Boondox
Elite Member
- Joined
- Apr 6, 2000
- Messages
- 3,871
- Location
- Craftsbury Common, Vermont
- Tractor
- Deere 4044R cab, Kubota KX-121-3S
I should prefix this missive by stating categorically that we’re still married, the Wife and me. But it’s been tough, and we’re down to only four bottles of champagne.
My latest tribulations began with the onset of mud season. Wife, while not a neat freak, prefers her arable land outside. With five large dogs, three cats, and a grubby hubby, this is not always possible. There are times, mud season being high on the list, when some of our acreage is bound to find its way inside the house. This year, mud season was gratifyingly short lived. Luce Hill is officially thawed, and major portions have dried to the point where it is possible to traverse without leaving one’s footwear behind.
Then came the annual Blowing of the Poop. I tried something different this year, the Soaking of the Poop, thinking that thawed poop would readily dissolve when attacked with a garden hose. The problem was that the garden hose didn’t thaw till mid-afternoon, and by that time – having been given a double whammy of sunshine and barely above freezing temperatures – the poop in the yard had entered a remarkably resilient state of freeze-driedness. And it turns out desiccated poop does not dissolve.
Then there was the fox who developed a taste for Wife’s chickens. We lost three birds one sunny morning: two prime laying hens which were left in the field to rot, and one of her prize little bantam roosters. Later that afternoon I spotted a fox and fired off a round from the shotgun just as the predator was lit up by six thousand volts from the electric fencing. Maximum range and all I had was #8 shot, but the rascal got stung and I hoped he’d seek safer prey.
About half an hour later I was in my shop, tinkering and generally minding my own business, when my bride – an avowed pacifist and gentle soul – came charging out of the house with her shotgun, cramming round after round of 00 buckshot into the magazine. That, in itself, was an accomplishment, as in practice she had never demonstrated enough thumb strength to load the magazine. But there she was, Bride of Rambo, transferring cartridges from her mouth to her shotgun like she’d been doing it all her life!
In our home, I have arranged the shotgun shells for my lovely pacifist bride such that she doesn’t have to remember what each size shot is for. When standing next to the ammunition supply, the box closest to you is #8 shot, conveniently labeled “Annoys Squirrels.” The next box is #6 shot, labeled “Kills Squirrels and Annoys Rabbits.” Then there is a box of #4 shot, labeled “Kills Rabbits and Annoys Coyotes.” Then there is a box of 00 buckshot labeled “Kills Anything and Knocks Wife on ****.” Beyond that are boxes of my 6.5x55mm that go with that lovely rifle that lets me hit half dollars at a quarter of a mile. But Tamara doesn’t like the rifle since it requires careful aim. She prefers the shotgun with light shot.
But it was double-ought she was loading. Magnum rounds. Big suckers! And she was waving the barrel of that 12ga shotgun in the general direction of two antique trucks, a tractor, our Subaru and my plain but utterly reliable Dodge pickup. I thought for sure everything I owned was going to be full of holes! But then she dropped to one knee, took careful aim, and fired in the direction of the chicken coop. Two things happened then. A large red fox thirty yards away was hit in the chest and fell mortally wounded. And my pacifist bride was knocked on her ****. But her hens had been threatened, so she rose and in her best Linda Hamilton Terminator 2 imitation chambered another round, fired, another, fired, another…till the magazine was emptied! The fox, well, we salvaged a beautiful tail.
Aside from my pacifist bride’s clearly developed maternal instincts, the other incredible thing about that attack was the behavior of our surviving rooster. He had called the alarm and ushered all the hens inside the coop to safety…but remained outside with all his plumage fluffed up clearly intending to take on the fox! Eggs aside, I don’t think much of the hens and find chickens some of the stupidest creatures on the planet, but I have to admire that rooster doing his best George Bush “Bring ‘em on!” imitation in the face of certain death!
