The Funny Farm - 2010 in review

Poor blog. I don't seem to get to update here very often, despite all my good intentions. I think for 2011, I'm going to simplify and just aim for a month-end snippet instead of frightening myself off like I have done this year by wanting to write up everything, and spend more time on it than I actually have (which means that 'cos I can't do EVERYTHING, I do NOTHING - doesn't really make sense, but then I hardly ever do!)

The first thing anyone ever asks me is 'is the house finished yet?' so... The good news is that we started building again! Stop-started, it's true, but we're very close now to putting a roof on the kitchen/upstairs main bedroom area. We have some beams already in place, and bascially just ground to halt over the holidays, but we'll be back at it in January, so hold thumbs that that side will be all done soon! Our main man Thulani, who's been our all-round handyman and farm-hand, has proved to be pretty good at the building as well, so we've decided to put him full time onto completing the house under Burgen's watchful eye. A very good step in the right direction we think, since we can now afford to hire another bod to take over all the farm duties that Thulani managed so well. The new chap (Reebok) is still learning the ropes, but with a little supervision, we're sure he'll do OK. We did try another tack around mid-year by employing a building team to work on the house, but it proved to be just as much of a hassle (actually more!) as plugging away at it one bit at a time with a few okes, so we gave that up as a bad idea and went back to plan A. With any luck, 2011 will be the year that the house is finally complete! Can't wait!!

The farm continues to grow, but with far more controlled breeding programs in place and serious gender segregation, the growth is not as wild and out of control as it has been in the past! With the addition of the maternity hutches (which I did put on the blog - yes, strange but true!), we have had far less fatalities and far better managed baby birthing/hatching from rabbits, ducks and chickens alike. Our very first ducklings were hatched on Christmas Day (so fluffy and yellow and CUTE!) by a hen, no less, since they are better sitters than the ducky girls (who tend to get distracted and wander off in the middle of a 28 day sit-in to go swim in the pond). Having said that, we do have one very determined ducky-mom sitting on a clutch and she's about mid-way by now, so let's hope she hatches a few that will know they're ducks ('cos the others think they're chickens! Ag, shame...).

The bunny-breeding was all shot to hell this year when Mr Cinnamon Bun (one of only 2 studmuffins, more about the other guy - Roquefort - in a mo') decided to take an unscheduled break out of his pen, NOT into the forest (which is their usual escape route, leading to the fun and games of us chasing rabbits back into their break-out tunnel while slipping and sliding over fallen logs and muck - very entertaining to watch, if you're a bunny!), but very stupidly (and fatally) into the house area. No sooner had we found out he was AWOL than Ruffy Ann had him and noshed his head right off!! Geez Louise! She was not my favourite dog for a while after that, especially since we discovered (after waiting a long month) that he hadn't done his job and that neither of the ladies then honeymooning with him had been impregnated! Lazy git! So now we're down to just Roque, the boy who almost didn't make it this year when the aforementioned Mr CB stuffed him up six-love, by biting all the fur off his back! Yeesh! Bunnies! You think they're so cute and furry, but they're a short genetic hop away from rodents!

We decided to try and instill order in our canine pack (since Minx's death last July they've been helluva unruly!) so we started Teeg (downgraded from Twiggy - she's too porky!) and Ruffy-Ann (aka Hoolig-Ann) to Canine Good Citizen classes in Rosetta. Apart from the usual problems of paws stuck firmly in ears (hence unable to hear any commands given), the two poochies didn't do tooooo badly... Um... Actually, we'd better get back to our drill sergeant routine 'cos they take their exams for CGC in Feb and they're not quite ready. Ahem! Also with an aging pack (Harley 10, Ziggy 'bout the same, Keesha 8 with buggered knees, and the two young 'uns Ruff and Teeg and 2 and 4 respectively) we decided we needed a new dog - just stop laughing!! I can hear you, you know! Anyway, we approached the sheep dog ladies (neighbours who live up the road from us and who are top breeders of SA's best border collies as well as some very gorgeous GSD's - that's german shepherd's for you non-doggie types) to put us on the list for pups from one of their beautiful GSD mom's, and we are finally about to go and pick up our new pup (it'll be B's dog) from them tomorrow! Very exciting! Will definitely take pix to put up on the blog sometime soon (you're laughing again, aren't you?).

