Not Dead in the Heart of Dixie (20 page)

She's eighteen years old. We can't tell her not to live in her motorhome or where to park it, and we're not about to give her a five-gallon gas can and tell her to be on her way.

I'm going out to do a load of laundry before supper. See ya!

10:15 PM...

Nana baked two loaves of homemade bread in the
cook stove oven today. She mixed up a conglomeration of chunk chicken with mayo and re-hydrated dried apple slices. She also threw in some walnuts from the pantry.

That chicken salad was yummy on her homemad
e bread. We had that for supper along with a bunch of half-moon shaped fried apple pies.

Nana used dried apples that she'd cooked down to mush with enough brown sugar and cinnamon 'til it tasted "right." She put a couple
spoonfuls in the center of a flattened piece of biscuit dough and folded the dough over, sealing the edges with a fork. She fried those little half-moon pies in lard and butter. They were dee-licious and I had memories from my childhood, when my great grandma used to make them, come rushing back. It made me feel warm and safe.

Mick says the delivery truck was completely empty. I told him that the military guys probably got anything that was in there.

He had an empty gas can and filled it by siphoning diesel fuel from the delivery truck's tank.

Mick and the boys headed home with the propane
canisters. They stopped at the pull-off for Diane's motorhome, and Jeremy drove it to Caleb's house. It's parked back in the trees and has one of the big propane canisters hooked up. Diane has her motorhome, and heat, and she's sleeping there tonight.

Jeremy and Jason will head back to TSC tomorrow for more fencing and whatever else i
s left. I told them to check the bathrooms for toilet paper.

Before we went to bed, Mick pulled something from his pocket and handed it to me. It was that little crystal dragonfly from the display case in the gas station. Lord, I love that man.

I'm crawling in bed to snuggle up with Mick and go to sleep. Tomorrow, I'll need to do laundry. He wants to work on the water situation. We're down to half of what I had stored. We are now water desperadoes.

Bye for now.

Monday, January 20

I'm a new grandma. Yep, one of the does gave birth to healthy triplets this morning.

I heard a doe yelling as I was walking to the kitchen to make coffee. I've heard that kind of "yell" many times, so I grabbed my coat and headed to the barn. I grabbed my cigarettes and lighter on the way out. I have four packs of cigarettes left and I'm trying to make them last. I know, I know, don't preach.

Jason already had the laboring doe in one of the kidding stalls. We watched her push for about ten minutes before the first little booger came sliding out. I grabbed a paper towel, wiped off its nose, cleared
its mouth, and handed it back over to its mother. While she was cleaning it, I checked underneath and saw that it was a buckling.

A few minutes later, she started pushing again. It gets a little crazy at this point because she's trying to push out another baby, and the first one is yelling 'cause he wants to get up and find the milk factory. The poor doe is caught between
trying to get the next one here and comforting the one already on the ground. She finally gave it all she had and another little booger shot out. The third kid came out right behind the second. They are both doelings. Yay!

Doe, and kids, are all doing fine. T
hey're up on their feet and had their breakfast before I had mine. The human kids are begging to go out and hold them, but I told them they’d have to wait a few hours because the doe needs a little recovery and bonding time with her new babies. We'll raise the buckling for meat. We've never used any of our goats for meat, but times have changed.

Diane loves
the new babies. She had plans to start college next fall, to study veterinary medicine. She wants to care for the babies and do the milking. I'm not gonna argue about that, and I'll bet Jason won't argue either. I immediately told her that the buckling's name is "BBQ," but she could name the doelings whatever she wants to name them..

She helped me clip the navel cords and dip them in iodine. Jason buried the placenta out in the woods (so predators don't come around) and cleaned the stall. He went back to chopping wood while I put down fresh bedding and made sure momma goat had clean water and an extra cup of food in her dish.

Diane's out there now, watching the new babies. I'm in here to make breakfast before I start on laundry.

We'll have fresh goat milk starting next week. Yahoo!

2:00 PM...

We think the water situation is resolved, for the moment.

This morning, while baby goats were being born, Mick and Pop used several bags of
quick Crete to pour a "dam" around a 6" PVC pipe.

Remember
that little stream in the woods? The one that runs right down the hill with our property line? Mick and Pop dammed up the stream with mud and sand about twenty feet above the spot where they want the permanent dam.

Caleb and Michael were responsible for dipping out water at the temporary dam before it went over the top. They poured it into five-gallon buckets. Nana made sugar cookies for them to snack on while they were dipping water. They were relieved by Carisa and Merry about an hour after their "shift"
began. When they came in the door, they were soaked to the skin.

Mick and Pop cleaned the area for the pe
rmanent dam and placed a "form" they'd hammered together out of wood scraps. The 6" PVC pipe fits into the bottom of the form and comes out the other side. They mixed the quick-Crete and poured it in. Mick says he wants to wait 'til tomorrow to remove the form.

They glued, and clamped, three more 6" PV
C pipes to the pipe in the form and then, set up the above-ground pool in a two-foot deep hole they've been digging every spare moment they've had for the past few days. The pool is downhill from the permanent dam. Jeremy's been carrying the five-gallon buckets that get filled at the temporary dam and dumping them into the pool. So, there’s forty feet of pipe from the permanent dam to the pool. There’s concrete blocks every six feet, and the pipe is lying across them so it doesn't sag.

They tied together all the screens we
got from Mr. Peterson's house for the "lid." The end of the PVC pipe will lie directly on top of the screen and any water coming through will be screened before it drops into the pool.