Work has been hell recently. Challenging, fun, rewarding, stimulating, but the pace has been truly brutal for the past several weeks. By Tuesday afternoon I’m ready for Friday. Tired. And so you’ll understand why, when I crawl home at the end of the day, the animals’ food and water is replenished, but from me the chickens and sheep get little more than a cursory nose (or beak) count. This past week, however, it was impossible not to notice that our fenced enclosure was full of udders with sheep attached to them. Big, honkin’ udders. Harbingers of impending lambs. And ewes so wide they barely fit through the doorway into the shelter we made for them last month. Thirty gallon wooly trash cans with legs!
So on Friday, home from work, I picked up the Wife’s “How to Raise Sheep” book and read the part about the birth of lambs. Thumbed through it. Saw that aside from body type (biped vs quadriped), it was remarkably similar to human childbirth. Heck, I’ve delivered five kids during my time in the service. Sheep wouldn’t be a problem.
Slept late this morning. Didn’t get up till 6:30. Went outside to bounce the dogs. Wife staggered outside to feed her sheep. Fudge Baa, the roundest of the ewes, had expelled the mucus plug from her cervical opening. “Wow,” I thought, “what exquisite timing! No late night marathons by flashlight. No delivering lambs in a driving rainstorm by Braille. What a nice little ewe to time it for my day off!”
My bride took one look and uttered, “There’s slime coming out of her butt!” I checked again, then attempted to point out that it was a mucoid discharge, not ordinary slime, and she had the wrong hole. She glared at me then, one of those truly venomous Wife looks that make grown men afraid.
I’ve seen what she can do with a shotgun!
We spent the next several hours with me observing nature run its course while feeling quite comfortable that all was well…and my pacifist wife chafing to intervene every two minutes since Mother Nature obviously was suffering from cranio-rectal inversion! Poor Tamara lathered her hands in obstetric slime so early it dried on her and had to be peeled off like banana skins. I’m watching the ewe’s breathing between contractions thinking how like Lamaze it seemed, as if they were programmed to push only when there was a possibility of something productive happening.
Two front hooves came out. Then a nose. Then most of a muzzle and a pink tongue. I stuck a sanitized finger up Fudge’s nether regions, ran it around the little head inside, checked how much give there remained in the birth canal. Plenty of lubrication in there. All was well. No need for an episiotomy or any other form of intervention. Nature was doing fine. My bride expressed confidence in my medical abilities. “Do you remember that nasty steel castrator in the livestock catalog?” hissed my Pacifist Bride. “I’m going to get one and use it on you if anything goes wrong!”
No pressure there!
Her hands freshly re-slimed, my bride bulled her way into the lambing pen and pulled the birth canal over the lamb’s forehead, then retreated. Just then the ewe gave a mighty push, then another. The slippery little lamb slid right out and into my waiting hands! Wife flashed a victory sign. I felt her action was just lucky timing – positive reinforcement of an accidental contingency.
There followed a mad scramble to shear wool away from Fudge’s udder, as the little lamb couldn’t find a nipple. So as mother and baby bonded, Wife and I hacked away. We needed to get that colostrum into the lamb, so finally resorted to milking her into my latte mug, then poured it carefully into a Diet Coke bottle, slapped a nipple on top, and bottle fed that critical fluid. Then we left them alone so mom could clean baby. Half an hour later we realized we had no idea what the lamb’s gender was, so we went back to look. The conversation went something like this:
W: “I think it’s a boy, but it’s dark down here.”
H: “Hold him up to the light.”
W: “That’s better! I think it’s a boy. Or maybe it’s a girl.”
H: “Well, look for a little wang in front of the sack. “
W: “I don’t see one. Must be a girl.”
H: “Okay. Look at the other end. Are there two holes or only one?”
W: “What am I looking for?”
H: “A ******.”
W: “What does it look like?”
H: “Jeez, babe! Surely you’d know better than me!”
W: “Don’t push it! It’s not too late to order that castrator!”
H: “No pressure! No pressure at all!”
