vituperation

Last Saturday dawned gorgeous, a truly perfect day. A good day, if I may be crass, for a couple of pigs to die. Especially the couple of pigs that had become the bane of my existence just a couple of days before.

“If you haven’t heard from me by nine Saturday morning, give me a call,” the processor — Joe — had said when I called him that Thursday night to explain my predicament, and what had happened when a boy was sent to do a man’s job. “It doesn’t mean I’m not coming, it just means I got busy and forgot.”

I spent the early hours moving Robyn’s web sites to our new virtual server. The old one, it turns out, never had any kind of operating system upgrades done to it, and with the big DNS exploit from a few weeks ago, it needed to be patched. The long and short of that is that the hosting place told me my options were to wade in and do the patch myself (which I tried for about 3 hours one day, and gave up in frustration because each piece I tried to install needed 2-15 more pieces installed) or back up everything on the server (for a fee, of course) and hit the button to install a later version of the operating system.

I opted to just move to a new server and cancel the account for the old one. The new server has 6x the disk space and 10x the bandwidth for half the cost.

Nine o’clock rolled around, and I hadn’t heard from Joe. At five past, I called. His wife answered.

“Oh, shoot,” she said when I told her who I was. “I was supposed to call you last night. Joe can’t come get those pigs; he’s got too much meat to cut.”

She went on to explain that Joe worked the midnight shift at his ‘real’ job, and that he had to work the next three nights. I needed to try and find some other way to get the pigs there this weekend, and if I absolutely couldn’t find anything to give her a call.

“One way or another, we’ll get those pigs here,” she promised before we hung up. It made me feel a little better, but not much.

I spent last Saturday in a state. Between the freaking out over thinking I was stuck with the pigs and the fury at the original guy who sent a boy to do a man’s job, I was pretty upset. I was a little mad at the meat processor, but really, he’d been planning to do it as a favor and just got overwhelmed with his other stuff. The first guy and I made a business agreement, for money.

I tried calling the first guy, to see if we could try getting the pigs again or if I could rent his trailer for a week and work on luring the pigs in with food. He didn’t answer, so I paged him. After waiting fifteen minutes for him to call back, I called the co-op to see if they knew anyone who might have a small bumper-pull livestock trailer for rent.

By ten that morning, I was mostly just freaking out. I saw a future where the pigs were going to live here until it was cold and I had to process them myself. By then, of course, they’d weigh 400 pounds and have gross, fatty, tough meat.

“Fuck it,” I said to Robyn. “I guess this is only going to get done if I do it myself.”

We spent Saturday driving around north Alabama looking for used livestock trailers. Along the trip we went through Wheeler State Park and by the marina, which was nice. We ended up in River City that afternoon, with me looking at a cargo trailer because we couldn’t find any livestock trailers that were less than SEVERAL thousand dollars.

I didn’t really like the cargo trailers, because they seemed kind of flimsy. I had pictures in my head of the trailer disintegrating on the highway, spilling pigs all over the place. But I did see something there that gave me an idea.

Bright and early Sunday morning, I made a trip to Tractor Supply to make a big purchase. From there, I went to Lowe’s for something smaller, but still vitally important. I spent Sunday hard at work, and by the early evening I was ready to test my plan.

It didn’t work on Sunday, but I saw the potential. And I had a whole week to make it work. Life was looking up.

This morning, I had the opportunity to test out my plan for real, because the pigs were due today at 8:00.

Mission accomplished.

To complicate things, guess who got here this morning before the sun came up? Fay, that’s who. After two weeks of nothing more substantial than a sprinkle, it poured for hours…including when I had to go load the pigs and hook the Pork Chop Express up to the truck.

Sometimes, I think my life is a black comedy.

Little Pig slid down the ramp on his knees when I was trying to get them in (they’ve been eating in the trailer for most of a week, so they had it associated with food in their heads), and for a couple of minutes I thought he wasn’t going to try again. Finally, though, the doughnut in my hand worked its magic.

The pigs currently reside in a holding pen at the slaughterhouse. Big Pig, according to the butcher, probably weighs in the vicinity of 325 pounds. His hams are so big — 40 or more pounds each — we’re having them cut into much smaller pieces for manageability.

I can’t wait. We should pick up the meat in a week, maybe two.

I got so stressed last weekend that on Tuesday I started getting cold sores. By bedtime I had four, more than I’ve ever had at once in my whole life.

I butchered a couple of young roosters, which we ate last week, unfried. They were stupendous.

(insert joke about me loving the young cock here)

Unfried chicken, veggie medley, sliced tomatoes. All produced here.

Between processing McLovin and the two young roos, I discovered one of life’s great secrets: roosters have about 473 times more feathers than pullets/hens, 90% of which are pinfeathers. I worked on plucking the two youngsters for almost 45 minutes, before I just gave up and skinned them.

I solved my problem by purchasing a plucker off eBay. It was cheaper than trying to build one (Robyn bought a book on building a plucker back before we ever moved to Smallville, oddly), and definitely got here faster. I had occasion to try it out Friday afternoon on one of our Jersey Giant hens:

Sorry for the saturation, I took the picture with the crappy camera.

It took about 1 minute for the plucker to do this. ONE MINUTE.
And I didn’t even know what I was doing. Wait till I learn.

Yesterday, we drove up to Lawrenceburg to visit Amish country. I half-wanted to get some piglets if I could find some, and Robyn wanted to get some Amish butter for cooking. For the first time, we saw people selling eggs (which is odd, you’d expect something like that to be a staple product).

“We should try to get some fertile ones and hatch them,” I said to Robyn. “We’ve been talking about bringing in some new blood to the flock.”

She agreed, and so this time we actually stopped at Amish homes. Usually we just drive around and talk about how intimidating the peaceful and quiet people there are. We stopped at three places offering eggs, but only the first one had a rooster in with his pullets.

I picked up 24 potential chickens for $2.50. That rocks.

The first guy was by far the most open and friendly Amish person I’ve ever spoken with (not that they’re unfriendly, per se, they just seem…closed), and we talked for several minutes. He had a pig he would sell, a 125 pounder. I told him we wanted weaned piglets and he gave me directions to another Amish person’s house where I could find some.

We drove over there, but ultimately decided to wait a while before getting new pigs.

The eggs are in the incubator, and I guess we’ll see what we see in three weeks. He told me his chickens were gold campines, but they looked nothing like them (plus, gold campines lay white eggs). The hens were all a mix of white and brown, and the rooster was a dull brown. He said it was a Rhode Island red, but it didn’t seem bright enough.

Between telling the Amish man I wanted “two little weaners” and asking two Amish women “Are your eggs fertile?” I felt like a real pervy guy yesterday.