3-7-08

I apologize for the length of this movie, but I am no movie editor; I just dumped it to a file and uploaded it. If you want to hear the peegs grunting as they run up to me, crank your volume up. This is from yesterday, when I took a sliced apple, a ton of grapes, and a bagel out to the pigs. That little one sure does like his grapes.

YouTube link

 

Dear Robyn: As you know I am highly opposed to these pigs, but whatever, my question is…why must you feed them people food? Is there some reason? Don’t they sell Pig Chow? I mean, you can’t be serious that you are actually buying full price GROCERIES for swine? Sincerely, Pig Hater.

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I was wondering, too, why you don’t feed them Pig Chow? I didn’t think it was too expensive and it’s got everything needed for healthy pigs. You can always give them treats of table scraps.

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Here in Milwaukee, many grocery stores have “seconds” tables set out reduced produce/bakery. (Usually a smaller market will do that but not usually the big ones.) Maybe a stores in the bigville does it and stores in smallville don’t. Good luck – seconds can be a great deal if you dig deep enough on the table.

I guess I forgot to mention the fact that we actually do feed them Pig Chow (or whatever it’s called); that’s their main source of food. They have that available to them all the time in the bowl by their shelter. The other stuff I buy – bagels, fruit, vegetables, is in addition to the pig feed. Because it’s the law here at Crooked Acres that all animals must be fed and fed well for all the days of their lives.

We have a bakery thrift store near where Fred works, where they sell bakery stuff for rock-bottom prices. It’s where we get our bread, and Fred was there earlier this week but didn’t see anything worth buying to feed the pigs.

I promise, I do NOT buy full-price groceries for the pigs, I buy stuff that’s on sale or about to go bad, so it’s marked way down. Also, they get our leftovers.

 

I have a question for tomorrow that might really be more for Fred, but I thought maybe you could answer it. Is there any aspect of “you are what you eat” with respect to the pigs and the quality of their meat? I mean, does the quality of the pig meat (which you guys will be eating!) change with what you feed them? Can you make it leaner and/or more nutritious if you give them healthy grains and veggies vs. Little Debbie Snack cakes? Just curious.

As mentioned above, the main source of their intake is the “Pig Chow” we leave available for them in their bowl, as well as the stuff they dig up from their yard (pigs like to eat roots, among other things). The majority of the people food we give them is fairly healthy – fruits and vegetables with bagels tossed in because they like them so much. The Little Debbie snack cakes are a more occasional treat specifically chosen because the pigs can take them directly from Fred’s hand (Fred, sitting behind me right now, says he’ll take care of his fingers just fine, thanks.) and they’ve already come to know that when he does that (holds food out to them), it’s ’cause he’s got something good to eat. That training ensures that when the time comes to shoot them in the head, he won’t have to do it from a distance.

 

Those are going to be the most spoiled piggies on the planet. The pictures of them frolicking in their yard too cute. Do they have names?

As of last night, they are named! Meet:

Hock Hudson.

And Hamuel (“Ham”) L. Jackson.

 

I was listening to a show on NPR the other day regarding backyard chicken and egg production. One of the drawbacks, according to the person being interviewed, is that in late summer flies can become a huge issue. Did you find that to be a problem last summer? if so, how did you and Fred deal with it? – I would imagine it to be a good idea to avoid pesticides as much as possible, especially if one plans to consume either the eggs or the chickens. Do those sticky fly strips work?

The fly situation was actually not that bad, except in the coop itself. We put up sticky fly strips around mid-summer, which helped a lot. Cleaning out the bedding on a regular basis helps keep the fly population down, too.

 

Ed, my orange tiger, has started eating about half of his meal like a cat, and then eating the second half like … Idk, a raccoon? A monkey? He uses his paw, scoops up some food and then eats it off his paw. He only does this for the second half of the meal and I have gone over to the bowl and fluffed things up, thinking maybe he can’t get the food with his tongue anymore? But he still eats the second half (roughly, he’s not standing there with a scale and a t-square) with his paw. Is he a freak?

I think I’ve heard of cats doing that, though I don’t believe any of ours have ever done it. I saw somewhere (I did a lot of Googling around so don’t remember where I saw this) that it’s possible cats who lick food off their paws do so because they don’t like having their whiskers touch the side of the bowl, and if you feed them off a plate rather than a bowl, it’s not an issue. So the question is – do you feed him from a bowl? If so, give a plate a try and see if that makes a difference!

 

I don’t even know what edamame or quinoa is. Are.

The only reason I knew what edamame was in the first place is because someone on Survivor once objected to the idea of killing a chicken, and asked why they couldn’t have gotten a nice pile of edamame instead. And then I read about it in a magazine, and then someone mentioned it to me in an email, and then I saw it in the produce section of the grocery store, so I decided to give it a try. And I found that it was GOOD.

I’ve never had quinoa, and only vaguely know that it’s something grain-like. Right? This site says it’s the botanical fruit of an herb plant. It is treated as a grain in cooking. It’s one of those things I’ve always thought about trying, but never really got around to it. (It’s pronounced “keen-wah”, by the way.)