We got a lekker rough-and-ready paddock fence up this year (very ingenious idea of B's, which I have been meaning to put pix up of up on the blog - sigh), so the naggies have had far better grazing than in the past and they all came out of winter looking healthy and hale, even old Miss Tess who's now about 23 and is in partial retirement. The JellyBaby (my little ginger biscuit!) has learned quite a lot in the last year, not in the least of which is being able to shimmy under fences and shake loose the holding poles of her's and Tessie's stables in the middle of the night, setting the two girls free to munch away at the hillside veggies and the flowers I'm desperately trying to grow in front of the house - the buggers! We've rigged up old choke chains (confiscated by the local SPCA) to keep their 'doors' closed at night now - more evidence of 'tinkers in the 21st century' (see old blog entry). We aimed to take part in a few endurance rides but the dates clashed with dates for yoga stuff that I had planned, so this is yet to materialise.

The yoga classes I started taking in April have gone really well and I've thoroughly enjoyed ending the working day at 4:30 and setting off to take my 5-6pm groups. I must confess that if I wasn't actually teaching the classes, there'd have been many days when I'd've laughed it off and a) stayed head down at my desk b) had a glass of wine c) goofed off! The results have also been pretty amazing - one lady even came off her high blood pressure pills 'cos her blood pressure equalised with regular yoga! Great stuff! I had my first pregnant student as well, which was a bit nerve-wracking, but with careful coaching from Aryo (via cell from Jo'burg and with her DVD), all went well and the lady has delivered a lovely baby girl - mom and babe doing well! - on my birthday, nogal! I'm sorting out my certificate this coming year, and by August I should be a fully qualified YA (Yoga Alliance) teacher! Cool, izzinit?

On the work front, we have made some good progress too, updated our software and hardware - long overdue! - and been kept fairly busy with a good variety of projects. There's an un-updated blog for that too (http://crazycatdesignandillustration.blogspot.com/), but will add some of the best of our 2010 work very soon so if you go and check it out in January you'll be able to see it. B has had a lot of fun using the stylus and he's working mainly on the illustration side now with a few design clients to keep him occupied as well. My Midnight Rescue series (written and illustrated by moi!!) was finally all wrapped up and printed and since then I've had very little time to write or pursue any other writing submissions as I've also been kept out of mischief with a ton of illustrating work. 2011 promises to be hectic with new submissions for the SA Dept of Ed (they're starting to revise the 2005 OBE curriculum) and we already have a number of bookings as well as actual manuscripts on desks (unheard of at this time of the year - but very welcome!) so we'll be hitting the ground running this new year.

That's about all our news (in short, precis form anyway), so I think I'm gonna stop there for today.
I hope that 2010 was a good year for all of you and that 2011 only gets better! Wishing you everything that you wish for yourself - may 2011 be a year of wishes fulfilled, hopes renewed and goals achieved!

Making a (sort of) greenhouse

I think I mentioned something about this in the Tinkers in the 21st Century entry, but here are the actual pix of the Freers nice netting being put to good use. You'll see, in the first pic or two, that there are still a bunch of chickens wandering around in the going-to-be-planted area while Burgen contructs the 'greenhouse'. This is because this was their area, and they have very kindly dug in fertiliser (um, yes, you guessed it - chicken poo) and the duckies have splashed nice, icky pond water around, adding to the good goop in the ground we're planning to use. In the past, we've had problems with foraging raids led by maurauding chickens and bunnies, but we figure they won't get through this! (even though you'll spot some very obvious holes).

I can comfortably report that to date the veggie patch has been safe (this was constructed in August and it's now October - not bad going so far). The only real threat was Roquefort (our blue-cheese coloured stud bunny) who made a few concerted efforts to gain entry into lettuce-land from his adjacent run. At first he carefully dug all the way along the fence but Thulani filled in any serious tunnels before he got to finish them. Frustrated with this, he muched great big holes in the netting where-ever he could, but the chicken wire behind it foiled the fella again. Finally Roque climbed on top of his shelter and attempted to leap across the meter gap between it and the fence, aiming for a rather large hole in the netting, but I spotted the bugger and raced out to move his launch pad into a far more challenging spot (another meter away and to the left of the hole). Completely disgruntled, Roquefort retreated to under his other shelter to sulk, emerging only for dinners or to thumb his little grey nose at me. Oh well. Life is not a popularity contest!

