High Heels and Muck Boots

This was Roxy, two days before we left for Michigan.  She slipped in her muddy paddock and tweaked her back just before her cross-country trip, to the point where she was limping on two legs.


Poor Little Miss Cow-Eyes.  The very patient woman standing next to her is a vet based in Boulder who specializes in equine acupuncture and chiropractic.  Roxy absolutely detests needles, so acupuncture was out.  But my normally happy-go-puppydog mare was in so much pain, we had to suffer through some adjustments from the good Doctor.  The picture sums up how it went.

I was very nervous about the horses making the trip.  Would Roxy's sore back make it twice as hard on her?  Would Sam's arthritic hocks flare up?  Would they just plain freak out at the stress, the haulers, the strange trailer filled with strange horses?  Turns out, they were the best-behaved horses out of a group of seven.  We took the drivers out for dinner after Sam and Roxy were unloaded into their new home, a fleeting connection that ended in hugs.

Roxy's registered name is Denver's Ace of Hearts.  She's traveled about 35 miles in her lifetime from her original place of birth.  Sam, well, who knows about him.  My guess is he hasn't gone too far either.  But they are settled in and loving the new digs.  They have more space than they ever have before, with real green growing GRASS!  Well, not at the moment.  But it's coming!  We're all ready for Spring.

... then I starting working on a farm and now I throw like a MAN.

OK, probably not so much but it's been suggested.  I amuse most of the good ol' boys around here just by virtue of being me, but in the months since I started working the amusement seems to have turned from "haha, you're a sissy girl" to something more along the lines of, "She's a pretty good worker... for a woman!"  I'm fairly certain that Paul meant that as equal parts joke and hearty compliment, and it's something I hold close and carry proudly with me out here.

Jim has been working on the house near to where most of the pigs are kept.  Apparently on his smoke breaks he watches us work from the windows.  One day we got done around the same time, and I walked over to say hello.  "How's it going Kate?" he asked. "Out there workin' like a man?"

His favorite joke now seems to revolve around me arm-wrestling the other guy working on the house, Ray— and winning, of course.  Yesterday as I was filling buckets of water, Jim stuck his head out the window and hollered to Ray, who was carrying sheets of drywall or something, "Well lookatchu Ray, carrying two at once!  If you keep that up you'll be as strong as Kate!"

Amidst the blood [literal], sweat [literal], and tears [figurative] of the day, that just struck me as so incredibly funny that I was grinning about it all evening.  On some days it feels as if my body's going to break if I try to lift or throw or hoist or... anything else!  Other days, however, the combination of icy wind and a gently warming sun and pig problems makes me feel so very much alive that each breath feels like a renewal.  This must be what the French mean when they talk about joie de vivre.

This morning I was out in a field perched on the tractor bucket 8 feet above the frozen ground, tipping bags of grain into a big feeder.  Chew [his name is either Jimmy or Johnny but no one can ever remember so he just goes by Chew... wah not?]... anyway Chew walked up and we talked about this n' that... as he bid good day he paused, turned to me [by that time climbing back onto the tractor] and said "You know, I'm gon' brag on you a bit now but, for a woman... you amaze me."

Seems I really earned the soft pink Carhartt hat that keeps me warm when I'm out working with the pigs.  Many thanks to Chuck and Nadine for the badge of honor.

Animales interns had a crazy day today!

Greg and I walked up to Pig Hill as usual to feed the miaili and miailini and check fences. At some point Nello, the giant polar bear-esque boar, escaped from his pen and wandered into the mill where we keep all the grain. The pictures don’t do this guy justice— we guess that he weighs around 500 pounds— but he’s not very excitable, so we chased him at a snail’s pace back into his pen and went to feed the rest of the pigs further up the road.

Then it was time to check the fences. They’re divided into three main sections, and two of them weren’t working, so we started walking to the back pasture where the third section has a breaker. Once you figure out which sections aren’t working, you have to walk along the fence until you find the spots where the current is broken. As we walked, we came across a sow who had just given birth to nine miailini. We found another sow last week while walking fences, so we knew what to do more or less. We went back to the mill to get buckets to carry the piglets, and returned. The tricky thing about collecting them is that the mothers can become upset and step on them as she tries to protect the “nest.” We put the 9 mialini into three buckets and then encountered the next tricky thing: actually getting the mother to follow you. The first time we did this, Giulio was with us and the sow came along pretty easily. The sow today refused to follow, despite our pleading “Qua! Qua!” [“Here! Here!”… the Italian equivalent to “Sooooeeeee!”].

