Ty, you cloven-hooved idiot!

A little while ago, Jenn said that it felt weird to have outgrown some of our dogs  and I knew what she meant.  We have some dogs in our yard that, for various reasons, don’t make the starting lineup anymore.  They are either past their hard-working days and ready for their pension or they are not able to keep up with our team’s endurance or speed.  It was a hard decision to make, but it was a necessary one: we put some of our dogs up for adoption.  Of all the responses we had, one of them was from a new musher who is looking to start a team of dogs.  I wonder if, after visiting us, he has changed his mind.

He showed up to meet the dogs on Sunday afternoon and we thought it would be fun and benefitial to have him go out with me on the fourwheeler and run the dogs we were adopting out.  We introduced ourselves and headed to the dogyard.

I made sure that Ty was put away.  That bastard goat had already confronted one team of mine a few days earlier on the trail and I was not looking for a repeat performance.   Especially with company.  The fourwheeler was ready.  The dogs were ready.  Jenn was already hooking up some dogs and the commotion in the yard was at its pitch.  I had just hooked up Mouse when I turned around to see Ty, that friggin’ bastard goat, sauntering towards the middle row of dogs; all of which were losing their minds at this unexpected but definitely welcome meal headed their way.

Here was the dilemma: the goat had to go, but how to accomplish this?  I can’t walk up to him because he’ll just run away, knowing I’ll just put him back in his pen, but I can’t shoo him out, either, because he’s headed right for three dogs who are well-fed but willing to make room and I don’t have time to get on his other side.  I opted for the grab-n-go approach because necessity overruled trickery and finesse.   At this point, Jenn is holding out the line of dogs that are already hooked to the fourwheeler – they want in on the action – and so she can’t help me and our guest was probably wondering what he’d gotten himself into.

I position myself between the two rows of dogs and say, on the outside: ”C’mon Ty, it’ll be okay.  C’mon over here.”  But on the inside: ”I swear to God, you stupid goat, if I get my hands on you… how can you be so dense?” and “You cloven-hooved idiot!  Get over here before they kill you!”  He stopped and looked at me, unsure of what to do next.  Somewhere inside that wee little brain of his, a synapse flickered briefly and he realized he was amid ancestors of his ancestors predators.  While he let that thought sink in, I used that opportunity to grab him by the horns and try to drag him out of the run.  But Ty is as strong as he is dumb so it was not easy and Dekker, one of our new aquisitions from last year, managed to grab his ear.  In less than second, Dekker had the bottom two inches of Ty’s ear in his mouth, while I had Ty by the horns two dogs away.  Losing a third of his ear didn’t seem to phase Ty: he still fought and struggled against me as I dragged him out of the run.  He still didn’t want to co-operate once he was out, so I had to haul him all the way back to his pen, snorting and grunting.  I glanced quickly at his ear: it had stopped bleeding already but would have to wait for attention until I was done with the dogs (it got some antibiotic spray when all the commotion had died down.)  I ran back to the dogyard, continued hooking up the dogs with Jenn and then jumped on the fourwheeler with our guest and took off. 

It wasn’t our best run, but it was a good one and I’m glad it was good because the dogs that we gave away ended their time with us on a positive note.  I’m glad to have had them in our yard and I’d take them back in a second but they just didn’t fit with us anymore and they wouldn’t get the attention they would deserve from us if they stayed.

We offered four dogs that he could choose from  and in the end, he decided on Mouse, Lacey and Taiga.  I wonder if he’d have taken a goat, too?

Mouse

 

Taiga

 

Lacey

My weekend was full of goats and turkeys.

Friday, Markstay:

I don’t know what I have done to anger the Fates so, but they have conspired lately to turn my life  into a series of Comedies of the most absurd kind.  Take for example today. 

I got in from helping a friend move and it was early afternoon.  A perfect time for me to lay out the platform for the woodstove downstairs.  I went down into the basement and began to unpack my tools when I heard the dogs barking, which is something they don’t normally do, unless there is an animal around or, rarely, there is somebody in the driveway they don’t recognise.  I could see no one, so I assumed it was an animal – and by the way they were barking, a big one.  I ran upstairs and out towards the dogyard, just in case there was a dog loose because, judging from their increasingly excited sound, something was still going on. 

