I Wanna Go Home

Beautiful prairie near Indus, Alberta. Home.

"I wanna go home, I wanna go home, Ohhh how I want to go home..."- Bobby Bear
It appears it's that time in this semester. The prospect of home is only a week and a half away. I love Texas, I don't really want to leave my new friends, acquaintances, my new bros or brahs. I am not looking forward to a few more weeks of rainy, cool Alberta spring weather once I do land in Calgary. But oh, how I am ready to go home.

The Tex-Mex will be sorely missed

Until you move away, I guess it's hard to  understand how good you have it at home. Free food, at a real dinner table, with your immediate family. A comfortable, also free, bed to sleep on in a room of the house all to yourself, a room that is always at a comfortable, stable temperature. People who know you and understand you and yell at you all the time. You know, that mental image of home that everyone who has left has. I want it back.

Oddly, I miss seeing our nice red CP & CN locomotives

I would like to think that there are few things that make the prospect of home so exciting. One is my family and all the squabbles and conversations and laughs that come with living in the same house. Another is the sheer familiarity of everything: I don't need a map or a GPS to find the next town over, I probably know who just drove by and waved, I never need to actually stop and use the sun or wind to tell me which direction I am headed. Another still is the prospect of getting the hell out of this city. I am certainly never going to be a city dweller, not even a small city like College Station, Texas. The constant noise, the never ending sirens and yells and horns and motorcycles and trains and PEOPLE. People everywhere, all the time. Eating with new people. Walking with new people. Peeing beside a different person in the same bathroom every time I use it. I know none of them (especially the random dude in the washroom-that's a no talking zone), and I never will. I need wide open spaces every now and again, as in a population density of less than two people per square mile.

I will miss the Lone Star State- Especially the accents

The city is a good place to be from, and a swell place to visit. It's fun, and fast, and loud, and it has variety. But it certainly isn't for me for long periods of time, and I am just about to the end of that line. I miss my cattle, I miss my dog, I miss highway driving for hours and hours and not seeing anything other crops. I miss Degrees Celsius (I'll have to adjust back to that), kilometres per hour (that too), kilograms and litres of fuel.

Home

But, having said all of that, I am beginning to panic a little at the prospect of going home. We have a noted absence of Tex-Mex food in Alberta, we don't know what a crawfish boil is, there is no such thing as sweet tea and very few really good pecan-anythings. We drive slower, we talk faster, and we don't, generally, even know what Aggieland is or how to get there. So, as the saying goes, I wasn't born in Texas, but I certainly got here as fast as I could. I'll be loading up on Spanish rice, refried beans and burritos (Please pray for my roommate during this smelly time), drinking gallons of real ice tea, and trying to smuggle a whole suitcase of of pecan tarts across the border for summertime enjoyment. I love Texas, but for now I love Alberta more, and I am ready to be Alberta Bound. I am sure that by the time the summer is nearing it's end I'll be singing, "I can't see Texas from here, I can't see Texas from here, no matter how I try-y-y it makes me want to die-y-y, so if you see me looking down I'm tryin' not to show this frown..." -George Strait But I'll be back, Mr. Strait, I'll be back.

Child Labour

So, the US government is poised to make a monumental mistake. The Obama Administration is pushing a bill through Congress that will make child labour on family farms illegal. Individuals under 18 years of age could not work for recompense in places like grain elevators, auction markets, livestock exchanges, feed yards, grain silos, grain bins, etc. First off, the level of government intrusion here is massive. It is my own opinion that the government has no authority over what children can or cannot do for their families in regard to rural lifestyles. This bill passes all boundaries of privacy for rural, hard working Americans, and goes to the level of telling an Auction Mart operator his son or daughter cannot work pens or clerk a sale until they are a legal age.

Rosie Templeton, of The Absolutely Agriculture Blog,
 doing work that may become illegal in the USA.
http://www.realagriculture.com/2011/06/does-4-h
-desensitize-kids-to-killing-a-4-h-alumnis-response/

This is a prime example of how urban, modern politicians simply do not understand the lives of rural constituents. It makes it very obvious that the American governmental machine is forgetting its rural routes, forgetting the demographic that provides nourishment to the people of the nation. A bill such as this was never even dreamed of in decades past, when the farming family was a picture of success. Farming is not a two-person endeavour. It is simply not possible to make money with only spouses participating, so children are put to work when they reach an age that is deemed appropriate by their parents. Most rural kids start to help when they are around 12 or 13, respectable ages for an education in work ethic, business practices, and the workings of a farm or ranch.
The next part of the rebound from this bill is the kids themselves. Many rural kids have started to tell the government that this bill is ludicrous at best. They claim that the education they received from their parents often was more practical and useful than what they learned in school. The emphasis placed on work ethic is what has allowed kids like myself to get where we are: in colleges and universities across the continent, learning every occupation under the sun. Our farm education, from working for Mom and Dad, is absolutely irreplaceable. But that seems to be exactly what the US Obama Administration seeks to do.