Tuesday Tool caseous microtome edition

I think the tool today is...

The cheese plane.

Six months ago, after milking the goaties, I took the twelve liters of milk into the kitchen and got it to about 30 degrees C.  I inoculated it with a mixture of mesophilic bacteria--some specialized in fermenting lactose to short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs), some specialized in fermenting lactose into SCFAs but also some interesting ketones and aldehydes and whatnot.  After letting them do their thing for an hour, I added some coagulant--a protease from a fungus that has the same specificity as the major component of rennet.  Over the course of about an hour, the combination of acid and coagulant curdled the milk.

I cut the curd up into chunks about a centimeter on a side, and slowly warmed the curds and whey up to 39C.  After about an hour, I removed half of the whey and replaced it with cool water, bringing the temperature down to the mid-20's and removing much of the lactose from the mix.  A half hour later, I removed all the whey and put the curds into a form, and pressed them with ever-increasing pressure for about ten hours.  The curds mostly stuck together, but preserved some of their individuality.

I removed the nascent cheese from form the next day, and immersed it in a saturated brine solution, and let it sit there for twelve hours.  As far as salt is concerned, cheese is a liquid, and it dissolved into the cheese.

Then, I let the cheese dry out for a bit, and then put it into a wine 'fridge in my basement, set to about 12 C.  And there it sat; I'd turn it every so often, and brush off the mold.  The exterior turned a golden yellow color, and turned hard and tough and horny.  The interior lost some moisture, becoming quite firm.  The curds, having been "washed," did not stick together as completely as they might in other cheese processes, leaving a few gaps or "mechanical spaces" in the cheesemaker's parlance. As it aged, organic compounds in the cheese became further oxidized and recombined; though the bacteria were mostly dead, their enzymes lived after them and continued their work.

Today, I dug the cheese out of the basement, brushed off a bit of mould, halved the 2 kg wheel with a cleaver, and then cut one of the halves in half.  I shaved off a bit with the cleaver and tasted it--it was very, very good.  The taste had elements of a tangy cheddar, elements of Parmesan, a little carmelized sweetness, a pleasant salty buttery-ness, and a firm texture.  What one should do with such a cheese is serve it after a nice dinner with some fino sherry, some membrillo or raisins and almonds...and cut it with a cheese plane.

Tomorrow I will go out and thank the goaties for their miraculous ability to eat spring grass and alfalfa hay and water and turn it into such amazing milk.

Tuesday Tool Cream of the Crop edition

This week's tool is the Slavic Beauty hand-crank cream separator.  Krassnaya!

On the one hand, it's pretty mundane.  Milk goes in, up to three gallons at a time; vigorously turn the crank for fifteen minutes, and the cream comes out one spout while the skimmed milk comes out the other.

On the other hand, it's pretty darn cool.  It is a home preparatory centrifuge.  You crank it by hand, about 60 rpm, And the gearing takes the rotor to over 10,000 rpm.  From my life in biology, I'm used to sample centrifuges--a sample is loaded into a bottle or tube; after spinning, the tube or bottle is removed, and the partitioned sample is decanted.  You do one sample at a time. But preparatory centrifuges are magic; they can be continuously loaded and unloaded as they are spinning and separating.  The magic is in the rotor, the bit that spins so fast.

Milk is continuously fed into the port on the top of the rotor and subjected to an intense gravitational field.  Just as continuously, the cream is ejected from one escape port, on the left of the neck in the picture, and the milk escapes through the port lower down on the neck.  Even cooler, the heart of the rotor is a series of "cones."  These divide the volume of the rotor into a dozen stacked sections.  This has the effect of taking a sample of milk and subjecting it to an extreme gravitational field once; then taking the upper portion of that, and subjecting it to an extreme gratiational field; then, taking the upper portion of that, and repeating over and over again.  To get the same effect with a rotor with only a single compartment, the rotor would have to be meters in diameter.  (Interestingly, the technology dates to the 1800's; before, "skim milk" was the result of letting milk stand for quite a while and then skimming the top layer off.)

So, one of today's jobs was separating some cream, with which I will make mascarpone, which I use in place of butter.  I started with two gallons/eight liters of milk from our Nigerian Dwarves; it is relatively late in their lactation, and their milk is averaging about 7% butterfat.  I ended up with a bit shy of a quart/800 mls of very, very, VERY heavy  cream.

Yummers.  The skim milk has been mixed with whole milk, and is turning into a tomme as I write.

Tuesday Tool: the Ballot.

Election day, here.  The one issue on the ballot has to do with changing the county charter, basically de-professionalizing county government.  It's brought out much of what I don't care for in local politics.  When I first heard of this issue, it struck me as an expression of the generalized all-government-is-bad sentiment of the area, as well as the no-expertise-or-knowledge-is-necessary-for-governing sentiment one sees nowadays, especially on the conservative side of the spectrum.

But then, somebody noticed that this charter would have allowed citizens to block or delay logging on certain county lands.  Indeed, one of the people who proposed the new charter was involved in protests against the logging of a county park.  That led to a county-wide blossoming of signs urging us to STOP EXTREME ENVIRONMENTALISTS! And vote no on the charter.

