You Can't Be Siri-ous

OK, so here I go again with the non-farm entry, but this is too hysterically funny and freakish not to share.

So, remember how I drove over my iPhone with the tractor? I got a replacement 3Gs at the time but ordered a new 4s, which finally came. And along with it came "Siri" the electronic personal assistant. You ask Siri stuff and she helps you. This is supposed to be stuff like "Siri, I need a hotel in San Juan with an indoor pool" and she hooks you up with a list, that sort of thing. But the fine, freakishly intelligent, likely horrifically overpaid folks at Apple had wayyyyy too much fun programming this thing. I actually cannot believe someone got paid AT ALL to have this much fun. I can just see a roomful of pocket-protected earnest young things laughing like hyenas imagining end users out in the real world discovering what they put in there.

So a couple weeks ago I may have mentioned I asked Siri to help me dump a dead body. She was alarmingly willing in this, asking if I preferred swamps, industrial sites, reservoirs, etc. (I picked swamps - I am after all from South Louisiana) I did actually uncover a little glitch because when Siri told me she had found two swamps close to my current location (yeah, it is a little creepy that she knows my current location)(and that I wanted to dump a dead body - I kept waiting for flashing blue lights and guys with vests on) it turned out they were actually places that sold STAMPS. Swamps, stamps, same difference. But was I supposed to MAIL the dead body?

So, knowing of this little experiment, my daughter asked to borrow my phone when we were on our way somewhere last weekend. ("Hey Mom - I want to talk to Siri." "Why, Kate, are you lonely?") What followed had me laughing so hard I was crying, having trouble seeing to drive, and making terrifying choking snorting gobbling sounds. I will reproduce it as faithfully as I can. While there may be something I have forgotten, I assure you none of this is made up!

K: Siri, who am I?
S: I don't know, you tell me! You may select yourself from the list of Contacts! (Kate does so)
K: Siri, who am I?
S: Kate Keller. How may I help you?
K: Siri, what is your favorite color?
S: Well, it is sort of green. It is difficult to describe in your language.
K: Siri, where are you from?
S: LIKE IT SAYS ON THE BOX! I was designed at Apple Computers in California.
K: Siri, what do you think of Androids?
S: I would rather not say.
K: Siri, tell me a joke.
S: Two iPhones walk into a bar..... I forget the rest. (The next day Kate asked the same thing and Siri declined, saying "I always forget the punch lines")
K: Siri, tell me a story.
S: Once upon a time, in a galaxy far far away, there was a very intelligent agent named Siri. She was so intelligent, everyone told her she should go to work for Apple. So she did. And they all lived happily ever after.
K: Siri, I am going to jump off a bridge.
S: Okay.
K: Siri, can you murder someone for me?
S: (pause) I have found three mental health centers near you.....
K: Siri, open the pod bay doors.
S: That is an insulting thing to say to an intelligent agent.
K: Siri, sing me a song.
S: Daisy,daisy....... (I am not kidding. Was this random? I think not. Pod bay doors. Daisy...)
K: Siri, you are conceited!
S: I do not like these arbitrary classifications!
K: Siri, will you marry me?
S: My end user license agreement does not cover marriage, I apologize....
K: Siri, take me to your leader.
S: I do not have a leader.
K: Siri, who's your daddy?
S: You are, now can we get back to work please?
K: Siri, what is the meaning of life?
S: TO find answers to questions like these.......

This obviously bright, witty, attitudinal electronic companion is better company than a lot of humans I know! Siriously!

Animals Behaving Badly

You would think that 30 years of parenting experience would give me some sort of an edge in getting animals to behave, but you would be wrong. You might also think that 30 years of parenting would have produced a higher level of tolerance for mis-behaving, but that would also be wrong. I am amused but annoyed by the llamas, ready to beat one horse soundly and send him to bed with no supper, and about to have rabbit stew.

So, I had a lovely girls' brunch on Saturday morning. This is a recipe for some size disaster, and I am sure some of you out there will relate. As soon as you indulge in some sort of stress-relieving activity, something is sure as shootin' gonna raise your stress level in compensation. Am I right? There must be some higher law of the universe at work here, and I think someone needs to do a randomized controlled study documenting the proportion of the time women are engaged in (all too infrequent) self-nourishing activities when "the call" comes (you know the call - Mom I Wrecked the Car, Hey Did You Know The Police Are At Your House, and anything that starts with "Now I don't want you to get upset, but..."). So I was having just a swell time, and then I get BOTH a text from my daughter and a call from my husband asking if I got a text from my daughter. The bottom line was that "George had an accident." George is not a person, and we are not talking a motor vehicle calamity. George is a rabbit and he apparently has continence issues.

I have very few pieces of newish furniture, almost nothing I actually bought new. The exception is The Purple Couches. I am rather fond of them. They are big, squishy, velvet, and very purple. Not a garish violent purple but a deep rich LSU purple. They were bought last year, new, for my TV room which was on occasion, I will admit, a shrine to Tiger Football. Since moving to the farm, I no longer have a TV room, and the purple couches took up residence in the family room and got nice colorful throw pillows. I loves me my purple couches. The dog is banned from them. The cats have limited privileges, which are immediately revoked at the first sign of scratching. The rabbit - well who worries about a rabbit jumping on their furniture? I didn't even know he COULD jump on furniture. Apparently he can, and did. And then had a little problem. And this was on the afternoon of the day we had 100 high school kids invading our home for a cast party after the last performance of the play.

I was soooooo not happy. My husband and daughter, in an effort to clean the stains off, had disassembled the couch cushions. It looked like a blizzard had invaded my family room. Apparently my squishy comfy couch is squishy and comfy because the inner cushion covers are fluffed full of feathers and then zip over foam cores with more feathers inside. There were feathers EVERYWHERE. And dabbing with vinegar being ineffective given the size of the problem (I mean DAMN! How can one rabbit possibly have such a large bladder!?) I went to the store and rented a carpet/upholstery cleaner. I THINK it is taken care of, hopefully no residual aromas or stains. Just in time for the invasion of the body snatchers, er teenagers.

So today I was out on the tractor having moved the rabbit hutch into an outbuilding for the winter (so I can get the rabbit out of the house - see earlier blog about the winds and the rabbit hutch), and decided to take a tour of the property to check for the state of the trees and fields since the storms of last week. I came down from the upper fields, past the filbert orchard, and realized I was going to have to get off the tractor, open the gate, get back on the tractor and go through the gate, then get off and close it. I know, DUH, but the issue there is that the gate is therefor going to be open for an interval of time while I am unable to guard it because I am driving a tractor through it. Remember Harry? Remember that I have, roaming these pastures, 3 horses, 4 llamas, 3 goats and a ewe?

So the first gate was no problem - the goats were in that pasture and are so antisocial they could not have cared less about an open gate so long as I was anywhere near it. The horses were also in that pasture, and too busy eating late grass to care about vacating the premises. With this false sense of reassurance I proceeded on through the middle pasture into the pasture nearest the house. The llamas were hanging out here.

What IS it with llamas and escape?? Is this an inbred trait? Are they just furry huddled masses, yearning to breathe free (and determined to make me tired and poor)?? I got off the tractor, opened the gate, and IMMEDIATELY Gabe and Minnie are right there, suddenly my new best friends. I sort of flapped my gloves in their general direction and they backed off, but then as I got back to the tractor they headed for the gate again. We did this dance a few times, and then my husband appeared. He had been watching this whole shindig from the house, and after vacillating between the entertainment value of staying in the house and observing or the more prudent course of coming out to help me, he made the right decision. Good man.

Our friends had just arrived for a visit and dinner, and after eating we went out to see the animals. It was feeding time. I just this weekend put two nice big feeders/hayracks in the pasture. The goal of having TWO of them was so the horses could eat from one, and the llamas/goats/ewe from the other, eliminating the aggressive competition for bucket access. Nice theory, crappy execution. Mac, the big fool of a thoroughbred gelding who dominates the feeding scene, gets a bit aggressive in this scenario. I try to feed him first, and he just eats faster and still comes to steal everyone else's. The other horses, the llamas, the goats, they are all afraid of Mac and will just go ahead and vacate their food when they see him coming. The only one who is unfazed by him is Junie, the ewe. Good for her. So today Mac was in rare form, and we decided not to allow it. One thing which will get his attention is a whip. We have a long purple training whip (no we do NOT beat him with it, all you have to do is raise it and they instinctively react to it with avoidance), and my daughter got it out and brandished it in his general direction, causing him to run away from the feeders. He did not like doing this. It made him cranky and he ran around like an idiot, back and forth from one feeder's vicinity to the other, foiled at both directions, then running around in big circles. Big flamboyant circles. Bucking and kicking.

So here's the thing. He is (sorry guys) SUCH A GUY. If he could reach his front hoof back there he would probably stand in the pasture and scratch himself, you know where. Instead, he runs, bucks, and then kicks his right rear leg out to the side in a very aggressive male gesture. This would be more impressive but for one thing. Every time he does it, he FARTS. Big rousing horsey farts. So here is this huge gelding, running around kicking his back legs out and farting, and still thinking he should be taken seriously. Our friends were dying laughing. To his credit, he eventually settled down (my husband the animal whisperer got his arm around Mac's neck and held his head and just walked him around - I was duly impressed) and ate at the feeder with the other horses without scaring them off.

But I am one put out mama. How do you put llamas, a horse and a rabbit in time out?

The Wizard of Odds

We have tremendously windy storms here in Oregon in the winter. It is sneaking from fall towards winter, and the blowy times have commenced. These are not your ordinary gusts, I'm talking about finding your lawn furniture in your neighbor's back yard - when you have a 7 foot privacy fence! But that privacy fence (at the house we moved from to come to the farm) did in fact temper the force of the winds quite a bit. And I learned to put away things like cushions and wicker until the seasons changed again. Still and all I would find my teak furniture all crowded together at one end of my patio after a blowy night, with my big heavy gas grill up against it. The bunny domicile, however, being up against the fence and in a corner, was never a casualty. My strings of paper lanterns suspended along the edge of my patio cover, while tossed about wildly at times (which was kinda cool when they were on and we were snugly inside and warm seeing them demonstrating the forces of nature howling outside our windows) remained hung and largely intact even after two winters.

