Chick run

Here's photos of the chick's recent gala day, in which they were transferred from their brooder, which they had outgrown, to Aimee's five star chicken tractor.

This is the first time I've shown pictures of this device, which was made with the greatest of care.

No chick of ours is going to live in no stinking substandard chicken tractor.

Aimee has one in her hand, I'm following dutifully with the other six in a box. I think I do dutiful well, when it comes to wifely orders, don't you?

The peeps don't like being in a box and are complaining lustily, appealing to their chicken rights, but who am I to complain at the method. Just following orders, is my excuse.

This transfer process, which we'll call the "peep walk," was accomplished with a lot of peeping and flustered feathers, but by the time they'd been in their new home for a day or so, they'd settled down and were going up and down the ramp from their sleeping quarters to the grass as if born to it.

Haggis the miserable sheepdog, whose attention span for herding sheep is about two seconds, was all ears and tail for this poultrified process.

How annoying is that? When I need him to help me move sheep, he's barely on the job before he starts chewing on some sheep poop, or sniffing at some interesting smell.

The problem with Haggis is that as a young pup he had only chickens to herd, and so he's imprinted on them, not sheep.

Haggis, of course, is perfectly happy with this arrangement, and has no understanding at all of how shameful it is for a pedigree Australian Shepherd to be imprinted on chickens when he has a whole herd of sheep to look after.

They're even part Corriedale. Antipodean sheep, if you will. Like the dog breed.

Me, I'm disgusted. Not the least because as a result I have to behave like a sheepdog whenever I want to move sheep. While my otherwise perfectly operable sheepdog is sniffing the posies.

I'm a Yorkshireman, for heaven's sake. I'm supposed to be the sheepdog handler, controlling huge herds perfectly with a simple whistle and my trusty dog.

How humiliating is that? How am I ever going to be realized as a person?

I least I have the grace to be ashamed about it.

Chick run

Camry on the road and a day out

So the Camry passed inspection yesterday and Aimee has a new car to drive. Not a brand new car, obviously, but the newest car we've had since we were married. Aimee's truck, now retired to be a farm truck, was bought new but that was in 1999.

Time for a road trip. Aimee is due to give a field class soon at the Humboldt Field Research Institute, down the coast in Washington County, and needed a recce. So off we went for a day's tourist-ing in our new Camry. Here's couple pictures of Aimee on the hike we had, and the view across from Schoodic to Mount Desert Island.

The car drove well and we had a nice hike and a pizza dinner. Haggis got to play in the ocean, which he likes. The only bad part was the old cigarette smell in the Camry, which Aimee is now trying to exorcise with some old folk remedy -- placing a bowl of vinegar in the car overnight. If that doesn't work she has two others to try.

You'd think that now the Camry was on the road that would be the end of my vehicular labors for the year, but both the other vehicles are rusty and I need to inhibit the dreaded oxidization progress somehow or we'll be shopping for another car long before we want to.

The salt that we use on the roads around here in winter makes for very bad rust problems on cars. It's a heartbreaking business, because it means the car bodies and frames fall apart long before the engines die. I hate rust.

In a few days I will get busy with the angle grinder and the tractor's loader and lift that old rusted-out bed off the truck, preparatory to fitting a wooden flatbed with angle-iron sides. I'll take the opportunity to blast, grind, or scrape off all of the rust I can see and spray the entire underside with red oxide paint. The result should be a truck that can take fifty or more bales of hay instead of the current thirty, and that can accept an entire sheet of plywood laid flat.

Why anyone would design a pick-em-up truck bed that wouldn't accept a four-by-eight of plywood is beyond me. Something to do with the increasing urbanization of global society and the alienation of folk from practical life.

The Ford wagon will get similar treatment with red oxide paint. I'm hoping not to have to buy a car for at least four years.

Except perhaps a Land Rover.

Jewel safe

Jewel the formerly sick ewe had a very good day, yesterday. If you'd not known that she was sick, you'd never have been able to tell. She ate fairly heartily, drank, walked around, and lay down in the shade and slept like a log.

