Marginalia, Trivialities & Suchlike
Quick update: We had snow last night, which gave proof of the return of the scurrilous skunk. The run and coop were surrounded by incriminating skunk prints in the snow, especially in the area where I suspected entry had been gained before. But we awoke to three healthy hens, so all’s well that (so far ) end’s well. The trusty Ruger 10/22 remains ready for future bad acts, of course.
I think a while back I mentioned that one evening I went to put the hens away and found several skunks in the coop. They disappeared after that encounter, or at least they weren’t around when I was tending to the girls. Last week, they were back again at chicken bedtime, and I ended up leaving the coop open. The next morning I found that they’d eaten all the chicken feed. So when I put them girls to bed on Sunday night, I took the feeder out of the coop and wished the five hens goodnight, assuring them I’d feed them bright and early the next morning.
On Monday morning, I went to let the chickens out into their run and found three live hens and two dead ones, and a distinct skunk aroma lingering in the air. Murdered by smelly skunks. What an indignity. Needless to say, Monday was a pretty shitty day. I’ve since fortified the old, decrepit coop as well as I could, and there don’t appear to have been any further incursions. But each morning, I experience a terrible knot in my stomach until I see all three remaining hens out and about, scratching and clucking.
Anyway, sorry to share the sad news, but there it is. RIP Eleven, and nameless black hen. You were good girls and we appreciated your brief lives.
It seems like Thanksgiving was maybe a week ago, but here we sit, everything Christmasing around us. This is the first Christmas that Kid No. 1 has been out of school, and she and her beau decided to split the holidays— Thanksgiving here and Christmas at his parents’. If it was my choice, I’d have chosen to have it the other way around, but I guess I didn’t get a vote. Anyway, we had (a) Christmas here on Saturday. To quote the Man In Black, “I don’t like it, but I guess things happen that way.” We had scads of non-traditional foods and exchanged gifts and all that. And it was nice to be with family in front of a warm wood stove. Dr. Evil and I decided that our big gift to each other would be a fancy new water heater, so as you can see, the romance between us remains en fuego.
But now it’s actually Christmas and . . . well, nothing. No stockings, no making of the merry. Even our egg nog turned out to be “spice” nog. It’s not bad, but it’s not egg nog. Our favorite Chinese restaurant isn’t open today, so we can’t even do a Jewish Christmas.
I suppose this, or some variation of this is how it’s going to be from here on, so I’d better just get used to it.
Kid No. 2 will be staying with us, presumably through New Years, so that’s pretty nice. She came bearing all of her laundry, So I guess I’ll have to buy more detergent soon, and give the septic some time off. So. Many. Clothes.
I hope everyone is having a wonderful Christmas, and I really, really hope for a better 2019 for our country.
It’s exactly one month late, but construction of the garage began on Monday. The worker bees swarmed the old structure and had it stripped and torn down in one day. I worried when no one showed up early Tuesday morning; a favorite tactic of contractors is to begin work, then wander away, insulating themselves from fraud claims because technically, they’ve started the job. Around mid-morning, though, they showed up to retrieve the scrap metal. Wednesday dawned to the sound of a skid steer zooming and forms getting built. I was, however, a bit concerned when the contractor came up to the house to basically ask to be reminded what exactly they were building. Uh oh.
But it seems to be working out. They poured concrete yesterday morning and spent the rest of the day floating the surface. By close of business, it looked like a frozen pond. Speaking of freezing, the weather gods are favoring us; it’s been durned cold, lately, but this week warmed up right in time for the pour, with overnight lows not even hitting freezing for a few days. It’s Friday now, and they came to cut relief lines on the pad. It’ll continue to cure over the weekend and I hope to see framing start on Monday. Next potential hiccup: trusses. They haven’t been ordered yet.
I know this is about as exciting as hearing about someone else’s dream, but it’s damned exciting to us, so please forgive my prattling.
Has everyone seen The Ballad of Buster Scruggs yet? If not, get on it!
This guy gets it.
“The cozy comfort of a crackling fire—and the very necessary warmth it generates—is a rhythm that feels to me more like a wave: either you catch it and ride it out through winter, or, if your timing is off, it crashes over you. […] Mounded up on the front lawn, the half cord looked like an impressive amount of wood. But when my neighbor Kevin came by the house a few days later, he asked if I had found firewood for the winter. Gesturing to the porch, where I had by then neatly stacked the logs, I told him about the locust. He assured me that he had seen the logs—he was worried that they wouldn’t be enough.”