Even after we grabbed sticks to prod her along she refused, sniffing around her nest looking for the miailini and making all sorts of strange and angry sounds. We assumed that, like the sow last week, she would follow the squeals of her babies, but this one was particularly stubborn. At one point I actually thought I was going to get mauled, because I tripped on some of the thick underbrush and fell backwards just a few feet from her, with a bucket of squealing miailini in my arms. Fortunately I still had my prodding stick in hand so a somewhat panicked thwack on her nose kept her away. According to Greg, pigs do bite. Hopefully I won’t find out.

In honor of Google's 10th birthday, they are enabling a search page from 2001. It's amazing to think of how much has changed since then, and it's fun to see what results turn up for things we take for granted. It's also kind of depressing. Case in point:



Also, the page is archived from a pre-September 11th world. Nothing comes up. No Department of Homeland Security. When you google "President Bush" you get his old campaign website, complete with depressingly out-of-date slogan: "George W. Bush is running for President of the United States to keep the country prosperous." So much for that.

On a lighter note, there's no youtube, no Perez Hilton, no "The Hills." Facebook was still available only to students at Harvard. Feels like so long ago...

FARK never ceases to amaze and entertain. But it also does a service to people who might not otherwise hear about odd stories in the news. Tonight's gold came with an intriguing tag: The AFA has set up an online form to send Hallmark hate mail for making same sex marriage greeting cards, what a shame it would be if logical people used it to send Hallmark support mail instead.

Naturally, I did just that.

The American Family Association sets forth a rabid argument against what Hallmark is doing. I actually thought it was pretty funny— oh, the fearmongering!! Seems like American families have better things to worry about these days than people getting married, but maybe not. I mean, the housing crisis will fix itself, right?

They write, Hallmark Greeting Cards has announced it will begin selling same-sex wedding cards, even though same-sex marriage is legal in only two states. The purpose, they say, is to satisfy consumer demand. It appears that their purpose is also to push same-sex marriage. Last year Hallmark began offering "coming out" cards - as in "coming out of the closet" -- a euphemism for announcing homosexuality.

So if you're feeling saucy, send Hallmark a letter. In mine, I basically said that I appreciated that the company was promoting tolerance and that it would certainly influence my decision to buy cards from them in the future.

I just don't understand why, in the world we live in today, these kinds of issues are what people are devoting all their time and energy to. But I guess there will always be people brainwashed to the point of irrelevancy. If they want to be on the receiving end of ridicule, well, that's their choice and the lifestyle they've chosen to live. Too bad idiocy isn't illegal in 48 states.

I am one of those people who eat predominantly healthy foods and gets regular exercise. I also have the benefit of youth I suppose, but then again, I'm surrounded daily by 45,000 other college students who are all little carriers of doom and missed classes. I don't get sick very often, but for the last couple of days I've been sick.

This won't turn into a recitation of symptoms [or an "organ recital" as my grandmother refers to it]. Rather, I would like to comment briefly on our medical system these days. We're constantly bombarded by commercials and advertisements for various medicines, prescription or otherwise. People can google their symptoms and "diagnose" themselves, then find the "perfect" drug for whatever ails them, all without a doctor. On the one hand, it's incredibly empowering and has probably saved lives. On the other hand, we think we can be our own doctors. I'll admit, when I woke up this morning with a painfully sore throat, the first thing I did was whip out my laptop and google "strep throat symptoms" and "tonsillitis." Then I made an appointment with the university health clinic, called my mom, and took my dad up on an offer for homemade chicken noodle soup.

I drank green tea with honey until my appointment, then dutifully recited my symptoms to the nurse and was poked and prodded by various instruments by the doctor. He took swabs to test for strep and the flu, said I was a little congested, and prescribed me pseudoephedrine, a decongestant. I was honestly a little surprised to be getting a prescription at all, because I am hardly having trouble breathing due to excessive snot migration or anything of the sort, nor is it interfering with my social life. [Is that too graphic? Apologies.] In fact, I think this is the least congested I have ever been while sick— the common cold is much worse.

I think that the prescription was symptomatic more of the expectations of patients rather than my symptoms. People go to the doctor and expect to get medicine to make them better. I understand that, partly, but I also have read about superbugs and drug-resistant strains of common afflictions. An MSNBC article from 2004 reports, "Flesh-eating bacteria cases, fatal pneumonia and life-threatening heart infections suddenly are popping up around the country, striking healthy people and stunning their doctors. The cause? Staph, a bacteria better known for causing skin boils easily treated with standard antibiotic pills. No more, say infectious disease experts, who increasingly are seeing these “super bugs” — strains of Staphylococcus aureus unfazed by the entire penicillin family and other first-line drugs."

That's scary. Among other things, such as shared close quarters, the article cites "overuse of antibiotics, which tends to kill weak bacteria and help hardier ones develop resistance."