Blech

Some years I'm so ready for the end of summer, ready for nothing to pull me outdoors anymore, no more lawn mowing or flower weeding or garden harvesting. Time to curl up under a warm blanket with a good book. Nest.

This year, however, isn't one of those years. And the cold, rainy, gray weather of the past few days has just left me feeling blech.

Winston went off to the hog buyer today. The butcher hogs went off to the locker. The garden has that end-of-the-summer look about it.

Sara farrowed 7 piglets on Saturday. She layed on one, and stepped on another leaving a rather large gash on its shoulder. Thank goodness for my brother, who came and stitched it up and administered tetanus toxoid and antibiotics. Now, since we market our meat as "natural", we'll have to mark that piglet so we know its had antibiotics and don't sell it. It's doing fine but last night Sara layed on another one, so we're down to 5 piglets. There goes our revenue stream for next March.

So we'll be culling Sara after the piglets are weaned. Besides her apparent loss of mothering instincts, it would be difficult to integrate her with the 3 new gilts without a lot of fighting.

And of course today being the day it is.

I think maybe I'm just grieving.