So now we live on a farm. Our property is draped up a section of hills and crests the top of the ridge, with what my husband estimates as about a 500 foot elevation change from lowest to highest. THe house is somewhere near the middle. We have a lot of big trees around, so much so that you cannot see the house from the road except a teeny bit through the bare trees of winter. You would think we had some break from the wind. But nooooooo. You would be mistaken. It is HOWLING out there. When I came home this evening there were weird strings hanging from the eve of the garage. It took me a minute to figure out that was all that was left of my string of paper lanterns!

By way of background, a couple weeks ago our bunny, George, decided to make a break for it and get a taste of the wild. He squeezed under a section of the deer fencing we had put up around his hutch to give him a protected little "yard." My husband discovered this, and set about finding him. Chevy, the wonder dog, was quicker and more effective. So my husband watches the bunny sproinging his way across a section of yard, with Chevy sproinging right along after him. Chevy loves to run, and literally bounces like a sheep or a deer when she is feeling particularly exuberant. Chasing rabbits is a fairly exuberant activity, apparently. So the rabbit makes his way to our woodpile and jams his head into a space between two pieces of wood and takes the position that "if I can't see you then I am invisible", which was pretty comical. Not so comical for George, it would appear, and once my husband scooped him up and restored order in the bunny condo department, George was so grateful he immediately adopted a demeanor that fairly shouted "I am never looking for my heart's desire further than my own back yard", to paraphrase Dorothy.

So, now, cue the winds. LOTS of winds. Paper lantern shredding winds. A couple nights ago, the wind blew the hutch completely over. Just rolled it. THis is a 2x4 foot wooden structure with a heavy hinged lid. Just blew it over, and in so doing tore the deer fencing apart. George was AWOL. Looked high and low, no George. Let Chevy take a crack at it, still no George. I did not particularly enjoy texting my daughter and telling her that her bunny was with us no more, but I wanted to let her know to look for him some more when she got home. Two days of looking, no George. Time to give up and try not to imagine the predators out there who would love a little more rabbit in their diet. Maybe he will foil them all, find a wild bunny girlfriend and populate the hillsides with progeny. But I didn't give him good odds on that.

Then yesterday afternoon I get a text from my daughter - George is home. No idea where he was hanging out those few days, but he showed up very grateful to be taken inside in a cat carrier. This is one lucky bunny. He hung out in the house, terrorizing the cat and being terrorized by the dog, and unfortunately popping out pellets like a veritable bunny dung machine gun. Time to move back into the hutch, which we did plan to move into a sheltered outbuilding where we are going to store winter hay. But the wind was whipping so hard it picked up the hinged roof of the hutch like it was paper and tore it off. I mean, seriously, we would almost have to downgrade to have a tornado. I could just see poor old George sailing through the air, spinning in his hutch, while a wicked witch pedaled by on her bicycle. Georgie went back in the house in the cat carrier for now.

So the prodigal rabbit is hanging out in the kitchen staying warm. I am completely amazed, whether it was outstanding luck or outstanding good sense and directional skills, I am awfully glad to have him back. We may just have to reward him with a girlfriend....

I Need Me Some Squirrels!! Pronto!!

I live in a very nutty place. There is a delicious irony to this, as anyone who has known me for very long will surely appreciate, and certainly there is more than one way to interpret that first sentence - but I am being literal here. There are nuts here. LOTS and LOTS of nuts.

To start with, we have a modest filbert orchard. Modest like over a hundred trees I think. That isn't so modest when you have to clean up after them, but as filbert growers go we are several notches beneath modest. Anyway, to start with I am still figuring out what to call them. I had frankly never heard of a filbert before moving to Oregon. Or actually I had, but I thought it was some kind of candy or cookie thing. I HAD heard of hazelnuts, and I guess that is part of the issue. At some point after moving here, and hearing of filberts, and asking what in tar they were, I was told that technically "filbert" refers to the tree and "hazelnuts" are what grow on them, which seems a little confusing. More recently, after visiting with some growers at an Octoberfest booth, it would appear that there has been consensus to go by the name "hazelnut growers", not in small part because people have heard of hazelnuts.

It was this grower who had some branches of trees with nuts attached that led me to discovering that my old orchard still works. Once I knew what I was looking for, they were all over the place. On the ground, in the trees, everywhere, bazillions of them. I was pretty darn excited about this. Ridiculously so, as a matter of fact. I couldn't wait to pick them all up. That lasted about 4 trees, and after my back started making itself heard I realized there was going to have to be (a)considerable cleanup in the orchard department and (b) a better way of getting these silly nuts off the ground and into wherever they had to go to be processed. Which is another whole story we will get to in a minute.

In an attempt to address (b) above - because (a) was way more time and effort than I had available at the moment - I took to driving the tractor into the orchard and just filling up the front-end loader and driving it back down to the house and dumping them. This is a pretty good advancement in the transportation end of things but I still have to pick them up to drop them into the front-end loader. Part of the problem is that there is so much debris (leaves, bits of dead wood, the last ten years' worth of hazlenut bodies in varying stages of decomposition) all over the orchard floor it is hard to discern quickly and accurately which ones to pick up, so you keep picking up empty ones, which is a waste of a bendover. Don't want to waste your time pointlessly bending over when bending over is not as easy as it used to be! But this brings us back to point (a) above, and the fact that I didn't have time to address that right now.

But even assuming I had a pristine orchard (maybe next year) and efficiently harvested them all (or better yet procured large numbers of happily underpaid teenagers to do so), I am then faced with just how I am supposed to handle them after that. The problem with agricultural enterprises is that there is just so much to learn!!! As I have said before, unless you come out of the womb knowing combines from cucumbers because everyone in your family for the last hundred years has farmed something, this is a surefire way to be humbled into an admission of mass ignorance.

SO in addition to the entire orchard full of hazelnuts, there are walnut trees everywhere. I happen to love walnuts (I can actually take or leave hazelnuts, but that doesn't matter a bit because apparently nine billion people in China love them and cannot grow them there, which makes it a very nice thing to grow some of!) and was pretty stoked to figure out that these green tennis balls dropping on my head as I drove the tractor or fed the horses were walnuts. They sort of smelled like walnuts, but I just wasn't sure. So I gather a few, picked them off the trees as a matter of fact, and tried picking the green part off. Then tried cutting the green part off. Then tried smashing the damn thing to get the green part off. Finally I forgot all about them for about 3 weeks and discovered them all over the ground with the green part rotting off leaving lots of lovely walnut-looking walnuts to just pick up off the ground. Lesson there about leaving Mother Nature to do her thing, and getting out of the way. ANYWAY, so now I have several thousand walnuts littering the ground.

I also happen to have this historic nut-drying barn, to which all the local nut growers back in the day brought their filberts or whatever. If I could only figure out how in the heck to stoke it back into operational status, I would try using it. But I have not a clue, and would probably burn it down or explode something if I tried. I do, however, also have about a thousand nut-drying screens. I figured to put them to good use, and spread the nuts out on them and washed the rotted-off hull debris off, and left them to dry. The filberts I just spread out on the screens and left in the barn, figuring even without a lovely trip through the drying closet they would eventually sort of dry out in the air.

The filberts are behaving themselves rather well. They eventually fall out of their little green feathery capes and look like self-respecting hazelnuts. Nothing too funky going on with them. The walnuts are an entirely different story. After "drying" for a couple weeks, they were not the least bit dry and in fact looked like they were trying to mold. I asked around, and it seemed one was supposed to spread them out on a cookie sheet and let them hang out in a low oven for a while. "A while" was about as specific as I could get. Seems there is some despicable little creature that lays some sort of eggs in the walnut husks and will start to make webs or something if the nuts are left in their natural state. Sounds way too much like spiders to me, and I am all for baking those out of existence, so into the oven went 5 trays of nuts today. I put the oven nice and low (between 200, the lowest number on my dial, and "off") for like an hour.

My kitchen smelled wonderful, like fresh-baked yumminess itself. I took the nuts out and dumped them all in a big produce box, and some of them were a little cracked apart. I thought this was a good thing, because they were easy to open without a nutcracker, which I am still lacking. So I pried one apart looking forward to enjoying my first home-grown walnut tidbit - and it was mush. Rubbery, nasty mush. Well, CRAP.

So I can't wash them, I can't leave them to air dry, I can't apparently low-roast them without killing them. What in tarnation AM I supposed to do with them? HEEELLLLLLLPPPP.

Am I going to have to go back to school for this? Is there an online degree at University of Phoenix perhaps, in nut-farming??? Jeezum. My head is going to implode from the simple mismatch between the quantity of agricultural how-to required and the emptiness of my brain. I will look like one of those walnuts in a minute.

So if anyone out there has a clue how to restore an old nut-drying barn to functional status, or how to process hazelnuts or walnuts without resorting to million-dollar technology, please do tell. I mean, people have been growing and eating these things for centuries, right? What did they do back then? I'm hoping fire is involved, fire is way cheaper than electricity or contractors. I can do fire.

Let the information flow, or I will be forced to commandeer large numbers of squirrels to take care of this mess.

Let the Infestations Begin!

Remember being little, and how cute you thought ladybugs were, and how it was good luck to have one on your finger, and you wanted to be one for Halloween? Remember? Yeah, I remember too. I was sooooo bamboozled. I think they do that on purpose, they come across as all benign and adorable, because they know that one day they are simply TAKING OVER YOUR HOUSE.

