The Newest Obsession

Thanks to Mrs. Lawless, I have ALL SORTS OF NEW THINGS to spend money on.

Caution: the things presented on this website are really super exciting, and cost money too. If you're trying to keep to a budget, I don't recommend clicking.

Sarah, I REALLY don't recommend you clicking on this. If you do, we may just have to make a club of People Who Will Never Have Money Again But Will Be Able To Can The Entire Summer's Worth Of Fresh Food, Not To Mention Cook And Heat The Whole House At The Same Time With A Wood-Burning Stove.



Those caveats being over, let me tell you that this website is cooler than Facebook, cooler than LadiesAgainstFeminism, and even (I can't believe I'm saying this) cooler than the Vermont Country Store. AND they sell real-live (real-inanimate?) wood burning stoves, gas-free lawnmowers, meat grinders, veggie grinders, fruit grinders, super canning supplies, everything one would ever need to make goat cheese and butter (except the goats, of course, but I'm working on that. Goatses!), and a whole library of natural-living knowledge.

And now you know why I don't think I'll ever have money again.

And so, without further ado, I present to you
Lehman's Products For Simple, Self-Sufficient Living
http://www.lehmans.com/

More Farm Girl News

The Lawlesses are kindly letting me come over and follow them around during their morning chores, by which I mean experiment on their animals rather than kill my own. In honor of them, I shall enumerate:

Things Everybody Needs To Know About Goats:

1. Their horns are super-efficient handles. Don't think you're hurting them when you wrench their heads around to get them to go where you want; they secretly like it.

2. Another note about their horns: they get stuck on things. Like, in the middle of a fence. Goats are smart enough to get their heads through the fence one way, but not smart enough to get them through the other way. It works like barbs on an arrow, except it baas.

3. Every morning you have to clean the poop out of their food troughs. 'Nuff said. These are not particularly smart animals.

4. They're fast little boogers.

5. When you chase a baby goat and manage to catch it and it screams bloody murder for its mama, don't worry. It'll quiet down after you hold it for a while, and the next time it won't scream for such a long time, and so on until it doesn't mind being caught.

6. On a related topic, the goats always sound a lot more pathetic than they actually are. Don't let a goat make you think it's lost and sad and miserable and needs extra food; it's a lie.

7. When you're throwing hay down from the top of the hay stack into their feeders and you miss and hit a goat on the head with a fourth of a bale of hay, it probably won't even notice.

8. If you shock it with a cattle prod, however, it will notice. Then it will make a funny startled "maa-ap" sound and leap over the rest of the goats, and probably get stuck crowd-surfing, if you happen to shock it when they're all crowded around trying to stick their noses in the bucket of grain that you're taking to their trough.

Crazy week

Lessons learned this week:

Lesson 1.

Country people carry chainsaws in the backs of their pickups just in case there's a tree down across the road.

Other country people cut trees and just leave them when they fall across the road.

If someone hasn't gotten there with a chainsaw to clear the road, it takes a REALLY LONG TIME to get to Mass if you don't know alternative routes.

The Moral: when you live on a dirt road, always know alternative routes.







Lesson 2.

That drain pipe that goes from the gully on one side of the driveway to the gully on the other side that empties into the pond is there for a reason.

When the drain pipe is full of leaves and the forecast calls for 8 inches of rain overnight, you ought to clear it out.

If you don't, your barn is going to flood and a lot of boxes are going to be ruined.




A snow shovel is a very efficient tool for moving water from your barn floor into buckets.








Lesson 3:

Sometimes one's front pasture turns into a river, when the skies let loose 8 inches of rain. There is no moral to be gleaned from this, just miscellaneous wisdom.

Also, when one's front pasture is no longer a river, sometimes it's still a lake for a while. And then you might not want to haul dead branches from the banks, because you might fall in. I didn't, but I might have.





I will post pictures of the flood once I finish this roll out. In the meantime, pictures are going here: pictures, so check back. I tried to embed pictures in this post, but I failed somehow. I'll try to figure it out again, because it's much more interesting to read posts that have pictures in them.

