Apparently, today is the day where the animals eat all of my food.

Went to the grocery store today.  Greg's back at his winter job, which means he has regular hours on top of his other gigs, but I knew he'd be home in time for dinner tonight.  As a surprise, I'd picked up a bargain-bin steak for him and some blue cheese sliders for me.

Once home, I dumped ice and water out of the animals' buckets and used them to bring the groceries inside.  I left the steak and sliders for the second round, not wanting to put raw meat in with the vegetables I'd bought.  I left the back of my car open and went to put everything away.

Half the groceries away, water buckets emptied, rinsed, and refilled, email checked, and lunch eaten, I went back outside to finish up.  I absently loaded the rest of the groceries into a reusable bag and took them over to the base of the steps.  While I was dickering around with ice in the rabbits' bowls, I suddenly realized that . . . I . . . hadn't . . . seen . . . either the steak or sliders in the back of my car.  I walked over, checked, wondered if I'd left them at the store, remembered my decision to leave them in the back of the car . . .

. . . and, looking at the giant dog asleep in the parking pad, suddenly understood all too well what had happened to them.  *facepalm*

To add insult to injury, I went back to finish with the rabbits.  While I was doing so, one of the goats wandered up to me to sniff at their grain pellets.  I hollered and swatted at the goat.  She wandered off while I tended to the bunnies.

Suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, I noticed one of the cabbages laying on the ground.  I whipped around to discover the goat merrily munching away on the outermost leaves of the other cabbage, her head halfway inside the grocery bag.  Cue more hollering, swatting, and cabbage retrieval.



. . . Some days, I think the mosquitoes might have been worth putting up with after all.

We've officially reached the time of year where I hate having livestock.  Namely, it freezes at night (and often during the day), so watering the animals becomes a huge pain in the ass.  We don't have the money for heated watering tanks, so all of the water has to be hauled by hand.

The hose is no longer an option, so we have to try and break the ice out of the buckets and water bowls.  Failing that, we usually have to bring them inside, run hot water in, shuck out the ice, refill the buckets, and haul them back out and down to the animals.  We have lots of little ice disks scattered about the driveway from the rabbits' bowls, and wind up with slick ice spots near the turkey coop and goat pens.  Not only do we have to make multiple trips, now, but I usually wind up with water slopped onto my pants somewhere in the bargain, making this a very unpleasant chore.

In addition, the usual source of water is the bathtub.  The kitchen sink is deep enough for a 5 gallon bucket, yet somehow the sink mysteriously seems to wind up full when it's time for chores.  This means that I often wind up with little bits of hay and the occasional goat pellet in my tub.  Which, of course, makes me wish I had the drive to clean the tub much more frequently, but to be honest, I don't.  Add that to the muddy bucket rings on the bathroom floor and near the front door, and you've got a recipe for farmstyle glamour right there.

Ah yes, the pastoral lifestyle. >.<

Yesterday was our first snowfall.  We woke in the middle of the night to pounding rain and howling winds, but the morning revealed a couple of inches of wet, heavy snow.  The drive into town was diabolical at that hour; at one point while driving in the neighborhood, I was going straight on a paved road at about 30 mph--and the car started to drift!

We still have a large pile of wood that needs to be split, as well as the stuff that needs chainsawing, then splitting.  I hung the second door on the turkey coop the other day, so all that is left is a bit of siding that needs to be done.  Of course, I'm at the point where I'm going to have to trim things, which is a bit of a pain.  I still need to put away the chairs from around the fire pit, empty and put away the recycling bin, get rid of the sink we've had sitting on our deck for *mumblemumble* years, put away tomato cages, pick up various odds and ends, put the last touches on the rabbit hutch, and so on.  Luckily, we're supposed to get back up to the 50s by the end of the week.

It's too windy to make a fire today, so it's pretty cold in the house right now.  Hooray for wool sweaters!  Luckily, I have a bunch of stew and soup that needs to be canned up, so that'll help warm the house up some.  I made a cup of mulled wine last night in celebration of winter's arrival, but we've no more wine

When I went outside to take care of the animals, I discovered that one of them, our cinnamon-gray harlequin (as we call her, even though, technically, she's not) had given birth during the night.  Into her food dish.  There was only one baby--and rather large at that--but it hadn't lived.  The mother had unceremoniously chewed off three of its legs (both hind, one front) in vexation.  Or something.

Now, here comes the weird part.  She's been in a cage, completely alone, for nearly two months.  We've shifted her around so she's currently a few inches away from the buck, but I wouldn't  think that he'd be that well-endowed.

We did breed that doe and two others . . . back in late August/early September.  Gestation is 30-35 days or so.  Ovulation is stimulated by breeding, so rabbits catch pretty easily.  Nearing the end of their gestation, living quarters for the rabbits were a bit full and harried; none of the does gave birth, and we figured they'd all just been too stressed and had either miscarried or hadn't caught in the first place.  We'd given up on young and had been meaning to rebreed them.  After all, nearly double the gestation time is a little long, innit?

Maybe we'll name her Mary.

