Reflections on Lower Pond Farm – Page 4

The Way Back

A few nights ago, we had one of those moments. It was about six pm and we were done feeding, ready to make dinner and relax for the evening. We were having pork chops, and I went out to start the grill. When I came back in the kitchen, I told Vanessa I needed to send a short email about school while the grill warmed up. She said “okay” and went on about her business, like married people do.

She left the kitchen a couple minutes later, and I went into the office to use a computer with a real keyboard. I figured it would take about ten minutes to write the email, but as usual I was overly optimistic.

Twenty-five minutes later I went back to the kitchen, couldn’t find Vanessa, and thought Oh crap, I should have already started the pork chops. I figured she’d be mad that I was slowing down dinner. This is a pattern for us. She’s early, I’m late.

So I took the pork chops out to the back porch and that’s when I heard her yelling. Fortunately, I am deaf enough not to have made out the words, but I could tell from her tone that she wasn’t happy. So could the dogs. We all huddled in the back while she came down from the barn.

“Where have you been?” she asked.

“In the office?” I said, timidly because that seemed the safest. “I told you I was going to write an email?”

“I thought you were dead!”

Then I understood. Death is her go-to thought when she can’t find me.

“Sorry… I was in the office the whole time,” I said, then added. “The pork chops are on the grill.”

“I was afraid that Jose (the ram) had gored you.” Jose has no horns, but he does like to head-butt. About the worst he could do is knock my back out of joint. “I was afraid you were dead in the Way Back.”

The Way Back is the farthest, darkest part of our property. Werewolves live there. In Vanessa‘s mind I had been gored by a hornless ram and wondered into the dark Way Back to be eaten by werewolves.

And it turns out that when she was coming down from the barn she wasn’t yelling at me, but yelling for me.

I think I would would have preferred the quickness of a heart attack punctuated by a fall from the hayloft onto the concrete floor. But we don’t always get to choose our exit.

We sorted out my imagined demise, cooked our pork chops, filled our plates, and sat down to eat. That’s when I poured salad dressing all over my pork chop instead of the salad beside it.

The Egyptian

We sold most of our lambs yesterday. That always brings mixed feelings. On the one hand, I am relieved that our flock is down to a size that’s sustainable through the winter on the 250 or so bales of hay we already have in the barn. I’m also glad to recoup some of the money we spent on that hay last summer. It’s also a lot easier to move six or eight sheep from pasture to pasture than it is sixteen, which is what we had earlier in the summer. On the other hand, it’s distressing to the animals. We have to catch them and, once we do, carry them upside down by the legs to a trailer where they are locked in. As you can imagine, they aren’t fond of the process.

We sold them to an Egyptian man. He and I had been texting back and forth for a week about the lambs I had available, the breed, the price, and when he could come to get them. He wanted four young Dorper ewes, he said, because he had a Dorper ram. I told him that’s what I had, and that I had the registration papers. He wanted to come one night at eight o’clock, and asked if we had lights in the barn. Yes, we have lights, I said, but eight o’clock is too late for me.

At that point, I didn’t know he was Egyptian. We had only communicated via text, and his texts were like most people’s—short, lacking context, and mostly grammar free. At one point he wrote, “This [the lambs] is full blooded for pet right?” I asked him what he meant by “for pet,” and he responded, “sorry for the auto correction I meant dorpers”. Okay, I thought. I was suspicious because 1) texts have no tone of voice, and 2) I had gotten other weird texts from my Craigslist ad, some from bots and some obvious scams.

He arrived with his family about six o’clock last night. An American wife and two adolescent children, a boy and a girl. Very nice people. The kids jumped out of the car and started playing with our dog, Mike, while he and I walked to the barn to look at the lambs. We chatted, turns out he is a policeman. He wanted the ewes, and decided to buy one of the ram lambs, as well. For about an hour, he and I wrangled sheep while Vanessa entertained the kids, and his wife maneuvered their very large SUV (I think it was a GMC OhMyGod or possibly a Ford BiggerNshit) and trailer around the pasture as we loaded up the lambs.

The key to loading up animals, I keep having to learn over and over, is to have them in a contained area before the buyer arrives. No matter how friendly the animals are when you are holding a grain scoop, after you snatch the first one, the others get skittish.

