Welcome to the Lounge

I am with you. For the last ten years, I have driven to Waco to play with my hobby for eight hours per day. The best part – they actually pay me for it. Unfortunately, they do not pay me well for it – I am working for a ".org" and a great pay scale is just not in the budget.

When I go home at night, I get to play rancher — the herd and the chicken flock have to be checked, watered and if Nature is not cooperating, fed. I get to relax and walk where I can almost totally turn off the sounds of civilization. My nearest neighbors and the nearest road are a tenth of a mile away. The nearest major road is a quarter of a mile away. The nearest highway is two miles away. These distances are all "as the crow flies." It really is, as the song goes:

The stars at night are big and bright, deep in the heart of Texas.

Retirement??? Do you know how the farmer and rancher retirement party begins? The minister stands up, calls for silence and intones: "Dearly beloved, we are gathered here to celebrate the life of ...." In all seriousness, at Farm Bureau meetings, I am one of the "young guys" and I am almost 70!

Thirty years ago, I would have agreed with you. At that point, I never expected to move to Texas. I got a job with a defense contractor and, after a while, they moved my family to Texas. We sold our three-bedroom house on a third of an acre and bought a ranch. We even had money left over. My wife and children bought a herd of goats — and suddenly we were into agriculture!

We all had a lot of learning to do. Not only did we have to learn how to care for the herd, but also the government rules, regulations and paperwork. We did not look back. My wife and both children have each earned a college degree in agriculture.

I quickly learned to love the wide open spaces. I now feel trapped and confined when I am in a city – even a small city such as Waco. I do not think I could ever go back to urban or even suburban living.

No, we do not grow peppers, at least not in quantity. When you are raising goats on open range, they get into everything and everywhere. They are foragers. Sheep and cattle are grazers and prefer pasturage. Goats want more variety and will exercise considerable ingenuity and effort to get it. One of our major issues is keeping them out of the kitchen garden. As you can imagine, they love to eat any foods we grow for our own consumption.

The appellation "Jalapeño" comes from my love of eating these tasty and often spicy peppers, whether diced into an egg dish, sliced on pizza or on a burger or in a sandwich, pickled whole or sliced, or any other way.