A Direct Skunk Hit

I don't know what it going on, but I have seen more skunks around this fall than I have seen in the previous seven years we've lived here combined.

A few weeks ago, the eldest child came to find me late at night to let me know that a skunk had sprayed directly under his window and that it was too awful in his room to sleep. He moved onto the couch for the night. Shortly after that, the dogs sounded the alarm in the shop, and A. went out to find a small skunk wedged against the shop's foundation wall, under a shelf. He managed to shoot it anyway and we disposed of it. The dogs were slightly stinky, but didn't sustain any damage from the encounter.

This morning at 5:30, I was sitting in my room with the window open when I smelled the unmistakable presence of a skunk. And then the dogs again started barking frantically, this time in the covered porch that is right out our front door.

I grabbed a flashlight and opened the front door to find Jasper on the front steps and a skunk right next to the steps with its tail raised.

I stood in our front door to take this photo. The skunk was right between that jug of vinegar and the red jacket.

I closed the door and alerted A. By the time he got his pistol loaded, the skunk was gone. The dogs had left their defensive positions. Partially they gave up because once I arrived, they considered their job done. But also, the skunk sprayed. Right there. On our front steps. And directly in Jasper's face, I think.

When A. went out to find the skunk gone, Jasper was hiding in the corner, making little gasping noises and with his eyes streaming tears. He had clearly gotten the spray in his eyes and also inhaled some. I looked online to see what we should do, but the suggestions of flushing his eyes out with saline solution or bathing his head with a mixture of hydrogen peroxide, etc. didn't seem too practical for one of our feral dogs. They are not accustomed to being handled, and he was obviously in distress. I think we would have gotten a pretty good bite for our troubles.

The internet also said we should take him to a vet. Given the nearest vet is 100 miles away, I decided to wait a bit on that one and see what happened.

In the meantime, our entire house absolutely reeked of skunk. I have never smelled anything like it. A strong skunk smell is a bit like really strong tire rubber. This was like that, but more chemically and a little like garlic. If garlic smelled like tires and chemicals. It was bad. SO bad. And everywhere in the house.

The smell actually woke all the children up. There wasn't much I could do. I don't buy scented candles, although we do have three religious candles with saints on them that A. bought at the grocery store many years ago for the children. These are lightly scented, so I lit them and gave two to the youngest children, who brought them into Poppy's room. This is a small room, with no outside windows or anything, so they could kind of seal it off. 

They also asked me for some of my perfume. I bought a set of sample fragrances awhile ago so I could try a bunch, and I still had some. I gave this to them.

A plethora of options.

They chose Versace White Diamond and sprayed it liberally in Poppy's room.

The eldest child barricaded himself in his bedroom and sprayed his cologne in there. Amusingly, this is Versace Eros. So now that entire side of the house smells like a Versace scent factory.

I, meanwhile, sat at the dining room table with the St. Martin candle directly under my nose.

Being careful not to burn my nose, of course.

As soon as it was light, I was out the door in search of fresh air. An excellent incentive to get out for my run this morning. 

Jasper was still in his corner, but when I came out, he got up and went on my run with me. His eyes seemed fine, although he did stop several times to rub his head in the tall grasses and I caught his unfortunate stench anytime I was downwind of him.

The face of a dog who will not be getting any petting in the near future.

The kitchen, which is pretty close to the front door, still smells bad, even with all the windows open. For this reason, I allowed the eldest child to eat his breakfast in his bedroom. The younger children ate theirs in the van.

Well-ventilated, and with handy cup holders for their chocolate milk.

I can only hope that skunk took off for a far-off destination, never to be seen again. And that we don't get any more skunky visitors this fall.

Addendum: How naive of me to think the skunk was gone! Just now, hours after the excitement, I was coming up the front steps and saw something black and furry wedged under the firewood rack right next to the steps. Like literally eight inches from where my feet were. For a second I thought it was one of the dogs. But they had gone on a walk with one of the kids. Could it be the skunk, which had hidden itself RIGHT NEXT TO MY FRONT STEPS?

Yup. Apparently the dogs were so traumatized by their run-in with it, they just decided it could live next to our steps forevermore.

This time A. had his pistol ready to go and dispatched it quickly. But it did not go gently into that good night, instead sending out more waves of putrid stench as it died. Next to my front door.

Thanks a lot, skunk. And good riddance.

First Fire

Over the most recent two decades of my life, woodstoves have featured heavily in 17 of those years. We had a couple of years in our house on the Canadian border without a woodstove, and about six months in the rental house we first lived in in New Mexico didn't have one, either. But otherwise, I have built hundreds of fires to heat our homes both in New York and New Mexico.

Our woodstove in New York would hold a fire overnight, so it wasn't always necessary to build one every morning. But our woodstove here doesn't do that. I have to build a fire every morning. This is almost always my task, because I get up so much earlier than everyone else.

