Moving day … and putting goats on hold

Today the first boxes from the old house move to the new. Today we’re moving the kitchen and most of the “non-furniture” items in the entire house except for the office. The movers come Thursday for the big stuff.

Yes, it’s really happening. I am moving onto horse property.

There’s still a lot to be done over there, but it’s OK for now. The two horses who lived there when I bought the place have moved next-door, and my friend’s horse and goat will move soon after. 300 feet of privacy fencing is about two-thirds in. The secure six-foot chain-link yard within the yard area to secure and protect the dogs will go in next, with the added bonus of making sure the dogs aren’t ever in a position to bother anyone else, neighbor or livestock on my property or others. I don’t expect any problems, but I don’t want any problems, either. I always have my dogs behind not one but two lines of locked gates, because I never want any accidental roaming or loss.

The privacy fence, running along the line between the side and back of the property, blocks off my view of my only adjacent neighbors. It’s nothing personal, but I just wanted to feel a little more private than it was before. The neighbor on the other side is on the other side of my big pasture, and he’s building a home in the back of his two acres so it’s not like having a neighbor at all.

The barn still needs work — and I’m reconfiguring the stalls a little — and the pasture will need to be graded and seeded before the rains come back. The house needs a new HVAC system, and that will also happen in the fall. Other than that, it’s all pretty safe and very comfortable for us all, and we’ll be moved by the end of the week.

Then I have to get the contractor in to get my old house ready for the rental market.

By June 1 the dogs, cat, chickens/ducks and horses will be moved in with me (the dogs/cat move with me this week, of course), but there’s one addition I’ve put on hold for a while: two goats.

I want to have a pair of dairy goats, and even went so far as to call on a pair of well-bred yearling Nigerian dwarf does I found for sale. But I think I’m going to have my hands full with the adjustments (and my regular work!) all summer, so the goat expansion is on hold at least until fall.

A Mr. Ed moment

Took the retrievers out to visit Patrick (a/k/a Teh Spotted Ass) and Haggin yesterday. I thought I would tell Patrick the good news that he’s back to being a trail horse. He didn’t say much.

My friend Mary Cvetan sent along her suggestion for what he said. Then she shared the pic with a blank bubble.

Your turn!

More color

The “fancy” wall in the kitchen:

I’m thinking of using this chair rail, stained in a medium grain with the leaves painted.

Cleaning house

A week and a day ago, the housemate left rather abruptly.

The situation wasn’t ideal to begin with. He was a former co-worker who wasn’t having any luck finding a job and had been living with his dog in his car. I needed a house-sitter for a two-month book tour starting this time last year, and asking him seemed ideal. And it was, but when I returned he still had no job, no money and no place to go. I had spare bedroom, so he stayed. The months rolled on that way, and since he’s a decent fellow and not that hard to live with, I just really couldn’t make him leave. I knew he wanted to leave, and when he got a job he would. But with the economy and all … he just stayed. And stayed. And stayed.

In the last couple of months I knew I wanted my space to myself again, but I felt awful about making him go. The chance of a  clean break with the move to the new place seemed right for the change, but I still couldn’t quite do it, and I told him he could move. And then … I tossed and turned for three nights, unhappy with my decision.

I told him he wasn’t going to the new place, and shortly after, he left for good. It was not a happy parting.

I have felt more relief than sadness, even though I know he is no better off now then before he moved in. Every day I feel more happy than the day before for having my home back, and happier still to know that I won’t be sharing the new home with anyone except the short-term guests I can’t wait to welcome for short-term visits… and of course all my animals.

But even at the new place, the eviction notices have been handed out. My friend’s horse and goat are just waiting for fences to go up at her new place, and they’ll be gone. And the young woman who has been boarding her two old geldings has a little more than a month now to move them.

I move in three weeks, and I want my place to myself and my own animals.