Does typing edamame that many times make it look as weird as it does reading it that many times?

Every time I type it, I have to stop halfway through and talk myself through the damn word.

One more edamame thing: Trader Joe’s has a really great combo called “Soycutash” – it’s like succotash, except instead of the lima beans, they use edamame. Really yummy … I bet you can make your own this summer with your garden produce. (You can google “soycutash” to see it)

Y’all make me so jealous with your Trader Joe’s love. There are NO Trader Joe’s around here, damnit!

That Soycutash looks good, only I don’t like red peppers. I could see making something like corn, edamame and beans, though. I bet that’d be good!

 

A friend of mine found these and for some reason I thought of you and Fred.

I’ve posted the first one before, and just saw the second one for the first time a couple of days ago. That cat in the second one, the way s/he sits and thinks about it before moseying through the door? That is EXACTLY what Miss Momma does, and it drives me nuts. I actually start COUNTING OUT LOUD sometimes when she’s sitting there debating whether she wants to come inside or not. Usually by the time I hit three, she gets her ass through the door.

 

How in the heck does one manage to swallow cross stitch thread? and do I even really want to know? heeeee I cross stitch like a mad woman at times and have never had this happen yet and would like to try to avoid it.

As I am sitting on the couch cross-stitching, sometimes the end of the thread gets a little frayed, and I hate that, so I use my little scissors to clip the end off, and then I touch the scissors (where the thread is) to my tongue because both my hands are full (one with whatever I’m cross-stitching, the other with the scissors) and I intend to pick the thread off my tongue when I have a free hand, but sometimes I forget and swallow the thread. THAT’S HOW THAT HAPPENS.

 

Hey Robyn – Just wanted to let you know that pigs LUUUUV chocolate! This is probably TMI, but we artificially inseminate the sows on our farms. So when the boars get up on the dummy and we have collected their semen, they get a little cookie for doing well. Whenever I share my “hog farm” stories with my girlfriends, they always ask if I leave cookies on my husband’s nightstand!

Fred laughed and laughed when I read this to him, at the idea of boars doing their thing, getting off the dummy and then getting a cookie for their efforts. Thanks for the info, though – next time I make cookies, you KNOW Fred will be running out there to feed them to the pigs!

 

We used to have problems with our cats getting into the potted plants also. Since I had a boat load of plants I was damned if I was going to throw them out and waste all that money so I went and spent more money… on a big bag of river rocks. I covered all the dirt with rocks and the cats hated it. Pro: I could keep my plants and water them easily. Con: They weighed a ton and were a bitch to move.

I think this is THE MOST AWESOME piece of advice I’ve ever gotten. Never EVER would have occurred to me – what an awesome idea. I’m going to go start buying plants again!

 

i have used twin sheets as curtains. you don’t have to sew anything if you make a tiny slit with a seam ripper in the side hem of the curtain. i didn’t adjust the length and just let them puddle on the floor. one of my GAY husbands was over to see the house after i got them up, and he grabbed them and said something about me “being miss fancy with her expensive suburban window treatments” and he couldn’t believe they were just bed sheets. works, plus they have a line at linens-n-things called colorups that you can buy in a jillion shades and just buy only the twin flat sheet for like $5. i usually hung them up in pairs, and if i didn’t puddle them on the floor, i would use tassels from dollar tree as tiebacks. fancy schmancy!

I was actually just going to make valances to go across the tops of the windows in my bedroom. But we’ve got the old, crappy blinds traded out for the lovely plantation blinds (that look SO much better!), and I still feel that if someone really wanted to, they could peer through the little gaps at the side of the blinds and see into my bedroom. Which, big thrills there, all they’d see is me laying in bed reading, but still. I think I might have to give the twin-sheets-as-curtains idea a try and see how it looks and how I like it!

 

Regarding the cat sucking thing, do you think that applies to dogs too? I have a 3-year-old Weimy who sucks on blankets and has since the day we brought him home.

I don’t see why not!

 

I think you should call one “Pork” and the other “Chops”. I also noticed for the pics on Fred’s page that one has piggy eyes (like you read in a novel “He had mean little piggy eyes…”) and the other has big pretty eyes like Wilbur or Babe. Pretty cute.

Fred said that exact same thing (about the eyes, I mean). I don’t know, they both look the same to me, I’ll have to take a closer look.

 

Unless I’m mistaken, in the 3rd picture of the pigs on Fred’s site, the pig on the right appears to have nipples. I could be wrong, but don’t only female pigs have nipples?

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umm, forgive my ignorance, but is it not possible to see piggy private parts? Nipples or not, why can’t anyone tell the gender?

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If you do manage to get a picture of the “piggy privates,” PLEASE post it if one of them is male. Pigs have a corkscrew shaped penis and I want to see that. I’m gross that way.

Like humans, male pigs can have nipples; nipples don’t determine sex. (The same holds true for cats – every time he stretches, Tommy points a nipple at us that is glaringly obvious and we’ve been known to whine “Tommy’s pointing his NIPPLE at me!”)

