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Saturday I went to a 5yo’s birthday party and stayed overnight and was absorbed into my BFF’s extended family for a while, which is fun. I wasn’t all that close with her folks in high school but as I’ve stayed close we’ve grown closer, and now I’m on pretty good terms with all of them. Her sister’s kids, who are 22 months and 5 years, still are sort of suspicious of me, but I’m around just enough for the 5yo to mostly accept me, and the little one recognizes me enough that this time she let me refill her milk cup when I was closest to the fridge when she toddled in asking for more to drink.
I got to the farm Sunday afternoon, just in time to catch Farmsister, Mom, and Dad in three tiers on the scaffolding, panting the east face of the house yellow after months of work by Dad getting the siding repaired and primed. The south face, which faces the road, took the entirety of last summer, and every board was replaced except the very topmost, but Dad saved all the ones in good condition, and the east face is 100% shod in original siding now, with its damaged boards replaced by salvage from elsewhere on the face of the house. (Dad really wanted to preserve what he could, and it seemed best to just pick the least-damaged face and use all original materials on that.)
[image description: framed by the branches of a maple tree, an 1810′s-style wooden farmhouse has its face covered in the framework of scaffolding. A young woman is on the ground level standing on slanted cellar doors, an older woman is seated halfway up looking back over her shoulder and smiling at the camera, and an older man in blue is barely visible through the tree branches on the top level of the scaffolding. All are using brushes to apply yellow paint over white primer, so that the house is the color of sunshine.]
The trim still needs painting, so the scaffolding can’t come down, but the paint had a solid few hours to dry before we got rained on last night, so it should be fine.
A new apprentice arrived to replace the one who had to go back to college, so we had a nice roast chicken dinner to welcome her. After dinner, I walked out with the apprentices toward the cabin, since it was threatening rain. I peeled off and stopped at the yurt, but I know the rain didn’t start before they arrived at the cabin.
It was foreboding, and very lightning-y, and I tried to get pictures but couldn’t capture the eerie glow of the red sunset through the trees while the rest of the sky was black.
The thunderstorm came on and was violent, but not so windy, and no hail. The only leak I had in the yurt was the usual one where the water comes under the sidewall. I need to figure that out, but. I held off, as it was only 7:30, and sat on the unmade bed and read until the rain stopped around 9, and only then did I get my sheets out of the waterproof duffel they were in. Which was good, because Whiskey-cat came in in the midst of the downpour, and walked all over me with wet feet, and sat and groomed herself dry on the bed.
Speaking of cats, Whiskey’s brother Reno, who is a good-natured and not very bright sort of floppy lovey cat, came down with a violent inner ear infection on Thursday night– he woke them because he was walking in circles under the dining room table banging into the chairs, unable to understand how to walk in a straight line. They thought he was having a seizure, and took turns sitting up with him the rest of the night, holding him because he was so agitated he kept trying to run away, but he couldn’t walk. They took him to the vet as soon as the vet opened, and while the good news was it wasn’t a stroke, the bad news was his rabies vaccine was out of date, and so they called the County Health Department and had to put the cat in quarantine under observation for 48 hours to be sure it wasn’t rabies.
Now, they could tell it wasn’t rabies, because it was very clearly an inner ear infection, but. The good side is that the health department paid for the extended stay, instead of requiring them to shell out, because that’s a Lot.
Still, he was hostage until this morning. We retrieved him, and he was agitated upon first arrival at home– he wanted to go outside, and nobody would let him, and we tried to shut him into a baby-gate enclosure and he jumped out and fell on his head because he can’t actually jump yet, he’s still walking like he’s mildly drunk– but he eventually settled down, and has been sprawled out on the lower shelf of the kitchen counter for a couple of hours now.
I’ve just finished cleaning the slaughterhouse for tomorrow– yeah, the new apprentice’s second day is a chicken slaughter, and she’s not a farm kid like the last one was, so we’ll really have to see how it goes. She seems sensible enough, and is a student at the local engineering school, just taking a semester off because she took classes over the summer. We’ll see how it goes.
BFF gave me a stack of Seanan McGuire books, and i made it through all the InCryptid books and was like, yeah they were fine, and have given them back, but now she’s given me all the October Daye books, and they’re also like, not really super my scene, but I am enjoying them and am probably reading them too fast. Hey, that’s what this kind of literature is for. I only wish I could write like that. (Maybe I could. I dunno. I wish I had time to do it, is I suppose what I really mean. Or like. Focus. That’s probably what it is that I lack. Also, I’m spending what tiny amounts of time I’ve got spare for writing on reading these instead so. C’est la vie.)
Slaughter day tomorrow… but I was efficient today, somehow, and I finished the setup early, and I’m just killing time now. It’s nice to know I’m not neglecting anything particularly by just taking a few moments of daylight to look at the Internet and collect my thoughts.