The screens will keep leaves, branches, twigs, frogs, bugs and children out of the pool. I was worried abo
ut birds pooping on the screens and algae growing in the pool. Mick said he'll cover the whole thing with a tarp except the little area where the pipe sits, and add a little bleach to the pool to keep the algae down.

An
y dirt or debris that makes it through the screen will fall to the bottom of the pool before we dip water off the top. We'll run the water through our super-wham-a-dine Big Berky water filter that I bought on sale last year. The water will be placed in our empty blue barrels and treated with bleach. We'll continue using the water like we've been doing. Nana said she plans to boil any water she uses for cooking or drinking, and I'll do the same.

I pray this
works. There isn’t a huge amount of water flowing down that stream, except when it rains, but a small amount is better than no amount, right? The guys have plans to clear and widen the stream, if they need to, all the way to the top where it comes out of the hillside about 100 feet above our property line.

Hisa plans to go up for dipping duty and relieve Jeremy so he and Jason can go to TSC. I wish everyone could be in the house for supper, but we need at least two people on dipping duty, so we'll be taking turns. Maybe, after dark, Mick and I will let the dipping run
amuck while we do something more fun, ha ha.

We have a couple of
canned hams simmering in their own juices and crushed pineapple. They're precooked, but we'll simmer them 'til they're falling apart and have them with something or other for supper.

11:50 PM...

We all got a little crazy for a while.

Jeremy and Jason came back within two hours and had a good bit of fencing on the flatbed. They'll unload it tomorrow. There wasn't any propane tanks locked up in the back, but they did bring home two industrial half-rolls of toilet paper that they took from the bathrooms.

Nana said we could eat anytime. We were all hungry fro
m smelling the ham all day. Supper was gonna be early.

It was almost 4:30 and I was getting ready to eat when I heard another doe yelling. I told Nana to throw my food on a paper plate 'cause I was headed back to the barn. She threw a couple of biscuits with ham and a few green beans on a plate
. I pulled on my coat, grabbed a solar lantern, and went out the door, eatin' green beans with my fingers. We had a dipping crew, supper, and a goat obstetric crew all going at the same time.

Pop ate his supper
, anyway. The kids were ordered to sit at the table and eat with him. They were throwing a fit because they wanted to watch baby goats be born. Pop gave them a stern look and calmly said "We are going to sit at this table, and eat this supper that Nana has been working hard to prepare. We aren't going to say a word while we're doing it. Now, eat." They stopped talking and started eating.

The doe was having a little trouble but I let her try for thirty minutes before I lubed up my hand and went in. Hisa had to hold her around the neck while I was working on the back end of the situation.

There were two babies trying to come at once. I pushed the one who was farthest back even further back, and that freed up the first one to slip out. The doe didn't like that, but she'll get over it.

The first baby is a big doeling and the second is a small buckling. His name will be "BBQ2." They're doing fine and
they’ve had their supper. Mick cleaned up the icky stuff and I put down fresh straw and checked the water and food situation. We came back in to get near the fire and warm up.

Marisa
and Jason had their dipping turn later, and Mick and I took the turn after that. I can't say it was fun, but we did it anyway.

I'm totally exhausted, and I don't know who's on dipping duty. I'm going to bed before I fall over.

Bye for now.

Tuesday January 21

We're gonna "work at home" today.

Marisa and Nana plan to do the rest of the laundry.

Jeremy and Jason plan to unload the fencing and place it near the area we'll start with. They'll also be digging post holes.

Mick and Pop will remove the form and take down the temporary dam. We have quite a bit of water in the pool, from all the five-gallon buckets we've dumped in. After they
find out if the water plan works, they'll go over to the tractor shed at Caleb’s house and see if the Kubota runs, and determine what they need to do if it doesn't.

I'm making muffins for breakfast. I
wanna clean the cook stove before supper, so I'll let it burn out and take the coals to the laundry crew. We'll have finger foods for lunch.

I'll clean up the dishes, clean the bathrooms, and strip the beds so the sheets and blankets can be washed. I'll take the dirty linen out to the laundry crew.

Carisa and Merry will be in the basement, organizing food. They'll have help from the kids for as long as they can stand it.

I need to give the little kids a bath and wash their hair. Their dirty clothes will
be taken out to the laundry crew. They'll have to take turns helping Carisa and Merry because I want each of them to sit in front of the fireplace for a little while to dry their hair before they head back downstairs.

I'll also carry in
wood a little at a time to fill the wood box for the fireplace and the one in the kitchen beside the cook stove. Every surface in the house needs the dust wiped off, and all the things we have lying around need to be put back in their proper places.

Diane plans to muck out stalls, clean up the barn, and play with baby goats.

Soo and Hisa will be moving their stuff back up to their motorhome and they'll start roping off an area for a big garden. They plan to scope out the old Stang house and see how much wood it'll take to board up the bottom floor windows. They may want to live there after the fence is built.

W
e'll have baked potatoes with home canned chili, shredded cheddar, and chopped onion on top for supper, and we'll cook it on the motorhome stove if I'm not ready with the cook stove.

Gotta ru
n. I wanna finish everything before supper.

9:00 PM...

It was a good day.

The water plan works! We a
ll danced a little jig when the water started coming out of the pipe and trickling into the pool. We have water! Yay us! Mick and Pop watched it flow as they strutted like roosters around the pool. It was a great moment for the group. We all had a little extra spring in our step for the rest of the day.