How about something positive?

I don't know about you, but I need something sunny right about now.  With recent events and listening to the radio - I was very gloomy.  Thank goodness I don't watch television!  While reading the most recent entry of the Heifer Diary, my favorite weekly journal, I came across this and thought I would share it:

"I stood on the deck as the sun went down behind the hills. The sheep were backlit giving them a golden aura, the cows were grazing on a section of new grass, and farming seemed like the best possible way to live. I don’t feel tied down. I feel uprooted when I have to leave."


Exactly and amen.

Gobsmacked.

I love that word, but seldom find the occasion to use it.  And now, unfortunately, I feel it is the perfect word to describe how I feel about my much-too-short relationship with Gigi.  I am very attached to all my companions - I flatly love them.  They comprise my immediate family and our relationships parallel all the two-legged relationships I have and have had.  They have spats, they misbehave, they forgive me if I misbehave, they make me laugh.  But the one thing they give me that no person does is unconditional love.  How astonishing that a small, feral cat who populated my life for such a short time would have such a hold on my heart?  I have such a clear image of the last morning I saw her - she was lying warmly against me on the sofa.  I was scratching the distinctive pattern on the top of her head when she raised her head, looked at me through squinted eyes and rumbled her amazingly loud purr.  She had kohl lined eyes and a sweet smudgy patch on her chin.  And now she is gone.  We had been working on making her an indoor-only cat, but the process wasn't completed.  I had one other outdoor cat who engendered that much love, and he disappeared as well.  It was a long, painful process, forgetting that loss.  And it will be a long and painful process with Gigi's loss as well.  I will hear her mewing at the back door, under my bedroom window, out in the poultry yard.  I will see her out of the corner of my eye.  Not knowing how it ended leaves you with the hope that it hasn't.  And hope, in that sense, becomes a form of purgatory.

Missing.

Along with a large portion of my heart.

And there was peace. In the nesting boxes.

Dottie the Muscovy duck apparently decided she WAS a chicken.  And a very broody chicken at that.  She has been wedged into one of three favorite nesting boxes for months.  And that sets off broodiness in Marie Claire, who needs very little encouragement, and Crazy Lady Hen, who suffers from symbiotic broodiness with Dottie.  CLH feels compelled to wedge herself into the already tight quarters with the nutty duck (that's her fluffy butt in the picture).  This, not surprisingly, causes all kinds of problems with chickens, egg laying, other duck relationships, and my nerves.  Every morning I have to pry Dottie (and Crazy Lady Hen) out of a nesting box.  Then I remove Marie-Claire, then the drake chases Dottie all over the yard, CLH runs around all fluffed up, which sets off Marie-Claire, which sets off Junior the rooster, and on and on it goes.
  Out of desperation, I ran an ad in craigslist trying to find a home for Dottie.  Lo and behold, there was someone who could not live without her.  She has gone off to Connecticut to live in an all-duck family.  I hope she can be rehabilitated.  And I hope the estrogen level drops in my chicken yard.

Lambie Triage.

The dogs I have adopted over the years all shared one thing in common - none of them had normal puppyhoods.  This meant that there was no 'throw the ball, bring it back' play.  With my long-haired dachsie, Oscar, it was because he had been a puppy mill 'worker' and had not had much socialization.  He did latch onto a rubber squeaky toy that was as large as his head.  He would not squeak it, nor would he share it.  It took almost six months before he was relaxed enough to leave it behind on his walks.  Reilly, my Great Dane, spent all of his puppy hood/young adulthood in a crate that was too small for him.  I tried to get him to fetch or play - no dice.  Bernie, who is incredibly fearful, sees dog toys as potential objects of terror.  When Scrappy joined us, I assumed he wouldn't want toys or be interested in a rousing game of fetch.  How wrong I was!  He was outside 'helping' me garden when he caught sight of my gardening gloves.  He snatched one up and raced around with it, tossing it in the air and leaping on it.  He now has four toys:  Lambie, Foxy, Squirrelly, Ropey.  (I dare any of you who have dogs to make fun of those names...)  Lambie is most often a victim of limb-loss.  Poor dog toy construction.  Squirrelly gets the most use, has lasted through a few emergency stitchings and keeps on squeaking, albeit weakly.  Ropey is the toy of last resort.  Foxy is his new favorite because it has a squeaker at both ends.  I like it because it has no stuffing.  And, while Bernie does not approve of dog toys, she is not above sneaking out when Scrappy is getting a drink and gathering up all the toys, taking them to her bed and lying on them.  Smart cookie.  That Foxy can drive you crazy.