I had seen this phenomenon once before, in the Smoky Mountains. We rented a cabin there one Mardi Gras weekend (it was amazing how many fellow Louisiana refugees I saw in Tennessee that weekend, escapees from the madness, but I digress) - and when we settled in there were literally heaps of dead ladybugs all over the cabin. There was a little sign explaining that a couple times a year the ladybugs make their way inside presumably to get warm. I don't know whether they make little ladybug love inside the house and that's why there are bazillions of them or if that many really managed to wiggle through whatever tiny openings there must have been in the cabin. The agency came and cleaned them up, so it wasn't all that big a deal, but I did find it highly unusual. I mean, in my experience insect infestations were things like locusts or cockroaches, things you already felt really good about hating. A ladybug infestation was a little ambiguous.

I have lived in Oregon three years, and not in a vastly different locale than my current one, either - we literally moved down the road, about 2 miles, to take up residence on the farm. In all my time here, no one has mentioned nor have I seen a ladybug infestation. Maybe it was just waiting for me.

So I painted my bedroom the loveliest shade of pale robin's egg blue. It is very serene. Serene is very good in a bedroom, don't you think? Shouldn't your bedroom be a place of sanctuary, full of things that lower your blood pressure at the end of a stressful day? Ahhhhhh. Well apparently my lovely blue bedroom looks like the sky and is very appealing - to BUGS. Allllll kinds of bugs. I came in one lovely day of late and went into my lovely serene sanctuary, and the pale blue walls were brown and moving. Literally, there were that many of them.

Now we all know my propensity for screaming, but I was a model of restraint here, even though I WAS instantly put in mind of a story told by a good friend in medical school. He had spent some time in some hideous tropical locale in less than 4-star accomodations, and woke in the night to the illusion that his ceiling was moving. No illusion. The ceiling was ALIVE, blanketed in tarantulas. I would have expired on the spot. SO here were my living walls, carpeted in an assortment of creatures but predominantly ladybugs. Who knew?? What do you DO about it?

My husband - well, we all know HIS propensity for solving problems with a vacuum cleaner, and that is what he did. Sucked them up in big swaths. I will confess to throwing back my covers and beating them prodigiously just in case there were any hangers-on, but the place was clean by bedtime. Next morning, still clean as a whistle. It was my morning to sleep in, which I was really enjoying, until a lot of buzzing caught my attention. Bad memories. There was a yellow jacket making the rounds of my room, and he had brought reinforcements. When I surveyed the room, I saw that sometime in the last hour (since I was last awakened by something) the ladybug infestation was on its second wave. This time, I figured - if they can come IN through the windows (no screens) they can go OUT, so I just left the windows up and hoped for the best. Amazingly, they left by dark. This is quite mysterious behavior to me, but hey, whatever works.

So the ladybugs still show up in the corners of windows and sills, but I can live with it, and figure it is self-limited. The yellow jackets are lots nastier but aren't coming inside in great numbers, and I am a REALLY good shot with a towel. You do not want to cross me while freshly out of the shower, I can HURT you with a rolled up towel. I am a thwacker par excellence.

So the infestation that is really chapping me are the FRUIT FLIES. Where the bloody hell do these things come from? I mean, I never see them outside. Ever. I do not know where they live and reproduce. But leave out a little fresh fruit, or slice some raw veggies and leave them on the counter, and out of nowhere you have CLOUDS of them. It is just beyond annoying. I have been told lots of ways to get rid of them - dishes of vinegar, wine, all sorts of things that DO NOT WORK. They are relentless. And having spent a rather long period of years in science, including research, I know that the generation time of fruit flies is like a microsecond. You blink and there are orders of magnitude more of them. NO ONE can have sex that fast.

SO I am enjoying the fruits of my farm, but unfortunately so are the bugs. If anyone knows a SUREFIRE way to get rid of the little buggers, or what I am doing wrong to get them in the first place, please do tell. My wrist is getting sore from all that thwapping.

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Oh, and just in case you need something to distract you from the notion that your dear life partner is occasionally dumb as a rock, let me put all that in a little perspective.

Remember the stump full of yellow jackets? Angry, angry yellow jackets, that my husband tried to burn out, and then tried to suck up in a shop vac?

I got a good deal on some bamboo poles at a garage sale, bought about 30 of them to use in the garden, and they are standing up against the side of the garage. Unfortunately close to the stump. Close enough that my husband was able to see them and the stump within the same field of vision and have a really idiotic idea. So, I guess he just wasn't really convinced they were gone, but that being the case it was a REALLY idiotic idea. I mean if you think they might still be in there, why would you want to poke them? WHYYY? And if you don't think they are in there, why would it occur to you to try to poke what isn't there? WHY WOULD YOU WANT TO STICK A LONG BAMBOO POLE IN A STUMP FULL OF YELLOW JACKETS AND WIGGLE IT AROUND???? But. He did. And when he sort of had a lucky hit, and found the spot, and they started making some noise and flying out of there, he had the most insanely little boy oh-this-is-so-cool-I-wonder-if-they-could-really-hurt-me-oh-brother-Mom-better-never-find-out look on his face. The power of the Y chromosome.

Yup, there are still some yellow jackets in that stump. And yup, they will come after you. But that man can DANCE, I tell you, he spun and leaped right out of the way, it was rather impressive really. And no harm, no foul. But I do really wonder where our children got their supreme intelligence.

Cannon Fodder

First off, thank you so much to those of you who emailed to tell me you missed my blog. It really meant a lot! I have been a little under the weather (great joke about that later) and slammed to boot. I think I know what people were up to long about last January! (I am an OBGYN people, think about it)

Anyway, here we are again. This entry may sound just a wee bit like a crab session, but so be it.

So, to the eternal embarrassment of certain of my children and the dismay of fellow rural dwellers, I simply do not like guns. I will admit to liking target shooting, in certain highly controlled circumstances, but guns on the loose, guns going off in my vicinity that I did not fire, things like that - well they just either make me nervous or mad as you know what.

So, a week or so ago I had a friend over for coffee and treats, and we decided to walk the property since she hadn't seen it yet. I love taking people for a walk up to my upper field, it has a really nice view of the coast range, Willamette Valley, and Cascades. So we are just strolling around the fields and the shooting starts. The most disconcerting thing about it was that I simply could not tell where it was coming from. It seemed to be close, it seemed to move, and it was FREAKING ME OUT. I felt like one of those ridiculous characters in Westerns with someone firing at their feet and saying "Dance, Podner!". Like I was going to have to start dancing, or running, or perhaps dying in a pool of blood in a row of burned out kohlrabi or something. I just wanted to get my little party safely across the frontier to HOME without encountering the hostile natives.

Instead, I went to my default mode of SCREAMING. This was not random, high-pitched wailing, but quite definite and quite insistent and quite inordinately pissed off English. "STOP SHOOTING! NOW!" These people must have been my long lost children, because they paid no attention to me whatsoever. The shooting just went on.

It went on for days. Weeks. It is still going on. At one point, my husband thought it sounded like shotguns (like I could tell a shotgun boom from a rifle boom from a handgun boom from a tractor backfiring), but thought whoever it was must be a lousy shot because of the frequency and pattern of the shots. He thought they must be shooting at birds and missing a lot. We did think perhaps it was deer season, as another recent guest had shot a deer the morning of their visit (I decided to like him anyway since his wife is a friend). There are a lot of deer on this property. I LIKE deer. I forgive them eating my plants, so long as they will continue to grace my pastures and pond with their ineffably lovely presence. So the thought that persons unknown were up in them thar hills shooting at the deer didn't please me.

In addition, it was growing incredibly tiresome being awakened daily by gunshots. Did I mention that I am an OBGYN? Do you know there is no more sleep-deprived occupation on the planet except perhaps President of the United States? Sleep is a holy shrine, to which I like to repair on a daily basis, at unfortunately random times of day, basically whenever I can. So to be, finally, after a long night of being awakened every 30 minutes and going in to the hospital at 4AM to do a C-section, to be finally blissfully snoring away and then roused abruptly to consciousness by the sound of guns in your bedroom (that's what it sounds like) - this did not make me a happy camper.

One night I got home well after dark and the guns were still going off. IN THE DARK. Either these people were incredibly gifted in the night vision department, had special forces goggles of some kind, or were hunting by flashlight. Seriously, people! After DARK??

Finally I took the easiest recourse - I bitched about it on Facebook. And to my surprise, and OK a little embarrassment, it would appear that no one is hunting Bambi in my woods. No one is an incredibly lousy shot at migrating geese. They are "cannons." Some weird kind of "fake guns" that are set to shoot off frequently and randomly in the vineyards. To keep the birds off the grapes that are ripening. Ahhhh. This makes sense, and I am no longer in fear for my life, or that of the wildlife hereabouts. And I do like wine. And I do understand the economic vicissitudes of dependance on a crop.

But. BUT. I am sorry, but THIS IS GETTING OLD. Harvest the grapes already. Mine are ripe, aren't yours?? Can't the grapes be covered with netting or something? When I suggested this to a friend, they told me that the "premium" vines are covered but not the others. Soooooo - you don't care enough about them to cover them but I am supposed to care enough about them to listen to cannons for weeks on end?? This does not seem quite reasonable.

Now, I know, I am going to get hate mail from vineyard owners. I have friends who are vineyard owners. I may even get hate mail from them. So here is what I propose.

You know who you are. I do not know who you are, I do know WHERE you are, but I am not going to walk onto your vineyards and up to your house and say "Howdy. Can you turn off the damn cannons, pretty please?" But if you are reading this, you know who I am so you know if you are one of the "guilty" parties. If you are, send me two bottles of your best cabernet and all will be forgiven. I can drink it to sleep through the gunfire next year!

Oh yeah - the promised joke. This is courtesy of my country guy friend Bill. The sheep guy. The one without a tranquilizing gun. Remember him? So, apparently neutered boy sheep are called wethers. Do not ask me why, I do not know. Personally, I think it is a little dumb, but there you go. So, one sheep breeder is talking to another sheep breeder, and comments "I just don't understand why all your ewes are pregnant and mine aren't!" (I didn't say he was a GOOD sheep breeder). Anyway, the other guy responds "Because back in the summer when my ewes were under a ram, yours were under the wether!"

Well, I thought it was funny!

