I'm trying to sort out my animal situation.

Animals take a lot of constant work, unlike the garden which requires bursts of seasonal work. To some extent that constant work is important for me since it gets me up and moving every day. To some extent it's a problem, because it makes vacations etc difficult. To a large extent it can be ameliorated ( Read more... )

Mom and brother showed up Friday night. Saturday we went into town and picked up my new (to me) truck, spent a long time doing the transfer papers and insurance since there's definitely a staffing bottleneck in the city, at least on Saturdays, and drove her home. She's lovely. Driving her is also going to take some getting used to, this is a very ( Read more... )

I've been immersing into the farm lately. This is good for me and for the farm in a lot of ways.

Anyhow, I've been spending time thinking about systems and about the animals. Part of this is the business class, writing about these things, and part of it is having some of my interpersonal met in quality-vs-quantity ways so more time gets freed up.

One ( Read more... )

So after pickup tomorrow I'll have:

Baby Driver, the boar

Penny, an original sow
Black Chunk, out of Sparky
Apricot, out of Rapunzel
Hooligan, out of Rapunzel
Banana, likely out of UV (Penny x Baby)

3 med-large barrows

1 3-month boarlet
1 3-month barrow
2 3-month gilts, one out of Nox

7 boarlets, one with a testicular hernia
3 gilts

I slept under a weighted blanket for the first time last night. It's made like a quilt, with two layers of fabric sewn into squares and glass beads in the squares. That's a pretty common way of making a weighted blanket, and it had the issue that I expected: that is a lot of thermal mass, and so it took a long time to heat up to body temperature ( Read more... )

So a lot of my energy/money goes to my farm, which is primarily dedicated to breed preservation. That is, I keep my freezer full but I'm maximized neither for feeding myself nor making money. I'm maximized for being able to have as many people keep Ossabaw hogs as breeding stock as possible.

I'd been maintaining two boars for the genetic diversity, ( Read more... )

Counseling yesterday, with some epiphanies:

( I think I figured out what's happening when Tucker is gone and I have a rough time. )

Ok. I made it through the last couple days. Cautiously, hopefully, the last week might have been the worst. It was that acute shock/loss thing where my emotional self just felt like TV static turned on extra loud all the time and I numbly went through the motions -- there were lots of motions, because a LOT of pig processing to do -- and I couldn't ( Read more... )

The butcher came yesterday. He slaughtered five pigs, one of which was a foundation herd sow Rapunzel, another of which was Friendly, and then three littler ones. When he came originally a couple months ago the pigs were mostly smaller; I hadn't considered that the delay in finishing the job would result in a lot more meat.

Well, it did.

I was ( Read more... )

Yesterday was the first field day I've led in awhile at work. I had one of the summer students with me.It got some stuff done but wasn't super productive; we're learning to estimate lengths and diameters from 7.5cm to 50m or so in various configurations which requires lots of guessing then measuring. It's easy enough to just to measure first, but ( Read more... )