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dragonlady7ugh i can't do a chapter update, i just can't. i need-- to think, for a moment, and I am so tired.
I think I actually should mark the current story complete, and put the rest into a sequel, because yes there are still loose ends, but I have the main thing resolved and a secondary thing resolved, so I'll just-- yes, I should do that. There's a fair bit, and I just want to check off the primary thing and feel like it can move on. IDK, I'll think about it a bit more. Not today, though, and not tomorrow, because I am booked solid from dawn until well after dusk.
Friday will be rainy, though, so I might have a few moments.
oh whoops i went to bed without posting this, now it's morning. okay, well, it's 35 outside but it's going to be 68 and sunny, so.
The Pork Sort went smoothly-- I went out first thing in the morning and moved the eggs out of that room and finished cleaning it. (We thought it safest to leave the eggs in place overnight.) Only five pigs, and both Sister and BIL were there and not dealing with crises too much (though BIL had to run off to help one of the apprentices repair a leak in the water line to the greenhouse, and assorted other small crises), and the slaughterhouse hadn't made any mistakes, for a wonder, and the pigs were on the smallish side so the fact that one customer had neglected to cancel her order and we had an extra quarter was no big deal, we could just divide it up among the customers who wound up with smaller pigs so that they had a more generous share. (You pay by the pound, so if you get more you pay for more, but there were some shares where the two people splitting a half had both requested the same things and guess what a half-pig only has so many of various anatomical parts, so if both halves of the half got a tenderloin, well who is really going to complain?) Z and A were so efficient that my job was largely to open the cooler door (which is a hunk of insulation held on with a bungee cord; someday, a real door, someday) and fetch additional cardboard boxes and the like.
We were done with the sort in time for the lady who sometimes washes eggs to show up, so then I just stayed on and helped wash eggs, until BIL came in and asked me if I could help him go retrieve the farm truck from Massachusetts, where the apprentices had left it after the brakes started smoking when they rode the brakes all the way down the Petersburg Pass because neither of them had any sense. Apparently, the garage there said, they broke a caliper and then kept driving it against the resistance of the closed caliper; remains to be seen whether that warped the rotor. But BIL showing up in person gave the garage where they left it the actual incentive to see to it, where a confused young woman saying "I dunno, it's going slow and there's smoke coming from the wheel I think?" did not really. (Probably most crucially, when she said "but it's not my truck", they were like "well fuck this nonsense," and then having the guy whose truck it is show up and not just be a disembodied voice on the phone helped a lot.) So they've offered to more promptish-like replace the caliper so it can be driven back to the garage that replaced its brakes last month for further re-evaluation.
(They were only in that truck because neither of them owns a car and neither of them can drive stick, which the entirety of the rest of the farm vehicles are, including both personal vehicles. It is approximately the last vehicle in the world I would want to take over the Petersburg Pass, which is why Veg Manager had told them to take rte 90 instead, and we still don't know why they had declined to do that. An auspicious start to the season; it was the second apprentice's very first day.)
Then it was lunch, and apparently there's 25 pounds of over-wintered spinach to get through, because it was harvested for personal use instead of putting it into the spring share, and boy, I am actually kind of excited about getting through 35 pounds of spinach. It's good spinach!
And then in the afternoon, Sister and I planned dinner, then finished working in the side yard of the house-- they got a new concrete walkway, but the walkway was a tripping hazard, so she finally got a dumptruck-load of compost dumped out there and filled in the soil around the walkway to be level, and so we finished that job and I went and got a wheelbarrow and three small loads of gravel ("don't fill that!" Sister yelled at me, and I looked at it, and looked at the gravel, and said "if it was full i couldn't move it," and she yelled back, "Exactly! Ask me how I know!" and the humor of it propelled me a good while) and filled in the end of the walkway so it's level with the driveway, so nobody will trip.
And then we went out to the space where the flowers will be this year, and laid out garden beds. I'm excited to discover that it's the area directly in front of the yurt, which was a cover crop last year (sudan grass, it was enormously tall). Sister made the call that she was going to do no-till and just use a planting knife to wedge the transplants into the mulch left behind when the sudan grass was cut down, so we just stapled landscape fabric down. (This kind of staple is six inches long and you pound it in with a mallet.)
The reason she was given that bed to work with is that it is largely gravel, and VegMan has struggled with getting vegetables to grow well in all the stones. Flowers don't care, though.
The area closest to the yurt was reserved: they're going to set up the small Gothic hoop-house there (rigid plexi and a pointed roof means it can be left up over winter), which is great for me because they'll likely bury both electric and water lines to it, which means extending power to the yurt goes from a 100-foot extension cord to a 20-footer, and if I put a little effort in, I could probably build a hand-washing station off the north or east wall of that Gothic with real running water and a little gray water tank or a dug sump filled with gravel (or a drain hose long enough to move periodically to water different parts of the field).
But the real exciting thing is: that Gothic is absolutely not getting put up until fall at the very earliest, and probably really not until well into winter, so, I get to plant my flax RIGHT THERE. So I'm hopefully going to get to do that today (Thursday). This may involve learning to use a push-along rototiller, but I've seen them used a lot so I'm a lot less intimidated by that than I would be by a tractor.