Saturday I went to a 5yo’s birthday party and stayed overnight and was absorbed into my BFF’s extended family for a while, which is fun. I wasn’t all that close with her folks in high school but as I’ve stayed close we’ve grown closer, and now I’m on pretty good terms with all of them. Her sister’s kids, who are 22 months and 5 years, still are sort of suspicious of me, but I’m around just enough for the 5yo to mostly accept me, and the little one recognizes me enough that this time she let me refill her milk cup when I was closest to the fridge when she toddled in asking for more to drink.
I got to the farm Sunday afternoon, just in time to catch Farmsister, Mom, and Dad in three tiers on the scaffolding, panting the east face of the house yellow after months of work by Dad getting the siding repaired and primed. The south face, which faces the road, took the entirety of last summer, and every board was replaced except the very topmost, but Dad saved all the ones in good condition, and the east face is 100% shod in original siding now, with its damaged boards replaced by salvage from elsewhere on the face of the house. (Dad really wanted to preserve what he could, and it seemed best to just pick the least-damaged face and use all original materials on that.)
[image description: framed by the branches of a maple tree, an 1810′s-style wooden farmhouse has its face covered in the framework of scaffolding. A young woman is on the ground level standing on slanted cellar doors, an older woman is seated halfway up looking back over her shoulder and smiling at the camera, and an older man in blue is barely visible through the tree branches on the top level of the scaffolding. All are using brushes to apply yellow paint over white primer, so that the house is the color of sunshine.]
The trim still needs painting, so the scaffolding can’t come down, but the paint had a solid few hours to dry before we got rained on last night, so it should be fine.
A new apprentice arrived to replace the one who had to go back to college, so we had a nice roast chicken dinner to welcome her. After dinner, I walked out with the apprentices toward the cabin, since it was threatening rain. I peeled off and stopped at the yurt, but I know the rain didn’t start before they arrived at the cabin.
It was foreboding, and very lightning-y, and I tried to get pictures but couldn’t capture the eerie glow of the red sunset through the trees while the rest of the sky was black.
The thunderstorm came on and was violent, but not so windy, and no hail. The only leak I had in the yurt was the usual one where the water comes under the sidewall. I need to figure that out, but. I held off, as it was only 7:30, and sat on the unmade bed and read until the rain stopped around 9, and only then did I get my sheets out of the waterproof duffel they were in. Which was good, because Whiskey-cat came in in the midst of the downpour, and walked all over me with wet feet, and sat and groomed herself dry on the bed.
Speaking of cats, Whiskey’s brother Reno, who is a good-natured and not very bright sort of floppy lovey cat, came down with a violent inner ear infection on Thursday night– he woke them because he was walking in circles under the dining room table banging into the chairs, unable to understand how to walk in a straight line. They thought he was having a seizure, and took turns sitting up with him the rest of the night, holding him because he was so agitated he kept trying to run away, but he couldn’t walk. They took him to the vet as soon as the vet opened, and while the good news was it wasn’t a stroke, the bad news was his rabies vaccine was out of date, and so they called the County Health Department and had to put the cat in quarantine under observation for 48 hours to be sure it wasn’t rabies.
Now, they could tell it wasn’t rabies, because it was very clearly an inner ear infection, but. The good side is that the health department paid for the extended stay, instead of requiring them to shell out, because that’s a Lot.
Still, he was hostage until this morning. We retrieved him, and he was agitated upon first arrival at home– he wanted to go outside, and nobody would let him, and we tried to shut him into a baby-gate enclosure and he jumped out and fell on his head because he can’t actually jump yet, he’s still walking like he’s mildly drunk– but he eventually settled down, and has been sprawled out on the lower shelf of the kitchen counter for a couple of hours now.
I’ve just finished cleaning the slaughterhouse for tomorrow– yeah, the new apprentice’s second day is a chicken slaughter, and she’s not a farm kid like the last one was, so we’ll really have to see how it goes. She seems sensible enough, and is a student at the local engineering school, just taking a semester off because she took classes over the summer. We’ll see how it goes.
BFF gave me a stack of Seanan McGuire books, and i made it through all the InCryptid books and was like, yeah they were fine, and have given them back, but now she’s given me all the October Daye books, and they’re also like, not really super my scene, but I am enjoying them and am probably reading them too fast. Hey, that’s what this kind of literature is for. I only wish I could write like that. (Maybe I could. I dunno. I wish I had time to do it, is I suppose what I really mean. Or like. Focus. That’s probably what it is that I lack. Also, I’m spending what tiny amounts of time I’ve got spare for writing on reading these instead so. C’est la vie.)
Slaughter day tomorrow… but I was efficient today, somehow, and I finished the setup early, and I’m just killing time now. It’s nice to know I’m not neglecting anything particularly by just taking a few moments of daylight to look at the Internet and collect my thoughts.
