A1A South

The raccoon predations on the chickens have continued to the point where the sheep barn has also been cleared of chickens, and the chickens roosting beside SwampMan’s workshop have also been victimized.

Ruby, the beautiful red Doberman Pinscher that died a couple years ago, used to keep the place absolutely vermin free, and I suppose it has taken this long for her memory to die among the local critters. SwampMan and I would come home from a trip to the store or an occasional movie, and Ruby would greet us at the fence, wagging her entire rear end, and prance up to the patio where she had proof of her devotion to duty laid out for our perusal. There would be a neat, evenly spaced row of the bodies of assorted varmints laid out in front of her food bowl, which was filled with her favorite squeaky toys. The death toll would include possums, rats, squirrels, snakes (which scared the heck outta me but she was never bitten), and the occasional raccoon.

Ruby’s only weak point as a stock guardian/defender was an inability to distinguish chicks from ducklings. When she would find an unattended chick, she would pick it up gently, gently in her mouth and carry it to her water bucket and plop it in. Sometimes I would hear the hysterical peeping for rescue and be able to fish out the little victim before the down became waterlogged and it went under. Often I would find the little body or bodies when I went to clean and refill her water bucket. Perhaps, rather than altruism, it was just a passive/aggressive way of dealing with the way chickens stole from the food bowl.

Odie, my old blind/deaf pointer mix, was a great stock dog. I left him out with the chickens a few nights ago only to be awakened in the predawn hours by frantic chickens screeching for help. I opened the gate to let puppy out; he immediately raced to the gate on the driveway. I opened it, and he pursued something into the woods. Following chicken cries for help (a hen, as it turns out), I was able to retrieve something’s intended dinner and return her to her rooster who was out braving the dark in search of her.

I let puppy patrol the entire place the past two nights and haven’t been awakened by chickens screeching bloody murder. In fact, when I glanced outside at dawn, puppy was lying down calmly watching chickens eat the food out of his food bowl. A little later, I heard barking and growling in the sheep pasture where he was threatening something beyond the fence. Ewes and lambs were fine and not at all concerned about the proximity of the dog.

Guess puppy has turned into a stock guard dog now. I’ll still keep him in the kennel when we aren’t home just because he’s still a puppy, after all.

In other local news, another varmint to have to worry about getting into the chickens.

Put a 12′ python into a pillowcase? While I will admit that I will gently gather cute little rattlesnakes up onto shovels and place them across the fence into the woods where they belong so they can eat the cute little rats and mice, and I will poke the bigger timber rattlers with a long stick until they get annoyed enough to slither off the property, any critter big enough to swallow small grandchildren is going to be executed. Immediately.

I’ve been saying this to every high school age person of my acquaintance wondering what they should do for a living for the past several years.

I hate cubicles.

After getting drenched yet again today, I decided to call my mother and complain. After all, mothers are the only people that actually listen to complaints and have a solution which is either “let’s go shopping!” or “let’s have dessert!”

So, I called mom and she said “Oh, you didn’t have to call me back!”

“Hunh?” was my less than eloquent reply. “You called earlier?”

“Don’t you EVER listen to your messages?”

“Well, um….no!” I had to reply, glancing at my answering machine which showed 30 messages. Dang. Most people know that if you want me to actually listen to the message, you have to call until I answer and then tell me to listen to the message, damnit. People not in my family, that is. People in my family have the illusion that I spend all my spare time at home staring at the phone, willing it to ring, looking for the human connection that will bring meaning to my drab and dreary life.

Mom is counting down the days until I am unemployed so I can go shopping with her once a week. I have been told that I shop like a man. I go in and, if I like something, I buy it. Mom goes in, finds something she likes, then has to go to all the similar stores in the county to make sure that the item isn’t $1.00 cheaper somewhere else. I return home exhausted; mom returns home energized and happy that she has hunted down that elusive bargain.