The chickens and ducks will be first of the livestock to move. My trail horse, Patrick, moves in shortly after. He was going to be my hunter-jumper, but that doesn’t seem to be much to his liking. Fortunately, my horse-trainer is smart about listening to what a horse is telling her.

Patrick went to Alana three months ago to see if he could change to a hunter-jumper. Not long after, I sent Haggin, the trashed racehorse, back to her as well for a tune-up, figuring he’d become  a pasture pet at my new home, with maybe some light riding.

But that’s not the way it’s working out at all.

Patrick loves to jump, but hates arena work. He will likely return to the Western life  as my trail horse. And Haggin has recovered from his racing injuries better than anyone could have imagined. He’ll never jump, but one of the assistants has been riding him every day and he shows promise in low-level dressage. He is such a social, people-loving horse that he has bloomed in the barn environment. He’ll be staying at Sunfire, even though I bought my horse property with the idea of never paying boarding again. He’s happy there, and that’s what matters to me. I’ll ride him under my trainer’s eye in her arena.

As for Patrick … he won’t be alone at my new place long. I’ll be fostering off-track thoroughbreds for my trainer, one at a time, providing a quiet, small pasture for horses with second career promise, but who just need six months or more of rest before moving on to their new lives.

I’m already researching the addition of a pair of milk goats.

Sad to say it, but it’s always less complicated to give a helping hand to an animal in need than a person.

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Image: Haggin wants a cookie, Sunfire Equestrian Center

Color

The first house I bought wasn’t painted inside until I put it up for sale, 15 years after I bought it. It had been freshly painted before being put on the market, so I just left it … white. The house I’m in now was “staged” in a relatively inoffensive (if too fussy for my taste) style, so haven’t done anything much with it, either, except pull up carpets and paint the two bedrooms. (One of which was pastel pink; the other staged for a toddler complete with baby-girl borders.)

In both places, I did a minor make-over to put in a home office, but that’s kind of a separate issue — I can live with almost anything, but I can’t work that way. In fact, the single biggest factor in me finally leaving my last job was the horrid, dark and depressing little cubicle I was given a few months before I left. I begged to be moved, to no avail. So when I realized I could make it as a free-lance writer, I left for the natural light and soothing sage of my home office. I don’t know many people who’d quit over a cubicle, but I just couldn’t work in place they stuck me. It made me hate being there, which I’d never experienced before.

But painting wasn’t an option at Rancho Buena Fe´ — it was a necessity.  Such is the nature of a fixer, I suppose. Everything except the kitchen was done in sort of a peach, but that looked to be a while ago. In the kitchen, the wallpaper and molding said ’60s, and not in a hipster-retro way, either.  The walls and the floors were worn, stained and faded, and I just couldn’t move into it like that.

The real reason why I never painted before wasn’t because the paint was fresh enough to live with — although that was surely part of it. But I find when thinking about my home that I’m overwhelmed by choices. Paint? The choices are endless, and I just can’t decide.

I found a good painter, though, and we talked about color in terms of what I wanted to accomplish in each room, and what was the overall “theme” of the home. (Painter: Erin Van Ohlsen, Agape Painting.) All I knew was that I wanted “bold” colors, lots of green (it is a small farm, after all), and a blue bedroom. By the time we were done, we’d chosen 12 different colors, not including white for the ceilings and trim, but almost all of them are related shades of sage green, with different accent walls. My bedroom is the only room with no green at all.

The kitchen is the only room left to be painted. If the rest of the house is any indication, I’m going to love it. Only one room — the guest bedroom — was a “misfire,” and that just happens to be the one where I overruled Erin’s suggestion. Easy to fix, since the problem was the accent wall, now repainted.

I like it all so much I’m now wishing I’d painted in my previous two homes.

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Top image: I never would have picked the dark orangey-brown, but it’s my favorite wall of them all.

Middle  image: Most walls are variations on sage green; here, the darker is the living room (the color meets the orangey-brown, shown above), and the lighter is carried down the hall to the bedrooms.

