Poultry Pandemonium

Sooooo - here's the thing about raising fowl of various sorts. They grow.

I know this seems obvious to the uninitiated, but seriously - they GROW. I remember when my own babies were small thinking there were weeks or even days when they seemed to change in front of me, but not like this. This is like, blink and gain five pounds. I thought only I could do that.

The champions in this race to adult birdhood are the ducks. I mean holy cannoli. You get these adorable little balls of fuzz that cheep and cuddle and next thing you know they are a foot tall and their voices are changing. Literally they are expanding as you watch. I do love me some ducks, and we have gotten them many an Easter during the course of raising my kids. Always before, we had to raise them up and then go find a home for them - a friend who lived in the country, or more recently taking them to the LSU lakes. Now? Voila! Home pond advantage.

So in my fondness for ducks in particular, and my newfound enthusiasm for raising fowl in general, I MAY have gone just the TINIEST bit overboard in the procurement of ducklings. We started with two. They were precious, grey with pale yellow chests and multicolored feet, and in an attack of Trekkiness we named them Sulu and James Tiberius Kirk (or JT). About ten days later, we were in the farm store and they had more ducklings, different varieties than we had already gotten. They had the quintessential Easter ducks, yellow puffballs that are white when they get feathers. We decided to get two more, but the yellow ones were already spoken for so we got two really cute ones that were brown with dark facial markings. These four are now enormous. Absolutely enormous. And of course, then, well.....they were just so CUTE. When we went back to get feed there were more yellow ones. So we decided to get two more, only that only left one and I didn't want him to be alone, so we brought home all three. So now we have seven ducks. I am insane.

In a desire to get the ducks into their natural habitat (and out of my garage) as soon as possible, my daughter and I built them a spiffy duckie play yard next to the pond. In a feat of determination and questionable engineering prowess, we even "fenced in" part of the water so they could get in there and swim but still be contained. I was just not up for wading hip deep into the pond to chase them down when it was time to go back in the garage! They loved it. But we cannot leave them outside until they can fly out of harm's way, so they are part of the ridiculously expanded bird operations in my garage.

The "big boys" (Sulu, JT, Scotty and Spock) were kinda mean to the little yellow babies (either Uhura, Data and Jean Luc or Larry, Curly and Mo - we hadn't decided) so we had to separate them. Unfortunately, we were out of containers. This is of course pre-ordained, in accordance with the rules of farming that require that every initial expenditure engenders at least 6 additional expenditures that you didn't think of. So we bought a "chick enclosure" - basically, a set of plasticized panels and little rings to put them together with, which you then set up in a ring to contain up to 15 baby chicks. As I am discovering, 15 baby chicks and 4 rapidly-approaching-adulthood ducks are not comparable quantities of fowl mass.

The ducks are as tall as the enclosure. It is pretty ludicrous, really, to view them as contained at all when they are looking over the top of the thing at you. But here's the thing about large-ish ducks - they are strong. And those adorable webbed feet? They will FIGHT YOU with them. Like, to the death. Not in any sort of mean-spirited way, you understand, they are just not the brightest of birds and they will FREAK OUT.

So today, lovely morning, gotta feed and water the birds because Kate is farm-sitting elsewhere and John is not at home. No problem, takes like 5 minutes to rinse out all the waterers and fill them and dump some food in their feeders and put 2 scoops of bunny food in the bunny feeder and give everyone a little conversation. Hah. I open the garage door and there are 4 maniacal ducks running around, having used brute force to simply pop apart their enclosure in search of greener pastures. Or more water. Or whatever. Duckie masses yearning to breathe free.

So just try and picture this, if you will. If you know me, it will be even funnier. I am not a lithe, graceful, picture of athletic elegance. So here I am, dashing around the garage trying to change direction as quickly as my tiny horde of freaked out ducks in an effort to herd them through a small triangular opening in their enclosure. They, on the other hand, are moving as one, like those schools of fish you see that all magically change direction at the same time, waving their stubby little wings, necks extended, and "quacking" for all they are worth. I had to stop myself from expostulating loudly, something on the order of Steven Tyler's favorite expletive concerning the copulatory habits of waterfowl. I finally herded them into a corner and made a grab for the smaller ones. This is where I discovered about the feet. They are sharp, they wave around a lot, and they are like little jackhammers. Really nasty, poop encrusted jackhammers. So much for my clean shirt.

When I finally contained them, I was a mess. Had to go and change before going in to work, making me late, and then on the way I was too distracted to look at my dash and ran out of gas. Good thing I love ducks.

THAR BE CHICKENS!!!!

