Kat Dancing

Okay, so I'm in Canada now, and... eh. I'm not going to bother describing everything that's happened since I got here. Dan's post pretty much covers it anyway.

Suffice to say that I spent Saturday, Sunday, and part of Monday in high fever la-la land, which was unpleasant, to say the least. Today I am better, but hungry (oh, did I mention I was also throwing up from Friday night to Sunday evening?), and weak, and very grouchy.

Other than that, Canada's being good to me. Oh, and I have high speed internet again. This. ROCKS.

My family is not very good with current events. Case in point: we were cussing the mailman up one side and down the other as a lazy bastard today until we finally remembered.

Reagan.

What is it they're doing to him now? Burying him?

For the record - if by some bizarre twist of fate I die famous - let it be known that, no matter how famous I am, I do NOT want to be carted from one end of the country to the other, shown to millions of people, cried over, discussed endlessly, had the mail stopped for me, et cetera, ad infinitum. No fuss, please. Just chuck me into the coffin and cover me over like the rotting side of meat I will be.

I suppose at this point I should say something about how, personal distaste for spectacle aside, I respected Reagan as a person and so on, but actually I didn't. I was born about three days before Reagan was elected, and so, while I may have lived through the Reagan administration, it was not precisely my most politically aware stage of life. Reagan fell into that awkward time period of too long ago for me to really remember but too recent to be covered in my history classes. We did cover Reagan briefly in Environmental Politics, but that was confined to my professor bringing in a picture of Reagan's pet environmentalist, Julian Simon (actual quote: "The only environmental problem is the environmentalists!"), pinning it to the blackboard, and drawing horns on. Succinct, but brief.

My main hope is that when Bush Jr. finally kicks it he will not get all this hoop-la, but that instead the news will be quietly swept under the rug, as news of Nixon's death was. God knows he's as big a fuck-up as Nixon. At least Nixon wasn't a war criminal. That's right, our darling president doesn't have to follow the rules - he can torture people all he wants! And so can other people, because he told them so, in an actual written memo! His good buddy Mr. Ashcroft said it was just fine! Against the law, but hey, that's a-okay, since we're hunting TERRORISTS! God, I need to move.

Killed a calf today.

Of course, in certain ways it wasn't my fault, but in other, more numerous ways, it was.

Maybe I do want a job where fucking up doesn't require you to watch an innocent animal thrashing itself to death at your feet, after all. I don't know. Probably not a good time to be thinking about it overall.

So I had a call from the Customer From Hell today.

That woman, I swear, is a walking example of why Yankees have such a bad name around here. And the worst of it is, you can tell that she doesn't think she's being rude. She thinks she's being "sharp". And I'm willing to give her the benefit of the doubt and believe that in New York City or wherever you really do have to watch whoever's selling you something. Maybe you really do have to peer over their shoulder every second; maybe you do have to call them up every ten minutes to make sure they're doing exactly what you told them; maybe they do habitually overprice things, so that you have to haggle and weasel and whine discounts out of them, and maybe they really are out to cheat you and hide the defects of the product and you have to quiz them up one side and down the other on every possible point just to make sure.

But around here, we call that "rude".

We sold this bloody woman a cow nearly eight months ago, and it was a nightmare, let me tell you. She had to see the cow - fair enough - and question us, and question us again, and make us catch the cow to prove that she really was tame (I think even the cow looked at her disbelievingly there. Our cows generally regard humans as walking feed dispensers, occasional playmates, and head-scratchers-on-demand: wild beasties they're not.) Then she decided she didn't want the cow. Then she decided she did want the cow, after all, and set a date for pickup that would be convenient for her. She seemed rather surprised, and very put out, when we said we'd like a date that was convenient for us as well.

But at long last the cow was picked up, gone, and the check didn't bounce, and we dusted our hands and figured we were rid of her.

Not so.

And this is another frustrating thing, not restricted to this particular woman, though she's a bad offender: people seem to think we have unlimited time. Because we work at home, you see, we're always there; and because we're always "home" (and this is the annoying bit) people assume we must have tons of spare time.

Hello? FARMING?

We're insanely busy, much more so than ninety percent of the people who have a workplace, and we're busy all the time. Because we're not at home all day and night; we're at work all day, and sometimes all night as well. It is very, very hard to get this through to people, and they'll call us up or come by and take up our time in a way they'd never do to people who were "at work." They just don't see. And those of them that happen to be hobby farmers of one type or another are the worst. They come around and want us to train them or give them advice and they expect us to be quite pleased to do it - for free - even if it means we have to take hours out of our day to do it. In fact, they expect us to be grateful, and are usually annoyed if we're not.

We are not hobby farmers. We do this for a living. We can't talk with people all day; we've got ten thousand things that need doing and too little time to do them all as it is.

This woman began by calling once a week, although she's slowed down a bit, and I hadn't heard from her for over a month. She wants advice. She also wants to tell us - or rather me, since the rest of the family flees when they realize who's on the phone - all about how the cow is doing, which is great, except she's not my cow any more and I have a hundred more to worry about. And she wants favors. This morning she called at about ten to seven wanting to know how she should feed the cow now that she'd calved.

