The Woodpecker Hunt

Today my cats Henry and Aspen decided that they would try to catch a woodpecker. Mighty hunters that they are, they thought the best way to go about this was to climb as quickly as possible up the tree the woodpecker was pecking.

Obviously, the woodpecker had nothing to worry about!


I haven't been putting many photos on the blog lately, so just for a treat, here's a sunset I photographed last week. Our spectacular sunrise and sunset views are one of the things I treasure about living here on this farm:

Bucket Brigade

It's a cold, dry day today. Everything is hard and bright and frozen solid. Temperatures are supposed to drop to 11 degrees Fahrenheit tonight.

Now, I grew up in Maine, so I know that 11 degrees is nothing to some of you northern folks. But it's just about as cold as it ever gets down here. It brings up lots of challenges, because our farm is not set up well to deal with temperatures this low.

For example, we don't even have a frost-free outdoor faucet. We just have the regular kind of faucet that sticks out of the foundation of the house. From there, I run a long, long hose across the yard and down to the animal paddocks so that I can fill the 500+ gallons of water troughs per day.

In cold weather, the faucet freezes. And if the hoses are not laid straight and completely drained of all water, they freeze too. When that happens, we have a portable propane heater that we light and tuck in the crawl space under the house to thaw the faucet. If the afternoon is going to get warm enough, I lay the hoses in the sun and hope they thaw in time for me to water the animals.

If the afternoon is not going to be warm enough to thaw the hoses outside, we have two choices: Either drag 250' of frozen, dirty hose into the house, cram it into the bathtub stall, and let it heat up in a tub of hot water until it thaws, or else fill buckets in the kitchen sink and make a gazillion trips, carrying buckets by hand.

All the animals needed the ice in their troughs broken and removed today, of course, but only the sheep and the young horses needed their troughs refilled. So we opted to do the bucket brigade.

We collected all the spare buckets we could find (we save every empty cat litter bucket we ever get, because a farm can never have too many buckets) and started filling them in the kitchen sink and in the bathtub. I didn't count how many trips we had to take, but Ken and I both worked up a good sweat doing it.

As a special treat, we used warm water, which the animals really appreciated. I feel bad for the poor sheep, who were sheared a month late this year and have very little wool regrowth yet. But Icelandic sheep are used to cold weather, and they don't really seem very bothered about it.

I like our Virginia climate. I'm glad that we don't have very many days in the year like this one. In the interests of efficiency, I always look at what the weather is predicted to be, and every day that it's warm enough for me to water the animals using the hose, I fill everybody's troughs right up to the brim, just in case the next day will be another day when I have to do the bucket brigade.

Brrrrrr!

Our house is a wind tunnel because of the cat door, which faces directly into our prevailing wind direction and funnels the cold air from the Blue Ridge Mountains straight up the long central hallway that runs through the middle of the house.

Normally on windy days, I close the cat door to keep the wind out. But apparently last time we cleaned up the stack of junk mail piled on the kitchen counter, we didn't notice that the cat door was tucked into the stack, and we threw it out with the trash. Whoops!

So now we have nothing to close the hole with, and all day today the wind was blowing straight in, chilling the whole house as if we'd left a window open. I blocked it as best I could, but tomorrow my project is to cut a piece of something (maybe the sturdy plastic lid from a cat litter bucket?) to make a new cat door. We can't be wasting heating fuel like this---the hole needs to be plugged!

I keep thinking that we'd have a lot less wind chill in the house if we closed in the back porch. But every part of the year but winter, I love the openness of the porch. It's not very deep, so closing it in might make it feel cramped. Besides, we'd miss those Blue Ridge breezes during the warmer months of the year.

I have chilly "air conditioning" problems of my own. Every pair of jeans I own, except for one, has a large hole in the right thigh where I wore through the denim stacking hay bales. I always use my right knee to help me boost the bales to the top of the stack, and the abrasive hay wears right through my pants. So now I'm stuck doing chores outside in the cold, windy weather, with holes in my jeans the size of my palm. Brrrr!