Well, whaddya know. When I named this blog, I had it in mind to build a chicken house and have chickens. There has been a whole lotta blogging since then and no chickens. Today that finally changed!!!

I am one of those people who can usually use a little, shall we say, incentive. I sometimes need a little something to force me into finishing (or even starting) some project or other. I would probably have spent the next year planning my chickenhouse and not building it, but now I am forcing my own hand. Unless I want 8 chickens in the living room, I gotta build the thing.

I really didn't want to wait until next year, and it was getting a little far along in the chick season apparently - our local Wilco went through 1800 chicks in 2 weeks - and it was starting to look like spring, and all that. And I made the mistake of letting my daughter take me to not just one but two farm stores in one afternoon. Soooooo - we have taken the plunge!

I actually did do a little reading about chickens in my Basic Country Skills book. If I had been in possession of Chickens for Dummies I would have read that. But at least I knew there are laying breeds, and meat breeds, and dual-purpose breeds, and what some of all of those are. I knew a pullet from a cockerel (I know you are DYING to know, so pullets are girl chicks and cockerels are boy chicks. While we're at it, let me just inform you that hens are woman chickens, cocks are men chickens, and capons are eunuchs. As if it weren't bad enough just being a chicken. I digress.)

I had a fairly sizeable enclosed dog kennel I could set up in the garage, and I figured this would do for the time being. So armed with my newfound knowledge and a preference for laying breeds off we went to Coastal Farm and Supply. What you need to understand about me is this. My heart does not race at the thought of a trip to Tiffany's or Sak's. But give me an afternoon in Coastal, or a good hardware store, and I am one happy camper. I mean, what can you DO with diamonds anyway, except pass yourself off as a poor imitation of Elizabeth Taylor? But there are so many things you can DO with stuff from the farm store. Plant things, grow things, build things, feed things, ride things, ahhhhhhh. And in the spring, there are babies. Chicks, and ducks, and bunnies, and turkeys, and some ugly strange birds of various kinds I am not too sure about.

So having gotten this far, we were then faced with the quantity question. Basic Country Skills told me to overbuy by 25% to allow for deaths and culling. Coastal told me that the female rate is about 70% (I plan to EAT any males that crop up. I detest roosters. There is a story there.) BCS also told me to anticipate 2 eggs per 3 chickens every day, or that each hen should lay 2 eggs every 3 days. All this is beginning to be A LOT OF MATH. So I just picked a nice round number and went with 8. I will probably get more. But I felt like 8 was good to start. Then there was the matter of STUFF. What my book told me was protein concentrations, not what kind of feed. Not anything about grit. GRIT? Not the kind they serve in the south, apparently. Electrolytes for the water? What kind of feeders? Yikes! So after a nice long chat with the chicken guy, we got a feeder, a waterer, a heat lamp, some chick food, some grit, and bedding.

Then we went to Wilco. My other fave. There, we were lucky enough to snag the last 2 ducklings at either store, bought MORE feed (ducks can die from chick feed), another feeder and waterer, and some electrolytes for the water.

Ducks are a big tradition in our family, starting when my oldest daughter (now 30) was 3 and we got Puddles. Puddles bought the farm in like 3 days, and ML cried herself sick, so we went back and got Puddles 2. P2 grew to adulthood and went to live at a friend's pond. In subsequent years there was a succession of Puddleses, then one year we got 2 and had to come up with another name. So it was Puddles xx and Aflac. Today I just could not bring myself to enter the 21st iteration of Puddles, so we named the ducks Sulu and James Tiberius Kirk, or JT. I know, I know. Just deal, they're my damn ducks.

Naming the chicks took a bit more thought. I mean, there are EIGHT of them, so just remembering them all could be a challenge (never mind telling them apart). So it seemed logical to name them something related to make it easier. The only thing that came to mind in the appropriate numbers were the von Trapp children. SO we now have Liesl, Friedrik, Louisa, Kurt, Brigitta, Marta and Gretl. And Maria. Yes, I know, we are very strange.

My other purchase at Coastal was a whole book on chickens, so I have some bedtime reading. And I think we will take a photo of each chicken and write their name on it and put it on the kennel for reference purposes. We have, in no particular order, a white chick of unknown type (which may turn out to be a white turkey that got in the wrong bin - we just thought it was pretty), 2 barred Plymouth Rock, 2 Rhode Island Reds (my fave), a black Australorp, a black sex linked, and a Buff Orpington, which wins the cool name award.

We are pretty excited. And now I absolutely have to go out there and build a chicken house!

O Death, Where Is Thy Sting?

