Down on the Farm

And the man at the back said everyone attack, and it turned into a ballroom blitz. This one line of this Krokus song has been in my head for about four days now. It's driving me quite mad! Now that that's out of the way, I can get to the details of the past few days.

I mentioned (complained) that I was going to be insanely busy last week and in fact, the busyness has trickled well into this week too. A few things that I didn't anticipate were thrown into the mix, but for the protection of the innocent, I can't blog about it. Too many people I know have been busted writing about people they know, then spend weeks trying to mend fences. But, it would make for really good blogging fodder if I could write about it.

To steal a phrase from Plimco, the siding job is coming along swimmingly. Well, not really, I've just been wanting to use swimmingly in a sentence. Smirk. Actually, the siding job is killing me. I failed to communicate that this job we are working on is an addition to an old farm house. I also failed to mention that this family has a working pig farm.

All day long, I hear, "uhRHEEE, RHEEE, ungthth" and squealing like someone is getting murdered. I suppose the pigs are cute enough, but they are nothing like the sort EB White speaks of. They are much bigger than I imagined, even being a girl from the country and having some knowledge as to the goings on of farms. These are the fellas that greet me every time I journey to the barn next to their pen to gather more siding material. (Our stuff has to be kept enclosed otherwise the birds will poop all over it - yes, there's that many.)


Too bad pictures can't portray a smell. See that mud that they're standing it. It's not mud. The brown one is the male of the bunch. Know how I know? He was on top of the pink ones all day long!

As if pigs weren't enough, they have two big lumus black labs, Buddy and Bosco that think it's a game when they steal a freshly cut piece of siding and go running around with it in their mouths, head held high, while I chase them threatening to feed them to the pigs. And cows....

Cows, I think, are the most curious of all creatures. Every time I look over at them, this is exactly what I see. They are all staring at me.

Today was a rainy day. Cold rain. I wasn't very happy about that. Not only did I have water dripping on me from the roof, but rain always makes a farm smell worse than it really is. And everything was muddy. When I used to build full time, it was great fun to ask a person who was jumping around holding his thumb and cussing a blue streak, "did you just hit your hand?". Not so fun anymore. Especially when you're the one with the busted thumb. What do you expect when you're on wobbly scaffolding up in the air trying to nail a one and half inch nail.

Here's a close up in case you don't believe it's me.

All right then, that's what I've been doing all week. Now I get to play catch up on everything else that went neglected, including blogging.