I need to shop for new jeans sometime---and also new sneakers, since I've worn mine right through until the soles are falling off---but I just hate jeans-and-sneaker shopping. It's so boring and annoying trying on pair after pair that all look pretty much the same on the shelf but fit completely differently when you try them on.

When I do go shopping, I think I'll look for some nice thermal long johns too. That will make going out to do chores a lot less uncomfortable.

Meanwhile, maybe I'll dig out some of my stash of old jeans that don't fit me anymore. I bet I can pirate some large enough pieces off the jeans that don't fit to patch the jeans that do.

The Geography of Dreams

They've built an amusement park in my subconscious. By "they" of course, I mean "me." Or at least the sleeping, night time unconscious version of me.

I visited the place again in my dream last night. I've been there a few times before, but only now have I realized how vast it is. It's a crowded, noisy midway filled with flashing lights, spinning mechanical rides, throngs of strangers pushing strollers, merchants selling trinkets, booths where you can buy hot pretzels, Italian sausages, or fried dough.

It's the size of a city. It has its own train station. It has lighting displays to rival Las Vegas. It has the smells of every county fair I've ever been to and the soundtrack of a thousand video game arcades. Apparently, it has beach frontage on what seems to be the Pacific Ocean.

If you know me, you know that this description is the epitome of the kind of loud, bright, hectic environment that I usually try to avoid. Yet somehow, in the dream, I seem to know my way around. When I woke up this morning, I lay there for a while thinking that it was a real place and trying to remember when I had been there. It took a few minutes to figure out that I knew it from other dreams, where I had visited other parts of the place.

Do you have dream locations that you visit over and over again in your dreams? Or motifs that keep repeating themselves? If so, you probably understand how odd it is for such a gigantic---and totally alien---place to develop in my subconscious without my noticing it.

I'm sure it has to do with how stressful, busy, and multifaceted my days have become lately as I try to accomplish all the various tasks necessary to keep this farm afloat. I only want a quiet, peaceful life, yet right now the life seems overwhelming.

The interesting part is that in the dream I seem to be fairly confident about where I'm going. I don't get lost amid the maze of rides, booths, and lights. Even though it's not the type of place I normally see myself, in the dream I know that the place belongs to me. I take that as a good sign for my waking life.

I guess the new dream location is just symbolic of this new phase of my life that I'm in. Naturally, I've noticed that the motifs in my dreams do evolve over time. When I was younger, my "stress" dream was that I was missing the school bus. Until I was in my mid-twenties, every time I was stressed out, I would dream about missing the school bus. Eventually, one night I dreamed that the bus crashed into the lake without me on it, and after that I didn't dream about the school bus anymore.

Then I would dream I was trying to get to school in my car. Sometimes the car wouldn't start, or the brakes or steering wouldn't work properly. Or sometimes I'd parked it somewhere and couldn't find it.

Lots of times, I've dreamed that I got to school, but it was now much bigger than it ever had been in real life. All the hallways were different, I couldn't remember my locker number, I couldn't find my books, and I had no idea where my classroom was.

I like to imagine that my disorientation in these dreams was caused by my dreaming self actually flying back to my real high school, which has been expanded and completely renovated since I graduated. So I probably wouldn't be able to find my way around even if I went there when I was awake!

When things are going well in my life, I often dream that I make it to my class and am ready to start my lesson. Clearly there is a huge "learning" theme in my dream motifs.

One of the longest-running dream motifs I ever experienced was the "scary bathroom" motif. For years, I had unpleasant dreams about bathrooms. Sometimes I'd be trying to go and people would burst in and keep trying to talk to me, and I couldn't get them to go away. Or it would be this huge, cavernous public bathroom with no doors on the stalls and every toilet overflowing until the place was ankle-deep in filth. One time, I dreamed that some tough, urban teens cornered me in a bathroom stall, squirted lighter fluid on me, and lit a match.

