A cat in the house

Older Daughter was away for a week, house-sitting for some friends several hours away. This meant Frumpkin, her cat, was alone on her side of our house. (For those unfamiliar with the story, we partitioned our house several years ago when Older Daughter took over our woodcraft business. Her suite has the two tiny bedrooms, a bathroom, and an "catio" porch with her own outside door.)

Anyway, normally when Older Daughter leaves for any length of time, either Don or I will go into Older Daughter's suite to play with Frumpkin and give him some attention and affection. But this time, since she was going to be gone for so long, we took the easy way out. We opened the connecting door and just let him out into the main part of the house.

We figured it was easier to just let Frumpkin be part of the household (during the times Lihn the parrot was in her cage, of course) than to spend time giving him attention on his side.

Both Frumpkin and Darcy were both gentlemen about the arrangement. Mr. Darcy hates all cats, but he knows by now that Frumpkin is the exception, so he tolerated him very well.

After spending the first hour or two exploring, Frumpkin – in typical cat fashion – spent the rest of the time sleeping in various locations.

Here he's curled up on the leather welder's gloves we keep next to the woodstove. No spot in the house is warmer!

For a full week, he just luxuriated wherever his little heart desired.

I think he tried out every chair.

Yet another chair.

Darcy and Frumpkin came to a truce during this time, and the lion laid down with the lamb quite often.

Interestingly, I wondered if we were creating a monster during the week. Would Frumpkin yowl and scratch at the connecting door, demanding to be let out once Older Daughter returned?

In fact, no. He's so thrilled to have Older Daughter back that we haven't heard a peep from her suite. I guess all is right with the world once more.

Fighting pheasants

Don stepped out on the deck the other day, then called for me to join him and bring my camera. It seems two male pheasants were going at each other hammer and tongs.

The birds were across the road in a neighbor's field, so these photos are enlarged and cropped (in other words, not the clearest).

One bird was conspicuously larger than the other, so you know whose tail was getting thumped.

Still, to his credit, the smaller male wasn't backing down.

The fight went on and on, very dramatic at moments.

Honestly, it was almost exhausting to watch these warriors.

They fought for at least 10 minutes while we watched them, and probably longer since they were already fighting when Don spotted them.

Finally the smaller male gave up, and the larger bird chased him alllllll the way down the valley. I tell ya, both creatures must have been exhausted.

These aren't the only fighting pheasants we've seen. We've noticed at least two other pairs going at it.

Ah, spring, when a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love. Or, in the case of pheasants, murdering one's rivals.

Watch that credit score!

Don logged onto our credit card company's website today to see what our upcoming bill will be this month. We have one credit card, and we use it to pay our regular monthly bills (internet, phone, electricity, car insurance, etc.). Until last month (when I got laid off and we entered our spending lockdown), we also used the credit card for ordering anything online. We pay it off completely every month.

While logged onto the company's website, it also shows our FICO credit score. We've always had an excellent credit score (north of 800+), but this time our score had tanked into the 760s. It's still rated as "very good," but we wondered – why did it tank so much in one month? We've barely purchased anything (except hay, paid for in cash) since the job loss.

And that, dear readers, appears to be the issue. We're not spending enough money.We're continuing to live the all-cash (whenever possible) lifestyle we've lived for the past ten years and spending far less money overall, and the credit card company is trying to convince us that's somehow unfair and irresponsible.

The explanation given for this change in credit score is below:

Translation: We're not servicing enough revolving debt. We have no outstanding bills, we're spending a whole lot less money, and we pay off the credit card in full no matter what. And for being responsible adults, we're "punished" by having our credit score tank 40 points. Go figure.

Personally, we could care less. We don't really care what our credit score is because we have no intention of ever owing anybody anything ever again. So there!

Bringing in the hay

About a year and a half ago, we found a good deal on hay. We bought 4.5 tons for a decent price.

This was long before we had our cows, of course, but hay stored under cover does fine for a couple of years (meaning, it doesn't lose much of its nutritional value).

This hay fed our cows all through the winter, but we knew in advance it wouldn't be enough to get them through the lean early-spring time, so we've been keeping an eye out for another good deal.

We found it. A local farmer was selling "okay"-quality hay in 500-lb. round bales. Round bales aren't our first choice, but the price was right, so we bought three tons (12 bales).

The farmer was able to deliver them (which was nice, since we don't have the means to transport a lot of hay), and Don was able to offload the bales from the man's flatbed and place them next to the driveway for the night.

The next day, Don moved the bales. He used tines attached to front of the tractor bucket...

...to stab a bail and hoist it up.

One by one, he transported the bales up the lower driveway to the barn area.

He stacked them neatly in an area heavy with gravel (meaning, good drainage). We anchored one side with a railroad tie to keep the bales from rolling.

