Cheap things, chickens and hay

1. Am I the only one whose first thought after seeing this ad was "ok, what's the catch?"



I've been looking at ways to make various things recently and there seems to be an ironclad threshold or paradox of a sort: things that look like they take a lot of time to make take a lot of time to make. As a result, they're very very expensive from our Ikea-skewed point of view. You can cheat a bit by specializing and using specialized tools but still - that beautiful handmade chair will still set you back $300 or so because someone spent at least 3 days making it (and used the wood that someone else dried for 3 years or so). For me (for example) that means that I'll use a cardboard box full of old phone books or whatever for a chair, rather than paying for a nice one. That's why a 19th century family would have about 5 chairs total, which chairs were probably constantly dragged from dining room to the porch to the church for a wedding to ... you get the picture. We can do with a whole lot less but that really requires a certain mind adjustment. On the other hand, if you're not quite ready, old chairs from a thrift store could be a nice halfway point since our society has surely produced enough of excess goods recently to last us all for a while.

2. When I was locking up the chickens tonight, I couldn't quite see all of them, so I used my flashlight to push one of our roosting beauties a bit aside to get a better view and do the headcount. What does she do? Keeps grabbing the roost with one leg and gratefully lifts the other one to calmly push my flashlight aside as a random nuisance. Hey you stupid chicken, don't you realize I'm your emperor, god and master? Apparently, not.

3. A truckload of hay (according to DW, who did all the dirty work) from one 72" strip cut on Lake West. Wow. It did look like a lot though. And yes, I can't help but love that new Landpride bushhog - it does such a nice job on weeds.

4. One of the things we get asked a lot is - Sheep are really dumb, aren't they? To which I always reply - Yes, not a single one of them can beat me in chess. Sounds silly? Well, how silly is trying to measure intelligence of a different species by our own standards? It's much easier for us (omnivores) to appreciate intelligence of other omnivores (dogs) or predators (cat) than herbivores because cats and dogs are so much closer to us. For us, dogs and cats, a sudden sound and movement in the bush means "May be I can eat it or may be we need to scram but let's check it first". For the sheep it means "Let's get the heck out of here before it eats us, whatever it is". For us, cats and dogs, grass means something to step on. For sheep ... I'm pretty sure, they don't even have have word "grass" in the sheep language. They have "short sweet grass" and "long tasteless grass" and "short so-so spiky grass" and "oh so sweet and tender leaves on that weed that human hate" and so on. Probably 10,000 of them. And they remember from he last year where exactly on the pasture the best grass is. I don't.