Tim Hawkins on pig slaughtering

I couldn't help posting this in the light of our latest slaughtering adventures!

A quick note

I said I'd give my opinion of Nicholas Nickleby, so here it is. I thought that it was a rather tedious book. That's not to say I didn't enjoy it, but I have read other books that I enjoyed much more. Of the Dickens books I have read, this is probably my least favorite, but A Christmas Carol comes close. A Christmas Carol has the advantage of being short though.

Any suggestions for non-fiction books?

A little whine

I can't quilt and read at the same time!!! It's too difficult to hold a needle and thread, the quilt, and a book, so I'm having to choose between finishing the endless quilt and the endless book! I have to choose the one that means the most to you... ummm... I mean.... that makes it appear that I'm doing something rather than just lazily sitting around. So, it's either quilt and watch a movie, or read classic literature. Neither look very good.

Observations

• Flan is better served warm.

• A little coffee enhances the flavor of chocolate.

• If your an author, you somehow have full authority to make up, misspell, and twist words.

• Microsoft Word is sometimes just plain ornery.

• Milking is no fun when it's freezing outside.

• It just doesn't seem right that it's snowing way south of us.

• Slivered almonds burn very easily in attempts to toast them.

• Chicken spaghetti made with yellow rubber (a.k.a. Velveeta, processed cheese product, etc.) is not good at all.

• My last few months in the kitchen seems to have changed my views a bit. :)
  

Ugh!

I think I'm going to have to read some sort of book on literary analysis next. You just wouldn't believe how that prospect enthralls me.......... or not! Still, I'm absolutely sick of reading books and not being able to ascertain whether or not they were actually good! I don't think even a book like that would help me very much to reveal how to figure out the world view or slant of any particular book. How could it? It has to have a slant too! I have finished reading The Wars of the Roses, but all I came away from it with was the desire for more! It seemed to ask for a sequel, but I don't know if the history in it was very good or not. I certainly don't know if the world view was good! That sort of bothers me, but.......

I'm in the middle of Nicholas Nickleby, but I'm finding it quite a bit more tedious than the other Dickens books I have read. Somehow, my opinion of Dickens books improves one I am done with them, so I defer final judgment of it until I am through, and, even then, just to say whether I liked it or not.

Friday and Saturday

This past Friday and Saturday some of the wonderful folks from our church (plus a family from GA who are working on getting up here) came to our place and helped us slaughter and butcher the rest of our pigs. We could not have done it without them!!!! Thank y'all so much!!!

Friday afternoon Daddy, Kyle, Luke, Lingo men, and various members of the Fish family slaughtered the three pigs, and hung them in the smoke house. The walk-in cooler is currently out-of-commission, but it was cold enough to leave the halves outside overnight.

Little Smoky was the first to go (Daddy thought he might be smarter than the others and runaway after the first shot).

They had all three done by 4:30pm, at the latest!

Friday evening Mr. Draper, and the Evans' pulled in. After everyone had eaten, there was some conversation, and refreshed our butchering memories with the Meat Man (he could not only use someone to redo the videos, but the website too!) video.

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Saturday morning Mama, Mrs. Evans, and Mrs. Fish started making a batch of soap, but I am not allowed to post any of the pictures Claire got of that process.

The men went out around 10:00am or so and started butchering.

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A few of us were happily occupied inside, where it was warm!

Sausage-maker extraordinaires!

The packaging table was kept pretty busy most of the time.

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Cuties!!!

I've got it

Mama took me to get my driver's license permit this morning. We were only there an hour, and everything seemed to go smoothly. I've kind of got a Hitchcockian "that was way too easy, what's going to happen next" feeling. I filled out a form, answered every question on the test correctly, passed the eye test, and had my picture taken. Really the only problems we encountered were: the computer wouldn't accept a Morrison address with Grundy County (Easy enough to fix. The mailbox is in Warren County anyway), and one of the ladies there couldn't read the school name on the diploma because of the fancy font. They also wouldn't let me keep my head covering on, but that was no big deal.

We also cleared up the stuff about the graduated driver's license: because I'm getting my permit when I'm 17, I'll just hold that until I'm 18, and then go directly to the regular, unrestricted driver's license. If I'd gotten my permit when I was 15 (holding it a minimum of 180 days), I would have had to apply for an Intermediate Restricted driver's license when I was 16, then, when I turned 17, I would be allowed to go to an Intermediate Unrestricted driver's license, and by the time I turned 18 the state would have decided I was ready for a full-blown driver's license. Thankfully, I get to skip all that in the middle now.

