Home Alone

14 January 2010

It’s been a peaceful week, just me and Aaron and the occasional visitor. Sometimes it’s nice just to have the house to ourselves.

We’re already 2 weeks into the New Year and I find myself thinking (worrying?) about what this year will bring. 2009 was such a good year for us and I find it hard to believe we could be so lucky as to have more of the same.

So far so good I think, but I have an uneasy feeling about today. I fed out this morning and the piglets were gone.

 How Many Pigs Is Too Many?

Aaron was given 2 x 8-week old piglets on Wednesday evening and they have escaped 3 times already. Aaron’s 4th attempt to keep them penned in seemed like it was fail-proof, but alas, it was not to be.

We opened the gate to the yard, from where they’ve escaped, and I poured their breakfast into their tray. I can only hope they come looking for it sometime today. I looked for them this morning but it’s not easy to find anything at 4 O’clock in the morning. I suspect they’re curled up asleep in the bush somewhere.

They spent all of yesterday outside Joy’s, wanting to get in and play with the other piglets but Joy was having none of it. According to Aaron she was aggressively defending her territory and so the piglets just curled up and went to sleep outside the fence.

Eventually they gave up trying and went up the drive and Aaron found them trying to get in the paddock with Stanley and the girls. He managed to get them into the yards and trapped them in there. It didn’t take them long to escape though and off they ran. He managed to catch them again in the evening but, well, they’re gone now.

Aaron has lost patience. This morning he gave in to the idea that they could just go bush and so be it. It’s a lovely idea in theory but the practicalities leave a lot to be desired. They’ll come back regularly because there are other pigs here. How long do you suppose before they start getting into the vege garden, the compost, any unguarded bags of cheese or buckets of fruit, etc?

If we had a 100 acres of bush behind us and no close neighbours I’d say “Sweet. Let them be!” But that is not what we have and so we must try again. And again after that if necessary.

I have an idea already for a good pen. The first one we built for Joy, Phyllis and Spotty was just warratahs and corrugated iron and it worked beautifully. We’ll do it again and by the end of February they should be familiar with us and happy enough to just stick around like all the other pigs.

Of course we have to find and catch them first and that’s where the uneasy feeling is creeping in. I’m quite convinced something is going to go wrong today and we’re going to be unhappy with the way the day unfolds.

But perhaps I’m wrong. I hope I’m wrong!

Stan Is The Man

Well it’s all very odd.

Or is it?

We put Stan in with Rose and Mabel and as soon as they came into heat he went all shy and brooding. For 5 days the girls harassed him and pleaded with him to make them pregnant and nothing. We saw no action. Instead Stan played hard to get. Actually it wasn’t even ‘hard to get’, it was more a case of “Leave me alone. Stop harassing me!”.

Poor Mabel. I was devastated for her. Her desperate pleading was just humiliating. She shouldn’t have had to beg after all those months of love talk through the fence.

I had words with Stan. I also pleaded, asked him to see reason and even tried to bargain with him. He was tolerant with me but I could tell he wasn’t interested.

Okay. I was willing to consider that maybe something wasn’t quite right. Maybe Stanley’s diet wasn’t quite right. Perhaps that was affecting his libido. We’d had no such dramas with Arthur. And so we changed Stanley’s diet for 2 weeks and then a week ago we waited for the girls to come back into season. Nothing. I’ve been checking every day and quite frankly it hasn’t happened. Is it at all possible that they coincidentally both skipped a cycle at the same time?

Or is it possible that they’re both pregnant?

When?! How?! Did he just do it the once in the early hours and then decide that was his duty over and done with? Or did he make them hang out for the 3 days and finally relent after the constant pleading? I find it hard to believe he got them both pregnant.

I’m not trusting what I’m seeing. I won’t believe it until their next cycle is due.

What About Olive?

Olive appears to be pregnant.

This is devastating news. We had actually thought Emily was pregnant because we caught her brother Spotty getting too friendly with her just before he went to the butcher. We quickly shut Emily and Olive in a paddock alone and I washed Emily’s rear end with white vinegar in the hope the acidity would kill off any sperm. It was an action born of desperation rather than knowledge but she’s not pregnant so maybe it worked.

But what about Olive? When did that happen and who with? Did one of her brothers also take a fancy to her? What about Stanley? I remember him trying to mount one of the girls one day while the piglets were in there playing with him. Could he possibly be the father? He’s so much bigger. Surely he would have crushed her?

