Kat Dancing

I suppose one of the downsides of having a pet is watching them make great strides in rather different directions than you would wish. Alphie the parrot came to us able to say "step up" (his command for getting on a finger): now, six months later, he can also say "What's up?", "What's that?", "Stop it," "Alphie, no!" "dammit," "brat", and (today's accomplishment, still a bit wobbly around the r) "You're a twit". As well as doing an imitation of water gurgling and an imitation of my laugh that makes him sound like a mad science-bird.

Other people get their birds to say stuff like "Polly wanna cracker" and "pretty bird". I am a bad bird-momma, I am.

In other news, I'm doing Novel in 90 again, so progress reports are hereby removed from here to there. But there is progress again, for now.

And if it's neither too hot nor too cold tomorrow we may kill hogs. So that's all right.

Round about eight this morning, our youngest group of heifers had a conversation that went something like this:

FEARLESS LEADER: Hey! Some nice deer has knocked down the fence for us! Let us stage AN ESCAPE!

MOB: Yay! Escape!

FEARLESS LEADER: We have escaped to the road!

MOB: Yay! Road! Which way?

FEARLESS LEADER: We go... that way!

*mob mob mob*

MOB: Yay! Another road! Which way now!

FEARLESS LEADER: Up the hill!

*mob mob mob*

MOB: This hill is boring and steep.

FEARLESS LEADER: Then we will go into the woods!

MOB: Yay woods!

*mob mob mob*

MOB: Yay woods!

*mob mob mob*

MOB: Yay... hey, there sure are a heck of a lot of woods out here, aren't there?

*mob mob*

MOB: Trees are boring.

FEARLESS LEADER: Um....

MOB: Hey, isn't it about time for breakfast?

FEARLESS LEADER: Okay, does anyone remember which way we came from?

MOB: No! We are not woodscows! But we are very hungry!

FEARLESS LEADER: Well, let's see what's in that direction....

MOB: Trees!

FEARLESS LEADER: Ah, but in that direction --

MOB: More trees!

FEARLESS LEADER: Oh. Well --

MOB: We are hungry! And bored! And surrounded by trees! This isn't fun!

FEARLESS LEADER: ...I don't wanna be leader any more.

LEADERLESS MOB: HALP!

Which was probably about the time that the deer hunter came around and asked if that group of cows was supposed to be rampaging through the woods, and our Mennonite employee and I groaned, hopped on the bike, and went looking.

It is surprisingly hard to find a formerly rampaging mob of cows in the woods. I ended up leaving the bike to the Mennonite girl and trekking around on foot, and even then I pretty much stumbled across them, as they had gone into a huddle and were sulking quietly about the unfairness of it all. Got them out of the woods by a mixture of coaxing and bullying, put them back in their field, fixed the fence, and fed them so they could sulk on a full stomach.

Idiot cows.

In the meantime, one of our three sausage hogs was having the following conversation with herself:

HOG: Hmm. Feels like I'm in heat again. Shall I escape?

HOG: .... sure, why the hell not.

We had noticed this development, but as the hog always does this when she's in heat, and as she never goes far, and as we had our hands full with the juvenile delinquents, we were ignoring it. We (and the hog) had neglected to remember that the hog would be escaping into the field where the milking herd was currently grazing. About the time we got the ex-woodscows dealt with I heard a particular type of bellow from the vicinity of the herd. It was a bellow particular to the Jersey breed of cows, a bellow which translates roughly to "OMG NEW TOY! I loves it! Let's all play with it until it falls apart!"

"Whoops," I said.

So then we had to rescue the hog from the cows, which wasn't easy, since the whole lot of them had surrounded the hog by that point and were dancing, bellowing, head-butting, frothing at the mouth, et cetera. The hog, at first inclined to take this calmly, soon began to panic (as one does when surrounded by eighty frolicking beasties weighing half a ton each and equipped with numerous hooves). The cows loved this. Panic was cool! More panic!

In the meantime the Mennonite girl and I are trying to seperate one increasingly frantic hog from a throng of dancing cattle. I thought we were going to have piggy pancake for a bit, but in the end we got her back in her pen with nothing more than a bruised ego.

Idiot hog.

