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.

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....