Benefits of movable netting (as opposed to a formal structure): 1) we get to move the 'greenhouse' along to a newly fertilised area from time to time. 2) the mesh protects against hail and frost, while still allowing rain and sun to reach the plants. Lekker, hey?

Fire, Fire!!

Friday was shaping up to be a busy day. We were on the home stretch of an important deadline, and were about to settle down to scanning roughs to send and finishing off the remaining drawings when we noticed a large plume of smoke from next door. No cause for concern - lots of folk are burning blocks now for the new grass to come up. We could hear Bubble's voice yelling orders so no worries. We scoffed down our breakfast and headed to our desks.

About an hour later, I looked up from my scribbling to see that the plume had spread and that there was a suspiciously close column of puffs in front of the horses' paddock. 'Let's not panic,' B advised, 'we'll go down and check it out.' 5 minutes later the panic stations were primed, manned and fully funcitonal! The fire had sneaked in at the very bottom of our carefully burned fire brake and was racing up the hill towards us at a heckuva pace.

We ran back up to the house where B leapt into the bakkie to go get the guys (they were fixing up the driveway in preparation for the rains) while I filled up fire-fighting backpacks, rounded up the fire-beaters (rubber flat do-daffs onna stick - just for you city ou's) and briefed Anastasia to fill up water containers and keep 'em coming! Bubble's tenant arrived at our gate as we ran around making our preparations. 'How's the fire going your side?' he asked pleasantly. Gah!!!!

We split up like so - 'Sbu (with backpack) headed off to the furtherest edge of the fire headed towards the as yet untouched neighbours, while Thulani (backpack) and I (beater) attacked the edge closest to the trees and the horse paddock. Mr Lange (our other neighbour's forestry fella) was smacking away at the flames with a branch and B added his beater to aid that effort, joined by the tenant and his helper running back and forth with buckets of water. The fire, fanned by the emergence of a good strong wind, had flown up our hill and covered about 3hectares in less than half an hour. Bubbles and another team were fighting huge flames on the other edge of her property bordering the larger, 1000 hectare forest.  If it got into the gum trees, we all stood to lose our timber, paddocks and possibly homes as well!

People from all along the road started arriving to help. There was a tractor with a 500litre water tank and a pressurised hose, a truck with even larger firefighting paraphenalia, another tractor, and about 30 people all told. Fortunately, our home team had breathing masks and some goggles that helped stem the choking, stinging smoke and fumes, but even then our eyes and noses were streaming and we were gagging. Our staff were amazing in the crisis and we stopped the flames from reaching the trees- JUST!! If you have a look at the pix, you'll see the path of the fire ends a few short meteres from the tree line. A very narrow escape!

Excuses, excuses!

Oh golly gosh! Is that the time? Has it really been so long since we posted anything new to this blog? Good heavens! Well here's a few little scraps of news to catch up a bit...

The building. Yes, well. Like all builders, ours did not manage to complete what they were s'posed to in the time they were s'posed to. And, like everyone who has ever paid for any building work, we discovered that (yet again) it was gonna cost more than we'd budgeted for. Sigh. This is all just too predictable, isn't it?

The good news is that we haven't given up, but are plugging, very slowly, away at it. Burgen and I dug out and built some stairs to prevent summer flooding (IN the house!) and we have some poles that are too squonk to use for the roof or use to pay off our legal debt (don't ask), so we're gonna throw those into a loosely contructed verandah type effort in front of the house. Why waste time doing that instead of doing some proper building, you ask? Ah, but you see, this is, in fact, another cunning plan to escape storm deluge pouring in, under and through the double doors facing the oncoming summer storms! There may yet be method in our madness! (but don't hold your breath, just in case).

