dragonlady7 | progress and such

processing, farm life

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ah i never updated. so the moving company did come as promised for my sister on Sunday. apparently, on thursday, one of their crew foremen had a serious heart attack, so they’re down a crew, and one of their biggest trucks was in the shop with a broken lift and they got it back and the fucking lift still doesn’t work. and on friday, when they were supposed to come for her, they were at a job that had been quoted to last 3.5 hours, but when they got there, the customer had a bunch of shit that hadn’t been on the inventory, and there were several large items that needed disassembly that they’d said they’d have dissassembled but then hadn’t done so, and the job took 8 hours instead, with no notice, so– well the movers were super apologetic to my sister about the delay, and had brought an extra person at no extra charge, and afterward knocked some of the time off and didn’t charge her as much as they might have, and also were exceptionally polite to her and also to her housemate.

Also they congratulated them on the purchase of the house and said “you’ll make so many happy memories together here” and in general really super obviously assumed that what they were dealing with was a lesbian couple. Afterward my sister was like “oh i did have a pride banner hung up in the living room” which actually was my doing, i thought it was cute and had stuck it on a hook that was already there.

ANyway. There’s still a lot of shit in my sister’s apartment but we’ve done a lot more work and there’s less and less. we’re closing in on the end, on being out by july 1st.

There’s so much goddamned liquor, and Farmsister actually described it to our mom, who has been fretting that M-L was becoming an alcoholic– and Mom was so reassured, because a genuine addict would not have a thousand half-empty bottles each one of a different liquor. No, an addict would have empty bottles. Clearly the problem M-L has with alcohol is just that she really likes to collect things– and to be fair, there are no two bottles of the same thing, not even wine. She just has every single possible conceivable cocktail ingredient you could ever want, which is ridiculous, but does serve extremely well to highlight the fact that no, she does not have an actual addictive problem with alcohol. Kind of backhanded reassurance but it is genuine reassurance.

Anyway. Went and helped her pack more of her stuff Monday night, but that might be the last time I’ll be able to help her, because of Assorted Chickeny Tasks for much of the rest of this week. I’m going to throw this post in the queue which is why I’m being vague about it, because I keep picking away at writing more of it in little dribs and drabs here and there, so who knows what day it will be when it goes live.

oh monday was a day of screen doors– I should get a reasonable blog-shorthand name for the person who is now most concisely described as my middle-little sister’s housemate, but it’s unicornduke https://tmblr.co/mVpJNDQaUH5cHEJCTfGjjzQ, who no longer has a tumblr, and it feels weird to use that as a nickname, but like, why not i guess. anyway she stopped by and helped me hang the screen door on the south door of my cabin, which was awesome and I had been wanting to do for weeks and last time I visited had been promised help with by a couple different people and then there just never was time. Anyway. Now that’s done. And then I stole the fabric magnetic-closure flappy screen door that had briefly been up at the new house but had gotten pulled down for the movers and honestly didn’t really work in that doorway very well anyway, and stuck that to the east-facing door, which isn’t getting a proper screen door because I’m planning to screen in that whole porch eventually, but I’m not going to get that porch screened in until after the siding’s done, so for the forseeable short-term future I need a temporary screen door, so. Anyway that’s all taken care of and now it’s being 50F at night but when it’s 90 again (like it was on sunday) that’ll be totally sick.

Tuesday was chickens and it went smoothly despite three regulars being missing, we just sort of figured things out on our own. Most notably, one of the part-timers who’s here three days a week and has been mildly annoying BIL by not being a fast worker including during slaughter days came in to do evisceration and absolutely shone there, he was so well-suited to it– listened well, was great about asking questions, kept up his pace as well as could be, meshed well with us, really took to it well. So the thing about working on a line like we do with chickens is that if you’re just not a hustle-y sort of person it’s easy to get overwhelmed and fall behind and just not be good at adjusting to keep up etc., and that was the difficulty he’d had out on the plucking table. But in the evisceration room, regardless of how backed-up everything is, you’re working on one bird at a time, and it’s really obvious that’s how he does best, he gets a task and he does it until it’s done. So it was good data to have, that he’s better-used in that kind of context. He also helped us package and was quite cheerful about learning new things there too. We quite like him as a person, so it was nice to find jobs that match his skills.

I am quite tired but not as badly so as I might be, all things considered, so I’ll take it.

Oh, a sort of gross-funny-weird anecdote from processing– we’ve currently got three cockerels wandering the barnyard, all sons of the late lamented Lil Roo (a heritage Silver-Spangled Hamburg rooster) and the broody Barred Rock Henrietta, and one of them hopped up onto the trailer full of crates of meat birds awaiting processing. He checked them all out, and when he found the coops with the 20 Freedom Ranger birds, which have striped feathers similar to his, he started doing fancy dances for them. It’s partly the markings, I think, as they look like the hens he’s used to– his mother was a Barred Rock and so are most of the adult hens on this farm– and partly that Rangers are slower-growing than Cornish Crosses and thus were older birds.

Anyway, we processed the Rangers first, so when he came back he was looking for them and they weren’t there and he seemed sort of depressed. “Where did the sexy chickens go,” my sister supplied, as his line.

He is getting a new home next week, though– he and his brothers are going to get caught and thrown in with the new half-grown pullets for next year’s egg flock, who are finally old enough to come out of the brooder and go out on pasture. They’re still too young to care about a rooster for those particular duties, but the other thing roosters do is that they tend to protect a flock from predators and other dangers, and these three cockerels have been free-ranging around the barnyard for almost a year now and haven’t gotten eaten, so they very obviously know how to survive, and will likely help the new girls transition to life outdoors.

So, no more startlingly beautiful cockerels wandering the barnyard and crowing in alarming places at unexpected intervals, but we rather think they’ll be happy having jobs and like, girlfriends. They’ve been surprisingly mellow with another’s company but they definitely would rather there be hens. (Your picture was not posted)