I told her that I’m not sure how much shopping I’m going to be able to do without an actual income, and she happily replied “Thrift stores! We’ll go shopping at all the thrift stores!” Well, I can always dig up some of her flowers and sell them at the flea market, I suppose, so that I’ll have thrift store money. I don’t have any flowers I can dig up and sell. The chickens keep eating mine. Maybe I can sell the chickens.

My computer has decided to take this opportunity to die on me, the ungrateful bastard, so posting will probably be *very* sporadic until I have the opportunity to buy another one! I have to sneak computer time on SwampMan’s computer for the present.

Well, KC at Pixie’s Place tagged me a few days ago to provide 8 random facts about me but I begged off, citing slogging through waterlogged pastures with hay to deliver before and after work as a reason as to why I couldn’t answer at the time. I can’t come up with any more excuses (of course I can, but they’re worse than having to think up things to share about me, like scrubbing down the bathrooms), so here goes.

1. I sometimes buy women’s magazines at the checkout counter just so I can laugh at the articles. “Lose X number of pounds just by not eating (fill in the blank for the eeevil weight gain causer of the day, whether it be plastics, diet soda, regular soda, fast food or by eating non “organic” foods, whatever the hell that is).

The articles on how you can “firm and tone” by using 3 and 5 lb. weights are particularly hilarious. I’ve been out of the gym for 2 years now due to various injuries and work schedules but, when I worked out regularly, I unknowingly made some young women decline to join. They saw me, a decidedly middle-aged lady with a figure that was far from sylphlike, and decided that if I could do it, so could they, by golly, and asked the trainer to show them the proper technique. They were surprised to find that not only could they not manage the weight I was pressing, they couldn’t lift the bar without any weights. Then they couldn’t match my hour on the elliptical trainer, either. If I would have been able to talk to them, I would have explained that muscles quickly strengthen when stressed, and that they, too, would be lifting weights and probably outdoing me in a short period of time. But, unfortunately, I was told about it after they left. I don’t care WHAT the magazines say, 3 lbs. isn’t going to get rid of that cellulite. Neither will 150.

2. A friend was attempting to console me about my impeding unemployment by telling me that I have so many talents that surely I’ll find a position that will be just right for me soon! Actually, my biggest talent may be in pissing people off! It is a talent I exercise regularly. When Gawd says “okay, servant, what did you do with YOUR talent?” I’ll be able to tell him/her that I exercised that talent mightily and turned a mere tendency to be annoying by always being right to a person that is always right and then rubs people’s noses in it, REALLY pissing them off. Bad, BAD person! (SWAT!) PAY ATTENTION THE NEXT TIME YOU VOTE, DUMBASS!

3. I talk to my animals like they can understand me. Most of them do, except the chickens.

4. I talk to Swampman like he can understand me, too. *sigh* He’s out there in chicken territory a lot.

5. I fiercely resent any limitations placed on personal freedoms. As long as you aren’t hurting anybody else or anything, it’s nobody’s damn business what the hell you do. Smoke* if you want, eat whatever you want, and drive without a seatbelt or helmet. I don’t care and neither should anybody else.

6. I like to learn new things and periodically develop new enthusiasms in which I immerse myself in books in the area in which I am interested, then I follow up with putting it into practice. When I’ve learned as much as I want, I’ll lose interest and move on to something else.

7. In the past I’ve had an extra high energy level and held 2 or 3 jobs/businesses simultaneously while raising a family. My energy level is lower now and the family is grown but, once I’ve satisfied my curiosity about a particular field/hobby and how everything works, I move on. ADD? ADHD? I dunno. Maybe.

8. I have a problem following instructions because I always figure I can improve on the original. I can’t recall a time in which I even followed a recipe exactly. (Oh, sure, you’re thinking I’m talking about a cake recipe, and I’m thinking in terms of a a recipe for various concrete items.) Now that I think about it, I don’t follow cooking recipes, either.

*But not in an inside environment beside me, please, I get all drippy nosed and tight chested around smoke. I get the same physical reaction around people that have drenched themselves with perfume or aftershave.