Looking at the weather forecast for today, I saw 48 degrees overnight and a high of only 59 degrees, with rain, for today. That, to me, spelled out "first fire" just as clearly as if it were in the forecast itself.

Accordingly, I spent some time yesterday cleaning up around the woodstove. I had to clear away all the things that had accumulated around the stove--the apple scrap vinegar that was fermenting, water jugs, empty ice cream buckets, etc.--and then vacuum off the woodstove itself and the area around it. It always gets very dusty over the summer.

The interior of the stove was cleaned out after the last fire, so that was ready. I had to shift the liquor cabinet from its summer position closer to the woodstove (and clean the cabinet and the area around it, because gross) to its winter position further over so there would be room for the wood rack.

Last, I gathered together everything I would need to start the fire: kindling that was still scattered in the area where the boys chop it for me in the winter, small pieces of wood, a box, and paper. I bring all of this in overnight so it won't be damp when I have to start the fire.

The younger children's old math workbooks are the best for starting fires, because the pages are so thin. And they like to see their math burn.

At 5:30 a.m., I layered the crumpled paper, ripped up cardboard, smaller pieces of kindling, bigger pieces of kindling, and small pieces of wood, and lit it.

The first flames of a very long woodburning season.

Barring difficulties like wet materials or zero draft, I can get a fire started in about ten minutes.

There it is.

When it's time to get the children up for school, I will get their clothing out of their rooms and lay it on top of the woodstove to warm up before they put it on. It makes it slightly easier to roust them out of their warm beds and into another cold school morning.

It's not yet time to burn the stove continuously, as the weather will fluctuate between pretty warm days and colder nights for some time yet, but the stove is now ready to go whenever its needed.

Are there any winter preparations happening at your house?

Git Up There, Sheep

We did something fun and certainly unusual yesterday: We had a sheep drive.

You've heard of cattle drives, right? Well, this is the same, but with sheep instead of cattle.

The reason we did this is because our neighbor is the caretaker of our ghost village's cemetery, and he agreed that it would be very helpful to put the sheep in there to clean up the weeds and tall grass that have grown up around the trees and headstones. 

Cemeteries are very labor-intensive to landscape with weed eaters or mowers, because of all the grave markers, flowers, etc. that must be avoided. But sheep are very skilled at picking around anything in their way while they're grazing. They are also small enough that they won't cause any damage, unlike cattle. So our neighbor asked anyone he knew who had relatives buried there if they minded sheep being in there to eat down the grass and weeds. None did.

This cemetery is fully fenced and quite large, about an acre. A. was happy to have a new place for the sheep to forage while we're waiting for the grass in their usual pasture to get establishd, especially one so nicely fenced. He waited until after Memorial Day, when quite a few people visit the cemetery to decorate graves. But first thing Tuesday, we prepared to move the sheep.

This cemetery is about two miles from our house, and it required us to get the sheep across the main road. We started early, so as to avoid the traffic resulting from Texans going home from their holiday weekend in the mountains. Luckily, we can see a couple of miles down the road in both directions from our village, so we waited until there were no vehicles in sight and then ran the sheep across.

Why did the sheep cross the road? To get to more grass, of course.

The rest of the drive was just keeping the flock from turning off into open pastures or other roads.

I drove the Honda so I could get ahead of the flock and block off intersections where they might go the wrong way. 

Waiting for the flock at the intersection to turn them left.

Little Bo Peep was with me.

One boy was on his bike, so he could drive the sheep from behind but also get ahead of them as necessary. A. and the other boy were on foot behind the flock.

It took about an hour, but eventually . . .

Success.

A. has to haul water up there for them in his truck, but it's otherwise a very nice place for them to spend a couple of weeks. And at the end, the entire cemetery will be well-manicured, thanks to the sheep.

Some Small Slices

Let's just say that these photos and the accompanying explanations are small slices of the bizarre pie that is our life. Because there's really no other connecting theme.

We'll start with yesterday and work back in time.

Slice #1

In the summer, it is often the case that I spend all day trying to get my children to stay outside, and then they go out about an hour before bedtime. That means that then I have a very hard time getting them back IN.

It's very annoying.

On the plus side, though, we do all get to see skies like this as I'm marching them inside by the ear. (Literally.)

The view to the east looked alarmingly like a mushroom cloud.

And the view to the west looked much more impressive in person. (Both photos--plus about two dozen identical ones--taken by Cubby.)

Slice #2

There is a bull snake that hangs around our property. Cubby has named him Howard. Howard is liable to turn up anywhere, but the other day, the dogs' frantic barking alerted us to the fact that Howard had turned up under the bunk bed in the covered porch*.

