May the Lord Grant Fern a Pregnancy

Three weeks after her last signs of heat, Fern was, as far as we could tell, in standing heat. This time Isaiah was the one to notice: "Fern is mounting one of the babies," he said.

I'm not terribly surprised, or even disappointed. Three weeks ago was still unrelenting hot temperatures, and a day late in her cycle. And, as she had never had AI before, she bled a lot.

Professional cowmen would not try AI again, but would use a "cleanup bull" to impregnate her. We don't have a "cleanup bull," and don't really want one, either.

May the Lord grant Fern's AI works this time.

Oh! Giovanni the technician is here! I must go!

Our Most Disgusting Experience EVER

In retrospect, we should have known better. We know the story of Lazarus, and how, when Jesus instructed the folks to roll the stone away so he could raise the man, Martha said, in the incomparable King James, "Lord, by this time he stinketh."

But, despite our biblical knowledge, after we killed and skinned Chrystal, we wrapped her in gardening cloth and left her to hang, for a more congenial hour (as 1am was really pushing it). Phil had an idea that it would be good to have a table for the actual butchering process: trying to cut up meat when the carcass is hanging, and swinging, is not terribly pleasant.

The first day was a fairly cool day, too. The second day was not. But Phil wasn't feeling well, and we had other things to do.

Even today, when we noticed a smell, we didn't immediately connect it with the hanging carcass.

I know: what were we thinking? Maybe we were remembering the good times, when the temperature was in the 30s? The extra 70 degrees makes a big difference!

To spare you all the horrific details, Chrystal ended up being a total loss, and our compost pile is one animal richer.

But we are richer in experience, I suppose!

I gathered the remaining guts out of the pig pen; they were gross enough I, with a fairly strong stomach, almost disgorged. My most disgusting moment ever. (I now know that I could try cooking the innards, thanks to helpful comments on the blog.)

Phil, standing in the compost pile in order to create a good burial spot, unwrapped the body. He realized that gardening cloth will not be sufficient to keep the flies—and their offspring—away from meat. That was his most disgusting moment of all time.

So we know that whatever butchering we do, from now on, must be start to finish in one long stretch.

I keep mentioning "sale barn, sale barn," but we aren't quite that desperate yet. We shall see.

About a year ago, we realized that all the top quality beef we'd frozen and brought with us for our first few weeks here had gone bad. It was a devastating day.

A year later, we are still, apparently, not quite aware of how quickly heat deteriorates meat, but at least our spirits are high and we can even laugh about it ... on the same day.

In other news, we moved the 14 chicks and their two surrogate mothers into the main chicken pen. All 14 chicks went with one mother, and the other chicken has been wandering freely, pleased to be freed of her brood, it appears. Her maternal instincts stopped with hatching, I suppose.

Phil, after a day of much paperwork, had made it down to the lower pasture, working to fence off the final stretch before we move the cows down, when he noticed a very dark cloud. He scrambled to put his tools into the truck, but before he was quite done, sheets of water poured from heaven and thoroughly soaked him. That's the second time in two freak thunderstorms that he's been soaked like that. He wrung the water out of his socks and went and sat in the office.

I remember last year when we were still in the tent and the incredible rain fell. How to keep dry, when all the housing for six people is a tent? And all the sleeping bags are all around? It was really challenging! And I could hardly write about it, because we had no electricity, and no internet, and my computer had almost no battery! What great, great strides this year.

Finally, a brief (it's a pun, as you'll soon see) brag on my son Joe. I had thought to potty train him a few months back, but he refused to sit on the wooden toilet in the trailer. I tried to run him over to the motor home, but that was, well, a lot of running for me. And he ended up liking the motor home bathroom a bit too much. He would sit, with me, on the toilet and wave and smile at himself in the mirror, totally hamming it up and not getting down to business. For forty-five minutes! Argh!

After two days of deep breathing and reminding myself that patience IS a virtue, I gave it up until I could find a good potty chair.

But we just don't go to stores that sell potty chairs very often. Amazon came to the rescue, and Joe got his potty chair yesterday afternoon.

Since last night, he has been completely and perfectly dry. If he needs to go to the potty, he lets me know, sits happily in his little chair, does what he needs to do, then VERY proudly stands up and just beams from ear to ear.

What a guy!