Bottom image: Blue bedroom with brown accent wall. The floors are in bad shape, and will be painted in a distressed mottled farmhouse brown in the general vicinity of this “espresso” brown.

Pissing on the boundaries

The house had been empty for a few months before I bought it. The widow of the couple who built the home and raised four children there had gone to live with her daughter, and then passed away. With a minor kitchen remodel and a lot of paint, I have had no problem feeling as if the home will soon be mine. In part, that’s because the daughter has been so welcoming.

But the barn? That’s another matter entirely. And this week, after a couple months of gentle messaging, I had to make it clear that I do, in fact, own the entire property.

The previous owner had rented out the barn and pasture to a veterinary student with two aging horses. I told her before I bought the house that the horses could stay, because I know how stressed and broke a veterinary student can be, and because I admired her care of her two pasture pets, along with the barn cats and a rooster who took a piece out of my friend Jeff before being relocated.

I suppose things would have eventually come to a head after I moved in (which I will in about three weeks), but I brought conflict in a little ahead of schedule by telling a friend who needed a place to put her horse and goat for a while that she could use my place.

She hastily put up a small paddock for the two, and I told the veterinary student that if she would feed my friend’s animals, she would not need to pay any board. I could tell she didn’t like the arrangement, but I suspect she realized she didn’t have much choice but to go along.

The arrangement is far from perfect.  As I got closer to my move-in date, I realized that I needed to claim the place as my own, and told her that she needed to start looking for a new boarding arrangement elsewhere. Within two months I intend to bring my horses over, and so the boarders all have to be gone by then.

Two months is pretty fair notice, I thought. It’s also after her finals. I know my decisions made her unhappy, but I felt I needed to make it.  My horse are being boarded through the end of May, and then … they’re coming home.

I felt guilty about giving her the eviction notice. She’s a kind young woman who’s doing the best she can for her horses (as well as the barn cats and the rooster, the latter now living next-door). But the undercurrents of friction over my feeling like an intruder in my own barn were wearing me down. I have felt more welcome on the properties where I have boarded horses than on the property I myself own.

While the veterinary student has been taking loving care of her own horses, the other two animals needed more than she had time for. Yesterday the horse — a former racer — was jumping out of his skin in the small paddock, so I decided to turn him out in the pasture. Because I worried for the oldest horse, I put him into the small paddock for protection, then stayed around long enough to see that everyone else got along.

They did for at least the next 90 minutes, but later, a neighbor saw one horse chasing another. The vet student was called, came over and restored the previous order, putting my friend’s horse and goat back in the small paddock and turning her horses loose on the rest.  This morning, I found the gate on the small paddock secured not only with the usual cord and chain, but also with knotted bailing twine.

She apparently intends for my friend’s horse and goat to never be let out again. I have no doubt the twine was subconscious on her part, but I got the message.

I moved the friend’s horse and goat onto the smaller of my two pastures, and put the vet student’s two horses on the larger. Each side has a stall, and on each side there is room for animals to move freely.

I closed the gate between the two pastures,  and I sent a text to all parties describing my decision. I hate being such a hardass about things, but sometimes you find even when everyone is trying hard to do what’s best, it just isn’t going to work anymore. The horses currently in residence will need to go.

Image: Dix, one of three short-timers at Rancho Buena Fe´ — and the one who finally provoked me into establishing my ownership rights. Dix belongs to a friend, and is hanging out at my place while she puts up fences at hers.

Flea, damn flies!

Flies are the bane of any barn. They make the horses miserable, and aren’t exactly a pleasure for the people. With spring just spring, I’m hitting them hard, with fly predators and feed-through preventives. I will add fly traps as well, and, finally, pesticides if I have to.

And, of course, aggressive manure control.

Since I live on the property, this is a battle I aim to win.

The fly predators arrive this week!

