Once in a while I get to be useful…

I mean in a “not just scut work” kind of way. Met with D this afternoon at a neighbor’s who had some telephone poles he wanted rid of. L wants to build a horse arena, and phone poles make excellent corner posts. We cut them into 10′ lengths and used the neighbor’s tractor to hoist them into D’s big flatbed trailer.

I didn’t bring my chainsaw, because D said we’d use his. But when we fired it up the chain bound and the saw wouldn’t work. “You’re the mechanic,” he said, handing it to me. Turned out to be no big thing, just somebody had installed the chain wrong and it tied up on the drive sprocket, but it would have been a mystery if I hadn’t spent so much time fixing saws. Once in a while that year and a half I spent in the repair shop when I first moved out here comes in handy.

We got ten ten-foot lengths of telephone pole cut and stacked, drove them to D&L’s to unload them. On the way there, Little Bear whined and delivered himself of a devastatingly noisome fart. If he’d done it in Syria we’d have gotten droned by Obama right on the spot. Poor guy’s gut has really been acting up lately. So we had to stop and get out of the Jeep for a quick walky. He was a good boy, did his business with great relief while Ghost gave me no trouble about staying in the Jeep. Then we loaded up again and finished with the poles.

Now I’ve got to go to Landlady’s and do something cruel. Those five Cornish pullets she brought up a few weeks ago are ready to slaughter – indeed they’re positively grotesque. They’re the same age as my new RIR pullets but several times the size. They can barely walk on their little immature legs. They’re correspondingly docile, and I’m gonna feel kinda bad about caging them this evening. Tomorrow afternoon they get the hatchet and I swear in this case it’s pretty much putting them out of their misery, but caging them for the night so they’ll empty their crops and guts always scares them. Unless it’s a chicken that’s gotten on my nerves, it makes me feel like a less than nice person.

Still, that’s where meat comes from.

ETA: Bless his heart, James Dean stood up for the pullets I’ve never seen him deign to notice. Of the two Brahma cocks, he’s the one I elected to let live because he wasn’t always attacking me when my back was turned. Once in a while, but not always.

But after I’d shoved two of the protesting Cornish pullets into a cage and while I was capturing a third, he fluffed himself up and charged to the rescue – to my face, not my back. I just knocked him aside and went on with my business, but didn’t repay his attack with the usual kick. I kinda had this one coming.