Endorphins Make You Happy

After I spent fifteen minutes exercising last night, I woke up today in such a cheerful frame of mind, I couldn't help but think, "Exercise gives you endorphins. Endorphins make you happy. Happy people just don't shoot their husbands. They just don't!" (from the marvelous Legally Blonde, in case you missed the reference)

I was pleased that my first T-Tapp "Basic Workout Plus" was not as brutal as I remembered; the shaky legs of past first workouts didn't materialize. I love that I get a comprehensive workout in fifteen minutes. And I'm especially pleased that I felt like I had fifteen minutes to dedicate to my own health and well-being.

That was good.

What is not so good is that I've been missing promptings lately. I would say they are from the Holy Spirit, but Phil thinks that might be a bit much, so maybe I should just say intuition. Like on Monday: I called to place my feed order for the month, so that it would be delivered near our house on Tuesday morning. As we finished the conversation, I thought, "I should ask him to repeat the order." But I didn't, and we'd never had a problem before.

Tuesday morning, I woke up and noticed that my phone was dead. I thought, "I should really plug that in," but I wanted to read my Bible, and the charger was in the motor home. I didn't really want to leave the house with sleeping boys, and couldn't think of any compelling reason to plug the phone in. Who would call before 8am anyway?

Sadly, our delivery guy was running an hour early, and did call before 8am, and again a bit after 8. By the time my phone was working, he had made our delivery at the regular drop point: not a short 8 minutes to the top of the drive, but a good twenty, in the next town up.

And the most important of all feeds somehow got dropped. The five bags of pig feed simply didn't make the invoice. I asked for them, but my phone reception isn't always great (someone wondered if it was the tree foliage, blocking the signal), so I didn't fully communicate what I needed. Which meant that Phil had an extra hour of drive time today. So he had to drive all that way, and we paid $20 for the delivery. What a waste.

I hate it when I'm not listening to the Holy Spirit (or my intuition)! I hate it! It makes a bad situation seem so much worse, because I could have prevented it. Bah!

And poor Phil. We'd bought ice cream at Whole Foods for my Dad's visit (which we didn't actually eat while he was here—sorry, Dad). Phil had a moderate amount on Monday and woke on Tuesday just not feeling so great. But by the evening, it wore off, and he had another moderate amount. By this morning, he was pretty sick. No more ice cream for him. (And the ingredient list wasn't even a bad one: the Tara gum and natural vanilla flavor were the only things somewhat questionable, although I suppose the cream and milk was not hormone-free, and the sugar may have come from GM beets; still, it didn't have corn products. I wouldn't have thought he would get sick.)

Despite not feeling well, he managed to build lovely shelves in our metal barn, using scrap wood from a friend's construction site. The unopened bags of feed have a handy place to rest, and we have gained a bit more floor space with the new, floor-to-ceiling shelves.

Also, our chickens had dropped production by half the last two weeks: rather than two dozen a day, we were getting maybe 12 or 13. I figured they were hiding their eggs in the woods, but after Abraham and I looked and didn't even see much evidence of chicken scratching, let alone 12 dozen eggs, I wondered if Phil's hypothesis (too hot to lay) was correct.

It certainly may be: after a second day, yesterday, in the 80s, we had 20 eggs.

Finally, perhaps a note best skipped by the squeamish. On Monday night, we processed Chrystal until a bit after 1am: gutting, skinning, and so on. She had the most incredible layer of yellow fat I've ever seen on a ruminant. (I know where all our hay was going!) We filled two five-gallon buckets with her innards, and at that point, we weren't sure that what was left was worth keeping. There wasn't much. She certainly wasn't a meat goat.

The next morning, we gave one bucket of entrails to the pigs. They went for the fat right away. (I would have, too. Wow, was it a beautiful yellow!) The second bucket, though, the one with liver and kidneys and other such "high vitamin" organs, they weren't interested in. I'm a bit mystified by that. Oh, well. Our compost pile will happily accept whatever they don't eat.

One-Year Anniversary

A year ago today, we woke up in Staunton, Virginia, and drove the last hour or so to our land. We'd arrived.

It's been a good year.

***

My Dad came out for a whirlwind visit: late Friday night until Sunday morning. We drove around most of Saturday looking at properties for sale in our area.

With the declining price of land across the nation, I've wondered (grumpily) at times whether we weren't hearing from God correctly, or whether we'd overstepped our bounds and purchased the wrong plot of land. It feels sometimes like it's so costly: economically, emotionally, relationally.

I read in Psalms that morning, "Rejoice in the Lord always." And I purposed that I would do that, no matter what the properties looked like; even if I liked something better than ours, I would rejoice.

But as the day passed, my spirits rose. I didn't like any of the properties better than ours. Not remotely. More than that, I realized that, though I feel like we live at the edge of the world (45 minutes or so outside of Charlottesville, a fairly small city of about 100,000), we could be A LOT further out.