Anyway, after careful examination under halogen lights, it’s a boy! We think. He has huge ears, so we’ve named him Weasley!
And now we’re down to three bottles of champagne…
My latest tribulations began with the onset of mud season. Wife, while not a neat freak, prefers her arable land outside. With five large dogs, three cats, and a grubby hubby, this is not always possible. There are times, mud season being high on the list, when some of our acreage is bound to find its way inside the house. This year, mud season was gratifyingly short lived. Luce Hill is officially thawed, and major portions have dried to the point where it is possible to traverse without leaving one’s footwear behind.
Then came the annual Blowing of the Poop. I tried something different this year, the Soaking of the Poop, thinking that thawed poop would readily dissolve when attacked with a garden hose. The problem was that the garden hose didn’t thaw till mid-afternoon, and by that time – having been given a double whammy of sunshine and barely above freezing temperatures – the poop in the yard had entered a remarkably resilient state of freeze-driedness. And it turns out desiccated poop does not dissolve.
Then there was the fox who developed a taste for Wife’s chickens. We lost three birds one sunny morning: two prime laying hens which were left in the field to rot, and one of her prize little bantam roosters. Later that afternoon I spotted a fox and fired off a round from the shotgun just as the predator was lit up by six thousand volts from the electric fencing. Maximum range and all I had was #8 shot, but the rascal got stung and I hoped he’d seek safer prey.
About half an hour later I was in my shop, tinkering and generally minding my own business, when my bride – an avowed pacifist and gentle soul – came charging out of the house with her shotgun, cramming round after round of 00 buckshot into the magazine. That, in itself, was an accomplishment, as in practice she had never demonstrated enough thumb strength to load the magazine. But there she was, Bride of Rambo, transferring cartridges from her mouth to her shotgun like she’d been doing it all her life!
In our home, I have arranged the shotgun shells for my lovely pacifist bride such that she doesn’t have to remember what each size shot is for. When standing next to the ammunition supply, the box closest to you is #8 shot, conveniently labeled “Annoys Squirrels.” The next box is #6 shot, labeled “Kills Squirrels and Annoys Rabbits.” Then there is a box of #4 shot, labeled “Kills Rabbits and Annoys Coyotes.” Then there is a box of 00 buckshot labeled “Kills Anything and Knocks Wife on ****.” Beyond that are boxes of my 6.5x55mm that go with that lovely rifle that lets me hit half dollars at a quarter of a mile. But Tamara doesn’t like the rifle since it requires careful aim. She prefers the shotgun with light shot.
But it was double-ought she was loading. Magnum rounds. Big suckers! And she was waving the barrel of that 12ga shotgun in the general direction of two antique trucks, a tractor, our Subaru and my plain but utterly reliable Dodge pickup. I thought for sure everything I owned was going to be full of holes! But then she dropped to one knee, took careful aim, and fired in the direction of the chicken coop. Two things happened then. A large red fox thirty yards away was hit in the chest and fell mortally wounded. And my pacifist bride was knocked on her ****. But her hens had been threatened, so she rose and in her best Linda Hamilton Terminator 2 imitation chambered another round, fired, another, fired, another…till the magazine was emptied! The fox, well, we salvaged a beautiful tail.
Aside from my pacifist bride’s clearly developed maternal instincts, the other incredible thing about that attack was the behavior of our surviving rooster. He had called the alarm and ushered all the hens inside the coop to safety…but remained outside with all his plumage fluffed up clearly intending to take on the fox! Eggs aside, I don’t think much of the hens and find chickens some of the stupidest creatures on the planet, but I have to admire that rooster doing his best George Bush “Bring ‘em on!” imitation in the face of certain death!