If I can get that done today, it's supposed to rain gently all day tomorrow. Of course, that also means that all the flower transplants waiting to go out also need to get into the ground so it can rain gently all day on them tomorrow.
And also, as a complication, Farmkid came home from a day at Grandma's refusing to eat after a big lunch, and then began to complain that her stomach hurt, and as we were finishing dinner (she had refused to join us and was upstairs, and her mother had said, well, i think she might just be hungry after forgoing all the normal afternoon snacks, but she's five now and I'll trust her to know her own body)-- well, she threw up, and now we're all on Oh No Norovirus watch.
We'd hosted the interns and VegMan for dinner, and I'd done one of the zillion venison backstraps from this fall as boef en daube provencale in the pressure cooker, but the pressure cooker wouldn't hold pressure properly! Something's wrong with the valve. I'd gone for a walk, and came back after 25 minutes to see it letting off this consistent little hissing plume of steam.
So we vented it, and tried to examine the valve, and I was sort of panicking until Sister reminded me that venison backstrap, alone among the venison cuts, doesn't really need to be pressure-cooked, whereupon I switched the setting to Slow Cook and let the thing simmer for the rest of the time until dinner and it was Just Fine.
So, boef en daube, only venison, over mashed potatoes, with fresh spinach mixed in as an option, and that seemed to work well for dinner. I had neglected to make a dessert, so we just turfed everyone out when the child started puking, though as she did not come down to join us perhaps she has managed not to just give all of us whatever she's got.
She seemed perky by bedtime, if decidedly not hungry, so it's possible it was just one of those little passing disturbances. At any rate, it's an improvement over the time she felt sick so she hid under her mother's skirt and then vomited down the back of her mother's legs, while her mother was cooking dinner. That doomed everyone. Now she's older and not so clingy, so we'll see.
I posted a bunch of photos on my Instagram, and have started a new Highlight in my Instagram Stories where I put all the farm ones. You don't need an account to look at them, but I can't hotlink them here. (If you watch to the end, it'll tick over into a Highlight that's all my Chita stories, though.)
I think I actually should mark the current story complete, and put the rest into a sequel, because yes there are still loose ends, but I have the main thing resolved and a secondary thing resolved, so I'll just-- yes, I should do that. There's a fair bit, and I just want to check off the primary thing and feel like it can move on. IDK, I'll think about it a bit more. Not today, though, and not tomorrow, because I am booked solid from dawn until well after dusk.
Friday will be rainy, though, so I might have a few moments.
oh whoops i went to bed without posting this, now it's morning. okay, well, it's 35 outside but it's going to be 68 and sunny, so.
The Pork Sort went smoothly-- I went out first thing in the morning and moved the eggs out of that room and finished cleaning it. (We thought it safest to leave the eggs in place overnight.) Only five pigs, and both Sister and BIL were there and not dealing with crises too much (though BIL had to run off to help one of the apprentices repair a leak in the water line to the greenhouse, and assorted other small crises), and the slaughterhouse hadn't made any mistakes, for a wonder, and the pigs were on the smallish side so the fact that one customer had neglected to cancel her order and we had an extra quarter was no big deal, we could just divide it up among the customers who wound up with smaller pigs so that they had a more generous share. (You pay by the pound, so if you get more you pay for more, but there were some shares where the two people splitting a half had both requested the same things and guess what a half-pig only has so many of various anatomical parts, so if both halves of the half got a tenderloin, well who is really going to complain?) Z and A were so efficient that my job was largely to open the cooler door (which is a hunk of insulation held on with a bungee cord; someday, a real door, someday) and fetch additional cardboard boxes and the like.
We were done with the sort in time for the lady who sometimes washes eggs to show up, so then I just stayed on and helped wash eggs, until BIL came in and asked me if I could help him go retrieve the farm truck from Massachusetts, where the apprentices had left it after the brakes started smoking when they rode the brakes all the way down the Petersburg Pass because neither of them had any sense. Apparently, the garage there said, they broke a caliper and then kept driving it against the resistance of the closed caliper; remains to be seen whether that warped the rotor. But BIL showing up in person gave the garage where they left it the actual incentive to see to it, where a confused young woman saying "I dunno, it's going slow and there's smoke coming from the wheel I think?" did not really. (Probably most crucially, when she said "but it's not my truck", they were like "well fuck this nonsense," and then having the guy whose truck it is show up and not just be a disembodied voice on the phone helped a lot.) So they've offered to more promptish-like replace the caliper so it can be driven back to the garage that replaced its brakes last month for further re-evaluation.
(They were only in that truck because neither of them owns a car and neither of them can drive stick, which the entirety of the rest of the farm vehicles are, including both personal vehicles. It is approximately the last vehicle in the world I would want to take over the Petersburg Pass, which is why Veg Manager had told them to take rte 90 instead, and we still don't know why they had declined to do that. An auspicious start to the season; it was the second apprentice's very first day.)