We saw nothing actually happen and so I am at a loss to know when it happened.

It’s an unexpected shock and not a good one.

When is she due? And what will happen to both her and the babies?
To have them so young may damage her reproductive organs and ruin her chances of ever having piglets again.

If one of her brothers is the father there’s a high possibility of deformities. I can’t begin to imagine the horror Aaron and I will feel if we are forced to euthanase new born piglets.

Everything about it makes me feel physically sick. We are responsible for her and we’ve let her down. She’s such a sweet wee piggie like her mum and I just wanted her to get to be a carefree gilt for the 1st year of her life.

One of God’s Angels

And so it was that Aaron set off for work at 4am on Tuesday morning. It was raining; wonderful, blessed rain. And as Aaron drove out the other side of Kaiwaka he could see a car on the side of the road with hazard lights on. He drove past, but in the dark and the driving rain he could swear he saw someone trying to wave him down. Something made him think he should stop. And so it was that that he turned his car around and drove back.

He discovered a couple in their 60’s with their son and daughter-in-law, in a car with a failed transmission. The older couple were on their way to Auckland Airport. They had a 90th birthday party to attend in Warrnambool, Australia. Aaron offered to drive them to Wellsford. The older couple jumped into the ute with their luggage and the younger couple stayed behind to mind the car. They drove and talked and Aaron realised they didn’t have a hope in hell of getting to the airport in time.
“I’ll take you” he said They were extremely grateful for the offer.
The couple rang AA to get their car picked up. Their membership had expired and it would cost $180 to renew it.
They had no choice but to pay it. Only one catch, they didn’t have a credit card and AA wouldn’t bill them.
Aaron gave them his credit card details and they paid the fee.
An apparently devout Christian couple, they bestowed many blessings on Aaron and promised to pay as soon as they got back from Australia.
They asked to pay for petrol but Aaron had mentally calculated the cost of the car recovery and repair and he refused. “The company pays for it” he lied.
More blessings and then he dropped them off at the airport and they had time to make their flight.
He got to work 2 hours late and somewhat poorer but with a happy buzz on that lasted all day.

He trusted his instincts. He did good and nothing bad happened.

And I feel quite impressed by his selfless act.

Last year my New Year’s resolution was to be less selfish and more giving. I thought I had done quite well by the end of the year but then I thought about what Aaron had done and I asked myself “Would I have done the same thing?”
The answer is no.
I would be too scared to stop my car to help someone in the middle of the night. 1 stranger on the side of the road is scary enough but 4?
If I did even get that far would I offer to take them to the airport knowing they wouldn’t get there otherwise?
The answer is no.
Fighting Auckland traffic, spending an extra 2 hours on the road and then offering to pay for the gas? Are you serious?
But say I did, by some completely random brain short-out, offer to do that, would I then give my credit card details to a stranger so they could have their car towed?
I don’t even need to answer that. You know the answer.

So am I the selfless, giving person I hoped to be by the end of 2009? Clearly not!

It was a bit of a shock to the system to be honest. I thought I had done so well last year but then I found out what the problem is when Marty came to dinner on Tuesday. He asked Aaron why he’d done it.
“Because I like doing nice things for strangers. It makes me feel good”
Whoa! Is that it? Is that all?! Because it makes him feel good?
Feeling good is one thing but that has certainly never been the driver for me when I perform random acts of kindness.
What I’m after is payback; karma payback. When I’m nice it’s because I’m clocking up spiritual brownie points. I‘m a total believer in the ‘give and ye shall receive’ philosophy. I don’t care if the payback is in this lifetime or the next I ‘m just making sure I’m heading into the future with good deed credits in my back pocket.

And so essentially that’s the problem. Yes, I am a much more giving person, but selfless? absolutely not. I’m not sure I actually ever do anything for other people without out even some vague thought of myself.

So here’s the question – is selflessness achieved through nature or nurture?
If it is nature then there’s little hope for me. I would essentially be destined to be selfish for the rest of my life, and too bad about those poor people who need a helping hand who I choose to ignore.
If it’s nurture then Aaron’s mum has done an excellent job and perhaps there is hope for me yet. Although quite frankly, such a state of mind seems completely beyond the realms of possibility for me.