Tag Archives: humor

Writergrrrl vs the Dastardly Drysuit

Posted on March 10, 2017 | Leave a comment

There can be only one winner… and something tells me it wasn’t me…

For some reason I thought it would be a good idea to get myself a drysuit – you know, in case I am invited to go surfing in Antarctica. I found one, really cheap, online. This was my attempt to put the stupid thing on.

Warning: Best not watch this with a mouthful of coffee… I can’t be responsible for any damage your keyboard might suffer as a result.

Curious how I got out again? Pop on over to Patreon and sign up to be a Patron. There’s a sequel that only Patrons get to see… Escape from the Dastardly Drysuit.

When a Field Becomes a Bog and Eats a Big Truck

Posted on March 20, 2014 | 9 comments

We have had a lot of rain here recently. The ground is saturated and at our place, winter springs have appeared in places where we’ve never seen them before. Being on a hill, most of our water runs off and causes standing water problems elsewhere. Over at Maypenny Farm (the destination for the young hogs), the field where we were to drop off the hog shelter looked deceptively field-like but, in fact, was more like a deep bog disguised with a top crust of soil and grass.

The field didn’t look so very wet…

It didn’t take long for things to get sticky… one minute we were inching along…

And the next minute, we were stuck fast!

Sinking fast!

We tried backing out… moving forward and over to the right where the ground looked a bit firmer, but no luck. Even in low gear and four wheel drive, there was just a lot of tire spinning and no movement in any direction except deeper.

MC – Considering the options. Going back to Germany was looking pretty good at this point…

It was pretty obvious we weren’t going to be able to haul the trailer anywhere – the tongue was buried in the mud – so we jacked it up and took it off, thinking that if we could get the truck out we might be able to drag the trailer backwards from behind…

I called home to see if someone could bring us a couple of sandwiches… They arrived half an hour later just as we were getting the horse trailer pried off the truck hitch.

We scrounged around and found a heap of old bricks, some scrap wood, and piles of brush. We made a crude ‘road’ in front and managed to squirm forward about ten feet before sinking even deeper into even wetter territory.

At this point, the residents of Maypenny had come out to see what was going on and we were a couple of hours into our ordeal… More backing and forthing and digging and hauling of rocks to try to create a more stable ‘road’ for the truck to get a grip on… the end result of which was sinking deeper into the muddy water.

It is at this point in any bog meets truck ordeal that one calls in the friendly neighbour with a tractor.

Because the access to the field was sort of narrow and huge boulders were strategically strewn around to create an obstacle course, our initial thought of trying to pivot the trailer around before pulling it out of the way was thwarted.

The drama intensified as ominous clouds rolled in. Pulling the trailer back by hooking it to the tractor bucket didn’t work too well… so we turned the tractor around, jacked up the front of the trailer a little higher, and wedged a spare tire under the tongue.

This provided a bit of bounce and protection to the trailer jack as we hauled the trailer backwards, dragging it to safety…

Note that four hours or so after arriving in the field, the hog hut is still sitting in the horse trailer!! So much for being ahead of schedule…

With the trailer out of the way, we still had to haul the truck out. Chains, ropes, etc. were stretched from tractor to bumper, more rocks, brush, bricks, boards, etc. were strategically place and slowly but surely, the tractor pulled the truck to high ground.

As you might expect, the truck was completely coated in mud… Unfortunately, because we had the windows open for screaming at each other purposes, the inside of the truck looked just about as bad as the outside!

With truck and trailer on solid ground once again, we re-hitched and tootled down the road to the house end of the property and then stopped traffic while we backed into the driveway and up to the lawn. MC and I crawled into the trailer and shoved the hut out (this part was much easier than we had anticipated) and with all the extra bodies that had shown up for this mud-wrestling spectacle, we slid the hog hut over the lawn and into the new field.

Mission accomplished!

All that remained to do was to go back to our place and pick up the hogs. If, however, you have ever tried to move a pack of teenaged hogs, you will know this is no quick and easy job. By this point, our daylight had pretty well faded away, so we had to postpone the fence-erection/hog retrieval part of the operation for another day. I’ll spare you the details of all that (suffice it to say that MC and AB were HEROES and somehow we got the job done!!)

Happy hoglets in their new field. They are clearing it out and rototilling this area so Maypenny Farm can expand their market garden growing area.

9 Comments

Posted in Blog, Pigs, Uncategorized

Tagged farm life, humor, moving pigs, portable hog housing, workaway

Shoehorning a Portable Hog Shelter Into a Horse Trailer – Where’s the Bear Grease?

Posted on March 17, 2014 | 9 comments

After building the most lovely of hog shelters, MC and I had to figure out how to move it up to the road and into a vehicle for transport over to the new hog field at Maypenny Farm. We hitched the truck to the ‘tow bar’ on the hog hut and dragged it up the hill. Easy peasy! The heavy duty runners (built out of posts that once held up our old deck) slipped over the gravel like an Olympic skier skims through powder. Maybe not quite like that, but it was way easier than I thought it was going to be and the next thing I knew I was zipping around the block to pick up the horse trailer. Hitching was a snap with MC giving extremely accurate and precise hand signals (in Germany, there’s some sort of license specifically for anyone who wants to haul trailers around… part of the prep for taking the license test involves learning a very effective hitching communications system…). Before I knew it I was back up on the road in front of the house and had backed the trailer up to the hog hut… I was humming at this point, smugly thinking we were ahead of schedule. Hah!!

