Everything has been taken up this week by sickness, sore throats and snot. With Ethan out of town, and my teenager off at middle school instead of homeschooling (I tried to talk him out of it), it has been a fevered blur of sipping huge steaming mugs of ginger tea, struggling through dew-soaked grass hauling heavy buckets of feed and skimmed milk up to the pigs, leaning against the cows’ flank as a hot compress on my throbbing forehead while milking, and waking up late at night to tend to ear aches and crying children. 

I haven’t been able to think of anything to write about except how much my throat hurts and how acutely all my bones ache when I finally lay down in bed. 

I started a few recipes but couldn’t photograph them properly due to sneezing and, no one is going to want to cook something with snot on it in the picture anyway.

On top of it all, the new batch of piglets discovered the kitchen and have taken to marauding around the barn. Weeks ago they had slipped themselves out of the garden, and then weaned themselves by not following along when we moved their mamas to one of the wooded pig grazing lines. We tried over and over again to herd them over there, but they refused. And then one morning i woke up to this:

Ok, I have been learning to live with the chicken invasion… and then the geese now that Ralph missed picking on the turkeys and escaped the orchard so he can goose the chickens in the butt every morning while they are fighting over their scoop of feed.  And the dogs lounging around, and the five cats always underfoot in some obscenely relaxed state of napping, but this was just too rustic for me. 

I spent a couple of weeks taming them with treats until I  could get close enough to scritch them on the back for a second before they squeaked and jumped away.  

Once they were tame enough to gorge themselves and then flop into a full-belly stupor in the middle of the path and i had to navigate stepping over them, it was time for something to be done. 

( I had sent this picture to Ethan saying, “Something killed all the piglets,” as a joke, and unfortunately the next part I wrote, “Actually they are just sleeping,” didn’t go through and he lost several hours of sleep wondering what could have killed them and worried about it until i woke up the next morning and realized he had taken it seriously.)

Luckily my friend Karl came out and helped with the actual piglet round up. He was a too surprised by the ungodly loud squealing they make when their hooves leave the ground to catch any, but it was nice to have moral support. They are very, very fast on those short little legs. 

Have a lovely weekend!