Growing our own meat seemed like such a good idea at the time. I love lamb dearly, so I started with that, despite most of my livestock-raising experience being in beef cattle or pigs. Lambs are small enough to do well in the smallish pen out back and I had a connection who supplied some local 4-Hers with show lambs to raise. Since they moved the fair up a month this year, he had some small lambs that just wouldn’t have made the weight cut by fair time, so he gave me a good price for them.

I crammed them both into the dog crate when they were weaned, and brought them home. They were born sometime in January, and I got them in March. I didn’t tame them down, thinking that if they even looked a little bit like pets, it would be hard to kill them at slaughter time. I was lucky and got the only black one my friend had – that’s not such a hot color in the show world, but it sure would look nice draped across my couch.

For a while, they were fine. The dogs were interested at first but then left them alone. I started letting them out into the dogs’ side of the yard to take care of the weeds there, and they did fine. Sure, we’d have odd moments like the time the ewe lamb somehow locked herself into the kennel, and going out to take out the trash and coming face-to-face with an alarmed sheep.

But they started demanding their breakfast earlier and earlier, along with the dawn. And on the weekends, man, did that get annoying. There was no such thing as sleeping in, even though they had plenty of hay to munch on. I’d have to find some clothes, cram my feet into my porch shoes, and stomp outside to feed those goddamn sheep. It was mostly the ewe too, not the wether, so I promised her that she’d be the first to go.

When they got big enough, life kept getting in the way. I’d initially thought that we’d have our friend the mobile slaughter-man come around and do them, but it was fair time and he was really busy. Besides, he laughed at us when we asked him. He said, “You’re hunters; there isn’t anything about this that you can’t do.”

So we made a project of it. Since the cruise was cancelled, I had room to take a day off of work, which I did last Friday. We borrowed a hand-cranked hoist from Junior’s dad that fits into the hitch receiver of the truck, since my back is still too torn up to work on the ground. I’d been feeding them near the dog kennel for a few days, thinking that on the morning of the deed, I could just feed them in there to make it easy to catch them.

But that ewe lamb was a wily beast, and she wasn’t having any of that kennel nonsense, even though she routinely went in there just to scope things out on her own. So we had ourselves a bit of a rodeo trying to catch these creatures so we could kill them, and that sure was a lesson learned. Next time, I’ll halter break whatever it is I’m raising to make it easier on all of us at killing time.

But once they were caught and I’d killed them, things went pretty smoothly. They turned out to be a little harder to skin than deer are, so it took us a little longer than we’d anticipated. By the time we got the second one bagged and ready to go, I was a little worried about the first one getting too warm. It was 105 that day, although not quite that hot yet. But we took them up to the meat locker and they were fine. I wanted the locker to cut and wrap them even though Junior and his dad do it all the time with deer because I like to have lamb bone-in and we don’t have a meat saw. Venison is just fine boned out, but little is as fine as a nice crispy bit of marrow on a lamb chop. It was well worth saving my back too, as the whole thing set me back at least a week of healing time.

When we got home, I still had the hides to deal with. I fleshed them out back with the pressure washer, which was nice to keep the heat down if nothing else. Salting them was a bit of an adventure, as deer hides don’t hold anywhere near the amount of water that wool does. I flipped them and they got dried out OK.

So when the locker called yesterday, I was thrilled. The tannery isn’t too far from them, so Seamus and I brushed the excess salt off the hides and took them in. Then we went over to the locker to pick up the meat, and I was glad I brought the big cooler. The carcasses had weighed 76 and 78 pounds, and I think I got most of that back. One of the lambs is for my mom, in trade for a painting she’s done that I fell in love with. It will probably take me more than a year to eat the other one, since I’m the only one who loves it so, but each time I do, I’ll remember them. We raised them respectfully and to be tasty, and I have no doubt that they will be.

But if we do a steer, I’m having someone come in to kill it. I am simply not capable of getting that much weight into the truck!

We’ve been going through some major crap in the family, mostly dealing with lawyers and custody and psychopathic ex-wives. It’s really been getting to both of us. I simply have never been exposed to the level of evil that I now have to deal with on a regular basis.

But Karma’s name seems to be Irene. My grandma felt bad that we were being unjustly beat down so much, so she decided to do something nice for us. Initially, she offered to bring us with her on a cruise over the winter holidays through the Panama Canal. That would have been incredible, but I just can’t take two weeks off of work. So I sadly turned her down.

Grandma had an elegant solution though. Since I couldn’t do that, how about a shorter cruise? She let me pick the destination, and I picked Alaska, as Junior’s always wanted to be there. My backup operator was available to cover for me this summer, so I scheduled it with work, Grandma bought the tickets and the flight to Seattle, and we got Junior a passport.

We’ve been planning our getaway for six weeks. It was the only good thing in life lately that I had to focus on. I so desperately needed to get away, not just from the current bullshit, but from the stress of being on-call twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. It wears on you. Even if I have a backup operator cover the system on a weekend, it’s never far from my mind. I was hoping that a week completely away from it, with an operator that I trust running things, that I could let it go.

But the backup operator emailed me last night. His day job is sending him out of state that very week with only a week’s notice. He can’t work for me. And there’s no one else who can. Every operator that I know has a day job, and they can’t risk losing that. I don’t blame them. I found one who would be willing to cover for me as a consultant over the phone if something happened, but I can’t take that risk. If something did happen, which is unlikely but possible, it would look so bad for me not to be there and not to have an operator present, that if I didn’t lose my contract immediately, I’d surely lose it when it comes up for renewal in February. And if I lose my contract, there goes my house.

So all that bullshit about how things always happen for a reason? Yeah, I don’t think so. I think that’s just something people say when they don’t know what else to say. I think good people get shit on for no reason often enough and it doesn’t mean anything. There’s no greater purpose to it. There’s no getting away from it. If that kind of thing made sense, then why don’t assholes get shit on too? I always see them getting away with murder scot-free. It seems like the responsible people, the ones who actually care about consequences, are the ones always getting stepped on.

So while I desperately need a vacation, I need a job more. It’s a no-brainer when the stakes are this high.