Fall Break, Day One

Dear all,

Yesterday, M. and I decided to get out of the house. We work and work and work and work some more until we feel like the mining dwarves in that Disney movie and we work and work and work except we don't have any gemstones to show for all that work work work work, if you get what I'm saying. (Bear in mind that I'm not sure that I know what I'm saying.) So, yeah, we needed to get out, so we got. Out.

Well, not so fast. First, I went to an orthopedic (or orthopaedic, if you're British) doctor in the morning about my hips. He thinks that I have a tear in my acetabulum labrum and I might need surgery. Alas. Well, once we get decent insurance, that might be an option. I've always wanted to add to my cool scar collection.

I also had to interview a faculty member from an academic department that we tutors in the USM Writing Center weren't familiar with--I got the "Administration of Justice" Department. (Rather grand sounding, eh?) See, in the Writing Center, we get students from every department, every major, so we need to be jacks-of-all-trades, knowing what each and every department wants in the essays they assign. It's a large undertaking, but the faculty member I interviewed was really patient, so the process went pretty well. That, and, since it's Fall Break, I could actually find a parking spot on campus.

Melanie and I had been looking for something nifty to do. We thought about driving to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to visit Whole Foods and stock up on organic bananas (I'm allergic to regular bananas) and visit the temple, but the temple wasn't available (it's a small one), and I had a hard time justifying the need to drive 2 1/2 hours for bananas. (Fortunately, I found a place in town that has organic bananas--AT $1.26 A POUND.) (Yes, I bought them, slave to appetite that I am.) So we were looking for somewhere else to go when we stumbled across this working farm that lets visitors pick their own vegetables. "Wow," I said, "we could do our shopping and vacationing in one fell swoop!" Also, Melanie discovered that the farm had a "Peanut Pit," kinda like the ball-pits at McDonald's playgrounds--a large pit filled with peanuts that we could play around in. (NOTE: As further proof that I am an official Wild 'n' Crazy Type Guy, I didn't understand--I thought that the Peanut Pit--and I'm sure that's not the official name, but it's what I'm using--was a water tank filled with a mixture of water and peanuts, and I thought that it was some kind of alternative spa treatment or something, swimming around with all the peanuts. And I was STILL WILLING to do it.) (Or at least see it.) (Okay, I wasn't going to do it.)

Off we went to Mitchell Farms, located outside of Collins, MS. On their website, they had all these pictures of happy people in shorts posing on haybales, picking vegetables, etc. Once we got there, though--

*Cue creepy music*

--there wasn't anybody around. Sure, there were some surly-looking guys working on tractors and winnowing peanuts, but, aside from the funky wagon we'd seen driving in (more on that later), we didn't see much. There was a pumpkin patch, but it wasn't really a pumpkin patch--just a bare plot of earth that had pumpkins for sale scattered across it. There were some period-piece cabins, but nobody was in them. There were Native American tipis (!), but, nope, nobody there.

And then the wagon came pulling up.

A long wagon, nearly twenty feet long, decorated with enormous orange cut-outs of peanuts with smiling faces ("Howdy! I'm delicious!" I imagined them saying), pulled by a tractor with another surly-looking fellow at the helm. The wagon was full, we learned, of people from a retirement home nearby, and there was an elderly lady with a microphone giving them a tour of the farm. We heard some of her spiel; here are some highlights:

"My husband and I got married when I was fifteen and he was seventeen." (They said it wouldn't last, she said, but it did.) (Man, I wasn't even dating when I was fifteen.)

"Those are tipis over there. Nothing's in 'em, but we put some rocks in there, and the kids love playing with 'em." (Of course! Rocks! Just what I wanted when I was a kid!)

When the group disembarked (which was rough, because the surly guy parked the wagon on a hill, and one guy in a wheelchair started rolling out of control when he got off), we joined them in touring a farm museum that they had there; it was filled with all sorts of farming/Southern/domestic kitsch--one wall in the museum was covered with nothing but dozens and dozens of antique cheese graters. I stared at it with one of the ladies from the retirement home. "That's grate," I said. She didn't get it. (Across the room, M. just shook her head and laughed.)

Eventually, we tired of all the cheese graters and antique tin cans and odd posters. (One featured a quote from Lyndon Johnson: "Sometimes you just have to hunker down and take it like a [donkey] in a hailstorm.") So we went outside and found a small animal pen. Inside were two goats, one of which was reclining in the feed trough and defecating on his food; three rabbits; and two miniature donkeys--I believe it was a mother and her, uh, baby donkey. The donkeys were quite friendly, and we hung out with them for a while. The baby donkey liked to stomp his hooves, so M. named him Stomper. The mother donkey had a dark streak across her side, so we named her Streak. Yep, there we were, Stomper, Streak, M. and me, shooting the breeze and trying to get that obscene goat to stop pooping in its feed trough.

By now, if we squinted, we could see our sanity slowly dripping away from us, so we bid a hasty retreat. We did drive by a cotton field, though, and we stopped and took pictures, which we'll retrieve as soon as we can get the pictures off M.'s cellphone.

Then we went to the Farmer's Market and the New Yokel Market, which had organic bananas, and all was well. The end.