Then our county sheriff jumped in.  He's absurdly popular around here, because during the Obama administration, he sent a letter to the Vice President--apparently because the President wasn't legitimate?--saying that he wouldn't enforce any gun regulation laws.  (He also had on his Face book page a link to a video suggesting that Sandy Hook was a "false flag" operation.  Trucks all around here have stickers saying "I SUPPORT SHERIFF HANLIN").  Well, the new charter could possibly be interpreted to possibly maybe limit his powers, so he came out against it.  So, a picture of him making a Mussolini face is now up on the "no" posters, which urge us to SUPPORT SHERIFF HANLIN VOTE NO!

And then there's the letters to the editor in the local paper.  Hoo boy.  "Fight Communism--vote no!"  "New charter is first step on road to Nazism."  One of the originators of the charter (a woman) apparently has been subject to menacing, grotesquely threatening phone calls, mail, and social media.  Around here, if somebody says they're coming after you with an AR-15, it's believable.

I don't think the charter will pass.  Backers have been massively out-spent (by a hundred to one), out-postered, and have no support from the business or education community.  I don't care for the charter, because government requires skill and professionalism, and nobody worthwhile will serve as a volunteer county commissioner.  But geez, it sure has brought out the ugly in Douglas County.

Tuesday Tool Straight Outta Serendip Edition

The job for Tuesday of last week was a bit of reclamation.  We had a chunk of one pasture that was very difficult to use.  It was next to what had been a decrepit barn, and there was a lot of discarded stuff in the ground--the remains of a couple of feeders, hoses, wire, glass, and so on.  Also, when we did the foundation work for the new barn, the excess soil had been dumped in the area, and then driven over while wet.  The result was a barn-sized patch of pasture, situated in what should be a high-transit area, that was riddled with foot-deep ruts, rubble, and weeds.  The plan was to drag out the larger chunks of metal and then level the damp and workable soil with a box grader and then smooth it with a screen.   The screen--a heavy "horse panel," would break up clumps and put a nice finish on things, though really, a harrow would be a much better tool.

So, I started work, digging up some chunks and hauling them out.  There was about half a foot of an old rail protruding from the side of one of the ruts, and it did not come out by hand.  So, I got the tractor bucket underneath it and lifted--and nearly flipped the tractor.

I dug a bit more with the bucket, saw that there was a chain welded onto the rail, and that it kept going.  I got some heavy chain, wrapped it around the tractor's bucket, and started tugging and yanking and digging and wiggling at it, and more and more rail and more and more chain started appearing.  It was starting to wiggle a little, but it was still not coming out, despite almost flipping the tractor a few more times.  The simple first step of the morning's work was becoming considerably more complicated.

After two hours of hard exertion by both myself and the redoubtable Kubota, it became clear that I was looking at a heavy drag harrow that had been buried underneath everything, I don't know how long ago.  I don't remember seeing it when we bought the place, five or six years ago now.  A few of the cast iron connectors had broken, but the welding was still good.  And heavy!  Lifting it with the tractor bucket caused the rear wheels to lighten noticeably, and that was with the box grader riding on the back!

I set the harrow aside, and set myself to work with the box grader.  I'm not skilled with it yet, so what would take an adept earthmover a half hour took me two hours, and I was still looking at a lot of wrinkles and ridges.  (If you ever want to learn humility, try to do something that a tradesman does easily.)  I thought to myself that a horse panel really would not do the job, here.  What I wish I had was a nice, heavy drag harrow...and hey, I have one!

So, that part of the pasture is returning to usefulness; here's Eleanor inspecting it--she has since decided that she needs to dig halfway to China there, marring its smooth surface, but still, it's much better than before.

Tuesday Tool Primitive Pete edition

Today's tool is probably either the first, or the second, tool an anthropoid ever used.  It's a stick.

I guess it's four years now that we've been heating our house with wood.  Got our nice, efficient fireplace insert, got cords and cords of wood from the trees that were crowding the house, and we had piles of kindling from the remodeling and upgrading that we've done--lots of lath and pulled-up floorboards and subflooring.  What we did not have was a fireplace set: a nice poker, an ash shovel, maybe some tongs.  But, you make do with what's at hand, and what was at hand was a one-foot-long section of rough-cut subflooring that had been busted up to make a piece of kindling.  And, because it did, we kept making do--it got more and more charred (or perhaps fire-hardened), the "handle" end became more and more polished, and at one point last year a chunk split off of it.  Still worked, though.

Well, we finally got ourselves a fireplace set.  It's nice, and it actually works significantly better than the stick.  But I haven't had the heart to burn it yet.  It's just sitting by the fireplace, behind the "real" set, and occasionally, when I'm building the fire, I grab it instead of the iron poker, without thinking.  Some primitive, atavistic streak, I guess, "Mmmggggg, Thag poke fire with stick!"

Tuesday Tool Second Tuesday in November Edition

The tool is the ballot.  Like any tool, use it responsibly, and think before using.

