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| My nemesis, Fence |
I'ma keep things vague and just say that recent developments in my personal life have cast a heavy pall over things, keeping my brain in a haze and my body feeling like my limbs were hollowed out and filled with sand and peanut butter. The fog is finally beginning to lift (I think), so I can finally get my bearings and try to evaluate all the fuckery.
Life in general is a rollercoaster of EMOSHUNS, and these emoshuns of which I speak have seemed particularly close to the surface for the last several months, possibly because for the first time ever I have had nothing and no one distracting from or diluting them. It's all SO RAW. To wit: yesterday I found myself, as one does, in the middle of a pasture sobbing as though the world were ending (it WAS!), only to be lit'rully smooshed from four sides by a goatular cypher, which, if you didn't know, is approximately 88 thousand times more potent than any Prozac you will every fucking encounter. Just fyi, Gar was NOT among the comfort-givers, because she is way too aloof for that nonsense. She subscribes to the school of tough love and made it clear that cud-chewing was more important than her most devoted supplicant's mental breakdown. FAIR ENOUGH, BOO.
Today's beginning did not bode well. I arrived to find Al, our handsome and amazing vet, chilling in the driveway and got a pit in my stomach the size of a moon crater. (That is a thing right?) I headed inside to set up for making tommes, sanitizing forms, assembling the whey pump, running the Delvo test and stirring the milk. Michael popped his head in and I asked whether it was Crabcake the Elder who was sick, as she had been a little off the previous day. No, he said, it was Trudy. She had Grass Tetany.
Blank stare.
"I'll explain later," he said.
Before he got a chance, I took to the world wide web to research it -- evidently it's a Magnesium deficiency/Potassium overabundance that often occurs in ruminants that are grazing on spring grass, which can have subpar nutrient components due to a lack of sunshine, or so I gather. The result is the goat consumes too much potassium, which messes with its magnesium absorption, and the symptons are that they sort of stumble and stagger around all woozy like and their necks get all stiff and then if you don't catch it in time they straight up die. Thankfully, Al administered an IV and gave us some large pink magnesium chloride (ie LARGE and PINK) pills to give to Trudy so fingers crossed, she'll bounce back sooner than later. Unfortunately there's not much you can do prophylactically for this sort of thing, so the key is to be vigilant about the symptoms and catch it before it's too late.
Back in the cheesehouse, I added the rennet to the vat and stirred, waiting the usual 10 minutes for the milk to flocculate, and observing, as I have in recent weeks, that portions of the milk began to coagulate while others remained liquid. Michael came in and took a look at the vat and coudn't figure out the problem. I submitted that the only common denominator seemed to be me, so I went through the steps, showing him how I'd stirred it in, which rennet I'd used, how much I'd measured. I thought to let him know that I tried to shake out as much sanitizer as I could from the measuring flask, and that's when the EUREKA YOU ARE A MORON moment we all wait our whole lives to experience occured...
"You NEVER sanitize the flask when you're measuring rennet!" Michael exclaimed, "Rennet is extremely sensitive to chlorine and it deactivates the enzymes and renders it basically ineffective." Well that explains why every time I fucking rennet the cheese lately it takes fifty years to coagulate. DULY NOTED.
It must be said that I give bossman SERIOUS props for maintaining composure and a sense of humor about my fuck-up despite being, I have to believe, at least a little bit pissed off/frustrated/exasperated with my dullardry. He set to work adjusting and tweaking (ie adding more rennet and proceeding to cut a challengingly soft curd), and we did what we could with the results. We will know in three months whether the cheese could be salvaged or not. And by then I will be dead!
Joking.
Kinda.
The rest of the day proceeded without incident, and I even attained minor victory in my constant quest to refine my skill in the Tractor Arts when I successfully used said apparatus to remove dirty shavings from an unoccupied kids' pen and then returned the tractor to its parking place, lining up the whey tank on top of a set of cement blocks WITHOUT EVEN DAMAGING ANY PROPERTY AT ALL!
It's the motherfucking little things, people.
The two eldest groups of doelings are now completely weaned and are co-mingling and forging lifetime friendships and preparing to be unleashed onto actual grass for the first time in their very precious lives. Taking the goats out to pasture at night continues to be a harrowing spatial puzzle that punishes me with real actual electrocution when I underperform. The mold in the cellar is a truly breathtaking kaleidoscope of seafoam greens and greys and rosy swirls. There are blossoms on the apple trees and morels sprouting up in secret spots in the woods. The days are luxuriously long, so that when I leave the farm at 7:30 I am treated to a riotously dappled sky on the western horizon and make it home as the sky turns from blue to grey. The weeks slip by. I notice that there are some things that used to be very hard for me that are no longer hard, and other things that I still suck at despite repeating them fifty or a hundred or a thousand times. I wonder how much longer it will take until I begin to really feel like I know what I'm doing, and how much longer after that until I feel like I'm good at it.
And whether it's worth the wait.
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