Idiot cows.

... why am I in farming again?

On a slightly lighter note than last week, I present Ten Things I Wish I Could Make My Parrot Understand.

1) Ears do not come off.

2) This new toy you have discovered is my keyboard. It works better with the keys on.

3) It's cute how you climb using your beak. And it's cute how you crawl down inside my shirt to cuddle. However, no matter what they look like from underneath, some things are not to be used as climbing holds. If I want my nipples pierced, I will go to a professional.

4) Were the broom, mop, and spray bottle The Enemy, I'm sure they would be most impressed by the protective screams of a five-ounce parrot. However, they are not, and I am now deaf in one ear. Please stop helping.

5) Seriously. The ears? Do not come off. No, not even when you hang upside down from them by both feet and yank. My screams and ineffectual flailings were not intended as encouragement.

6) I am not sharing my cereal with you because dairy products are bad for you. Crawling down my arms is just going to make me juggle the bowl like it's a hot plate, and attacking my lips while I'm chewing is going to get you bitten. Sitting quietly until I get distracted and then doing a kamikaze jack-in-the-box dive into the bowl is effective but annoying, especially when I have to clean milk spatters off my screen. And dairy products are still bad for you.

7) This other new toy you have discovered is my computer. It works better without a bird chewing on the reset button.

8) Sticking your head in my mouth every time I yawn is not a survival tactic. Especially when your head is covered in tickly feathers.

9) You know, there are any number of things on people that Do Not Come Off. Moles, for example. Freckles. Fingernails. Noses. Lips. And EARS. Just because birds don't have these things does not mean I will look better after my emergency parrot-beak surgery.

10) Stop eating my story notes. I write slow enough as it is.

Speaking of writing, I'm back on the wagon, for however long that will last.

Rewrite Progress

18,497 / 100,000 (18.5%)

Salvaged Words: Today? None. For the project as a whole? About 10, 700. Yes, I really am anal enough to track that, though as I'm typically chopping a quarter to a half of what I salvage I'm not exactly sure what I'm tracking.

New Words: 379.

Comments: Threw out the scene I was previously working on, because it was getting in my way. If it's important it'll wriggle back in somewhere. The important thing is that I get back to work on this damned thing, because I really, truly would like a functional draft before the end of the year.

Haven't been posting lately, for several reasons -- mostly relating to overwork, laziness, and a general lack of energy, but also having something to do with my father's dog, as I mentioned in my last post, being on his last legs. He died a few days later. Shep was smarter than most people I knew and, at thirteen, had been around for literally half my life. It hit me hard. He was my dad's dog. It hit my dad harder. There are some things you don't see your invulnerable ex-biker dad going through without it shaking up your world, and this was one of them.

So I've been quiet, and down, and let an obligation to crit someone's work and a lot of housework and all the novel-writing go to the dogs, which had the effect of making me more down, et cetera, ad infinitum, hello depressive rut. You'd think I'd catch on to the whole "reading too much, wasting too much time on the Internet, irritated by stupid friends-and-relations interrupting fantasy life, never voluntarily leaving house, tired all the time" cycle after the first umpteen times, but no. Blindsides me every damn time.

Anyhow.

I cleaned the living room. I did at least some of the dishes. I printed out those bits of the novel I had gotten rewritten. I'm getting back on track with this whole life thing, because really, detailed as my imaginative life is, it just ain't the same.

And I'm saying a bit of my goodbye to Shep. Y'all didn't know him, and I can't describe him. This is the dog that learned to recognize us spelling his favorite words. The dog we bought goldfish for to keep him amused, fish he would remind us to feed. The dog who caught butterflies and let them go, and was so gentle that they flew away afterwards. The dog who drove us all half-crazy with his Rules, which were to be Obeyed, who no one but my dad could really use to work cattle 'cause he thought the rest of us were dumb as dirt, who we all cussed and tripped over and loved, because he was people.

After the vet drove out (after hours) to put him down, the clinic sent a card 'round, signed by all the vets and vet techs who'd known him, with little things they remembered about Shep in it. When I went through that week to pick up some meds one of the techs nearly broke down talking to me. He was her favorite dog in the world, she said. Even more than her own dogs. Shep was something else. Shep was special.

