Farm News 04-13-08

Sunday morning, after chores, 36°

Weight: 208 lbs.

Barn News

Does Shotgun have kittens hidden somewhere? I think so. She wasn't waiting to walk to the barn with me yesterday or this morning, something she has been doing amost every day, even when there was fresh snow on the ground. For the past three weeks she has been looking like she had swallowed a cannonball, so I think she now has kittens hidden somewhere. They will open their eyes nine to fourteen days after they are born, so it would be good to find them before they are two weeks old. If they are handled a bit before they open their eyes they will socialize with humans much better. Perhaps some neighborhood girls will help look for the kittens.

When I used to stack bales of hay in the hayloft in preparation for winter, I liked to leave cat passages between some of the bales. Stacking hay is more fun if you create a cat maze in the stack, one that will be run in the dark as the cats seek out rodents that fail to look both ways before crossing a dark alley. Cats often hide their kittens in a deep, dark, dead end passage, safe from prying children and right next to the haystack supermarket. One year, when living on L.E.'s farm near Vinland, we almost filled the loft with bales of oat straw and lespedeza. The mice raised lots of babies in this nutritious environment, but never were able to increase in population. It was, basically, a cat mine that produced litter after litter of strong, healthy, half-wild kittens. The hay was fed to dairy cows and goats, and a small amount of fresh milk each day was used to bribe the kittens into tameness.

Wednesday I spotted a Bald Eagle. Most of them have gone north by now, but some of them still have chicks in the nest. Eagles lay their eggs early and as soon as the chicks can fly they usually go north.

The geese are back home. They had been at Jesse's place to mate with his ganders. Now they are all back home, along with Jesse's most obnoxious gander. The gander likes to chase ducks and, when penned up with the ducks, killed one of them, so Jesse sent him into exile at my place. I keep the ducks and geese in separate pens at night, so there isn't much of a problem here.

Jesse has gone to Florida with his classmates on the senior trip.

Warthog

Why do we consider warthogs ugly? Why do I say ducks are stupid? Warthogs are neither beautiful nor ugly, and ducks are neither stupid nor smart, they are just what they are, the results of millions of years' accumulations of minor adaptations to changes in their environments. Warthogs look like they do because their ancestors who looked like that were more successful in producing offspring than the ancestors who didn't look much like warthogs. Ducks act stupid because they were bred to produce eggs, not literature.

I enjoy calling one of my nieces Warthog, not because she looks like one, but because she is so pretty that calling her Warthog is ludicrous. Being a teenage girl and not yet certain of her beauty, she doesn't know whether to put her nose in the air and sniff or to run away and cry. She just had her 18^th birthday, so I imagine that the time is coming when she will laugh, realizing that being called Warthog is an inverted sort of compliment.

Last week I overheard someone say that he would like to be a teenager again, knowing what he knows now. Knowing what I know now is why I would hate being a teenager again.

The Ecstatic Umbrella

I think it was Stranger in a Strange Land, by Robert Heinlein, an atheistic right-wing kook science fiction writer, in which the central character makes a big spiritual production out of sharing water with people. There was a group living in KC who had read the book and adopted it as their official guidebook to things spiritual. Being more than a little off center, they frequently needed help in dealing with the rest of the world. They couldn't accept help, though, unless the person offering the help came to the apartment where they all lived in damp harmony and shared water with them. I was the only one at the Umbrella who could keep a straight face when talking to them, so I had to go help them when they were lost.

Seven or eight of them lived on the second floor of a building that should have been condemned. I would walk up the stairs, knock on the door, and then go through an interrogation through the closed door until they were assured that I was who I said I was, they person they had just called and asked to come over to help them with something. Once they were sure it was me, they would crack the door open just enough for me to slip through, then quickly shut it again, locking it with various bolts and chains. The security was necessary because if someone tried to rob them, they were prohibited by their vows of peace from resisting. There was nothing in the place worth more than 25¢, but, they were right, the neighborhood did contain some very stupid thieves.

The first time they called me I was able to help them with a very difficult question. When I finally made it through the door we all sat cross-legged on the floor in a circle like good little first-graders. The leader, who seemed to have that position because he had memorized the greatest number of passages from Stranger in a Strange Land, went to the kitchen and returned with a quart fruit jar half full of water. He lit a stick of incense, then took a sip of the water and passed it to the next person. Everyone was very quiet and spiritual while the jar of water slowly went around the circle. I dutifully took a sip along with the rest, glad that I had all my immunizations.

After the jar of water had gone all the way around the circle we all sat there for a while, silently grokking the ambiance. Then the leader spoke. “Can you find out for us if the city water has dangerous chemicals in it? We've been buying pure water, but it is expensive.”

Fortunately, I was able to immediately reassure them. I told them that, only a few days earlier, I had asked our consulting pharmacologist the same question, and he had assured me that if the water was left standing, uncovered, for at least twenty minutes, that any trace chemicals would disappear, and that being penetrated by pure vibes would clear the water of any impurities. “In South America,” I continued, “the medicine men take yohimbine, and then meditate in front of gourds full of Amazon river water, which becomes clear and clean after a few minutes.” I wasn't lying, I was helping. They were so full of shit that water-borne dysentery would have been curative.

Books

John Burdett

John Burdett, the author of the mysteries set in Bangkok (start with Bangkok 8), has an interesting essay at http://www.powells.com/fromtheauthor/burdett.html. Thanks, Dianne, for bringing it to my attention.

Nature Girl by Carl Hiaasen

Carl Hiaasen is great, especially if you are having a gloomy day and need a boost. His books are full of round-heeled babes, bright kids, and weird good guys, all beset by environment trashing jerks. In this book, an old Bald Eagle lands in a tree, under which an environment trashing jerk is sitting. The eagle, being wise, shits on the jerk, providing the first of a series of events that bring the book to a satisfying close.