hedonic adaptation

Mornings are hope filled happy times here at the farmette, especially now, in July, in peak blooming season. Though not only. I look out and take in the world. There's always something sweet, pretty, tantalizing, evocative out there.

But of course, you have to face farmette challenges too. Take for instance the new and rather aggressive predator we've been dealing with here. Most likely a raccoon. A very smart and very bold raccoon. He has learned to use the window cat door to get into the sheep shed. He can't quite fit in the slot allowed for the endeavor, so he pushes the whole cat door out, giving himself plenty of space to get inside, finish up all the cat food, and then take some empty cans out with him for good measure. Who knows why. He must be smarter than Ed or I am. He knows something that we don't know. In the morning, I find littered cans up and down the path to the barn.

Several days ago, Ed trapped him and found a new home for him rather far away. (He'd also been clawing at the chicken coop. A threat no matter how you look at it.) But Ed thinks this smart and bold guy has found his way back. No other raccoon has ever littered the path with cat food cans. It's his trademark. 

We can't trap him again because we have nowhere else to take him and besides, this dude wont make the mistake of getting caught again. And so today, at breakfast...

.. we talk about our options. In the end, Ed'll put up a stronger cat door and we'll be locking up the food for the night in the bathroom. The cats need to hurry up and eat before nightfall, that's all!

But this is just one of those things that comes along and sets us thinking. We can't get too concerned with small stuff. I mean, no one is gravely ill, no one is dying. Everything else is manageable. Disappointments abound, but there's always a ladder to lift you up, up and away from them.  As I read in the paper this morning -- "there is something called hedonic adaptation, and research shows that humans have a remarkable ability to get used to or get accustomed to changes in our lives." This from a professor of psychology at the U of California at Riverside, who studies happiness. Her findings are that healthy people climb out of disappointments routinely. It's true that "what goes up must come down," so that bubbles of euphoria have to burst, but, too, for most of us -- "if you experience disappointment that your expectations are not being met, you will get used to it and feel happy again."

I would call this the arc of happiness. Remember how in Martin Luther King Jr. said that  "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice?" Let me just borrow form this and say that sometimes the arc of disappointment is long too, but ultimately it bends toward happiness.

In any case, all the animal worries are like children worries -- they pepper the days and months, but they don't surprise us. We come to expect them and we take them on. Today, for instance, Ed spent the entire day rearranging all his stuff in the sheep shed and cleaning out the bathroom for the new feeding station.

Me, I started off the morning with lily snipping. It took a while. Close to two hours. 573 spent heads snapped off into a bucket. it makes for a heavy bucket!

 The rewards? Well now! Where do I begin!

I'll limit my photos to the fields just by the farmhouse: by the porch and around the secret path. There's enough in just those two, believe me!

In the late morning I zip over to the downtown Farmers Market. For the flowers and the corn. I knew these guys would be selling it -- they're among the first to harvest a crop and also among the last to finish up the season.

As for flowers -- oh, they are everywhere! I was to pick up one bunch, I came home with two.

Well, not home immediately. I first detour to the Goodman Community Pool where I meet up with the young family... 

... for a morning of swimming. 

It's the best place to go on a weekend morning if you're with young kids because they keep big kids and people without kids out so that the chaos of shouting, splashing and bomb diving doesn't frighten the little tykes. We spend a wonderful hour on this very hot day doing some tame water play.

Afterwards, the two big kids come over to the farmhouse: showers, lunch, play, art and a garden walk. In that order.

(inside)

(outside)

I ask Snowdrop -- why the raised hand? She tells me -- I'm the Statue of Liberty. Not sure Sparrow gets the symbolism, but he'll do it if she does it.

Because of various activities and vacation stuff, I wont be seeing any of them in the next week so it was especially delicious to have the big two here today. I'll leave you with a picture from the kids in the garden. (I'm posting early tonight. We're to have a line of severe storms pass through. I wouldn't be surprised if we had power outages.)

With kids, flowers and love...