An ancillary to this tool is the yard sign or bumper sticker--a simple statement that can be affixed to property, branding it with the name of a politician whom it is hoped will be elected.  Since it only consists of a name and maybe a slogan, it's far more vague than a haiku.  "Make America Great Again"--there's a lot packed into that, and it can easily be interpreted in many ways that smell of rotted corpses.

(As a question of semiotics, perhaps this is more of an issue for the Wednesday Word; but, it is Election Day, so here it is.)

I am deeply perplexed by what to make of people who deface their property--their car, land, or body--with the name of Donald Trump.  The statement is vague.  Are they like the shop in town that has a big sign saying "WE ARE VOTING FOR THE SUPREME COURT NOT THE PRESIDENCY"?  Do they really think they are just voting for a set of so-called "conservative" values?  If that's the case, they are exactly like guys who said that they subscribed to Playboy ONLY for the articles.  Either they are more naive than a ten-minute-old lamb; or, they lie, and are pleasuring themselves with thoughts of discriminating against women, non-Christians, immigrants, homosexuals, and every other non-white non-male group.  

If it's the former, well, they will probably be educated soon enough in the school of hard knocks by a professor selling colloidal silver and chemtrail repellent.  If it's the latter, what do I do?

If I hire a contractor with a Trump/Pence sticker on his truck--do I assume that he would be OK with me stiffing him?  The guy with a "Make America Great Again" hat and a Vietnam Service Ribbon and POW bumper sticker on his car--do I assume that he wants me to mock him as a loser and a coward?  My neighbors with the big "TRUMP" sign by their driveway--do I assume that he would be A-OK with me assaulting his wife, and that she would be just fine with me saying disgusting things about her daughter and making sport of their disabled son?  Are they all good with me just lying to them constantly about every thing great and small? I know a lot of these people, and I'm pretty sure that these things would not go over well, but...that sign, that slogan...it is like being invited into a friend's house and stumbling over something shameful that you wish they had hidden away.  Was the business model of Playboy ever not explicitly based on exploiting women?  Did anyone ever buy a copy of Playboy just for the articles?

Tuesday Tool Bioassay Edition

This Tuesday's tool is the voltage tester.  It's a little doohickey with a probe that you stick in the ground, connected by a wire to a little box with a metal hook that you hang onto an electric fence.  If the fence is "hot", then the box lights up.  The stronger the voltage, the more lights.  You use this to see if your electric fence is working like it's supposed to.

You can also use a ram for the same purpose.  If he's scratching his head, flossing the gap between his horns with what is supposed to be the hot wire, then you can be pretty sure that your fence isn't working properly.

Tuesday Tool Shoveling $#!+ edition

The tool of Tuesday, reported a few days late, is the five-tined manure fork.

I spent a lot of time this week cleaning up--sorting through the desk, through the piles of mail, through my parents' mail, magazines, newspapers, all the thousands of leaves of paper that arrive and stack up in a household over the course of a couple of months of inattention.  Another set of piles occupied more time, as I worked my way through a great deal of laundry.  It's all a lot of work, and profoundly unsatisfying, especially now that the weather has turned nice and I can glance out the window and see green fields and blue skies and black and brown lambs frolicking between the two.  It is completely occupying for a whole day, and at the end one doesn't feel as though one has accomplished much of anything.  Very much a Red-Queen race.

Tuesday I took a break from paper-pushing, and mucked out the doe's portion of the barn.  Yes, it's hard labor, and yes, it is also a Red Queen race, but for whatever reason, shoveling out real manure leaves you with more of a feeling of having gotten something done.

Tuesday Tool Raising the (other) Roof Edition

The big building project continues apace here at the farm.  We are finally constructing a pair of matching pole barns to house our boys--the rams, who don't care much about weather but are quite adamant about destroying things, and the bucks, who (enthusiastic sodomy aside) are gentle souls and run for cover at the first drop of rain.  The goal is safe, sturdy, weatherproof, easily-cleaned, easily maintained housing.   We're getting there.

We finished the roof on the east shelter today.  Here's a pic from last week, though, before it looked like a roof.

Those are pressure-treated 6x6 posts, anchored in three feet of cement.  The rafters--paired 2x12s, and insanely heavy--are positioned at their final angle, but at a convenient height.  Corbels hold them in place.  Supports for the purlins have been nailed in between each member of the rafter, every 16 inches.  Purlins--the 2x6s that will actually hold the roofing tin--are nailed in place.

On the west shelter, we did all of this up in the air--each half-rafter was raised individually, then tacked into place; all the purlin supports were toted up and attached; and each purlin was lifted ten to 20 feet in the air and attached into place.  On this, the east shelter, all this was done at ground height, so it was much easier and quicker.

Which brings us to our celebrated tool, the winch (which if you get to the classic simple tools, is a lever).  At the top of three of the posts, you'll see a winch, and Kenny there is attaching one to the top of the fourth.  Everything being assembled, it was a matter of winching the entire roof--probably somewhere far north of 500kg--into place.  It wasn't entirely easy:  the poles were sticky and needed soap and wedges for the rafters to slide.  Also, there were four winches and only three people.  However, it was easier than lifting every darn thing by hand.  So, here's to you, winch!  Huzzah!