Adventures in a Very Chilly Wonderland

You know why they tell you to run your faucets when it's cold? It's so the pipes don't freeze. But what if you have a well and you never know when the holding tank is going to run empty? You can't really waste water all night, can you?

Well, if you're an inhabitant of the Cedar House, you can't.

Turns out, if you're an inhabitant of the Cedar House, you get to spend the first half of the next day figuring out how the siphon works, collecting buckets, and siphoning water from the holding tank into the buckets and lugging them up to the house. Because the pipes don't refrain from freezing just to accommodate your desire to save water.

When your hands are all wet from siphoning water into buckets and you don't have a towel, and then you have to stand next to the bucket holding the plastic tube to keep it squirting into the bucket and not all over the floor of the well house and it's nearly freezing outside, it's a good time to get some souls out of Purgatory.

I really don't like getting souls out of Purgatory.

But about half an hour after lunch, after I had lugged another batch of water buckets up to the house and was washing dishes (with a bowl of lukewarm soapy water and a sponge, and rinsing the soapy water by dousing the dishes with icy water [remember what I said about the temperatures?] from a pitcher), the faucet (which was now open because you never know when plumbing will start working again) magically started to drip. The drip turned into a steady stream, and the steady stream got larger, until there was no doubt that the pipes were thawed. So now all faucets are running merrily, wasting water for sheer joy of having plumbing that works.

Tonight I am definitely setting the sink to run.

In which our heroine begins a new life, and finds it uneventful.

Well, I'm a country girl now. I'm not quite sure I'm ready for this adventure, but I guess you're never really ready for anything; you just have to start. If the digital camera weren't at my aunt's house in Dallas, I'd post pictures of how quiet and rainy it is here - just my sort of weather. Perfect weather for curling up under a quilt and reading Narnia. I gave my parents lots of tea for Christmas, and brought my own as well, so there is no shortage of hot beverages; unfortunately, though, the well water is tasting sort of funny lately, so the tea definitely needs sugar to mask the well water taste. I usually go sugarless, because otherwise how can you taste the tea?

I would just like to announce that I am a very spoiled person. The entire time the folks have been up here, they've been suffering with dial-up internet. About a week before I came up, the satellite finally came through, so I only have to deal with pages that take 30 seconds to load, instead of 3 minutes like it has been up till now. I don't quite appreciate how spoiled I am, though, since 30 seconds is still inexcusably long with any reasonable internet connection. And my dad works in telecom, so we always have stuff long before anybody else does. All the neighbors except two still use dial-up. Yeah, we're in the country. There is no DSL. There is no spoon.

I was planning to start leash-training the fat white cat today, because he's obese and has no muscle at all, and if I can manage to leash-train him he will at least be able to take walks up our driveway, which might be good for a couple of pounds. (In case anybody thinks this is a paltry sort of exercise regimen, you're quite right, but we do live at the back of a very narrow 10 acres, so the driveway is fairly substantial.) But it's rainy and cold today, and I feel like reading Narnia instead of going outside, so the Cat-Drag will have to be postponed till tomorrow. I hope Mr. Fatso appreciates how lucky he is.

Christmas, Christmas time is here

Quotable moments from the sisterly edition of Christmas this year:

My nephew Joseph: That's funny looking.
My niece Elizabeth: Your face is funny looking.
Joseph: Your mom is funny looking.
My sister Robin: You have the same mom!

Joseph: Because I'm sooooooooooooooo glamorouth.
(the kid is destined to be a drama major.)

Joseph: Man, guys, that was a great party. I'm totally hammered.
Robin: Joseph! Do you know what that means???
Joseph: No, I heard it from Elizabeth ...
Elizabeth: YOU DID NOT!!!

Wow

And just like, that, four and a half years of college are over. I'm free, but I feel so empty. How could I have spent the last semester not savoring every moment I had here?