vituperation

Suzy has a head-shaving fetish, and would love to shave her head (again!), but she really needs your help to do it.

Please donate and help save some kids.

re: the gimpy foot

My foot is a lot better now. I’ve actually had a couple of completely pain-free days. What’s kind of humorous is that now that all the pain on the inside part of the foot is gone, I’m discovering that the outside hurts, too, it was just covered up by the magnitude of the original pain.

The outside pain is weird. It hurts when I’m using the foot too much, but doesn’t tighten up and grieve me in the evenings like plantar fasciitis. It feel more like a pulling sort of pain, and I actually think it comes from the fact that the original pain caused me to alter my stride — to walk a little lighter in that loafer, you might say — and the new foot positioning is causing some muscle / tendon stress.

There’s also a tiny bit of pain on the bottom, under my heel, that I think is just a remnant of the original pain. Maybe the cortisone didn’t reach over there or something; I’m not sure how far the anti-inflammatory effects reach from the point where the goop came out of the needle.

In any case, it’s still a lot better than it was.

I picked up the phone yesterday evening after dinner, somewhat dreading the call I was about to make. Cold calling people always leaves me, well, cold. I don’t think anyone likes to do it, even when it’s for something as cool as this was.

Checking against the number on the screen (thank God for Bellsouth’s online Real Pages, which kick ass because they give you a searchable version of their print phonebooks, and actually LOOK like phone book pages on the screen, ads and all) I punched in the seven digits and held the handset against my ear.

It rang a couple of times, then a gruff male voice answered.

“May I speak with Mr. Johnson?” I asked.

“This is him,” he said, sounding rightfully suspicious.

“Mr. Johnson, my name is Fred And3rson. I got your name from a man named Jim Fostel, who told me you might have a couple of feeder pigs you’d be willing to sell me.”

Pigs are not as easy to find as I thought they’d be, I discovered this week. At least not in Alabama. I started out with Google, assuming a simple search would yield me more hits than I could process. My searches did yield plenty of hits…just not for people selling pigs in my area. After a couple of days of half-assed searching — we didn’t really want the pigs until late March or early April, so I wasn’t in a rush — I was starting to wonder if I was going to have to start looking out of state.

Then on Thursday I had a flash of inspiration: I remembered seeing a local farm that sold fresh pork they raised right there on their land. I called them, only to be told that it was nearly impossible to find what I was looking for because there weren’t many small producers left. This particular farmer didn’t keep pigs around all the time, he bought his from a larger supplier who was going out of business. He wasn’t sure where he’d get his pigs after this year.

Undaunted, I looked up Farmer Rich, whom long-time readers will remember used to supply us with farm-raised chickens before Fred (can’t blame Robyn here) decided that (a) they tasted too chicken-y [ yes, I know ], (b) they cost too much, and (c) driving an hour each way to get them was a pain in the ass. Farmer Rich bent my ear for about 45 minutes, telling tales of giant agribusinesses (the Walmarts of farming) and how they’d driven everyone out of business by swooping in and selling their pork for something like 20 cents a pound when the going price was a dollar.

Farmer Rich does not care for the giant agribusinesses, I found.

He gave me the name of a man in Tennessee, a man who has the distinction of having the longest court case ever with the IRS over taxes. He was a money-changer, a buyer/seller of gold, and the IRS claimed that the money he made by buying gold then selling it at a higher price should be taxed. He argued (rightfully so, I think) that since all he was doing was converting legal tenders, the IRS was trying to tax the equivalent of someone going into a bank with a $10 and getting it broken into ten $1 bills.

Longest case in history…and he won.

The state of Tennessee disagreed, and threw him in jail. He’s out now, and still in Tennessee changing monies (except for Tennessee people, that is), and his son is running the family farm. Farmer Rich told me they would probably have the kind of piglets I’d want. I thanked him again and we hung up.

Sure enough, they did have some pigs, but they’re already bigger than what I wanted. I want small ones, just weaned, and these were already about twenty pounds. These pigs were also pretty pricy, $60 each. I told the man I was, at the minimum, a couple of weeks from being ready, because I need to build a shelter and a fence, and buy any equipment I think I’ll need (like a trough and waterer), but tentatively agreed to make the two hour drive up there to get them in two weeks. On the upside, he’d already castrated the males and all the pigs were ringed. On the downside, that extra two weeks raised the price by $10 per pig.

During all my pig talks, I really learned some new lingo. I knew weaned pigs were sometimes called “weaners” (hee!), but they’re also called “feeder pigs,” because they’re pigs you feed yourself. A pig is “fed out” near the end of its life, which means it’s put into a more confined area and fed nothing but grains, like corn. This fattens them up and helps make for a less piggy-tasting meat.

“Ringing” a hog means putting a ring through its nose to keep it from rooting. Rooting is a natural pig behavior, but rooting pigs will dig under the fence if you let them. As much as it pains me to think of a pig going through the pain of getting ringed (think “ear piercing”), I want ours to be ringed because I’d rather a pig have some quick pain than get loose and terrorize Smallville).

Castrated males (”boars”; females are “sows”; the birthing process is called “farrowing”) are referred to as being “cut.”

I got his email address and we agreed that I’d email him a few days before I was ready to come up there, and we hung up. I wasn’t as excited about the pigs as I thought I’d be, primarily because of their size and the long drive to get them. So, I decided to keep looking, this time a little closer to home. I called the co-op, and they told me that a woman who worked there would probably know someone, but she was gone for the day. Later that afternoon, I stopped at the grocery store down at the corner, to see if any of the old men in there knew someone who had a sow.

