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!