To us, and to everyone who ever knew him.

Rest in peace, old man.

So, as promised, the story of how I came to own a parrot. (We won't get into how long ago I promised it....) But first, a visual aid!



So back in November, shortly after deciding to move to San Francisco, my brother and his girlfriend bought a Jenday conure. Bro's gf already had cockatiels and loved them, but they were looking for something a bit more personable and intelligent. They brought him to visit and I was most fascinated and envious. I'd been interested in parrots for years, ever since happening across Irene Pepperberg's research, and had even looked into getting myself an African grey before concluding that I had neither the money, the time, or the right to commit to such a resource-intensive bird (they are very, very smart birds, and thus about the same as buying yourself a chimpanzee. Or a three-year-old who's going to stay three for about, oh, 60 years.) I didn't know much about the smaller, less demanding parrots, and hadn't expected them to be so tame nor so clever.

But bro went off to San Francisco, and I blathered on about parrots for about a month until Dan and my mother told me I was nuts to think of buying such an expensive pet, and life did its thing.

Without getting into details, let's say that the move to San Francisco didn't work out for my bro. GF's promised job turned out to be working for rich snobs who backed out on the housing they'd agreed to provide, drove her to distraction with their demands, and started advertising her job the minute her agreed trial period was up (without telling her they'd done it -- pity she found the ad on their website.) Both of them found themselves commuting much further than they'd expected and in the all-too-common San Francisco situation of making twice as much money but spending three times the amount they had elsewhere. They got tired, and as a result they had no time for their parrot, who started developing the usual bad behaviors of neglected parrots -- mostly screaming his little head off all hours of the day. If you've never heard a parrot scream, dear gods, can they scream. Not a noise you want in your house, much less in a small suburban California community.

By the time they moved back home, about six weeks ago, they were both really broke and sick to death of the damned bored screaming parrot.

Enter me, my soft heart, and poor Dan's inability to say no to stuff that makes me happy.

Yeah, I took their parrot home -- supposedly on trial, but, eh, yeah. Got attached. Dan is less attached than resigned, but he is a sweet boy who spoils me. Particularly considering that he'll be living with the birdie for the next 25 years.

So, I have a parrot. His name is Alfie. He still screams, but in relatively normal, manageable amounts, probably because he now lives with a human who carries him around on her shoulder whenever she's home, feeds him grapes, makes him toys, and generally spoils him rotten.

A month or so along, I am still utterly and completely thrilled by this. We're not supposed to have pets in our apartment, you see, but a bird -- a bird sneaks by. And he's a cool pet! He does tricks! And plays in my hair! And talks! (Only one clear phrase, so far, but he's got another far enough along that I'm catching recognizable words, and I suspect he's working on one or two more.)

Twenty-five years is a long time, and these birds are not cheap, and left to myself I probably would have chickened out on buying one. But sometimes life is just good to you.

(This post brought to you despite the help of Alfie the conure. This would be the day he decided to be fascinated by the keyboard.)

The good news: the shipping dorks actually managed to pick up our pallets of cheese -- not on Friday, as they'd said, but early Saturday morning. Dan and I didn't end up having to help make up the actual pallets, as my parents decided that getting us on site and capable of work at 6 am was more trouble than it was worth. I am wounded. Not a walking zombie as I would have been at 6 am, of course, but nonetheless wounded.

The weird news: the truck driver for this shipment, while a nice man, somehow managed to get my cellphone number instead of my father's (they're only one digit apart) and despite repeated attempts to convince him that he needed to call ***8 instead of ***9, it was me that he called at 8:30 in the morning for directions. The poor sod's lucky he even ended up in the right town.

The bad news: we bought three itty baby pigs on Friday for eventual sausage dinners. And now we have two itty baby pigs. Apparently while my mother and the NYC intern (who is a real sport) were transferring them from the truck to their new piggy home they made the mistake of leaving one piggy in the truck while they carried two to the pen. My mother did put the camper's lid down but the piggy, having watched his brethren being carted off and apparently having watched more horror movies than were good for him, made a desperate leap into the unknown. After getting chased over half the farm by two women and a very excited dog he finally escaped, last seen heading off into the woods as fast as his little piggy legs could carry him.

