Wednesday, Jan. 25, 2012: Storm of the Eye

In Which A Scary Incident Occurs, Precipitated by Pig

I skipped writing on Tuesday, and that's OK, because all the excitement happened at around 9 p.m., and we were too busy taking a dog to the emergency clinic for me to maintain a blog.

What happened was, in brief, two of our dogs got into a fight, and one of them ended up with a rather bizarre injury.

The long story is that

Monday, Jan. 23, 2012

The harness came off today, and Violet squealed as much as she did when it was going on.

Rex is irked with me because I feigned sleep this morning when Violet became entangled

Sunday, Jan. 22, 2012

In Which the Piglet Gains Social Skills

Violet has made some excellent strides in her short tenure as a house pig:

1. She knows where her food is, and who to pester to get it there. I'll be cleaning up the counter and sink and suddenly become aware that a piglet has trotted in and is grunting at me.

Saturday, Jan. 21

In Which Violet Survives My Absence

I left the house at 8:30 a.m. in a mild snowstorm that was greasing up the roads just enough to make my 118-mile trip to Peterborough, N.H., an invitation to die. Before I'd gone 15 miles, my car had spun out over the crest of a hill and come to rest, miraculously, not wrapped around one of the trees at the roadside. Did I turn around and return home to pig and hearth? No, I stupidly journeyed on. Such was the pull of fiddler Rodney Miller and the annual Snow Ball contradance.

I had no qualms about leaving Violet at home with Kayti, who is 13, and Rex, who is watching 61 disappear into the fog of yesteryear.

Vi's Birth Family

Thursday, Jan. 19: Pig in Day Care

In Which Violet Returns to Her Roots

Violet got to visit her mom, aunt and 15 siblings and cousins today. I felt she needed some food, and also I had to go to a four-hour seminar on how to impress potential employers and save the state the cost of my joblessness, a class to which pigs were not invited.

So home she went, and I'm sure she is mightily p.o.'d that I came back and took her away again. I KNOW her mother and aunt are p.o.'d, because they tried to assault me as I stalked Violet around the pen.

So Violet is back, and I keep having brainstorms about raising a pig. For example,

Jan. 18, 2012: From Pigpen to Pigsty

In Which A Piglet Moves into a House and Gets a New Name

When Aimee the Funny Farmer offered to let me take the runtiest of her 16 piglets home, I knew I would not refuse -- even though we already have three dogs, a cat and a guinea pig in the house, and even though the piglet was of a species completely unfamiliar to me.

I picked up the three-week-old female this afternoon. We put her in a box with some hay, closed the box flaps, stuck it on the front passenger seat of my car and closed the car door. After a brief talk with Aimee about weaning strategies, I opened my car door and