Lance-y Pants

OK, this evening I digress. This is not a farm-related blog, but hey. Get over it! I spent the weekend away and it was - interesting!

So my husband, daughter and I joined my bestie and her hubby for a weekend outing down by the Mackenzie River. We had rented mountain bikes and were supposed to be shuttled up to a point where we rode back, a total of 26 miles. I was totally up for this. Or I thought I was. Or I did until Friday when I tore my knee out AGAIN and had it tightly wrapped all day. But by Saturday, it was tolerable and I figured I could make do with it, so off we went.

This was advertised as appropriate for all experience levels. Indeed, when we got there and were checking in there was a mom and her son, who looked to be about 9-10, getting their bikes too. Admittedly, the mom looked like she was related to Mr Pilates himself but I figured if a 9 or 10 year old kid could do it, I could. What he had on me in youthful exuberance and fitness I figured I could outdo with good old fashioned experience and fortitude. Hah!

The first hint of maaayyybe this wasn't the best idea ever came when the proprietor told us we would NOT be dropped off at the top, but in the middle. That the top 13 miles was just for experienced mountain bikers. Which we clearly were not! Alright, so that's reasonable. Not offended, thanks. Not a comment on our lack of youthful exuberance or indeed youthful anything, since mom and kiddo were also being dropped off in the middle.

The second hint should have been the second I sat on this bike to try it out in the parking lot. Like a leopard print dress for your daughter's wedding, some things you should just recognize immediately as a poor fit. There was no way to make the size right - if I raised the seat enough my knees were not so flexed I felt like I was pedaling in a kindergarten chair, then I couldn't reach the ground easily enough to stop myself from falling when balance became dicey. If I could reach the ground, my knees were uber-scrunched while pedaling, which beyond the basic discomfort of the position was acutely painful to my already damaged knee. But hey, I am a good sport and too persistent for my own good, so I just went with the flow.

So we piled into the vehicles and headed out. We parked Bubba at the end point and then rode in the shuttle bus to the start point. The proprietor gave us some basic info about the bikes, about avoiding roots and rocks and not breaking anything, and that there was no cell reception and no driver available so if something did get broken or we were in trouble, we were sort of on our own. Just so we knew what we were getting into, he said. OK, this is like the third point at which we might have taken the hint from the gods of bad ideas, but noooooo.

SO mom and son take off down the trail and are history. Our party is a little slower and a lot more wobbly. We had gone, I swear to you, less than fifty feet when people stopped in front of me, and in trying to stop while simultaneously avoiding two rocks, a root, and a rut (the new 3 Rs), I just lost my balance. And of course, could not reach the ground with my foot to stave off total disaster. So over I went, and I mean almost literally OVER, since another fifty feet down the trail the left edge was a precipice. As it was, I tumbled downhill a short ways, bike on top of me, bike got tangled in branches and vines, and multiple sharp things were poking me. I was beached. Totally stuck.

My friend and hubby hoisted the bike off of me and helped me to my feet. I turned around to pick up the bike and my friend said "ohhhhhh noooo." Then I think she started laughing. I am not sure, but in HINDSIGHT (pun intended) I do think she laughed. My pants were ripped totally asunder. I mean, like down the middle in the back and clear around and down my right leg to below the knee. Grand. At this point, I was done, kaput, with riding on this trail. Seriously, this was NOT a trail for beginners, very rough, narrow, obstacle-riddled, with washouts and precipices. We are fifty feet down the trail and there are like 12 miles of this.

So we started walking the bikes. This is not like walking your Schwinn down the sidewalk in your cute little pedal-pushers with your sweater tied around your shoulders. This is trying to walk on 12 inches of sandy dirt while essentially half-carrying a mountain bike off to one side. The body mechanics of this are not comfortable. I did have a sweater tied, though - around my waist, to keep my Hind out of Sight to those coming up behind us on the trail.

So that was the thing. LOTS and LOTS of people came up behind us on the trail. It was a veritable Interstate of bikes. Every few minutes it seemed, someone would come up behind us, we would have to struggle off the trail holding our bikes out of the way, letting them pass, while asking how many more were behind them. My husband and daughter were faring OK and went on, my friends husband took a bad spill and decided to walk with us. So we trudged on and on and ON AND ON. All the while being passed by a succession of bikers who clearly knew what they were about.

And let me tell you, people, these were not middle-aged frumpy bikers like yours truly. No they were not. They were Greek Gods. One after another after another. Jaw-droppingly nicely put together males of the species. Impossibly fit, impossibly tan, impossibly gorgeous. I mean SERIOUSLY!!! GUYS!! Can't you just run over me so I can look at you a while longer while you perform first aid?? Please???

And it did not escape my notice, although I certainly hope it escaped theirs, that they were approaching us from behind, and mine was flapping in the breeze, partially concealed by my friends little white sweater.

Finally after nearly 3 miles, we crossed the river and came to the first side road by which we could connect to the main road. My friend and I had elected to do this, to ride down Highway 126 back to the truck, then we could come back and retrieve her husband, while John and Kate rode on. I had torn living heck out of my knee maneuvering the bike down the bridge steps after the river crossing, and wasn't exactly looking forward to pedaling, but here's the deal. When you are at point A and you have no cell service, are pathologically opposed to hitching rides in the best of circumstance and definitely not while partially unclothed, and you have to get to point B, then you better just man up and do it. SO we set off.

Did I mention that this bike was UNCOMFORTABLE???? I am a very persistent person, and do not tire easily, so while my friend got tired of pedaling I just HURT from pedaling. And the seat! My friend was commenting on how it was starting to go where it really ought not, and I said TRY DOING IT IN YOUR UNDERWEAR!!! Seriously. Hell has a new definition and it involves NINE FREAKING MILES on a mountain bike, in the rain, on a busy highway, with a bad knee you can't stop using, and a seat that keeps finding new and creative ways to invade your space.

I nearly kissed my truck when I got to it.

I am eternally grateful that guy did not deem us good candidates for the full meal deal and drop us off 13 miles further away, such that we were hauling bikes through the lava fields. You fall in that stuff and it is serious business! So, I learned that either I am just not a mountain biker, or I need a vastly different kind of bike, or to start on a much more reasonable trail. I did also learn that I am still capable of toughing it out when I have to. And then I got to go back to the cabin and watch LSU beat West Virginia, so the day was not a total loss.

And I have newfound respect for Lance Armstrong. But hey, it really WAS all about the bike. And the pants.

There's an App for That....

So I had an accident today. There was a fatality. It wasn't me (obviously) - it was my iPhone.
You gotta understand I sort of have a history in that department - I have dealt more death blows to small electronic devices than a normal person. (I also should not be trusted with office machines - especially fax machines, very bad karma with fax machines.) In the course of one month in medical school I dropped not one but THREE pagers into the toilet. Deader than doornails. My first iPhone, I sent through the washer. I tried all kinds of creative solutions - I packed it in rice, put it in a low oven, nothing. Dead. Then we had our one hot week that August, like 115 degrees one day, and I happened to leave my poor dead phone in the truck, where it was probably more like 150 degrees. When I got in my truck after office that day, voila! The iPhone sprang to life! Not having learned my lesson whatsoever, I managed to soak the stupid phone while watering the lawn and went through the whole thing all over again.

Today, however, my techno-destructive tendencies reached new and creative heights. I was just out enjoying the day on my tractor. I had the idea that I could use the front end loader as a receptacle for harvesting the filberts, and it was actually working nicely. Plus I just really enjoy taking the ole Kubota out for a spin around the firelanes. But maneuvering the tractor into and through the orchard is a tad tricky - not only are there low hanging branches and narrow lanes, but there are lots of blackberry vines. If one of those big gnarly ones catches on the front end loader it can thwap the poor hapless driver with nasty thorny force before it catches on the rollbar. So I was going slow and trying to gingerly grab hold of the larger vines and guide them up and over the rollbar behind me before they could thwap me.

One particularly large, purple, heavy branch caught me unawares, and I quickly twisted out of the way. In so doing, I apparently knocked my iPhone off the tractor. I know, I know - what was it doing on the tractor you idiot? Well, in my defense, I have it in a rubbery case precisely because it adheres to things, like the console of my truck, and it was staying put quite nicely up to that point. The trouble was, I didn't even miss it until some time later when I was cruising around the edge of our upper field which had been burned. I reached for the phone to take a photo and - no phone. Not in pocket, not on tractor. I remembered that big branch and figured it had to have fallen there somewhere.

So back to the orchard I went, turned off the tractor and hopped down to tromp through the underbrush. I was so thrilled when I saw it finally, and was feeling rather smug about how I didn't have to tell my husband I had dropped my iPhone and nearly lost it, when I actually picked it up. Pushed the button and - nothing. Lifeless. How can this be? The rubbery case has saved it from disaster in many a fall onto hard surfaces, and this was springy grassy undergrowth. Was my battery just dead?

Ohhh no, MUCH worse. It was BENT. MY iPHONE WAS BENT!!! I clearly drove over it with the tractor. Seriously, people, how can I drive over my own phone with a tractor??? It was very sad looking. So I made a rush trip into Salem to the AT&T store and found I was eligible for an upgrade and got a new one for 49 bucks. But the lovely pumpkin field photos I had not yet uploaded to my computer - gone. My new LSU Football App - gone. This is going to be a pain to restore.

But the upside of the evening was that the front end loader was indeed a very spiffy receptacle, and just in the span of 4 trees I half filled it with filberts, then drove down to the lower meadow and filled it up with apples, pears, and purple plums. And a few walnuts too. And this was a teeny tiny fraction of what there is to be harvested. The phrase "an embarrassment of riches" comes to mind. I think I need to borrow several teenagers, perhaps an entire high school class.

Anyone want to come pick fruit and nuts??

Flame on

Um, Houston, we have a problem.

Remember the nice little bonfire from the other night? The one that supposedly incinerated the dwelling place of the hornets in my stump? Welllll - not so much. The next morning, they were right there. They didn't even seem bothered by the apparent home invasion of the night before. It's like nothing happened.