Community

I don’t watch a lot of TV. No time, and really, if I’m going to waste what little I have, I tend to spend it online. But I always seem to have a couple of shows to which I become completely addicted. They’ve ranged from “Toddlers and Tiaras”  to “Glee” to “The Office” (American version, never as good as the original, but pleasant enough). Those kinds of shows are my transitory escapist entertainment fixations. The shows I’ve watched for decades — and probably always will — are things like “Frontline,” “American Experience” and “Nova.”

All of my most current batch of lightweight fair have jumped the shark. “T&T” just got too depressing, and quickly became a reason to demand changes to our unerstanding of (and laws regarding) child abuse.  “Glee” was really a break-out show that normalized the idea that LGBT kids are just …  kids, with some good-to-great singing/dancing thrown in by a cast that was hard-pressed to pass for teens when the series began, and really can’t manage the feat anymore. The only reason I still watch “Glee” is so I can enjoy BFF Christie Keith’s exceptionally entertaining recaps at AfterElton.com. “The Office”? Once you’re put your all your eggs in the “gotta the girl” basket, it’s over.

My fixation these days is with “Community,” which may be one of the best shows I’ve ever seen (time will tell), in a league with the short-lived, much missed “Sports Night” (“Sports Night” got bonus points because one of the characters had worked the sports desk at The Sacramento Bee, as did I.) The heart of both shows is great writing, and not coincidentally, an underlying theme of the importance of the family we choose vs. the family we’re born to.

I love my family, but I honestly don’t have much in common with them. I stopped attending family gatherings a year ago Thanksgiving when my teenaged nephew told a racist joke about Pres. Obama, and no one called him out on it — except me. I’m sure they’re much happier without me at the table, and I can certainly say that’s true for me. I love them and I’m there for them, and they’re probably there for me. We talk, we see each other in short bursts. But that’s probably enough for us all.

But then, there’s the family I’ve chosen.

These are folks who generally believe in making the world better in one way or another, and they’re optimistic, open-minded, critical thinkers who believe in the value of verifiable evidence in supporting their views. While you might suspect that many are progressives, quite a few are not.  I don’t care, never have, and a long as we’re drawing from actual facts, we can always disagree on what those facts mean. It’s the talking-points folks (left or right) who let others “think” for them that I can’t abide, not people who disagree with me thoughtfully.

My friends are a far-flung lot, and many of us keep in touch electronically. It is indeed amazing how many I have met in person, whether that has meant me going overseas or them turning up in California. We are writers, scientists, techies, attorneys, academics, veterinarians, farmers/ranchers, teachers, chefs, horse- or dog-trainers, groomers, builders, ministers, photographers, artists and a smattering of people so eclectic in their pursuits I just can’t categorize them.

Many of them will be a part of Rancho Buena Fe´, even if they never set foot on the place. My communities — my family — are what have brought me to this place.

It is not by coincidence that one of the first things I’ll be doing is serving as the host of a staging area for a buyers’ group that supports local farmers/ranchers. The first step of community service — but by no means the last.

I hope to keep that guest bedroom full, almost all the time.

The great poop giveaway

I have two pastures at Rancho Buena Fe´, neither of them what you would call large. The larger of the two, where the barn is, is maybe half an acre, maybe a little more. The smaller, which is directly behind the house, is about a third of an acre.  Plenty for a nice urban farm, but not exactly room for a lot of animals.

I’m going to have to be very careful about my use of the space to get the most out of it and keep everyone happy, and perhaps more importantly, very aggressive about staying on top of waste management.

Shit happens, a lot. Especially when you have horses.

There are three horses on the place now, and two of them have been there for quite a while. Their owner has been extremely diligent about keeping the pastures clean, but she hasn’t had any place to put what she picks up. So for months, she has been carefully putting it in a pile that runs along the back of the property, turns and starts towards the front. At this point, it’s maybe a couple hundred feet long.

That’s the manure pile in the picture (image by Anne Williams). When he was replacing the septic tank. the backhoe operator tilled some of it under. But there’s really just too much, and of course, the horses are making more manure every day. While my long-term plans for manure management aren’t yet set, I decided to try to get rid of the backlog.