We put the dogs in the shop to get them out of the way, then A. nudged Howard out from under the bed and out the door. The children were thrilled to be able to examine Howard up close.

Relatively speaking, that is.

Given that Howard is most likely the same snake that struck at me in the chicken coop, I don't feel quite so friendly towards him as the children do. However, bull snakes do eat rats and gophers, so I grudgingly tolerate his presence.

Slice #3

Remember that goldfish pond Cubby was excavating in the back pasture? Well, he hasn't gotten it big enough for goldfish yet, but it was certainly big enough to make a satisfying children's pond when it filled up after several big rains.

Muddy play is the best play.

Okay, I think that's a big enough pie for now. Over and out.

* Yes, there is a bunk bed in our porch, left there by the previous owner. I think his nephews used to sleep out there when they were visiting. We use the top bunk to store junk we don't want the kids to get. The bottom bunk is now a dog bed, and the space under the bed is also a dog den.

Still Here!

It occurs to me that my last few posts have focused quite a bit on the raging fire near our house, and a lack of updating here may lead some people to fear we were swallowed by that fire.

We were not.

We had one bad night when the wind was blowing directly to us from the fire and we could see it just over the paved road a few miles to the south of us. We figured that if it jumped that road, there was nothing to stop it from running right through the (very dry) pastures to our house. That was the night I packed all the essential documents and put the bag by the door.

A. stayed up to watch, though, and around 10:30 p.m., the wind shifted just a bit, the humidity went up, and the crisis was over for us.

Also, there was a big truck with a water tank on the back that was running up and down that road for hours, soaking the ground on the south side.

Can I tell you how grateful we are for the 75 men and women who showed up to help fight this fire? SO GRATEFUL. Most of them were from volunteer fire departments all over the northern part of the state, and they had to come a looong way to help. The community donated food, water, and places for them to sleep, and the school opened up so they could shower.

It's very comforting to live in a community that can mobilize so quickly when there's an emergency.

That fire is about 90% contained right now, burning in isolated pockets of trees on unoccupied range land. It probably won't be 100% out until it rains, though, and we don't have much of that in our forecast.

Anyway. Let's hope that's the last of the fire talk for a very long time.

Over and out.

As the World Burns

Yesterday I went into the chicken coop to check for eggs and a snake hissed and lunged out of one of the other nesting boxes at me.

WOAH THERE.

Let me tell you how not happy I was about that. SO NOT HAPPY. I hate snakes. Especially being surprised by one in an enclosed space.

I couldn't see it very well, because it retreated back into the box and I didn't have a flashlight. I was pretty sure it was a non-venomous bull snake, though, rather than a rattlesnake. I still retreated, but when I cautiously re-entered a few minutes later with a long stick, it was gone.

There was, however, a dead chick in the coop this morning. Dammit.

Also yesterday, the entire south and east horizons were a wall of smoke.

A wildfire sparked by lightning started just five miles south of us on Saturday, and by yesterday had burned thousands of acres and was threatening the village, along with several ranches in its path. The 30-mile-an-hour winds made it pretty much impossible to control, and I was getting a lot of phone calls from neighbors offering places to stay if we needed to leave, a place for our horse, or just information.

I had a bag packed with clothes and in the van if we needed to leave quickly, but thankfully the wind was in our favor and it never came closer to us.

It is still burning, though, and friends of ours are still re-locating their livestock in case they have to evacuate, so it's not over yet.

I could use a break now, okay, universe? Just . . . just lay off for awhile with the anxiety-inducing situations, please.

There's No Escaping Sheep

At least, not if you're married to A., who considers life a sad and empty thing if there aren't wool-bearers somewhere on the property.

The last sheep we had were the three ram lambs A. bought to fatten over the summer and feed us over the winter. The last proper flock we had was at least five years ago.

It was a long, sad five years for A.

But no more! For yesterday, the sheep man brought home the beginnings of his new flock.

Baa.

Those are Merinos. A. drove to the southern part of the state to get them (sleeping in the open trailer on the open range so he could be at the ranch early in the morning, but that's another story) and got them from a large sheep operation that was shipping older ewes to Mexico. There are six ewes there and one ram lamb. Most, if not all, of the ewes are probably pregnant and could have a lamb anytime in the next couple of weeks.

A good start to a flock, indeed.

Although A. and the children were very excited at the arrival of the sheep, you know who wasn't? Samson. 

Well, that's not strictly accurate. He got excited all right. As soon as he caught the scent of the sheep when A. was preparing to unload them, he galloped right across the pasture and jumped two five-foot-high fences to get away from them.

Twenty-three-year-old horses are NOT supposed to do that.

Luckily, we live in a ghost town, so he can run quite a ways before he gets to anything. What he did was make a beeline for one of our neighbors about half a mile away to visit her horse. A. went after him and brought him home with no trouble, and thankfully no injuries from his athletic endeavors.