Work has been hell recently. Challenging, fun, rewarding, stimulating, but the pace has been truly brutal for the past several weeks. By Tuesday afternoon I’m ready for Friday. Tired. And so you’ll understand why, when I crawl home at the end of the day, the animals’ food and water is replenished, but from me the chickens and sheep get little more than a cursory nose (or beak) count. This past week, however, it was impossible not to notice that our fenced enclosure was full of udders with sheep attached to them. Big, honkin’ udders. Harbingers of impending lambs. And ewes so wide they barely fit through the doorway into the shelter we made for them last month. Thirty gallon wooly trash cans with legs!
So on Friday, home from work, I picked up the Wife’s “How to Raise Sheep” book and read the part about the birth of lambs. Thumbed through it. Saw that aside from body type (biped vs quadriped), it was remarkably similar to human childbirth. Heck, I’ve delivered five kids during my time in the service. Sheep wouldn’t be a problem.
Slept late this morning. Didn’t get up till 6:30. Went outside to bounce the dogs. Wife staggered outside to feed her sheep. Fudge Baa, the roundest of the ewes, had expelled the mucus plug from her cervical opening. “Wow,” I thought, “what exquisite timing! No late night marathons by flashlight. No delivering lambs in a driving rainstorm by Braille. What a nice little ewe to time it for my day off!”
My bride took one look and uttered, “There’s slime coming out of her butt!” I checked again, then attempted to point out that it was a mucoid discharge, not ordinary slime, and she had the wrong hole. She glared at me then, one of those truly venomous Wife looks that make grown men afraid.
I’ve seen what she can do with a shotgun!
We spent the next several hours with me observing nature run its course while feeling quite comfortable that all was well…and my pacifist wife chafing to intervene every two minutes since Mother Nature obviously was suffering from cranio-rectal inversion! Poor Tamara lathered her hands in obstetric slime so early it dried on her and had to be peeled off like banana skins. I’m watching the ewe’s breathing between contractions thinking how like Lamaze it seemed, as if they were programmed to push only when there was a possibility of something productive happening.
Two front hooves came out. Then a nose. Then most of a muzzle and a pink tongue. I stuck a sanitized finger up Fudge’s nether regions, ran it around the little head inside, checked how much give there remained in the birth canal. Plenty of lubrication in there. All was well. No need for an episiotomy or any other form of intervention. Nature was doing fine. My bride expressed confidence in my medical abilities. “Do you remember that nasty steel castrator in the livestock catalog?” hissed my Pacifist Bride. “I’m going to get one and use it on you if anything goes wrong!”
No pressure there!
Her hands freshly re-slimed, my bride bulled her way into the lambing pen and pulled the birth canal over the lamb’s forehead, then retreated. Just then the ewe gave a mighty push, then another. The slippery little lamb slid right out and into my waiting hands! Wife flashed a victory sign. I felt her action was just lucky timing – positive reinforcement of an accidental contingency.
There followed a mad scramble to shear wool away from Fudge’s udder, as the little lamb couldn’t find a nipple. So as mother and baby bonded, Wife and I hacked away. We needed to get that colostrum into the lamb, so finally resorted to milking her into my latte mug, then poured it carefully into a Diet Coke bottle, slapped a nipple on top, and bottle fed that critical fluid. Then we left them alone so mom could clean baby. Half an hour later we realized we had no idea what the lamb’s gender was, so we went back to look. The conversation went something like this:
W: “I think it’s a boy, but it’s dark down here.”
H: “Hold him up to the light.”
W: “That’s better! I think it’s a boy. Or maybe it’s a girl.”
H: “Well, look for a little wang in front of the sack. “
W: “I don’t see one. Must be a girl.”
H: “Okay. Look at the other end. Are there two holes or only one?”
W: “What am I looking for?”
H: “A ******.”
W: “What does it look like?”
H: “Jeez, babe! Surely you’d know better than me!”
W: “Don’t push it! It’s not too late to order that castrator!”
H: “No pressure! No pressure at all!”
Anyway, after careful examination under halogen lights, it’s a boy! We think. He has huge ears, so we’ve named him Weasley!
And now we’re down to three bottles of champagne…
