Thursday Thirteen #530

I live in a rural area, and we all know from the holiday commercials that farmsteads and such are supposed to be the idyllic places that everyone yearns for down deep in their soul.

And while it is very much a lovely space that I live in, it is not all unicorns and butterflies. So I give to you 13 things about rural living that can be - though may not always be - a nuisance or frustration.

1. People set off fireworks. Big fireworks that go "boom" and scare the beejezus out of the cows.

2. People shoot guns all ... day ... long. I shoot guns myself, sometimes (just a .22), but not all ... day ... long. After a while it wears on your nerves. I don't mind a little while. I do mind hours on end.

3. Big cement trucks run up and down the road, because a big cement plant is about five miles from me. They are very loud and I can hear them even though I am 1/4 mile off the street.

4. Hot air balloons sometimes fly over the farm. They are pretty and I like to look at them, but again, they scare the beejezus out of the cows. Nothing like a stampede when the hot air balloon goes "whoosh" to heat up the air to stay aloft. (Fortunately this has not happened for a long time and I hope I'm not bringing the sky gods down on me for mentioning it.)

5. Thistle. I know this is good for some things that ail you, but thistle in the pasture is not good for the cows. It's not good for my clothes, either.

6. Bad weather means the roads are among the last plowed. My husband and other farmers sometimes plow the roads in front of their farms before the state comes through.

7. Round Up. I hate weed killer but my husband uses it liberally along the fence row, mostly because we have an electric fence and the weeds will short it out. I make him strip all of his clothes outside and water them down with a water hose and leave them, literally, for weeks out in the sun and rain to get the chemicals off of them before I will put them in the wash.

8.  Wild animals. I enjoy watching the wildlife and it is exciting to see a bear in the backyard. It is not so exciting to watch deer nibble my rose bushes to nothing, or to grow a garden only to find that the wild animals got to it the night before harvest.

9. Stray animals. I don't know why people think farms are the places to drop dogs and cats, but they are not. We can't take care of them and the barn only has so many mice. They ultimately end up at the local shelter, which is where you, whoever you are, should have taken them in the first place if you couldn't keep them. Better yet, if you can't take care of an animal, don't get one.

10. Dead deer. Unfortunately, we find dead deer in the fields quite often. One year I counted 21. We bury them because (1) the state takes forever to come along and get them; (2) usually they have run out of the state's right-of-way and the state won't take them anyway and (3) you can't leave them in the fields for the buzzards because then the bones, etc., get into the hay and can damage the machinery. We have a special dead deer cemetery area.

11. Poor cell phone service. There are towers near the interstate, but out here, the service is poor. For a long time I could only get service on my cellphone in the garage. It's a little better now, but still not great.

12. Poor Internet service. I have DSL and that is all I will have unless I got to a mobile hot spot or something. It doesn't pay the phone company to run a fiber line down this way because it has so much space to cross for too few people.

13. No Christmas lights. This may not seem like a hardship, but I really like Christmas lights. And out here, where so many people live a long way off the road, we simply don't see that many. We have to take tours of the subdivisions.

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Thursday Thirteen is played by lots of people; there is a list here if you want to read other Thursday Thirteens and/or play along. I've been playing for a while and this is my 530th time to do a list of 13 on a Thursday.