My sister and I own a small business together. It’s so small we have one employee and she’s not an employee but a subcontractor. We’re that small.
But we want to act like a routine business, so we take our subcontractor out to lunch once in a while. Makes us feel like employers.
We met at a small Italian restaurant with an atmosphere. Brown pottery. Checked tablecloth and sparkling goblets. Earthy colors on the walls. Paintings of ships and canals. A large wine rack of reds and whites.
Soft jazz floated through the room. What a great place for lunch.
We settled around a square table, leaving an empty chair to my left.
Between bites of bruschetta and baked ziti, we exchanged stories about our families and the latest news—maybe gossip—of our town.
Finally, the lunch ended. We were stuffed as stuffed as the ravioli and even resisted tiramisu.
We kept chatting, waiting for the waiter to bring our bill. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I noticed the padded check sleeve lying on the table beside me. A soft brown binder to conceal the bill. Classy.
How did I miss the waiter? Obviously, the conversation had been too rich to see the bill arrive.
So I picked up the folder. “Here. You’ll probably need this.” I handed the sleeve to my sister because she always pays these bills.
This is what regular businesses do, right? Delegate to the appropriate branch. She was the credit card bearer.
She didn’t take the folder. Instead, she stared at me with a look that I interpreted to mean, “Oh, no, I forgot the credit card in the car.”
I figured I’d be gracious, so I smiled, giving her time to get up and get that credit card. I’m pretty patient that way. We’d met to act like a big-time business, so a little professional courtesy was in order. Even to my sister.
Well, professional courtesy had nothing to do with the bill. Her look had nothing to do with a forgotten credit card, either.
She said, “Why are you handing me the wine list?”
It wasn’t her who had forgotten how to handle a business lunch. It was me.
A while back, I decided that a daily can of Mountain Dew consumed along with Mounds candy bars was not good for my health.
I go deep, don’t I?
So I’ve been exploring healthy eating. Everything from grass-fed beef to eggs from pasture-raised chickens. I planted a small vegetable garden and may even try composting.
So all these healthy choices could only lead to one thing, right?
Yep.
Pigs.
I never know how I stumble onto these articles, but this one introduced me to pasture-fed pigs.
American Guinea Hogs.
I guess they were the rage in the 1800s and then nearly went extinct before homesteaders revived the breed. But they had three things I wanted: they eat grass (because I have a nice pasture and it’s healthier meat), they stay smaller (commercial pigs can grow to become hippopotamus), and they are friendly.
I like friendly animals on my hobby farm.
So I found some baby Guinea Hogs.
I brought them home, and they settled in. We named them Bacon One, Two, and Three because I had plans for their futures.
I knew nothing about raising pigs when the Bacons arrived, but I quickly learned that they take mealtime seriously. And when is mealtime? Whenever I feed them. They’d have gone for the Mountain Dew and Mounds bars if I offered those.
The Bacons plowed over each other to get to the closest corner of their pen when I walked to the barn. Claiming to be delirious with hunger. The literature I read advised not to believe them.
When they’re not hurdling one another in their race to the feed trough, they scream. Friendly screaming, of course.
They are happy to let me pet them and offer them animal crackers. In fact, to feed them everything except chili peppers. They declined a second bite of those.
Yeah, we tried peppers just to see if there are limits to pig chowing.
Truly, all I wanted was for the Bacons to eat grass. All they wanted was to eat what I eat. Maybe eating my food for me.
One day, my sister called. “I have some food for your piggies.” She had cooked five pounds of potatoes, stirred in all the salad parts, and then added some mayonnaise, which had a sour flavor. Nobody in her family would eat the potato salad. Would my pigs?
Well, let’s find out.
I dumped the entire load of salad into a rubber pan in their pen. That was the happiest minute of their day. They turned a blind eye to the grass for twenty-four hours after that, waiting for more of my sister’s potato salad.
I asked, but she said it was a onetime deal. I hope her family appreciated her next potato salad as much as the Bacons would have.
As soon as my pastures greened up, I opened the gate to let the Bacons out. They found the grass quickly, and I figured my summer was set. Let them graze all they wanted.
But the next day, they were running around the barnyard. Outside the fence.
As soon as they spotted a human, they raced to us. Probably looking for potato salad.
We got them back in their pen.
“Pigs like to root,” my sister said. So we speculated the Bacons had lifted a gate off its hinges. We didn’t see a gate off its hinges, but this was our best guess. We strapped down the hinges so a rhinoceros couldn’t lift that gate.