Ha. Lovely, poetic, somewhat hypothetical question. To which I have a pungent, painful and not in the least hypothetical answer. In my thumb. Death is stinging me in my thumb, my thumb is dying, I am not kidding you.

So after a lovely sunny day yesterday, in which I even managed a quick trip to Al's Garden Center, an experience of orgasmic proportions on a sunny day, today the clouds were back. Yesterday I was in shirtsleeves, today it is hailing and snowing again. And raining. All in the span of a few minutes. Again. So as you might imagine, with the whole snow and hail thing, it is a bit cooler. Again. So I decided it would be lovely to make a fire in the woodstove, if I could get it to stop being cantankerous and draw worth a damn.

Enter my friend Rod, woodstove zen master. He even has the same exact stove as mine. He dropped by, to see if he could help figure out the new airflow problem. He brought an axe. Now there are not a lot of men I would be comfortable showing up at my house with an axe, but Rod is one of them. So not only did he educate me on the finer points of my stove, he tightened a screw on the door handle (while pointing out it was mounted upside down), and then went out to my woodshed with me and split wood. I am not kidding. I didn't know men even still did this, it was awesome. Life is good when a nice man with an axe shows up at your house and splits wood.

Armed (literally, our arms were full) with logs and split kindling, we went in to tame the beast. I thought I was a pretty decent firestarter, but Rod elevated it to an art form. It was great. And now that I know about the thermometer on the top of my stove, and how hot it is supposed to be, I realize my fires were just little baby fires, practice fires, not really house heating fires. Flame on.

So the fire was blazing, the stove was functioning, I had my instructions on when and how to add wood, and Rod went home. I went about my business of the evening with an occasional eye on the fire. When it looked like the middle had fallen in like it was supposed to, I opened the door to add wood. I reached down and grabbed a nice chunk from my cool brass woodholder thing, and instantly was in searing agony. Amazing agony. Agony that takes your mind to another plane, where half of your brain is screaming obscenities and the other half is cooly marveling at how something can actually feel that exquisitely bad. Right in the little thin web of skin at the base of my right thumb, it was total Armageddon. In other words, a yellow jacket.

My devoted readers may recall the entries from last summer about the yellow jackets and our efforts - largely unsuccessful - to eradicate them. I am quite sure this was a sole survivor of some little group of yellow jacket cronies who has been lying in wait for months for the opportunity to extract revenge. In my WOODSHED? In the WINTER? While it is HAILING? Are you FREAKING KIDDING ME?!?!?!?!!? Don't these damn things ever die, or at least hibernate?

It is actually quite stressful to hurt that bad. You want to peel your skin off or jump out a window or plunge your hand into a tub of ice (which for me is usually as appealing as the other two). I have only hurt that bad one other time, when I suffered a severe burn on my same hand from steam coming out of a kettle. I remember plunging my hand into ice, screaming because that hurt so bad (I have Reynaud's) so pulling it out, then the burn hurting so bad I plunged it back in, doing all this while rolling on the floor clearly entering another plane of consciousness. And no, I am NOT a wimp. Can you say 11 pound babies and no epidural??? But this is sudden, exquisite pain that takes your breath quite literally away.

I sought chocolate. I know there are those of you out there who will understand. Chocolate is a perfectly appropriate stress response. I am a doctor, I should know. Trust me. So I alternated running my hand under REALLY cold water, cursing, and eating chocolate dipped wafer cookies until I could breathe fairly normally and think rationally.

Now I think I will go get a pair of forceps, pick up the yellowjacket who is still faintly writhing on my living room floor after my stomping on him and thwapping him with my slipper, and throw his detestable self into the fire, a burnt offering to the gods of pain.

And in case you wondered, I typed this mostly one-handed, thanks for asking. Because writing is the next best thing after chocolate as a stress response. Besides, of course, Margaritas, which I do not have the wherewithal to make. But if anyone feels like bringing their blender over, I won't stop you.

DAMN it hurts!!!

It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas

Yeah. So, all that stuff I wrote a mere 2 days ago about SPRING? Yeah, well, not so much. Shoulda known! So both yesterday and today, I have had in the span of several 5-10 minute intervals, these crazy cycles of rain-snow-hail-sunshine. I am not kidding, in like 5 minutes time.

This is charming in its way, but it makes it really difficult to get anything done. I look outside, it is raining, so I scratch off the list getting my outdoor work done. Three seconds later - just as I am starting to gear up for, say, sewing - I glance outside and the sun is out. Fantastic! Run out, pull on the boots, and head to the pasture to feed the animals (oh dear Lord, more on that in a few). By the time I get halfway across the pasture, it is snowing. Big fat flakes that melt on my head and drench me in wet loveliness. And cold. So I finish the bare essential and get back to the house where I proceed to start a fire and a cuppa (hot tea) and then voila! It is bright sunshine streaming in the window making my office uninhabitably hot, never mind the fire in the woodstove just around the corner. So I throw open the window for some air, whereupon it promptly starts to hail. In the sunshine. This seems to be a peculiarly Oregon phenomenon and still just cracks me up.