A tuft of six-foot tall grass blocks  a straight-line view of the dogyard from our house, but once I rounded the corner, I saw the cause for the excitement.  It was our male goat, Ty.  He was standing a few feet from the gate of the dogyard, staring in, much like that simple kid we all knew did when he saw something just beyond his comprehension.

I don’t know what goes through a goat’s head in the course of a day, but it can’t be much.  Here stood our Ty, looking ponderously in at twenty-two dogs intent on at least getting a bit closer.  Within tasting range closer.

I clapped my hands and said “TY!” in a loud voice.  He seemed startled at hearing me and turned to run away, so I chased him and clapped my hands the whole way hoping to impress upon him that with 38 remaining acres to roam, the dogyard should be avoided.  He bucked as he ran and bleated his little bleat – a sound not unlike a soft, maniacal laugh that ends in a snort.

Back in the house I went.

Not five minutes later, the dogs start barking again.  And I go outside again.  And there is Ty.   Staring in at the dogs. 

I could let the dogs bark all day if they wanted to.  I don’t really care – I barely hear them.  But our neighbours do.  As do the people across the river from us and I expect that they would care, which means that I kind of have to care.   So, off I go again to scare away Ty.

“But wait,” I hear you ask, “don’t you have two fenced in pastures with a barn in each for the goats?”  To which I respond:

“Why, yes, dearest reader, I do.  But that G-D goat can climb the fence faster than I can fix it.”  It’s here that I’d like to point out that I haven’t been outsmarted by a goat, just out manoevered: afterall, he’s got all day to devote to planning his escape.  Me, I have other things to concern myself with.  In all of this, I don’t bother trying to re-pen Ty.  He’ll just escape again.

I lack the fenceposts to stiffen the fence up: Ty escapes by putting his front legs on the fence and standing on it so it sags.  Then he just sort of lumbers over it.  More fence posts would be helpful as would the time to install them.  Another answer is an electric fence – which we have most of the parts for – but again, I lack the time to put one up.  But, if I did have the time, I’d rig it up special for Ty: I’d wire it into the 60-amp service we have at the house.  Jenn and I would be eating fried goat for dinner.  Next year we plan on having the lower field enclosed by electric fence.  That shouldn’t take long; it’s only a few acres in size.

Me chasing that stupid goat around the yard continued until it came time to feed everybody, which is to say I spent the better part of my afternoon running after a goat, clapping my hands, looking every bit the poster guy for institutionalization.

Tomorrow is the Great Turkey Roundup, so I hope to have nothing to write about that.

 

Saturday, Markstay:

You’re not going to believe it.  I didn’t believe it and I was there.  Nothing happened with the Great Turkey Roundup.  Not a problem anywhere: in fact, we we’re even ten minutes early leaving the house.  I know – amazing.

We caught and loaded our birds and planned to leave the house at 09h00.  We were smart and locked the turkeys in their coop the night before so it was just a matter of grabbing and putting in the truck.  We had been warned that the cut-off for processing was twenty five pounds and as we loaded the birds it seemed more and more like we’d be having to do the work ourselves.  Some of those birds were heavy.  And flappy, which didn’t make the task any easier.

At first, I would just grab the bird around it’s wings and body and carry it to the truck, but that featherless, snakey neck of theirs always seemed to position their heads right at my eye level and I don’t trust those peck-y buggers.  They’d peck at the rivits in my pants or the buttons on a jacket and seriously, with a brain little more than a nerve with a knot tied in it, what’s preventing them from having a go at my eyeball?  I started to carry them by their legs, upside down.  This reduced the flapping considerably, too.

There’s a pretty picture.  The turkeys finally loaded into the back of the truck.

Next was a dozen or so of Jenn’s laying hens.  She’s sold all but four now and those she’s keeping for us to have eggs through the winter.  We were going right by the buyer’s house that morning so Jenn said she’d drop them off.  After grabbing and wrestling with turkeys, these wee little hens were almost like chicks.

Jenn’s chickens awaiting transport in a dog crate to their new home.

It had been raining all morning – hooray for the Ontario autumn – and as we left the house with a full coffee, dressed kid, load of turkeys and chickens and ten minutes to spare, the rain stopped and the clouds parted.  We drove in a rare beam of sunshine. 