This is all that was necessary to obtain the permit:

• My diploma
• Mama's driver's license (as long as it had the correct address on it, which it did)
• A certified birth certificate (I guess to prove that I was actually born???), and
  
• My social security number

Now I'm going to have to find some way to get 50 hours of driving time, including 10 hours of night driving before 10:00 pm, this year!

General update

Okay, then, since my last post I have finished Our Mutual Friend, and started The Wars of the Roses by Allison Weir (it was just one we had, don't know if it's good or bad.). I ended up enjoying the book Our Mutual Friend better than the movie. The movie was fairly close to the book (besides leaving out a great deal of the "Society" scenes, and making Eugene less bored than he seemed in the book), but it was more graphic. It had a few more disgusting parts in it that weren't in the book too.

Anyway, I am only at the beginning of this Allison Weir book, but so far, though sort of interesting, I'm not too crazy about it. For some reason, I tend to stray away from women authors when it comes to nonfiction. I don't particularly know why. It may be I don't like this book because of the first chapter where the authoress kept referring to the fourteenth and fifteenth century women as having been regarded as chattels and heir-bearing machines. She said this or things similar to this several times, and I just got tired of reading about how "poorly the women were treated" and so on. The parts about how the kings had to go to war with France just to keep the people and Parliament behind them are fairly interesting.

I have also done a great deal of quilting. See! I haven't quite forgotten my goals for this year! With quilting comes hours of stitching monotony unless, of course, you get to watch a movie! Which I have been doing (too much, judging by the way my head feels this afternoon). We watched the 2005 "Pride and Prejudice" and "National Treasure" yesterday; Kyle, Luke, and I watched "How the West was Won" this afternoon.

We've been making Claire practice the Psalms and hymns that we've learned in parts at church. Once she can play them, the rest of us can practice our parts.

I bought a planner a while back to use for the organization of my menus. I recently looked through the front pages that are used by students to write down stuff about where their classes are and who is teaching that class and so on. It also had a page for Morse code, Braille, and sign language alphabets; along with these however, was a section entirely devoted for emoticons!!! Mama, Claire, and I looked over some of them; these were some of our "favorites" (to laugh at):

O:-) meaning angel (if y'all already knew all this, please pardon me. This is completely new to me, except for the smiley :) or ;) or :( frown)

%-( meaning confused

:-& meaning tongue-tied

|-O meaning yawn

Looking these things up on Wikipedia brings up a few more than my little planner. I like these too:

',:Y meaning concerned duck

~:> meaning chicken

Just thought that was weird.

That's all for now. Maybe I'll get a post up soon that has a lot of pictures for those of my "readers" who don't look at this blog unless there are photos.

New Year's Resolutions

Usually I'm against things like that (on no other basis except that I can never seem to keep them), but this year I decided to test myself again. I have a couple of goals for the year 2008:

• I am (hopefully) going to finish a quilt that's been in the works for about three years. To try to make it more certain that I accomplish this I am not going to sew anything else until that's done. :(

• Also, I hope to become better read this year. I intent to expand my knowledge of certain authors in fiction (C.S. Lewis, Charles Dickens, etc.) , read up on some of the more "modern" history, and perhaps add a little theology. I'm going to try anyway. I'm working on Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens right now. I've never been too much of a Dickens fan, but this one seems to be alright as did A Tale of Two Cities. They're still nothing I'd put top of my list though.

There. Hopefully I will be able to accomplish these things this year, especially now that I've declared them to the entire world. Then of course there's all those things that are normally on people's lists of resolutions:

• Eat better

• Be nicer to everyone

• Go through all the junk everywhere

... to name a few. Unfortunately, I have no desire to eat better than I do. I hope I am nice to everyone, but I know I'm not. I've been labeled, and labeled myself, "mean" too often to not know it! I am continually striving to overcome that, whatever it may look like. A desire to get rid of junk? Of course! I'm all for it! Having to go through it all before it goes to the appropriate place (trash, Goodwill, Ebay, etc.)? "Ummmmmmm......... weeeelllll........... you see........ I... uhhh.... ummmm......... I.... uh.... think.... I'm busy. Yeah, that's it! I'm busy!" Not much desire to do that either. It's got to be done sometime though, and better now than when crunch time comes!