So this confounding cycle has continued pretty much the whole weekend, and as a result I have given up on most of my projects because I got tired of vacillating between them, and just tended to paperwork in my office and started a new Patricia Cornwell novel, which seemed as productive as anything else I could do while watching our full-on panoply of precipitation options playing outside the windows.

So today, after church, Kate and I decided to check out the higher elevation of Silver Falls after a friend posted there was snow up there. I am a sucker for snow, sorry guys. Don't even mind shoveling it, but I never have to. It just doesn't accumulate like that here. And I don't exactly have sidewalks anyway! So we took off driving, and about 500 feet higher than us it was snowing consistently, and there was a little accumulation on the roads and fields, and it was lovely. At our house it was raining. We drove for about 45 minutes, by the time we got back to town it was bright sunshine - in fact it was bright sunshine to the west as soon as we got around the Falls, and it was breathtaking. To the east, snow, and to the west, blue sky with streets of cumulus clouds, and long strands of low misty cloud hugging the hollows between the ridges we were driving along. I love that about Oregon. It makes you almost want to cry it is so lovely. But I commented "Gee, I wish it could snow at our elevation for a change."

Well, guess what. I am sitting here looking out my office window at the rapidly accumulating whiteness on my garage roof and truck while big fat flakes are flying around everywhere.

(And, I might add, it smells wonderfully yeasty in here since Kate made rolls to take to youth group) Then it stopped as suddenly as it started, and we got a lovely sunset. You just never know what you'll get around here.

So now, about those animals. It is a good thing I am a basic pacifist, non-hunter, animal loving sort. Or they would all be shot at sunrise this morning and that would be the end of that. You may recall that in my last posting I mentioned moving them, and their feed, down to the run in shed and how Mac attacked the feed bins, so I had to move them. SILLY ME, I actually thought I had secured them. Never, never underestimate the maniacal cleverness of a big male-ish horse and three goats of any gender, and normal peace-loving llamas who are operating under the influence of bad animals. I got out there this morning, in the snow, and there were trash cans, buckets, and soggy blobs of feed everywhere. Everywhere. I was NOT PLEASED. In all honesty I wasn't surprised either, but still. So I took the empty trash cans and buckets into the run-in shed (after smacking Mac in the head with a lid for good measure)(it's plastic and lightweight people, don't go calling the ASPCA) and then the goats all got in there and so did Mac. I chased him out without too much trouble, but the goats were comically resistant. I had to resort to throwing things at them to make them move, because they just kept wanting to hide under the workbench and were not interested in being enticed. Finally one of them headed for the gate so the others followed and then I shut the gate and locked them all out. No food, no shelter, how do you like them apples. I do not feel the slightest bit guilty. They are animals, this is not a harsh climate, they can eat grass and lump it. I am DONE.

And for good measure, in my struggle to get all this done I sank up to my knees in the damn mud, I am not kidding, it was like quicksand. I had to half climb the posts of the run-in shed to pull my foot out and my boot came off - and it is knee high! SERIOUSLY???

Sigh. I shall go drink my Calming tea and watch the Oscars. Merry Christmas.

Rockin' Robins

Yes, boys and girls, it is that time of year. Almost. Maybe. I mean, this is after all Oregon. And this is, after all, still February. So although it has been a weird weather year and a rather warm winter, it is probably just a tiny tad bit premature to say Spring has Sprung. But there are some dead giveaways that it is trying hard to get here. There is a large-ish new batch (some overwinter) batch of robins having at it in the turned earth of my pasture. Yummmmm - manure and worms. It is alarmingly apparent that I am actually going to have to cut my grass soon or risk losing small children in the yard. I can hear bullfrogs in the pond trying out their mating calls. There are daffodils all up and budding in various spots on the farm, mostly where they are about to be choked out of existence by rapidly expanding blackberry vines.

But perhaps the surest sign of impending spring is that my driveway is a river. I am not exaggerating, it is a river. Not a rivulet, not a wet spot here and there, a freaking downhill cascade of water seeking it's level or whatever it is that water runs downhill seeking. More on this in a bit.