Then A. spent some time in the pasture with Samson and his halter, feeding him hay, patting him, and reassuring him that his new pasture-mates were nothing to be afraid of. He's fine now.

Don't even think about trying to leap that fence again, Samson.

I have no idea why Samson freaked out the way he did. He's been around plenty of cows, but I guess the scent is different. Luckily, the sheep are accustomed to both horses and dogs, so they were perfectly placid.

Anyway. The current menagerie stands at four chickens, two puppies, one horse, and seven sheep, and who knows how many lambs to come.

At least it's never boring around here.

Waiting on the World To Change

It is currently 31 degrees, dry, and windy. But when I get up tomorrow it will be snowing. And it will continue snowing most of tomorrow and tomorrow night.

I was not dreaming of a white Thanksgiving, if only because it makes animal care so much more difficult. They still need food and water, even if their hay is covered in six inches of snow and the outside tap is frozen. And even if the power goes out, which is a distinct possibility.

So I took some measures to ensure that no matter what happens tomorrow, I can feed and water our growing menagerie without too much aggravation.

First I placed a large tub in A.'s office--which has a door leading directly into the shop--and filled it with water. That way I'll have plenty of water to put in buckets for the horse, chickens, and dogs, with or without a functioning tap or water pump.

No one needs to go in and out of that door anyway, right?

I used some rocks to secure a tarp over part of Samson's hay in the pasture, because it's not under cover and if it snows as much as they think it will, he might have a hard time getting to it. I might have to dig the tarp out a bit, but at least once it's moveable, I can just flip it off to uncover the dry hay underneath.

For the chickens, I cooked a couple of the greenish pumpkins from the volunteer plants. They'll probably stay in their coop for a couple of days, and having food for them to peck at keeps them from pecking at each other.

And finally, for the humans, Poppy and I made chocolate chip cookies.

I suppose we could eat some pumpkin, too, but cookies sounded much more appealing.

Okay, Mama N. I'm ready as I'll ever be. Bring on the Thanksgiving snow. (But not too much, okay? Thanks.)

Introductions Are in Order

So.

As of yesterday, we have a horse.

Everyone, meet Samson.

Samson, meet everyone.

Samson was given to us by one of the teachers at the school, who also co-owns a ranch down the hill and runs the quarter-horse breeding program there. Her family has had a horse operation for generations, and to say she knows horses is a great understatement. Samson was the horse her own daughter, now grown, learned to ride on and won many competitions with.

Samson is now 22 years old and has bad teeth, which means he can't just graze on pasture like all horses do here. He needs special senior horse feed, which is expensive and requires someone to actually feed him twice a day. 

On a large ranch, this care quickly becomes burdensome and impractical, as well as expensive. So Samson really couldn't stay where he was, but they didn't want to just put him down, because besides his teeth, he's in very good shape.

So she thought of us. I had asked her about riding lessons for the boys when we first moved here, and she thought maybe we would like Samson.

We would.

Samson is an exceptionally calm and well-trained horse, which is just what our children need. According to the lady we got him from, who taught her own two daughters to ride on him, there is no safer horse for children. Good thing, as I know exactly nothing about horses and wouldn't know what to do with a horse that isn't basically like a huge, well-trained dog.

His implacable nature is also useful given that Jasper--who apparently has a deep distrust of horses--spent all day yesterday by the fence, barking at the horse.

Samson was unimpressed.

Samson is living in half of the back pasture with the chickens. It's a little louder here than what he was used to, but it doesn't seem to bother him.

Welcome to Crazytown, Samson. We're so glad you're here.

Shot Him an Elk When He Was Only Nine

Warning: Dead animal photo ahead. 

An interesting thing about the state of New Mexico is that there is no minimum hunting age. And that is why nine-year-old Cubby--who completed his hunter education course just this spring--was able to enter his own name in for the elk draw this year. And draw a tag for a mature bull elk in a hunting area about two hours from here.

Now. Some things you should know about this place where he got his tag. It is a mountain. It is a high mountain. It is a high, remote, cold mountain with no road going up it.

The prospect of taking a nine-year-old hunting on a mountain in October on a hunt that would require camping, hiking several miles, and packing out hundreds of pounds of meat in the event of Cubby actually shooting an elk would probably seem ridiculous to most men.

Luckily for Cubby, his father is not most men. A. was all, "He drew for that mountain, and he's going to hunt that mountain."

On a positive note, more than one person told A. that that area is the best for elk in the entire state, and because A. and Cubby were planning on hiking in about five miles, they were unlikely to see any other hunters.

They scouted the mountain a couple of weeks ago and found that our Honda won't go to the top of the track that goes part of the way up, so that meant that they would have to hike in from fairly far down. And since they were going to be camping up there, that meant they had to carry all their gear on their backs all the way.

