Day 19

"Well this day has just been bizarre".  I think Steve put it best.  I woke up at 710 because I had already planned out my breakfast meal.  I had some leftover pop tarts from New York that were ripe for the picking, so I basically ate breakfast in bed.  Booyah.  And what a breakfast it was.  I was out the door by 730, and just as I was walking out Will layer some heavy news on me.  The JD was in the shop, so I would be doing the morning rounds on foot...classic.  So this took some immense organizing in my head for maximum efficiency.  So I ended up carrying a whole bucket of bird feed, my egg basket, and two bowls of dog food.  As I went from pasteur my left hand with eggs got heavier, and my right hand with feed got lighter.  But in the end it wasn't bad.  I moved each rabbit cage, and then Steve offered for the rest of the rounds, he would be willing to drive me around with the tractor.  score.  So the pigs, and the rest of the bird feed were all done nicely, compliments of Steve, but more importantly compliments of the tractor.  We fed the three pig paddocks that were nearest, and then it was off to the Sal's paddock.  Now let me explain in greater detail what was happening with the murderous Sal.  A Sal gave birth to 11 piglets last week, but had a terrible limp.  She had the limp prior to the birth.  As she gave birth to the 11 piglets, her tits ( teets ) grew bigger to feed them.  Unfortunately, for the piglets they have to reach under their mother to get to the milk.  Unfortunately because the Sal's bad leg has hindered her ability to get up.  So as a result when she plops down, she can't really get up.  As a result of that result, she has killed 5 of her own piglets, and one baby pig form another mother.  It really is a terrible situation.  That was why Dan had to save the one piglet yesterday, who was squished by the Sal, but still barely alive.  It's not really the mom's fault that she has a limp, but its also not the piglets fault for being so young and needing constant milk.  Again, a very tragic situation.  So as we went around feeding the pigs, we looked inside to see if anymore piglets had been crushed, or trapped under the mom.  Thank goodness there were none then, because earlier that morning Steve told me that him and Will had found the baby pig, from another mother, dead.  So we moved on, and I collected the rest of the eggs for that side of the farm, and I went back to the barn and washed them all.  I fed and watered all the rabbit bottles, and placed a handful of hay in each cage.  After that Steve and I were supposed to move a whole pig shelter from one side of the paddock to the other.  These shelters are pretty big, and not to mention they were cemented in the ground by mud and old straw.  We ended up getting extremely lucky, because the forklift on the tractor lifted the whole shelter very nicely ( sometimes the forklift slips off the shelter, Steve told me ).  So that was pleasantly easy, but as we were finishing the rain started to come down.  and it was coming down hard.  Cats and Dogs hard.  So we decided to stay in the barn for awhile and try to wait it out.  We waited/ bonded for about 45 minutes, and I played about 5 games of hanging with friends, until it seemed that the rain wasn't going to stop.  So we broke for lunch.  I went in and heated up some lasagna I had never seen before, and made a small tuna sandwich.  The lasagna happened to be Eggplant ( which I did not know at the time, but Kent told me at dinner that night ), which i was not too fond of.  The tuna was classic though.  After lunch I kid of moseyed around, but the rain still didn't let up.  So I met Steve in the barn, and we decided to start doing some work because the rain was only lightly drizzling, and we didn't think it would let up much.  So we took a small shelter to the Sal's paddock, and some straw to cover the grotesque shelters.  As we were about to put some straw down, I looked into the shelter with the limping mother, and noticed two small lumps in the dirt.  I walked closer, and found out that these lumps were two dead piglets.  I gasped for air, but Steve was pretty used to it by now.  It was terrible.  Piglets are debatably the cutest things on the farm, and to see a caracas was just awful.  We went into the shelter and picked up the two bodies.  Steve went in first and picked one up, like it was a grocery bag, and I was astonished at his casualty about the retrieval.  Yea, so just pick the other one up.  Back to reality.  Yea, alright I will.  And I walked into the shelter and picked up the piglet by its hind leg, and put it on the tractor like it was a piece stinky trash.  Holding that frail, cold body was something I have never experienced before.  It grossed me out, it saddened me, and scared me for the other piglets.  I didn't want to leave the shelter just in case the Sal laid down again.  So we drove the piglets to the compost pile and buried them.  As Steve was burying them, I said a few words in my head about the piglets, and how it wasn't there mothers fault, but I had hoped that the time they had been alive they enjoyed it.  And then it was on to the next task.  I packaged some eggs, and then it was time for the afternoon rounds.  So i picked up my egg basket, and as I was leaving th barn a contractor who works there, muffled hey we need to go help steve get the sheep on an island back. ?.  classic chewing tobacco language barrier.  But it still didn't make sense.  So i found Steve, and what had happened was that because of all the rain, the river in the back of the farm and made sort of an island where the goats and sheep were roaming.  Turns out about 15 of them were stuck there.  So I had to cross the 2 ft river to the island to herd them back.  As soon as my boots were completely filled with water, they all scurried back to the main land.  Nice guys.  As they were hopping throughout the water, they almost looked like a single file line of gazelles, it was rather graceful they pranced.  So for the remainder of the day I had a good liter of water in my boots.  I was drenched, and uncomfortable, but I didn't mind.  I finished collecting eggs, and came back to wash them when Steve told me he need my help to capture the piglets.  We were ordered to move the remaining four that were left, so that they wouldn't be squashed by the mom.  So we went in with a net, and put the four in a straw filled bucket, and placed them in the barn.  They were going to be bottle fed, because it was  a liability to leave them with their mother.  It was so sad too, the mother put up such a fight for her children, and I felt so bad taking them from her, but she was killing them accidentally.  Will reminded me that each piglet was about 500 dollars, so they were very valuable.  I thought it completely the wrong time to be mentioning money in all of this.  It was hard enough to separate a mother from her children, that was killing her babies by accident.  Now he water to complicate things even more by bringing an economic standpoint to it.  Forget about it.  We also moved the mother Sal out of her paddock so that on Monday, it would be easier to get her into the trailer to be slaughtered.  After all that excitement, the rest of the day we just packaged up eggs, and coolers for the farmers market tomorrow.  I went back into the house to shower, but realized that I had forgot to do my laundry so I didn't have any clean boxers.  I put all my laundry in, which was basically all of my clothes, and waited so that I could time coming out of the shower with the end of my laundry.  Turns out it didn't work that way, and oddly enough we were going out to dinner.  So I didn't have any clean boxers or socks for the meal.  I just decided I would go commando...classic.  Wasn't that bad after all.  So now I am in bed eating a bag of gushers, and excited for the farmers market tomorrow, even though it should be raining.  So. Nighty.