Farm news is that we've contructed a sort of greenhouse thingee in one of the fallow areas of the chicken/rabbit area with the netting gleaned from the fabulous (sadly emigrated) Freers and the veggies underneath seem to be doing well so far. The idea is to move this along every year or two and use ground already watered and fertilised by our very accomodating livestock. The netting keeps maurauding chickens and destructive hail and frost off the precious greens and still lets thru a lot more light than my hillside veggie area gets through the winter. We're hoping to be able to keep some stuff growing throughout the year next year. Keep your fingers crossed!

All the fruit trees we planted last October have weathered their first Mooi River winter and are covered with bright and beautiful spring-green leaves. I wonder if they'll bear any fruit this summer? Will keep you posted...

Ruffy-Ann and Teeg have been going to dog school every Saturday for the last few months and are almost ready to take their Canine Good Citizen exams. Our instructor tells us that a judge will be in our area next February and she'll organise for our class to do the test with him then. Good thing it's next year 'cos I'm still bribing the Ruff with cheese and bread and ducky etc!!

That's gonna be it for now 'cos it's almost time for dog walk (4pm) then off to Mooi River (4:30) to take staff back to Bruntville, and  for me to take my yoga class in town (Mon-Thurs 5-6pm). B gets dogs, cats and horses fed, chickens and ducks into their housey (to protect them from a nasty monkey bandit who's been biting off birdie heads and leaving carcasses - the wasteful creature!!) and with any luck (from my perspective ;-)), also makes dinner!

Magpie Bunny Babies

Now, using the freshly converted hutch (see story below), we installed two freshly serviced bunny girls. Miss Molly 2 (M2) and Gorgonzola 2 (G2) had been honeymooning with the fully recovered Roquefort (Mr Cinnamon Bun put the poor fellow in sickbay for over 6 weeks! If anyone needs to know how to treat rabbit septicemia, just give me a shout - gick!). Anyway, after a good month of fun and frolic, we were pretty sure the boytjie had done the business, so, at the beginning of June, we put M2 and G2 into their side-by-side apartments, and settled down to wait for the emergence of new baby bunnies.


Ah yes, let me just mention this: the girls have hitherto bred willy-nilly in their appointed areas. They've dug burrows in every available spot, and hidden babies down them, taking great care to avoid the nicely constructed underground pens we devised. This has resulted in babies being drowned in heavy rains; babies emerging above-ground before they should and being abandoned by their mothers; babies meeting a bunny version of cot death in the nest and rotting alongside their healthier offspring; little baby bunnies being attacked by hens and killed; and various other equally undesirable endings happening. With the hutches, we hoped to be able to control their environment a bit better and thereby avoid any casualties.

So now, back to G2 and M2. To our great delight, within a week both girls had made cosy little nests of their own fur and bedding and had given birth. We had several weeks of freezing weather (-10 one night - yeesh!) but Mums and tots stayed snug and warm. After about 4 weeks, the little guys started to venture out of the nest (which is like a cocoon feathered with the softest rabbit down, and buried in a big pile of bedding). At about 5 weeks, we moved both mums and kids into slightly larger pens (one crate was bigger than the other). Babies are now almost fully weaned (6 weeks) and we'll give it another week before we let them out into an open pen.

Here are pix of both girls with their bubs. Gotta say, G2's really giving me a hairy eye-ball, hey?

Tinkers in the 21st Century

Tinker (as defined by Collins Concise Dictionary) 1 a travelling mender of pots and pans 2 a gypsy (scottish and irish) 3 (verb) to play, fiddle or meddle with machinery while undertaking repairs
Yes, well.

This description - the Tinker-Thornes - was applied to us by our dear friends as we carefully sifted through their stuff prior to their emigration, loading up our battered and bent old Colt bakkie (a real workhorse!) with various bits of old fencing, offcuts of very useful tree netting, pieces of wire and garden hose, an old wooden workbench and lots of other extremely handy but banned-from-Oz items (no wood allowed in and limited luggage space). I daresay it's quite true. - we are tinkers! Collectors of all sorts of stray and strange bits and bobs that others no longer have a use for, but that we can convert into some new gew-gaw.

