March 2019 – Lowerpondfarm

We have been on this farm for five and a half years. It wasn’t even a farm when we bought it, really. It was a house, a couple of out-buildings and a pond on a little over twelve acres. There was an rusty, old wire fence around most of the perimeter, patched in places with pieces of cattle panel and baling twine, a small raised-bed garden near the well, and a couple of old peach and pear trees. That was it.

We have, by ourselves and with the help of a few friends, built a mile of fence (literally) and three sheep and goat sheds, put in a large garden, cut back brush to get pasture, painted the barn with rollers and brushes, rebuilt fences that we didn’t build right the first time, played midwife to a couple dozen sheep and goat births, and buried a few who didn’t make it.

One day I spilled half gallon of primer from the top platform directly in to Jordan’s hair.

I won’t try to speak for Vanessa (I’ve learned… the hard way), but the hardest thing I have done so far is build this damned web-page.

It’s confusing.

It’s confounding.

It’s ephemeral.

I began a couple of years ago on Valentine’s Day. I did some research on which platform to use, how to get started, and so on. I decided to use WordPress.org, rather than the simpler, free site WordPress.com. That was my first mistake, though of course I didn’t know it at the time.

I ordered a book (because in America all new adventures should begin with a purchase) titled WordPress for Dummies. That was my second mistake. When it arrived, it was 820 pages long. That’s like the size of a Russian novel.

And that was the version for Dummies–can you imagine the number of volumes in WordPress for the Reasonably Smart ? And WordPress for Those with Extremely High SAT’s would have to be delivered in boxcars.

It wasn’t just the size of the manual, either. It was the way they describe things, things I didn’t understand, with words that fled to the ragged edges of comprehension. Here’s a example, from page 289: “In the section ‘Adding Custom Fields to Your Template File,’ later in this chapter, I show you the template tag you need to add to your WordPress theme template in order to display this Custom Field, which appears in my post like this: My current Mood is: Happy, shown in Figure 5-3, where the Custom field appears an the end of my post.” WTF?!?

I just want to write about my sheep and my goats.

For a long time, I told myself the best way to learn to do this was just by doing it. So I would write a story or post some pictures, and they would be there for a while and then they’d disappear, or turn upside down. That was okay because nobody was looking at the cite anyway. It was just me playing along frontier of some dark and vast cyber universe. Then, last fall, for some reason I don’t understand, a lot of people I don’t know in real life started visiting the site and signing up to be notified of new postings, which I didn’t know how to do.

So I didn’t do anything. There were two problems, really. First, I wanted the web site to be good–when someone visited it, I wanted the experience to be pleasing. Second, I didn’t know what I was doing.

I still don’t know what I’m doing, but I’m tired of being a closet blogger.
So this is my coming out post.

There are some things I want to write about that I don’t think are right for FaceBook–they are either too long, or too sad, or too… something. The first is titled “Eating Lulu.” You get the idea.

My plan is to post stories on this site and link to Facebook, if I can figure out how to do that. The subscription doohickey is working now, so if you sign up for notifications, whenever I post a blog, it will come directly to your email. It even has a link for unsubscribing.

There are a lot of things I want to write about and a lot of pictures I want to post. I will have to figure things out as I go. The website is still under construction, but that’s okay. There are three or four pages already working, with half a dozen or so posts, and more to come.

I’m not sure what to do about the hundred or so people who signed up last fall. I have their email addresses, but I don’t know what to do with them. Maybe a road trip.

I feel strangely liberated….

There’s an old song keeps going through my head. “Mama said there’d be days like this. There’d be days like this my mama said.”

Mama didn’t mention this one.

Our buck, Buck Henry, has been limping a bit for the past week or so. It hasn’t been real pronounced, but he was definitely favoring his left rear foot–not putting much weight on it when he walked, holding it off the ground when he was standing still.

We figured we needed to trim his hooves. That is a nasty job at best, because of course the owners of those hooves never cooperate. They pull and they tug and they flinch and they act like you’re trying to stash them in a trunk. Add to that a hundred and fifty or so pound animal and one who has been walking in mud for weeks and weeks, but now that mud has completely dried. It’s like concrete. I figured we’d need a jackhammer. I was really dreading the job.

Then I had an idea.

Drugs.

For him, not for us. (That was my second choice.)

On Saturday morning, I called the vet’s office and asked if I could get a tranquilizer for Buck. I told them what I wanted to do, and at first I got the “I don’t think so, but I’ll ask the vet” response. Fortunately, the vet on duty was one who we’ve worked with before, and she approved the overall plan. So I drove up and got two shots–one to put Buck to sleep and one to wake him back up.

On Sunday, we did the deed. Vanessa gave Buck the first shot, and about three minutes later, he went into this woozy three-tequila fugue state. He staggered around for a while, loved everyone–Buck has always been a happy drunk–and slowly started dipping. Lower and lower. Lower and lower.

About fifteen minutes in, he’s on the ground, and we start working. We don’t know how long he’ll be out. Could be two hours, could be ten minutes. We had to guess about his weight, which of course determined the amount of the sedative. It’s really hard to weigh a goat with any accuracy. They won’t stand on the scales long enough for you to read the meter.

Vanessa is working on his rear hooves, the one he’s limping on, when she finds some sort of strange growth. It’s about the size of a grape, growing between his hooves (which is why he’s limping, we guess), and it’s very fatty. She clips off the top, and it starts bleeding. And bleeding. And bleeding.

Then for some reason I still don’t understand, I’m down there working on his hind hooves, and blood is going everywhere, and I’m thinking, “I gotta cut this whole fatty-grape thing off.” I find where it connects, deep in between his hooves, but every time I try to clip it, Buck flinches–even though he is completely unconscious. This is not good.

So I do what I always do when things get really tough: I call Vanessa. “Sweetheart, can you do this?” I ask. “I’m not good at it.” There is a part of Vanessa that really wanted to be a surgeon when she was young, but that part of her got blocked by the part of her that enrolled in chemistry.

So Vanessa-the-wannabe-surgeon comes down and just clips the bleeding grape right off at the root. Then, we go from blood oozing to blood squirting. There was a steady stream, like a hole in a radiator. Blood was splattering everywhere. On the bucket, on the tarp, on the little bottle of rubbing alcohol I’d brought to sterilize everything.

“Surely, we are killing him,” I thought.

“Pack it with paper towels,” Vanessa said.

So I did. And after about 15 minutes, we got the bleeding to stop, and eventually even got to clean and disinfect the hoof.

Then I gave him the shot to wake him up. It didn’t work nearly as quickly as the first shot. For the next two hours, the most common utterance between us was, “Is he still breathing?”

He was. Every time.

Later, Vanessa told me was a lipoma–a fatty cyst growing between the muscle and the skin. Generally, they are benign, but this one was badly placed. I looked it up.

Buck is getting better now. He’s still limping, and I’m sure he’s sore. He may even have a hangover.

But I swear he is the most magnificent beast.

And Vanessa is pretty great, too.

Month: March 2019

The Hardest Thing So Far

The Lipoma