Walk sneaky and carry a piece of plywood.

I have discovered the secret to sneaking into the sheep pen to get to the chicken run....carry plywood.  Elvis thinks its a fence, apparently. He comes right up and asks for pets and doesn't even think about butting.  Kind of awkward to carry a flashlight, a piece of plywood big enough to mimic a fence, and the heavy filled chicken waterer and a coffee can of feed, but hey, needs must.

Good thing I am good at the whole holding your life in your hands - sometimes I think I have 12 hands.

When we were building the greenhouse, my habit of holding on to everything I pick up, developed when I had all those toddlers and babies, became a problem.  My husband would say, "Nancy, put DOWN the level before you try to hold that piece up."  Oh yeah.....but then five minutes later there I am with the hammer under my arm, the level under the other, and two pieces of pvc, trying to stand there holding things in place.  "Nancy, put it DOWN." Oh, yeah...

When we used to live in the city, when my big kids were very small, we lived up two flights of stairs in an apartment complex.  I would walk with the kids in the stroller to do the marketing and then walk home and then have to figure out how to get two babies and loads of groceries and a stroller up those stairs.  I got creative and very good at carting awkward, heavy, and precious things with a death grip lest I drop anything.  I guess the habit stuck with me.

Musing

I miss laughing.  You know that deep belly ache laugh that causes snot to come out of your nose and your stomach muscles a good work out?  I miss that.  I haven’t had a laugh like that in such a very long time.  

I miss not feeling worried deep down at the bottom of my stomach all the time.  Even when I am busy and involved and happy in my work, there is still that deep gnawing worry about what is going to happen next, what could go wrong.  As if there were two parts of me co-existing rather uneasily.  

I miss the feeling that all your work is done, there is nothing to do but something frivolous: reading for hours and then talking about the book...baking fussy cookies for the intricacy of it, rather than bread because “we gotta eat”.... working on a Hawaiian quilt, even though I am very bad at it and have to rip out half the stitches anyway.  It’s kind of like the growing flowers instead of food, just because they’re pretty.  There isn’t any room for metaphorical flowers in my life right now.  

I miss that feeling that you are done with your work.  That first day of summer vacation when you are a small kid (when you don’t have to rush out and find a summer job) and the whole long glorious stretch of warm sunny days and games of capture the flag stretches out in front of you.  Heck, I would settle for going to bed at night with the day’s list all done and no big list facing me the next morning!  

This is not to say that I don’t have things that I am grateful for now.  I am grateful beyond words for my family and for the opportunity to work together toward homesteading.  My job stretches my mind and allows me to work with some pretty amazing kids and teachers.  I am healthy, strong, and learning new things every day.  I am so grateful for friends, near and far (and the internet to keep in touch with them).  I am a fortunate woman, all told.  

There are still things to miss, though.  

Yay! The Younger hens started laying!

I went out and found a tiny pullet egg out there in the pile today!  That means the others won't be far behind.

One of my older hens isn't laying very well.  I know it is the one that is laying the fragile, very pointed eggs, but beats me which hen that is!

Now that the younger hens (of which I have ten) are starting to lay, I will have more eggs than I know what to do with - except that lots of people at work want to buy them.

The people who have been thinking about the horse have decided on buying her.  This has been such a long process, and a painful one, to be honest.  I just want her to have a good life, and the sooner that she gets started on it, the easier it will be on me - seeing her out there and knowing she's leaving just seems more painful than having her gone.  It feels like a dream is dying, never a fun feeling, but I need to live my life - and right now, my life is driving kids around, and feeding sheep, and teaching.  My life doesn't include teaching a young mare to behave, or training her to saddle, not right now anyway.

Yesterday, for inside chores I made 24 sandwich buns, a pot of potato and leek soup, a loaf of sandwich bread and finished the FAFSA.  Outside, I trimmed 6 out of 8 sheep's hooves and wormed 4 out of the eight (babies seemed too young? Maybe someone can advise?) and did a quick run through the garden to get the most obvious weeds, and a quick run through the stalls.  Tonight, I do need to work on taxes and folding laundry (the chore that never ends).  Fortunately, there is enough soup and sandwich rolls for dinner tonight, too.  I also have quite a lot of grading, but since most of them are late assignments, I don't feel the absolute need to get them back right away - you miss the deadline, you are lucky I will even grade it....

Off to finish the second (or third, depending how you count it) part of my day!

Sheep day!

I really need to do a lot of sheep chores (feet trims, worming, mucking out) today.  Since Confirmation classes are right after church, most of Sunday is already gone.  My husband is gone, since this was the cheap day to fly (and it is fun to watch the Superbowl with your childhood friends), so I need to take my football-y son to my brother-in-law's to watch with the guys.  I could sit here and watch (and fold laundry), but it just wouldn't be the same for him.  

Before we head out, I need help catching and holding sheep for all the shenanigans that are going to happen. And before that, I need to start some banana bread to take over, so he isn't just showing up hungry and without a contribution.   I guess I need to get off this computer and get hopping.  The plan is to have the two boys hold the 4 x 8 plywood up to herd the sheep in the corner, and then for me and the youngest to go in and dose them up.  I probably need the 16 year old to push the ram up against the wall so I can lift his feet to trim.  Then I need to chase them out to pasture so I can clean in the pen.

