About Jennifer, and Smokehouse Progress

12/06/06 - 4th Day - After Breakfast. This is Jennifer:


Jennifer is my 11 year old daughter. Jennifer is the "odd one", but in a good way. She has a spectacular sense of humor, an outrageous imagination, and she's got real skills. She has a natural gift when it comes to fishing. She can skin, gut, and butcher a goat, pig, deer, or chicken. She is learning butchering from her older sister Tracy (15), and she is going to be pretty good at it. She not only butchers animals, but she doesn't see any problem with that. She finds it to be perfectly natural. She thinks that people who are grossed out by butchering, or who maintain distance between themselves and their food, or who think (absolutely stupidly) that the food they buy at the store, because it comes wrapped up in plastic, is somehow cleaner, safer, or less gross, are really just ignorant and silly. I remember when Jennifer was a toddler. She was barely talking. We were going to be butchering chickens in the back yard, so I told the children to go inside because I thought they would be shocked at the blood and guts and that they wouldn't eat the chicken. Well, as we are beheading the chicken, I look up and my girls (Tracy and Jennifer) are looking out the window through the blinds. So we finished up the butchering, and that night Danielle cooked up the chicken. At the dinner table, Jennifer - who had a mouth full of chicken with some of it hanging out of her mouth - says "Daddy, why did you cut that chicken's head off?". I said, "So you could eat it". She smiled with the chicken hanging out of her mouth, and said "good". Now she's lived this way most of her life, and she doesn't really remember any other way of living. She finds the "world" to be strange and a bit bizarre.

Like I said, Jennifer is a bit goofy. She has a weird sense of humor. When most people like to play "hey, I hid your pen" or "Daddy, look, I took your lighter, come wrestle me for it"... Jennifer has her own special version of that game. She'll walk up and snatch something from me (cell phone, lighter, pen) and she will take off running full speed shrieking and laughing at the top of her voice. She is not running anywhere in particular. She just takes off running with it. Sometimes Robert or Tracy and I will be play fighting or wrestling over some item. Jennifer will dive in, grab the item, and just shriek and run like the wind with the item held crazily over her head. Game over. Next thing you know she'll be out of sight with it. This is her idea of fun. The rest of us, who WERE having fun, are just sitting there with a quizzical look on our face. So, it's like if I am kicking a ball with Sarah, Jennifer would come by and just grab the ball and take off running with it. Weird. And she is a book worm. Got that from her father. She reads all the time. Sometimes we won't be able to find her and we'll eventually locate her hiding behind the catchwater tank reading a book. She also likes to make things, like the wicked looking spear she made. She and Robert like survivalism stuff, you know knives, camping gear, etc., and they are always making spears and arrows.

Ok, here is a picture of the finished first "course" of the smokehouse. This is from last week, since we are almost done now with the second course. There will be three such courses, before we start working on the wooden roof, door, etc. The concrete face of the wall will be cleaned up after the three courses are finished, but we like the way it looks already. Dirt will be banked up to the very base of the rock portion of the walls. You can see the smoke pipe extending from the south portion of the smokehouse. The wall is very sturdy and solid. There are about 60 bags of concrete in each course, and there were about 110 bags in the foundation. Whow knows how many tons of rock we have used.


I hope all is well with you all out there.

Your servant in Christ Jesus,

Michael Bunker