For Better or For Worse by Lynn Johnston for July 17, 2012

I like the overall look on John.

Nothing smells clean and fresh quite like a trough full of cow waste, or a pen full of wet chicken sh*t.

Sounds like John was working and didn’t have time to admire the scenery.

John’s just been mucking around.

John looks cute in his overalls, but he is so out of his element. LOL!!

Couldn’t she smell him coming?

Growing up in Manitoba,,, Lynn is right, you can see a storm coming from miles away! Tornadoes too!

Looks like John has lost some weight. I spent my summers on my Grandpa’s farm in Alberta and still have pleasant, vivid memories of watching thunderstorms approaching from miles away. It would be beautiful blue sky overhead and dark angry skies with lightning and thunder gradually moving towards us.

Although the farm I grew up on wasn’t in the middle of open prairies, it was at the northern tip of NH. At night I’d sit under the stars and swipe my fingers through the Milky Way, swirling them around. In the winter, I’d run and chase the Northern Lights.

yeah, the horrible smells and the insects can spoil all the village romance

Some parts of a farm do smell fresh, and even the manurey smells beat the smell of automobile exhaust and occasional unidentifiable chemical smells that are pervasive in the suburbs where I live.

What’s at the backend of the barn is what’s come out of the backend of the cows!

And don’t lose your chewing gum in the hen house!

Q. What do they call a snake that eats pigs?A. A Boar Constrictor

Waste management hit a big snag in feed lots a few years ago.The problem was that it was not degrading, but piling up.Then, someone realized that the animals were being fed so many ANTIBIOTICS that even after passing out of the animals, the waste was still so full of antibiotics that the bacteria that normally broke it down could not touch it!(and too big a job for the tumble-bugs)

Would you blevie that Laura Engles Wilder small house still exsists, especailly one here in KS and her furniture is very small.

In Minnesota!!! ( Couldn’t resist! )

When my in-laws were alive, they lived 500 miles away from us out in the sticks of northeast Georgia. Visiting them was just about unbearable when any of the neighbors up and down their road spread “chicken litter fertilizer” all over their pastures. You could smell that disgusting stuff for miles and there was absolutely NO getting away from it — not even inside the house! YUCK!!!!! A good torrential rain would help a little bit but that didn’t seem to happen too often while we were down there though. It was just something that had to be endured for the length of the visit.

On a totally different (and less nostalgic) note, I love how John’s pitchfork purposefully pokes a hole in his dialog balloon and seems to deposit, um, dirt on it.

John and Ellie aren’t there on vacation — they’ve hired on as (paid) farmhands.