Tuesday Tool--Roof raised! edition

The tool is the 1 1/2" roofing screw--self threading so it can auger its way through the roofing tin, with a little rubber gasket under the head so water won't leak through.

About 480 of them.

I am tired.

Also, yesterday I didn't get any phone calls.  Today, while working on the roof of the ram's shelter, I got seven.

Tuesday Tool Raisin' the Roof Edition

The tool of the day is definitely the Bostitch Framing Nailer, aka the big nailgun.

We are finally--finally--building the shelters for our rams and bucks.  These are going to be essentially small pole barns, rugged enough to deal with cranky rams, equipped with waterers, hay storage, etc, and will eventually make my life much easier.  But for right now, they are a lot of work, and I'm learning the useful skil of how to build a pole barn.

We've got the poles in, and rooted in cement; we've been working on the roof for the last week.  The rafters are up, which was a job.  Each one weighed a couple of hundred pounds or more, and needed to be raised into place and quickly secured, which is tricky when you're twelve feet off the ground on a ladder, leaning against the same pole that the rafter's going to be on.

Right now we're working on the purlins, which go across the rafters, and are what the roofing metal actually attaches to.  Each of them needs to be braced onto the rafters--more work while perched on top of a ladder, often reaching over the beam to nail something to the other side.

These are situations where the big nailgun is fantastic.  I can reach out, fully extended, with one hand--my left hand, which is not as strong--press a button, and WHAM!  A 3" nail is driven home.  No swinging around, no repeated whacking, no holding a nail in one hand and a hammer in another, no bruised thumbs.  Fantastic.

Just wear your safety glasses and your ear protection.  And have at!

Tuesday Tool: The Needle and the damage done, and the damage repaired.

Today's tool is the needle.

Every so often, we need to draw blood from our animals.  There's a couple of reasons for this.  One is biosecurity.  There are a number of infectious diseases that can be devastating to an operation that is trying to sell breeding stock, as we are.  The pathogens responsible for these diseases have in their bag of tricks ways of bamboozling the immune system; they can infect an animal for years, and yet the animal's immune system will not register their presence.  (One of the pathogens is a lentivirus, like AIDS; another is a relative of the tuberculosis bacillus--both of which are similarly hard for human immune systems to process.)  So, a critter could be infected at birth, and give rise to a couple of years' worth of offspring, and infect them, before you could be sure that they were infected.  So, it behooves us to periodically do blood tests on everybody.

Another reason for blood draws is to test for pregnancy.  We want to know whether our animals have been successfully bred, or whether they need to go and visit the boys again.  A blood test can tell you this within a month of breeding, well before the mom-to-be's start bulging.

At any rate, a blood draw is no big deal, mostly.  The tool of the day is a 20ga, 1" needle on a 12cc syringe.  My job in the process is to straddle the goat to immobilize her, and firmly but gently hold her head pointing slightly up and to the side.  The Real Doctor is getting quite good at feeling for the jugular vein, slipping the needle in, finding the lumen of the vein, and pulling out five or six cc's of blood.  The vein seals itself up nicely when she pulls out, and, just as I always got a lollipop for getting a shot, the goat goes away with a couple of peanuts.

All is mostly routine, and for a dozen of our goats all was routine.  However, there was one doe, Mizuki, who went all drama queen on us.  First she was totally squirmy, and would not agree to be held.  As soon as I could hold her somewhat still, and the Real Doctor started palpating her throat, she would scream, and scream loudly.  If we ignored the screaming and the Real Doctor could actually locate the vein, she would give a tremendous wrenching twist, or rear up on her hind legs, or somersault, or lash out with a hoof, or otherwise upset things--and we'd have to start all over again.

Three times, Mizuki reared up just as the Real Doctor was about to poke her.  Even though she's a Nigerian Dwarf doe, she's on the large end of the spectrum for her breed, and way overweight.  So, when she reared, it was with some power; it was enough to throw me over (and because of a wrist injury, I was choosing to roll onto my back rather than catch myself).  Three times she did this, interspersed with bouts of kicking and flailing.  I was getting kind of sore, the Real Doctor was getting kind of frustrated, and eventually, Mizuki was getting kind of tired.

After almost half an hour of this, Mizuki gave one mighty effort and reared up, and I was able to hold on to her as I was launched onto my backside.  There I was, on my back in the mucky straw, clamping a wheezing, upside-down seventy-pound goat to my chest.  The Real Doctor was able to slip in, find the right blood vessel, and slip out before Mizuki recovered herself enough to struggle.  I let her get up, gave her a peanut, and picked myself up.

Surveying the damage, I had a lot of scratches and stiffness.  There was evidence of one close call: a sharp hoof had punched a four-inch-long gash into my jeans, from the crotch seam to the inseam.  I had a nasty welt, but given the location of the tear, I was glad that was all that it was.

Which means that the tool of the day makes another appearance: the needle, but this time it's one used with thread.  I just got the jeans back from the seamstress, nicely patched and (I guess) more fashionable than new.  A few dollars of repairs have saved me $40 of jeans, so I'm happy.

