Kat Dancing

Ghastly morning. It was cold as fuck when I got up to milk - cold enough that when I got to the barn Dad said, "Don't bother washing down - the water's freezing on the concrete." It was, too; a bare five minutes after you'd sprayed something with water, it'd be covered with a thin sheet of ice. There wasn't much snow but the wind was howling, and everything in the parlour seemed to have soaked up an extra dose of Cold overnight.

Things went downhill from there. First it was the vaccuum pump. I'd just started putting milkers on and was noticing that they weren't really staying on very well when Dad came in and started cussing. We were a good ten bar below pressure, which meant that we either had a leak or a blockage somewhere in the tubes. We went over everything in the parlour trying to find the spot. Then we went over it again with hot water, trying to thaw anything we thought might be frozen. Then we went over it again. And again. Then Dad went over it with a stethascope.

An hour and a half later, we finally got the damned thing working, and I started milking. The cows were in a really evil mood by this time (as were we, to be honest) and it hadn't gotten much warmer, but I figured hey, the worst is over, right?

Until we realized the cooler on the milk tank wasn't working.

A relay somewhere had - guess what - frozen. More hot water, much more cussing, all useless, and Dad finally had to call the tank electrician - who was almost a hundred miles away at the time - to come out and fix it, because until he did our milk was staying warm. Warm milk = illegal milk. Illegal milk = milk down the drain.

In the meantime I finished milking turned the wash-down cycle on, causing one of the milkers to fall to the ground and shatter - and not only shatter, which isn't that big a deal as we keep the plastic parts around for replacements - but somehow, in falling, to bend the screw that was holding it all together. Not massively, mind you; quite subtly, so that I nearly went mad with frustration trying to put the thing back together and wondering why I suddenly couldn't make a simple screw thread straight before I finally realized what was going on. The screw was, of course, an intregal part of the milker body. The milker body will cost about $250 to replace.

By the time I got through milking it was noon - giving me exactly five hours before I had to get my butt out the door and start evening milking.

And tomorrow morning I will get to do it all over again. Oh joy.

On the bright side, the tank guy got here fast enough that we didn't have to dump a few hundred gallons of milk down the drain. That's something, right? Makes up for the whole rotten day, right? Right?

*sigh*

A little over a year ago, my brother and I were on our way to visit some friends of ours - my brother driving, I passengering - in our old Izuzu Trooper. Like most of the county I live in, the friends' house could only be reached by driving through some of the twisty, narrow back roads that this area is famous for. We'd just topped a hill and were going down the other side at a fair clip of speed when a wild turkey suddenly sprinted out of the underbrush and across the road.

Now, we were still about a hundred yards from the turkey, so this was not a big deal; the bro didn't even bother tapping the brakes, and we kept on flying down the hill, which would have been fine if the turkey's best mate hadn't made the decision to likewise cross the road when we were about five yards from it.

At that distance, at the speed we were going, there was no question of stopping... and it would still have been no big deal, just another sad story of roadkill, if the turkey hadn't at the absolute last minute decided to take off. Now, turkeys are not real graceful fliers, so this was about as effective as throwing pine cones at an incoming hand grenade, but the overall effect was that instead of hitting our well-protected, impact-resistant bumper, or even our radiator, the turkey slammed into the windshield.

We had about a split second to see it coming. I screamed, threw up my arms, and closed my eyes, and my brother screamed, hit the brakes, and closed his eyes. There was a loud whump noise, a second, softer whump from above, and a sensation of motion somewhere to my left, which we later identified as the rear-view mirror coming unstuck and flying into the back seat but which my panicked mind interpreted as "crazed turkey coming through windshield". My brother grabbed for the stickshift but got my knee instead, I, mind still full of bird-in-car visions, shrieked and dug my fingernails into his hand, and my brother (who had felt the rear-view migrating as well) yelled and tried to beat the turkey that was clawing him away, and there were a few seconds of pointless misdirected hysteria before we thought to open our eyes.

We did not have a turkey in the car. What we did have was a dent in our roof where the turkey had flipped after impacting the windshield, and a rather pretty spiderweb-shaped pattern of cracks all across the useless pane of glass that had once been our windshield.

