comrade simba

I’m mostly glad it’s over…

After three weeks of maniacal work to get the farm “sitter-worthy” for the guy across the street to keep the animals alive we headed off for Topeka to my wife’s sister’s and her husband… with the mother in law in the back. Read the tag line on this blog – “engaged in battle with the 21st century” and hear the clang of the opening bell for round one as we walked in the door. All I wanted was a pan to heat some water in to make coffee – their cosmic coffee maker was something you put whole beans and water into and after a terrible noise and fuss out came coffee- or whatever the gourmet stuff was. I didn’t want to wrestle with that monster, but get this – they didn’t even have a pan to boil water in. Microwave stuff, sure, but no dumb ass pan to throw some grounds and water into. After a while they remembered a camp pot as a decorative top shelf item. 6 quart enamelled steel pot with lid and handle… I got my coffee and a really cool present, heh heh heh. Spent most of the time there smoking cigarettes in the garage to escape from the 42 inch tv sucking in everybody’s attention. Suburbia is dead, long live suburbia.

Picked up Ran Prieur at the train station and brought him down to our corner of the world on the way back to the farm. You can read about his adventures via the link.

Spent the night regrouping at home before the wife and I headed for our annual getaway in Eureka Springs Arkansas. We stay at a little bed and breakfast and alternate our time between jacuzzi soaks and marathon sessions in bed – mostly reading without having to do tend critters, stoke the woodstove etc. etc. Not having to do chores for two days is bliss after 363 days of keeping up with everything. The last night in town we go out for a fine dining experience…

Rogue’s Manor Inn – wingback leather armchairs, perfect lights, great wait staff – I’m deciding between the sea bass and the king shrimp. Waiter says you can get shrimp anywhere – the “chilean sea bass is dusted lightly with special herbs, seared in pan by the chef with a magic touch blah blah blah… Knowing what’s coming I go for the fish.

So I’m doing my damndest to enjoy this fabulous meal and looping through my head is a documentary about the IMF descending on the poor third worlders of Chile. Here come the corporate fishing trawlers sucking up the easy coastal fish and moving on to deeper waters to keep those profits swimming into the elite shareholder’s bank accounts. The “poor third worlders” in the fishing villages paddling out in their fishing boats to feed their families found no fish! The factory ships sucked ‘em all up! All that’s left in their ancestral fishing grounds are crappy low dollar mussels. So this visual of women and young children cracking mussels in the muck 12 hours a day – while the men suffer from deep diving with no equipment sorta fucks up my dining experience. You try like hell to convince yourself hey it’s only one fish, man…

Bad Comrade…

To top it all off I’m dealing with a one hundred dollar tab (with gratuity) – that’s 20 sacks of corn! I spend six long months fattening up two pigs… and I slurp up the equivalent amount of corn in one meal. There, instant karma. Probably no comfort to a couple of billion landless peasants, though.

All in all I got some kinks worked out of the old bones and most of the imbedded dirt in the hands went away. Nice to be home again. It’s the last day of the year so I went and paid the County their pound of flesh, and all that’s left is whip up the farm fresh egg nog and get the kid to bed

Happy New Year – got a feeling it’s going to be a dandy…

Jim Beam has been a major contributor to the other forum:

http://www.comradesimba.com/compost/viewtopic.php?p=907#907

and ponied up the change that has funded this dot com for a while now. I got back from vacation and found a Christmas card from him and his wife in the mailbox, so, feeling like an ungrateful cheap shit I thought I’d post to the world about his generosity.

So Merry Christmas to you and yours, Jim. You got camping rights on the doomstead if TSHTF…

At Autumn’s end there is a time period that is oh so pleasant – the canning and putting up is done, mowing and haying is over with for the year, and the days are shorter so the chickens get to bed earlier giving me some free time before bed to just groove on how nice it is to just keep the fire burning and relax. Happens every year just before the world goes bazzoo.