The other sure sign of changing seasons is that there is, suddenly, WORK to be done. LOTS of work. I am about to run out of "dormant" time for my "dormant spraying" - and 6 months ago I had never even HEARD of dormant spraying. It is exactly what it sounds like - spraying (in this case fruit trees) before the little buggers spring to life and have new leaves all over the place. As a passingly busy (OK, exceedingly madly busy) employed person, there are not a lot of opportunities to get out there in daylight and spray trees, despite my actual desire and willingness to do so. The last day that my time off and sunshine and minimal wind all coincided was last weekend, and I had the best of intentions. I also had a Mardi Gras party. But that was Saturday night, and I had this long list of outdoor chores I planned to do on Sunday. However, while washing the dishes from the party there was a rather catastrophic failure of my large glass beverage urn to stay upright, and it threw itself into the sink in a suicidal rage, sending large shards of glass into the space occupied just moments before by the urn. That would be the space I grabbed in a vain attempt to abort the suicide by smashing. The result was that I slashed my hands up pretty good and there went all hope of trimming and spraying trees, hauling wood, burning burn piles, or anything else requiring pressure on my hands. SO what the heck, we drove up into the hills and played in the snow.

So today is Thursday. I am off on Thursdays. In an astonishing stroke of good fortune, the sun actually has shone all day. And my hands were better enough I could tolerate both wearing work gloves and washing the dirt off after. So it was a work day. But like so many other days off, in the balancing act between hours of light and personal energy on one side, and my to-do list on the other, the to-do list won. But I gave it a good go.First up: moving animals into one pasture.

We have three pastures gated between, and we have had all the gates open so the horses, llamas, goats and ewe could roam freely eating up all the grass and blackberry vines. That was in the summer and fall. Then winter came, the grass was pretty much used up or dried up, and so they started congregating in the end of one pasture nearest to the feed shed. So, it rains here. A lot. Rain produces mud. A lot. And I am not talking about little puddles in the dirt kind of mud, I am talking world class boot-sucking mud, pounded and pulverized and stirred up to a depth of about 12 inches by the hooves, cloven and otherwise, which populate my pasture. So it seemed that now there is grass coming up, it was time to give it a fighting chance of covering the pasture again. So first I put the feed bins (40 gallon trash cans with lids) in the front-end loader and toted them to the middle pasture where the run-in shed is. This of course attracted the attention of the animals, who all tagged along, which was my plan. Then I could close off pasture #1. Of course, there was so much of that boot-sucking mud at the entrance to the run-in shed I could not get in there, especially with 300 pounds of feed-filled trash cans. So I arranged them in back of the shed and put fencing around them to keep the animals out of them.

Then I found a new toy, half-buried in the dirt/grass/mud next to the run-in shed - one of those implements made of pipes with metal mesh between them that you drag over the ground to smooth it out or something. I am sure these things have a name, but per usual I am ignorant of it. I do have a photo though, so maybe one of you can educate me. But I hooked it up to the back of the tractor and pulled it out, and then decided it was just the ticket for spreading all the accumulated and assorted piles of manure all around the pasture to fertilize the new grass. So I spent an hour dragging pasture #1 and felt inordinately pleased with myself for my cleverness. So I closed off pasture #3 and dragged it too.

Then I heard a ruckus in the vicinity of the run-in shed and found Mac, the $(#(*@^$(*! thoroughbred gelding that is part goat, with his damn long neck atop his damn long legs reaching over the fencing barricade like it was nothing and repetitively smashing the top of the feed bins, and had made a big hole in one of them. The result was not quite what he hoped for. For one thing, he couldn't topple them over so he didn't actually get any feed out of the deal, and for another he was suddenly confronted by a cursing crazywoman on a tractor threatening to kill him, and half meaning it. So now the feed was exposed, it is going to rain again tomorrow and for the next 3 days, and it would all be ruined. And feed ain't cheap. So I had to go find a large flat object (found some big plastic thing that looked like the old roof of a playhouse) and put over the feed bins, which I moved into the sheltering arms (read obstruction) of a nearby tree. Time for lunch.

The afternoon agenda was primarily devoted to spraying the fruit trees. I had chemicals, spraying oil, and a large backpack sprayer all of which were discovered in the garage. I thought I was all set. This is inevitably faulty logic, as one is NEVER "all set" for anything to do with farms or animals. The backpack sprayer smelled like herbicide, didn't seem like a good thing to spray on fruit trees, so I had to wash it out, then when I tried to spray plain water as a test it didn't work. Once again, this was operator error and ignorance, but I had to pack it into the truck and take it down to the farm store where someone smarter than me could explain what I was doing wrong. Then come back home and start over. So then when I opened the concentrated spray stuff, it was dried out. I was NOT going back into town, so I just put water in it, shook it up, and made the best of it. Mixed it all up and went down to the lower orchard and sprayed. Memo to self - it is always a good idea to know which way the wind is blowing, and not just metaphorically or politically.

