And now for the Thrifty Farm Report ...

See, when Evil Genius Husband and I started having babies, I, the farmer, was, by nessessity, kind of stuck in the house (and apparently collecting commas for later use). An ex-suburbanite, EGH gamely tackled the farm chores as I became less and less able to be any use in the barnyard (hugely pregnant, nursing, caring for a newborn, chasing a toddler, etc, etc). As time went on he became damned good at farming and soon he was taking care of the four-legged animals on the outside while I took care of the 2 legged ones inside.

I still make the executive decisions - who gets bred to whom, who gets culled, and so on. ( I also do all the construction, not because I'm nessessarily better at it, but because I have the Grand Plan (*snort*) in my head of where everything should go. And I love building stuff.)

So I had put an advert in the local farm paper this week selling some animals and got the oppertunity to do some trading. I much prefer trading. I mean, why shuffle bits of paper about between two people and the bank when you can just trade goods for goods? You have something I want, I have something you want ...

With the advert came the usual array of baffling phone calls.

I have Katahdin sheep - pronounced kuh-TAH-din after the mountain in Maine - and some mixed Dorper (DOOR-pur)sheep. I had one of these mixes for sale - a Katahdin/Dorper cross ram. The phone rang bright and early:

"Hello?"
"Yeah, I seen you had some ah them katydids?"
"Excuse me?"
"Katydid doopers. In the paper."
"Katydids?"
"Katydid doopers ... SHEEP!"
"Ahhhhhh ... yes, how stupid of me ..."

What in the world are people thinking? Are they taking a stab at pronouncing things they've never heard? Can they only read at a first grade level? And why, oh why, do folks continue to mispronounce things even when they're talking to you and you're pronouncing it correctly? Do they not understand that you're saying the same words? Or do they simply thing that you are the one mispronouncing it?

The problem seems rampant in the livestock circle. I used to breed and show dairy goats. I had Saanens (pronounced SAH-nen) and a large number of people I encounterd insisted on saying suh-NEEN. Hell, that doesn't even make sense! Then there's 'Barbie Doll' sheep (not to be confused with Babydoll sheep - a real breed) It took me years to figure out that people are talking about Barbados sheep. Hello! Barbados is an actual place. On a map. bar-BAY-dohs. Jeez.

The domestic livestock world has some real tongue twisting names: Oberhasli goats and Gelbvieh cattle spring to mind, but goodness gracious, these lazy people misprononce the simpler ones. Of course within the dairy goat community there's a hideous trend of pronouncing the noun caprine (the genus of the goat is capra) as kuh-PREEN. Uhh ... no. It's CAP-rine. Use your common sense. Say: canine, feline, bovine, equine ... So would caprine be kuh-PREEN? Bloody NO!!! Some of these folks are very intelligent - I've met them - but they insist on this mispronunciation.

So, uh, anyway ... back to trading ...

I had a good day, trading that Katydid Dooper (*rolls eyes*) and my lone turkey for a nice LaMancha buck (and have been humming the song from Don Quixote since). It was good to get back out into the barnyard even inthe 90 degree heat. I always miss it. I confess to getting much more pleasure from standing around at a stock sale or farmyard bullshitting about animals than I would at a playground in heated subtle competition with other moms.

Is that wrong? You decide. In the meantime, I'm pulling on my Wellies and I'll be up at the barn if you need me ...