Bout of Books 17: Update 1

Well...this week has certainly not gone according to plan. Yesterday was insanely busy, so I actually didn't even end up reading a single page. I'm heavily disappointed by that. Yes...I am participating in Bout of Books. No...I haven't read at all yet. Yes...I missed last night's Twitter chat. (Another devastating realization today.) But...let's hope that things will start getting back on track starting tonight.

Yesterday morning I woke up around 8:30 with a splitting headache. I ate some breakfast and was about to go back to sleep for a short nap, when I was informed that the pig was giving birth. We had anticipated that we had 2 or 3 days until this was going to happen, so it was a bit of a surprise. So...for the next five hours, I helped babysit the sow and clean off piglets, making sure she didn't crush them.

We wound up with ten, but she did manage to lay on one later in the day when we were out getting some supplies, so we now have nine. (Pigs are notoriously super terrible mothers in case you didn't know that.) In addition to the surprise births, we ended up with a runt who had her side cut at some point during the birth. She needed cleaning, bandaging, and she is now a temporary indoor piglet. Say hello to Pippa.

(She's not always this docile. She's a fiesty one.)

Once we got everything reorganized in the pen, it was after 8pm. We had originally planned to move the sow into the barn into a specific segregated area, but her jumping the gun led to a change of plans that required some creative construction. Once things were somewhat settled outside, I made a mad dash inside to get started on school work, since yesterday was also the first day of fall semester. Cut to me being up until midnight working on first day crap. (I sincerely hate the "you have to do all of this junk on day one or we'll manually remove you from the class" move. Professors...it's a dick move. Also of note...I hate it when you post some vague syllabus that doesn't tell me anything about what assignments I need to do when. I do have other classes. I need to be able to plan.)

After that, I fed Pippa and crashed out. I woke up at 3am to feed her again and then we were up at 7:30 so that we could get ready to go into Bemidji for the morning. I fed Pippa, got ready, and then our expected four-hour venture into Bemidji wound up taking nearly eight. There went another day. I'm now finally sitting down to post this update (which is really more of a whiny rant and was supposed to have been done yesterday) and then I will actually start some reading. First up, American history...specifically thirty pages on industrial capitalism. Sounds riveting, doesn't it? After that, it's some psycholinguistics. Maybe I'll even get in some leisure reading tonight. We shall see.

Now...let's see if I can actually make something of this Bout of Books...