So then on my way back up the driveway it occurred to me I could fix the river that we drive on every day with a little engineering and PVC pipe. See, this is the trouble with farms. One thing tends to lead to another, and pretty soon you are up to your armpits in mud and trouble trying to do something that wasn't even on your to-do list to start with. And my lovely plan to dig little diagonal trenches across the driveway at intervals and put PVC in them with holes drilled in it, to drain the water that flows along the one side of the driveway from close to the house down to mid-lower orchard, where it cuts across the driveway and magically dissipates in the grass, was a no go. The driveway is by turns gravelly mud or something as hard as diamond that my hoe bounced off of. As I stood there contemplating my sins and the driveway, it came to me: The water cuts across the driveway because the driveway curves. The water just wants to go downhill. In a line. What if I dug it a nice straight line along one side of the driveway, lined with some of the mega-billions of rocks we have around here, and then at the point where the driveway turns, just dig a creekbed, let the water go through it, and build a picturesque little bridge over it. Voila! If you think this paragraph, and this blog entry, are long and rambling - THAT IS THE POINT. This is the crazy stuff that people do when (a) they live in the country, (b)they have limited time to do things outside that need doing, and then (c) they are handed a stunningly beautiful day. They (I) get a little nutty and overly ambitious and flit from one great thing to the next until all their body parts hurt and they get a sudden dose of common sense and stop.

But before I did that, I got the scythe and the machete and whacked my way through those blackberry vines, because I remember how lovely those daffodils looked last year when I visited the farm in the spring.

So now the day is petering out, there will be a nice sunset tonight and I may just watch it with a glass of wine in hand. There are still lots of things to do (didn't get to the burn pile today) but I have sequestered the herd, dragged many acres of pasture, and can watch with satisfaction while the grass grows and the robins dive for worms, knowing my fruit trees were sprayed in the nick of time.

Ahhh Spring.

Farewell, Gabe

Well, I know it is inevitable when you have animals. But it is the part I hate. That part when somebody dies.

Gabe was our old man llama. He was gray and grizzled, and a little weary-looking. I don't think he had a lot of oomph anymore for holding his own in a herd, so he would sort of hang back and let all the craziness subside at feeding time. But he was a gentleman.

Last Friday Gabe didn't show up at feeding time. Neither did the goats. When John went to investigate, he found Gabe dead on the ground near the run-in shed. And the goats were all huddled in a corner of the run-in, and would not come out no matter what he did. They would not go past Gabe.

On a personal level, this was just a not so grand ending to a not so grand week. On the larger level, there were practicalities to be dealt with. Like, what does one DO with a dead llama in ones pasture?? DO you know how BIG those things are?? Even a rather emaciated elderly llama is definitely bigger than a breadbox. On top of that, it has rained pretty much non-stop the last week (see prior posting about the flooding inside and out) and the ground was like a freaking sponge. Not ideal conditions for digging a biggish hole. Add to that the fact that when the pastures are axle-deep to a Ferris Wheel in mud, it is not an auspicious time to take one's rather petite tractor into the fray.

So what, you might ask, did your intrepid farm girl do? She left town, post haste. To be fair, I was already scheduled to leave town for a girls' weekend with my daughter at the coast. Being a tad bit stressed out and ready to bug outta town, I felt more that a little guilty about leaving Gabe in situ, so to speak. But that's where he still is.

Because it WILL NOT STOP RAINING. I mean, really truly what DO you do with a large deceased animal??? Cremation? (Yeah, like ANYTHING would burn in this weather). I am open to all ideas and suggestions.

And practicalities aside, I will miss his old gray self in the mornings. He was such a gentle presence. And the goats need to stop freaking out and come out of the shed. I never knew goats were so superstitious or psychotic!

So send your suggestions. And here is a photo of good old Gabe with his mates. Requiescat in pacem.

Water, Water Everywhere and Not a Drop... Oh WHATEVER!

Ah, the joys of rural living. Fresh air, sunshine, peace and quiet. Well, one out of three ain't bad I suppose. That being the fresh air. This is, after all, OREGON IN WINTER. So while those at higher elevations or more northerly latitudes are enjoying the snowfall, we are DROWNING in the Willamette Valley, people. Literally.