We looked at this for a while.

"Well, shit," said my brother. That seemed to more or less cover it.

We drove the rest of the way to the friends' house in a state of silence and adrenaline overload, and were so shaken that we didn't even notice the absence of rearview mirror until the next day, and were mildly surprised to find it sitting in the back seat, in hiding from kamikaze turkeydom, presumably.

And that was that. The windshield got replaced, the rearview mirror was glued back on but retained psychological scarring which manifested itself in a tendency to fall off until the end of its days, and in fact the Izuzu Trooper itself has since gone to that great used-car dealership in the sky (RIP - or at least RIP until we get around to paying the junkman to come and tow you away) and the whole episode would really have no relevance if I hadn't nearly had the exact same bloody thing happen to me today.

Different road, different car, one would hope different turkey, and I was coming around a curve, not down a hill. The turkey was alone, this time. But it flung itself in front of my bumper in the same way that the previous turkey had flung itself in the way of the Izuzu. I hit the brakes instantly, of course, and I wasn't going as fast as the bro had been, so the thing had time to run to the double yellow line and back a couple of times before - with my bumper practically touching it - it decided that now would be a good time to remember the flight thing, and took off in its lumbering turkey way. Its claws, I kid you not, scraped the hood of my car, and if I hadn't managed to get myself to a complete stop by that time (thank God for good brakes) it would have been turkey-in-the-windshield all over again.

I sat there, staring at the thing as it flapped its ungainly way across the road to a tree, and thought "My God, those things are stupid."

Which got me thinking about intelligence. It's not entirely fair, after all, to judge the turkey stupid. Prior to the twentieth-century invention of roads, the poor things probably never had to react so quickly, since nothing but a cheetah can hit car-like speeds and there are a distinct lack of cheetahs in the Appalachian mountains. So really, here's the turkey, happily bobbling along for centuries and centuries, and then we humans show up and change the rules on it and there it is, playing the same old game. It's bound to look a bit stupid.

On the other hand, isn't that the true nature of intelligence? Not the ability to spot this or that or the other, or get the right answer on a multiple-choice test, but the ability to adapt to novel situations. The ability to not only see what's going on in the world ("Hey, this black shiny thing, it wasn't here before, was it?"), and make connections ("And, hmm, those loud vrrm-vrrm things seem to travel on it a lot, and very, very fast,"), but to extrapolate and learn from those connections ("So... perhaps I should stay away from the black shiny thing, then?") It's adaptability - flexibility - alert observation and the ability to draw conclusions from those observations, and not merely to plod along unthinkingly following the same course, that creates intelligence. Having only one course to follow, only one way to think, one way of life that you are capable of understanding, inevitably leads to extinction.

And the logical conclusion is, therefore, that Republicans are inevitably headed towards extinction. One of these days. That's the problem with mother nature, she's just way too damned slow.

(This post was brought to you by sleepy Kat. As if you couldn't tell.)

We've got a deal going these days with one of my mom's employees regarding meat chickens. Essentially, we buy the chicks, provide the feed, and help with the kill, and he provides the labor. He doesn't have to lay out a bunch of money, we don't have to waste time on the revolting little sods, we both get chicken that isn't the revolting industrial imitation, everybody's happy.

Today, however, was the day of reckoning in chicken-land. Sixty-five chickens to get from squawking bundles of feathers to neatly packaged freezer food. I'm fucking exhausted, and I didn't even have the hardest job - in spite of my years on the farm, I'm still a bit of a wimp about actually killing things, so I typically get put on gut duty, for which I am better mentally and physically suited (without getting into the gristly details, this is one time when having small hands and long fingernails really comes in handy.) But I spent four hours standing on hard concrete and cutting up dead meat, and that takes its toll.

At about this point most people would be asking me, with varying degrees of horror, how I could stand to kill and eat an animal that I've raised.

My answer varies, depending on what particular species we're talking about, but with chickens it's easy. I can quite happily help kill and eat a chicken because, having raised them, I know what foul and revolting beasts they are.