Because it was dry the weekend of the hunt, A. decided to do without a tent. But because it was cold--well below freezing--he brought two sleeping bags for Cubby and one for him, plus wool blankets. His pack was incredibly heavy just with the bedding, ammunition, and other sundry things. That meant that Cubby carried all the food in his pack.

They hiked in six miles to their first campsite.

See those two teeny tiny peaks way in the distance? They went to the top of the one on the right. Insane.

Luckily for them, my brother--who is also an experienced hunter--was able to fly into Albuquerque and meet them at the mountain for the hunt. I felt much better having another adult there, just in case, and A. felt a lot better having another adult there to help him pack out the meat, just in case. Also, my brother took all the photos.

Like this cool one with the moon in the background.

It was a strenuous, physical hunt, with a lot of hiking and stalking and crawling around in the underbrush. They camped out for two nights and hunted all day Saturday with no success. But first thing Sunday morning . . .

Victory.

Cubby shot that elk right through the heart, a perfect shot, from 35 yards away.

Then the real fun began, as A. gutted, skinned, and boned out the meat at high speed so he and my brother could pack it all the way back to the car. They carried their own packs with all the gear they packed in, along with a game bag of meat weighing approximately one hundred pounds. Each. Five miles.

Do you know how brutal that is? So brutal. And Cubby carried the elk's rack on his own pack, which is a not-insignificant weight when you only weigh 70 pounds yourself.

They made it, though, and we now have about a thousand dollars worth of meat in our freezer and one very, very proud young hunter.

Maybe not as dramatic as Davy Crockett's bear when he was only three, but pretty damn good for nine years old.

The Obligatory Pumpkin Patch Post

It's that time of year! The time of year when the Internet is awash with photos of children wearing sweaters and being all adorable in pumpkin patches.

I have a contribution to that category this year.

Poppy and I went to the pumpkin patch today and she picked out her very own pumpkin.

She was quite pleased with herself.

You will note that my toddler+pumpkin photo is not actually in a pumpkin patch. That's because the patch is the backyard under my clothesline, which is currently riddled with gopher holes and decoratively accented with dying green bean plants.

How festively autumnal.

Actually I don't have a picture in the pumpkin patch because I didn't have the camera with me when Poppy and I went out to water my newly transplanted sprouting broccoli and took a detour to pull a pumpkin off a dead vine.

It was quite a heavy pumpkin, but Poppy insisted on carrying it inside by herself to show Daddy. Which is when I actually got the photos of her with it, in my chair in the corner of the living room.

All smiles with her pumpkin.

The smiles turned to tears when I had to confiscate the pumpkin because she was sure it was a toy and kept carrying it around and dropping it. Since I do actually want to eat these pumpkins rather than play with them, I put it safely in A.'s office for storage.

Poppy was not pleased that I took her toy away. Good thing there are about a dozen more in the backyard. 

There are no wagon rides or corn mazes at our pumpkin patch, but then again, it's free and right out our back door. Can't beat that.

The Serpent in the Garden

Jack had a very scary encounter with a snake last night. Scary because this snake was not small; it was not a harmless garter snake; and it was not hiding quietly in the green beans.

Last night after dinner, A. and Jack went outside to continue work on a stone wall A. is building adjoining the patio. Jack ran out first onto the patio and stepped right over a rattlesnake. On the patio. Eight feet from the door. Directly in the path we always take to go into the back pasture.

Holy shit.

The snake was probably there because the sky had clouded over and it was seeking the warmth of the stones that had absorbed the sun's heat. It didn't rattle or, thank God, strike as Jack ran over it, though it did coil up.

A. was right behind Jack, saw the snake just as Jack ran over it, and yelled out that there was a rattlesnake and GET AWAY. Jack veered right off into the driveway and ran a safe distance away. The snake had still not moved.

It was a pretty big rattlesnake--about two feet long--so A., rather than use a hoe or a shovel or anything that required him to get within a handle's length of the snake, got his gun and shot it in the head.

All of the other children of course joined in at this point in the proceedings to observe the snake and hear all the details of the encounter. Charlie, being Charlie, requested the rattle. A. got out the hatchet to cut off the rattle, but took the precaution first of cleanly cutting off the head and throwing it over the fence.

And still, five minutes after its head was blown off, when A. went to cut off the rattle, the snake's body tried to strike A. WITHOUT ITS HEAD.

Freakiest thing ever.

Anyway.

Charlie got his rattle, no one got a snake bite, and Jack's guardian angel should get a promotion and a pay raise.

The end, and three cheers for a happy ending.

Poppy and the Chickens

Like most toddlers, Poppy is a big fan of routines. Particularly if it's a routine that she knows well enough to dictate the steps. In her case lately, that means taking care of the chickens in the morning.