I can commiserate. I once had one of these bacterial diseases that knock you around like this. I had Rocky Mountain spotted fever, and felt like I was at death's door. I slept solid for something like 48 hours.

Thank Sir Alexander Fleming for both recoveries.

Now we have to get these sheep sheared.

Support Local Agriculture: Drive a Recycled Camry!

It's been great weather here in Maine lately. One of the paradoxes of living in "Vacationland" is that although millions every summer visit Maine, arriving after Memorial Day and disappearing after Labor Day, the best weather occurs outside of those times. Between Memorial Day and Labor Day this part of Maine is hot and muggy. And the coast, while cooler, tends to be foggy. But May often brings hot sunny days with a nice breeze, and cool clear nights, while the weather from later August to early November is usually superb.

The tourists lose, we win. Suits me. But I sometimes wish I could teach at least some of the time in the summer and have more time to work on our own projects in the fall. The fall is a great building season, although you're always racing the snow at the end. And it's good for fixing vehicles and farm equipment too. But summer is growing season and firewood drying season, and grow we must and dry firewood we must have, and all that takes work, so it does work out OK that our summers are freer than the rest of the year.

"Vacationland!" As an immigrant and thereby the owner of a different, if sacreligious, sense of perspective, these state license plate slogans always amused me. "Vacationland went well along with Idaho's "Famous Potatoes" and Wisconsin's "America's Dairyland" and similar tat. If the best thing you do for the world is provide butter, potatoes or vacations, well, that's certainly useful and probably a decent living, but why proclaim your single-mindedness to the world? Did Idaho really sell more potatoes that way?

Our new thirteen year old Camry has a license plate that states "Support Local Agriculture," which I find infinitely preferable to "Vacationland." This may represent a change of ideology for my wife, however, since she was the one who selected it. Every other car we have has "loon plates" that promote conservation. But who am I to complain? I certainly hope my local agriculture is supported.

"Support Local Agriculture" is fine by me.

On that front, here's Aimee with the lamb that needed a penicillin shot for Erysipelis. Notice the mucky knees, from all the kneeling that is typical of this disease. The sheep were all riled up that night, so I needed to use the shepherd's crook to catch him, and after that it was easiest to bring him into the kitchen for the shot and the dose of vitamin paste. He recovered the next day and hasn't been seen on his knees since.

Jewel the ewe-l is feeling a little better and may actually be recovering from Listeriosis. We confined her to the barn for a few days so that she would have less scope for staggering and wandering, and wouldn't be bullied by the rest of the sheep, who were not happy to have such a kultz in their midst and pushed her around a lot. It was easier too, to use the small confining pen in the barn to give her the nine mililiters of Penicillin that she required -- a massive dose, no less than three full syringes a day, given intramuscularly, in different muscle units each time -- and the huge horse syringe of glycerin down her gullet that helped slow the rate she converted fat and muscle to energy to stay alive while she was unable to eat.

Obviously she was never happy with the treatment, nor the confinement, and when not staggering or sleeping it off would look longingly out the window at the rest of her flock, grazing obliviously on the lush green grass of the new paddock.

Poor Jewel. Sheep really hate to be separated from their herds.

But yesterday the sun was so nice and I was due to be around all day working on the Camry's fuel tank so I opened the back door to the confinement/lambing pen and let her out. This door opens onto the North Paddock, from where she might eat a little grass, get a little sun and breeze, take nap in the shade and even communicate with the others over the fence. She was out like a shot, and while clearly still weak and dizzy, she never actually staggered or fell down all day, didn't "star-gaze" or circle, and even ate some grass and nibbled some sheep kibble.

So, we'll see, but she might be past the crisis. If she can stay on her feet and begin to eat in the next few days she'll be on the path to recovery and the land of the living. Luckily, like all our retired ewes, she's fat, so she has a reserve to fall back on. When we butchered Larkie a few weeks ago, we finished up with the greasiest chops and lamburger I've ever seen. It tastes great, but it's not your Atkins diet special.

In other news, Aimee has finished her chicken tractor masterpiece, which I have displayed on the lawn here alongside last year's masterpiece, the garden cart. Aimee's dad Dick, who no doubt will read this, is a master wood carver and furniture maker, and so wifie mine is a chip off the old block. These products are of such high quality you wouldn't even guess they were home-made.

