Fred and Jack get hitched

These guys are both very nice, but Jack is Mr. Hyde once he’s hitched.  I guess I was too slow, but when I was tightening his hame straps he gave me a pretty good bite on the collarbone. Once we got going, Jack was crazy for a minute or two, and I was unable to avoid driving over several substantial obstacles in the yard. After Tammie  got them hitched to the wagon, they slowed down a bit, and we made several circuits of a small pasture until they were responding to voice commands with minimal use of the lines. At this point the bull and steer saw us and broke into a panic. Jack and Fred gave chase. The wagon was bouncing around behind me like a can on a string, and I debated whether to leap from the vehicle and try and roll clear.

They finally slowed down again, and it was back to voice commands. They look so calm in this picture, considering they were bent on destruction just moments before it was taken.

Proud to be an American

This is the kinkiest country in the world, buddy. AND DON’T YOU FUCKING FORGET IT!.

Poleaxed

Sykes walks the former A&D railroad

We’ve started building a small shed some distance from the house where there is no access to electricity. It’s a pole building, which means the real nightmare part of the construction is getting the supports lined up and plumb.  It involves lots of digging and moving cedar posts around utilizing  hitherto unknown back muscles.

In this heat, it’s like swimming through mud. The cows are in this field, mowing down scrub, but I rarely see them until evening, when they bring the calves out of the underbrush to have some water and enjoy a couple of hours of not having their brains cooked out.

Scrub seems to be a good habitat for a variety of small birds: I see a lot of indigo buntings and scarlet tanagers here;  rabbits and deer will often pass fairly close to you. I’ve yet to see a fox in this spot, but I know the place is crawling with them. The strangest part of being in that dense mat of young trees is the way sounds are isolated and amplified. Yesterday a cardinal flew across the clearing we mowed for the building and it startled me: I half expected to see a hawk or a buck crashing through the undergrowth with all that noise.

the humble beginnings

biting insects just love it here

It’s about the singing, innit?

That cumbersome morning erection. NSFW!

The images you are about to see are not… not wholesome, but I post them  solely in the  spirit  of scientific inquiry. I am aware of certain debates hurtling through the diesel scented tunnels of the blogosphere, i.e. Mac vs. PC,  Joel Hodgson vs Whoever, but none has, or will, attract as much traffic as the Cut vs. Uncut confrontation. There are times when I would have argued that the lowlife quack who took his scalpel to my infant cock should be coated with honey and stretched in the desert to be eaten by ants, and there are times, like today, after getting a glimpse of uncut mule dick, that I am compelled to make a donation to my local B’nai B’rith.

I repeat. These are not for the faint of heart. I’m a little faint of heart, and they make me ill. I’m not responsible. It’s the eye of the camera. And my mule’s cock.

Added bonus: my wife’s delicious photography of biddies!

100

That’s the expected high today, so we’re scrubbing out a horse trough and filling it with cold water. We will sit in this periodically until it’s time to pass out.  I’ve been fairly busy lately, but you’d never know it around midday, when everything just shuts down. I might walk out in the yard and brush the mules or crush a few of their horseflies, but mostly I just sit by the fan. And the projects keep piling up. When we purchased the mules, we were  obliged to take what the seller referred to as a Conestoga Wagon. The way he described it,  I thought at worst it might be a factory job- not entirely useful, but something you could use to haul water or feed  in a pinch.  I was encouraged in this impression because he told us he’d driven it in  a couple of parades and  a wedding procession.  As we walked to the shed where he kept it,  I envisioned a prim little carriage with laquered wood panels and graphite composite spoked wheels with pneumatic tires.

I might have known it would be like this:

Those are bucket seats, Hoss.

A little sad, even all tricked out for a wedding, don’t you think? To me, it looks more like a hearse for some depression era mass-murderer hillbilly icons…. say, Carl “Babyhead” Tilley and his love interest  Evangelina “Dot”  Poke.

Cue Flatt and Scruggs:

“He was a fumbling for her zipper when they hit the guard rail.

Drove straight into lake Mickey, and never lived to tell

how that risin’ water trapped them in that 34 Ford

Their killin’ spree ended in the arms of the Lord.

They was buried at a little church that stood by the lake

Drove ‘em in a hoovercart (They’d blown through their take)

Some people say on full moons you can hear them from the bridge

Sounds like two gorillas bumpin’ uglies in a fridge.