So a couple days ago, my husband and I took a drive up toward Silver Falls in the evening to see the snowfall. He and Kate had driven that way two hours earlier and had to turn back because it wasn't plowed and pretty deep. I thought surely it was plowed by then. So up we went. ABout 500 feet higher than where I live there is a magic line where the white starts. It is that clear cut a demarcation. It had been precipitating for a couple days, reports of winter storms abounding in the Pacific NW, and that anticipatory excitement of maybe getting snowed in for a day was making itself felt all around. But by then, it was pouring rain at our elevation.

We reached the usual snowline, and while it was still raining and my car said 38 degrees, there was over a foot deep slush on the road, and only our side was plowed. So far so good. About 500 more feet of elevation changed things a lot. It was now over a foot of snow on the road, and neither side was plowed. And it was dark. And my trusty little all-wheel-drive Subaru was starting to struggle a little. A little further on and it became clear we had to turn around, which was easier said than done. Thankfully we WERE in the Subaru and not Bubba, so we could just turn around in the middle of the road, which was still tricky given the propensity to go some other direction than the one you intended in all the mooshy snow.

So that was night before last. What a difference 24 hours makes. Like about 15 degrees warmer and monsoon season. It was like the 40 days and 40 nights around here, and I was beginning to wish I had an Ark. Naturally it was my day on call. Naturally I got called. Naturally it was the middle of the night, blowing 40 MPH, and pouring rain like all bloody hell. To make it that much more delicious, the phone service was behaving as if I lived in a third world country. The patient I was called about had a distinct problem, I was trying to consult by phone with a specialist in Portland, and got disconnected no less than four times. On both my cell and land lines. So finally I headed into the hospital, only to get to the bottom of my driveway and encounter the LAKE that used to be the lovely little gravel road on which I live. It had been accumulating there when I got home a few hours earlier, but was by then distinctly worse. Like, I had no driveway. Just a drive into a lake, with a dropoff into a culvert lurking in there somewhere on either side. So I backed up, turned around (thank you AWD for getting me through the mud in a circle) and went back for Bubba. More ground clearance seemed like a profoundly good idea.

The water was up to my wheelwells. I got through, but nervously due to some horrific reports earlier in the evening of cars being sucked into culverts and disappearing. I decided to stay the night at the hospital and tackle the return trip in the daylight. I was reeeaaaallllly looking forward to a relaxing day off. Well, forget that. As I was on my way home, Kate called. You know you really do not want to have a conversation that begins "I just thought I ought to let you know this before you got home", or "We have a bit of a situation here", and you know damn well you don't want a conversation that begins with both. Sigh.

The situation was water in the basement. A lot of water. Alllll over the basement. Not good. We had carpet in the basement. And furniture. And a sewing and crafts area with fabrics, paper, paints, all sort of stuff. And a furnace, water heater, and washer and dryer. With electricity. ELECTRICITY. And WATER. Are you getting this??

When I got home and went down there, there was a lot of noise. Not a good noise. A noise like a small waterfall. It WAS a small waterfall, coming right through the wall of my basement and splashing on the floor, or onto the lake that used to be the floor. About 7 discrete leaks on one wall and one on the adjacent wall of the corner behind my utility sink and water heater. Where I could not get a bucket in. Time to think creatively. So off I ran to the hospital, where they graciously produced an under-butt drape with a pouch and a drain hose, which I planned to affix to the wall and catch the water. Great plan. Didn't work worth anything.

Next plan, hydraulic cement. I followed the instructions to the letter, and this was advertised to "set under water in five minutes" and to work on "active water leaks." Well, apparently not THIS active. Well before the five minutes were up the plug fell apart in my hands and the water began streaming out from under it. Damn.

Enter the world's best next-door neighbors. You CANNOT SURVIVE in the country without neighbors. Preferably neighbors who know a great deal more than you do about almost everything, are full of applied skills, and willing to employ them on your behalf. In this case, it was two trucks, three guys, shovels and picks, and in the blink of an eye a trench around my house draining an impressive quantity of water away from the house and into the driveway.

While we are not yet dry here, the waterfall is no longer shooting out from the wall at a 90 degree angle, and is approaching a dribble as we speak. Yes, we will have a rather nasty cleanup, and it IS supposed to rain for the next week. So there may be some more joy and rapture in our immediate future.

But I am not ready to abandon ship. I have a sump pump, borrowed from one of my partners (which is a whole nuther story as they say - how is it that men just inherently know how to drag out a gas powered thing that has sat fallow for 20 years, take things off and put things on, checking spark plugs for sparking and carburetors and chokes and all those things and magically making it start? Thankfully he was willing to do this on his lunch hour), I have a large tub of hydraulic cement which might work a lot better when it isn't fighting Little Niagara, and I am armed with the attitude that this is life on the farm. Sometimes crap is coming your way. Get a shovel.