Me, I'm a Sheffield lad, so I prefer hard steel to wood. I exercised my talents some yesterday switching out that leaky gas tank on Aimee's new Camry. I also tried to switch out the bad ABS sensors, to discover the parts house had sent me rear sensors instead of front ones, so that job didn't get done. But I did drive the car down, once the tank was changed, to our local inspection station, where I got confirmation that it will pass inspection once the ABS sensors are changed.

While I was changing the tank, I was amazed to discover that a previous owner had actually drilled the hole in the old one, seemingly on purpose, or at least for a reason, and that was why it was leaking. Recently, too. I discovered a neatly drilled hole with fresh swarf on the edges, right through the top of the gas tank, right under one of the drain plugs in the car body, right under the driver's side back seat.

Go figure.

Some foolish person had taken a 3/8 drill bit and drilled through the center of the plastic drain plug and then on through the gas tank. This had me scratching my head. I imagine that this was perhaps done to drain out water. There's a cover plate for the fuel pump right there, held on with some kind of black cement sealant, which may have been leaking, and the drain plug is at the bottom of a natural well in the body, so water would have collected there if the car was leaking. Enough water, and the seat foam would have been wet and even moldy. You'd want the water gone. And if you were totally ignorant of Camry geography and totally quick on the draw with the drill, you might choose to drill out the plug and inadvertently penetrate the gas tank.

Hah! What a prize numpty that was.

And so then, with the ABS light on and the gas tank holed, what else can you do but sell the car? Especially if you're that stupid?

But how well have we made out from this stupidity? Well, we now have a Toyota Camry that cost less than $5,000 to get on the road, but that has only 44,000 miles on it. According to Craig's List, we might expect to pay anything from $7,000 to $13,0000 for a Camry with so few miles. There are very few that are the right year, though, as old as 1997, and those that are have upwards of 200,000 miles.

I expect we'll find out how well we did if the thing lasts four or five years. that would be my goal. I'd like to get seven or eight, but I'd settle for four or five.

Busy bees and more sick sheep

Summer is in full swing now, with days that get well into the seventies (F), and nights that show no hint of frost. But we had frost just last week, and so all the tomato starts that Aimee grew in the greenhouse, now hardening off, must stay in their trays for the time being in case they need to be whisked back inside. All the cabbages, Brussels sprouts and broccoli are in, though. They can stand a small frost. Peas are about four inches and onions two.

Aimee has had her first day of marine biology field research, while I'm a couple days into my summer roughnecking trade of raising and lowering and moving anemometer towers from site to site. This is basic research for small scale wind power and wind mapping in then the good old State o' Maine. The results allow me to redraw the current wind map, which is based on a computer model and not especially accurate, given our tough topography of hills and dales and tall trees.

The wind does what it wants in this state, not what computer geeks who primarily sit in offices and tinker with algorithms think it does. You have to measure directly, at least for a year or two more until we get an algorithm that works. If we ever do. Which suits me. I'm a field site, ground-truthing, just the facts, ma'am, kind of dude.

I have a merry group of students on payroll, and we are going back today to clean up our first site and begin configuring a couple of 30 meter anemometer towers out of two 60 meter ones. These will go to a couple of farms that have nice high hilltops, where they'll tell us if a farm wind turbine is a good investment, and also fill in some blank spots on the map.

The Camry fuel tank has arrived, but I have to get some field work done first. Friday will be Camry day, weather permitting. And maybe this will be the weekend the tomato starts go in.

We have another sick sheep. Actually, we had two, but we seem to have cured one. First a male lamb, whose name Aimee could tell me but she's still fast asleep, got the same septic arthritis that sent Polly to the butchers last year. This time we were ready and a quick shot of penicillin and a dose of selenium/vitamin paste was administered and he was back on his feet the next day. The other is Jewel, who has gotten "circling disease," one of the several creative and inventive ailments sheep have in their vast toolbox of ways to die.