The pigs were out the next day.
In their latest prison escape, they found the stored alfalfa in the lean-to. They explored the orchard. They grazed their way to the middle of the neighbor’s alfalfa field.
We lured them back to their pen with a big jar of animal crackers. Food is food, after all.
But the mystery continued. How were they getting out?
Aha. We finally spotted a broken crosspiece in the woven wire fence.
“Let’s laminate a panel over that hole in the fence,” I said. So we grabbed a wire panel and began lashing it to the woven wire.
“There are only two pigs in there,” my sister said as we worked.
“Yeah, the other one’s behind us.”
And so he was, watching us fix the fence. As soon as I spotted Bacon 3, the other two rammed their shoulders against the fence and pushed through the wire links. Easy peasy.
So that’s how they were getting out.
I locked them in a stout pen that closely resembled solitary confinement cells in the penitentiary. They didn’t escape.
Now what to feed? The Bacons got alfalfa until I realized I didn’t want to pay for expensive alfalfa all summer. The whole idea was healthy – and cheap – pasture-fed pork.
One of the side effects of carving your farmstead out of an alfalfa field is that alfalfa never dies. It’s like mint that way.
We have bunches of volunteer alfalfa still popping up in odd places, so I took the lawnmower out, catching the shredded alfalfa and dumping that in their pen.
It was almost as good as the potato salad. Based on their snarfing sounds.
And it kept me mowing the place.
Then came a magical day when I realized the Bacons were growing.
Nothing ventured, nothing gained. I opened the gate to the pasture.
They started grazing the grass immediately. No more ramming the fence and no more escape.
Now they eat nonstop in the pasture now. All-day cafeteria.
They still scream when I approach, to signal that they are starving to death and potato salad is required.
I don’t believe them, but I do have a rough idea why they almost went extinct once.
But when the kids had an invitation to a party at a local fishing pond, I saw an opportunity. I loaded my newest book in with the fishing gear.
Being a responsible mom and all, I would, of course, check on the kids frequently. Occasionally. If they screamed like a pig waiting for a second breakfast.
You’d think I’d find a book that didn’t captivate me so I could monitor the kids.
Well, I didn’t.
I found an outstanding book and a comfortable chair.
Once we got to the little pond, my kids ran to the gaggle of other kids where a brave father was digging worms out of a cardboard box and weaving the bait onto each hook. How the kids didn’t all sink hooks in their bodies while not really waiting their turn is beyond me.
Maybe they did. I had a book to read.
This book grabbed my attention from page 1. It had wit, quirky characters, and page-turning mystery. I leaped into the story.
So much so that my daughter had to call my name twice before the word weaved its way through the story and into my brain. I actually heard the book’s hero call “Mom” the first time, which was so confusing that I heard “Mom” the second time.
Kind of like when you’re dreaming and somebody is shaking your shoulder. It can take a bit to pierce the fog.
“What?” I answered before I even located her along the pond’s edge.
She held her pole high in the air with a fish as long as my hand squirming on the hook.
Great. She’d caught a fish.
“Wow, way to go.” I had already dropped my eyes back to my hero, who was racing through an alley looking for a place to hide from the bad guys.
“Bring me a tackle box.” Reality can be so tame at times.
I jammed the bookmark in place and marched through the thick grass along the mossy green water’s edge. Our tackle box was blue and dented and I wasn’t sure what all the kids might have packed in there besides bobbers and weights. I hoped no soft bananas or squashed sandwiches.
My daughter danced from foot to foot, her ponytail bouncing like fifth graders set loose for the summer. “Look at my fish! We gotta get the hook out before it gets hurt.”
True. I didn’t want an injured fish. I wanted to rejoin my hero.
How does one get a hook out of a fish? This was fresh territory for me.
I set the tackle box on the rough wood of the dock and gazed into the tangle of hooks, bobbers, weights. No banana or sandwich. The kids had some focus.
“Grab those pliers, Mom.”
OK, I knew pliers. I lifted the metal tool and held it out to her.
“I can’t do that,” she said with a voice that sounded like the whine of a jet engine starting up.
Like I could? “I don’t fish.” Clearly, a boundary was in order here.
“I’ll hold the fish, and you get the hook out.” She gripped the squirmy fish in her nine-year-old hands.
Um, I don’t get hooks out. I stared at the fish, which stared back with empty black eyes. This was no time for a “who blinks first” contest. Do fish even blink?