These dreams happened fairly regularly for years. It got to the point where I started to believe I had some kind of weird, repressed phobia that I didn't recognize. Certainly I had never had a bad experience in a bathroom, and I wasn't afraid of public bathrooms in my waking life. I couldn't figure it out, and still the dreams continued.

Finally, one night I had another terrible bathroom dream that woke me up out of a sound sleep. When I woke up, I realized that I really, really needed to pee, so I got up and went to the... BATHROOM.

Oh! Finally, the light dawned. This whole time, literally for YEARS, all those bathroom dreams were just my subconscious trying to wake me up so I would go pee. When I wouldn't wake up, my subconscious just made the dreams more and more unpleasant, trying to make them bad enough that I would wake up.

I laughed so hard---and felt so stupid---that it had taken me that many years to decode such a simple message. After that, I have never had a scary bathroom dream again.

I’m not the kind of person who has nightmares very often, anyway. My subconscious and I have pretty much come to an understanding. I’m open to listening to messages from the dreamworld, and it, for the most part, doesn’t feel compelled to scare the daylights out of me.

Actually, my subconscious seems to have a rather dry sense of humor, which manifests in my dream symbolism often being comically obvious---often involving a pun or a riddle that makes me groan at the joke when I finally get what the dream meant.

It's kind of funny to imagine my subconscious as a separate entity or person who is slipping me coded messages across the borders of sleep. But the technology is archaic, and the messages hard to decode. Sometimes it’s like when you were a kid and you played “telephone” by fastening tin cans to the ends of a piece of string and talking into them so your voice carried on the vibration of the string. The messages get through, but they’re fuzzy.

One time I had a dream in which I actually saw the dream-person who had been sending all these messages. He was very small, and was yelling very loud to try to get through to me. It was all very “Horton Hears a Who” except that the person trying to get my attention was a tiny little man, all dressed in black, like a mime, and wearing a beret. What was he shouting over and over? Faintly, I managed to make it out: “We are not a mime!” except that, with his French accent, it came out as “We are not a meme!”

When I woke up, with this startling announcement ringing in my ears, I went into fits of giggles. What did it say about me that my subconscious would produce this comical image of a personified meme (for what else is he, if not that?) in a beret and mime outfit using the royal “we” and declaring himself not to be exactly what he is?

Cat-A-Clysms

I don't know what's up with my cats lately. Just as Henry's latest mysterious leg wound was finally healed up, he came inside yesterday with a huge bite mark on his face and one side of his head all swollen up. I put some antibiotic ointment on it, and within minutes the wound started draining. Of course, he felt that he needed to be sitting on my lap for this process, so... yuck!

Today the swelling is gone, but there's still a big hole through the skin in the side of his face. I keep putting ointment on it twice a day, and he has cheered up and no longer seems to be in a lot of pain, so I guess now it's just a matter of waiting for it to heal and hoping he doesn't get some new wound before that.

Aspen has been getting into deathly fights with Maddy, hunting her down in the yard or in the barn, chasing her across the yard and viciously attacking her whenever she tries to come in the house to eat.

Twice today the two of them had big screechy cat fights with Aspen attacking and poor Maddy running for her life. Of course, now Maddy is so used to being attacked that now whenever another cat even looks at her she puffs up and starts growling, which of course only offends the other cats and starts more fights.

To top it all off, Aspen is still peeing on stuff in the house every now and then. Tonight she came in from outside, came into the living room where we were sitting, and deliberately peed on Ken's canvas bag. Either she's really mad at us for scolding her when she tries to kill Maddy, or she's got a urinary tract infection, we're not sure which. I have to order her some medicine in case her bad behavior is actually a medical symptom. I've just been so busy I haven't gotten around to it yet. Guess it needs to become a priority now!