And Mizuki?  Not reactive for any diseases, and pregnant.

Tuesday Tool Torturous Treatment Edition

Today's tool is the Portasol disbudding iron.

It works a treat--gets up to temperature faster than electric dehorners, and stays hot.  The only downside, compared to the more common electric dehorners, is that it's a little smaller (not a problem for our Nigerian Dwarves), and you'll need to refill it every six to ten goats.

Most of the time, as the owner of a herd of goats, I'm as nice as can be.  I am generous with the treats, and try to give the goats all of what they need.  There are occasions where they think I'm a little mean, like jabbing them with the occasional needle or trimming their hooves, but really, those insults are no big deal, easily compensated for by a couple of peanuts.

Then there's disbudding.

Most goats have horns, or would, were they not disbudded.  For a goat to be shown in an American Dairy Goat Association sanctioned event, it can't have horns.  For the safety and sanity of the goat's owner, it can't have horns.  And really, for the safety of the goat's herdmates, it can't have horns, and for it's own safety so it doesn't get caught in fences, it can't have horns.

The horn starts as a growth from the skull, and if you were to dissect a mature goat horn, you'd see that it had at its core a projection from the cranial bone, covered with some tissue and then a heavy layer of keratin.  It's a living part of the animal, not like an antler, so removing an adult horn is really amputation.  Thus, it's best to take care of it before it starts growing.

When the kid is born, you can barely feel a little bump where the horn is going to be.  If you wait a week, the bump will be a little button; you want to wait until you can easily feel it, but before the bud breaks the skin.  Your object is to kill that horn bud--all the cells in the skull that will be growing into the horn--without killing the animal.  There are paste dehorners, caustic goops that eat into the skin and bone.  These are OK for cattle, but not so good for goats--they tend to rub them all over, causing random and occasionally severe damage.  Better to use a disbudding iron.

The disbudding iron is a tube-shaped element, usually a little over a cm in diameter.  Sometimes it's heated like a soldering iron, while our disbudder uses lighter fluid.  Once it's up to temperature, you get your goat kid, wrap it in a towel or other restraint, drape it over your leg, hold its head down, and press the hot disbudding iron onto the horn bud for

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ten seconds.

It is agonizing.  The kid doesn't like it, and struggles and cries for all its little body is worth.  You can trim their hair away, but there's still going to be the awful burning flesh smell, not to mention the lovely sizzling sound and sight of burning flesh.  If you don't hold the iron in place for long enough, you'll have to do it again--you need to burn down into the bone a little way, to kill it completely.  If it's a buck kid, you need to do a second burn, because their horn buds are not little dots--they're elongated, like paisleys.  Then, having burned a ring around the bud, you use the side of the iron to char the surface of it off, bubbling and burning down to the bone.

Then, you have to do the kid's other horn.

It's horrible.  I hate doing it.  But, the next step after this for me was to do fourteen more kids. Then, being neighborly, I did eight kids for a neighbor.  It made for a long and horrible-feeling day; I was jittery and jangly and irritable.  It didn't help that I had to get a lamb unstuck from our fence, and just as I was pulling him out and had a hand on each hind leg, he jumped up and pressed himself into the electric wire.  He was fine but it made me dance around.

I'm always worried that I'm going to kill the kids or leave them traumatized or something.  We give them a dose of banamine, a painkiller/anti-inflammatory before, and a cooling spray afterwards, and an hour later they're bouncing around like nothing has happened.  They're all out there now, romping and playing and being goat kids, with these two horrible burn scars on their heads.

Come to think of it, I had an anaesthesia-free operation on a sensitive part of my body when I was a few days old, and I have no memory or lingering horrible feelings from it.  So, hopefully the kids will be alright.

Tuesday Tool Keepin' it cool edition

The Tuesday Tool is...

the 35-liter Dewar flask of liquid nitrogen, full of freshly-collected and processed goat semen.  The Monday Tool would be unmentionable on a family blog.

Tuesday Tool Early Winter Edition

The tool of the day was going to be the 20-foot trailer used to schlep the two tons of hay which I unloaded this afternoon.  But no, the honor of being the tool of the day goes to...

...the cat warmer.

Seriously, he hasn't moved for the last four hours.

Tuesday Tool wise use edition

The tool of the week--of the last several weeks, on a twice-daily basis--is Oxypol veterinary ophthalmic antibiotic ointment.  It is a mixture of oxytetracycline and polymixin, in a vaseline carrier.

There is a lot of well-placed concern about the overuse and abuse of antibiotics in agriculture.  Our culture's excessive dependence on these drugs is likely to bite us in the butt in the near future.  We--that is, anybody who eats a burger at Mickey D's or buys meat at the grocery, or is not particularly fastidious about antibiotic free meat and eggs--all are participants in a system that uses tons of antibiotics every year.  These drugs are used as an entirely routine part of the diet of almost all livestock and poultry, partly prophylactically to prevent the spread of disease in crowded settings, and partly because, for reasons not well understood, they promote rapid weight gain.  Recently, the FDA came out with a set of (easily ignored) guidelines to get the food industry to reduce its dependence on antibiotics.  I don't think much will happen to change the status quo.  In our society, the contest between short term profit and long-term public health goods is not a fair fight. 