Of Men and Mushrooms

I remember being a kid who was, always and perpetually, horse-obsessed. When I was about 4, I began pestering my parents for a horse, for a farm, for living in the country. My dad used to tell me "I'll get a horse for my grandchildren." I think I understand now that they would really love to have given me that, but it was not within their reach. I know this because I am now the parent who didn't manage to give her kids that experience until they weren't kids any more.

When I was in residency training, I promised my youngest daughter - the only one still living at home by then - that if I just got through it we would live in the country, wherever we ended up, and she could have whatever animals she wanted (within reason - I did have to put the hammer down on an elephant). I PROMISED her. And did not deliver until she had graduated high school.

But here we are, on a farm, with animals. So my other kids all came for their holiday visit and saw the farm for the first time. I was really curious how they would respond to it, whether they would love it or hate it or not care two figs about any of it. And like a kid with a new toy, I could not wait to show it to them. I insisted my husband was not allowed to take my son who arrived first on a tour of the property, he had to wait and let me take him. This is the son who has never (unlike his brother or younger sister) been horse crazy or expressed a desire to get back to nature. The son who has traveled Europe, seen great cities, worked in research in Germany and graduated with a degree in engineering. I did NOT expect him to be particularly impressed. Hah. After years of academic drudgery he had started wanting to get more connected to things, the earth, whatever, and to do real work with his hands. Hey, I am ALL for this, I have a lot of real work that needs doing, so I was down with that plan.

Four days later his siblings arrived, my oldest daughter, son-in-law, and youngest son. A couple days later the engineer's best friend arrived. We suddenly had a very full house. It was insane. And I loved it. Not the mud, exponentially increased quantities of trash and recyclables, or reduced frig space from all the exotic beers, but the pandemonium of MY KIDS filling my house and my farm.

Each in their turn got the walk through the pastures, shown how to feed the various animals, shown the orchard, and then up to the upper field to tromp around and see the view. And each in their turn found their response to the farm. My oldest daughter took her camera and found lots to photograph (which she does rather brilliantly much of the time). My engineer and his friend - who studied mycology in college and was a horticulture major - became obsessed with finding and identifying all the mushroom species on the place. I had NOOOO idea how many fungi I had around here. My kitchen table looked like a science lab - multiple plates and trays with carefully laid out mushrooms with overturned glass bowls on top of them to try and capture the spores and help in their ID. I got them a book on mushroom species of the Northwest. And prayed an awful lot that they were neither eating nor smoking any of them.

My youngest, the one who is dying to live "off the grid" and who has always been obsessed with anything having a motor and a key, couldn't wait to learn to drive the tractor. Then he very helpfully jumped right in and despite the rain cleared out the stumps, old bits of this and that, and debris behind the woodshed so I could put a chicken house there. My older son (the engineer/mushroom hunter) had been giving me no little amount of grief for driving my diesel-burning, pollution-belching farm implement to do things like move hay, which he (being considerably more buff than I) could just do manually. So it cracked me up no end to look out as my other son finished up his clearing project to see the two of them taking off up the firelanes headed for the upper field - on the evil machine. When they could have walked. Boys are such - BOYS.

Gradually they left for home, leaving my engineer here for another week. Two days before he left, I came home one night and found him up near the garden in the fading light. I called out to him to ask what he was doing. "Digging." Digging what pray tell, in the near dark? "A hole." Well, that was highly illuminating, but whatever. The next night I came home to find out he had come into the house requesting an extension cord and Christmas lights. Apparently he plopped an entire string of lights in a big wad down on the ground to provide light so that he could keep digging, knowing he left the next day and wanting to finish. Finish WHAT??? Just digging.

So the morning of his last day here, I went out in the daylight to see what it was. He was inordinately proud of it. It was a good 2 feet deep, square, a good 6 feet on a side. A gigantic - hole. With an island in the middle, about 2 feet square. And all that excavated dirt had been piled up on 2 sides and crowned with beer bottles. It was rather elegant. And hysterical. So this is what happens when a large strong male with energy to burn is turned loose with a shovel and no restrictions. When my husband asked me why I thought he had dug the hole, I said "Because he didn't get to do it when he was ten."

I love having this place. I hate that I didn't get to have it for my kids when they were growing up. Except that they are still growing up, and hopefully one day their kids will play here, but in the meantime THEY are getting to PLAY. Some of their play is work - my son did rake up a lot of debris from the filbert orchard and planted 14 blueberry bushes - and a lot of the work seems like play to them. This might not last, but then again - I am considerably more "grown up" than any of them and I still delight in the work of my hands (and back, and knees, and all those other things that hurt) around this farm.

This, my dears, is living.