Sterling was out walking around under the horses' feet tonight while I was filling water troughs. I was worried that he was going to get stepped on, so I picked him up. Then I thought it would be fun to put him on one of the horses' backs.

He absolutely refused to be put on Callisto's back, but when I put him on Boo's very wide back, Sterling got really happy, turned upside down and started rubbing on her back and knitting her side with his claws. Lucky for him, Boo is very gentle and just turned her head to investigate what was going on back there.

He was quite at home on her back until Callisto, all curiosity, came up and started sniffing him with nostrils almost as big as his head. He grabbed at her nose with his claws and she ducked away. I finally had to take him off Boo so that he wouldn't end up jumping in the wrong direction and getting squooshed.

It was cute in the meantime, though.

Counting Our Chickens

It was a rainy day today, so instead of disassembling the big sheep shelter to move it to the main ewe paddock, as we had planned, Ken and I instead spent some time today discussing our plans for getting chickens in the spring.

The farm has good sized old chicken house, but it's very dilapidated. Plus it's old enough that I'm not sure that the old paint that's chipping off it might not be lead-based paint. So, we decided we don't really want to try to fix up the old chicken house.

It would be really nice to tear down that house and build a nice replacement one in the same spot, but that would be a pretty significant project, and building a new house might make getting the chickens more of an investment than we want to make right now.

So we've been looking at lots and lots of other chicken shelter plans: hoop houses, range shelters, straw bale shelters, you name it. We're weighing the pros and cons of a permanent chicken house in a safe, convenient place vs. a portable shelter in the pasture where the chickens get fresh ground more often but we have to take the time to move them frequently---while also preventing rampaging horses from crushing the chicken shelter to pieces just for the fun of it.

We also have to consider that we get very strong winds here quite often, so a lot of the portable shelters that are light enough to move frequently would also be prone to blowing away on our windy days.

I think for now we're leaning towards a compromise design: A sheltered, semi-permanent location, convenient to the house, which has lots of shade and about 1/3 of an acre already fenced in poultry-appropriate fencing. We'd make a permanent-type wooden floor, just as if we were going to build a wooden house, and then top it with a roof of arched cattle panels and tarps (sealed in with 1" mesh to keep predators out).

Later, if we wanted to finish building a wooden chicken house on top of it, we could take the mesh-and-tarp roof off and use the same floor. And meanwhile, the current house plan would be both easy and inexpensive to build.

Of course, it'll be several months before it's time to get the baby chicks, so we have lots of time to think and rethink the plan before we make our final choice.

In case anyone's wondering, I've had my breed of chicken picked out for years now. I'll be getting Buff Orpingtons. I like them for several reasons: They are a dual-purpose breed, good for both eggs and meat. They are known to set their own eggs, so I can raise baby chicks naturally, without messing around with incubators. They're docile, don't fly much, don't make a lot of noise, and when they do make noise their voices are deeper and more melodious---not like the shrill, ear-splitting shrieks of some of the other breeds.

We've gotten so we do like to have the big "farm-type" breakfasts with eggs pretty often, so it will be great to be able to supply all of our own eggs and have chickens for the freezer as well.

Titan's Big Chance

Now that a week has passed since the main part of sheep breeding season, it's Titan's turn to be let loose with the ewes. As this year's cleanup ram, his job is to breed any of the ewes that didn't get bred by the other rams. Unfortunately for him, I don't think they've left much of a job for him to do.

Still, he's happy to be able to roam free with the rest of the flock for a little while. In a few weeks, he'll be put back in the paddock with the other rams, and the ewes will be a "boy-free" zone until after the lambs are born.

Not much else to write about today. Ken and I drove into Charlottesville so I could buy a new halter for Penny. She's the only one of the fillies still in a weanling size, and she's almost outgrown it. So now I bought her an adult "small." Grace is so large that she skipped the "small" size altogether, and went straight to "medium"---and she's only 8 months old!