She wakes up before the sun, and before the chickens. But as soon as the sun starts to come up--around 6 a.m. these days--I tell her it's time to go let the chickens out and she heads straight to the door to put on her pink boots.* Then she goes to the refrigerator to get the container of chicken scraps and waits at the door until I open it for her.

After getting down the steps and into the enclosed porch, she leads the way to the shop, wherein lives the commercial chicken food. Once there, I fill the container of food for her, and we switch containers; she carries the commercial food and I carry the scraps.

I would rather it was the other way around, because the container of scraps has a lid on it and is therefore much less likely to spill all over if she falls over a rock or into a hole or whatever.

But she wants that open container of food, and she will have it, by God.

No one's telling THIS girl what she can and can't carry.

To be fair, in the two weeks or so that we've been doing this, she's only tripped and spilled the food once, which is pretty good for a kid who's not even two yet.

Anyway.

Once we get across the back pasture to the chicken coop, I open the outer door to the pen, and we both dump our food into the chickens' pan.

At which point she always announces, "Dump!" with great satisfaction as she suits the the action to the word.

Then she exits the pen and I open the door to the actual coop for the chicken rush.

Best to stay out of the way of those birds when they're headed for food**.

As soon as the chickens are released and eating, she heads back to the shop, puts the container back in the bucket of commercial food, takes the empty scrap container from me, carries it inside to the kitchen, and puts it back on the counter, thus completing another successful morning of chicken care.

Pretty soon I bet I can just send her out on her own to do it. 

* Which, incidentally, she can do all by herself. As the parent of any small child can tell you, this is pretty much the Holy Grail of children's shoes.

** Unfortunately, the gray chicken formerly known as Lucy appears to be more of a Lucius and will probably not be with us for long, because I have no interest in having two roosters.

Many Photos, Few Words

I seem to have been taking a lot of photos lately and then doing nothing with them. And so . . .

It snowed all day on Saturday.

The tulips were brave.

As were our neighbors across the street: the horses and bull.

The boys were thrilled with the enormous snow balls they could roll. This is Cubby.

And this is Jack.

Poppy was slightly less thrilled.

Then yesterday, it was sunny and 70 degrees and all the snow was gone. The boys chopped down two and a half trees.

Because A. told them they could, not because they just went to town with the hatchet. Though I wouldn't put that past them.

Meanwhile, Poppy gave some of the farm animals a bath in a bucket.

Safely out of range of any falling trees.

And that's pretty much it. I think you're all caught up now. Over and out.

Eating My Mutton Words

Okay. Time for me to eat crow. Or rather, mutton.

Remember when I was all, "Mutton is strong. Mutton is gross. I do not want to eat mutton.This wether is going to be disgusting and I want to get rid of it." Or something to that effect?

Well, I was wrong.

We ended up only having Big Boy for about 24 hours before A. decided it would be kindest to just slaughter him. Sheep are flock animals, and without his flock and in an unfamiliar place, he was very distressed and unhappy. So A. killed, skinned, and quartered him on Wednesday night and hung the meat up in the shed to age.

It was pretty warm during the days, but very cool at night, and the meat was in game bags to keep off any flies. A. also cut off the tenderloin and put that in the refrigerator to age. He decided to grill some of it last night. I smelled the raw meat. It had no smell at all that I could discern, so I allowed myself to hope that it might be edible.

Not only was it edible, it was downright tasty.

I've eaten some pretty good lamb and some pretty rank sheep in the last several years, and this was one of the best we've had. Not only was it not strong tasting, it didn't taste of lamb at all.

Never have I been more surprised.

I thought maybe it was because of the vinegar marinade A. used and the grilling over juniper wood. So today, when we butchered the remainder of the meat and A. made stock from the bones, I tasted some of the meat from the boiled bones.

Nothing. No lamb taste. It may as well have been beef. Even the fat A. rendered doesn't have an unpleasant sheep-y taste.

I don't know if it's the breed, the fact that it was a wether, or the aging process--or maybe a combination of those factors--but whatever the reason, I'm very, very happy to be proven wrong.

I'm still going to leave the line-dried sheep jerky to A. and the boys, though.

My clothesline isn't just for clothes anymore.

Shepherd Vibes

First we got a reputation around Blackrock as people who will dispose of unwanted roosters. This reputation was re-established at our home in northern New York, where we once again found ourselves offing extraneous male chickens for neighbors.

And now? That reputation is only growing in our new home.

We have a new short-term resident.

Say hello to Big Boy.

Yesterday A. called the guy we get our milk from to tell him we wouldn't be there today to pick up our usual two gallons because I'm still trying to catch up from the backlog of milk that accumulated during A.'s trip. When A. got off the phone, he informed me that we would shortly be receiving a wether to butcher.