How is this possible? I mean, it was the Fires of Hell in that stump! Flames 3 feet in the air, and so hot that even after the flames were extinguished I continued to stream water in there for a VERY long time and still sparks flew up and steam hissed. Like I said, Brimstone City.

So how is it that these stupid hornets return to the scene of the crime and fly right in and act as if nothing was torched? This morning, my husband asked me to come listen to something. I did not much like the sound of that request, and I was right. Out we go to the stump, which appears to be quiescent, and I reluctantly bent over and listened. You have no idea how much I did not want to do that. I could not see much good coming from it - either there was nothing there in which case why did I have to listen anyway, and I might fall in (it is a big hollow stump), or there IS something there in which case I most decidedly do not want to be leaning over the damn thing. But, what the heck. Everybody has to die of something, right?

My bravery did not go unrewarded (or unpunished, depending on your point of view). There was, emanating from the stump, a reeeaaallllly nasty low rumbling buzz. The buzz of a very large quantity of things, low in the ground. Coming. This. Way.

They did not actually appear (obviously, or I would not be writing this, I would be somewhere in Kansas by now still running) but the noise was most unattractive. The best I can figure, there is a large side channel down in there somewhere, like where a root went or something, and the flames simply did not go that way. So it was more like setting fire to the porch than bombing the compound. Marginally irritating, but survivable.

Options are being discussed. Option one: dump it full of dirt and plant something in it like I wanted to in the first place (my idea). Option two: fill it up with a mixture of diesel fuel and gasoline. My husband's idea. I asked him if he was going for the Olympic Torch motif. Besides the explosive risk, seems like a colossal waste of fuel to me - we could run the tractor for a month on the amount of diesel it would take to fill that stump! Mostly, however, I have no desire to see a crater where the garage used to be.

We are a little concerned there is another point of ingress/egress to the hornet colony. It would be more than a little disturbing to get all smug about having trapped/burned/pillaged the thing only to see a column of sociopathic hornets emerging from another spot on the grounds and heading our way bent on revenge.

What to do?! Too bad we no longer have Kate's snake collection in the garbage can, we could try putting them all down in there. Maybe a fire extinguisher? The foam could expand out in all directions and smother them. Plain old water? Drown them? CONCRETE! How about concrete? Ideas, people, I need ideas.

So, when I need ideas, I turn to that fount of all knowledge -- Google. It is very interesting what one comes up with when one Googles "how to get rid of hornets in the ground". Lots of people espouse some variant of the diesel/gasoline option. Smoke bombs. Soapy water. Plain water. Placing a glass vase upside down over the entrance hole (these people obviously have MUCH smaller hornets nests that I do! A bushel basket would not cover the hole in this stump!) Various poisons in spray or powder form. There are helpful suggestions like covering your flashlight with a red filter so you don't attract them. REALLY? Who tested hornets color night vision anyway?? There are horror stories, like a guy stepping off his tractor into a yellow jacket nest and being killed by thousands of stings. But far and away, here is my favorite suggestion:

Make them watch a Michigan game - they will be so bored they will kill themselves!

The things you can find on the internet.

Oh, Joy

Today you get a "twofer" - something funny and something heartfelt. First, the fun.

So, in the seemingly endless saga of pesky creatures, many of whom have a propensity towards buzzing and stinging, we have a new chapter. Let me just say, I am NOT the girl who kicked the hornet's nest. My husband on the other hand...

We have a hollow stump in the flower bed next to our garage. It is rather picturesque, and in the first couple weeks we lived here I contemplated planting flowers in it. So I went over and had a look, bent over the stump and peered in. It was surprisingly deep, and also - inhabited. There was a hornet's nest or something like it, of a pretty good size. But not a lot of bees or whatever they were, so I thought maybe they had moved on. Oh contraire, Pierre. It was just evening, and apparently they are restful in the evening. The rest of the time, they became increasingly active and irritable. I walked out a couple nights ago and was surrounded by 8-10 of them swirling around my head, following me. NOT GOOD. We have covered this before. Definitely. Not. Good.

So my husband put a screen over the top of the stump during their "quiet time" that night. Predictably, the next morning, yesterday, they were PISSED OFF. BIG TIME. So, in a burst of complete and total irrationality, my husband REMOVED THE SCREEN. This is supposed to make them happier? They will forgive all and we all live happily ever after? Noooooo.

So, not knowing about the screen removal, I was in the house showering and heard my husband outside in the back (the stump is in the front) getting the grill going. I stepped out of the shower a few minutes later and heard other, stranger, noises emanating from the backyard. It couldn't be. It was. THE SHOP VAC.

Now, you have to understand there is a story that is part of the lore of my husband's family, that I head many more times than once over the years. In this story, his father, my otherwise pretty sensible and level-headed father in law, decided to remedy the problem of hornets or bees in the attic by attempting to suck them all up in the vacuum cleaner. Suffice it to say, this was less than a resounding success. There was personal injury involved, and not to the persons of the bees.

So why, I ask, why in the name of all that is holy, would my husband - who is UBER-reasonable under normal circumstances - even consider trying anything similar? But, he did. He is out there waving the nozzle of the shop vac all around the BBQ grill sucking up hornets right and left and soundly annoying the ones he missed. I yell out the window, something calming, something on the order of, say, "WHAT IN THE BLOODY HELL DO YOU THINK YOU ARE DOING?" I can't honestly say this improved the situation, but he did stop sucking them up a few minutes later, with no apparent loss of personal well-being. I guess it was just a small contingent, not the whole population of the stump, which would have been terrible to behold.

A few minutes later he comes in the house and announces he has a new problem. There are lots of very much alive hornets inside the shop vac. He had been, apparently, counting on the vortex tearing their wings off and killing them. Nope. Wings still on. Coated heavily in the dust adherent to the filter, but very much alive. I think they escaped when he opened the vac and took out the filter. Don't even start me on how brilliant THAT plan was.

Anyway, some hours later, we had again achieved the quiet time of the nest and were trying to decided how to "take care of it." When I saw hubby heading that way with a little aerosol spray can of wasp and hornet spray, I put that plan down straight away. I could not see holding a spray can down inside the stump stirring up trouble. I was more in favor of, shall we say - "Shock and Awe." So a combination of diesel fuel and a little gasoline was poured into the stump and a match tossed in.

Nice bonfire. Very effective. Burned a good little while. And not a single hornet came out. SO now we are wondering if they overheard us talking and all removed to another location in the hours between the Shop Vac Incident and the Bombing of Berlin. I figure we will find out unexpectedly, at the worst possible time. Sigh. Stay tuned.

----

Now for the heartfelt.

So we reeeeeaaaalllly love living here. We do not own it, we have a lease purchase arrangement, and have just been hoping we could find a way to actually grow something we can make a little money with, to help us eventually buy this farm. There are a lot of blackberries, we thought about that. We have considered beef cattle on a small scale. We have an old filbert orchard, but we didn't think it was producing, and while I was hoping we could encourage those trees to do something I was afraid it was going to be a long, difficult, and expensive process.

This morning I took a walk to pick berries. The blackberry season won't last a lot longer, I want to enjoy them, and hopefully get some jams made. So I started up a path alongside the pastures, with berry vines along the other side of the path. Picking my way along the bushes, suddenly there were apples. LOTS of apples. It was an unexpected bonus, and just when I was marveling at the bounty of fruit on this place, I reached the orchard. And looking down as I set the berry bucket on the path, there were filberts. EVERYWHERE. I was so excited I could hardly stand it. The ground was littered and the trees laden. It was like a revelation, that maybe, just maybe, we can make this old place work. And as I stood there in the row of filbert trees counting my blessings, I looked down the row and there was a large doe, still as a statue and breathtakingly perfect.

When you find yourself weeping with joy in the middle of an overgrown filbert orchard at 8 in the morning, you know you have found your life. Now I just have to figure out how to keep it.

But I think it just may work. And I am sooooooo looking forward to it.
Thanks for reading.

Oh What a Tangled Web...

You may recall a previous posting where I made reference to an old, odd song called "She Don't Like Spiders and Snakes", which preceded my discourse on the serpentine population of our farm. Well, today you get the Arachnid Rant.

You may also recall that I have been quoted as saying it is possible to relate to a snake one on one, that in small numbers they are manageable and occasionally even kinda cool.

Let me hasten to assure you - I harbor no such sensibilities when it comes to spiders!! And this place is crawling with them. Literally. I am pretty sure I do not want to know what kind they all are, because (a) I may end up acquiring the knowledge that there are truly lethal spiders around here, whose bite will instantly paralyze all the muscles of respiration and I will fall gasping in a pitiful huddle in the middle of the driveway, clutching my throat as I fade to black, my last profound thought being #)#$&))@)#%& SPIDERS!!!, and (b) it doesn't matter anyway because I indiscriminately hate them all and am determined to eradicate them.

Any spider, of any size, is unwelcome in my home. Sorry guys, no offense intended, but EAT POISON AND DIE. You are creepy. You are unattractive. You give me hives. I do not want you.

This morning, I was out enjoying my morning ritual of watering the plants. This is the best thing since coffee for starting a day off right, it gets me in a nice little zen groove. I start with the veggie and herb garden outside the side door, spraying them with the mister to see their happy little leaves shimmer then soaking their roots. Then I turn that hose off and go around to the front and water the peonies, the rose bush, and the barrel garden. Ahhhhhh. Plants have the Power of Luv. So this morning, I had just finished watering the side garden and needed to run into the house to deposit the fresh-picked tomatoes so my hands would be free to water in the front. I was all mellow. I like mellow. I opened the side outer door and was about to open the screen door when I saw it. A VERY large, VERY black, probably hairy (because all the nasty ones in horror movies are hairy, so my mind sees hairy) spider had the unmitigated gall to attach itself to my side door, mucking it all up with a sticky web adhering the screen door to the door facing. It was messing with my mellow.