That said, on our farm, we use antibiotics.  Our medicine cart and freezer contains a variety of antibiotics, injectable, oral, and topical, and all are hardly ever used.  They only come out when there is some specific, treatable disorder.

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(Squeam alert--if you're turned off by graphic descriptions of eyes, injuries, or the opening of Un Chien Andalou, probably time to close the page)

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Bucks are good at cleaning up blackberry brambles.  They are, however, not especially bright, or sensitive to pain (as befits an animal whose primary means of delivering a message is to whack his head as hard as possible against the message's recipient).  I have seen a buck, quite contented and happy, with a thorny blackberry stem jammed an inch up his nostril.

Cherubino is one of our many bucks, and one of the dumber ones.  Over a month ago, while enthusiastically eating brambles, he jammed a thorn in his right eye, smack in the pupil.  The result was a wound which, when I saw him at the end of the day, had punctured the cornea, damaged the iris, and caused massive vascularization of the eye.  There looked to be a hole or pit in the surface of his eye, about a millimeter across.  It looked like hell, all red and inflamed and swollen.

The Real Doctor, with her expertise in this field (at least with human eyes), prescribed antibiotics right away, and her prognosis was grim: messing with the iris was, for her, the first step to a dead eye.  However, as our vet told us, goat eyes are a bit tougher.  He agreed with the use of antibiotics, and suggested that the eye would look worse for a couple of weeks, but heal to have a lump of white scar tissue in the pupil, and a deformed but functional iris.

Our vet's prediction is bearing out.  The wound initially got black and mounded up, with inflammation and scar tissue creating a bump over a millimeter high, focused on a crater a millimeter across.  This blackened ocular landscape was surrounded by intense red vascularization and inflammation of the iris and sclera, so the whole eye looked like an angry volcano that had just erupted.  It was the nastiest looking thing on the farm (and there are some nasty things on a farm), and made our eight-year-old niece, who normally has an unconditional and all-encompassing love of goats, scream and run away.  Cherubino looked like the hell-goat, at least from the right; from the left, he was totally unconcerned and hungry for more brambles.

Most of Cherubino's eye looks OK now, except for a lump of white scar tissue right in the center.   A lot of this healing has been helped by twice-daily applications of Oxypol.  Of course, Cherubino does not agree with this regime, and vigorously contests with my applications of the drug.  So, twice a day, I have to catch him, lift his forelegs off the ground and tightly grip his neck with my thighs, wrap my left arm all the way around his head and force his right eye open, and oh-so-carefully squeeze a 1-cm-long ribbon of goo into his eye.

I should mention that it is the rut--so Cherubino, like all our bucks, is extra stinky.  Like, paralyzingly stinky, a stinky that makes the air gelatinous, a stinky so thick that it is almost audible, a stinky like a lump of Bulgarian feta that has been sent by ship to Borneo and back, a stinky that is repulsive from a hundred feet away.  His glands are going full blast, and like all our bucks, he spends a lot of time peeing on his head and beard.  So, this is what I have to squeeze between my thighs and wrap my arm around--and about half the time, I notice that he's wet, and it hasn't been raining.  So, I have a special pair of "buck pants" and a "buck jacket" that I wear, twice a day, to deal with this.  I have about two more weeks left of this treatment.

If I were smarter, there might be a different tool of the week; I have a friend who has a tyvek bunny-suit, just for dealing with bucks. 

Tuesday Tool, looking back and looking forwards edition

It's been a busy few weeks here at the farm.  There has been a lot of tool use going on...which has precluded sitting down to blog about tool use.  I have an hour of breathing room, now, so here we go:

Two weeks ago, the Tuesday Tool was the Makita 18V cordless 6 1/2" Circular Saw. 

This tool saw extensive use making a new shelter for our goat does.  Their old shelter was falling apart, difficult to clean, and way too crowded.  They now have plenty of room and protection from the coming rain, not to mention access to a pasture full of brambles yum yum. 

Last week it was the drywall lift. 

The addition to the house is finally getting some work done--it was left more or less as a shell, with the siding and trim and windows all done and some insulation in the walls, but no drywall or ceiling or floor.  Thus it stood for over a year, with the only changes being that some of the insulation was removed by our cats, who found it enjoyable to claw at.  Now, with much help, insulation has been topped up, a vapor barrier installed, and the walls and ceiling drywalled.  And, if you want to put  twelve-foot panels of 5/8" drywall up on a ceiling, you will need a lift.  Roseburg Rentals has them, along with scaffolding. 

Which brings us to today's tool, the CIDR and its applicator.

The CIDR (pronounced like the tree) is a little widget of plastic impregnated (pun intended) with progestin.  The applicator is used to insert it into a doe that you wish to breed, and the hormones diffuse out of the plastic and into the doe, swamping out all other hormonal signals and effectively resetting the doe's cycle.  After a dozen or so days, it is removed, the doe gets a shot of another hormone, and comes into heat like a ton of bricks.

