Carnage on SA

Chris was up at 3:00 a.m. Saturday morning, sources say, to slaughter and dress his guineas. His friend Adam helped him, though I don’t know if Adam was on hand at 3.  When I strolled down to check on them, Adam was handling the grisly task of extinguishing each guinea.

skinning a guinea
Chris guts a guinea

Chris had rigged up a kind of funnel attached to a dog-run fence post in which Adam inserted each guinea in its turn head first. The head and neck protruded from the bottom of the funnel and the funnel kept the guinea form being able to move. Adam then cut the guinea’s throat and let it bleed into a plastic sack. Chris, in the mean time, was busily skinning, etc.  I presume he then gutted each bird and placed it in a plastic freezer bag. He showed me the cooler full of already processed fowl. I think there was one he was going to spare. It was crippled and he’d kind of adopted it as a pet, I’m told.  Unfortunately he didn’t distinguish it form the others sufficiently or something and it got caught up in the process.

Joyce and I went to see The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee with A&M Brokenbek Thursday evening. We had dinner at a pizza joint/sports bar called 575Pizza,  before the play. It was staged in what used to be the warehouse of the old Civic Circle Skaggs. It’s an Amarillo Little Theater facility. Although at times the play grated on me, it turned out to be fairly entertaining, especially in retrospect. Anyway it was a pleasant evening and I’m glad we went. Joyce and I need to get out of our rut every once in awhile.

Little R missed four days of school this week. Strep throat, I think. Saturday Kari said she’s feeling OK but still running a temperature. Kari has avoided taking her to the doctor because she didn’t want her to have the antibiotics she was sure the doctor would prescribe. Abigail also missed at least one day of school but Kari says she’s fine now.

Jill took Sophia to the ear doctor, a follow up appointment because of the ear infections she’s had. Sophia was feeling fine and Jill was surprised when the doc said she had an infection again. It seems Dave suffered from them as a small child. His affected his hearing to the point he had to undergo speech therapy so they are watching Sophia very closely.

Saturday I hauled off the trimmings from last weekend. The day started out chilly and windy but by the time I got out about 10 o’clock it wasn’t too bad and I was comfortable working. I took two loads to the chipper site. It was windy on SA but nothing like at the chipping site out in the open country.

Over the winter I’ve been spraying weeds with Round Up when I could catch a calm, sunny day. It’s a leap of faith because it takes so long for the weeds to show the effects. It’s gratifying to see that the weeds I sprayed are now quite dead. There are plenty of weeds left, though, ones I didn’t spray. Round Up only works when sprayed in bright sunlight so lots of weeds weren’t in the sun when I sprayed because the sun was low in the south causing them to be in the shadows. Now as the tilt of the earth causes the shadows to recede, many of the weeds that were in the shade are now in the sun at certain times of the day. It’s easy to tell the ones I sprayed a couple of months ago from those I didn’t so now I need to make another round and see if I can’t get the ones that were previously protected by the shade.