And we could be in a much less congenial place. Rather than Butch, the Bessettes, and the Bush clan around us, with other friendly, helpful neighbors dropping by at times, we could be in a place with Confederate flags and thick accents. Rather than opera and God and gardening, we might have had to figure out how to talk about ... the mind boggles.

Even the basic shape of our land, a lovely rectangle, felt so well-defined, so easily fenced. I've been grumpy in my mind at times because we all know that a square would be the easiest shape to fence, and require the least fencing for total area. A long, thin rectangle seems so, well, wasteful.

But that was only until I considered the alternative: a giant's mouth, full of missing teeth as a perimeter. Or a diamond shape, with bites cut out. Maybe a squashed hat? No thank you. Straight lines and four clear corners make me smile. Ahh.

So I returned to my paradise, after the hottest day, perhaps ever, in Central Virginia (Dennis Bessette said, "It hit 115; hottest I've ever known it here"), and rejoiced.

Today, incredibly, the weather hardly hit 90. After what may be about four weeks of 100 degrees or more, a day in the upper 80s is livable, workable. Phil went to the lower pasture and, when pulling the cedar didn't work, he pushed it into the creek and kept on fencing. Three sides are now done, and he's working on clearing the fourth side. There is lush growth in that bottom land. We are excited for the cows to get down there.

The boys and I have been doing more school work. It's very pleasant for me to read to the boys, and I enjoy the little insights they have. Today we read a paragraph about muddy rain, that falls when volcanic ash mixes with rain. While the example volcano was in Southeast Asia, Jadon said, "Something like that probably happened at Krakatoa" (see The Twenty-One Balloons for that story), and Isaiah said, "Yeah, and at Vesuvius" (he reads and rereads a book about Pompeii).

To round out a pleasant one-year anniversary on the land day, we had the unpleasant task of beginning to destock our animals. The count was at 25 mammals, not including people or pets: 13 sheep, 3 pigs, 5 cows, and 4 goats.

When Phil and Ara killed the pigs, Ara actually did the shooting and the sticking (throat-cutting). But for an old goat, we didn't think it worth the money to pay someone else, or worth the hassle to bring her to the sale barn.

But it is so hard to kill a living animal. I'm actually tearing up over Chrystal, one of the first two animals to come to our farm. She was crotchety, and didn't breed, so she's been, more or less, a freeloader and a money sink since she came.

But she taught us about the importance of decent fences. And her coat changed from coarse black in the winter to a softer tan and black in the summer. She had a name and a history (Bessette farm to Tocci farm to Lykosh farm).

I won't miss her. I am happy to have her meat.

But we had to entice her out of her paddock with grain. After she had walked a little distance away, she refused to go any further. Phil took his .22 rifle and, while I held the lead rope to keep her head steady, Phil shot her between the eyes from about two inches away. She didn't flinch and died instantly.

Phil told me that he didn't close his eyes while taking the shot, but did when cutting her throat.

For Phil, who didn't cut the umbilical cords when his sons were born, to kill one of our animals: it's a big deal.

We're really in this life. We're doing it.

First Lumber

Phil finished assembling the sawmill today, and dragged (by hand!) one of the logs we've had next to the driveway (cut down from our stone fruit orchard, and dragged out with the truck over the winter).

He started with a termite-eated pine, which was a good idea, because first attempts are always a bit tenuous, even though he's watched multiple movies about how to saw.

In order to make a round tree into square lumber, first you must clamp the tree in place, so it won't roll while sawing. (I guess, really what comes first is felling the tree, then limbing the tree, and somehow man-handling it onto the mill. For a large tree, I think that would be a job in itself!)

Next, you take off the top, in order to create a flat surface.

This can be tricky: how can you tell if you've taken off enough? If you don't have it low enough, the blade will emerge out of the side of the tree, rather than the end. And if you try multiple times at almost the same depth, you might end up with a very fine sheet of wood: almost like paper. It took several goes, but Phil was finally satisfied.

With one flat edge, professionals turn the log 90 degrees, and saw off the top again. This gives them a square corner, and they can stop using the guides after that.

Then the third side, and either the fourth, for a square log (above), or simply leave the three-sided log in place and cut boards off the top, leaving the bottom rounded.

As you may tell from the photo, Phil's first attempt didn't work out quite so smoothly. His square, for whatever reason, was not square; no 90 degree angles anywhere. So frustrating!