There weren’t any old men in there, just the owner’s wife, but she told me of an old black man up the road who might have some. “Right before you get to my house,” she said, which made me feel practically accepted because that meant she thought I knew where she lived. Unfortunately, I didn’t know and had to get her to pinpoint the area a little better. Turns out she lives on Smallville’s main street, too, just further along than us. I got his last name from her and went home.

Robyn and I drove by the man’s house, and agreed that he sure had a lot of shelters that looked like they were built for animals. We didn’t actually see any animals, though. I decided to give him a call the next morning. When I looked in the phone book yesterday morning, though, I discovered there are TWO men with the same last name right on that stretch of road, and I had no idea which was which. I decided to just suck it up and go to his house after work, then called the co-op back to talk to the woman there.

“I guess I do know someone,” she said after I told her that people there thought she might know someone with pigs. “My daddy raises pigs.”

We talked for a while, and I leached some knowledge off her because I am a question-asking motherfucker when I need to learn something. Based on her recommendation, I decided to fence the pigs with field fence instead of electrical, because she said if the electric fence ever lost power the pigs would get out. I also got the name of a much closer processor (killer / cutter-upper) than the one I’d planned to go to, who has very reasonable prices. At the end of the call she got my cell number and said she’d check with her dad to see what he had right now, and call me over the weekend to let me know.

By now, I was feeling a little better about our pig situation. I planned out a pig shelter in my head (I’m getting good at that) and made an order for the structural materials with a local building supply, to be delivered this morning. I wanted something stronger than Masonite for the siding, because pigs are bigger and clumsier than chickens, and they put me in touch with a sawmill, where I’ll be going later today to pick up a load of rough-cut poplar boards.

As it turns out, poplar is cheap at forty cents per board foot. Siding the entire 10×6x5 pig shelter is $80, and there’ll be wood left over. That’s cheaper than Masonite, and it’s some thick-assed (one inch) wood.

About an after I talked to the lady from the co-op, my cell phone rang, only it wasn’t her. It was a man named Jim Fostel, who’d gotten my number from the lady at the co-op when he called up to check on the price of corn. They’d gotten to talking, and she told him about my situation, so he gave me a call. He had three pigs and wanted to sell two, but they were already 200+ pounds and just needed to be fed out.

I thanked him and told him I was looking to raise them up myself, and wanted some pretty small ones. “Let me give you the name of just the person you need to talk to,” he said, and told me of one Lemuel E. Johnson (called Egg Johnson by all who know him), an old guy up near the Tennessee line who’d been raising hogs for 50 years or more. Jim Fostel’s hogs had come from Mr. Johnson, and were some of the finest hogs he’d ever had.

I thanked him for the information and for the offer to sell his pigs, and got off the phone.

“Mr. Johnson, my name is Fred And3rson. I got your name from a man named Jim Fostel, who told me you might have a couple of feeder pigs you’d be willing to sell me.”

The old man chuckled.

“Reckon I might. What you lookin’ for?”

“I wanted to get two feeders, maybe eight weeks old.”

“I got some ’bout that age. I have to catch ‘em. They been out in the pen runnin’ around with their mama and ain’t never been caught. May take me a couple of days.”

“That’s perfect,” I said. “Is there any way I can get them in a couple of weeks? I don’t even have their pen built or a fence or anything.”

Then, because I can’t resist overexplaining: “I didn’t know pigs would be ready this early; I thought it would be springtime. This is our first time to ever try something like this, and I’m pretty much just flying by the seat of my pants.”

He laughed. “A couple of weeks would be fine. Give me time to catch ‘em.”

“If I have the choice, can I get females or castrated males? Like I said, this is our first time and I don’t think I’m ready to start castrating them. Heck, all I know about pigs is what I got from a book.”

He laughed again. I find that country people tend to laugh a lot when they talk to me.

“I can get you a couple of females,” he said.

“Do you know what breed they are? Are they a mix?”

The guy in Tennessee had pigs that were the result of four different breeds getting mixed together. Mutts, if you will.

“They’re Yorkshires,” he said, then realized he was talking to an idiot. “A white pig.”

Little did he know that my BOOK SMARTS meant I already knew about Yorkshires.

“Perfect. Will they be ringed? I want to make sure they won’t get out, but given that I don’t know anything, I’m a little concerned about ringing them myself…”

Again with the laugh.

“I’ll ring ‘em for you.”

“Excellent, thanks!”

We made some more plans. He got my number, and should be calling me in a couple of weeks to come pick up our piglets.

“One last thing,” I said. “Can you tell me how much they’ll run me?”

“They go for twenty each.”

I very nearly shit myself, but tried to contain my elation.

“Great,” I said.

We hung up, and I happy danced around the room with Robyn. The pigs are arranged, the wood for their shelter just got delivered, and things seem to be falling into place for us to have some FINE eatin’ next year.

Now I just need to get busy.

Oh. About those Yorkshires. Yes. They’re the cute ones.

And yes, we will be eating them.

Now, you simply must go watch this. I insist.

Trust me, it’s worth it if you haven’t seen it.

Finally, the best song from the worst movie. Look beyond the glasses and facial hair, and you might recognize a familiar face. Surely you’ll recognize the familiar voice if you don’t.