Diagnosis was difficult at first because she was just sad and off her feed for several days. If we had given her penicillin right away, we might have done better. But we were just scratching our heads, and worrying what essential sheep nutrient she might be missing, or whether she had a bad case of flystrike, or whatever. Sheep are often sad, it seems. I examined her over and over trying to figure it out. But after a while, encephalitis set in, she developed "star gazing" and one-sided paralysis, head-resting, and a tendency to go around in clockwise circles when bothered.

So now she's fighting it, with massive doses of penicillin. The encephalitis symptoms are somewhat reduced, and she's comfortable in the barn. But she still hasn't eaten for days. She is drinking, though, and I have given her glycerin for energy and will give her more. What she could really use is an IV drip with feed and fluids and penicillin, but she's still too mobile for that.

In any case, she's a working sheep, who lives on a farm in Maine, not a human, and definitely not a pet. If she was on some total vegetarian hobby farm, she might get that kind of treatment. But she's a retired ewe on a farm that slaughters and culls appropriately, and will have to take her chances. As long as the symptoms are less than they were, she will live, but if they get worse she will have to be culled right away.

But I feel bad for her and hope she gets better.

All of these diseases, the listeriosis, the arthritis, and the tetanus that Maggie had, are caused by critters that live in soil, and probably can't be helped much, but we have moved the rest of the flock from their home pasture, the Back Forty, to the nice clean New Paddock as a precaution. As soon as I can get the Kubota back from my wind power work, I'll rake up manure and waste hay in the security pen and we won't let them back in there until the fall, by which time sun and wind and rains should have reduced the bacteria load in the surface soil somewhat. Even this precaution is a trade off. The New Paddock is by no means as secure from coyotes and stray dogs.

All of the breeding flock, including the temporarily arthritic lamb, seems healthy and happy on the New Paddock, so I'm hoping this is the end of sheep disease for one year. Shearing time soon, so that's another danger point, when fresh wounds are made and so on. They've all had fresh tetanus shots, though, and the ewes have had two each, since the previous shot didn't seem to help Maggie much, so we suspect that batch of vaccine. If we can get through shearing, we'll be home free, I think, and we'll have saved all our breeders except Maggie and Polly.

Camree, camra

So the Camry needs a new fuel tank, and a new driver side ABS speed sensor or wire or both. This last according to the on board diagnostic system. I already ordered the new tank -- cost $200 online -- and it will come before Friday. The speed sensor needs another diagnostic test, a basic logic-problem switcheroo where you switch the suspect one with what should be a working sensor from the other side and see if the fault code stays with the bad sensor, meaning it is the sensor and not the wire that connects the sensor to the ABS computer.

New speed sensors are $113 -- ridiculous for an item that is no more complicated, really, than a magnetic door switch you might find on a household alarm system. A ten-dollar item, at most. But there ought to be a '97 Camry in one of our local salvage yards, or another model year close enough, and if I can find said scrap Camry, I can probably get two for $20, since each car will have two easily accessible on the front end.

So the full price for the final complete Camry, on the road, not counting registration and tax which you'd have to pay for any car, will be less than $4,600, counting the $210 interest the credit union charges us on the $3,500, eighteen-month loan. Assuming I don't find anything else to fix.

That makes me fairly content with the deal. Turns out that Camry's are easy to work on, too. Lots of room, not so many tight places, simple organization of equipment. I should have known -- I had an '87 or '88 Toyota two-wheel drive truck years ago and it was easily the best vehicle, and most useful, I ever owned. I sold it to pay for my first year of college, which was a good trade, but I've never had a more reliable vehicle.

This car is in better condition than Aimee's truck was in when I first met her those 7 years ago. It even still has the manufacturers original double-electrode spark plugs. Not one but two electrodes per plug, to get a good quality spark for easy starting, redundancy, reliability.

Crafty, those Japanese.

I expect we'll get at least seven years out of it, then.