The farm imposes on us an odd relationship to scheduling.  Day to day, there is very little in the way of a schedule.  It does not matter if it's Tuesday or Saturday, the chores need doing, and there is always the miscellaneous backlog of work to be done as soon as possible.  Most of the time I am unaware of the day of the week.  I become aware of weekends only because the Real Doctor is home, and if she's home on a weekday or away on a weekend, I'm utterly lost in time.

The flip side of this is that we do make some plans, set in stone, about a year in advance.  There are some events--fairs, shows, the violin workshop, and conventions for the Real Doctor--that occur on specified dates known years into the future.  These events dictate our schedule--we want our lambs to be of a certain age by the Black Sheep Gathering; it would be nice to have some does in milk by the RDGA nationals; it would be nice not to have to milk during the violin workshop; it would be nice to have some kids weaned by county fair; and so on.  So, sometime in the summer each year, we sit down with a calendar, decide what we want to do and attend, figure out the gestation period for our animals, work backwards, and say that we want them conceived right then.  The CIDRs allow us to make it so that the does and ewes are very willing and able to be bred on that date--and so, in a couple of weeks, there will be a frenzy of mating going on, and five and a half months from now, we will have a long, sleepless week of lambing and kidding. 

Tuesday Tool Winter is Coming Edition

It's been cold here for the last week.  As soon as the sun goes down, a thick fog develops and the temperature goes down to about 28 F.  With the waning moon, it gets really dark and cold, the lights from our neighbors barely visible and the noise from the road deadened.  Walking across the field to feed the sheep, I can slip into imagining that the world outside my headlight beam has fallen away and I've gone adrift in space.  I had a hard time recognizing my own sheep last night; in the dim light of the dying LEDs, they all looked white to me.  I was wondering what happened to all the black and brown ones--where's Woglinde?  Yvette?  Gretchen?  Rita Hayworth?  There's the right number of sheep here, but they're not all mine, are they?  Looking closer, I realized that they really were my sheep, but their fleeces were all painted silver with frost.  It wasn't yet 7:00 PM.   

When the sun comes up, the sky rarely clears and we've been lucky to get out of the 40's F.  The frigid mornings are not without beauty; every spiderweb spun in the length of summer, every tuft of wool left behind by a wandering sheep, is frosted and rimed.  The heads of the grasses are made more beautiful by the white highlights, and even blackberry leaves become appealing when outlined in ice.

But, it is cold, and there's work to do.  Hauling in yet another load of wood to feed the constantly-burning fireplace can keep me warm for a little while, making the rounds of the animals and hucking hay bales out of the truck.  But that warmth dissipates before all the work is done, and it seems the chill fog can touch your skin through anything.  So, the tool of the week has to be: 

Carhartt Flannel-Lined Jeans. 

When we moved here, we became aware of the various local tribes, how they distinguished themselves from each other and which to ally ourselves with.  One such division was the Filson/Carhartt schism.  Both are authentic and very much of this area.  The Filsonian culture is somewhat wealthier, and biased towards timber, ranching, and fly-fishing.  The Tribe Carhartt, at least locally, drives an older pick-up truck than the Filsonians, won't be seen in town during hunting season, and is more likely to have traces of its trade--caulk, manure, and such--anointing its trademark tan jacket. 

I wouldn't mind clothing myself in Filson and doing as the Filsonians do; I'd probably have more time to go hiking and such.  However, this morning, as most mornings, I got on my Carhartt flannel-lined jeans (with permanent stains on the knees from kneeling in pens to deal with kids and lambs), my Carhartt jacket (with paint stains, s#!t stains, tattoo ink stains, blood stains, and miscellaneous small rips), and my Carhartt watch cap (similarly stained, and which the Real Doctor concluded was my tool for cleaning the underside of the house), and marched out into the freezing fog to feed the sheep.  Flannel-lined jeans make life better. 

Tuesday Tool Tyin' 'em off edition

The tool today is the elastrator, and the associated rubber band.

I am a terrible blogger.  I should keep up to date, but I have not--witness the six goat kids bouncing around outside the window, heretofore unmentioned.  I should post cute photos--and there is precious little as cute as a precious little goat kid--and I have not.  As for the first failing, well, that cat is out of the bag.  As for the second, here, have this:

Those little kids are both bucklings.  The association between male goats and randy behavior is cliched, but until you actually see a two-day-old buckling making the moves on his brother, you don't really appreciate quite how strong the drive is in these guys.  These little lads are now about two months old, and it won't be too long before they are not just play-acting.  We don't really want that--we want to control who breeds with whom, not to mention avoiding incest.  So, out comes the elastrator. 

Pretty quick work, actually.  Slip the little orange cheerio(TM) over those four prongs, squeeze the handles, and it opens up about two inches--wide enough to fit over the necessary bits.  Roll the rubber band off of the prongs, and you're done.  The kids appeared to be slightly uncomfortable for about an hour, but it seems (based on some conversations I've had) far less painful than a vasectomy.  Another week or so, the whole package will fall off, and we will no longer have bucklings--we'll have wethers. 