Chorus:

“Babyhead”  and “Dot”

“Babyhead”  and  “Dot”

Once the terror of the Tri-state

Now they’re not.

KINO

Guy makes me understand how silent movies worked. In another life, maybe, I’ll get to make one.

Fred and Jack

Fred and Jack

We got another pair of mules today, seeing that Andy’s foot problems will take a little time to be corrected, and it’s good to have a pair you can dismount without scaffolding. These guys are sixteen hands and barely distinguishable from each other in both coloration and temperament.  Fred has a small bone spur on his jaw, and Jack has a small yellow spot on his flank.

We’ve put the cows across the street to keep the bull from going into paroxysms of bellowing at all hours of the night. I just started building a small shed there yesterday, where we had contractors stretch a woven-wire fence through a thicket of Virginia pine, greenbriar, poison ivy, and some of the biggest aileanthus trees I’ve ever seen. The mules will be a big help carrying the lumber there, as well as riding over periodically to make sure coyotes haven’t attacked  the calves.

The horseflies are bad this year ( probably because of the incessant rain) and I swear they’re bigger.  We’re also seeing dragonflies that appear to have been feeding on hummingbirds. We watched a few of them bounce a termite swarm a couple of days ago, eating the little bastards in flight. The wings were drifting to the ground in clouds of scruff. It was delightful.

What is Lynchburg doing in my paper? Another letter to the editor.

I’ve been to many places in the United States, and I’ve also been to Lynchburg, VA. I assume Mr. Roberts has done some traveling, when he presumes to speak for American values, because Lynchburg may as well be Moscow, or Beijing, or Tehran. It’s one of the least American places on the planet. Pork-barbecue theocracy with a dash of scuba-suit kink and compulsory inbreeding is by no means a plan for the rest of this nation.

I know many Republicans are distressed that the promised thousand-year Reich didn’t materialize under their beloved imbecile king, but democracies have a way of sweeping the trash out periodically, especially when the trash has presided over the looting of the treasury, the delivery of the public trust into the hands of some pompadoured thugs, and the use of the Constitution as a doormat.

It seems obvious to me,  given the expanded wiretapping capabilities and the suspension of habeas corpus by the previous administration, that it would be prudent on the part of anyone to resist screaming “Fire” in a crowded theater, or calling for yet another treasonous attempt at Balkanizing the US,  unless they feel like a trip to Gitmo is their only shot at a Caribbean vacation.

In addition, proper English usage dictates “Democratic ” congress or party. The substitution of “Democrat ” when  the proper modifier is called for,  makes you sound like you were a forceps birth, or at best, raised in the woods by feral hogs.

UPDATE: They didn’t publish my letter, but they did publish this letter, for which they deserve a round of applause: It’s in response to the same goober I was poking fun at.

To the editor:

I am sick and tired of phony patriots like Ronnie Roberts bellyaching about our president. We held an election and the people have spoken. They said Barack Obama.

As a real patriot, I served in the Armed Forces of the US under six presidents, from Eisenhower to Jimmy Carter. I have bullet holes in my body as a reminder.

In my opinion, making public statements declaring that you hope our elected president fails goes beyond freedom of speech. To a patriot like me this borders on treason. If our president fails, then we fail as a nation. No American in their right mind would wish this. I didn’t shed my blood so some wing nut can make statements like this.

I am an African American who grew up during the 40’s and 50’s. Because of Mr. Roberts’ brand of Christianity, I was forced to attend a segregated school system. We had rundown buildings, outdated equipment and outdated books; however, we had great teachers.  My teachers taught me that America was founded as a representative Republic and not a Christian  nation. Nowhere in our Constitution does it mention anything about a deity.

I ask Mr. Roberts if he was forming a Christian Nation would he write into his constitution the State’s right to import slaves for the next 20 years? Would he write in his constitution that the descendants of Africans will be counted as only 3/5 of a person and that Indians would not be considered at all? Would his Supreme Court follow the Christian Doctrine of love thy neighbor as thyself and then uphold the constitutionality of racial segregation, even in public accommodations?

America is the greatest country in the world not because of Mr. Roberts’ brand of Christianity, but in spite of him and his wing nut friends’ brand of Christianity. Good will always triumph over evil.

Ernest Poole

Roxboro