So somewhere on our 175 acres is a very lost, damp, and lonely pig. Hopefully we will find him before the coyotes do.

Writing Progress:
Today's Progress: 304 words. I suck.
Comments: In my defense, that measly 300 words did get me to the end of the chapter. And I did spend the rest of the day whipping up my flagging enthusiasm for querying Harmony. I sent off four e-queries (one a re-query to an agent who hasn't responded) and have five further queries waiting to go out in tomorrow's mail (one of those also a re-query). So not unbearably lazy -- just lazy.
Crappy Writing Skill De Jour: Does a butterfly attention span count as a crappy writing skill?
Snips: Rare poetic moment: Behind Elliot, the unborn kin twitched, giant hooves fighting to churn at the nonexistant earth.

Let's see...

After a four am. wakeup insomniac night (for no good reason, too. Bah) I got a call from the farm worker saying that he had a calf down and couldn't get her up. My parents are in Portland, so this kind of thing defaults to me. Double bah.

The calf -- Bagel -- was laying on her side on a hill, not a happy position for a calf to be in, and at first I thought that was all it was: she'd cast herself. There's a fair amount of intense muscular negotiation involved in getting a barrel on legs up or down, and sometimes cows manage to get themselves into a state where they can't get purchase. I'd never seen it in an animal this young, but hey, why not? Even when we pushed her back onto her breastbone, a more amiable standing-up position, and still couldn't get her to stand, I figured it was panic. Jerseys have this tendency to fail once or twice and then give up, in a "nope. Cows can't do that", kind of way, and she was definitely in huffy-breathing panic mode.

When she still wasn't up an hour later, then I got worried.

When she wasn't up two hours later, and had in fact fallen onto her side again, I got very worried; and when, pushing her upright, I noticed something funny in the way her eyes focused and tracked, I gave up and called the damned vet.

In the hour it took the vet to get there she'd gone from slightly-wobbly-cast-calf to Very Sick Calf indeed -- wobbling neck, lack of muscular control, poor to nonexistant reflexes, and, most worrying of all, dropping body temperature. The vet checked her over and announced she had polio.

...

...

Well. That explains why I didn't recognize the symptoms.

We IV'd her with fluids and vitamins while the vet explained that this wasn't (thank god) human-style polio: similar symptoms, but a mineral deficiency rather than a virus, and tending to appear only in one or two animals. So my whole batch of calves wasn't likely to come down with this and I could start with the breathing thing again. About this particular calf... well, her body temperature had dropped 2 degrees from normal -- not at all good -- but about halfway through the fluids she started shivering and her eyes started focusing again. The vet was dubious but hopeful. My dad, when I called him, was more pessimistic and tried to ready me for putting her down.

We put her in a pen in the barn, propped her up so she couldn't go all the way onto her side and risk bloat on top of all her other problems, and crossed our fingers... and at 8:30 the farm worker called to let me know she was on her feet. "She's not gonna be running anywhere," he said, "but she's eating and drinking."

Little one, you may just make it through.

But I'm fucking exhausted. It was hot as hell out there today, muggy-hot, and I sat pushing a 200-pound calf up onto her breastbone and trying to keep her thrashings from knocking the catheter out for an hour and a half. Not to mention the worry and the lugging her to the barn and the various other crises of the day -- broken milk equipment, empty teat-dip containers -- and the whole no-sleep thing and the fact that, what with one thing and another, I didn't eat anything but three Lil'Debbie Pecan Spinwheels, a few bits of cheese, and a handful of green beans nicked from my parents' garden until 6 pm.

Once we got home I showered, ate, and passed out on the couch for an hour. I feel much better. But I really, really hope this isn't the Unlucky Fridays thing starting up again, because I'm stressed enough as it is.

Well, it wasn't 17 cows that calved.

Only 4.

And they were all real sweethearts about it too, except the one who was a New Mother and apparently in denial about the whole thing. By the time we got there the poor calf had one broken front tooth and one wobbly one and was lying quietly on the ground bleeding because every time she tried to get up Momma headbutted the crap out of her. She has been rescued, fed, and named Willow, and shows every sign of overcoming her unfortunate welcome to the world.