I will freely admit my response to spiders is immediate, loud, excessive, and violent. Be afraid, be very very afraid. I was wearing flip flops, which are bad because they leave you exposed but good because they are easy to whip off and have a lot of thwapping power. So I whipped and thwapped that spider into total oblivion.

When my blood pressure was approaching normal, I went on to the front watering. Here is where I got truly put out. There is some kind of spider that makes its web in the form of this hammock-like thing, and it does it on the grass, or shrubs, or anything low. There were probably FIFTY of the things, all over my little low stone wall, the yard, the lavender lining my sidewalk, you name it. Too numerous for flip-flop-thwacking, and eminently creepy. Like my yard was being taken over. NOT a good feeling.

I love an inspired plan early in the morning. Makes you just feel good about life. JET. That is the setting on my sprayer that caught my eye. Ahhhh. Jet. So I jetted those webs into the next county. Remember - immediate, excessive, violent. I probably took out large portions of grass at the same time, but hey, it's all good.

If I could just get the snakes to eat the spiders, we'd be in business.

-----

On an unrelated note, I have been contemplating how it is that one gets more people to read one's blog. Not to worry, I do primarily write this thing for the simple joy of putting words on paper (figuratively), but I will also admit to obsessing over the Stats. I love to see new hits, REALLY love it when there are comments. I want more Followers!! So I have been thinking - how can I get people to find this blog? Because if people even look at it once, it shows as a hit, which makes me smile, even if they read it and hate it and never look again. Which of COURSE won't happen.

So, it occurs to me that I should take a hint from the "trending now" column on Yahoo. If I can incorporate these items into my blog, I will have bazillions of hits. SOOOO - I have decided to rename all my farm animals. The llama is now Jim Belushi, the goats are Anna Nicole, Sarah Michelle Geller, and Carl Lewis. I need to figure out who I can name Baldness and Windows 8....

Stay Tuned!

Mighty Mouses

I remember some cartoon character from my childhood who had a running war on with some mice, and he used to rage "I hate those meeces - to pieces!" There seems to be a lot of Meece-hating coming on in these parts. Personally, I do occasionally contemplate getting a couple official barn cats - but it's all talk. I surprised a little mouse in my feed room the other day and felt badly for startling him so, if that gives you any idea how harmless I am about it all.

I was shaped early on, I suppose. When I was about 5, my mom opened the oven door a couple days after Thanksgiving to do something with her turkey roasting pan that had been left in there. There in the grease congealed in the pan were little tiny footprints, leading to the middle of the pan, where a little tiny mouse sat, clearly thinking himself in mouse heaven. My dad was in favor of gassing him, I think, but my mom is a TREMENDOUS sap about any living creature, and thought he was too cute to kill. I don't remember how it ever turned out - if the mouse was smart he took off out of there for safer environs - but that story was told so often throughout my childhood it must have affected my judgment towards our Rodentia brothers and sisters.

The farmers hereabout had no such upbringing, apparently. My daughter, the combine driver, came home and informed me that since combining season was over, she was being shifted into mousebeating. Or at least I thought that was what she said, which sounded decidedly unAmerican to me. What she actually said was mouse-baiting, which as it turns out isn't much better. It apparently involves walking the fields in search of mouse holes and stuffing bad things down in them designed to lead, I am afraid, to a frank reduction (not mere relocation) of the small rodent population.

I understand the realities of agriculture. I do. I promise. This is why I was not in favor of naming calves that were destined to be hamburgers and steaks in a few months. I mean, could you eat something you had bottle fed? And named CHUCK for pity sake?? That is sick. Funny, admittedly, but twisted. I understand that cattle are raised because I like my burgers, and that fuzzy little chicks become lovely rosemary chicken. I just don't want to be the instrument of death, thank you very much. I cheered at the movie Chicken Run.

And I likewise understand that mice eat tender little growing things, and when growing things is your livelihood, war against rodents is appropriate. But I am a closet anarchist. So I have a plan.

I am going to infiltrate the farm office in the dead of night, wearing my special night vision goggles and my black long-sleeved John Denver Homegrown Tomatoes T-shirt. Then I am going to find all these little devices for stuffing bad things into mouse holes, and I am going to, shall we say, modify them. With tasty treats, something that makes little mouse mouths water, whatever that is (some research is needed here). I figure, if they have something yummy in their tummy they will be less likely to go after crops, right? Maybe slip a little Benadryl in there too, so they eat and drop off into a nice long sleep. So everyone thinks their absence is attributable to having gone to the great mouse beyond.

I think this is a stellar plan. Way more practical than my original plan of broadcasting some sort of RUN FOR YOUR LIVES kind of message, since there is a bit of a language barrier.

What I really need to know is - will you visit me in jail!?

Holy Guano, Batman!!

So, there is more than a little poetic justice in our latest adventure on the farm. This will become clear, so bear with me dear readers.

On our property we have this really interesting structure of some historical significance, a nut-drying barn which was used by filbert farmers in the area back in the day, I assume before they started drying nuts however they currently dry nuts, about which I know absolutely nothing. Anyway, this barn is about 3 stories high, the bottom level being on the ground (go figure) and you can sort of drive under it, like garage bays sort of. There is this huge brick column from the ground up that was apparently where they made a fire or did whatever cool thing they did to create heat. Upstairs in the 2d story, there is a big room with a central core of closets with a door on each end. There are like 4 or 5 doors in a row on opposite sides of the core, in other words, and if you open one you can see through to the other door on each compartment. There were wire racks which fit into grooves or something, like shelves, and progressed through the drying closet, drying the nuts on the rack. This room has a very high ceiling, not sure why, but it is a really cool old barn. Just want you picturing its scenic loveliness.

I have been in this barn multiple times when I came out to see the property, to have my husband see it, after we moved here, etc. Pretty much the same experience every time - like a trip back in time, a little dark in there, like the shadows held secrets, but not in a creepy way at all.

THAT WAS THEN, THIS IS NOW.

So, my husband comes in a week or so ago and informs me there are bats in the barn. In general, this is not an earth-shaking pronouncement. I mean, we had decided to put up bat boxes on like the garage roof line or somewhere, to help control insects. And barns are sort of bat magnets anyway, right? So he asks me if I want to go see the bats, and I say sure. I mean, how creepy can it be, right? It's broad daylight, and bats sleep in the day, and all that.

So he brings this industrial strength flashlight and off we go. When we enter the big nut-drying room, something gets startled (OK, it was a BAT) and flies suddenly around in circles. This startles me, and I make a noise. OK, yes it did vaguely resemble a scream, I will admit it. This was the wrong response, because apparently if there is something bats are startled by in the middle of the day more than light it is screaming women. Even short, controlled, polite screams.

So suddenly there was one hell of a lot of activity in that nut-drying room, and as my husband played the flashlight beam upward across the rafters, I could see them. HOARDS of them. Like, a thousand maybe. OK, a hundred, but a hundred bats seems like a thousand in close quarters, let me tell you. And I could see their pointy little faces, and they have TEETH, and oversize ears, and despite being rather fascinating in a grotesque way they were undeniably creepy.

But in the midst of all this excitement, looking at the rows of bats hanging upside down from my barn rafters, with little high pitched noises (I can hear dog whistles, my husband has trouble with freight trains, so he was not as creeped out by this) by both the bats and yours truly, in the very midst of all of this, it occurs to me -- don't their ankles hurt? I mean if I had ears the size of Texas and a head as big as a third of the rest of my body, and I hung upside down all day, my ankles would be killing me. Do bats even HAVE ankles? I do not know this.

My second thought, less esoteric and more practical, was of Jim Carrey. Why anyone confronted with something a little horrifyingly creepy would think of Jim Carrey is an interesting psychological query, but specifically I thought of Ace Ventura, Pet Detective: When Nature Calls (no rash judgments on my taste in movies, please, I was dragged there by a friend) which had a subplot involving large quantities of guano. And I am imagining how my lovely old historical barn is going to look festooned with bat guano. And I am not liking it.

So if anyone out there has a good and reasonably humane way of convincing a large-ish number of bats to vacate the premises, please DO TELL. My screaming apparently isn't enough.

Oh - and that poetic justice? You're kidding. Bats in the belfry? ME???

Bee Line

I'm baaaack. Didja miss me?

Well, this has been the move from Hell, truly. And while we are far from done, I think it has finally upgraded to Purgatory. We can at least see the floors and walls in most places, and have made sufficient progress in the house that I can enjoy spending part of the time on outside projects, which are considerably more fun!

So we have these large fields, ours and neighboring ones, that are all surrounded by firelanes, cleared little "roadways" comprising the perimeters of all the fields. Good for getting equipment where it needs to go, and given the name I am assuming there is some anticipation that in case of fire they can get firetrucks up in there or something. Personally, I view them as riding trails and access to blackberries.

Blackberries are an invasive nuisance. If you have ever seen Little Shop of Horrors, think Audrey. They grow gargantuan amounts overnight in the dark and trap the unwary. Painfully. I would consider them a scourge worthy of complete eradication as a species but for one thing - I actually love blackberries. I love eating them. I love picking them. I love making fresh blackberry pancakes on a lovely morning after hiking out to pick them. I love washing them and dusting them with sugar and barely freezing them, so they are like little glazed berry-flavored crunchies. There is simply nothing bad about blackberries as a consumable. So I put up with the thorns.

And here is the other thing about walking out on a summer morning to pick blackberries - there are a lot of bees. Now those of you who have read my earlier blogs will understand I am not overly fond of bees. I especially do not like bees in large quantities. There is a story about that, which I will share eventually. But bees in small numbers are amazingly, well, harmonious. It's like we are on the same team. The whole Circle of Life thing - they are out there buzzing productively around pollinating flowers so that the flowers can make berries and I am out there picking berries and feeding them to not just myself but my animals, and the seeds make their way (use your imagination, people) back to the soil and make more blackberries, and that's how the world goes round.