I took a friend’s suggestion and offered free manure on Craigslist. The response has been pretty good: This Saturday, four different people are coming to get a truckload or two. That should make a pretty big dent.

Manure is clearly a popular thing in the spring.  Yesterday afternoon while I was checking out the latest round of work, a car pulled to a halt and a couple in their 60s got out. In broken English, the woman asked me if they could fill their buckets with horse manure. I finally got that they were recently moved here from Uzbekistan, of all places, and they had a garden in the backyard of their rental home. While her husband filled the buckets, the wife told showed me pictures of her tomatoes from last year on her phone. “Half a pound each!” she said. “I brought the seeds from home!”

She promised to bring me back some seedlings for this year, and I told her I’d have chickens later if she wanted eggs. “Fresh eggs!” she cried, and I nodded. “And chickens?” she said, making a twisting motion with her hands. “Maybe later,” I said, because in fact, I am going to have some meat birds eventually.

“Ah,” she said. “I’m accountant, but in Uzbekistan, even accountant knows how to kill chicken.”

Of that, I have no doubt.

Laundry confessions

I grew up in a generation where the smart, going-somewhere girls took shop classes instead of Home Ec ones. Because, see, we had no interest in being housewives. Mothers? Maybe, but the “drudgery” of the home? Pass!

In retrospect, it would have been better had we all — girls and boys both — learned to cook, sew and do the laundry. Because those skills would have gone much further than being able to tear down and rebuild a lawn-mower engine, which is what I learned (and have long since forgotten) in my high-school shop class. My truck, Mighty the Tundra? It has more computer parts than my iPad. Good luck fixing THAT.

Maybe I should have chosen wood shop? Carpentry skills I could still use. Basic electric repairs, too. And If I had to do it all over, I guarandamtee-ya I wouldn’t have laughed at the 4-H and FFA kids — I’d have been one of them. Dorky green kerchiefs and all.

As I work my way back to the basics, I’m finding small pleasures I’d never have imagined about doing some things myself, but there still those I will never love.

Top of the list?

Laundry.

It’s not that I haven’t tried. I popped for the hardcover version of housework historian/fetishist Cheryl Mendelson’s Laundry: The Home Comforts Book of Caring for Clothes and Linens. A fascinating read — be grateful that you weren’t born into the social class of laundry workers in the age before washing machines — but comforting it was not.

While I now know much more than before about the physics and chemistry of laundry, I still find no pleasure in sorting clothes, putting them into the fancy-pants front-load washer, transferring them into the matching fancy-pants front-load dryer, and finally folding (I hate that the most!) and putting them away. You know what? Just typing all that made me want to go find something else more interesting to do, like cleaning the litter box.

Back in the free-spending days of a well-paying 9-to-5 job, I honestly admit that I sometimes bought new socks and underwear rather than tackle the pile of laundry in my closet. Being a tight-budgeted free-lance writer has changed that particular habit, but it hasn’t cured me of the most embarrassing one of all:

Sometimes I send my laundry out.

I’m guessing this is one of those things what women often feel guilty about, but men never would. I finally  admitted to my mother that I had an abortion, years ago and very few regrets, but I don’t tell her I get so far behind on the laundry that I send it out a few times a year. I don’t even have the excuse of not having machines: As noted, previously, I have a near-new high-efficiency set, and they’re not more than 15 feet from where I’m typing now. In the new house it’ll be even worse: While now they’re in an attached garage, at Rancho Buena Fe´ I asked the contractor to convert an area near the back door to an indoor laundry room.

Despite that, I’ll still send the laundry out a few times a year. I just know it.

I did just that yesterday. I woke up stressed, behind and very, very sick. And the only thing that offered the prospect of making me feel immediately better was not looking at 150 pounds of laundry in my bedroom. So I asked the housemate to take it all away. Hours later, it all came back:

Hot damn! Now if it would only put itself away.