dragonlady7

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i am tired, the thing with having been at work so much the last 2 weeks at the office job is that there’s no moving at the office job so i am at this point so atrophied i’m like a brain in a jar and now i am at the farm trying to use my human body to do things on this physical plane and it’s some bullshit is what it is, brains in jars aren’t good at scrubbing things.

also for some reason most of the skin sloughed off my fingertips like a shedding snake? like– it’s not gross, it’s not painful, there was like, perfectly fine good skin underneath? but like? why? did my fingers? do that??? this is not normally how I exfoliate. I almost wrote defenestrate there. Not the same word, B.

but on the upside, it was chilly last night and oh my gosh I got Such Good Sleep?? I did not expect that. I zonked out at like 10:30 and then I woke up like, Ready For Action, at 5:45. Even though I’m dimly aware there were some cat shenanigans in there somewhere, I just did not care and it didn’t matter and seems to have resolved itself.

So– re having no socks, it warmed up so I could be in flip-flops today. That’s one day, saved. Tomorrow I do have one pair of socks I can wear, for slaughter day, so that’ll be okay. Beyond that it’ll have to be played by ear. I appreciate everyone’s sympathy, but do feel free to laugh about it.

Woop Farmkid is Done Watching TV and it is Time For Child Shenanigans, laterz! (Your picture was not posted)

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made it to the farm, another 300-mile drive boringly down. i sang most of the way, i should practice singing anyway. for some reason i’m super into Gillian Welch’s cover of “I’ll Go On Downtown”, which isn’t like, germane to my life in any way nor is it particularly ideal for my range (it’s not not either), I just for some reason like it a lot. Oh I tell everybody I’ve nothin to hide while I keep the Devil locked deep down inside

Kiddo was in the creek when I arrived, so I unloaded the car and went down and looked and– I swear she’s grown another foot since I last saw her, she’s like six fuckign feet tall in the last two weeks, what the fuck. Rude, child, rude.

Did I brainstorm stuff in the car? Don’t remember. This last two weeks went by like it was somebody else. Oof.

I gotta get my shit together and remember who I am here. Don’t remember what i wanted to write here now. Doesn’t matter, probably. (Your picture was not posted)

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whew i am tired. it has been a Day.

i spent saturday night with Dr F and MM and the kids, with Dude, and it was fun, and we didn’t Witcher or watch a movie we just sat in a room and talked like grown-ups. it was fantastic.

MM learned the terms and concepts “glory hole”, “pony play”, and, shit there was one other one. I don’t recollect now. Behind the cut, some miscellany of what I’m up to, mild tw for an offhand mention of a secondhand story of some Upsetting Hospital Things.

I asked Dr. F if anybody’s come into the ER with anything exciting in their butthole lately. And if they did, would he see them, and he was like oh yeah, they call me pretty often for those– a lot of times it’s a lot easier to deal with the situation if the person is unconscious. He said nothing notable had come in lately except one guy with a really huge dildo in there that was stuck, which sounds like it’d be hilarious but the more he found out about it the more it was sort of sad and upsetting, because clearly that person had not wanted that to happen exactly as it had, and, well, anyway, it just seemed like a bummer and not the sort of Wacky Hijinks we can all gently chortle about. He thinks the person will be all right, and gave us some explanations of what they do to remove such things, but like. yeah.

Anyway– am at the farm now. arrived Sunday afternoon in time to go over to Mom’s house to help FS and BIL work through some of mom’s list of seasonal chores. See, Mom and Dad had the house pretty divided up, what they each did around the place, and Mom admits she was sort of careless and didn’t pay close attention to how various of the things around the house went. The sunporch has some carefully handmade storm windows, plexiglass panes that get sealed into place with wooden side pieces, and they’re individually fitted to the windows of course, and, well. There’s a box they’re stored in, in the basement, custom-made to fit them exactly. So we took them down, discovered they were not marked in any way to label them, so we stuck tape on them with labels, and then I spent forfuckingever trying to wriggle them into their places in the holding box. Meanwhile BIL was up a ladder fixing a gutter, then sweeping out the woodstove chimney, then fixing a doorknob. Sister and I got the rain barrels out of storage in the barn and set them up. Sister rescued a birdhouse from a dead tree whose stump got damaged and is now going to fall over, but she failed to get the tree cut down because we looked everywhere and couldn’t find the gas can for the chainsaw. Meanwhile Farmkid read a book.

I maybe cried in the basement for a minute but nobody saw me and it was cool.