Disney movies have unintentionally done a real disservice to the human race, I think, because of the way they typically portray animals. At this stage, when I say "chicken", most people are thinking of cute brown hens scratching for corn in the barnyard and looking motherly and so on. And it's perfectly true that chickens will scratch in a barnyard, and that they eat corn. They also eat worms, flies, maggots, rotten flesh, and each other. When we raise baby chicks we have to use a heat lamp that gives off red light and will therefore conceal it if one of the chicks is bleeding, because the instinct of a chicken is to attack and peck whenever they see blood. Any chicken that is not actually the mother of a chick (and from time to time, even those that are) will go out of its way to catch, peck to death, and eat any young chicks that are around, and I can't tell you the number of times I've seen chickens attacking one of their number that was weak, old, or sick, pecking it to death, and eating the corpse. In addition the roosters are really vicious bastards who will fly at you the minute your back is turned, or even fly in your face and try to claw out your eyes if they think they can get away with it.

Add to this that these particular chickens were meat birds. Now, your average chicken is not exactly Einstein to begin with, and in fact generally falls into that rarified category of stupidity more often seen in creatures like sheep and George Bush. And chickens aren't generally the cleanest and pleasantest of beasts either - well below hogs, which are actually quite fastidious if given the choice, and certainly not something you'd care to be far downwind of. But meat birds, thanks to the brilliant breeding program of us humans, outdo even their own species in these areas. They're so stupid that they have to be taught to eat and drink, and taught repeatedly, as they often forget; so stupid that a full-grown bird can drown itself in half an inch of water; so stupid that an unexpected phenomena, such as, say, sunrise, will often send them into such a desperate panic that they will crush and kill each other in their frantic rush to get away from it. They can't be trained to not to sleep in their own shit, which means that by the time they're full-grown, even when you're moving the pen twice a day, the ammonia stench is still enough to knock you over at ten feet. They can't seem to learn not to shit in their own food, nor not to eat the food afterwards, which means that they're buggers for catching various diseases. Their sole purpose in life, from the time they're born, is to eat, shit, and die.

Overall I fail to feel any guilt in helping them with the last.

Hum, that turned into quite a rant - perhaps people have asked me that question once too often?

In the meantime, I have parts of the chicken I'd really rather not know existed under my fingernails and a clinging smell of burnt feather and warm meat surrounding me. I think it's past time for the bro to give me a turn in the shower.

I spent most of yesterday up on a ladder painting the side of the barn, which in general wouldn't have been that bad, but which in this specific case was hell. I like painting, but painting from the top of a ladder is uncomfortable at best, and this particular ladder was at its worst. There was a massive slope beneath me which made keeping the ladder stable a nightmare; I had to have a second ladder set up to balance my brushes and paint can on; there didn't seem to be any way I could set up the ladder, or any way I could sit/stand on the ladder, which wasn't hellishly uncomfortable and a strain on one set of muscles or another; it was bizarrely hot weather and I was on the sun side of the barn, so I nearly passed out from heat exhaustion more than once; and the dogs, who thought the whole thing was very interesting, kept coming around and banging themselves against the bottom of one ladder or the other and looking up at me with an interested expression. It's a miracle that I didn't fall off, and a larger miracle that none of the dogs earned themselves an unexpected paint job.

Finally got it done, though, and went back this morning to finish up the inside posts, and it *does* look a lot better, not to mention that with the wood painted it'll last a lot longer.

And of course I could have been my brother, who was welding together some sort of clamp thingy for the side of the manure pit while I was painting. First he welded it together backwards. Once he got that straightened out and put it back together properly, he realized that he'd done the measurements wrong and the whole thing was worthless. So he broke it up, salvaged what he could, recut it, rewelded it, and realized - guess what? - that he'd welded it together backwards *again.* I'm not sure what happened after that, as I prudently escaped the area.

In the "good news" region, my mom apparently shipped out 55 wheels of cheese today. At an average of 8 pounds a wheel. A *lot* of cheese, is what I'm getting at. And four of those were to *the* top cheese shop in New York City, a massive coup for Mom if they like us enough to reorder. Now she's biting her fingernails off worrying that there'll be some kind of massive, cheese-destroying heat wave between today and Friday. *sigh* My mother, the optimist.