Brother E. is in New Zealand at the moment, revisiting the city we lived in for a year when I was five.  I don't remember much of the place, but I do remember wonderful beaches.  A feature of all the beaches in New Zealand, as I recall it, was that the tideline was marked by those little orange cheerios.  New Zealand has a lot of sheep, which means a lot of lambs.  All of those lambs get their tails docked, and a lot of them get castrated, so a lot of those little orange cheerios get washed downstream.  Brother E. has visited the beaches, and says that he hasn't seen too many of them--I'm not sure if it's because of changes in practices, or because lambing season has just started there. 

Did I mention lambs?  We have lambs too.  See?  Bad blogger.  Baad!

Tuesday Tool...

...as in, "tooling around on my bike."  Both the Real Doctor and I have had a hard time getting into really good riding shape over the last few years--work getting crazy, or moving, or starting a farm, or health, or my parents' health, it seems like we'll start riding regularly and then something will blow up just as we start getting into shape.  Then, after two months of dealing with the crisis du jour, we're back to wheezing through a flat, twenty mile ride and feeling awful.

Well, we're riding more regularly now and have been for the last couple of months.  We certainly can't use the excuse that there's no place to ride.  Here's some pictures from a ride out our door.  At twenty five miles with a bit of climbing, it's a bit long to be quotidian, but short enough to do a couple of times a week.

A couple of miles of riding on Hwy 138 takes us over a ridge, and puts us in the valley of the North Umpqua river.  There's a bit of flat land in the river valley at this point, with some nice farms; the hills in the background are on the other bank, rising to Mt. Scott and four thousand something feet.

 Our ride goes along the North Umpqua for a few miles; we don't need to cross, but the view from the bridge is nice.  This is looking east, up the river towards Crater Lake.

 And, looking west.  The river's kind of low, now, with the dry year.  In winter, it's a couple of meters higher.  The river flows across sedimentary mudstones, giving a very corrugated bed.

 We follow the river to the town of Glide, and the landmark "Colliding Rivers."  The mudstone is cut here by a sill of basalt.  The North Umpqua flows in from the background of this picture, running along the sill; the Little River, having run into the same sill, flows in from the lower right of this picture.  The two rivers collide head-on, and flow out through a narrow chasm at the center left of this picture.  In flood, it's a remarkable sight.  Our ride leaves the Umpqua, and goes up the Little River for a mile or two.  Not shown:  a couple of ospreys. 

 We've left the Little River, and are riding up a tributary creek.  The road climbs easily but steadily, through some beautiful farmland.  This is looking back towards the Little River...

 ...and this is looking ahead, to what we'll be climbing over. 

 The climb steepens considerably, requiring the next-to-lowest gear for a half mile or so; this is looking back, but you can't really see how steep it is. 

 Here's right near the summit.  There's a false summit, a short, fast descent, and then another climb to the real summit.  It's right about here, on the descent between peaks, that a yellow jacket flew up my shorts (I was riding a recumbent, wearing baggy shorts) and stung me on the butt.  Hazards of riding.

 Once over the top, there's a couple of miles of lovely downhill and views.  Not shown: the border collie rounding up a herd of sheep, its owner whistling commands. 

 An inescapable part of the view in Oregon is that the economy is still largely based on extractive industries.  A lot of the greenery one sees on the hills is stuff that has been clear-cut and then replanted with monoculture.  If you're just tooling along, it's hard to tell the difference--treetops look like treetops, no matter the age--unless you have some way of telling that they're only a couple of meters tall.  Or, you can see a clear cut. 

 The end of the descent drops into another beautiful valley with nice farms; here's looking back to where we rode from, the left background of the photo.  Not shown: drivers waving at you.  Just about every driver waves, which is disconcerting if you come from California where you typically get other hand gestures. 

 This is looking ahead.  If we kept going straight, this road would join a larger creek and go straight into downtown Roseburg in six or seven miles.  However, we're going to go right--to the north--at the base of that brown hill on the right. 

 Here's a view of where we'll be going--we're going to ride up and over that brown, grassy ridge. 

 This is the view from the base of that ridge, looking back.  The blackberries are starting to come into season!

 Riding up the ridge, one is treated to another nice view of another nice valley.  This is a gated road; it used to service a timber mill, which is now closed down--another drawback to extractive economies is that they collapse.  However, it's a nice (though not maintained) road and has no traffic.  Not shown are the lazuli buntings and goldfinches. 

 We've crested the ridge, and we're looking back at it in the center left of the picture.  Riding the gated road has spared us riding up Hwy 138, the large (and relatively busy) road in the center of the picture. 

 Here we're looking forward from the same spot.  We'll continue on Hwy 138.  Two miles of downhill will take us into that valley, right to our driveway.  A nice ride. 

  As the Real Doctor has pointed out, it's nice to live in a place you wouldn't mind vacationing.  I hope we can keep riding more.  We don't have a lot of riding options from our door, but they are all nice--I'll try to put up more pictures of other rides later.  Maybe in the spring, when things green up a bit more.