I'm amazed

heh...it is an adjustment for us city folk...course, I am from suburbia, so that would be a Burbiot? Surdiot?

Ah, well, whatever it is, my hubby and I do feel like bumbling fools more than 1/2 the time. We are being overrun by wasps, ants and flies. My garden is more of a weed patch than garden. We buy high quality hay and alfalfa for our milk cow and get no milk due to us leaving her piggie calf with her. Our baby pigs slipped under the hot wire and rooted up our pasture. Our ram has lived up to his name and has systematically rammed all of the fencing. Our lgd killed a chicken (never a rooster, just the egg laying hen). I could go on, but I think I might start sounding a bit bitter.

It sure would be nice to have a friendly, knowledgeable neighbor help us out, but we have yet to come across one. So, we come here.

Eh, I will cop to being a bumbling fool in the country. Luckily, I have developed a sense of humor about it all (well, it is either laugh or cry and I think I have done both).

It seems that whether people are from the country or the city, many are judgemental about the other.

I was hoping for silly stories too. Like the time I was building a small shed- I had the walls framed and was getting ready to put on the siding sheets, so I removed the brace that I had put in it. Right after I removed the brace I had to run to the hardware store for something, when I came back 15 minutes later the whole thing had blown over and was 4x the work to undo. I think it was 11am Sunday before I got to the point I had been at around 3pm Saturday.

Just one of those stupid, forehead smacking mistakes from inexperience that makes you laugh while it's happening, even if its happening to you.

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The garden's getting bigger this year. Again.

I don't have much trouble with the in-comers as neighbors, except for (and I don't care where they have come from) the inconsiderate pigs who think that just because they have bought 2 acres in the country that they can do whatever they darn well please and nobody can tell them different.

They turn their barking dog loose to run and then get 6 more barking dogs and turn them loose too. They buy dirt bikes for their kids and turn them loose to tear up the dirt roads and make all sorts of noise and dust all day and all night. They build a dirt bike track and invite all their friends so it sounds like living right next to a freeway all weekend.They turn their kids loose to trespass and harass other people's livestock. They apparently feel that fruit and veggies are public property if they aren't located in window boxes where civilized people keep their garden.

They drive too fast and hit and kill wildlife and scare the bejebbers out of the horses that the local kids are riding on the shoulder of the road. (Attention new-to-the-country: when you pass a horse, you slow way down and move over as far as you can away from the rider.). They get ticked off if anyone dare to slow them down by driving the speed limit, or worse, moving a tractor on the road and respond by tailgating, making threats and rude hand gestures.

If the above doesn't apply to you, then I'm not talking about you. And not all of those people have moved out from the city.

Of course, when you get out of the local neighborhood and talk about the community at large, there is a lot of local resentment against all the Californians who flee from California to get away from the crowding, the drugs, and the high costs, and then they immediately set about to turn my area into a copy of California. Merely annoying when their aren't many of them. Rather tragic as soon as enough of them arrive to form a voting majority.

And stop using all the well water to water your grass!! We are on the same water table!!!

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"If you tickle the earth with a hoe she laughs with a harvest."
- Douglas William Jerrold

Real is Beautiful -Sherry in Maine

I am 47

A few years ago I was helping a farmer whose son was in iraq. They had some super city folks move in down the long 2 lane road. My friend owned all the land around them and being nice told them he didnt mind atvs but keep on the fielf roads.

THey tore up about 15 hacres of wheat one weekend. He asked again then they got all crappy about him having the nerve since he had so much land. They started chasing live stock and other things. Later he had trouble with them speeding down the roads. He made sure when they were bebhind thme if they blew the horn or gestured he would ut the tractor in the middle of the road with a lower gear. THey learned real fast.


THey did some stinking stuff to that man like shooting tires out on his center pivot rigs and things like that. Later he put poultry barns on both sides of them.

