Miracles Do Happen . . .

Especially when you are as stubborn as Ellen is. She has worked with the calf, Erin, for four days straight, trying to convince him that sucking and walking are good activities for a small bull to be engaged in. Erin, for all his desire to lay down and die was very actively stubborn about dying. He wrestled, and flopped around and ooched away whenever Ellen tried to feed him. It isn't unheard of to see an animal without any will to live, it's just a little surprising to find one with a will to die. Or so it seemed.

The last time Ellen tried to teach Erin to suck a bottle he got so angry that he accidentally learned to walk on his three good legs. After about an hour of fighting to get him to suck, she finally put the rest of the milk down him with the tube, again.

The next morning, she went out to repeat the process only to find this: She said she was so relieved she almost cried. He finally learned to nurse and has apparently decided to live.

Life is a Perilous Venture

This morning one of our Murray Grey cows, Elizabeth, birthed a hundred pound bull calf. (Seventy-five pounds is considered a good weight for a new calf.) He was christened Erin. Unfortunately, after a few hours of life Erin still hadn't made it off the ground and as a result still hadn't tasted any nourishing colostrum.

Ellen and Nathan loaded Erin into the wheelbarrow and carted him over to the cow chute. They put his mom in the chute and started milking her by hand. She behaved very well considering the circumstances. Her colostrum came out thick and sticky, very similar to sweetened condensed milk.

Ellen and I tried to get some of it into Erin but any sucking that he did on the bottle was very half-hearted. He really wanted us to leave him alone so that he could sleep but that wasn't an option. Ellen would hold his head up with the bottle in it while I vigorously rubbed his gorgeous silver fur. After trying to convince him to suck the bottle for about half an hour Ellen finally gave up and decided to tube feed him.

Tube feeding is a last resort for a few reasons. First, you have a little better than a fifty-fifty chance of actually getting the tube down the right pipe so that you are siphoning milk into the stomach instead of the lungs. It is also important for a baby to get the chance to actually suck at first or they seem to lose the natural urge to do so.