It felt as if summer would never end here in Appalachia. Columbus Day was sweltering, but eleven days later we had our first frost, and that was that. I think I have enough firewood laid in, but I have no real estimation of how much we will burn in a season. We arrived here well into the heating season, but I’m not comfortable using last year as a model, because we were so busy unpacking and settling that we relied on the heat pumps mostly. I have an innate fear of scarcity, and it’s not like you can just run down to Kroger and buy more seasoned firewood should you run out. In the end, I know we won’t be cold, and I’m thankful for that assurance.
Speaking of heat pumps . . . Dr. Evil’s folks opted for geothermal HVAC in their new home, and they had various issues with it during the cold months, mostly due to installation errors and the installer’s unfamiliarity with the technology. I’ve long been interested in geothermal, and with things having settled down with their system, toward the end of summer, I asked how their electric bill had run during the cooling months, “Terrible!” came the answer, “It’s about what our old one was.” We discussed how this could possibly be the case, resulting in a low grade squabble which was fortunately extinguished by the arrival of the waiter with our food. Boy, was it dumb of me to have asked. It turns out the electric company never switched the billing over properly when the in-laws left this house and established a new account for the new crib. Yes, friends, they’d been paying our bill and us theirs. Sorting this out with the utility was exactly the cluster you would imagine. Although I would not want them paying our way, I do have to laugh at my uncanny ability to step on rakes.
I never got our fields cut this year, but I don’t really see a big difference from how they appeared last winter. I don’t think it would be wise to let them go another summer without mowing, but it’s good to know I didn’t screw the pooch through inaction. Maybe I’ll start a GoFundMe for a tractor. It seems to be how everyone else is trying to solve their money woes. That or a Patreon for Surly Farmer. I’d estimate I could make a good dollar-dollar fiddy. It’s a start.
For those keeping track, the mystery cat is doing very well. We ran through a half dozen antibiotics getting his gut straightened out, only for him to develop a tenacious respiratory infection that required three more varieties. He apologizes for using up all the medicine. He is also fully litter box trained, and doesn’t have to sleep in his box at all any longer. Weight: 7lbs. Energy: High, very high.
I’ll be back soon with some thoughts on politics. Promise? Threat? Maybe both.
Yeah, I know Washington is a burning swamp, and the Koch boys have their beady eyes one re-writing the US Constitution, and the GOP wants to turn the Supreme Court into a frat house, but I’m not here for that today. Today, I am here to tell you that since the end of July, that skinny Siamese cat that wandering onto our property has more than doubled his body weight. We have gone through just about every antibiotic known to veterinary science and finally seem to have beat back all the critters squatting in his gut. (Seriously, if the last one hadn’t worked, we were headed towards “compounding.” I’ll bet that’s cheap, right?) He is a very pleasant little guy. He is still sleeping in his box, because he can’t be completely trusted to always use his box, but he’s getting better every day.
I pestered Dr. Evil for weeks, just repeating one question: So, are you keeping him? Until she finally relented and squeaked out a tiny “Yes.” We said we were going to go petless for a while and see what that felt like, but ya know, sometimes the pet chooses you. 
You’ll remember that poor Zoë died last Wednesday, and we’ve been adjusting to her absence ever since. It’s strange how many times through the day you’ll expect to see a lost pet. For example, coming from upstairs to down, if Zoë wasn’t with us on the bed, it was a given she’d be found sitting on the edge of the dining room rug, awaiting her next feeding. And when I arrived to find her there, I’d always say, “Hello, Zoë” in the manner of Jerry Seinfeld saying, “Hello, Newman.” It was just a thing. Anyway, you really start to count these instances up. Sad. Happy. Sad. Wistful. Etc . . .