The goats all drop kids as the pasture browns out so I have starving goats disregarding the patch and scab part of the fence that I didn’t get around to rebuilding all year. Goats in the road every time they decide to go browsing about. The pigs get to tipping the scales at close to 200 pounds and they are sometimes not to concerned with the hog panel barrier if I haven’t moved it to new ground for a few days. They wait ’till the goats are in the road, too. It’s a conspiracy led by the faction of chickens that won’t lay eggs in the nest boxes, but make me track ‘em down. And to make things exponentially more difficult these are the few weeks before our annual 2 day getaway, so I gotta run around and fix everything all perfect so the neighbor doesn’t have to put up with all the crap I’m dealing with right now.

The wife is snowed under with papers to grade for the semester’s end, the kid has been home sick for three days, I’m supposed to be doing laundry and cooking dinner and the loggers have started cutting on the back 40. ‘Scuze me for a moment… a glance out the window displays goats migrating towards traffic again. Wonder if the pigs are loose…

…30 minutes later – back again, pigs weren’t out but was time to feed them again. The goat kid was screaming for her feeding – we have one on a bottle because mama shuned her – she was the near death kid that we saved. Her mama is the best milker so twice a day I do that chore. The baby goat for sale sign by the road has yeilded no results, so Saturday is sale barn day when both her kids go on the auction block and we get fresh milk and cheese again.  I’d take every damn kid to the sale barn but I gotta wait ’till after the Christmas stuff is over – the neighbor sure as hell isn’t going to milk 3 goats twice a day. They get their dairy products from walmart.  Oh, yeah, and made lunch for the boy. Perhaps I should eat…

At least I cut wood during the spring and summer – I’d hate to try and find an hour or so a day battling the ravines and a wheelbarrow as screwed up as everything is right now. Did I mention the graywater line became a 150 foot long cylindar of coagulated soap scum and congealed grease clot last week? I applied the gunk eating bacteria so the line is now running like my nose from some other damn bacteria that attacked me slopping around in the wet and cold.

two weeks later…(I musta got real busy…)

Bad case of internet burnout I suppose, but I ran the last 150 feet of new fence needed to keep the goats sealed in, built a self feeding pig feeder, a hay feeder for the goats and trained all the chickens to get their ass in the barn at night. Goat a goat sitter for the milkers and the neighbor is lined out to feed the critters.  So what’s left is moving the pigs to a new piece of ground to keep them happy and clipping the chicken’s wing feathers so they won’t fly out of the chicken run.

Ran Prieur is coming to my neck of the woods – turns out he has a “christian anarcho- primitiveist” friend that happens to live 5 miles away from me. Strawbale house, grease bus – the real deal. I squeezed in a couple of hours to go visiting and feel like I’ve been given a really cool christmas present from the Cosmic Santa. Nice to get thrown a bone now and then.

Merry Christmas everyone.

the comrade

It’s been pretty busy around here, got a set of triplets from ol’ Mabs, twins from Sandy and Creampuff and a single from Mabs’ spring baby that slipped off to the buck waaaay to young.  No stillbirths and everybody is okay – even the one that had “weak kid syndrome” and couldn’t stand up. Soaked her in hot water until we got her temp up, syringed corn syrup down her and then bedded her down on a heating pad overnight. She stabilized by the morning and now she’s back with the herd – in a sweater the wife made out of a sweatshirt sleeve just to keep her comfy.

New chimney is built and the offending fireplace and wall that kept the kitchen from the living room is gone. House is toasty warm with the woodstove right in the center of our living area. The little Hasty Baker cookstove is going in tomorrow and baking season begins anew. My towney neighbors across the road got tired of the chickens I gave them last year pooping on their four wheelers and roosters going off at 4am so they are in a cage outside tonight and going in the pot tomorrow. Drag out the noodle maker, grind some wheat, swipe an egg out from underneath a chicken and light a fire. Winter isn’t so bad if you know what to do with it.