In this case, it was a choice between forcing the colostrum into his stomach or watching him die of hunger. Thankfully, the tube did go into his stomach. When we left him he was finally holding his head up which we take as a good sign. Now we wait to see if the colostrum is enough to give him a will to live.

~~~~~

Later in the day, Ellen noticed Erin trying to get up. His left hind leg seems bound up so that he has to balance on the other three. If you've ever seen a calf try to balance on four legs you can imagine how hard it must be to balance on three. We hope that his leg will relax and function normally.

We're encouraged that he's trying and try to feed him with the bottle again. He seems to finally be catching on to the idea that if he sucks the food comes faster.

Today, Tirzah helped us round up the small herd of rams and bucks before we gave them all shots and separated the two we needed. She always takes such joy in her work that we have to remind her to settle down. She would prefer that all herding be done at a hundred miles an hour.

The first one we needed was a handsome young ram that we released into the yard with Sue. I'm afraid it wasn't love at first sight. Sue doesn't recognize him as the same species and he is too paranoid about being shoved into an apparently hostile environment to do anything but frantically snatch up grass and wildly bleat between bites.

We also captured a young buck that is too small both for breeding or eating so we're going to try to turn him into an adorable pet. Ellen christened him Hancock. If he was a sheep instead of a goat I don't think that we would have any chance of taming him but goats are willing to be bribed into friendship over time. He is really quite cute and unusually soft. Hopefully he'll relax and start enjoying our pampering soon.

To Life

Living on the farm makes me realize just what fun it is to be around animals. Some people say it's nice to have a friend that doesn't talk back but I'm not convinced that animals don't.

This morning I woke to my cat, Judah, poking at my head with his paw. This isn't just any poke, it's his special patented Judah Poke. It starts with his paw on my head, but then it just lingers there while he gently inserts his claws into my skull. Just enough to be prickly and hair-raising but not enough to actually hurt. This is not my favorite way to wake up, but I have to say it's effective.

I don't try to fight for long, I roll over and open the door so he can go out. Instead he lays back down on the bed. "What is it you want, stupid cat?!" I don't know (though I have a good idea) and he doesn't say, so I lay back down. Minutes later, Tirzah, the brilliant but slightly crazy sheep dog wanders through the door that I didn't close and whines expressively. I'm almost sure she was saying something about how Ellen and Nathan both abandoned her and she was so glad I was there to rescue her.

I nicely say something about how crazy and annoying she is and how awful Ellen and Nathan are and I can just see the little brain working behind her eyes. "Oh, good. She likes me right now which means that she wants me to jump on her bed." "Don't even think about it" I warn, even though I know the thinking part is too late. She removes her exploratory paw from my bed while her eyes lose their pitiful appeal so fast it was like watching a mask drop; they returned to their usual conniving look. The situation is almost as plain as if she had opened her mouth and said, "Hm, my method just needs a little more tweaking before she'll do anything I want."

During this time, Aidenne has heard a happy voice from the other room so she comes to try her luck at being allowed on my bed. She isn't quite as tactful as Tirzah so she gets two paws on the bed before reluctantly retreating in lieu of my threatening explosion. I finally get up, just to find that all that whining from Tirzah about Ellen leaving her was bosh anyways. Ellen is sitting right there.

After I have my coffee, and get past the jolting overly sweet last gulp where my sugar apparently sat, Ellen and I go to rearrange the cows. This seems to be a favorite farm pastime. It always reminds me of a life size sliding puzzle, where all the pieces are alive. First we bring the whole herd up to the house, then between the two of us we cut out the ones Ellen says aren't supposed to be in the herd, then we chase herd 1 back to where they came from and put newly created herd 2 in their pasture. At least, that's how it's supposed to work.

Instead, one of the cows that were supposed to be cut into herd 2 wasn't with the herd at all. So, we go on a hike to find out if she's dead. After we encompass the two pastures that she was supposed to be in and figure out that the white hump we think is her is just another sheep, we see her, yet another pasture over, all by herself, munching on grass. We don't know for sure how she got in there but we do find that if she is under only a little bit of pressure, instead of going through the gate we opened for her, she is quite capable of jumping the electric fence.

We all mosey on back to the rest of the herd, encourage her to walk through herd 1 to arrive in herd 2 and then help them all go back to their appropriate pastures. Cow arranging completed. I didn't even tell you about the moment I almost got stuck between two saucy mares fighting over two buckets of alfalfa pellets, or the bull that we left on the wrong side of the electric fence he broke through, or coming so close to losing my boot in knee deep mud. I also got to scratch my obnoxious horse, who liked it so much that he looked pleased in spite of himself.

The point is that I love it that my horse is obnoxious, the mares are saucy, the cow is unpredictable, the bull is happier on the other side of the fence, Aidenne has no tact, Tirzah is crazy and smart, and what Judah really wanted this morning was just my attention. I absolutely love the fact that they are alive.