It turns out that my Egyptian friend—I say friend because catching frightened animals will make you friends, even if just for a short while—is a kind man. When we had a couple of long walks to the trailer carrying a kicking, bleating,upside-down sheep by the hooves, he would ask “Do you want to stop and rest?”He did not add, “old man.”

He had told me earlier that he slaughtered and butchered his own sheep. I think that’s a very humane way to do it, since what stresses the animal most is being transported and thrown into a new environment for a short period. If I had a stronger stomach, I might learn how to do it myself…someday… after the zombie apocalypse… and after I’ve eaten all the peanut butter. Anyway, after we got all the lambs loaded up, we were standing in the barn, signing the papers, and he asked, “Do you have an air compressor?”

“Yes, right over there.” I thought maybe he had a low tire.

“Let me tell you a trick,” he said. “After you slaughter a lamb and hang it, poke a little hole in the leg somewhere, and use the compressor to fill it with air.”

“The lamb?” I asked, imagining a large, woolly balloon.

“Yeah, it separates the skin from the meat. After you fill it, put your thumb over the hole to keep the air from escaping. Then just tap all around it with a little stick.”

Kind of like a piñata? I thought.

“Makes it very easy to skin,” he said. “Just peels right off.”

We finished signing the papers, he paid me, and they left not long after that. It was dark, their taillights bobbed down the drive and disappeared over the hill. Vanessa and I fed the dogs, put up the chickens, and had a late dinner. I felt a mix of relief at having fewer animals to feed, the familiar sadness of saying goodbye to animals I have cared for, and pleasure at having met a new friend. When I went to bed around ten, Vanessa was already asleep. I was too tired to dream.

Thursday’s Child

Thursday’s Child
(Written April 6, 2018)

Last Saturday, Lulu, one of our ewes, had a lamb that I named Thursday’s Child. She was the last lamb of the season. All the others were at least a week old, and they pretty much knew the lay of the land already. They were at the romping stage. This lamb was born late in the afternoon, in farthest part of our pasture, what we call “The Way Back,” and when the flock saw me carrying a grain bucket, they all came running. Except for Lulu. She hung back. When a ewe first has a lamb, she will separate herself from the others for a while, maybe a day.

I walked back to check on them, it was a couple hundred yards, and when I got there, things looked a little strange. Lulu hadn’t completely cleaned the placenta off the lamb and she seemed confused. I wanted the two of them to get back into the main pasture, which is more secure against coyotes and other predators, so I picked up the lamb, still wet, and tried to get Lulu to follow. Lulu kept acting like she was drunk. Looking around for her lamb, she’d come forward a few steps and then run back and bawl for a while. We did that all the way to the pasture. I got her up to the Sheep Shack where she was laying on some straw and doing fine. Then we took a video, which I posted, and then about 10 minutes later she started having contractions again.

In a normal lamb birth, the first thing you see is lips—it’s kind of freaky, actually. Alien-looking. It’s lips, then a snout, then you want to see a little section of cream-colored hoof, which means they are coming out the right way. It takes a while, especially for the first birth, but soon you will see a deep purple tongue hanging out of the inch or so of mouth that’s sticking out of the womb, and then you’re certain the lamb is dead because that tongue just ain’t right. But it’s not dead, it’s just a droopy purple tongue. Half an hour later, when you’re already digging the grave in your imagination, the head makes its through the birth canal, and the lamb slides out and plops down on the ground. Within a minute, it’s on its feet and Ma is licking it clean. It’s an amazing thing to watch. Goats are the same, only difference is the color.

When Lulu went into labor again last Saturday, it didn’t look right. She was pushing hard and when the lamb finally emerged it was breach, still wrapped in the placenta, and dead, of course. I helped her push it out, since the head was the last part to come, and after that she expelled her uterus, the whole damned thing. It hung out behind her, inverted, about the size of a football.

It’s called a prolapsed uterus. I had read about it, but never seen one. We’ve had three or four dozen lamb and goat births since we started this adventure, and this was the first real trouble we’ve had. The first time a mother was in danger.

While I tried to keep Lulu stable and as comfortable as a creature can be when her private parts are hanging out, I sent Vanessa to the house to get the sheep book, which turned out to be useless. So I did what we all do in times of uncertainty now-a-days, I Googled. ‘Prolapsed uterus in sheep’ on my iPhone, right out there in the pasture, still trying to keep Lulu calm and the baby alive. “It’s okay, baby, it’s okay. We’re gonna take care of you.” Little white lies.