Say what?

A wether is a castrated male sheep. They're castrated to make them easier to handle as they grow, so they can grow to a bigger size before being butchered. It also keeps the meat from getting too strong a taste. The milk people, who already have sheep, had been given three wethers by a woman whose father had always had sheep. He died; she wanted to get rid of the sheep. 

The milk people did not, however, particularly wish to butcher three large sheep. In the course of conversation with the milk lady, I had mentioned that we used to have sheep. And that we butcher our own animals. So I guess we were a logical home for an unwanted meat sheep.

We also suspect they do not wish to eat that much mutton.

Because this dude most definitely ain't no lamb. That's a full-grown sheep. And wether or not, that meat is going to be strong.

I was not enthused about this. I eat lamb, albeit somewhat grudgingly. It's not my favorite, and I have zero interest in eating mutton, which is of course even stronger tasting than lamb. A. said he would probably give most of the meat to some of the older people in the village, many of whom grew up raising and eating sheep.

In the meantime, however, we have a sheep. 

My parents are coming for a short visit on Thursday*. A. very thoughtfully said we could wait to butcher Big Boy until they left. They're not really into the homesteading lifestyle, so I think they'll appreciate that. Also, the weather is going to be too warm to hang the meat for aging until a week from Thursday.

But mostly, the delay means that A. is a shepherd again, if only for a little while. And that makes him very happy indeed.

* They asked what they could pick up for us before they came, no doubt expecting I would ask for something like lettuce or avocados. Instead I asked if they could pick up fifty pounds of feed corn for the sheep. And this is why I have the reputation in my family as the weird one.

Way Back Wash Day

I've read a lot about what you might call the history of domestic work, and one thing that has always struck me is how much it sucked to wash clothes. Every history of women's work I have ever read has specifically outlined the incredible physical labor involved in a wash day. So much hauling of water and pouring it in and out of tubs and agitating and scrubbing and wringing and NO THANKS.

Then my washing machine stopped working and I got a very small partial taste of  hand-powered washing which did nothing to change my mind about how much it must have sucked.

See, on Tuesday when I opened up the washing machine to take the clothes out to hang up on the clothesline, they were still sopping wet. I quickly ascertained that the agitator and spin cycle weren't working.

I pulled the clothes out anyway, wrung them out as best I could outside, and hung them on the clothesline to drip and eventually get dry*.

Now. We do not live in a place where it is easy to A) get appliances repaired or B) buy new appliances.

I figured A. could probably fix this machine with the aid of YouTube tutorials. However, he didn't get home from New York until Tuesday night and has been trying to catch up with work ever since.

He brought a bunch of dirty clothes home with him, and the rest of us keep producing dirty clothes, too. And while the washing machine isn't operating all the way, it's still partially working. That is, it fills with water and drains by itself. All I needed to do was the agitating and wringing part.

Or rather, A. did. He's much stronger than I am, you see. So I put in a load of laundry, soaked it in warm water for awhile, and handed A. Cubby's Little League bat.

He used to bat to agitate the clothes and sort of lift them up and around in the water. Then I drained the water and re-filled it for another round with the baseball bat. I don't use soap anyway, so I wasn't required to do multiple rinsings to get rid of the soap.

Who needs a machine agitator when you have a baseball bat?

After that, I just squeezed them out as best I could in the washer and hung them on the clothesline. They didn't get as clean as they would have if the machine had done it all--I probably should have done another rinse--and they certainly didn't get as dry, but they definitely got cleaner.

I did another load after this one by myself, which convinced me that I would have been a terrible pioneer woman. My hands were sore from the agitating and hand wringing, my sleeves were wet up to the elbow, and that was only one load. And I didn't have to haul, heat, or dump out any water.

A. promised me he would take the machine apart and look at it this weekend. Until then, if you need me, I'll be here doing my laundry with a baseball bat. Because that, my lovelies, is how this weird and wonderful life goes sometimes.

* I was once again grateful to have a good long clothesline as it meant I wasn't putting the sopping wet clothes in a clothes dryer to burn propane for the two hours it would have taken them to actually dry. Hooray for long clotheslines and excellent New Mexico drying weather.

It's a Dirty Job, and We Have To Do It

The very day A. was due home from New York, I had a terrible time keeping the fire going. After all my boasting about my careful fire care during his absence, I figured I had jinxed myself. But then I realized that the handle attached to the damper inside the stove pipe seemed to have come loose and was no longer turning the damper to open it. Which meant that the fire wasn't getting enough draft to burn well.

A. confirmed this when he got home and said there was nothing to be done but let the fire go out and take the pipe apart in the morning to get at the damper.

When we got home from church, he said, "Okay, I'll fix the stove now. It shouldn't take too long."

