All Purls. No Swine.
This post requires a bit of imagination. It involves what used to be called a "poetic conceit," in the days when it was allowable to speak in simile and metaphor, or to employ metonomy or synecdoche, secure in the knowledge that your audience didn't have to know what any of those things actually was, or… Continue reading The Headwaters of the Mississippi, and a Few Other Things
Beautiful morning today, down here on the farm, although a fleeting recollection of the old saying, "Red sky in the morning, shepherd's warning," did run through my mind. (True to form, the rain starts tonight.) But my first thought took me back to my high-school days, and the first time I read The Odyssey end-to-end… Continue reading Rosy-Fingered Dawn
I've had Whistle pet trackers on my Great Pyrenees dogs for at least a decade. I haven't really kept track (see what I did there) of the technology, what it was, how it's changed, where it is now. (As a 30-year IT professional myself, I have a deep aversion to wasting time looking at how… Continue reading A Review of the Whistle Pet Tracker–Short Answer for Rural Dwellers: Look Elsewhere
About a week ago, I made an executive decision: Come this next Sunday, I’m sending almost all of my sheep to the auction. All that is, except: Dizzabel, the tiny lamb who entered my life last January when I discovered her, down the bottom of the field, in the snow, crying, at about 10PM when… Continue reading Changes: Down Here on the Farm
I’ve started mowing the fields. Very late this year, due to a series of calamities and necessary service adjustments that put my essential vehicle in the tractor hospital for several months (“supply-chain issues”): a leaky hydraulic hose, worn tires, and a–not-required, but I thought wise–thorough going-over at her coming-of-age twenty-first birthday anniversary. (I poured myself… Continue reading One Girl Went to Mow….
To be perfectly clear from the outset, I've been living in a construction zone since 1986, the year the late Mr. Right and I moved out to the country and started on our house. Large swaths of the drywall were never painted. Much finishing was left undone. Doors have been missing. Floors were, in some… Continue reading Feeling Grateful, Blessed, and Very–Very–Clean
Well, there's the Wayne Newton original, which probably should come with a trigger warning, if only because of his execrable German pronunciation: https://youtu.be/0m_giioppT4 And then there's the karaoke music. You're welcome to sing along with my revised lyrics: https://youtu.be/DNL6I-NMhTw Schadenfreude, darling, schadenfreude I find myself feeling overjoyed. Blogging site, on the Internet Was the place… Continue reading The Joys of Schadenfreude
As some of you know, I’m currently owned by two dogs: Xena, an elderly Great Pyrenees, and Odo, a puppy of the same breed. My last experience with a puppy was in 1986 (Wulfie, the Old English Sheepdog), and I’d forgotten how exhausting, challenging, charming, and occasionally hilarious, such a thing can be. In the… Continue reading No Matter What: Contrarian Pets, and the Owner Who Loves Them
I just picked the first of this season's dandelions and brought them inside as a treat for Miss Bunny. Doing so reminded me of this post, from almost exactly a year ago, and of how much I love this season: Simple and fresh and fair from winter’s close emerging, As if no artifice of fashion,… Continue reading Harbinger
Lord. I am grateful to be where I am. Out here in God's country. With a house, a barn, a few dozen acres, and a generator. And a well. And an (expensive but extraordinarily useful) hand pump that will let me raise sweet water from 100 feet below ground level, should propane, or oil, or… Continue reading Surviving the Apocalypse–Or At Least, the Next Few Years of Joe Biden–Whichever Comes First