He took a break in the air conditioning, and researched what he might be doing wrong. For the next logs, he would get one side flat, then flip the log over, so the flat side was down. This gave him a good, workable surface, and he cut some very serviceable poplar boards. Non-standard dimensions (not 2x4s), but beautiful, pretty much square boards. Really fun!

In other news, Tyson, our regular hay guy, came today and mentioned that it is so unusually dry in Virginia right now that many people are feeding hay already. (We are, but that's because we have very little grass to begin with, and our lower pasture isn't fenced yet.)

To make matters worse, the first cutting of hay was only half what it usually is, and the second cutting might not happen. The price for stocker cattle (where you buy a young calf, maybe 350 to 600 pounds, and feed the calf until it's ready for the feedlot or, if grassfed, processing) has dropped about $.30 per pound in the last couple of weeks. Instead of $1.20 per pound, they are selling for about $.90. That's a pretty large percentage drop.

Phil and I have been learning about stocker cattle, and it's interesting to actually witness what we've learned: drought and destocking (where you sell cattle because you don't have enough feed), price drops and hay shortages.

We are so thankful to have hay supplied. If we had to try to make it ourselves, there is just no way. The cutter alone runs about $25,000. Farmers who need hay might have to ship it in from other states, or destock. Oh, the pain!

All these things I never thought about when living in town. Hmm. Lack of rain makes life difficult for farmers.

Most of our trees appear to be doing well. We are thankful, especially, for irrigation!

DMV Rules: Virginia Is NOT for Lykoshes

Butch came by yesterday morning and helped Phil lift the 800+ pound engine part of the sawmill off the track part, since it was shipped at a 90 degree angle from how it should end up. (The photo shows the right way.)

Phil has spent some time, off and on, assembling it further, and it's coming along, as you can see.

He took a break and went to the lower pasture to put up more fence. Abraham soon followed—ever eager for a chance to use the machete. While there, the sky opened and a deluge struck. Poor guys. They were soaked by the time they made it up the hill: just in time to see the sun come out with the rainbow.

Phil went to the DMV twice today. First time, they needed proof of social security (yet another piece of paper they hadn't mentioned the first three times). When he finally arrived the FIFTH time with all the paperwork he can supply, the "gatekeeper" wouldn't even grant him a number, since he couldn't furnish any of their proofs of residency. She wouldn't allow him to talk to a supervisor even: just a flat refusal. She didn't care about the contradiction in the law v. the code. No. No. No.

Can't do anything about that. When he goes to court next month, I suppose it will be incumbent upon the prosecutor to prove residency, and Phil thinks that will be an easy decision in our favor.

Yet another day wasted to impossible paperwork. We're looking into other options, since this has fairly large repercussions. After all, it's hard to file taxes in a state when you're not a resident.

I moved both broody hens into their new cattle trailer pen. They have seven living chicks each. Of the three unhatched eggs, when I gently shook two of them, they sloshed around, so I'm assuming they are rotten. The third, though, didn't slosh at all. I'm guessing that one was a chick that just wasn't quite ready: maybe it got pushed a bit too far from the warmth of the mother's breast.

We Like Chicks

This afternoon, we all headed up to the DMV. Phil's third (fourth?) time to try and get licenses and registration. He has poured over the law and the code, and thinks he has figured out a way, legally, to allow us to register despite having no address.

This time, though, inexplicably, they required birth certificate and passport, which they hadn't needed the previous two times. We couldn't supply them, so we left. Third time wasn't the charm.

I hate anything that feels counter-productive. And while I realize that dealing with the DMV is a requirement to living and driving, and, therefore, non-negotiable, the loss of man-hours (the loss of time, and, therefore, life!) just about puts me over the edge.

I know it is worse in third world countries, where missionaries sometimes go to the post office for days to pick up a package; I cannot imagine being one of them. If I am ever called to Nepal or some such country, I will go, but I will plan for ulcers!

In happier news, barn hen now has six chicks, with a seventh breaking out. She is much more mild-mannered than the previous hen, so we picked up her surrogate chicks and loved on them.

Isaiah is holding a chick from the first batch, now a little over three weeks old, and a 24-hour chick. Those birds grow so quickly!

Jadon also noticed, around noon, a wet head poking out from under tote hen. Her dozen are hatching, too, though that single glimpse is all we saw today.

The sheep have grazed our apple orchard sufficiently, so we moved them across the driveway to the cherry orchard (the pigs are not moving quickly enough for our needs).

While Phil set up fencing, he had the younger boys block the way for the sheep. Little Joe really got into the part. He'd put up his little arms and growl. Then laugh. Honestly, they weren't very effective, but that's okay.