“Something is bound to go wrong.  I hope those turkeys pass.” Jenn said, referring to their weight.

“Yeah.  We’re pretty organised today. ” I commented, continuing with “I might as well drive us into the ditch now.”

We offloaded the chickens to their new owner and headed to the turkey killin’ place.

A great line up of vehicles awaited us when we got there.  Most of them had a turkey head or two peeking out of some sort of makeshift enclosure.  There was activity at the door so Jenn went to see how backed up the place was and to let them know we were here.  As it turned out, they were an hour behind schedule because of the size of some people’s birds.  They were just not able to process them fast enough to maintain their times.

 

The guy in the white is the meat inspector and he’s headed to our truck to check out our turkeys.  The door where we unload the birds is open and processing takes place to the right of the door.

The three of us watched as a truck unloaded it’s cargo.  Then another, then another.  It’s pretty much the same for each bird: grab it by the feet, hold it upside down so it stops flapping and hang it by it’s feet on a wire frame.  Within the span of ten seconds, the bird is dragged over an electrocuted sponge and is killed.  Very quick, very efficient and judging by the speed with which it happens, painless.

The truck before us pulled in and parked his acre-sized trailer by the door.  He, his wife and their son jumped out and started unloading with all the precision of a military drill squad.  At one point, a flapping wing took the lady in the face, knocking her glasses so they were half-cocked on her nose and cheek.  She didn’t miss a beat: grab turkey, pass; grab turkey, pass; grab turkey, pass (nudge glasses back with shoulder); grab turkey, pass.  Added to the smoothness of their unloading was the fact that their turkeys all looked to be within a half pound of each other.  “They’ve done this before.” Jenn said to me; and it was good that they had done this before because they had sixty five birds in all to unload.  Grab turkey, pass.

Now came the moment we had been dreading: the woman in charge of the kill floor came out to organise the next batch; that being us.  We opened our truck and she laughed as she saw our birds.  Not good.  “I’ll take them this time, but next year, nothing over twenty five pounds.”  Thank God.  Grab turkey, pass.

With our birds sent to their final destination, we drove away happy to have raised them and glad to have them all accepted.  We’d be back for 15h30 to pick them up and deliver them to Jenn’s customers.

This is one of the larger turkeys that we delivered.  It was a “twenty-five pound plus” bird since Jenn’s scale only went to twenty five.  We weighed ours on the bathroom scale when we got home.  It was 33 lbs.

The Fates have conspired against me. Again.

As I leapt out of bed Friday morning, wide awake and eager to start my day, I thought to myself:

“Self, after your coffee and morning feeding chores, after you get the kid’s snack and lunch ready and drop her off at school, you just have to make a quick jaunt to town, pick up a few sundry supplies and head back home.  You ought to have that woodstove chimney installed in time to pick up the kid from school, you handy fella, you.”

However, after dropping Hunter off at school – she doesn’t get a bus in the morning – I arrived home and found out that we were going to town to look at a kitchen table and some colours.  “Good.” I think to myself,  “I was already going to town anyway.” 

Jenn, my darling wife, is a shopper.  I don’t mean that she likes to wander aimlessly around a mall, but rather, she likes to compare.  To find deals.  To research and know with great certainty that what she has bought couldn’t be had at any better a price.  She likes to kick the proverbial tires and take her time.  I, on the other hand, can’t be bothered.  If it’s there and we need it, I buy it.  Which is probably why we have a fourwheeler that took two years to get running and why we lost money on a Volkswagon Jetta that we never drove.  It’s also why I’ve been cut off of most of the financial dealings.  I’m the downburst that flattens the forest of household economics.

As may be imagined, then, from the previous information, we were not on our way to look at a kitchen table.  We were on our way to explore to the fullest extent the selection of tables that Sudbury’s finest (and not so fine) furniture stores had to offer.

The ‘Jenn’ that sits on my shoulder and makes me behave is telling me that I’m not being entirely honest.  We actually were looking at a kitchen table that she had already picked out.  I think she just needed me along for a signature. 