Knowing whom to call.

Being relatively new to home ownership, there are few things that strike more terror into my heart than when something that is vital to my existence stops working.  Such as power or water or my washing machine.  Although I am inching my way toward total self-sufficiency, I live in a mild state of angst on a daily basis.  Last Friday I woke up to - no water.  I discovered this alarming fact at 4:30 in the morning - my usual rising time, but not on any repairman's schedule.  The first thing I did was to check to see if I had left water running all night.  And I had.  I had broken one of my Cardinal rules - when running the hose in the sheep's water bucket, stay until it's full, then turn it off.  So I turned off the hose and went inside to wait for the well to recharge (fill back up).  And I waited.  And waited.  Still no water.  It then dawned on me that it was not running for another reason.  That's when panic kicked in.  I grabbed the yellow pages and looked up "Wells Water Repair" and dialed the one closest to me.  The "ahem" gentleman that answered the phone pronounced in dire basso tones that I had probably had my well blown out in the recent storms.  First, the last storm was two days prior and I had had water since then.  Second, if it was an electrical short, it would have tripped the fuse, which it hadn't.  He then informed me that he would come out and look at it but, since it was 8:30 and they started at 9:00, it would run me $100 for an emergency call.  In my best perky voice, I told him I didn't think so and I would call him if I was desperate. 
     Then I did what I always end up doing - I called my neighbors.  That is how I found Keith.  The first time I called, he was eating breakfast and would call me back.  When he called back, he interrupted me mid-stream to say someone was in his yard and he'd call me back.  When he called back again, he informed me, after some cursory information, that he had put in that very well some 6-7-8 years ago.  Then we had to try and remember who owned the house so he could look up the file.  That had me back on the phone calling my dairy farmer neighbor who knows everyone within a 40 mile radius.  That settled, he agreed to come out.  By then it was pouring rain and I trotted out with my umbrella to hold it over him and the well cap.  After about 40 minutes of testing he discovered that the problem was my new pressure gauge.  It had a cut-off mechanism that shut off when the water pressure dropped below 20 lbs.   He showed me how to lift the little lever until the pressure rose to 20 lbs. then it would fill up on it's own.  When I cringingly asked him how much I owed him for the call, he pondered a couple minutes and said, "$42.80."  I was almost giddy when I got my checkbook.  For $42.80, I had learned how deep my well was (very), how much water I had (not much), how they hit sulfur (surprise, surprise), how cheap Chinese parts were killing his business, how I should not let myself be talked into something I didn't need (new gauge), and how he thought the place looked like I really cared about it.  Keith is now on speed dial.

It took a village of two.

Lattice house framed in an afternoon. The diagonal pieces are for support.

In my constant effort to further complicate my life, I am building a lattice house, to house, well, it's a surprise.  But I do realize it is perverse for me to plan on building anything with one and a half arms.  Luckily for me, I have a friend who is a whiz at Eyeball Construction (her term).  She can look at my puny drawings (never even closely to scale or in correct perspective), then look at my pile of scrap lumber, and see my vision!  How cool is that?  While I was saying, "well, I think we'll screw these uprights here, and join that, and, well, heck, I have no idea on how to attach these wall units," she was visualizing the entire construction, moving walls around in her mind, calculating spacial elements, how many turns it would take.  When I trotted back from exchanging one dead cordless drill battery for a half-live one, she had it all worked out.  I am taking pictures of the progress and will unveil the surprise after the weekend.