Now at the farm I had told myself, Monday I need to come up with an excuse to get off the farm, there’s a complicated task I was supposed to have done like a month ago involving getting a thing notarized and sending it certified mail and i can do those things at locations near to the farm, but I have to go out and run an errand. Of course I forgot instantly, and spent the morning starting to clean the slaughterhouse, but at midmorning FS said hey would you mind real quick running out to Agway for me and picking up some bales of woodshavings, they fit just fine in the minivan which I know you can drive, you can fit fifteen in there, (normally we’d get them in the truck but the current F250 is this absolute beast to drive, it’s a stick shift but also sucks and I haven’t ever managed to drive it successfully more than like moving it across the barnyard and even that I almost died.

It was a sign. I got my shit together, I went to the town office and the notary guy was right there and happy to help, I went to Agway and the guys sucked their teeth and said “fifteen?” and I said “yeah here watch” and moved their shitty stacking job up and sure enough I could’ve got 17 in there, and then I swung by the post office and bombs away this hideously overdue paperwork is out of my hands and maybe I’ll never get the thing but at least I didn’t just not do it at all. I can’t tell anyone I know IRL about this so I’m saying it here for cookies.

Got back to the farm, finished washing and packing eggs, inventoried the slaughterhouse consumables– bags, labels– sprayed some vinegar and soap on the stainless steel to try to get off some of the film the hippie castile soap leaves behind in there, managed a slight improvement, put the eggs away, got the wash sink area out in the packaging room cleaned. (total count on eggs: 60 dozen.)

I also deep-cleaned the icemaker, which has been idle since November, and got FS to turn it on. It hasn’t made any ice yet in a couple of hours so I’m going to have to point that out to BIL, but it does seem to be running at least; there was water going into it. It does take a while to make that first batch of ice.

We’re not using the slaughterhouse until Thursday, so I’ve got time.

I still have to clean the kill room like at all, but there’s a bunch of livestock stuff out there in my way. And I still have to sharpen all the knives, but Beautiful Livestock Assistant wants to learn how to use the sharpener so I’ll wait until he’s available to show him. I still have to shovel approximately six tons of mud out of the clean room drain, but I’d rather wait until we can get all the egg stuff out of there, which won’t be until Wednesday.

oop farmkid wants me to read to her. i’m rereading her T. Kingfisher’s Minor Mage, which is not too scary for her because I spoilered her about the scary monsters and so she was in on it and was like “WHEN IS HE GONNA FIGURE IT OUT” so it wasn’t so scary. (Your picture was not posted)

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Just now I was in Farmsister’s kitchen talking to farm-BIL, and I laughed and went through the door to the hallway. Upstairs, my niece Farmkid heard my voice and shrieked, “Grandma’s here!” and came joyfully stampeding to the top of the stairs, and then was disappointed to see it was only me.

😂 I do have the same voice and laugh as my mother. She sees Grandma all the time and me relatively rarely, but I guess it says great things about her relationship with Grandma that she was so excited.

We’re going over to Grandma’s in an hour or so probably, once I get dressed and they hit a pause point in their playing. (My older sister’s daughter is staying here for the duration of the visit, so that there’s room for older sister, her husband, and both sons in my mom’s house. In past visits that brother-in-law has had to sleep on the daybed in the back room, which is– well, not super restful, as that’s not really a bedroom… but Other Niece is now old enough to be perfectly comfortable away from her mom overnight, and Farmkid is old enough to behave herself at a sleepover.)

Yesterday Older Sister’s family drove up from Maryland (various testing and quarantine protocols have been followed, don’t worry) and came directly to the farm. The older son recently spent all his Christmas and birthday money on a 3-D printer. He knows that Farmkid has always been his biggest fan, and is a kind enough child to know that it’s to his benefit to encourage this. So he came in the door amidst all the hullabaloo of all of the arrival (with the family’s two Springer Spaniels, it’s never not a great deal of hullabaloo), and said “Ah! [Farmkid], I made you something!” and with a flourish, he produced a 3D-printed replica of Luna Lovegood’s wand from the movies– he pulled it out of his sleeve very nonchalant-dramatically and handed it over to Farmkid, who was ecstatic.

Very smooth, Oldest Nephew, very smooth. he is at that age where he is basically a person, but then the teenager slouches out and you have to walk away for a minute. (He’s just 13.)

oh I hear the girls making an enormous mess, I should probably poke my head out and see like. what’s. happening. here. orrrrrrrrrr….. no, I’d better see. (Your picture was not posted)

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So tomorrow we’re processing the turkeys to sell for Thanksgiving. Preorders were uneven this year but in the end we’ve sold just about all of them (the key is to not oversell! very very difficult to count live turkeys).

