Today is 09/09/09. Great date! On 08/08/08 we had precious Jonadab, and now it is a year and a day later and here we are in a trailer in Virginia.Some impressions, some of which I may have mentioned previously.
On the night from August 31st to September 1st, the weather turned unexpectedly cold. Phil went to bed sweltering and woke up needing to put on a jacket and pants. It’s continued to be “sweatshirt weather” ever since. The rains began right after I finished my lasagna beds. We have had good rains every day this week, rains that wash rivulets in our driveway. They don’t wash the driveway away, because it is on the ridge of our land, but the water does run down. It runs down our slopes, too, and washes the red clay into our parking spots, so the grey gravel and red clay mingle. Then the red clay wins and pulls at our shoes when we unload the boys and the food or supplies we went to buy.
Thankfully Phil bought two sturdy mats for the entry to our place, because it was getting really dirty in our entry way. And, since our entry way is most of our front room, it was hard to keep anything clean.
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While I worked on the Beam (the ezine I edit every other week for work), Phil took the boys on errands yesterday. One of the places they went was the Humane Society equivalent, where he went for a cat or two. We had thought “barn cats” would be good (“free rodent control!” said the advertisement on craigslist), but basically the cat, once uncrated on our land, will never again have human contact.
That wouldn’t do for our cat-loving Isaiah and Abraham. So while Phil filled out massive paperwork (including revising the contract, which, as written said, “I will allow the organization to send someone to my land at any time and observe the animal and, if they deem necessary, take it away”—um, no, that’s a pretty big invasion of privacy that we’re not okay with!), the three older boys played with all the more friendly cats up for adoption. They were unanimous in their selection of “Tiger.”
Some of you may remember our dearly departed cat Ginger (missing, and presumably eaten by a coyote in our suburban Boulder neighborhood). She was a petite orange long-haired cat who would follow us on walks around the block. Phil described “Tiger” to me as a cat with similar coloring, but short haired and male.
Well, that all is true. But this cat is one of the largest cats I’ve seen in my life. In truth, I suspect it is a pregnant female, but time (and a visit to the vet, courtesy of the Humane Society voucher) will tell if my suspicions are accurate, or if this male’s pendulous belly is just due to obesity. Tiger is a pleasant cat, soft, purring, patient with Jonadab, who bodyslams the cat. Tiger has hissed dramatically, but has managed to keep his claws sheathed.
Have you ever woken from a dead sleep by a strange cat noise? The first time it happened, I was certain the cat was clawing my beautiful wall unit. However, the second time, I think it was just the cat trying to use the litter box. Apparently, even if the bottom of the box is covered with kitty litter, the cats want to shuffle that stuff around (?). This creates quite a racket on the linoleum floor, just feet away from my sleeping head. (Have you ever heard a cat pee? I now have. It sounds like any other animal peeing.)
Phil did get a barn cat, but it is in the tent, in a dog kennel, in a cage (by its own choice—it could come out of the cage into the kennel, but I haven’t seen it do so yet). We figure the barn cat will live outside and keep away the large mammal that walks across my table in the night, and the pet cat will come inside and purr on Isaiah’s bed. Or Phil’s lap.
Total animal count: one dog, two cats, two goats.
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What put me over the edge into deciding that I definitely did not want to live without a cat was waking up one morning to little animal paw prints on the table where I do my cooking. This little animal had sampled my dinner, but, as you can see from the photo, opted only to eat the noodles (which I why you can't see them), and left the veggies.
I would not like little rodents on my kitchen counter in Boulder, and so I do not like larger rodents tracking dirt on my table here.
The cat became a given.
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Today I was driving down Route 6, a largish road here (hey—it has a center line painted on it!), with a speed limit around 45 or so. I was coming down a hill and noticed an SUV stopped in the oncoming lane. Just … stopped. When he saw me, he put on his hazards, and backed a bit off the road. When I was even with him, I noticed a box turtle in my lane, and I didn’t hit it. In the rearview mirror, I saw the man exit his SUV and move the box turtle off the road.
You know you’re in a friendly place when men driving SUVs stop on the highway to move a passing turtle out of harm’s way.
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As we wait for running water, Phil had the good idea to get a couple water storage containers. One goes in the little cart behind the riding mower. It holds 35 gallons, and we can use it to water the animals (much easier to simply pass a hose into their waterer than to lug a five gallon bucket a couple of times. Blah!). We have a 65 gallon water container for the back of the truck.
If I haven’t mentioned it, for our personal water use, we use two five gallon water bags, usually used when camping. We fill the Berkey water filter that we used in Boulder for our drinking water, and I use the 5 gallon bag as my “running” water. (If I tip the bag far enough, it runs.)
For showers, we have an awesome solar shower. It can easily get to somewhere between 110 and 120 degrees. It holds 5 gallons, and Phil realized today he could take three showers on that five gallons. He has it rigged up on the side of the construction trailer away from the road, so it is fairly private. I tried taking a shower with it one time, wearing only undies. The Bessettes stopped by just then, so I hurriedly put on the rest of my clothes, but the wet undies soaked through. I haven’t tried that solar shower again, so you could say 100% of my showers at the farm have been interrupted.
I shower at the Bessettes. The boys get clean either with forced washings in the Bessette’s tub, in the Bessette pool, or, in Jonadab’s case, in a handy 5 gallon bucket. He loves that! What a water baby he is.
Today’s rain storm left large puddles in our driveway. He crawled around splashing in them, until he looked like he was part of a mud wrestling contest. Wow, was he dirty!
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I was just getting ready to read to the boys this afternoon, when I got an unexpected call from the minerals-for-the-land supplier. He said, “We have 7 tons of minerals ready to deliver to you tomorrow morning.” That’s not a whole lot of notice! But after a few phone calls, we think we are ready to receive 7 totes from Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The supplier, bless him, had called around until he found an incredibly cheap rate for shipping: $450 for those 14,000 pounds. Hard to imagine, with the price of gas. I don’t know how they can do it.
So, depending a bit on the weather, Phil might be able to broadcast the minerals tomorrow, before he leaves for his third trip back to Colorado, early Friday morning.
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Moving the goats takes quite a while. They are so skittish! And because we are putting them into the woods, Phil has to machete down some underbrush so we can stake the netting. And the netting itself catches on every stump and twig. Today there was a 6” log in the way, so Phil took his hand saw and was cutting through it. But the log was about to seize on his saw, so he got his peavey, a tool designed for moving logs. I held the log up with the peavey, and he cut through the log quickly.
When the goats are finished grazing a section, he goes behind them and cuts down all the remaining stumps that are too large to run over with the riding mower.
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He and Chloe walked down the property early this morning. He was thrilled to see little patches of grass growing where there had been only pine trees before. I am thrilled even when I see an occasional dandelion. Dandelions bring up calcium and break up tough soils, so I am thankful for their presence.
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Did I ever mention how tired we get without electricity to keep us awake? We often go to bed by 10pm, and don’t get up until close to 7am. This is about two hours more sleep than I used to get, but when the only light is a lantern or a flashlight, the darkness closes in in a hurry. We have a nice Coleman battery operated lamp, but when the batteries went out and we realized we had no working replacements, we used a hurricane lantern instead. It has white gas and a wick, and it puts off plenty of BTUs, but the light is very dim. It almost felt depressing to be in the same room with it, and it was hard to read. So we used either our LED reading lights from Costco, or an assortment of flashlights that ranged from small but brilliant (courtesy of the Evely’s in Kentucky) to large and dim—but waterproof!
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