“Call the vet,” Vanessa said.

“It’s five-thirty on Saturday. They’re closed,” I said.

“Maybe they have an emergency number.”

OMG, they did. In about 30 minutes, Dr. Bates was there. Dr. Bates is amazing. I absolutely mean that. She’s 5’2” and maybe 110 pounds, and she is fearless. She brought her husband to help wrangle Lulu, who had been getting up occasionally and wandering around the pasture, lamb at her teat, womb dangling behind her, me at her head, trying to keep her still.

Dr. Bates’ first goal was to put the uterus back where it belongs, and she worked at that for about half an hour or so. Lulu was still awake, of course, no one thought to bring an anesthesiologist. So I parked myself in front of Lulu, and I had her in a headlock, while Dr. Bates’ husband straddled her (Lulu, not Dr. Bates) and the two of us managed to keep her (again, Lulu, not Dr. Bates) more or less immobile. Vanessa’s job was to hold Thursday’s Child and provide a blow-by-blow account of the actions in the back.

At one point, Lulu decided to lunge forward, and she knocked me on my back. Later, Dr. Bates said she was worried Lulu would step on my glasses. I was more worried about the bridge of my nose.

The most intriguing thing was that Dr. Bates brought a 5-pound bag of sugar to rub all over the uterus to try to get the swelling down. It did get the swelling down, and she managed to untangle all of the after-birth from the uterus, but in the end it didn’t work. Every time she’d push a little uterus flesh back in, Lulu would expel it again.

So she did an emergency field hysterectomy. I won’t describe that. I didn’t see it, but when I tried to unlock my knees after an hour of holding Lulu in a headlock, I wished again for the anesthesiologist.

The Husband and I carried Lulu, by the legs, swinging upside down, into to the barn and to a small pen we have there for just such a situation. We kept her and Thursday’s Child in that pen for three days until the stitches seemed to be healing. For a couple of days, we didn’t know if Lulu would make it. She just stared a lot, and slept. Poor girl. Thursday’s Child was confused, slept beside her mama, occasionally tried to play. By Tuesday, though, Lulu was eating well, and by Wednesday, the sun came out and they were both ready to rejoin the flock. I went to the Vet’s office and paid the bill on Thursday. It was a lot. And worth every penny.

When I first saw Lulu and her new lamb in the Way Back last Saturday, I was listening to a song by Sam Baker, my new favorite Texan songwriter. The song is called “Thursday,” and it’s about a woman who has as many babies as she has ex’s. Clearly, she has not managed her life very well. The song ends with the nursery rhyme.

Monday’s child is fair of face
Tuesdays’ child is full of grace
Wednesday’s child is full of woe
Thursday’s child….

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Sick Goats

(Written August 7, 2018)

Some days the farm is idyllic. Since the barn is on top of the hill, the highest point on the property, and the rear door faces west, the sunsets there are wonderful, especially when it’s partly cloudy. On those days, after we feed, I generally linger a while and watch the sun go down. It is a peaceful end to a satisfying day.

Then there are days like today. For context, we have spent a week or more nursing three sickly goat babies. They have been lethargic, barely eating (and losing weight as a result), walking around as if in a daze and, last (for emphasis) suffering diarrhea. (Goats with loose bowels are not fun.) The symptoms could be caused by parasites—goats are prone to worms—or just a virus, sort of a caprine summer cold. Anyway, we gave them worm medicine and have been giving them daily doses of vitamins to get their red blood count back up. All of this is done by drench. A drench is a syringe with a pencil-sized, blunt steel tube instead of a needle. The idea is that one of us (me) holds the goat while the other (Vanessa) squirts the contents down the goat‘s throat. The goats, of course, have other ideas. They squirm, they fight, they spit. We try to get enough of the contents down the goat‘s throat to achieve the desired result. And it is working. The babies are getting better—eating more, gaining weight, getting livelier.

Then this morning, when we fed, I saw that Buck, the sire, was having trouble walking. His hind legs were wobbling, bad, and he was having trouble standing. It was like he was good and drunk. It was worrisome.

