The great plague of 2010!

The great plague of 2010 is over for most...except me. I'm currently sitting in the dorm watching the Labyrinth, quite possibly the best movie of the 80's. Within the past week, everyone was either throwing up from the flu or sick with a cold. I thought I was going to make it out alive...until I got hit. I had quite possibly the busiest weekend duty of the year and I'm sick (I took this weekend for someone that was sick during the week).

Any who, this has been a trying time for some of our animals. A few of our rabbits had babies, none of which survived due to lack of care from their parents. I'm currently in charge of looking after them so as the baby-daddy I feel some obligation to care for their well being. Our farm doesn't want to keep many male goats as we only need one to impregnate all the other females. We recently has a male goat and tried to sell it. Since we couldn't sell him we ate him. Must say, its weird eating animals that you knew. Also, one of our dry goats has an injured leg. When I say 'dry' I mean non-milk producing. Just like humans, when goats are pregnant, they produce milk.

Last week we got 3-4 inches of snow, something to rival a Midwest snow storm. We had a snow ball fight (which I pwned the Texans at) and also, on the same day, got a box of chicks! It's pretty amazing, they look like a bunch of peeps running around. They're being raised for a wedding in May. The pecan intern proposed to his wife on the orchard (which I'm yet to visit) in November and as a gesture the farm is raising them. These chickens are broilers, the kinds used in factory farms. They grow very quickly (full grown at around 8 weeks) so they will be ready for the wedding.

This last week one of the older couples left the farm and is headed back to Indiana. Something I learned from them this last week was hot to use a stick welder and a fire cutter. If anyone has an pyro instincts, these are the tools for you. The fire cutter uses acetylene and oxygen to heat up metal and then literally blast through it. The stick welder is a little more old fashioned but still awesome non the less. I thought it would be more complicated but it works on the principle of grounding whatever it is you're welding and completing the circuit through a stick of metal. Pretty sweet stuff.

Last weekend I helped one of the office assistants clean her father's garage. Little did I know he polishes rocks for a living. This guy had at least one ton of rocks! Most looked like standard rocks but some looked like orange sherbet, lava, and most of a petrified palm tree. It took most of a morning to move and arrange the rocks. We also had the take an entire rock polisher table and load it into a truck for scrap. May not sound like much, but it was a pain.

One thing I'm looking forward to using here is the solar dehydrator. You stick fruits into it and, as the name suggests, a few hours later they are dehydrated! Apparently there's a pear tree that no one owns that buds in the summer. We go over with the farm truck and collect as many pears as can fit into the bed. 'Tis a sweet time to be on the farm.

As this is spring time, we have several groups coming over the next few weeks. We had a church group on Saturday and an Alternative Spring Break group from UofM that's here now. I'm looking forward to reminiscing on old time...as in a few months ago. It's weird not having any sort of formal break but I guess being out here is break enough.

More on this later, I'm off to rest up for the week!