Frustratons

We passed our Common Swine Industry Audit this week.  The CISA is to provide consumers greater assurance of the care taken by farmers and pork processors to improve animal well being and food safety. We mostly lost points for not having enough documentation and not having as many explicit, written SOP's (standard operating procedures) they require.  Example: We now have to have an SOP and document every time we clean the gun that we use for euthanasia!
We are now PQA Plus certified, PQA Plus Site Verified, Illinois Dept. of Agriculture Certified Livestock Managers, we passed the Pork Producers Environmental Quality Assurance Program, and now passed the Common Swine Industry Audit. 
Past hog farmers would be rolling over in their graves if they knew the hoops we have to jump through and the red tape just to raise pigs!

My tiller is finally home! 
In late April I took it in to Big R for some repair work.  It wouldn't start and also needed some adjustments and minor parts.  They sell and service Troy-Bilt tillers, so that was the logical place to take it.  With the late wet spring, tilling the garden was not a priority at all.  I stopped in after a couple of weeks and it hadn't been worked on yet.  I called in a couple of weeks later and was told I would get a call back.  I didn't.  Then it was June and we got real busy and forgot about it.  About a month ago the old farmers wife stopped in and inquired about it.  The original service man was no longer there and the new guy said he would look into it and call.  Two weeks later he finally calls and says he is working on it and it would be done in a day.  Two weeks later he finally calls and says it is finished and working fine.  So I picked it up today.  Over seven months later.

On 11/19 our land line quit working.  We don't use it much, but we do like it for emergencies, and our confinement alarm system uses the land line to alert us to problems.  We tried to report the outage online, but it would just refer us to the 800 support number.  After calling the support number and slogging through numerous menus, just when we would get to where we would report, it would hang up on us.  Time after time, day after day.  We tried various ways to actually reach a human, but no luck.  Finally yesterday I was able to get the outage reported on the phone companies' Chat function after being disconnected on my first try.  This afternoon our phones were working again!

Sometimes life seems to be full of unnecessary frustrations.  Then this afternoon at a farm meeting, I met a former soldier who lost both legs because of a roadside IED in Afghanistan.  His heart stopped three times on the operating table.  He was in a coma for ten days.  They told him he may never walk again, but he does with a cane and prosthetic legs.  He has a great attitude and a great story to tell and it certainly puts our petty frustrations in context!

But when they came to Jesus, and saw that he was dead already, they brake not his legs:
John 19:33