Bubba’s 2010 Christmas letter

Bubba’s 2010 Christmas Letter.

My friend Bubba wrote another Christmas letter and he asked me to include it in the johntheplantman blog so everybody could see it. Heeeeere’s Bubba:

Hey, this here’s Bubba writing.

Well here it is and it’s been another year done gone by and it’s Christmas again. It’s been a really good year but it’s been hard on a lot of people who done lost their job. Now Bev—she’s my wife, but you probly know that—Bev cleans up offices at night for some lawyers and she’s been ok with her job. She told me that most of her customers were “bankrupt” lawyers and they was doing fine so she don’t have to worry about no job.

But for me, I got laid off at the carpet mill last January. They gave me two weeks pay and told me I was the best hyster driver they ever had but their wasn’t nothing there to hyst no more. (In case you don’t know, some people call a hyster a fork lift.).

I weren’t too worried until I found out that none of the other factories had anything to hyst neither. My friends told me to sign up for unemployment, but I ain’t never took something for nothing, so I didn’t go. I decided to go out to the shop and organize my tools and be a mechanic.

And that’s when I figgered out that when I used to be a pretty good mechanic was when I was really good at adjusting carburetors. The first car that came in woke me up to that. I looked under the hood and realized that there ain’t no more carburetors. Well, I knew where one mechanikin’ job that I could do and so I went out and got my John Deere tractor out from the shed and got it running. It’s a good one, too. It’s got a front end loader on it and all kind of stuff and power steering. It warn’t long till I had it running like a top. That was when I decided that a tractor warn’t much different from a hyster and so I got to be a tractor driver.

I did a little tractor work in people’s yards, but I warn’t making much money and then this guy that raises chickens ast me if I could clean out his chicken houses when they were empty. I done traded around and swapped my old pick up truck for a 1978 dump truck and I taken the John Deere over to the chicken houses and scraped out one of them chicken houses. It was full of chicken do do and wood shavings. I loaded the truck and ast the man where to dump it. He kind of looked at me funny and said, “Well, Bubba, that there’s your problem.”

I didn’t worry none, though, ‘cause I got 4 acres behind the double wide and so I taken the stuff and dumped it out back. Bev and the neighbors complained a bit about the smell but it went away pretty fast. And, my business grew and I had all these people paying me to clean out chicken houses and haul off all that stuff.

Well, the next thing I knew was that this here cotton gin business over in Alabama wanted me to clean up the cotton seed waste that was piled up all over about 3 acres. So I done started hauling that and then I had a problem. I went to see my friend John the Plant Man and told him about the problem. I said, “John, I ain’t got enough land to put all this stuff.” He thought about it and said, “mix it together and pile it up.”

So, I did and the smell went away and it got hot and John told me to turn it over and I did and it cooled off and then John said, “This here stuff now has a new name. It is called ‘compost”. And so now I am in the compost business. People pay me to haul it off and John got me some customers and now other people pay me to deliver it to them. And it’s good stuff, too. We even had to add in wood chips from the tree man to make it not be so powerful.

Here is a picture of my garden. I built it up with cross ties and filled it in with compost and planted lots of stuff last spring.

Here's part of my garden growing in that there compost. — Here’s part of my garden growing in that there compost.

And here’s a picture of all the stuff that Bev has put up in mason jars. Since we ain’t got much money this year, we are going to wrap up jars of food and give presents to everybody we know. Some of our friends still ain’t got jobs.

Here's some of what Bev put up in Mason jars — Here’s some of what Bev put up in Mason jars

And, I got my house all decorated for Christmas, too. The kids love it.

It has been a very good year. The only thing is we lost our health insurance that I had with the carpet mill. The kids are ok because the state has a program for them, but I don’t know what me and Bev are gonna do if we get sick. I’m gonna figure that out next year.

Anyhow, I’m thankful that I learnt all about chicken manure.

Here’s a picture my friend John gave me of a flower bed he is making with my compost. John said if you want me to bring you some of this compost email him here