Tomorrow is our 3rd annual Homesteading Weekend.  Basically, it's when we lay in our wood for winter.  A friend of Greg's dropped off no less than 4 pickup-and-trailer loads of aspen earlier this summer, so all we need to do is chainsaw them into manageable logs and chuck 'em in the log splitter.  Thanks to communication from Chloe and Jen, we now even have our own log splitter!

I need to finish rough-siding the turkey coop, but I think I can get help with that tomorrow.  Greg is off with Kenny, helping him harvest wood, in return for Kenny's help tomorrow.  We've also got a handful or so of friends coming up from Denver to help, and it ought to be a good time.  The weather has been gorgeous and should continue to hold, and we're providing food, beer, and a bonfire come nightfall.

Originally, plans were to make it up to the hot springs with our visitors this evening, but I don't think that's going to happen.  Between Greg being gone and me being called in to work this evening, I think I'd rather putter at home and get stuff done.  We've been cooking for a couple of days now, and there's more cleaning I'd like to get done.  I've been listening to Heather Dale and SJ Tucker all afternoon while making cheese, canning, and cleaning the great room and kitchen.  All in all, a pleasant way to spend the day.

It's been coming for weeks, but today was finally the day.

We'd been looking for a good month and a half to find someone who was willing to butcher our rabbits for us.  We had a buyer, but he didn't want to do the deed himself.  Neither, for that matter, did we.

We had seven rabbits from our spring litter that were large enough--and had been, for a number of weeks.  The first person backed out.  The second never called us back.  The third, my friend Chris, was a hunter.  Although he'd never killed and butchered anything that didn't go to his family, he was willing to give it a shot.  So to speak.

Greg was busy in town, so it fell to me to guide Chris around.  I showed him the rabbit cages, the plywood setup that we used as butchering station, the water outlet for the hose.  I pointed out which rabbits were marked for death today, and which ones to leave alone.  I gathered buckets for the heads and feet,  hides, organ meats, and guts.  I emptied our ice bin into the cooler and filled it with cold water for the carcasses.

I tried not to look as Chris grabbed the rabbits by the back feet.  They bucked like trout on a hook, eerily similar.  I sang softly to myself and the other rabbits as I tried not to hear the quiet grunt of an upside-down rabbit or the soft bonk of pipe against skull.  I sang the closest thing I could to a hymn, a beautiful a capella song called "The Drowning," by my friend S.J. Tucker.  The song is about ancient pagan rituals, about sacrifice and harvest, and I decided after our Thanksgiving turkeys last year that that was our song for such occasions.

A couple of hours later, Chris knocked on the door to let me know he was finished.  The flies, in the unseasonably warm weather, had been horrific during the process.  They swarmed around the buckets, brought by the rich stink of blood.

The carcasses were chilled, but would need to be hosed down to remove minute bits of fur that stuck to them.  The heads gazed out at me from the bucket in a most disquieting fashion.  They and the feet were destined for a friend, who is a raw-food enthusiast when it comes to her dogs.  The organ meats I took inside immediately to wash, bag, and chill.  Next step was the pelts, which were bagged and put in the freezer for attempts to teach myself how to tan hides.

While I was thus occupied, our Akbash mix, Ben, decided to investigate the gut bucket.  I came outside to several sets of innards strewn around in neat little piles.  There was much quiet swearing as I picked the still-warm effluvia out of the dirt and grass and put them in a plastic bag.  There were still a few sets left in the bucket, the smells of blood and shit wafting up as I bent over to empty it.

One at a time, my gloved hands reached in to grasp, carry, and empty.  At the last, I noticed a clear sac with light yellow fluid.  Ah, the bladder, I thought.  Then I noticed two more . . . with something else in them.

Round, dark circles for eyes.  Tiny paws with tinier claws folded over as if in prayer.  Little stubs for ears.  The clear wash of amniotic fluid laving over its inhabitant in its own miniscule world.

We'd removed bucks as we could from the large run the adolescent rabbits stayed in.  Sexing rabbits is notoriously difficult and often filled with error; after a disastrous incident involving a 2-month old doe being placed with a buck, we decided to wait until proof demonstrated itself.  One of the bucks had revealed himself as male far later than the others, and had evidently inseminated one of his sisters before we figured it out.

I said a silent apology for those wee creatures that would never draw breath or open their eyes to sunlight.  Realistically, their fate would have been the same, only delayed by a few months.  While I am staunchly pro-choice in my beliefs regarding humans, an unintended death like this is always a sad event.

Yet, with death, there is always the balance of life.  These rabbits will be eaten and revered in their own way.  The current batch of adolescents were now able to move into the large run, and they are delighted with their new, expansive digs.  We have three more does that are due to kindle any day now, their labor a subject of much joy and anticipation.

Death is just as much a part of life as breathing, birth, sickness, the turn of the seasons, and the rise of the tides.  It is as natural as eating--indeed, it is an integral part of eating--which, in turn, gives life.  It is important to remember this, to remember these inexorable things that surround us.

I have no doubt that I will go through much of the same grieving and reflection next month, when the current batch of adolescents is due to meet their end.  Tonight, however, I will raise my glass of wine to these creatures, to the cycle that pulls us all, even as I admire the beauty of autumn's dying leaves.