There’ll be no pig balls evident here at Crooked Acres; if the pigs are boys (and we suspect they are), they were castrated before we brought them home.

And if there were any corkscrew shaped penises, I can assure you you would never see a picture of them HERE. Maybe Fred would be posting pictures all over the place, but not me. I spend as little time as possible NOT looking at the back end of the pigs, because there’s nothing on that end that interests me at ALL.

 

Donny Osmond. I was far more into Sean Cassidy. Oooh baby. My plan was to go to LA when I turned 16 in a blue dress (his favorite color) and happen to slip and fall in front of him. Because he would of course help me up and look into my eyes and fall deeply and forever in love with me.

Oh my GOD. At some point after Donny Osmond broke my heart and married that Mormon manstealer, I fell in lurve with Michael Damian, who played Danny Romalotti on The Young and the Restless.

(Shaddup.)

And I had the most BRILLIANT plan. I was going to move to LA, and I was going to buy a house down the street from his house. Then one day I would be walking by his house at the SAME TIME he was walking out his front door, and he would take one look at me and fall in love. Of COURSE.

Also, when I was an older teen, I had a mad crush on Bryan Adams. Who is from Canada. And I thought that I would move to Canada after I graduated from high school to find my True Love Bryan Adams, because (I swear to god, I said these exact words) after all, how big could Canada possibly BE?

 

What was the quote? I love the Alien movies.

Someone needs to take off and nuke the site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.

 

So, what do the kitties think of Pork and Chop? If they are anything like my cats, they have thoroughly investigated the situation already.

The indoor kitties haven’t seen the pigs at all – and in fact, can’t really see them from the back yard. Miss Momma and Newt have seen them, though. Miss Momma spent a long, long time sitting and staring at them with big, dark eyes like she was thinking “What the HELL?” Newt just glanced at them like “Yep, there are the pigs,” and kept on going. He had places to go.

 

Wait. You fed the “Girlz” scrambled eggs? Aren’t the “Girlz” the chickens? Isn’t that … well, I don’t know what it is exactly and it’s not like I haven’t wanted to scramble and fry my own two rotten kids on occasion, but … I don’t know. Something is hurting my brain here.

The Girlz not only eat scrambled eggs, they eat cooked chicken as well. They’re total cannibals, and they love it!

 

Yes, I can see now that dinner is now going to be cooked for 4 – you, Fred, Pork and Chop. And when the big day finally comes there is no way Fred is going to be able to slaughter his dinner guests for the past 2 years

First of all, dinner doesn’t get cooked for FOUR, dinner gets cooked for the two of us, all 13 of the chickens AND the pigs. We’ve been feeding the chickens our leftovers for the past (almost) year, so of course the pigs are going to get in on that action.

Second, those pigs won’t be around for two years – they’ll be slaughtered in December, when they’re about 11 months old.

 

I’m laying a bet right now that the little piggy in that photo is going to die of old age on Crooked Acres. He’ll never be a pork chop.

I’m trying to convince Fred to take all y’all on – something like, everyone places a bet and if he goes through with it, y’all owe the shelter we foster for the amount of your bet; if he doesn’t, WE owe the shelter the amount of your bet. Anyone interested? (This is not an official call for bets – just seeing if anyone’s interested in taking part in something like that!)

 

I’ve been wondering whether the pigs will be getting a bath before they’re slaughtered?

Yeah, I’ve been saving up bath bombs for them, and we’re going to bring them inside and gently scrub their backs with a loofah.

I kid (but I wouldn’t put it past us!).

Fred says no, that they’ll be scrubbed and scalded when they are dead.

 

Any idea why our darling cat insists on stepping just inside the litter box far enough for all four feet to be on the litter, yet her hiney hangs over the edge, so poop is usually half right on the edge, half out, and often she pees on the litter mat instead of going in the box. We’ve always used the same litter (Fresh Step), keep it clean, and have the biggest box you can buy. It doesn’t have a top (we tried that, but have taken it off to see if that helps – it doesn’t). When I talk “cat stuff” I usually preface with, “Robyn says….” so thought I’d bring this issue to you. Thanks for any and all help!

Everything you’ve done is exactly what I would have recommended – the last thing I can think of is to buy something tall enough so that she can’t hang her butt over the edge of the litter box. For years, we used plastic sweater boxes, you know the ones you can get at Wal-Mart or Target, that come with lids that are meant to store things in? We’d buy those, discard the tops, and use the box itself as a litter box. If it’s tall enough, I would think that she’d have to get all the way in it and thus couldn’t hang her butt over the edge. It’s worth a try – the sweater boxes aren’t terribly expensive, and if it solves the problem, it’s worth it, right?

 

“I am former Senator Stanley J. Boogerton, and I disapprove this message.”

 

Previously
2007: Going on hiatus!
2006: Hell of a way to start out your retirement, ain’t it?
2005: Book recommendations and a meme.
2004: No entry.
2003: Be afraid. Be very afraid.
2002: Food for her youngs.
2001: Not much going on here.
2000: Mean mommy, huh?