So the turkeys, like all the animals here, are raised out on pasture– being outdoors instead of in confinement is generally considered to be better for the animal’s wellbeing and health overall, and in some animals is linked to a better nutritional profile in the meat, and such. For the purposes of this farm, the extra reason is that the animals on pasture add fertility to the soil by, well, you know, shitting eveywhere, since that’s what animals are good at. Like, there’s a whole thing about integrating pastured livestock into farms and such, so you can go read more about that if you want.

Anyway. The chickens, we load into coops to bring down to the slaughterhouse. The pigs are loaded onto trailers, live or dead, to be taken away for processing. But the turkeys? They’re quite large, don’t fit into coops, and there isn’t a trailer on the farm that would easily accomodate them. So the way they’re transported down the hill to the slaughterhouse is that they’re run in a particular pattern (we move the fences every few days to give them fresh pasturage) so that their last pasturage is just up the hill from the barn, not very far at all. And then on the day before processing, we set up all the extra fencing we have because all the meat chickens are done, and we park everyone’s cars strategically, and the tractor on the other side of the barn, and we prop up fencing and poles and things, and then we take down the fence of their pasture and get them to walk, or sometimes run, down the hill to the barn, where their last night’s pasturage is waiting, tucked up next to the barn.

We call it the Turkey Parade, and it’s a fantastic time to observe turkeys, which are very different critters than chickens. They have some individual personality, but mostly the flock as a collective has a kind of overarching nature. And so every year the Turkey Parade is a little different.

Universally, they are always astonished by the gravel driveway. They all have to stop and peck at it, in great detail, and it’s always a challenge to keep them going.

But this year we had enough people and got them moving well enough that they made their way down (following my sister, the traditional Pied Piper, with the feed bucket, about whose contents they cared not at all in the face of So Much New Stuff To Peck). This year also was the first year Farmkid was really big enough to help.

Before the parade started, she stood atop the big round haybales stockpiled there for winter use in the barn just across the way, and harangued them. (Sister said she was addressing them, my mom pointed out that she’d been pretending to conduct an auction and had sold the turkeys the entire farm.)

Sister posted a video of it on her Instagram https://www.instagram.com/p/CH0-8ihp8-f/ and I must say, it is really entertaining.

I just did an instagram post of it which may or may not crosspost here.

Turkeys, tame ones like this, are not bright. They’re curious and nosey, but they really have no wits at all. But you can see the echoes of how smart wild turkeys were, and sometimes the sort of haunting scary remainders of how terrifying their dinosaur ancestors were.

I’m not super looking forward to tomorrow, as it’s going to be hard work, but– the state inspector came by while I was cleaning the slaughterhouse, and i had just sprayed down the whole room including the ceiling, and the entire room was full of soap suds, so at least he could tell I was really cleaning the place, LOL.

I’m as ready as I can be. It was a long day today, and tomorrow will be longer, and Sunday is packaging and pickup day which will likely be pretty exhausting, and then Monday i get to clean the slaughterhouse again and then we repeat the whole process on Tuesday except we get to do the packaging right away then too. And then Wednesday we have to tear it all down for the winter and put everything away.

but on Thursday I get to see family, which is something a whole lot of people aren’t getting this year. That’s my silver lining. I’m here for work, but my mom’s here too, and my pop, and that’s nice.

And I get to eat a turkey I helped raise and helped process, and know 130 other families are being fed by that same labor, so. I mean, someone’s gotta do it.

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Argh. So I made it through chicken processing all right. Every time, it’s a gruelling, physically-demanding day– starts the day before when I have to clean the slaughterhouse, goes all day and packaging gets really repetitive and exhausting and heavy-lifting-y, and there’s just no way to reduce any of it.

Every time, I tell myself I’ve got to make a practice of working out during the weeks I’m back in Buffalo, just to keep my body in some kind of shape so this isn’t quite so brutal. Every time so far this year, i’ve gotten sucked into working extra, and at the camera store job, I’m often wedged into closets and corners and it’s just prohibitively difficult to get up from my desk and walk around at all, let alone go do intensive activity periodically so that my body remembers it’s not dying. I console myself that my lack of working out doesn’t actually matter that much because the people who are on the farm full-time and do intense physical labor all the time are also exhausted after chicken day and it’s not even that I’m out of shape, it’s just that it is gruelling and there’s no avoiding that.