I cannot overstate the importance of Buck to our whole operation. He was in the first set of goats we got. Along with Clara and Clover, he is a founding member. He is the only male source of genetic goat material (goat jism) we have. We bottle fed him when we first got him, and he is part of the family. If you have ever had a dog that you loved, but that stunk really bad, especially in the autumn, that’s Buck. In my head, I could never stop farming as long as Buck is here. (I feel the same about Clara and Clover, but this post is about Buck).

I called the vet and arranged for a farm visit in the afternoon. In the meantime, I got my teeth cleaned and inspected—I’d had the appointment for six months—and looked up the symptoms for “goats with weak back legs.” Turns out there is a thing called Meningeal Worm Infection. It comes from infected deer. The deer eat a parasite, it passes through them without any harm, then lands on something that the goat eats. It does not pass through the goat, however. It gets stuck in the spine and causes neurological problems—shakiness, weak hind quarters, plus skin lesions, etc., that Buck only has minimally.

The cure. Drenching. Just like with the babies, except instead of a 15 pound kid, which we are giving 6cc of vitamins, we are giving a 4-year old intact 170 pound male 50cc. 50cc is about the size of a Starbucks lotte.

He squirms, he fights, he spits.

I, on the other hand, wonder “Where the hell is my sunset?”

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Image may contain: cloud, sky, tree, twilight, outdoor and nature

Image may contain: cloud, sky, outdoor and nature

Patty, The Raccoon

Apparently, we held a racoon hostage in our garden. I’m not sure how long—anywhere from a couple of days to a couple of weeks—but maybe long enough for her to get Stockholm syndrome. We named her Patty.

It all started about the middle of June, when Roma beans began disappearing as quickly as they came up. The beans, the leaves, and the vines, all nibbled down to a nub. Every day, a few more feet would disappear. At first, I figured it was rabbits, so we put wire hoops over the bean rows, covered the hoops with bird netting, and secured it all with weights and clothes pins.

That worked just long enough to lull us into a false sense of security. Then, we went out one morning, and something had reached through the netting and snatched practically every bean in the row. Rabbits can’t do that. It didn’t stop with beans, either.

A row of sweet potato vines was decimated—every single leaf chewed off, in some cases leaving nothing but a single stem sticking out of the ground, kind of like a middle finger. I got mad and built a twenty-foot long cage out of some left-over horse fencing and baling twine. We replanted a few sweet potatoes, caged them all in, and moved on.

Not long after that, we started seeing weirdness in the barn. We keep a large box of dog bones on top of a refrigerator in there. For two or three days in a row, the box of dog bones was knocked over and dog-bone fragments scattered everywhere. This was too high for even the jumping dogs to reach, and it was way too heavy for mice. So, I went to Lowe’s and bought a plastic container with a snapping lid to secure the dog bones. That worked for about twenty-minutes.

A couple of evenings later as I was walking to the barn, I saw something gray and furry lumbering over the fence between the barn and the garden. It looked at me, it was wearing a mask.

We have an electric fence that we use for the sheep-n-goats. It’s portable, about four feet tall, four-hundred feet long, and sends out a 6,000 volt pulse every three seconds, enough to get your attention, that’s for sure. The next morning, I put the electric fence up inside the regular garden fence. With two fences, surely, our garden was safe.

Evidently, however, Patty was in the garden when I put the fence up—or she got in some time later, maybe when it was off. Vanessa and I were in the garden a few days ago, finding half-eaten eggplants, bites out of tomatoes, and so on, when I happened to look down and see that something had been digging under the electric fence, trying to get out.

Then I looked over and saw Patty slinking into a patch of ground cherries. We stared at each other for a few minutes, and then I removed the electric fence.

Then Saturday morning about six, when we went to feed, I looked up on the top shelf of the counter where we fill the feed bowls and saw two masked eyes looking back at me. Vanessa screamed and, as she later reported, nearly peed herself. All five dogs went into a yelping frenzy, though, honestly, at least three of them were just howling in sympathy, having no idea why. The sheep-n-goats started screaming at the delay of their morning grain.

Poor Patty, if it was Patty, just hung behind the counter, out of reach of the dogs, frozen in panic.

She spent the day on top of that shelf, curled-up, sleeping. I wasn’t sure if she was injured, sick from eating too much dog-food, or just comfortable. Whenever I would go in, she’d look at me, figure I wasn’t a threat, and go back to sleep. We had to keep the dogs out of the barn all day. That was the biggest challenge.