After I scratched Scoshi (my obnoxious horse) I put my head against him for a second to feel Life itself. I feel the warmth of his blood moving, the softness of his fuzzy winter coat, and I can hear his heart and feel his lungs rising and falling, and after a second his skin twitches like I am an overgrown fly he wants to get rid of.

I love it that when it comes right down to it, genius scientists really don't know anything more about what life is than I do. I love it that I can't create it, that I can sometimes preserve it, and I can always marvel at it. Life really and truly is magic.

I know that bad things happen, really bad and pretty often. Just focusing on animals, they eat each other, maim each other, get run over, get sick, get caught in fences, drown, starve, and everything dies in the end. I still maintain that the truly amazing thing is not that life includes pain and ends in death, but that it ever begins or survives in the first place.

Life is stunningly right.

One thing about farming, the animals keep getting hungry, again. Thankfully, on a grass farm, most of the animals only need a fresh pasture every now and then. Except for the pigs. Pigs eat grass but they can't live on it, so our pigs receive a home mixed grain feed that includes milo, oats, sunflower seeds, wheat, and barley.

Ellen and I went to brave the weather and keep our fat pigs from starvation. Not that it was pouring rain, but in this area, if it has looked like rain in the past week then you probably have boot swallowing mud up to your knees. When feeding the pigs, rain, shine or mud, you must understand that you will come back filthy. I don't know how it happens, it just does.

First we had to grind the feed which is the nice part of feeding. There is the risk of developing some lung problems due to breathing large amounts of ground grain. We have to grind the grain because pigs are not known for chewing their food properly and so it tends to come out exactly the way it went in, with no nutritional benefit to the pig.

After grinding the feed, we load it into five gallon buckets and cart it in wheelbarrows to the appropriate pastures. We currently have five separate pig pastures, the big pigs which holds the sows and barrows ready for slaughter, the medium pigs (between 50 and 100lbs), Louie's pen (our young boar), the little pigs (just weaned) who are more often in the wrong pen then their own pen, and Levi's pen.

Of all of these, the medium pigs and the big pigs are the worst because of sheer number. Our pigs are harmless . . . as huge, muscular, animals who have no manners usually are. In other words, they aren't out to kill you but you might feel like it if you see 20 or so 100+ pound animals charging you to get their head in the bucket first. So, we went to feed the medium pigs.

I went in first when the pigs are all still convinced that they are on the verge of death by starvation. Aidenne (a Labrador Retriever) is our pig herder, which means she sometimes makes enough noise in the right direction to momentarily sidetrack the pigs from the humans with the buckets. She helped keep the pigs away from me some. Unfortunately, the opening to a gate is usually the most muddy part of the whole pasture and this one was no exception. The wheelbarrow got momentarily stuck.

As I was leaning into it to keep it moving, my boot got stuck without my foot. So there I am in 8 inches of mud, pushing off my left foot, leaning into a wheelbarrow, with my right foot out of the boot and my knee in the mud. Thankfully, about the time my foot came out of the boot the wheelbarrow moved so that not everything was stuck at once.

Whew! I am now inside the gate. I retrieve my boot and put my foot back into it mud and all. Then, before I can really get going again, there is a complication arising from the melee around me. One of the pigs tried to go under the wheelbarrow, but instead of going between the legs and the wheel, it went inside the U shaped legs.

It didn't fit, and it didn't like it. If it had the good sense to back out everything might still have been okay. But honestly, when have you heard of a starving, stuck pig having good sense? Nope, it barged through with much squealing. In spite of my attempts to hold it upright while the pig worked out it's own salvation, the wheelbarrow dumped.

Now I have one boot full of mud, a crazily barking dog who still thinks she's helping, a tipped wheelbarrow, 20 hungry pigs swarming me, and 15 gallons of pig food being trampled in the mud. Ah, well. That was only the beginning of the day.

So, after that we mostly fed the pigs uneventfully. We managed to feed the big pigs with the tractor and not get it stuck. Although, seeing a tractor sway and slip in the mud is a little unnerving. While we were feeding the big pigs, we noticed that one of their water troughs had somehow been drug to the middle of their mud hole.

Pigs must have mud holes in the summer, because they don't sweat and they will overheat if they don't have mud to cool off in. The Big Pigs' mud hole is maybe 20 yards roundish and about 2 feet deep all the way across. The rain hasn't made it any prettier.

Now we had a choice, we could wade out into 2 feet of thick mud and wrestle a metal, slimy, heavy water trough out of it, or we could wait for the mud to solidify over the next few months and leave the half submerged water trough to become a permanent part of the landscape. Ellen decided we had better go get it now.

In she wades. The mud on the edges is only about a foot deep so that her boots are still useful. It's not long before one boot fills with mud and the water trough is only starting to break the suction. At this point, Ellen ditches the boots and goes back in with just her socks on. She says it's pretty cold. She rocks and wobbles and wrestles the trough to the side where I finally come in useful. We haul it out.