Then came Monday. It was spitting rain all morning, so I delayed my start and brewed a second pot of coffee and just took in the day. Around 10 o’clock, I wandered out to the front door and looked out into the yard to find . . . a Siamese cat out there. I kid you not. I went out and tried to coax him over, but he wouldn’t cover the last fifteen feet or so between us. I went back in to get a dish of food for him, but when I came back he’d gone and the rain had returned. I told Dr. Evil about it, but she hadn’t see him. I thought I might be going a little loco. What are the odds of a Siamese cat wandering across our property in the middle of nowhere? Slim, I think. I left the food dish out and found that it had been emptied a while later. But we often feed Napoleon (the cat, not the emperor), so that wasn’t unexpected. Later in the afternoon I was able to point out the little guy to Dr. Evil, just before he disappeared into the brush. As is my wont, I worried about the guy and kept an eye out for him all of Tuesday, but never saw him again.
On Wednesday morning, I woke up remembering a dream I’d had just prior to waking up, and I told Dr. Evil all about it, because who isn’t fascinated by someone else’s dream? The short version is that the wayward Siamese came to us, and I was able to somehow divine his name: T49. I then left for Charleston (oh, the exciting life I lead!), and about halfway there received a text from Dr. Evil featuring a photo of the littlest Siamese. He came back, and she was able to coax him into eating. He was still sticking around when I returned home, and seemed fearless of me, even in my big boots. He ate and ate, and napped and napped, and with evening coming on, I opened the door to see if he’d be bold enough to come into the house. He was so brave. And here’s where it gets spooky again: he went directly to the spot where Zoë died, and curled into a cat doughnut and fell asleep.
The extra spooky detail? Just before I woke on the morning Zoë died, I dreamt that she did, and very much as she did.
We’ve continued to feed this little kitten, and on Friday I took him to the vet to get checked out. Guess what. Not a kitten. By the looks of his teeth, the vet estimated his age at around seven years. He weighed in that morning at a hair over three pounds. He’s on a whole mess of medicines now and appears to be putting on weight. My read is that someone dumped him on our country road. I hate people. Except you, readers, except you.
We’ve decided that we probably won’t be keeping the nameless cat, but we are going to get him healthy. It’s the least we can do, and it feels like we’ve been chosen somehow.
I was looking at chain harrows on Amazon, mostly just to get a sense of the price range and I noticed this midway through the page:
Well now, Amazon. Either that algorithm is all kindsa confused, or there’s a very different way of harrowing a field.
I’ll be back soon with information on the stray cat, right now, Imma go look for harrow videos on Youtube.
Stay frosty.
We are slowly prepping for the big move across the Ohio, umm, to Ohio. [awk. be sure to come back and rework this] As I write this, I am sitting in my favorite room in the house: an office I share with Dr. Evil. All but about four feet of wall space in here is taken up by books, and by Jove, it just smells good when come in here. This is me, breathing in Tolkien and Melville, Dostoyevsky and Hiaasen (hey, a man needs his fun). When I moved myself here ten years ago, I only had my books, of course, and still I nearly killed myself after overpacking boxes to the point that they seemed to have their own gravitational pull. [everything has its own gravitational pull, please revise] Now, our books are happily co-mingled and even somewhat organized, but there are so many of them, with more arriving all the time. Add to this that Dr. Evil has been bringing even more books home from the office, as she will be a distance worker once we move. So. Many. Books. One positive is that the bougie Blue Apron boxes I was fretting about earlier are the perfect size for packing books—large enough to fit a few, but not so large that they should come with a coupon for a discount truss.
I was a fairly early adopter of the Kindle, so there are a number of books living in the ether and lightening our physical load, but even after several years with the Kindle, we still buy a good number of hard copy books. It’s difficult not to sometimes, when the prices are so similar. [yeah, keep rationalizing, pack rat] We have not done the smart thing like our friend Marie the Mad Librarian and made use of our local municipal library, but we aim to do more of that at the farm. You know, tomorrow.
Fac me bonum, o deus, sed nondum.
With the move growing closer by the day (we are told that a December handover of the new house to Dr. Evil’s folks is not out of the question), I keep returning to our little library to see what might be culled without too much pain. Friends, there is not much. Will I really be re-reading Francine Prose’s “A Changed Man” or Faulkner’s “The Reivers”? Probably not. But what if, man? What if? Add to this that there is no way to reasonably dispose of these books. Sadly, they have little value to anyone but me. I might be able to sell them to a used book store for pennies, or donate them to a charity that will probably cart them straight to the dumpster, and that just doesn’t sit well. I admire my in-laws, who set about replacing their most valued books with solid early editions and ditching the rest, but I’m just not there yet, ya know? Maybe after this move. Yeah, sed nondum.