Welcome to the Saturday Night Loser’s Club!
I am your guest Hostess with the Leastest for tonight while chingchongchinaman is off doing something out in the real world, and most of the people who can actually put together a good diary are partying right now at NN. So you losers are stuck with me.
However, you must consider that I am supremely qualified for this position. In spite of being a member of Daily Kos for years, and reading here absolutely every single day, I am still a diary virgin.
I was also the only one who had absolutely nothing better to do.
Now in the grand scheme of loserdom, my husband and I always thought ourselves as being rather expert. We were both computer programmers by trade, spending 14 hours a day absolutely riveted by esoteric programming problems, and coming up for air only when the need for food, water or a bathroom break became absolutely urgent. We met on the internet. We have worked in the same office for years, back-to-back, and I am almost embarrassed to say how many conversations we have had over Messenger instead of taking our eyeballs off the monitor and actually turning around.
And our idea of a fun Saturday night was not getting away from our computers, but spending literally hours decorating our house in Ultima Online. We would get excited over finding the latest rare that we could display on our virtual walls, building that cool valorite stone table, all while our real house was actually covered in dust and the sink was full of dishes. For a really special night, we would log into World of Warcraft and just kill things. You don’t know romance until you rush in to save your screaming husband from a basilisk.
We thought we had the loser thing down pat. We thought we were experts. But we had no idea the true depths that real loserdom went to. Like a secret society, there were hidden levels that were only available to those who could prove themselves truly worthy. So how did we qualify for this higher level of super-loserdom?.
Well, we decided that we wanted the ‘simple life’, and bought ourselves a 50 acre sheep farm in the boonies of Oregon (with high-speed internet, of course – we’re not completely crazy). We had visions of pristine white sheep floating over endlessly green fields, where the weather was always perfect, and we would grow our own vegetables and make hearty soups, and all the wonderful images that the country life conjures up.
Now we weren’t completely off-the-wall in this idea. We had both spent part of our childhood in the English countryside. We had lived for years in Australia. So sheep were part of our background. I also love Border Collies, having 4 of them, and I would regularly do my suburban sheep-herding. We had the Google, and we had books. We were confident we could figure everything out.
Now how wrong could this possibly go?
Well, we had been moved in for a day before we realized that the cold was mind-freakingly cold, everything was wet. There was mud everywhere. Including on all my 6 dogs, which meant soon all over the house. Suddenly the cute farmhouse that only had a fireplace for heat wasn’t quite as quaint anymore. And what did we know about building fires in the first place? Just getting the stupid thing to catch fire was a feat in and of itself. Figuring out how to keep it going through the night so you don’t wake up with ice on your face was completely beyond us.
Oh and sheep – we bought 50 sheep with the farm. Unlike the sweet ladies I was used to who were familiar with dogs and would behave nicely, these were 200lb rabid fiends who at the sight of a dog would charge headlong into a fencepost and drag the fencewire half a mile into the next pasture. They made it clear from the start that they wanted absolutely nothing to do with ignoramuses like us, so doing their monthly hoof-trim was more like a cross between a stampede and mud-wrestling.
Of course, they were in the middle of lambing when we arrived.. And you guessed it, we knew absolutely nothing about lambing. We knew what end they came out, and that was about it. We went into the barn, and saw all the various implements that I had only read about laid out before us. Rope thingies for pulling lambs, strange t-shape objects for when a sheep’s uterus falls out. Rubber band affixers for removing those male parts that cause all the problems. A whole array of medicines whose purpose was a complete mystery because all the labels had faded. And things we have still not figured out.
We were lucky that the sheep were smart enough not to have any complications that first year, but we were such stupendous losers, we didn’t even know we weren’t having complications. "Are those lambs supposed to be yellow?", "is there supposed to be blood?", "are they supposed to shiver like that?", "There’s something wrong with that ewe. Why is it lying on its side and breathing heavily? Is she in labor or is she dying?" We would check on those poor lambs every five minutes, driving them absolutely crazy.
It was quickly apparent that we had moved into a whole new realm of loserdom as the depths of our ignorance was truly systemic and profound. It was also painfully obvious. The realization that it is impossible to mow an acre with a push mower on anything resembling a regular basis. That transporting hay in the back on the SUV just isn’t practical. The losing battle with the weeds in the vegetable garden that would grow a foot overnight, and would just laugh at me and my pathetically inadequate hoe.
We had absolutely no clue how to do a single thing that was worthwhile in this environment. How do you start a tractor? What are all those gears and knobs for? What on earth is that piece of equipment supposed to do? What do you do when the forklift suddenly spurts oily stuff and then stops running? What do you do when a sheep dies – put it in the trash? What is the best way to get sheep poo out of your hair? And is it bad when a pile of manure and straw starts smoking?
How do you get a cow out of a creek where it has fallen down a 12 foot embankment? Through blackberry bushes. No kidding, that’s what I was actually doing this morning.
All I can say is thank goodness for our neighbors. Luckily for us they have been polite about our sheer ineptitude, and have abstained from laughing out loud at our complete ignorance. They have actually helped us, educated us, and prevented us from accidentally killing all our sheep. They are slowly bringing us back from the pinnacle of complete loserdom, which is just as well as it is exhausting having to constantly maintain such a high level.
I had never really appreciated these rural people before. They were generally ‘country bumpkins’ or ‘rednecks’. But these people now absolutely amaze me with their knowledge and experience. They can fix anything mechanical with a couple of screws and duct-tape. They are masters of plumbing, welding, wiring and construction. They know the nutrition level of grass just by looking at it. They are vets. They can do physical labor for 10 hours in a hot field and not go to bed as soon as they get home. I now know they wear cowboy hats because it keeps the sun both out of their eyes and off their neck. They wear flannel shirts because it soaks up the sweat. They have guns in the event an animal needs to be humanely put to sleep, and because when they don’t, a bear could kill their dog - like happened to a friend of mine a few weeks ago.
All the smarts and knowledge I thought I had are now as useless as tits on a bull, and my neighbor’s 10 year old kid has more practical knowledge than I do. And this knowledge, which seems esoteric and not very important to most of us, puts food on all of our tables every day.
Now I have nothing but the utmost respect for my new neighbors, and I am thankful they are here to save me from myself.
So the floor’s open! What is your loser story this week?