While we were in town, we splurged and went to a matinee of the movie The Golden Compass. I really liked it: good storyline, excellent special effects, strong characters, and just an overall beautiful movie to watch.

Surrounded by Flowers

I spent the middle part of today surrounded by flowers. Well, virtual flowers, that is.

I've been working on the website design for the fine folks at Bloomin Acres Farm, and a major part of that design is putting up photos and descriptions of all the plants in their plant nursery so that people can buy them online.

Today I worked on the Clematis section. Lots of beautiful, colorful photos to insert, position, resize, etc. It's pretty repetitive, detailed work, but on a gray, damp, cold day like today, it was really cheerful to spend several hours looking at lots and lots of flowers.

I also sold three more fleeces---payment arrived today, I'll send out the box tomorrow.

And I got a few more horse inquiries today as well, so I spent some time replying and answering questions. It would be so great if I could sell another few horses really soon!

A Load Off My Mind (And Out of My Closet)

Back around the end of October, I decided that I would sell my large personal stash of spinning fibers that I'd collected over the years, since I needed the money and I never have time to do any spinning anyway.

A few people bought individual items from the stash, but recently a lovely woman who runs a shop at a Renaissance Faire bought the entire remaining stash for $500. Tonight I just finished packing up these two gigantic boxes, crammed full of just about every kind of spinning fiber there is. Tomorrow, we'll ship them off to Washington state, and in the summer, she'll sell them in her shop. I like to think of all my fibers and fleeces going to a Ren Faire---surely someone will have fun with them!

The money, of course, like all our other money, is already spent buying hay for the horses. But it arrived on a week when we didn't have any other money to buy hay for the horses, so the timing was perfect.

Now, I'm reveling in the enormous amount of empty space I now have in the closet and under the bed in the guest room where I've been keeping all this fiber. With that gone, I may be able to reorganize the room to hold my loom and spinning wheel, plus all the fleeces from my own sheep that are waiting to sell, which will then clear out a lot of free space in our library where the fleeces have been stored. Maybe in time, we'll be well organized all over the house!

Now I'm on to my next big project, which is designing a website for a fellow Icelandic breeder. That's work I enjoy, so it should be fun.

Little by Little

It was a dreary, sleety day today. Despite having his nice shelter to stand under, Senter was shivering when I went out to check on him, so I went back inside and got his "coat" (horse blanket) to put on him. He used to get all spooky about it when I tried to put it on him, but now I think he understands that it keeps him warm, because he didn't budge at all when I put it on him today.

We spent a quiet holiday here at home. Ken went to our neighbor's Xmas dinner party, which she always invites us to, but I wasn't feeling well, so I stayed home. I've just been so tired lately, it was good to spend a day mostly just resting.

Even though unwarranted exhaustion was my only symptom, I think that it really may have been some kind of sickness, like a mild flu or something, because although today I felt better, tonight Ken was experiencing exactly the same thing, and went to bed early.

I have a bunch of loose ends to tie up, business-wise, so I worked on some of those today. I did a manuscript critique for a former client whom I worked with before when I used to do freelance editing. I packaged up and sent one box of fleeces that someone bought, and started organizing a few others. I'll finish packing those tomorrow. The fleeces are selling very well, considering I haven't even advertised them yet.

The payment check for my mare Bonnie did arrive at last, and tomorrow I'll be able to deposit the next payment check for my mare Boudicca who is being paid off on a monthly basis. So, for the moment at least, we have money to buy hay and pay some bills. It's going to vanish fast, though, so I have to still keep working on selling more of the horses.

Surprisingly, I have gotten a few inquiries lately. I thought everyone would be too busy with Xmas to be horse shopping, but apparently a few people were still looking. Plus I have a few previous people who inquired that I haven't heard back from during the holidays, so I need to contact them again soon to see if they've made any kind of decision.

Little by little, I'm getting things done.