Then it was lunch, and apparently there's 25 pounds of over-wintered spinach to get through, because it was harvested for personal use instead of putting it into the spring share, and boy, I am actually kind of excited about getting through 35 pounds of spinach. It's good spinach!
And then in the afternoon, Sister and I planned dinner, then finished working in the side yard of the house-- they got a new concrete walkway, but the walkway was a tripping hazard, so she finally got a dumptruck-load of compost dumped out there and filled in the soil around the walkway to be level, and so we finished that job and I went and got a wheelbarrow and three small loads of gravel ("don't fill that!" Sister yelled at me, and I looked at it, and looked at the gravel, and said "if it was full i couldn't move it," and she yelled back, "Exactly! Ask me how I know!" and the humor of it propelled me a good while) and filled in the end of the walkway so it's level with the driveway, so nobody will trip.
And then we went out to the space where the flowers will be this year, and laid out garden beds. I'm excited to discover that it's the area directly in front of the yurt, which was a cover crop last year (sudan grass, it was enormously tall). Sister made the call that she was going to do no-till and just use a planting knife to wedge the transplants into the mulch left behind when the sudan grass was cut down, so we just stapled landscape fabric down. (This kind of staple is six inches long and you pound it in with a mallet.)
The reason she was given that bed to work with is that it is largely gravel, and VegMan has struggled with getting vegetables to grow well in all the stones. Flowers don't care, though.
The area closest to the yurt was reserved: they're going to set up the small Gothic hoop-house there (rigid plexi and a pointed roof means it can be left up over winter), which is great for me because they'll likely bury both electric and water lines to it, which means extending power to the yurt goes from a 100-foot extension cord to a 20-footer, and if I put a little effort in, I could probably build a hand-washing station off the north or east wall of that Gothic with real running water and a little gray water tank or a dug sump filled with gravel (or a drain hose long enough to move periodically to water different parts of the field).
But the real exciting thing is: that Gothic is absolutely not getting put up until fall at the very earliest, and probably really not until well into winter, so, I get to plant my flax RIGHT THERE. So I'm hopefully going to get to do that today (Thursday). This may involve learning to use a push-along rototiller, but I've seen them used a lot so I'm a lot less intimidated by that than I would be by a tractor.
If I can get that done today, it's supposed to rain gently all day tomorrow. Of course, that also means that all the flower transplants waiting to go out also need to get into the ground so it can rain gently all day on them tomorrow.
And also, as a complication, Farmkid came home from a day at Grandma's refusing to eat after a big lunch, and then began to complain that her stomach hurt, and as we were finishing dinner (she had refused to join us and was upstairs, and her mother had said, well, i think she might just be hungry after forgoing all the normal afternoon snacks, but she's five now and I'll trust her to know her own body)-- well, she threw up, and now we're all on Oh No Norovirus watch.
We'd hosted the interns and VegMan for dinner, and I'd done one of the zillion venison backstraps from this fall as boef en daube provencale in the pressure cooker, but the pressure cooker wouldn't hold pressure properly! Something's wrong with the valve. I'd gone for a walk, and came back after 25 minutes to see it letting off this consistent little hissing plume of steam.
So we vented it, and tried to examine the valve, and I was sort of panicking until Sister reminded me that venison backstrap, alone among the venison cuts, doesn't really need to be pressure-cooked, whereupon I switched the setting to Slow Cook and let the thing simmer for the rest of the time until dinner and it was Just Fine.
So, boef en daube, only venison, over mashed potatoes, with fresh spinach mixed in as an option, and that seemed to work well for dinner. I had neglected to make a dessert, so we just turfed everyone out when the child started puking, though as she did not come down to join us perhaps she has managed not to just give all of us whatever she's got.
She seemed perky by bedtime, if decidedly not hungry, so it's possible it was just one of those little passing disturbances. At any rate, it's an improvement over the time she felt sick so she hid under her mother's skirt and then vomited down the back of her mother's legs, while her mother was cooking dinner. That doomed everyone. Now she's older and not so clingy, so we'll see.
I posted a bunch of photos on my Instagram, and have started a new Highlight in my Instagram Stories where I put all the farm ones. You don't need an account to look at them, but I can't hotlink them here. (If you watch to the end, it'll tick over into a Highlight that's all my Chita stories, though.)
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Date: 2019-04-25 11:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-04-25 12:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-04-25 12:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-04-25 12:46 pm (UTC)They don't sell digestive biscuits in the US! But we have assorted crackers and cereals and things. I also have a giant thing of mashed potatoes that we didn't eat that much of last night, and a batch of pancakes. I'm going to go try in a moment to get her to eat some more cereal. The low-key interpretive dances are suggesting to me that she is actually feeling not too poorly, coupled with her willingness to get out of her pajamas-- she chose herself an eye-searingly cheerful outfit with a teal skirt/shorts, pink leggings with bows, an orange Hello Kitty shirt, and black-and-yellow socks.
I wish I could pull off that kind of aesthetic but I'm about 30 years too old to do it.