Ah, the joys of an East Texas winter.

On October 3rd Sue and I went on an adventure. We had been invited to participate in the Indian Summer Days event hosted by Hopkins County Museum and Heritage Park. I brought Rowena (my spinning wheel) and Sue came along to look cute. During the day people from Sulphur Springs wandered around enjoying the good weather and seeing sights from history.

Sue and I were a big attraction for people under the age of 12. I thought that I would be spinning for people to watch, but it turned out to be much more fun to let the kids try it themselves. After they spun their own wool thread I cut it off for them to keep as a bracelet. It always amazes me how far a little kindness and patience will go. I offered to let the parents try spinning but they were not as brave as their children. Kudos to the 4 adults who were willing to try something new.

Sue did not enjoy the day as much as I did, she resented being brought from home and treated like an animal. She had her own little pen and she spent the morning pacing it and complaining. I tried to lead her out once but she disliked the lead rope even more than the pen. So far, I hadn't let any children in with her because I wasn't sure how she'd take it.

When I was trying to calm her down about 8 children flocked over and I allowed them to come in. Almost immediately, Sue calmed down, laid down and almost fell asleep. Apparently there is nothing more relaxing than a lot of over excited little kids in a very small area.

The other highlight of Sue's day were the two dogs that visited her. One of them would have willingly chased her and probably tasted her, while the other was only mildly interested. Sue was beside herself with delight until their owners dragged them away. Some pygmy goats visited her but she was too snobby to notice them.

When we returned home, Mandie our guard dog and Sue's most constant companion, actually seemed glad to see Sue return. Sue was rather upset at being in a pen in the back of the truck and when we drove up Mandie immediately climbed up on the tailgate to see what was wrong and say hi. I was always under the impression that Sue adopted Mandie and Mandie tried not to acknowledge Sue's existence. I guess Mandie is sweeter than she likes to let on.

These past few days have been full of excitement. First, two of our sows farrowed. For those of you that have never owned or had much to do with pigs 'farrowed' means she had her piglets. All told, there are 16 new piglets. This time of the year in Texas is not ideal for baby pigs but Fred didn't really seem to care when he climbed the fence to visit these two sows. Fred is now in a more secure location after proving multiple times that he has the energy, expertise, and willpower to get out of almost any fence.

In more recent news, I woke up night before last to a noise like a rain storm in my closet. On closer inspection I found that the pipe going into the water heater had busted. This did not create any gently annoying drip, it created a four foot fountain coming straight out of the wall before it hit the floor.

After alerting Ellen and Nathan (it was around 3 in the morning) I went back to see if there wasn't a shutoff valve in the closet. In pure amazement, I found that there was a shut off, but that it was no longer connected to the wall or my new fountain. It had popped off the pipe coming out of the wall.

Since that was useless, I decided I may as well see if I couldn't pop it back on and at least slow the water down. Apparently, as I was trying this technique Nathan came up behind me to shut off the water himself. My idea didn't work to slow the water down any but my trying did make the water pressure slightly rise, so that when I quit trying the fountain shot out six feet and blasted Nathan. I was totally unaware but I sure wish I could have seen it. I don't think that Nathan was really awake before then.

When Nathan saw that the in house shut off was useless, he turned off the water to the entire house. We vacuumed and toweled water up for about two hours before going back to bed.

We found out the next day that the local water company had a problem with their water pressure regulator that resulted in the water pressure in quite a few houses jumping from around 40 psi to over a hundred. We didn't have water all day yesterday.

Some time in the early afternoon, as Ellen got ready to publish a page on our new website, our electricity went out. In most houses this is inconvenient but when you have a couple thousand dollars in frozen meat it can be disastrous. Thankfully, Nathan was able to hook up the freezers to a generator. When we called to see how long it might be off we found that the problem went all the way back to the power plant. They said it might be out for at least 6 hours. To do them credit, I don't think it actually was that long.

Last night I woke up again around 3 am slowly realizing that my room smelled so bad I could hardly breathe. My carpet was sour. Today, some men hired by Nathan's insurance came out and ripped up all the carpet downstairs. If you have ever had your flooring redone you know how much upheaval it causes. Nothing is where it belongs, the house that I cleaned the day before the water busted is now in complete disarray and these huge (and hugely annoying) fans are blowing in an effort to get the house dry.

I am considering renaming this blog something like It Isn't One Thing . . . It's Everything; or When It Rains It Pours.

Don't get the wrong idea, given the interesting circumstances the past two days, we are doing very well, have had numerous good laughs over the situation, and are in fact grateful. Ellen pointed out that if I hadn't moved in with them then the water heater would have been sitting in their office instead of my bed room and it would have poured for hours before they found out. A lot more would have been ruined than the carpet.