Still Sick

Jason and I have unwittingly been having a contest to see who can be the grouchiest and the most sick. Jason is winning by a landslide in the grouchy competition. He has also pulled ahead in the sick category as well. So of course that meant we had a horse that needed to go to the vet clinic yesterday. The horse in question hadn't been on a trailer in almost five years. Unfortunately Jason and I both had violent coughing fits right as the horse was thinking "hey, maybe walking on this trailer isn't so bad after all." Thankfully the horse walked on nicely once Jason and I managed to stop making extraneous noises for a few minutes. 

We're slogging through life right now and we've both been fine tuning our abilities to feel sorry for ourselves. We're pretty much pros at that now. Carter has thankfully managed to remain healthy. I will never forget the time when we all three had the stomach flu at the same time a couple of winters ago. I will especially never forget that we had to blanket all of the horses in the middle of that. Jason and I alternated hanging on to the fence and throwing up and then chasing down a horse or two and putting their blanket on. I also remember that it was windy, cold and raining. Truly, it was a fabulous day on the farm. Compared to that it makes our current situation look tons better. We aren't throwing up, we aren't putting on blankets, the weather has been glorious (80F/26C the last couple of days) with a light breeze. I feel better with every sentence I type!

Anyway, I'm slowly inching my way towards feeling better. Jason still hasn't discovered just how horrible he is going to feel before he starts feeling better. I would recommend not getting whatever it is we have.

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Stormy, Walon and Rocky

Baby and Homer

this turkey was showing off

Traveller and Maisie

Cinnamon and Lily

Calimba and MyLight (Silky in the background)

some of the trees are thinking about leafing out; a few of the maples already have

Johnny and Clayton

pretty sunset

Trigger and Tony

Hemi and Apollo

Africa and Johnny

Sick

Jason and I have both succumbed to something over the last few days. We're pretty sure I have had the flu and according to the doctor Jason has had a sinus infection. Since I refused felt it unnecessary to go to the doctor we're only guessing at what has caused my issues. 

Hunting for Easter eggs apparently tipped me over the edge from being kind of sick but able to power on anyway to miserably sick.  We had another day scheduled with the horse dentist on Monday. I can count on one hand with fingers left over the number of times we've cancelled an appointment of any type with a vet, farrier, dentist, etc over the last decade. Heck, the day after my father died I was holding horses for the farrier all day. 

All day Sunday I kept insisting to Jason that I could get through the day with the dentist on Monday as he constantly told me I should cancel our appointment. Of course this involves getting up not later than 5am and working straight without essentially no breaks until 5pm or later by the time we get through all of the non-dentist related work. I finally waved the white flag Sunday evening when my fever made it to 102 and called the dentist and cancelled. It is a total pain to reschedule these things as any good practitioner stays busy, but I just couldn't do it.

Jason had been slowly inching his way towards being full blown sick and by Monday morning he had joined me in my misery so it was a good thing we had already cancelled. We snarked and groused at each other all day as we got through morning and afternoon chores and the other work we needed to do.  Today I had improved to the point that I only felt half-dead so I declined going to the doctor with Jason. If the trend continues tomorrow I should feel like I might actually get through this and by the end of the week I should be back among the living. Hopefully Jason will follow the same upward momentum. Here's hoping we will both be mostly functional again soon!

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Nemo, Sebastian and Johnny

Lighty, Sam, Taco and Renny

Murphy, Mick and Johnny

Baby and Thomas

Leo, Chance and Homer

Kennedy, Toledo and Stormy

Dolly, Maisie and Silky

Sunday Stills

Gus, Asterik and Lofty

George, Romeo and Lotus

Murphy, Renny, Taco and Mick; apparently this was a chestnuts only grazing area

Levendi and Thomas

Grand, Elfin, Homer, Trigger, Rip and Ritchie

Apollo and Moe

Johnny, Toledo and Kennedy

Gibson

Throwback Thursday

I was scrolling through some old posts looking for something I had written a few years ago when I stumbled upon one of our farm building posts. Almost exactly four years ago today Jason and I found the mother of all rocks on this farm, after not hitting so much as a pebble during the first rounds of building.  Re-reading that post made me very glad that we are largely done with major building projects. The small ones are bad enough. Since I can now see a glimpse of humor in the whole experience I thought it would be fun to revisit this miserable project.

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The saga of the rock continues. For anyone keeping a running tally the score goes something like this: 

Rock: 2 Jason and Melissa and any plan they come up with: 0 

You have no idea, none, how sick I am of this stupid rock. For those of you wondering what on earth I am talking about you should read the first post on our encounter with this rock. As you know this rock already defeated the 4 ton Ditch Witch. We called in the big guns. The guy with the backhoe (I should add here a very LARGE backhoe) came yesterday. He started pounding away at this rock with his large backhoe. I'll sum it up with the following score: 

Rock: 1 Backhoe: 0 

Someone in the comments section said she and her husband graded rocks using the system of "softball, basketball, volkswagen." I would like to add MACK TRUCK to that grading system. After never finding so much as a pebble at the new farm we find ourselves to be the proud owners of the Mack Truck of rocks. Reminder: a couple THOUSAND fence posts, 1 barn, and 3 run-in sheds later not so much as a piece of gravel. And now Jason has met his nemesis. 