However. I would really like to figure out a way to be in slightly better shape, that’s not unreasonable. Just in general it’d be nice to get into the habit of taking, like, yoga breaks at work, I just have to make myself do it and like, if they’re going to have me working in a closet I think I can be excused for needing to go into the main room to stretch once an hour, you know?

behind the cut for length, my woeful tale of pain and agony and menstrual cramps:

Anyway. The day after slaughter day, I’m now in the ritual of going out in the morning and doing slightly more cleaning of the slaughterhouse because there’s always leftover slightly-gross residue that seemed clean in my exhaustion and in the cold light of the next morning is super nasty, and then I set up that room to use to wash eggs. There’s some moderate heavy lifting involved in that as well, but nobody’s around to judge so I work pretty slowly.

I was doing that yesterday, and I’d moved most of the heavy things and was standing in the middle of the room contemplating my next step (I knew what my next step was, I just wanted to contemplate it a moment; nobody’s watching and I can work slow because it doesn’t matter), when suddenly my back was like HEY LET’S GO SIT DOWN ON A SOFT SURFACE AND EAT BONBONS FOR THE REST OF THE DAY.

There wasn’t a soft surface within a hundred yards of me, so I just stood there, in intense pain, and after a moment (it might have been a muscle spasm), I shuffled over and leaned against the wall and explained to my back that I did not have any bonbons, there was no soft surface, and I had four baskets of eggs to wash and pack.

It did not care for this explanation, but I went on and did it anyway. I came inside when I was finished, and informed my sister that I could pack some eggs but I wasn’t going to be able to move the loaded boxes (we put the cartons of a dozen eggs each into a box that holds a dozen boxes, and while that’s not super heavy it is heavier than I was going to be able to shift much).

I sat briefly and talked to my dad, who’d come by to help fix the barn (oh I did not tell the story of BIL’s near-death, and even-nearer-barn, experience in The Big Tractor; suffice to say, he’s fine, the tractor’s a piece fo junk as ever it was, and the barn, well, he and my dad had to put the corner back on but it seems okay, so all’s well), and then I worried I wouldn’t be able to get up. I’d sat in the straight-backed kitchen table chair, not the lower soft one in that room, but I still had trouble getting up.

I spent the rest of the day in increasing pain, despite ibuprofen, and last night was not a great time, trying to sleep on this very firm mattress that feels I really ought to be a different shape than I am. Now the back pain has combined itself with sudden menstrual cramps and I am just a ball of misery.

But, I think nothing is misaligned– it’s all muscle-feeling pain, if you catch my drift, not torn muscle or sprained anythings (i’m now old enough to have experienced all kinds of things so I can tell that, lol sigh), and if i dope myself up for the cramps– you know, there’s a hot water bottle over on the sewing desk, so today may be a hot water bottle day.

Tonight there’s supposed to be a brutally hard frost, so everyone will be busy trying to clean up water lines and harvest things that will become mush or unusable, so I’ve volunteered to supervise the homeschooling. The girls are old enough that if I beg them to go easy on me because my back hurts, they probably will, and if not, I will survive. (Mostly I don’t have to do much physically anyway.) I’m just going to move slowly today.

Oh– I also did get some more flax processed with unicornduke, which was very cool, and maybe I’ll post pictures at some point. :)

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am at the farm and just ran out to my car to get something from it and when i came back inside i got the Big Greeting from the dog, who apparently hadn’t… registered… that i had just been inside? or maybe that doesn’t matter, she’d done the Big Greeting when I came down the stairs two hours ago too, who knows.

Anyway the Big Greeting involved pursuing me to the chair where I had sat down and climbing into my lap so I’d pet her, which, I mean, she’s like 65 pounds of Lab, so, and all she wants is to lunge and put her tongue entirely into your mouth which no thanks Dini I know what you eat, you compost-digger (and this is a hog farm and poultry slaughterhouse so that compost is no joke this is not just distaste for dog slobber this is the very real knowledge that this critter is full of bad germs)

so anyway I scritched and scruffed her extremely gross extremely dirty Lab-greasy fur for a bit and came up with just literal handfuls of dense undercoat, and concluded that she hasn’t finished shedding out her summer coat for the winter one to come in. (For the record, this dog has had so many baths this summer, and baths are kind of bad for Labs, they only make them get greasier in response, and then the grease gets full of driveway dirt and anyway Dini is at her most aromatic in a while and yes they’ve switched her food but there have been complications all summer, so the poor dog is. well. petting her is an investment, you have to scrub out afterward.)

So I went and got the brush and have just basically rooed http://boulderneigh.blogspot.com/2013/03/roo-roo-roo-your-sheep.html the dog but she has settled down a bit more contentedly.