Things that have been rescued (or pilfered) and resurrected are: a few rusted through water tanks which we sawed in half and make ducky dams and animal shelters (we still need more of these - anybody got any??), crates/pallets from building that have been turned into feed platforms, above-mentioned netting acquired from the emigrants used to cover our water-recycling ponds to prevent the fool chickens drowning themselves, etc etc.

Recently, we managed to wangle a pair of old crates that were gathering dust and refuse in our feed merchant's yard. She gave us a rather funny look, but let us take them anyway. "They'll make great hutches," B said, and set our number-1 man, Thulani, to the task.

The crates were divided into 2 sections, windows and doors were added, the top was turned into the bottom and covered with wire mesh and shadecloth (to allow urine and water to pass through so as not to clog and mucky up the bedding), and legs were attached (to raise the hutches up to a good working height while allowing for poultry to shelter under it). And within a very short space of time, we had two very nice working hutches for our breeding bunny girls!

Undead

Yesterday I was not in a major car accident and did not die. This seems fairly obvious and ordinary, as most days pass without any monumental calamities, but yesterday was an exception - my right back wheel came off completely as I was travelling at 100kmph on the N3 back to Mooi River!

What happened?
I'd just passed that big dam on the left hand side of the highway after the Notties turn off, travelling back to Mooi River from Pmb, when the Isuzu lost acceleration. I tapped my foot on the accelerator, but the speedometer responded like a rev counter and nothing happened. Once, many years ago, I had an accelerator cable snap while driving, so I thought that was happening again. I aimed to pull over onto the shoulder of the road and applied the brakes. Suddenly the car veered and fishtailed. Clearly, I had no brakes either!

The incident took on the texture of a nightmare - everything seemed to be happening in slow motion, the edges were sharper than real life, but also kind of blurred and slurred. Perhaps it was just the frantic pace of my heart and breathing that made everything else seem sluggish. I was headed into a bend, no accelerator, no brakes. I can't remember if I tried to gear down or not, but suddenly the thought popped into my mind with brilliant clarity 'F*kkit! I'm dead!'

I must tell you that despite my body's panic, I actually was not afraid. Weird. It gets weirder. I had that feeling you get as you misfire your last shot in a computer game and the screen starts flashing 'game over' (yes, the last time I played computer games was in the '80's). Frustration - dammit, I'm not ready! - and regret - I'll never see the blasted house finished! - flashed through me. While I clenched the steering wheel in a death grip and gritted my teeth for the impact of an out-of-control head-over-heels flip of the double cab, I saw out of the corner of my eye, a wheel spinning alongside me.

Aghast, I watched it lazily cross the center median into the fast lane, then overtake me, and with what seemed a ridiculously long piece of metal sticking absurdly out of it, sidle off the road in front of me. It bumped into the concrete drainage ditch, mounted the bank of tawny yellow grass, and then seemed to give up. It rolled back slightly and settled on its side.

My mouth must have still been hanging open when the back of the Isuzu crunched into the tarmac. 'The bladdy wheel's mine!' I realised.

Amazingly, the Isuzu came to a neat little halt, perfectly aligned in the shoulder of the highway. It didn't drag along the ground and trash the underside of the car. It didn't flip. It didn't get smashed to bits by a heavy cargo carrying truck. It didn't get slammed into by any other vehicle. The wheel did not cause some harrassed suburban mother with a car full of grizzling toddlers, on her way back to the big city after a week at the coast, to plough through the center buffer of bush into the oncoming traffic on the opposite side of the highway. In fact, nothing at all had actually happened!

Somehow, in the midst of all the heavy vehicles and cars and tankers, speedsters and groaning timber trucks, this had happened in a bubble of perfect isolation. There was no accident. No injuries. No deaths. I sat gasping, still futilely clutching the steering wheel. I think I caught a glimpse of Death winking at me through the windscreen as he passed me by.

Today my morning coffee tasted better than usual. I had a good long think about all my beloved friends and family in the aftermath of that wink, and almost without fail, the last conversation I had, with my mom, my brother, my oldest friend, was a good one. The last time I rode my horse, walked the dogs, partied on down with a pal was the greatest fun. I could've died and not left too many unresolved messes behind (this surprises me), but I'm bladdy glad I'm not dead!!