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So today Sister toddled off to the bank with one of those zippered vinyl envelopes so stuffed full of cash and checks that it looked kinda like a football.
That’s the winter survival money. It’s always so nerve-wracking, until it’s all put into the bank. Even then, waiting for checks to clear and such is a bit of a nailbiter. But it’s pretty much all set now. A few loose ends to tie up, but a major source of stress, gone.
The cattle, too– three steers they bought as yearlings and fed out this year– are loaded up and on their way to the processing facility. In two weeks they’ll be back, freezer-packed for distribution and sale, and the money from them will go into the bank.
So there are a whole lot fewer live animals on the farm, almost no living plants that need tending, and the farm is settling into its relative state of dormancy. It’s never totally dormant, and we just had sixteen piglets born in the last couple of weeks, with hopefully one more litter to join them in the next couple of weeks somewhere, and the pullets’ fence is bad and they’re out all over the barn and surrounding countryside, and the hens are on strike and need more light and who knows what else, and so on and so forth. But. No more turkeys, no more cattle, no more garden chores.
I re-set the slaughterhouse today, deep-cleaned everything again, set up for packaging simultaneous with processing. Painted nu-skin over all the scratches on my hands that haven’t healed since Saturday (the rough ends of the neckbones scratched me up during panic-packaging, I’m realizing– didn’t quite break the skin enough to bleed, but did enough to make the skin inflamed with tiny infections, angry pink and slightly swollen and really really annoying), and took a shower finally and re-did my hair and am mentally steeling myself for tomorrow. Only 90 birds. Maybe I can arrange *not* to be packaging this time. i’d love to *just* eviscerate or pluck. We’ll see!
Sister dosed herself up with NyQuil, she feels awful. Tomorrow morning she’s to sleep in, and see the kid onto the school bus, and then come out– we’ll only have been going for half an hour, at that point, and we can manage without her until then, her job is literally the end of the line and we won’t have really gotten into it yet. I can probably do her job to start with, though if I set myself up there, then I’m totally going to get pulled off to do packaging. Noooooo….
Anyway, the last of setup is all on me and that’s usually what I do anyway, so I’m not super concerned. I should be asleep, though.
I spent an hour or so this evening researching how to cap a spring to use it, and I might make some efforts to do that around here next season. Not only would it improve some of the areas where there’s horrible chronic mud, it’d also mean we had to haul less water for livestock watering. I know you can get human-potable water out of those, with a little work, but it seems to me it’d be even less work to get livestock-potable water, so maybe that’s what I’d go for on my first try.
Between that and the grey water systems, I’m starting to think of possibly too many projects around here…
So today Sister toddled off to the bank with one of those zippered vinyl envelopes so stuffed full of cash and checks that it looked kinda like a football.
That’s the winter survival money. It’s always so nerve-wracking, until it’s all put into the bank. Even then, waiting for checks to clear and such is a bit of a nailbiter. But it’s pretty much all set now. A few loose ends to tie up, but a major source of stress, gone.
The cattle, too– three steers they bought as yearlings and fed out this year– are loaded up and on their way to the processing facility. In two weeks they’ll be back, freezer-packed for distribution and sale, and the money from them will go into the bank.
So there are a whole lot fewer live animals on the farm, almost no living plants that need tending, and the farm is settling into its relative state of dormancy. It’s never totally dormant, and we just had sixteen piglets born in the last couple of weeks, with hopefully one more litter to join them in the next couple of weeks somewhere, and the pullets’ fence is bad and they’re out all over the barn and surrounding countryside, and the hens are on strike and need more light and who knows what else, and so on and so forth. But. No more turkeys, no more cattle, no more garden chores.
I re-set the slaughterhouse today, deep-cleaned everything again, set up for packaging simultaneous with processing. Painted nu-skin over all the scratches on my hands that haven’t healed since Saturday (the rough ends of the neckbones scratched me up during panic-packaging, I’m realizing– didn’t quite break the skin enough to bleed, but did enough to make the skin inflamed with tiny infections, angry pink and slightly swollen and really really annoying), and took a shower finally and re-did my hair and am mentally steeling myself for tomorrow. Only 90 birds. Maybe I can arrange *not* to be packaging this time. i’d love to *just* eviscerate or pluck. We’ll see!
Sister dosed herself up with NyQuil, she feels awful. Tomorrow morning she’s to sleep in, and see the kid onto the school bus, and then come out– we’ll only have been going for half an hour, at that point, and we can manage without her until then, her job is literally the end of the line and we won’t have really gotten into it yet. I can probably do her job to start with, though if I set myself up there, then I’m totally going to get pulled off to do packaging. Noooooo….
Anyway, the last of setup is all on me and that’s usually what I do anyway, so I’m not super concerned. I should be asleep, though.
I spent an hour or so this evening researching how to cap a spring to use it, and I might make some efforts to do that around here next season. Not only would it improve some of the areas where there’s horrible chronic mud, it’d also mean we had to haul less water for livestock watering. I know you can get human-potable water out of those, with a little work, but it seems to me it’d be even less work to get livestock-potable water, so maybe that’s what I’d go for on my first try.
Between that and the grey water systems, I’m starting to think of possibly too many projects around here…
