The Walden Effect

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At the beginning of year three on the farm, we started this blog to document our journey into self-sufficient homesteading and voluntary simplicity.  We're glad to have you along for the ride!

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Posts tagged pets:

Anna Vet visit

StriderThe vet says Strider has a four degree temperature and is eight months old.  For $86, we came home with dewormer, antibiotics, and a more impressive ear mite medicine for Huckleberry whose ear mites have been resisting all over the counter meds for months.  The two haven't met, and won't until Strider fights off his upper respiratory infection.  For now, he's holed up in a cozy nook in the barn.

The trip to the vet went pretty smoothly, all things considered.  Strider was a bit of a wiggler at first, but soon settled in and didn't make any sudden moves amid a waiting room full of canines.  The only small problem was a bit of projectile pooping on the walk back to the barn at the end of the day --- Strider really did try to warn me by wriggling and meowing, but I held on tight thinking that he wanted to get down and get lost in the floodplain.  As a last resort, he pooped into midair, barely soiling my coat.  I dropped him in a hurry to let him finish, just as Lucy came barreling down over the hill to greet us.  Mark tackled Lucy while Strider fled into the cave created by an upturned root mass, to be slowly wheedled out again with honeyed tones.  Back in the safety of his barn, he ate and drank ravenously before settling down to pur on my lap.

I have to admit that his manners are impeccable, all things considered.  Yesterday, I talked about trying to give him to my brother.  Today I know he's here to stay.

Posted mid-morning Tuesday, January 6th, 2009 Tags: pets

Hunckleberry and AnnaHuckleberry is about to get a new friend as you may have read in the previous post.

I thought I would post this picture in an attempt to show him he was here first and we are not trying to replace him with the new cat, but to maybe add a bit of feline companionship to his already full and rich life of napping, meowing, eating, and reading on the couch with Anna.

Posted Sunday afternoon, January 4th, 2009 Tags: pets
Anna A new meow

New catYesterday, I jokingly told Mark that I'd gone to the dump (the source of our current cat) and found another cat, who I was now hiding in the barn.  No, no --- I changed my mind --- I'd stolen sweet little Bonnie from Mark's mom and had her hidden in the barn.  We both laughed and thought no more about it.

But this morning as I started to move the chicken tractors through winter mud, I heard a plaintive meow come from the barn.  I'd just left Huckleberry sleeping soundly on the sofa, but I thought it was possible he'd slipped out of the house and gotten his dainty paws wet or been chased by Lucy.  So I told the chickens to wait on me and went to check the noise out. 
New cat
Cowering behind our array of boxes and cast off belongings was...Bonnie???  The little cat had most of her markings, a white vest and white paws on an otherwise black fur coat.  But this little cat was smaller and oh so skinny when I finally tempted it to let me pick it up.  It was also a boy, just the same size Huckleberry was when I found him --- reaching that gawky adolescent stage where people tend to drop them off.  (Later, Mark found a towel on the road a mile from our house, one that hadn't been there yesterday, confirming our belief that the little cat got dumped.)

Just two weeks ago, Mark's mom asked us if we wanted another cat.  And without even checking with each other Mark and I both said "No!"  Huckleberry's a handful all by himself.  And yet --- if a cat walks a mile through the woods to find us, can we really tell it that we're going to renege on the contract humanity made with cats a few thousand years ago?  The truth is, I'm a sucker for strays.  Looks like we'll be taking the new cat to the vet tomorrow, and if it gets a clean bill of health introducing it to Huckleberry soon after.  I guess I should be a little more careful what I joke about!

Posted late Sunday morning, January 4th, 2009 Tags: pets

panoramic creek curve
Here's a picture of Lucy with our footbridge in the background where the creek has a curve in it. The panoramic nature of the photo is thanks to the Fuji Finepix S1000fd. It has a pretty neat built in feature that allows you to stitch three pictures into one long image.

After you take the first shot you save it in the memory and the next frame has about a fifth of the last image in a ghost like form that allows you to line up the picture exactly where you need it.

Posted late Saturday afternoon, January 3rd, 2009 Tags: pets

lucy and henThis is a picture of hen number 6. Hen number 5 if you ask Anna. She's at the bottom of the pecking order and had to be isolated because it was just too sad watching her getting picked on by the other hens.

Now she gets to roam free on most days, adding a certain flare to the place that makes me feel like I'm on the set of a movie and she's been added at the last minute for additional atmosphere for whatever new and wild scene is coming up next.

2008 was filled with a generous portion of good and happy scenes that make me feel confident I'm exactly where I need to be and doing exactly what I need to be doing.  I offer everyone reading this a warm and happy toast for good tidings in 2009.