"Look," I should have said. "I'm not an expert, feed's not my thing, why don't you ask your vet?"

But I was groggy and so I tried to answer the question. Mistake. I got off lightly - I was able to get off the phone with her after a mere 15 minutes, rather than her usual half-hour to an hour - but she also wanted baby calves (which we don't have) and for us to breed her cow (which we won't do) and it took some talking to convince her that "no" actually did mean "no." And the worst of it is that if the advice I gave her was wrong - which it may well have been, me being no expert and it being early in the morning - and the cow gets sick or dies from it, she is exactly the kind of person who would try and sue us for it. Legal trouble we don't need.

I've tried hinting. I've tried saying I'm busy. No good: she talks right over me. The only way to get rid of this woman, it's becoming clear, the only way to convince her that I am neither her free full-service 24-7 consultant nor her friend, is to be extremely rude to her, and I was brought up to be polite. Not that I don't stick my foot in my mouth on a regular basis, but actually setting out to be deliberately rude to someone may well be beyond me. So I keep answering her questions and secretly hoping she'll just go away, and she keeps calling me.

Oh, well. Unless she calls again in the next week (God forbid), I'll be gone, in Canada. Maybe the bro can dredge up something rude and nasty enough to say that will finally get rid of her.

I ended up taking care of a friend's beasties over the weekend in addition to my own. Not entirely voluntarily. He mentioned it to me when we were in the car one day, aka, "My wife and I are going to her college reunion, would you take care of my animals?" and I said I'd think about it. Next thing I knew he was writing up lists of chores. Oh well. It's not like I had anything better to do with my weekend anyway, so why not spend it taking care of two dogs, four cats, five ducks, an indeterminate amount of chickens, the same of geese, and a goat?

The goat is pretty weird.

Okay, the dogs are pretty weird too. The elder of the two, Murphy, hates everyone but her people, and when she saw it was me opening the door she charged right in with an "Intruders! Alert! Alert!" bark, only backing down when she finally realized that the younger dog, Eight, had taken a subtly different boat. She was barking too, mind, but it was more a "Happy joy joy happy FRIEND!" bark.

So Murphy sulked in the bedroom and Eight played with me. Eight (I used to think it was spelled "Ate", seeing as that was mostly what she did) is a dalmation-something cross, a mix that seems to have left her with unlimited enthusiasm, unlimited energy, and no brains. She's calmed down considerably since the last time I took care of her: at that time she was barely more than a puppy, albeit a big puppy, and much thinner and faster, and I was warned that if I let her off her leash she would run in a sort of orbit around the house and grounds, for quite a while usually, and that my only chance of recapturing her would be to stand and wait for her to come by and then tackle her. If I missed, I would have to wait until the next orbit, usually about half an hour later.

I only let this happen once. In my defense, I was distracted; I had just finished setting up a very complex series of open doors, a sort of reverse trap, in an effort to get Murphy's (now deceased) brother Skink out from the dresser he'd been hiding under for the last two days, and in fact out of the house entirely, because I was tired of cleaning up dog shit. The reverse-trap worked perfectly, and Skink escaped the house, never to darken the bathroom floor again; but Eight escaped as well. This was at night. I had horrible visions of standing in the dark, with a flashlight, all night, waiting for the black-and-white satellite to complete its orbit again, but luckily as I was getting the flashlight I heard the clamor of ducks. Eight loves ducks, and this time her obsession was her undoing. She truncated her orbit for it, and I only had to wait by the ducks for about two minutes before she came back through and was tackled.

She's much fatter and calmer now, although still disturbingly bouncy, and didn't bother me. The goat did. I had luckily been warned that she got loose and that I wasn't to worry about it if she did, because when I came on the first day she was standing in the path waiting for me. She has a disconcerting habit of dancing and frolicking around you as you walk around, occasionally tossing in a lighthearted leap which brings all four of her feet to a level with your head. Of course, this wasn't nearly as disconcerting as her habit of jumping onto the hoods of cars and jumping on you as you passed.

Oh, well. I got some cash out of it, not to mention the stories. And really, what else was I going to do with my weekend?

So I made a mistake today. Pity I work in the second-most dangerous profession in America, where "mistake" usually translates to "injury".

In this case my mistake was being tired and frustrated and in a hurry while in the pit and not being careful enough where I put my hands, so when the cow lashed out at me, she caught my hand between her knee and the bar. Why is it that any injury to your hands hurts like bloody hell? After a few minutes I was able to move my fingers again, so I figured I was okay, but when I pulled my glove off at the end of milking it was swollen as hell. Doesn't hurt much any more, but it looks like someone glued a fried egg to the back of my hand. Dammit.

The cows have been on a real rampage lately. Night before last they ripped up a bunch of fence on me during milking, and that night my mother woke up at about 1 am to the sound of chomping. Yup, the bitches were in her garden, and had gleefully eaten about half of what she'd been so carefully planting and tending for the last two months and destroyed most of the rest. Mom sat in the garden and cried for about twenty minutes afterwards. Then last night they got out and went and visited the neighbors. All the neighbors.

Must be the full moon.

Remind me why we farm again?