Even with the metal roof off, it was quickly obvious just how tight a squeeze it was going to be to shoehorn the hog hut into the horse trailer.

If we had been lifting in something the size of a dog crate, we would have been laughing – a sixteenth of an inch on either side is plenty of wiggle room. When the structure in question weighs… well, a lot, it took some German ingenuity and lot of good humour to rig up a system to haul that sucker aboard.

I kept finding myself thinking of the anonymous souls who used ramps and pulleys and levers and who knows what to build the pyramids and erect Stonehenge as we improvised a ramp using a couple of planks and attached a come-along to the tow bar of the hog hut at one end and the steel divider inside the trailer at the other. There followed an awful lot of pushing and heaving and ho-ing and grunting and levering to inch it up the planks until it wedged firmly against the back of the trailer frame.

More shoving, wiggling, jiggling, prying, squeezing and cajoling followed until finally, the hut was persuaded to board the bus…

At this point in the proceedings, the hog hut was well and truly jammed half in and half out of the trailer. Somewhere in behind the hut is a trapped German…

MC is 6′ 8″ tall and it was quite the feat of contortionism for him to squeeze past the stuck hut and escape… Our task was not yet complete, however. The hut was just a bit too long to shove all the way in without first removing the heavy steel divider to which the come-along had been fastened. More hammering, prying, lifting, and a bit of sweating followed before we were able to remove the divider and get it out of the way. The hut was so heavy and jammed in pretty tightly that we couldn’t budge it without help from the come-along. So… MC gallantly plunged under the horse trailer…

He was able to fasten the come-along to the underside of the trailer frame and with a bit of cranking and more shoving we were able to squeeze that thing inside and shut the door! We were no longer ahead of schedule, but we were on our way. Little did we know what traumas awaited us at the other end where, we learned, loading the hog hut was going to be the easiest part of a very long day.

Stay tuned for the next installment in the “Let’s Get Those Hogs Moved” saga…

9 Comments

Posted in Blog, Pigs, Uncategorized, workaway

Tagged farm, horse trailer, humor, pig housing, portable hog hut, workaway

Hog House Par Excellence

Posted on March 15, 2014 | 6 comments

I’m not exactly sure how this has happened, but ever since the international volunteers have started to come I’ve been busier than ever!! What is most excellent about this state of affairs is the number of things that are getting ticked off the To-Do list!!

One of the big jobs that really needed to be done was to finally get the weaners (now growers, soon to be finishers) moved over to Maypenny Farm. I had managed to sort out enough electric fencing, a battery and battery-powered fence charger to make a decent-sized grazing area, but the hogs really needed a good sturdy shelter that could be dragged around from place to place in the field as we moved the pigs from one pasture area to the next.

When MC arrived, it was quickly obvious he was a handy guy. He also fast figured out that my building efforts were not always exactly square and level. Our conversation considering how we might proceed with building a new hog hut went something like this:

Me: So, do you think we could build a small hog house? Sturdy, moveable, weather-resistant… up off the ground…

MC: Sure. No problem. I must warn you, though: I like to make things perfect. [Remember, MC is an engineering student back in Germany.]

Me; [Keep in mind that my farm outbuildings are not exactly perfect – more like rickety, cobbled together structures that defy gravity and windstorms because if you use enough binder twine, zap straps, and duct tape, you can actually make something that’s remarkably difficult to deconstruct.] Do you think I would drive you crazy if we worked together?

MC: [Exceedingly politely] I am happy to work alone.

Poor MC. I don’t think he fully realized that the project would not start with a trip to the lumber yard. Instead, we collected together a pile of shipping pallets and I showed him where the heaps of scrap lumber and tin roofing were stashed (leftovers from the renovation) and gave him the nod. It’s not that easy to build something square and solid and neat when you are starting with experienced raw material that has just spent a winter under inadequate cover.

Undeterred, MC set to work. There was a great deal of banging and the whirring and whizzing of power tools. After a remarkably short amount of time, I discovered THIS in the back yard!!

German engineering on the farm… the new, fully-portable hog hut.

Tuulen checking out the ramp into the new hog hut…

Undercarriage of the new hut… designed to be strong enough to pull behind the truck.

Alas, it has been so wet since the structure got its walls we haven’t been able to paint it, but the building itself is GREAT!! At this point in the process, the hut was behind our house – a distance of about five kms from its intended new home. This meant we had to somehow move it from our farm over to Maypenny.

Turns out if you build something solid enough to withstand being dragged around by the truck and rubbed against by hefty hogs, then its final weight is eighty-seven tons. More or less. Keep in mind our house is on quite a steep hill and the road is above the spot where the hut was built and we had our first challenge – how to move the hut from the building site to the road so we could then attempt to load it… somewhere. Into the back of the truck? (the canopy could come off… twelve burly men or a crane could show up…)

When we realized it wasn’t practical to lift this heavy-duty 87-ton hulking hog hut into the back of the truck we decided to drag it up to the road using a strong rope and my big truck and then somehow get it into the horse trailer.

It’s late and I’m bagged, so you’ll need to stay tuned for how that played out… Let’s just say that there is a very good reason why this blog hasn’t heard much from me over the past week or so… It turns out that moving a German-engineered hog house from A to B is not exactly a five minute job… Nor, for that matter, is convincing five teenaged hog boys that they would be happy leaving home in the pouring rain to be re-settled in a hog hut somewhere over in the next valley…