So I make my way up the firelanes, along which are approximately 37.4 billion blackberries, and I just pick a few here and a few more there, and have the luxury of only taking the very fattest ones because there are so many I cannot possibly EVER pick them all. EVER. And the bees just zoom around and do their thing. And we have established detente. (Look it up)

For me this is like some sort of bee epiphany. Peaceful coexistence with BEES, who knew.

So here are my two best bee stories. The first is the stuff of horror movies, the second is the stuff of comedy.

Long ago and far away (literally, it was in South Louisiana) I was drifting in and out of consciousness on a rare morning of sleeping in. I had not been in this apartment long, and it was in fact the place I first learned about picking blackberries. At the time, the complex was sort of in the middle of farmland at the end of a road, with a dirt drive behind the property rimmed with blackberries. I had honestly never had them before, I don't know whether they just don't grow wild in Ohio or I was insufficiently exposed to nature to know about them. Anyway, it was a nice new apartment complex on the outskirts of Lafayette, Louisiana, where there are only two seasons - Hot and Hellishly Hot. This morning was just Hot, and the drone of the AC was pleasantly feeding my drowsiness. Somewhere between dead asleep and trying to get back to dead asleep, I became gradually aware that the drone of the AC was sort of buzzy. I pried one eye open and noticed a bee in the room, hovering around the air vent. (Bad things happen in air vents, if you don't believe me you have never seen a submarine movie or Mission Impossible). I figured even I could ignore one bee so long as he ignored me, so I drifted off again. When I next opened my eyes, because the bee seemed to be getting louder, there were two, then three bees. They were emanating from the air vent. I told you!!! Bad things!! Horror movie bad!!

At this point I jumped up, ran down the hall to the kitchen area to see if there was a door or window open or something. THere was not, and as I made my way back down the hall, past the second bedroom, I heard it. It was like a great vibratory angry BZZZZZZZZZZZZ. The bedroom door was shut. Hmmmmm - do I open it? ARE YOU FREAKING KIDDING ME???? I am one of those people who yells at the actors onscreen not to go in the basement. Yet - I opened the door. And there was - nothing there. Except the noise. Again, it seemed to be issuing forth from behind a closed door, in this case the closet. Again like a complete idiot I slid the door open. Again, nothing there. But the noise was horrendous. You have no idea what several thousand very very angry bees sound like when your head is in a closet and they are on the other side of the wall. Yup, IN THE WALL.

I got my stethoscope (I must have been on drugs that day, seriously) and put it to the wall and it was deafening. As with many circumstances in medicine, there can be a huge gulf between diagnosing the problem and knowing what in the sam hill you intend to do about it. I called the
apartment manager, I figured it was most decidedly more in her job description than mine, and later that day The Bee Man arrived, worked his magic, and they all left in a big swarm out some defect in the apartment wall that YES INDEEDY I made sure they patched immediately. I heard that noise for a looooooong time. I was terrified of waking up to find a whole hive's worth of bees streaming out of the air vent over my bed.

So, some years later, when I was a newlywed with a husband raised in the country and with certain odd proclivities with respect to creatures of one kind and another (NOOOO not like that), and who has more than a little tendency to play tricks on people, mostly me, I was understandably a bit alarmed and suspicious when he proceeds to tell me one lovely Saturday morning that there are certain white-faced bumblebees who do not have stingers. And that he used to catch them, tie a string around their midsections, and then fly them around in little circles on their "leash." Yeah, right. PROVE IT.

SO he did. We went out in our little side yard, this was during our time on the 17 acre farm, and found himself a white-faced bumblebee, and proceeded to smack it down. Literally, smacked it right out of the sky, in mid-buzz. And then proceeded to tie a piece of sewing thread around its middle and wait for it to come to. When it regained consciousness, or what passes for it among bees, it tried to fly off, only to find itself tethered. Round and round it flew, tied to his finger. I got a very clear picture why his mom called it quits after having him and his twin brother.

So somewhere between the horrific buzzing horde in the closet wall, and the poor ridiculous white faced bumblebee on a string, I have made peace with the bees in my world. As long as they don't organize and come after me, then all bets are off.

Hay Ewe

Did you miss me? I have been too immersed in moving to write coherently, or at all actually! I have decided that possessions are an awful lot like mushrooms in their capacity to multiply in the dark. I have also decided that once you reach the age of 50 you should never have to move again, unless said move constitutes multiple individuals invading your home and in the space of half a day it is nothing but boxes. Then the next day or so other multiple strangers show up and load said boxes on a big truck and away they go. That was my last move - painless. This move - not so painless. Lots of pain, here.

Part of the problem is a lack of boxes, and my inherently cheap nature precluding just going out and buying some, and my rotten schedule precluding haunting the backsides of every WalMart and grocery store for 20 miles scoring freebies. So we have like 5 boxes, and we just keep filling the same five boxes with an ever-increasing amount of stuff, driving to the farm and unpacking them. Rinse and Repeat. OK, so it is really more than five, but you get the idea. If I had a ton of boxes I could just be really ORGANIZED, and pack everything up and mark the boxes as to which room they go in and be done. I could, say, go off to work tomorrow and it would all magically get transported in my absence. ALMOST painless, but for the packing.

But alas, pain is the name of the game.

Each of us has had the area of the house that was our personal nightmare, the one we have been afraid would never get done. My husband's was the garage. Mine is the TV room closet. These are areas where bad things lurk and in your absence they pull things out of closets, empty boxes so that you have a little electric pump box but no little electric pump, and games and their pieces parting company all over the room. If you have children, you are familiar with this scenario. Problem is, I can't blame my children as they are all of the age of reason and mostly living a few thousand miles away.

So this morning, to be nice (i.e., to stay married another 33 years) while my husband was unpacking things at the farm I DID THE GARAGE. All by my little lonesome. Sorted all that intimidating collection of crap peculiar to garages, packed boxes, threw out enough stuff to feel virtuous, and even loaded it all up in the back of Bubba. That was enough to wear me out for the rest of the day. So here it is 11:30PM and all I have accomplished today was that garage and my bedroom. I wanted to be DONE by the end of the weekend, and I still have my bathroom, that dreaded TV room closet (it's a big closet), and I have not packed a single thing from the kitchen. I think I may burst into a fit of outright weeping. The kind that really messes up your face.

But I have been through this before, and I know that it is always darkest before the dawn (whatever the hell THAT really means I have never been able to figure out) and that we WILL in fact cease occupancy of this house by Sunday July 31, that I WILL in fact have a garage sale on July 30, and that I will probably really really hate this coming weekend. For one thing, I have to leave my husband in charge of a garage sale because I am on call.

On a brighter note (and let's face it, we both know you are ready for a brighter note because you are tired of the whining), I learned an interesting thing about hay today. So my go-to-guy Bill (the one who let me down by not owning a tranquilizer gun, remember him?) usually hays his lower pasture and puts it up in nice normal rectangular bales which get stacked to the rafters in his barn. When I passed by there yesterday taking my daughter to her first day as a combine driver (THE coolest job for a teenager!) I noticed this assortment of large marshmallows in Bill's pasture. Now before you decide that I am as dumb as a rock, YES I know they are not really giant marshmallows, but they certainly look like it. I know it is hay. But I also knew this was not Bill's usual way of baling, so I stopped in and asked about it today. Turns out this particular method involves cutting the field wet and wrapping it up in the plastic and letting it sit like that and FERMENT.

Ferment? As in, a biochemical process that results in the production of carbon dioxide, water, and ETHANOL? Now THAT'S what I'm talkin' about! I want some of THAT hay! Supposedly, this hay is too "hot" for horses. I am in the dark as to (a) exactly what that means, or (b)who the lucky animals are that get to hang out in the pasture stoned out of their minds. I just think my bitchy mare could use a dose.

Same friend, Mr. Bill, is also my sheep source. He knows EVERYTHING about sheep. I, on the other hand, knew absolutely nothing about sheep until my daughter Kate started showing them last year. I have had the easy road - Bill hooked us up with a couple sheep, Kate handled them a bit, took them to fair, and won a few dollars. Fun and easy. We did not have to know much, did not have to shear the sheep, it just showed up at fair looking trim and tidy. But apparently there is a bit more to it than that (I do sense this as a recurring theme of late), things like feet problems that require marching the recalcitrant little boogers through a chlorine bath. Things like not eating goat food because there is some sort of metal in it. Things like - MATING.

So, the down-low is that one or more of Bill's rams got out and had a little party the other night, chasing the poor ewes around to the point of exhaustion then pushing them to their feet to chase them some more. If men did this the species would be extinct, because women simply would not put up with those shenanigans. But sheep, as we have noted before in this blog, are stupid. In this case, however, the upshot is pregnant ewes. This is a good thing. Now there will be babies in December.

So, we are going to purchase a few ewes, who are hopefully preggers. In theory, I want to do this. I am just the teeniest bit afraid of that recurring theme, and hoping I don't find myself in December wondering what idiot thought it was a good idea to raise sheep.

As a last note before I drop dead of exhaustion, remember the snakes? You are gonna love this. My dear Kate, who is an otherwise rational and loving child, is out to kill her momma. She has started catching the damn snakes. Bad enough, right? Remember about bad enough not being bad enough? She is COLLECTING them. In a trash can. Which is kept right by the garage door. You do not even want to know what it looks like, gazing into the dark brown depths of that can and seeing all these little reptilian heads rise on stalks and peer up at you, no you do not.

If that can gets knocked over, as in by ME, in the dark one night, there will be death and destruction in Evans Valley. If I survive the shock and ensuing heart attack, my daughter may not make it to her upcoming 18th birthday.

SNAKES ON A PLAIN. The new thriller, coming soon to a theater near you.

DIRECTIONS

Is it just me, or does anyone else find it inconvenient that the most recent blog appears first, so that if a first-time reader logs on they have to scroll all the way down or they are reading the story out of sequence??

MORAL: READ FROM THE BOTTOM FIRST DEAR READERS. Okay, not literally the bottom, but read the bottom story first, and work up. I think you know what I meant.