I drew a deep breath. Parenting involves more courage than you’d think. Extricating a hook from a fish’s mouth ranks pretty high on my “don’t want to do this” list. I took a deep breath, wishing an excuse would pop into my mind.
My daughter squeezed the fish’s mouth open, and I raised the pliers. Changed grip. Moved my thumb down the knurled metal. Shifted the handle into my palm. Stalling.
And then, while the pliers circus continued, a blast of green pond water hit me in the face. A cold, slimy, gritty tidal wave.
I raised my eyes from the squirming fish.
My five-year-old son stood a few feet away from me, gripping a stained, slightly concave paper cup two steps from dissolving into soggy mush.
He gazed at the fish while I glared at him.
Then he saw me staring, and he shifted his weight. “I grabbed the cup from the edge of the pond.” He held out the forlorn cup minutes from its ultimate resting place in the trash can.
“And I scooped up some water.” He dropped the cup down and scooped some air to show me how he’d gathered his treasure.
“Why?” I could feel the pond water still dripping from my chin. I still held the pliers, so I wiped my face with my off hand.
“I didn’t want the fish to die before you got the hook out.” His eyes were soft with concern for the squirming fish. Then he grinned just a little. “And I thought it might take a while.”
“So, you scooped up the water and threw it in my face?”
“I was throwing the water on the fish.” He shrugged and crushed the cup. “I missed.”
It is totally my fault that CAPTCHA has returned to my computer.
I tumble down the rabbit hole every time the little box comes up for me declare that I am not a robot. I check that I am not, and obviously the programming has second thoughts about that. Understandable, actually.
By Nikolay Shaplov – Transferred from en.wikibooks to Commons by Adrignola using CommonsHelper., GPL, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12813815
The idea of CAPTCHA is that humans can handle these puzzles while current bots – computer programming – cannot.
I was almost nostalgic the first time I ran into a new CAPTCHA. I rarely saw one. The nostalgia faded quickly, like remembering the smell of mentholatum.
The new onslaught of paranoid puzzles threw nine photographs in front of me. Click on the ones with cars in the picture.
One of the photos was so grainy and dark that it could have been a runaway giraffe for all I could tell. Another had a shadow under a tree that might have been concealing a car or cheerleading squad.
And then there was the shot down a highway with lumps of something in the distance. Were those cars or elk? Who could tell? Was I supposed to know?
Who would think that proving I’m human would be so challenging? (Siblings are not allowed to join the discussion at this point.)
I clicked three photos with cars and leaned closer to my monitor, hoping the other photos would somehow enhance.
If you’ve seen CSI shows, you know what I mean. They take a street video that consists of grainy pixels and enhance it about 100 times until the license plate magically -and clearly -appears. Or they can do facial recognition on that shadowy form in the front seat that could have been a bag of groceries as far as I could tell.
Trust me on this: that enhance technique would produce a photo as sharp as a blob of gray clay.
Then there are those letters that you have to read and type in the box below.
CAPTCHA letters may have been created by optometrists waiting just outside the door for your next eye exam. You’ll think you need it after trying to untangle blurry, elongated, and overlapping letters politely called distorted text.
Although I have to admit that there are guys in my life who don’t write any better.
CAPTCHA now happens every time I log into a website, throwing goofy letters or blurry photos in my face. These are puzzles that I’m supposed to solve.
I guess bots can’t do those things. Neither can half the adults, I suspect.
The reason for CAPTCHA reappearing in my life is my fault. When I got concerned about tech giants tracking my web browsing, I shut off the permissions. Suddenly my digital fingerprint disappeared.
For years, websites knew it was me – not a bot -by the fingerprints I was leaving. When I shut off that permission, CAPTCHA got suspicious.
I’m stuck with CAPTCHA or leaving fingerprints. The CAPTCHA tests seem fiercer now than what I remember. I can hardly wait for the one that asks me to count all the blades of grass on the out-of-focus lawns.
There could be a plausible reason for this stiff response. Since I’ve gone rogue on the internet harvesting, a new movie could be in store: CAPTCHA’s Revenge.
Snag a copy of my newest story, Escape, and join my group of newsletter friends to receive the latest news, updates, and resources. I hate spam, too, and will never spam you or sell your email address. And you can unsubscribe at any time.
I guess they were the rage in the 1800s and then nearly went extinct before homesteaders revived the breed. But they had three things I wanted: they eat grass (because I have a nice pasture and it’s healthier meat), they stay smaller (commercial pigs can grow to become hippopotamus), and they are friendly.
I found an outstanding book and a comfortable chair.
