View from the North 40: The whiny days of summer are here

By nature and nurture, I like just enough drama to make a good story. That’s the hallmark of a life being lived correctly — whether it’s a win-event or a fail, it’s all OK as long as the story is worth telling.

What I don’t like, and I think pretty much everyone will agree with me on this, is a story that is whiny. A story that, even in print, has the sound of a sleepy, petulant toddler explaining that she can’t eat her lunch and go take a nap because the noodles in her mac-n-cheese are not right with the universe, and she’s not sleepy anyway.

It sounds like: “It too booouuuncyyyyy n juuuuuuicyyyyy. I NOOOT tiiiii-yerrrrred — ehhh-heh-heh-hehhnnnn.”

It also sounds like a high-pitched buzzing noise in the inner ear — right where your ear drum attaches to that part of the brain that likes to say: “Oh, for the love of peace and tranquility, what am I doing here?”

It’s normal to want to run from whining.

And, yet, I’m using today’s column to whine because I hate heeeat, and I haate mosquitoooes, and I haaate shoooppinnng for haaaaay, but all that wretched stuff hit this week, ehhh-heh-heh-hehhnnn.

Heat, mosquitoes and worrying about finding enough quality, affordable hay for the year that’s my trifecta of misery, all running down the final stretch, jockeying for position and the most insufferable part about life.

My idea of paradise, my Shangri-La, is a place with maybe one month of freezing winter and one of high summer, but neither too extreme. The rest of the year it’s just spring with temps in the 50s to 70s and fall with temps falling down to the 20s to 50s, y’know, so I can wear flannel shirts.

It’s a modest dream, but I’m convinced this place exists somewhere on the planet.

This paradise will also be devoid of mosquitoes, and gnats, and biting black flies, and any other biting insects for that matter. And I don’t think I have to explain myself on that.

I know I should be grateful that the mosquitoes waited until July to emerge. I get that, and I am grateful. Usually, they’ve been attacking for at least a month by now and I am well and truly welted up with bites and bruised from slapping bugs by now. I am grateful. I am … it’s just that the mosquitoooes came the same week as the heeeeat.

Now I’m miserably over-heated plus annoyed plus itchy.

I’ve started calling about hay, which is a must-have. Recent rains during harvest time have made my prospects sketchy. Everyone is in wait-and-see mode. I suspect some of my sources cut hay and it got wet on the ground because they have been silent and not returning calls.

It’s similar to wondering if the grocery stores in your area will be open or not, like, for the entire next year.

Imagine saying, “Sorry, family, all we have to eat is what is currently in our cupboards, so we have to start rationing now, and come up with some recipes for eating the leather shoes. Maybe do some research on the Donner Party and think about the hard choices ahead, or maybe I could just sell one of you little darlings to travel the hardship miles for food in other regions. Just saying, we’ll likely have to pick the best of the bad choices.”

I have enough feed for a month and a week’s worth of pasture, then they’ll have to start eating fence posts and old lumber, maybe some sage. The ASPCA wolves will be howling at my gates.

Woe is me!

Or I’ll have to cough up a huge chunk of change and a lot of faith to buy hay from a stranger out of the area and pay shipping fees.

Contemplating all the calling around for hay sources while I sit in the heat and my life blood is replaced by biting-bug saliva … woe really is me.

Hear me whine, whine, whine.

To be fair, I can’t even stand living with myself right now.

My only hope is that the hay farmers are swathing this weekend, and that the heat will help the hay cure efficiently to make good horse feed — and maybe burn up a few bajillion mosquitoes.

That’s my trifecta.

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I don’t care who comes in second or third, just so long as a barn full of good hay is the winner at http://www.facebook.com/viewfromthenorth40.