Pigs in a pen: or not

Dear Gma

While we wait for the snowstorm this evening, i thought i would tell you about the pigs and how they fare on this mini-farm, or maybe it is how we fare with them :)

The kids have moved to their own farm on the other side of town and almost have all their stuff over there, but we still have the pigs and Bo, the Golden Lab. Janell has a line on getting some other chickens, so i guess the ones here will be ours. Probably a good thing since jim refers to them as his " girls". He refered to his lady employees at Penneys the same way, so maybe he is going back in time. It all sounds so familiar :) Anyhow things here have slowed down considerably without all the young ppl. Beginning to look more and more like just our
house, and it still feels like we have been here most of our life, certainly not just five months.

So, we do chores in the morning. Sometimes i do them, more and more though jim does because i dislike the cold weather and he is too good to me. I do always feed the three dogs though. :) So anyhow, Jim opens the gate to the pig-pen to take
the pigs their feed for the day. By this time, he
figures they are old friends and will just circle the pot to retrieve their food. Wrong! Oh, so wrong! Out the gate they go. He is dumbfounded.
He comes in and tells me to come help him corral them back into the pen. bawahahahaha :) Oh, this is rich :) Two seventy years olds chasing pigs! What
is wrong with this picture. Hysterical, yes it was.

I grabbed a dog leash thinking that might help us a little bit. After all the little ten year olds picked the pigs up less than a month ago at the birthday party.
We were told by the pig expert, janell, that you need to prod them with sticks and you have to let them lead ? No, that was not it. They would
not go back into a pen themselves. I forget, but she told us later you cannot pull them on a rope ???? Well, we learned that but not how you should
do it i guess. I am thinking a whole lot more ppl than just two of us might have worked better.

We did get them into the horses' Roundpen and i thought we were home free then, and i tried to get the dog leash around Rosie's chubby, much larger than a month ago, neck but she didn't like that at all. She screamed bloody murder and Lordy she scared me! Still i persevered and finally managed to sort of have her in the make-shift collar, but she ran away from me and she was
so strong i fell on my butt trying to hold her, and i just could not control her at all. All righty then... i see the hay bales and i am thinking we should just block the other gate and leave them in the Round Pen till help comes, but no, my husband has a lasso and he is determined to hog-tie, tee hee, the beast around the belly. Using his best boy scout knot, he manages, with my reluctant help.... I was scared Ham was going to bite us to tell the truth, and Rosie kept trying to free Ham/Bacon... to get the rope around the belly. And he wants me to open the gate to the Roundpen!!!! I am resisting with commonsense advice like, " You can't hold him! He is too strong!!!" But no, he knows all and so i open the gate because jim is getting a bit miffed at ME in his frustration. And now he wants to let these pigs out of a confined area. Made little sense to me, but i am a dutiful wife if nothing else. :)

We have about thirty yards maybe across the field and back to the other pen. That pig is screaming like an eagle after prey in a field, no, way worse than that. I have never heard anything like the ruckus that pig created. I was sure the neighbors would call the police. And, that pig would not move except to twist and turn and then.... out of the lasso around the belly and he is free free free! AND, Rosie has been right next to him the whole time trying to bite at the lasso to free her pig-partner-in-crime. They cavort away :(

So, jim and i get our sticks and try to keep them in the pasture as we clumsily herd them to their lovely fenced yard. Those two pigs ran us two old ppl all over that pasture, but by golly we kept them out of the road, out of the neighbors yards, and in the upper yard. I tried to tempt them with their food, but they wanted none. I finally got a bucket of scraps from the house and called piggy piggy piggy and shook it and got Rosie's attention. jim prodded her and eventually in she went. Well of course Ham/ Bacon wanted in too, but he could not find the gate. I cannot believe how dumb these animals are. I heard they were smarter than ppl give them credit for. Well, maybe if you spend a lot of time training them, but that would not be me.... not ever :) The next morning both of us moaned and groaned as we tried to get out of bed. OMG! We laughed at ourselves and our whineyness.

They had a really nice house down in the regular garden where we had housed them. They returned the favor of a great place to reside by rototilling our garden. You will find not a weed in our garden and they plowed it to the best of their abilities, which i found admirable. But, they got out of there somehow, so we stashed them up in the smaller garden up by the house.

They will soon move over to Chris and Janell's. We will miss all the excitement they bring most every day. However, We won't even open the gate to their abode. I climb up on the wheel barrow and dump their food over the fence into their feeder bowls, which they move all over the place so this is never easy. We built a shelter in there with hay bales. Today they must have been tussling around and they knocked the bales out from under the plywood roof and it looked like the wolf had visited the Three Little Pigs! Janell is just going to love having these unpredictable beasts. I hope their pen is tough because man their strength is surprising and all they have to do is scratch against a post and it thinks about bending. I cannot imagine what they will be like when they are three months older. Holy Schmolies!

Anyhow, that was a Day in the Life of the Heights Road Wolfeden where it is never dull. I am hoping the 8 inches of snow that falls tonight will slow us down. We did go to the store and stock up but we did not get diesel for the tractor but most likely we will be fine. Actually 8 inches is not all that much by Alaskan standards. But, up by Kalispell they did get 2 feet last night. Seems like those clouds should be all snowed out so maybe it will come back some other day.

Hope you have a great Thanksgiving and when you are eating that ham think about our Ham, or Bacon as i sometimes call him, and Rosie, of course, and the sacrifice they made on your behalf. :) And, don't even remind me about the turkeys who invaded our property in Eastern Oregon. Maybe i will become a vegetarian :)

You know i love you Gma
your
jackie ann aka *j*