Having now purchased a fairly nice table for a pretty good price (see?  I told you.  It was priced at just above ’scratch n dent sale’ price) we looked at a chair that had all the colours Jenn was thinking of for the living room.  “We’re not actually looking at the chair, right?” I asked.  “No.” she replied.  “Phew.”  I said.  Quietly.  The colours were tolerable, so we meandered our way across town and into another furniture store.  Now that that she had me out and in the routine, Jenn was going to make the most of this trip.   We browsed around the store looking at ugly chesterfields and loveseats.  And then it happened.  To understand fully the magnitude of this event, there are a few important details I feel are necessary to describe before hand.  We have been staring at a half-done living room – drywalled and mudded ceiling, patched hole in the wall where the window was and is now drywall and mud, mudded and sanded window – for almost a year and a half.  We haven’t done anything about it because ‘we’ have been waiting to find the perfect area rug that has all ‘our’ colours in it.  ‘We’ heard somewhere that it is way easier to find your furnishings first and then match your paint to them instead of trying to match furnishings to paint.  At least, that’s what all the cool interior designers are doing.  So, ‘we’ have been looking for the perfect area rug: this one has browns that have too much yellow in them; that one has a funny feel; this one has a good feel and a nice colour brown, but it will probably get dirty easily. 

You can well imagine, then, my shock when the perfect rug met us face-on in the store.  It was exactly the colours Jenn had just shown me across town, it was a swell feeling rug and it looked like it could stay fairly clean.  Plus, it was on sale.  I expected to be walking out of the store with a rug.  Nope.  And I’m still not sure why.

At last we were done with the furniture shopping.  We drove to the hardware store.  Jenn stayed in the car.  I was in and out with my drill bit so fast you’d think I stole it.   We headed home.

I now began to tackle the woodstove chimney.  I marked my circle for the hole in the wall and I then used a hammer drill to drill out the perimeter of the hole in my concrete block.  A 10-inch hole takes a long time to drill out if your only drill bit is half an inch in diameter, so I only did the outside and then I used a cold-chisel to bash out the rest.  The end result was a round hole in the wall.  Mission accomplished.

After marking out the hole by tracing the diameter of the thimble flashing and adding a quarter inch to the outside of the circle, I began perforating the brick with a half-inch drill bit. Yeah, it took a while.

Finally.  Light through yonder window breaks.  Well, okay, it isn’t a window, but if it were a cloud, it’d be like one of those “Jesus loves you” postcards.  Y’know: Heavely beam of light shining down … okay.  Forget it.

Next came the thimble flashing, which goes through the wall and houses the insulated stovepipe.  A few concrete screws on the outside and a minor modification on the inside and the thimble flashing was done.  It was now time to install the wall-support for the chimney.   Since I didn’t have enough stovepipe to pass through the wall, I put down my tools and waited until Saturday to get another length and finish the job.

Thimble flashing installed.  Now, it looks sort of like a porthole.

 
Saturday came.  I helped a friend move a hot tub in the morning and bought my stovepipe and headed home.   I was just getting ready to mount the wall-support when my neighbour came over and told me that he’d just had a bear on his deck.  It was headed our way, he said.  I didn’t pay much attention to the information until the dogs started to lose their minds barking.  I found out that the bear had, moments before, passed behind the goat pen and had made its way up behind the dog run.  Any bear that is willing to come that close to the dogs and my neighbour’s deck needs further investigation, so I grabbed the trusty .30-.30 and a few shells and headed down the trail.  Hunter was inside with Gilligan and she said she’d wait inside until I got back.  “I’m fine, daddy.”

I never did see the bear again.  So, back to work on the chimney.  The wall-support and the roof edge didn’t seem to agree so I had to measure them to make sure I could run the chimney all the way up without having to cut a hole in the roof.  I couldn’t.  Dammit.  I had to figure out another way to mount this increasingly bothersome pipe. 

It is now Sunday and because of the problems I had earlier with the pump, Stupid Friggin’ Pump! I decided to check on it, just to make sure it was working alright. It wasn’t. It was leaking out of the pressure release valve, which is sort of ironic since we don’t have any water pressure at all. Even before it started to leak. So, before I could get to work on the chimney, I had to deal with this new problem.

In the end, I managed to mount the pipe to some stiff angle I salvaged from scrap at my jobsite.  Yes, I went there on a weekend, a usual no-no for me.  But, the pipe now goes through the wall and is resting on the wall-support.  So much for having it done by late afternoon Friday.

The culmination of a weekend’s worth of work.