We lived in a rural area that had a huge section re-zoned into "rural residential" which just means a few acres for a big city house to sit on. One day a woman came to our door with a petition. She was from the new section. The petition was against the farmer who lived down our side road. It was a request for him to get rid of his donkey because it brayed and woke her and her neighbours up on the weekends. I cannot tell you what I told her because to this day I am shocked at myself that I used some of those words. She did get a lot of signatures (not from any real country people) but fortunately our county office just laughed at her. The donkey lived to a ripe old age and even before the petition I loved to hear his bray. After the petition it was music for my soul.

Definitely "sub-human".
Just ask the people who are so proud they can pronounce big technical words like "citiot", and have enough free time to play with them because they've done everything else that needs doing.

'Rural Elite'

I have an acquaintance who has twice started stories with lines like, "...you know how people who live in the country are stupid?..." It turns out that "stupid" in his vocab is synonymous with conservative, self sufficient, and resourceful. He was entirely serious and was shocked that I didn't agree.

His brother, also of the liberal persuasion, has also stated that conservatives are stupid in an entirely matter of fact tone, so it runs in that family.

Florida has a right to farm law. it isn't perfect defense, but basically if a "citiot" moves in next to an existing farm, as long as the farmer isn't violating laws he can make whatever farming related noise, stink, and commotion he wants.

I guess I'm the reverse -- before moving out here, we had a 1/2 acre property in Portland, Oregon, where I gardened intensely and kept two miniature horses (allowed by the city where space and proximity to other houses allows). We were the people who brought the country into the city.

Everybody loved our horses and we never received any complaints. One group of people who visited them at the back gate told us the horses were an asset to the community. Funny, they never said that about us!

When we moved to our 4 acres in a rural area and added chickens, we began receiving complaints about our rooster -- from people who had lived out here for ages. They stuck nasty notes in our mailbox saying that they were praying our rooster would die and snidely informing us that we didn't need a rooster to get eggs. Duhh. After the rooster settled down a bit and held off crowing until after daybreak, they sent another note complaining that he was waking them at 5:30.

As others have noted, idiocy is not limited to city folk.

I worry about me. That's enough. I don't care what others are doing, how they decorate, how much they mow, where or when they mow, what they plant, when they harvest, what they name their rabbits etc. Remember that sometimes the shoe is on the other foot. Sometimes the country folk find themselves moving to a city...I'm certain there must be a bunch of city slickers who make their observations about what the hillbillies did next. I don't care.

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"Those who hammer their guns into plows will plow the fields of those who don't."-Thomas Jefferson

I have been on both ends of this, a city girl gone country, and a country girl gone city and there are adjustments and a learning curve either way.

DH is a city boy and when we moved back to this very rural area we had something come up that still makes us laugh (and cringe a bit)...

DH had just retired from Camp Pendleton and was used to commuting a couple hrs on I-5, when we moved back to a very rural area in the deep south where my family has been for hundreds of years.
I had just gotten through telling him we needed to be extra nice to everyone as I was probably related to most of the people in these parts, but wouldn't recognize them if I saw them.

As we were driving down a rural highway he started giving everyone that passed an aggressive middle finger salute. I was horrified and asked him why in the world was he doing that as I had never even seen him do that in the city!

He said "their all doing it to me first!!"

I had to explain to him that around here, that is the "country wave, a friendly howdy-do" and they weren't flippin him the middle finger, they were raising their index finger in a hello...

YES.

Even though my neighbor to the north has been here a few years longer than I have, I still think its idiotic of them to have a HUGE water fountain/garden pond, blasting away all summer long.....washing their cars in the driveway for an hour once a week, watering their lawn all summer, front and back, etc.

Its probably why my well water is so low constantly, it wasnt before they got the fountain and stuff

They also take their big garden tractor and cart, and dump all their lawn clippings and hedge trimmings down in the back end of my property, are encroaching on my north property line by mowing the grass which now I have to get a survey done on that line so they don't get adverse possession of any of my land, and have a motorcross bike that they like to ride back and forth in front of my house at about 80 mph, no muffler, etc.

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Recognize the beauty in things, in creation, even when thats difficult to do.
Be loving, show compassion. Create while we're here.
Enjoy this life, be in this life but not be of it.