All of this is on top of a stack of grading, the taxes/Financial Aid things, and the weekly baking - and the ubiquitous laundry folding.  I would lay a bet that I won't get everything I need done today done at all.  Oh, well, one can only try.

Life is Good.

Thanks, Chai Chai for the "Life is Good" award!

I am going to pass this award along to Beyond My Kitchen Window, because she makes things look beautiful and passes along such yummy recipes and also to Kelly at Mainelyewes because of her inspiring winter projects.

There are some tasks that go along with this award beyond passing it along, so here goes....

1. If you blog anonymously, are you happy doing this? If you are not anonymous, do you wish that you had started out anonymously, so that you could be anonymous now?

I guess I blog semi-anonymously.  So far, the people I have met on the blog have been inspiring and so kind, so so far so good!  

2. Describe an incident that shows your inner stubborn side.

 Even though it might have made a lot of sense to move back to Oahu three years ago, I just knew deep down that holding on to this land was important.  I am still not sure that I was right to be that stubborn - usually I try to be very compliant - but that's the path we're on, so we'll play out the hand. 

3. What do you see when you really look at yourself in the mirror?


A person with more to do!  
4. What is your favorite summer cold drink?

I love lemonade made from the lemons on our tree and iced tea.   

5. When you take time for yourself, what do you do?

  Reading, hands down - but if I had a ridable horse, that would be my very first choice: a long ride.   

6. Is there something that you still want to accomplish in your life? What is it?

  I would love to get my PhD.  

 7. When you attended school, were you the class clown, the class overachiever, the shy person, or always ditching?

Overachiever - and that is saying something in light of the pressure cooker school I attended in Honolulu.  


8. If you close your eyes and want to visualize a very poignant moment in your life, what would you see?

  If I say one thing, I will short at least five people in my life....so I will just wrap it all up with the birth of ALL of my kids. 

9. Is it easy for you to share your true self in your blog or are you more comfortable writing posts about other people or events?

 I try to make my life more amusing than it sometimes feels.  It helps :).  I like writing about the sheep and the horses.  

10. If you had the choice to sit down and read a book or talk on the phone, which would you do and why?

Read, on most days - although I do enjoy talking to friends.  It is just that, if I am on the phone talking, I feel like I also have to be cleaning.  It is just a weird habit.  Reading is the most persistent habit of my life, and the one habit in which I find the most comfort, besides being on a horse.  

Another Hapless moment....

As extra protection from chicken stealing dogs, the chicken run gate is inside the sheep run.  Good idea - to keep the chickens several fence layers away from hungry dog jaws.

When I get trapped in the chicken run by a protective ram, though - not such a good idea.

The chicken run roof by the gate is lower than I am, so I crouched there, exhorting the ram to move away from the gate, yelling for my daughter (left cell phone in the house) to come and rattle the magic feed can, and trying to figure out how to distract him in the likely event she couldn't hear me.  Meanwhile, my rooster was considering my bottom as target practice.  Trapped between two protective males.

My daughter didn't, in fact, hear me, which is understandable considering the chicken run is behind the barn and a good 100 feet away from the house.  Finally, I just grabbed the chicken waterer and put it in front of me.  The ram doesn't like the sound of water in the hand of a human, so I locked the chicken gate behind me - literally behind me - with one hand, backed toward the sheep run gate and as he came charging out, slammed the gate in his face.

All that was left was to figure out how to get the chicken water back into the chickens.  I ended up dropping it through a hole in the chicken run roof.  Which meant I had to reach over fence where the sheep were running around like it was a race course and drop it (heavy and full) and hope no hens ran under it at the last minute.

Never a dull moment in the mud, I guess.

Delinquent me

I have been absent from the blog (and keeping up with other's blogs) for five or six days here.  I have been having a bit of internet trouble at home and it's that season again: track and field/tax/scholarship search time.

On top of that, February is a rather brutal month in education.  Apparently aware of the post-holiday blahs in the classroom, people plan lots and lots of Professional Development opportunities.  Between track meets (much, much longer than cross country meets and involving uncomfortable and frequently long and rainy intervals on hard bleachers) and Professional Development opportunities, my Saturdays are shot through April.  And somewhere in there, I need to do the taxes, the FAFSA, and other scholarship.  paperwork.  The farm is going to have to fit into the rest of my life, which we all know is a ludicrous statement.  Farms don't "fit in", they take precedence, often in the form of small (and large) unexpected happenings.

If I think about everything I would like to be able to do, and need to do, I would start feeling a little overwhelmed.  I just need to think how I am going to work through my first period class.  The copier quit on me 2 copies into a 10 copy run (of an 88 page public domain Shakespeare play).  Working for a school with no textbooks and no money for textbooks makes for some interesting dilemmas when the copier gets a glitch.  Time to get creative....

On the farm front, the lambs are growing so fast!  I need to take new pictures.  I am still back and forthing with the woman who is considering buying my mare.  I am still of two minds about it, but considering that all my Saturdays through April are already spoken for, and half of Sundays through May (Confirmation classes - not only is my son being Confirmed, but one of my students asked me to be her Sponsor, as well), it is obvious I do not have time for this horse.  I am just so sad about it, having it prolonged like this is really painful.  I think once she is gone, I will just "cowgirl up" and get over it, but seeing her everyday is a fresh reminder.