Those, my friends, are the very definition of famous last words.

He took apart the stove pipe. This is when he saw that there was a rather dangerous build-up of creosote inside the stove pipe. So we had to get that cleaned out lest it cause a chimney fire and burn the house down.

Not exaggeration.

However, we don't have the proper tools to clean the pipe. A bunch of old rags attached to a long, stiff wire did the trick, along with A. basically sticking his entire arm up the stove pipe. Luckily, our house is only one story, so the stove pipe isn't that long and this cleaned out the majority of it.

Now here is where I tell you my main objection to wood heat: It is filthy. Hauling in wood means dirt and bits of bark all over. Loading the stove means smoke and ash sometimes come out. Cleaning out the stove means ash gets everywhere. But the filthiest of all is cleaning out the stove pipe.

This is not what you want to see in your kitchen.

In addition to all the creosote that came out of the pipe and (more or less) into that pan there, the actual pieces of stove pipe that A. took apart fell to the floor and scattered creosote across a large part of the kitchen floor under the table.

I knew we had to do this, but to say I was displeased about the mess was a vast understatement.

A. bore the brunt of the filth in the cleaning of the stove pipe:

Look at that chipper chimney sweep.

But I was tasked with the clean-up of the actual house when the stove had been re-assembled. 

Thanks to Bugs Bunny (for the boys) and a nap (for Poppy), the children at least were out of the way during the part where the stove was in pieces and piles of creosote were all over the kitchen. But just as A. finished up and I was starting to sweep and mop the horrid mess off the floor, the cartoon ended and Poppy woke up.

The boys were whining in the doorway that they wanted lunch, Poppy was crying in her crib, and I was faced with the reality that a mop does very little to actually clean a large quantity of creosote off the floor.

I sort of got the floor cleaned--leaving Poppy to cry in her crib for a few minutes and ignoring the whining for food--but for the rest of the day everyone was going around with gray socks. 

After the kids were all in bed, I got down on my hands and knees with many wet rags and got the floor really clean. Hands and knees was the only way to do it. The mop was just pushing dirty water around, because it got dirty immediately, as did the water in the bucket the first time I dunked the mop in there.

This morning I spent some time with another rag cleaning window sills, cabinets, the top of the microwave . . . basically every flat surface in the kitchen that had collected a layer of fine creosote.

But now the kitchen is finally clean again, and the woodstove won't burn the house down. Hooray.

Keeping the Home Fires Burnin'

One of A.'s impossibly Dad Things is calling the furnace "the dollar bill burner." As in, "That dollar bill burner is running again; I gotta stoke up the woodstove!"

It's a point of pride with him to keep the fire going hot enough that the furnace doesn't turn on during the day. The first thing he does when he gets up in the morning is squat in front of the woodstove to get the fire going again. He grudgingly concedes that the furnace is a handy back-up, though, so that he doesn't have to get out of his nice warm bed to feed the fire at night*.

But otherwise, he is One With the Woodstove in his quest to minimize our propane use.

However, A. left on Sunday for a week-long trip to Blackrock, leaving the woodstove to my care. Unfortunately, I also have four small children in my care, which makes it significantly more challenging to give the woodstove the attention it requires. Before he left, A. magnanimously told me I could just run the furnace and not worry about the woodstove. I'm sure it hurt him to say that, but I appreciated it.

But! I am proud to announce that I have had the woodstove going--and the furnace not going--every single day he's been gone.

This requires significantly more planning than A. has to do in his woodstove care. For instance, I make sure the night before that I have paper, cardboard, and small pieces of wood so that I can get the fire started in the morning without going in and out of the door, thereby possibly waking up small children.

I can only empty the ashes--which has to be done every other day--when Poppy is safely strapped into her chair at the table and thus can't trip me up on my way out the door with a pan of hot ashes and embers.

I try to get the fire going before she wakes up, too, so that I don't have her standing at my shoulder, staring longingly at the pretty flames while I block her with my body so she doesn't crawl right in there with them.

Nascent morning fire.

Not that she has tried getting too close to the fire, actually. She's pretty cautious, as a matter of fact. And just yesterday, when she had a complete meltdown outside while we were waiting for the school bus that even nursing didn't stop, I brought her with me to stoke up the fire and she calmed right down while she was staring at the flames.

They are quite meditative, I must say. And they've been burning the whole time A. has been gone.

Thus, Ronnie Milsap performs my theme song for the week.

Here's me taking my bow. And washing soot off my hands for the fiftieth time.

* It has occurred to me that since I still get up with Poppy at least twice a night, I could actually shove a piece of wood in there on my way through the kitchen, but . . . no. Shuffling into her room to feed her is challenging enough without adding a live fire and splintery wood into the mix at 2 a.m.