Posted late Thursday evening, January 1st, 2009 Tags: pets

Lucy superspliterThe Gorilla glue bond was not quite strong enough to hold up against the heavy pounding a few weeks of wood splitting will tend to put it through. The wiggle is back, and parts of the bond are breaking away from the handle.

The maul has not flown off the handle yet, and as long as it gets the job done we will most likely continue to put it through the many paces of log splitage.

Lucy is often on hand for wood chopping, waiting for just the right piece to snatch up and carry off for safe keeping. We can never seem to get that kind of enthusiasm out of Huckleberry.

Posted late Friday evening, December 26th, 2008 Tags: pets

We're home from a wonderful visit with Mark's family in Ohio. As usual, I'm thrilled to be home, even though coming home to the farm is never easy.

We carefully picked warm nights to be gone, but we didn't think to check whether the warmth also equated to rain. It did. When we got home with two big boxes of frozen food, we found that the creek was nearly up to the footbridge --- definitely too high to drive the golf cart across. So instead we filled backpacks and braved the footbridge, slipping and sliding all the way home.

Luckily, everything else seems to have gone according to plan. The chickens still had plenty of water in their Avian Aqua Misers, though one set had scratched up the earth under their tractor into a mass of mud. Huckleberry seems to have caught a cold, sniffling and whining around the house, but after half a can of tuna he curled up to go to sleep. Lucy ran out to meet us, overjoyed as always by her adventures.

Posted late Wednesday afternoon, December 17th, 2008 Tags: pets

I was supposed to have a meeting this morning --- the good lord willin' an' the creek don't rise.  But the creek did rise and the doppler radar called for much more rain to come, so I called to say I was afraid to leave home for fear of getting flooded out.

While chatting to the folks I was supposed to meet with, I learned that the creek which folks talk about rising was originally meant to refer to the Creek Indians.  Which would make the phrase grammatically correct after all --- I always thought the "don't" in the sentence was just
Appalachianese.

Anyhow, Lucy and I wandered down to the uncapitalized creek to perform a stick test on its depth.  Someday I want to install a long stick with graduated markings in the creek so I'll know the actual depth of the creek water, but for now I stick to a more quick and dirty stick test.  I throw the stick across the creek and see how well Lucy does as she bounds after it.  Today, Lucy showed me up for a wimp --- she could walk almost all the way across.  Still, I'm always glad to be flooded in, letting nature win the battle for once.


Posted at lunch time on Wednesday, December 10th, 2008 Tags: pets

SnowFirst, the real point of this post --- congratulations to Andrea from Ohio, winner of our giveaway!  Now I will proceed to talk at length about the weather....

Which is snow!  A beautiful, though thin, sheet of fluffy white.  This morning Lucy romped about while I noticed deer and squirrel tracks.

Huckleberry and the hens, on the other hand, have taken the snow as a personal offense.  As I moved the chicken tractors this morning, our girls huddled on the patch of unsnowy ground until the last minute, unlike their usual rush-for-the-front as new greenery comes into view.  Cold feet for them this morning!

Posted mid-morning Sunday, December 7th, 2008 Tags: pets

Frosty windowHuckleberry is an indoors-outdoors cat, but yesterday he decided that he was most decidedly an indoors cat. 

When Mark and I came home from a day spent visiting, we were a bit surprised to find Huckleberry curled up on the futon.  Surely I'd put him out before leaving the house that morning --- but maybe he'd slipped back past us as we were leaving?  He seemed quite content to be inside away from the cold weather, so I didn't think any more about it. 

Until a few hours later, that is, when I put him out for the night and snuggled up in bed with a book.  Just as my book sucked me in, little feet came padding down the hallway and Huckleberry announced his presence with a pleased "Meow!"

What in the world?  I shot out of bed and did a little exploring, quickly discovering the new "cat door."  While we'd been gone all day, Huckleberry had deviously ripped the air hose to the outdoor wood furnace out of the wall, creating a massive hole through which he could easily prance into the house.  Thanks a lot, Huckleberry!
Chainsawing in the snow
This morning, I discovered that scientists are right --- cold hands make cold hearts.  Between Huckleberry's cat door letting in frigid air, the golf cart having frozen into the mud overnight so that we couldn't get the tires to roll and collect the wood Mark had cut at the other end of the property, and the chainsaw's gas having somehow frozen solid so that we couldn't cut any closer wood, I was cold and irritable.  Luckily for me, Mark solved all of our problems, even managing to start a fire out of wet kindling on a cold day.  As the interior temperature tops 60 F, my heart has begun to thaw. :-)

Posted Saturday evening, December 6th, 2008 Tags: pets

Park Seed

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