I woke up about three in the morning on Sunday, wondering about Patty. By three-thirty, I had convinced myself she had a broken leg, and I was going to have to deal with her, probably put her down since I’m not going to pay a vet bill for a wild, foraging raccoon, even if I did keep her hostage for a while.

But when we went to the barn on Sunday morning, she was gone, and things pretty quickly went back to normal, except the dogs keep sniffing around the feeding counter.

This morning, the lid was off the dog-food container, so now we’re back to where we were two weeks ago.

Of course, it could be more than just Patty—we could be feeding a whole village of raccoons. I often wonder what happens up in the barn at night, when we’re sleeping safely in our beds.

Dice and the Isis Bride

In Vanessa’s version, she gets home from work and finds me in a safari hat, carrying a shotgun and a camera. “What are you doing?” she asks.

“I’m going to kill Dice,” I say.

“Oh… okay,” she says.

In my version, I don’t own a safari hat. I’m wearing my straw hat, the one I wear when I’m on the tractor or the mower. It’s my mowing hat, not my shooting hat. I don’t have a shooting hat—I was improvising. Also, I don’t have a shotgun. The weapon I was carrying was a 1930’s Winchester .22-gauge single shot bolt action. We have two rifles, which we bought when we started farming. There’s the twenty-two, for putting small animals out of their misery (or ours), and there’s some Big-Ass Rifle that I’ve only had to use once, and I hope to never use again.

I was carrying a camera. We agree about that.

We also agree about the mission—to kill Dice. Dice has been torturing all living souls for over three years. We got him when we ordered a couple of dozen chicks from a McMurry Hatchery in early spring 2013. They put day-old chicks in a box and send them through the mail. When they mail chicks during cold weather, they sometimes put in a “free gift”—a rooster to increase the mass and the temperature for the others. Roosters are cheap because people don’t want them. Dice was a “free gift.”

And he was mean. He fought with Arthur (the nice rooster), he had his way with the hens, he attacked us, usually from behind, when we weren’t expecting it. He really pissed me off. Often and a lot.

So about a year ago, we put him in a secondary chicken coop we have on the other side of the property, away from the main coop—yes, we have two chicken coops. We put one of the hens in with him, and Vanessa named her “Isis Bride”—I’m not sure if it was a political reference or just a good slant rhyme. But “Dice and the Isis Bride” did fine. They had a small coop, access to an outdoor run, plenty of food and water, and each other. Most importantly, Dice couldn’t attack us, though he would glare at me through the fencing and threaten every time we changed their water or cleaned their feeder.

I had been threatening (read: talking myself into) killing Dice for over two years. I have dug many animal graves since we bought the farm—a dog, three full-grown sheep, a goat, several newborns, ducks, a goose, and a bunch of chicks/chickens. I didn’t have the heart to kill Dice, even though I hated him.

But at the end of May, we got a new shipment of chicks. They spent the first five weeks indoors, a few days outside in the chicken-tractor, and now they have to go to the secondary coop. It was the chicks or Dice.

Good-bye Dice.

I won’t describe shooting him—except to say it took four shots. Dice, it turns out, was mostly feathers.

In Vanessa’s version, I come down from the barn in my safari hat, carrying a shotgun, a camera, and a dead Dice. “What are you doing with him?” she asks.

“I’m gonna clean him,” I say. “The water’s already boiling.”

In my version, the water’s not boiling, it’s 145 degrees. I looked it up on YouTube.

Though I have killed a few animals and buried many that died on their own, I had never killed one with the intent of cleaning and eating it. I didn’t want to waste the Dice experience. Partly, that’s because as the hens that came with Dice get older, they will stop laying. Then we will have to make some hard decisions—fourteen hard decisions, actually. On the one hand, it feels a little icky to eat a chicken you’ve fed, watered, and cared for and that has given you eggs for four or five years. On the other hand, they’ve had a very good life for a chicken, and it’s a quick end. I keep telling myself that if I’m going to eat meat (and I’m going to eat meat), then I need to be aware of where it comes from.

I won’t describe the actual cleaning, except to say two things. If you do it, wear gloves and sharpen your knives.

Afternoon Surprise

When I got home this afternoon, I heard a sheep bleating in the back yard. At first, I thought one of ours had gotten out, though it sounded like a lamb, whereas we have no lambs yet. When I went up, sure enough there was a lamb, maybe 3 or 4 months old. Not sure where she came from, but there she was, bigger than life. She was friendly, following me around, but not getting too close.