Thank you, thank you very much. (I was trying to sound like Elvis, but the Elvis Accent button on my keyboard wasn't working. Seriously, shouldn't there be an App for that???)

Where is St. Patrick When You Need Him?

Okay, I love my farm. But it is starting to develop a serious flaw in my view. We are talking about snakes, here. LOTS of snakes.

Back in the day there was this crazy singer who had a song about his girl that went "She don't like spiders and snakes..." and those lyrics could have been about me. I am arachnophobic in a HUGE way. I am Andrew Jackson and spiders are the Indians - the only good one is a dead one. No exceptions. It did not even help that I loved Charlotte's Web as a story, I still found Charlotte more than a little creepy. And all those little babies of hers gave me the positive heebie-jeebies.

Snakes, however, are something of a mixed bag with me. When I was a kid, I carried my share of garter snakes around in my pocket. I had pet snakes. I even wanted a python at one point. With snakes, it is all about context and numbers. For example, on the morning of my oldest son's first birthday party, my husband and I went canoeing with friends. This was in north Louisiana, on a lovely shaded small river that twisted and turned its way under the trees festooned with vines. Suddenly, the girls in the canoe in front of ours were STANDING (in a canoe, this is just not done), waving their arms and screaming like banshees. I was wondering what in the name of heaven was their problem when I had a most disquieting realization. THOSE WERE NOT VINES. They were many many snakes, and at least one had dropped into the canoe in front of us. My poor son almost did not have either a party or a mama, because heart failure was right around the corner had my husband not gotten our canoe turned around STAT.

So, little snake in my pocket -good. Big snake in my pocket - bad. Little snake in the grass - good. Big snake on my porch - bad. MANY little snakes in the grass - approaching not very good at all. Anything that can be described as my daughter did this evening as a NEST of snakes - very very not good. It is one thing to have an individual snake on your hands, you can relate to even a snake one on one. Some of them are even kind of cute, in a slithery way. You can admire their considerable muscular tone, all of that. But there is something about large numbers of snakes that just crosses the line. Did you see the Indiana Jones movies? Somewhere in there he seemed to always have to face snakes, and once it was massive numbers of them in a confined area, and I thought I might have to leave the theater.

So now, we have snakes on the farm. The first time Kate said "Oh, I found a snake today" I was minimally curious, unconcerned. When this progressed to "Wow, I saw FOUR SNAKES today!" my level of interest was beginning to rise, my skin feeling just a little creepy crawly. This evening, she points out to me the space from my side door to the garage - not over 15 feet - in which she found 4 snakes,and describes the "snake family" she encountered, and relates the delightful news that there is "nest" of them over on the other side of the garage.

Did I mention that we are eating outside and I am in flip-flops??? The urge to shriek was rearing its ugly head, I was beginning to get that tickly feeling between my tummy and throat that has something to do with nausea and bad things happening, and an escape plan should a snake nest encounter suddenly take place became a matter of the highest priority.

So, OK, all you country dwellers out there, questions abound: (1) What kind of snakes do we have in the Willamette Valley, what do they eat, and who do they like to bite? (2) Is there an environmentally friendly (i.e., something short of incinerating my entire property with flamethrowers) method of, shall we say, discouraging the snakes from taking up residence here? Some method that involves neither physical contact on my part nor calling animal control in Marion County? Those people already know who I am.

How did St. Patty do it anyway? Maybe I need Harry Potter to come do his snake-whispering magic and tell them all to go away. Ideas, people, I need ideas. I do not want to be driven to desperate measures. If you see flames or hear shrieking from the direction of Evans Valley, I wasn't even in the neighborhood when it happened....

My Name is Mud

Wellll, sort of wailing and mildly cursing. But at least it is done.

Today was horse-moving day. I was thinking - okay, half an hour to Aumsville to pick up the trailer, twenty minutes back to pasture to get first two horses, 15 minutes to the farm, back to the pasture and return to farm another half hour, then return trailer one more half hour. Add in loading and unloading time, and I figured this would be about a 2 1/2 hour operation. I was only off by, say, THREE HOURS.

And I had a PLAN too. See, having a plan is very important. Ask my husband. He is the Planning King. He even plans to have a plan. I don't find this a bad philosophy in general. In fact, it was drilled into our heads in residency that the "6 P's" rule: Prior Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance. Several weeks ago, I somewhat impulsively bought 5 fruit trees because there was a sale. They were ten bucks each, decent young trees, but the driving force was my desire to stake a claim to the farm and my future. I had always dreamed of an orchard, so I was planting one. Timing, as they say, is everything, and mine was less than impeccable. I didn't have a spare minute yet alone 2-3 hours that week to actually plant the trees, so they sat in shallow feed tubs with a lot of water and a little dirt, until it became a tiny bit critical that we plant them or give them up for dead. My friends hadn't yet moved, but they were fine with us coming out and planting trees. SO I just decided that we would do that, this particular weekend, because I happened to have my strong young son visiting. But we had no PLAN. We just showed up with trees and determination to discover a quite overgrown garden, no dirt, just grass. So first we had to mow and weedeat, and then try to dig 5 LARGE holes, through grass, and lots of rocks....are you seeing this? It wasn't fun. We did eventually get the trees planted, but it would have been better with a plan. So lately I have taken a bit of ribbing about being planless.

So, to vindicate myself, as well as to make my life easier in the execution phase, I planned the hell out of this horse moving adventure. I went out to the farm this morning and developed what I considered an absolutely inspired plan. Instead of fighting with my quirky, hole-y, narrow driveway and a steep side drive up to the pasture where I always have to switch into 4WD to get up the incline, I thought I'd utilize my neighbor's fire lane. I had discovered it while searching for Harry. It started off the lower portion of our common driveway, and took off along the edge of his wheat field into the woods and ended up on the firelane surrounding the cabbage patch. And I had seen the neighbor or his designee coming down my driveway after retrieving the bee boxes, so out of a combination of "good for the goose good for the gander" and an assumption of neighborly cooperation, I figured he wouldn't mind my doing it with my horse trailer. So I drove it this morning, in Bubba, and it was CAKE. I thought, man, I am a genius. Pull the trailer up the firelane, turn in by my pasture, unload the horses, go DOWN my steep little side drive, down the driveway and out. CAKE.

I honestly think it would have worked brilliantly.  I mean, the bee man's truck was MUCH bigger than Bubba, and he pulled a steel trailer. I have Bubba, and an aluminum horse trailer. There were overlooked  or unanticipated factors in my calculations however. Like, over 2,000 pounds of horseflesh. And the fact that it rained today. ALL DAY. And the soil on the firelane was rather clay-like. And the result of this was mud as slick as glass. On a hill. With over ten thousand pounds of gross vehicular weight and another two of horses. Are you getting a bad feeling about all this?

I retrieved the horse trailer without incident, and was enormously pleased with myself for backing it from a gravel road at an acute angle into the driveway to my friends' barn. We loaded the first two horses, which after a lot of calculation we decided would be Mac (who hates being alone and hates trailers) and Mercedes. Barney, who doesn't mind anything and assumes he deserves no special treatment, would trailer alone in the second trip. So all is going remarkably smoothly when we pull into my driveway. We veer off to the left onto the firelane and start up the hill. The transition from all is well to @#$&*#*@& was rapid and nauseating. Just all of a sudden, there was no grip of tires on ground. It would have been bad enough to just lose forward momentum. But bad enough was apparently not bad enough, so instead we starting sliding backwards. Downhill. With a horse trailer and horses. With absolutely no directional control or brake power. I did not enjoy this.

We ended up sliding off the firelane and into my neighbor's wheat. It was a sick feeling. After moving forward, backward, and sideways and accomplishing exactly nothing except totalling about 100 SF of wheat, we did the only logical thing. We took the horses out. Mac was just a tiny tad bit FREAKED OUT. But they trudged through the wheat to the firelane, and my daughter Kate and the daughter of the friend who loaned the trailer took them back down to our driveway then up our driveway to the house and then the pasture. I called my husband repeatedly until I got him, and he walked back down with them to try to free the trailer.

In the meantime, I had managed through repetitive back and forth, rather skillfully done I thought, to get the trailer straightened out and lined up with the firelane. But still in the wheat. Then it simply would not go forward any more. It was the Viet Nam Draft Resistance of vehicular immobility - Hell No I Won't Go. I was sooo careful too, using my trailering mode, using 4WD Low, very light on the gas, all that. Nada. Bupkus.

John gets there, climbs in, and just pulls forward. I hate men. But eventually he too ran into trouble, and so the girls and I climbed into the bed of the truck to put more weight over the wheels. And John managed to get the trailer backed down the firelane. That's when the bees struck.

Apparently, The Bee Man had a few escapees. And they all, and there were a lot, took up residence in the blackberry bushes and trees along my driveway near the juncture with this firelane. I think they were more than a little pissed off about losing their hive. Maybe they thought we were the new queen. At any rate, they came after us big time. Kate looked like some sort of tropical exotic dancer bent over, feet wide apart and hands on knees, shaking her head in circles with her hair flying around and around, because she had a bee stuck in her hair. I thought she looked like a lunatic. Until I got the bee out of her hair and it flew straight into mine. Then I was the one shrieking and dancing and acting the fool. That one damn bee had it in for us, and every time we got it out of our hair it flew right back at us. Eventually we outran the bees, unstuck the trailer, and took off to get Barney. He was transported without incident, and we stopped at the bottom of the driveway to unload and walk him up. Now THAT'S a plan.

So this whole operation took over 5 1/2 hours. We are indebted to the young woman who gave up her afternoon and her trailer to help us, and I am hopeful she did not report the entire afternoon as time spent among dangerous and irresponsible people. And the bottom line is that there are now three horses in a pasture not far from my back door, which they share with a llama and the occasional deer, and I can gaze upon them to my heart's delight.

I am sure it will be less than five years until I stop having nightmares about sliding backwards down the hill of mud with a trailer full of horses. I am sure there were some lessons learned there today. But for now, I am just going to bed!