On the downside, it's supposed to get cold as shit tonight and snow, which means, via Murphy's Law, a glut of calves to celebrate the crappy weather.

Bah.

I'm in charge of the farm while my parents are gone (ah, the freedom! Unsupervised with a whole farm to play on! Unfettered by -- waitaminute, there's a fuckload of work here) including all the beasties. This includes the cows, who are all heavily pregnant but appear to be unaware of this; yesterday they were out in the hayground and running around bucking like a bunch of calves. Matronly, my ass. And it includes the two bulls -- soon to be hamburger -- who I have to feed from the bunk.

"Because they'll try to hump you?" I said when my father cautioned me not to go in the pen. It's a problem we've had before. The cows try and hump the humans, the cows hump each other, the bulls hump each other, the female dog humps the baby calves, the dogs occasionally hold a threesome which is a bit odd considering that one of the participants is castrated. It's your basic run-or-get-humped world. Occasionally people tell me how homosexuality is unnatural. They always seem unnerved when I start laughing hysterically.
"No," he said. "Well, yes, but only if you turn your back on them. The real problem is that they want their heads scratched and they'll knock you over if you're not careful."

This is another problem. Most humans have, I've noticed, two possible attitudes towards animals: either they see them as your basic Skinner machines, all instinct and reflex, or they think of them as furry humans. Neither is true. Animals aren't dumb, nor are they machines. They have brains. But they are also not human and may be missing some of the cognitive leaps, one of which is that "I got bigger" concept.

I am not joking. It's a well-known trick -- the Amish still use it -- to go in once a day for the first few months of a horse's life and pick it up. That way, when the horse gets to be a ton or so and capable of stomping you to a pulp, he never does, because as far as he's concerned you're still that kickass mofo who can pick him up and carry him around. You just haven't, y'know, done so recently.

Animals are not so good on the cognitive leaps, but they're buggers for remembering.

And this is where people get in trouble when raising calves. When a 50-pound calf butts you in the back of the knees for headscratchies, it's cute; when the same animal weighs 500 pounds, it's bloody dangerous. We know this; the animal doesn't. He doesn't know anything's changed, and he does not understand that he can hurt you now.

(This also gets people in trouble with the sexual thing. We don't see bulls as a sex objects no matter how much like humans we treat them, so we assume they'll understand that too. Guess again. Treat a bull like a pet, and when the hormones start a-goin' as far as he's concerned you're either his rival or his bitch, and either way you're likely to end up as a pretty red smear on the wall.)

We know all this and we're careful, but some animals are naturally friendly and one of the bulls falls into that category. He thinks he's a big fuzzy teddybear. Rule #210 of surviving farming: do not go into the bullpen with the 500 pound delusional teddybear.

It's things like these that make my career so much more interesting than most. I mean, in most places "watch your ass" is a euphemism....

I love it when they put the newbie cows out by the road. There's nothing better than watching a whole herd of beef cattle running away with their tails stuck straight up in the air going "AIEEE! The scary loud MONSTER ON WHEELS is coming for me!"

I mean, soon enough they'll have learned that the Wheel Monster never leaves its Magic Black Snake, and soon after that they'll be trampling the fence and standing athwart the yellow line going, "Uh-huh. Blow your silly horn if you want; my fat ass still outweighs that glorified shoebox you drive." But it's nice while it lasts.

Writing Progress:

25,659 / 50,000 (51.3%)

Today's Progress: 614 words, because I was too lazy to drag my ass out of bed on time.
Comments: ... but they were pretty good words for all that.
Snips: It was so tall, as tall as a full-grown ulog standing upright or taller, towering half again Timmain's height over his head; he nearly choked on his fear at the closeness of it. Its smell was strange and rank, dust-dry in his mouth. He had to fight to keep himself from running, from screaming, as it bent its bulging eyes closer to him, turning its head this way and that. One arm unfolded and reached towards him, and Tyse, still in the shadows, made a moaning noise; but the Other only touched him lightly on his shoulder and withdrew, straightening, swaying slightly as it did. Timmain gathered his courage in both hands and reached out to it.