Ownership costs of less than $800 per year. Ridiculously cheap. I'm not quite ready to declare victory over the vehicle-industrial system yet, but it seems like we might be on the outskirts of Berlin at least.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the truck also needed some work. It had developed that grinding noise that front discs make when they're worn down beyond their safe wear point. Which surprised me because I had inspected these pads only last fall before the truck got its most recent state inspection, and they were still fat and good for many thousands of miles. But Aimee hates truck noises, and I hate replacing expensive rotors on old trucks that don't need expensive rotors, just to pass safety inspection.

So, after we finished tinkering with the Camry fuel tank (that would be the "royal we" -- herself doesn't deign to work with mechanical devices, even though she finds them incredibly frustrating and would therefore gain great psychological benefit from knowing, and being able to do, more), we tore down the front brakes on the truck.

Where we found a stuck spring-and-plunger device that had meant only one pad was doing most of the work of stopping the truck, and so that pad had worn out earlier. The cause, of course, was the rust that this truck has everywhere, on almost all equipment. And the rust, of course, is why it's not worth rebuilding that engine, which after all, just has a head gasket leak, not a particularly fatal engine problem.

This plunger will need to be drilled out and replaced, or I will need to get a whole plunger and caliper mounting assembly from a salvage yard. Problem is, this is not the kind of part that salvage yard guys have a name for, so I'll have to go myself.

Which is not really a problem, since salvage yards are fun for me. I think of them as great cheap outdoor parts warehouses, cornucopias of cost savings. And I still need a tire for the Ford, another item that will be cheaper at a scrapyard. And it would be good to have a spare set of rims for the Camry, to carry the steel-studded snow tires we use here in Maine in the winter.

Funny, isn't it, how most of us have to suffer so much to pay for the vehicles we drive, though. It's a permanent chicken-egg problem that comes with middle-class, white-collar work. You have to have the vehicle to drive to work, but you have to have work to pay for the vehicle. You're expected by the standards of your position in society to have a respectable vehicle. Show up in a grungy old Land Rover, or worse, a VW microbus, and people will judge you, even though either type is eminently repairable and can be kept running for generations. But most of us pay $200, $300, or $400 a month for the privilege of owing a nice $20,000, $25,000 or $30,000 middle-class car that will run for ten years at most without problems, and more likely just five or seven, plus the interest, plus the $600 of insurance and about the same in taxes a year. So a middle-class vehicle that won't shame you at your middle-class workplace might easily cost $6,000 or $7,000 a year, before you've put even a gallon of gas in it. Which is more than 10% of the average household income in the USA.

And many families have two or three such vehicles.

And no-one who holds down one of these normal middle class jobs has the time to learn how to fix their own vehicles, or has the time to fix it even if they know how, to get out of the trap. I only have the time because college professors get a lot of free time in the summer, and I only know how because I was a blue-collar, working-class mechanic long before I was a white-collar, middle-class college professor. But even we pay for this time in spades in the term time. If I started dismantling either of our other two vehicles on a Saturday morning during term time, and for some reason couldn't get it back together before Monday morning, there'd be hell to pay around here.

I wasn't joking when I referenced the vehicle-industrial system. It's actually a form of insidious low-grade slavery, whereby millions of human beings are laboring long hours at tedious paper-pushing jobs to make the money to pay for the stupid and gas-guzzling vehicles that get them to their tedious paper-pushing jobs.

I'm perfectly content to spend another day in the Great Farm sun today puttering with the ABS system on this Camry, if it means we have a chance, and a good one at that, to escape ten- or twenty-percent slavery for seven years, or at least reduce it to five per cent or less for eighteen months. That's not a hard trade at all. Just another contribution to my project to have all our debts and this house paid off before retirement.

Before early retirement, if I have my best druthers. I get a gratuity and a 1/3 RAF pension at age 60. That ought to allow me to reduce my workload at least, if not retire outright.

And if, by futzing here and there with the truck and the Ford too, rather than writing either of them off, I can keep each going for a few years yet, and have a third vehicle around here on standby for whenever we need it, I can probably use those facts too, to help keep us out of the system.

Being free and independent of the system, so we can chart our own course, grow our own food in the Great Farm soil, in the Great Farm sun, look after our own house and belongings, make our own decisions, when we want to make them, and not be slaves, ten- or twenty-percent, or otherwise, to the system, to The Man.

That's the goal here.