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wecanthavethat https://wecanthavethat.tumblr.com/post/616730802467799040/systlin-linen-making-linen-fabric-from-flax :

systlin https://systlin.tumblr.com/post/616605700185112576/linen-making-linen-fabric-from-flax-seed :

LINEN - Making Linen Fabric from Flax Seed - Demonstration Of How Linen …

Please enjoy this nice Irish farmer showing how to process linen from planting to spinning, set to soothing music

Flaxen-haired makes a lot more sense now

he makes it look easier than it is if you can believe that

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At bedtime, Farmkid was running around excitedly shriek-explaining something. I finally poked my head out to listen to what she was saying. She had been telling her mother all about… the car? she was going to someday own? Yes. A car.

She’s going to have a car that is RED, except on the side it has LUMINESCENT YELLOW flames. (Those are the words she used, her mother was quite impressed with the correct pronounciation and usage of “luminescent”.)

And then she’s also going to DYE her HAIR to MATCH, all bright red but with two patches of yellow on the sides.

She was so excited about this, she said, she just had to scream, and proceeded to do so.

I was like kid I’m here to read your bedtime story so you need to simmer like way way down, and to my absolute shock, she did, so.

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So today was a chicken slaughter day and it was fine. This is 7/12 for the year so we’ve officially passed the halfway mark.

The two young male interns have both left to go back to school. They’ve been replaced by a young woman who has deferred her freshman year of college due to concerns about the handling of the pandemic. The two boys were rather rowdy, and she’s quiet, so far, but we’re glad not to be too short-handed, so.

We had a farm alumna come back for processing– the first Assistant Livestock Manager, who left two years ago or so– moved to Boston– she’s working now as an inspector for an organic certification agency, and she had a farm on her schedule nearbyish, so she scheduled the inspection for a Monday afternoon before slaughter day so she could come camp out in a tent and help us while being isolated.

Farmkid is delighted to see her; she worked here for two years when Farmkid was like, hmm, two to fourish? culminating in Farmkid getting to be the flower girl in her wedding? so it was pretty epic as early friendships go in Farmkid’s mind, and she’s always so excited to see this woman, who I guess can just be Farm Alumna for this post’s purposes. She was super good about her mask, too. We’re currently in three different isolation circles– FA, who has been isolated in a tiny circle of just herself and her husband in Boston, so she’s certainly not exposed, then the general circle of the farm, which is a large and irregular circle including me and my Dude, who is visiting presently, and then the third circle is the new farm apprentice and the last of the previous group of farm apprentices who just went on vacation; they’ve decided to co-isolate together, as the old apprentice was just on a plane and so ought to be quarantining, and the new apprentice who came from out of state and so ought to be quarantining and it’s just easier if they consider themselves a self-contained unit.

Anyway it’s a lot of mask-wearing and logistics but as long as we can eat lunch outside it’s not horribly difficult.

But the punchline of this post, okay, I promise it’s funny. It’s not that funny. Whatever it’s funny.

Mm last bit of background– we had three apprentices this year but along with them they hired a new Assistant Livestock Manager. He is an adorable young man of like, 23 or 24, very cute, slight of stature, a bit, hmm, I intend this to be a sort of neutral descriptor, but swishy– he’s a Texan who came to a small liberal arts college in central NY state to major in poetry? He’s rather interested in fashion? He likes to speak with exuberant gestures? Also he’s gay like in real life, but– he’s like, cartoony-gay on purpose in his mannerisms, he’s also quite experienced at farm living and very practical and also he writes poetry. So like, he contains multitudes. Anyway he’s a fantastic character and I could not possibly create a character in fiction as entertaining as he is in real life. (After we were done with chicken processing he went home and showered and changed and then came back for pizza night, as is customary, and he showed up in these fantastic white denim overall shorts with rolled cuffs, and actually pulled off the look flawlessly.)

Anyway.

So, Farm Alumna (and former Assistant Livestock Manager herself, as it happens) has been all toured around the farm and seen all the various improvements we’ve made since she left– she’d been by in November so generally she’s up on all the new stuff, but there’s been some additional new things.

The last thing she hadn’t seen that was new was that we got a really big long sturdy stainless-steel table to use out in the kill room, replacing two smaller tables of similar design. She worked in the evisceration room so she hadn’t seen the new table until we were cleaning up and it got moved into the hallway. She turned and saw it there, just as the new Assistant Livestock Manager was walking past it.

“Oh my,” she said admiringly, “look at this big boy!”

The new ALM paused, a little taken aback, then said “why thank you,” flexed, and kept walking.