. He can go about an hour without mom and that's it. We'll have to take him with us. Mr. Brown, get your shoes on. They are there. Oh my goodness, call the Inquirer.

Yeah, call them.

Hey, is this the Inquirer? Okay, I got a report. You ready? You sitting down? Mr. Brown found his shoes. Hello? Hello? Hey, is everything all right? Hello? Oh, okay, they fainted. They couldn't believe it. Yeah, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I asked if you were sitting down. Were you not sitting down? Oh, it fell out of their chair. All right, well, he found his shoes. Report that in the next one. What are you laughing at? Are you laughing at him finding his shoes? Oh, was it beeping? Shoot, you could hear that from over there? Okay, I'm caught. I got— okay, I didn't really call the inquirer. Rebecca just went into the post office. We're gonna see if they have some reusable containers we can send because we're running out of boxes to send these packages in. Are they giving you some of our boxes back? Yes! That's good. Jonah, we got us some UPS or US Postal Service storage containers. This is another tableload of books. More books under there. But wait a minute, we don't need any more. We got lots of boxes.

Well, that's just because we did that, but he'll pack those in. We just need to keep—

so we got everything today?

Yeah, all those are in boxes for today. Oh, but then this is for tomorrow, and I think this will catch us up.

Rebecca just came and watered her plants and said we got some germination. We planted lettuce here. I don't see it, but she said it's there. It's training time. Uh, Jacob, you gotta have goals for me today. What's my goal? Your goal is to do 3 sets of 5 deadlift and 3 sets of 3— or wait, you did the full get up last time, so we'll do— no, I didn't. I just did half get up. Yeah, yeah, but I mean like, uh, you were able to hold the kettlebell. Yeah, because my wrist is hard to hold it. 10 sets of 1 get up. 10 sets of 1 get up halfway. Yeah, halfway. Nice.

That little pink one.

Very good.

And then back.

Nice.