You have to understand, Jason hates rocks. He hates rocks of all sizes. From the softball to the Mack Truck all rocks are evil in Jason's world. We spent years searching for a farm because after the last few years of dealing with the family farm and its abundance of rocky soil Jason made a Scarlett O'Hara vow. Except instead of saying "as God as my witness I will never go hungry again" Jason modified this to "as God as my witness I will never pick up another rock again." 

Needless to say the Mack Truck of rocks has wiped the smug smile off of Jason's face - the one he used to have anytime he bragged about his beautiful topsoil. The irony of it all is that this rock is located in top soil. Even the backhoe guy couldn't believe it. He kept saying "we're still in topsoil, this shouldn't be here." Uh, look dude, we've already discussed extensively that this rock shouldn't be here, you're here not to tell us the obvious but to get the #$%^&! thing out. 

He starts pounding away at this thing with the bucket. Literally pounding at it. After a loooong time (and of course we have to pay for this by the hour) and much pounding he's managed to break off four large sections of this rock and we're nowhere near the bottom of Mt. Rock. After getting these four pieces of it busted out all progress stopped. It didn't matter what he did, how much power he put into it, how many times the big bucket slammed into this thing it wasn't budging or breaking. And it was too big to attempt to lift out of the ground even with the big backhoe. 

The only chunks that were removed from the offending Mt. Rock. This picture simply does not convey the size of these pieces of Mt. Rock. We can't even move them with the 60hp tractor. Jason said if we brought the 100hp tractor down wemight be able to push them with the bucket. So here they sit, blocking the area where they were supposed to start putting gravel to extend the driveay. You just have to love this rock.

Finally the backhoe guy waves the white flag at the rock and surrenders. We had already tried to go around the rock with the ditch witch this weekend in the area to the right in the picture above. They ended up having to trench a little detour to the left in the horse pasture. No rock there. It took a few minutes to dig the detour trench, the water pipe was put in, the trench was covered back up, and the water line was ready to go.

Then backhoe guy had to leave as he had another job to get to. He had anticipated only being at our farm for a short while. Just get the rock out, easy as pie, done. Hahahahahahaha. A few hours later he has to go and we're stuck with pieces of this boulder blocking the area where the gravel guys were supposed to start extending our driveway. I guess that has been delayed until backhoe guy can come back and drag/push our boulders off to the woods or something.

There is a lot I would like to say here but I won't. I could mention that we really didn't have to go to all of this trouble since we had already gotten down far enough with the Ditch Witch to bury our water line before we hit the rock but I won't. I could mention that we could have just tried to trench around it on both sides, not just one, with the Ditch Witch but I won't mention that either. I could mention that not only have we paid for the ditch witch and several hours with the backhoe, but now we're going to have to pay someone to bring in a load of soil to fill in the crater left by the removal of the boulder-sized pieces of this rock, all over someone's fixation with water lines being 2 feet in the ground. But I won't mention that either.

In other news related to this freaking water line it is finally in and ready to go. Of course given how other things associated with this line have gone this didn't go just as smoothly as it could have either. Jason was working away in the ditch getting filthy and gross while doing all of the plumbing to tap the new water line into the old one. Then there was a small problem.

This is not the face of a happy Jason; we've seen this face a lot lately

If the boulder wiped the smile off of Jason's face this made it disappear completely for awhile. It has been a trying week. I am happy to say that all is working properly now.

I don't even know what this was all about. I think it was just Jason taking his frustration out on something. I would hear sawing and then "bleep!" Then "Melissa find the hammer - now!!" So then we had sawing, "bleep," hammering, "bleep, bleep!" Like people rubber necking to look at a wreck on the interstate the horses start to gather at both gates to watch the crazy people. They could have cared less about the backhoe and rock pounding, but gosh they love to watch us when we get worked up over something. Apollo says "Look Ivan, they're starting to wave their hands around and yell again."

As you can see this section of pipe was sawed and hammered into pieces. I don't know why or what the purpose was. I just stopped asking questions at that point and watched along with the horses.

We now have another 1200 feet of water line. It works properly. We have some lovely new landscaping pieces to work with. My mom suggested maybe a landscaping company would want our boulder chunks as apparently sometimes these are used in landscaping design. I said "Mom, the problem is they wouldn't own a piece of equipment large enough to move them. I think we are stuck with these things for life." Hopefully backhoe guy will return tomorrow to move our new landscaping features out of our driveway.

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For anybody who cares the small update to this story is that the backhoe guy did come back and push the rocks out of the way. They have spent the last four years residing in the bottom of the creek that runs through the farm. They seem pretty content there. Occasionally Jason curses at them when we have a need to cross the creek, although he grudgingly admits that they have made useful stepping stones for that purpose.

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Griselle and Sparky

Toledo, Donovan and Kennedy were all playing

Dutch and Murphy

Stormy and Oskar

Donovan, Rocky, Largo and Clayton

Faune, Flyer, George and Asterik

Maisie and Cinnamon (you can see the roofs of the front two barns and a couple of the run-ins in the background of this picture)

Cuffie and Dolly

Fabrizzio, Lucky, Walden, Hesse and Bruno

Remmy and Lucky

I think it must have something to do with surviving a lot of Canadian winters, but Jason is obsessed with things that bloom in the spring. About once a week these days we make a quick trip to the botanical garden near us so he can see what else is blooming and take pictures of all of it.