The other side has cinder blocks to accomplish this task.

Then, since rain was threatening, we fetched a large tarp and got it over the hay and anchored.

This hay has some discolored spots, but it's not moldy. We can discard any parts that aren't good and feed the cows with the rest.

We didn't store the hay in the barn because, at the moment, we don't have room. Not only do we still have some bales left from our first batch, but the barn was messy and disorganized after a winter of shoving things "temporarily" under cover and then leaving them there. (The totes of Christmas items were still on the floor instead of up in the loft, for example.)

For the last couple days, Don has been cleaning the barn with a vengeance, and it's looking vastly improved. He still has a lot of anonymous totes and crates that even now, four years after moving here, hasn't been sorted. He suspects most of it is junk and will get discarded, but of course he needs to go through them all to confirm.

At any rate, this hay will last us well into the warm months when the grass in our pasture will be tall enough to let the cows graze without supplementing.

In all our years of rural living, raising and baling our own hay is one thing we've never been able to do. We've never had the acreage, the equipment, or the money. We accept this limitation and know that purchasing hay is just one of the things we'll have to do each year.

Additionally, this is one of the few planned purchases we had in mind following my job loss and our subsequent financial "tightening of the belt." Under no circumstances would we ever allow our animals to suffer.

Book Review Monday

As requested, I'm continuing our Book Review Monday, featuring books (reference or otherwise)  we have in our home library.

For the first two books, a small history: Back in 2012, I had the honor of being chosen as a speaker for a "Women of Prepping" forum at a preparedness expo in Colorado Springs (see posts here and here). It was a wonderful weekend, in large part for the opportunity to meet so many luminaries in the field.

One such person was Nurse Amy, whose medical expertise and teaching is legendary. She and her physician husband run the "Doom and Bloom" website. I found Nurse Amy to be eminently practical, not one of those "woo woo" medical types. Remember, not woo-woo. I emphasize this for a reason.

What do I mean by woo-woo? I mean she didn't sweepingly dismiss western medicine as inferior to alternative medicine across the board and without supporting evidence. She discussed the importance of obtaining medical knowledge and supplies for handling emergencies both before and after a bleep-hits-the-fan event.

During the course of her speech, Amy recommended two books on herbal medicines that every prepared person should have in his medical library. She said these two books were part of her foundational medical library and didn't lean heavily into the woo-woo (in other words, didn't make unprovable claims).

Based on her recommendations, we purchased these books. We are not into herbal medicine per se, but it has a demonstrable and recognized place in the global medical repertoire. Having reference books is, we feel, a wise precaution.

These are not small wimpy books. They're hefty and full-sized.

The first is "The Herbal Medicine-maker's Handbook" by James Green.

As the Table of Contents shows, it's very comprehensive.

The second book is called "Prescription for Herbal Healing" by Phyllis A. Balch.

The subtitle says it all: "An easy-to-use A-to-Z reference to hundreds of common disorders and their herbal remedies." As with the first book, the Table of Contents reveals how comprehensive it is.

Don also gave some book recommendations, which requires another short history: Back in 2017, Don and I took a rare trip together. We journeyed to Oregon to attend the Mother Earth News Fair, something I'd always wanted to see. We stayed with Dave and Ilene Duffy of Backwoods Home Magazine fame, and they were the most wonderful hosts.

One of the attractions at the Mother Earth News Fair was the massive book sale.

Don had his eye on a couple of books, but decided not to get them because we had (ahem) already spent our book budget. So I sneaked back later and purchased the books he wanted, then surprised him on the drive home.

The books were "Butchering Poultry, Rabbit, Lamb, Goat, Pork" and "Butchering Beef," both by Adam Danforth.

As with the herbal medicine books, these are beefy (sorry, bad pun) books, dense with information.

Don's remarks: "If you butcher farm livestock, are thinking about butchering farm livestock, are thinking there may come a day when you will need to butcher farm livestock, or are just interested in how farm livestock is butchered, these two books are a must for your homestead library. These books take you from field to freezer over 400 pages each with lavish illustrations. They have a prominent place in our library."

As mentioned, the illustrations are lavish, and the books take you literally step-by-step through the butchering process.

We've looked through many books on butchering through the years, and these are – hands down – the best we've ever seen. Highly recommended.

(Obligatory disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. As an Amazon Affiliate, if you purchase through those links, I earn a small commission. Thank you!)

So there you go, your book reviews du jour. If anyone has any more book review requests, let me know and I will review them if I can. Happy reading!

Is this winning the lottery?

I saw an interesting meme today:

When I read this, I started thinking of all the stories of people who, then they win the lottery, go stark raving NUTS and end up broke (and broken) within two years.

But this. THIS. Live peacefully. Mind your own business. Wear your little outfits. Feed the birds.

Hmmm. I think we won the lottery, without the lottery...