Imagine my my surprise when I looked in the barnyard and then saw a pig. We have never had a pig, though we often keep bacon on the premises.

The pig and the lamb (currently known as Laurel and Hardy) seem to get along very well, as long as they have separate feeding bowls. They are spending the night in Ramshackle, which is the fenced and sheltered area we kept Mac, our ram, until we sold him last week.

The fact that they showed up at the same time and seem to get along, makes me believe they arrived together. What confounds me is that I found the lamb in the yard and the pig in the barnyard, which means that one of them had to get past two fences with latched gates. One of the fences is five feet tall and very formidable–none of our dogs has ever gotten over or under that fence.

Some of you might recall that another lamb, Sophie Walker, showed up a couple of years ago. Try as we did, we never found her owner. Now a lamb brings a pig–or perhaps it is a pig on the lam.

Anyway, if I was the type to think the universe is sending us messages, I might think we need to operate a home for wayward livestock. Or I might think we need to eat more bacon.

Control of Nothing

This was one of those days when the universe reminds me that I am in control of nothing. After feeding this morning, my “plan” was to write for an hour, then do some grading, then leave at 9:00 for school and listen to “On Point” with Tom Ashbrook, my favorite radio show, on the way to school. I had meetings at 10:30, 11:00, and 1:00.

I took the dogs to the barn for one last whizz about 8:45, and that’s when I saw the pig-that-is-not-our-pig in barnyard, and all the goats and sheep standing around the fence-line with a horrified look, like someone had just farted in church.

Then the pig-that-is-not-our-pig took a big whizz, and I realized, judging from where the stream originated, that she is a he–assuming that pigs have roughly the same anatomy as other barnyard animals. I looked around and found where the pig-that-is-not-our-pig had gotten through two fences, patched those holes, got some grain and opened the pasture fence to coax the pig-you-know-what-I-mean back to Ramshackle, where he/she belongs.

As soon as I opened the gate and shook the grain, all the sheep-n-goats darted for it. Two full-grown does, two four-day old kids, and three very pregnant ewes stampeded. The pig was still whizzing.

That’s when I saw that Clara, one of our does, was about to give birth. I waved goodby to Tom Ashbrook for the day, and got out the electric fence to bolster the regular fence, since I didn’t want the pig-etc-et-era to get back into the barnyard and possibly harm the new kid or at the very least freak out the sheep-n-goats.

It took about twenty minutes to set up the electric fence, during which time Clara went from having drippy stuff, to having a foot emerge, to having a full fledged kid on the ground. If humans were born that easily, there would be 30 billion people on the planet.

But now it was 9:45, and my 10:30 meeting was toast. I came to the house, tried to call the person I was supposed to meet, and finally got voice mail. I went back to the barn, tried to dry off the new kid, and go to school, but I had goat afterbirth on my jacket and pants (you gotta love the farm) and thought, “It’s just a division meeting.”

Back and forth to the barn two or three times, cause I’m worried about the pig breaking out and terrorizing the sheep-n-goats, and it’s getting later and later. I call and move my 11:00 meeting to 12:00. At 11:05 I’m ready to go when I see that Clover (one of the goats) is hiding in the trees, afraid to go back to the barnyard because of the pig.

I tell her about the electric fence, but you can’t reason with a scared goat. It’s starting to rain, and goats hate rain, but she’d rather suffer rain than the possibility of a pig. I take out my cell phone and show her radar images of approaching thunderstorms from Weather.com, to no avail. Finally, I say, “Okay, you’re on your own, dammit.”

I trudge to the house, feeling bad about leaving Clover, though she can get to to barn any time from where she is. It’s now 11:20, and I will be 5 minutes late for the meeting I already put back an hour. When I get in the truck, I look down and see that I’m still wearing my afterbirth jacket.

I have control over nothing.

Accepting that, I feel better.

Happy Valentine’s Day

Hi Sweetheart.

I can imagine a website is not a very common Valentine’s Day gift, but here is one for you. I had hoped to have this farther along, and it will get there–as soon as I can figure out the difference between a menu, a page, a post, and a category and how they all interlink.

Anyway, I put up a few pictures and this message.

More to come!

Love you…