Early one morning I got a call from hubby that he had hit a deer on his way to work.
The truck did not seem too banged-up but it was not drivable because of the way the bumper was bent. The deer on the other hand was dead on impact.
Since it was not too far away the kids and I drove out to see whether we could legally pick up the deer. I hate seeing all the deer meat laying on the side of the road rotting when it could be put to use. We were able to get a tag from Natural Resources Dept and take our "road kill" home. This was my 4th time butchering a deer, but I had never gutted one up to now. It was quite yucky and unfortunately hubby did not plan well and hit the deer right on the backstrap (steaks) part of the deer. That meant that we humans could not eat that part of the meat. I packaged up the damaged parts of the deer to feed to the dogs and the good parts for us. Lemons to lemonade!
Unfortunately, the truck being quite old, the insurance declared it totalled and hubby is now on the hunt for a new truck. It was sad to say goodbye to a good old truck. This is the car that he picked me up in way back when we started dating. We used it for our 2 moves and countless DIY plots of mine.
That weekend, small tornado went through the town next to ours and the power was out for more than 24 hours. (Hubby was away camping with the scouts most of that time.) I did not open the door of our upright freezer at ALL during the outage. I knew that it only had a little life left in it and was hoping it would last a bit longer. I did not open it for another 24 hours after the power had been restored because I wanted to give it time to get everything cold again. When I finally opened it, everything was half thawed and several bags of marinated meat, beets, berries had leaked. A huge mess. Oh well. We tried. I started calling around to try to find some friends with freezer space. Luckily, or more likely providentially, my farmer buddy that we get milk from (aka Mr. Prepared) had a whole freezer that was cold and empty. What a huge blessing! I took it all over to his house right away. A few days ago our new freezer (perfect timing for Black Friday sales) was delivered. It's quite a bit bigger and so much better at keeping things cold. We moved the old freezer to the basement so that it can keep things cool -- like potatoes and fruit and things that don't need to be frozen.
We postponed turkey butchering day due to the power outage I mentioned above. About 25 people were coming to use our equipment to butcher their birds, or to learn, or to help. We rescheduled for the following Saturday and the people who had birds to butcher said that they would be able to come. A lot of the others could no longer come because of schedule conflicts. I was up around 5:30am getting things ready for a busy day. I planned to put chicken soup in the crockpot because hubby had a sinus thing and I had a full day planned. While I was peeling the potatoes I did something dumb and turned the potato around to get one odd spot and peeled right into my finger. I was determined not to let this get in the way of my already once rescheduled butchering day even though I could clearly see that it was a stitch worthy wound. I soaked it in a comfrey poultice, then bandaged it up tightly, put on a latex glove and went to work getting the equipment, tables etc. set-up for our day. It was incredibly windy and we had a lot of trouble getting the propane burner under the scalding pot to stay lit.
Things went well once we got rolling. Then I made a mistake while I was gutting and got some goo on my gloves. When I took the one on my left hand off it was soaked in blood. My blood. Ugh. At that point we were nearly finished with the turkey part of things and I decided to do my test butchering of the geese another day. I had gotten some duck wax to try. All my friends were telling me to go to urgent care pronto.
I finally went and of course they said that it had been too long and they couldn't stitch it. They cleaned it with saline and put steri-strips on it. I have some of those in my amazon cart now so I can doctor myself next time. These pictures are from today, after a week of steri strips and bandages. I can feel that their is a big scab under that section of my finger and eventually it will just push out the old dead tissue. Like the doctor said, "that chunk will just eventually fall off". Sooo forthright.
Then not far from where hubby hit the deer, I was driving along and came down the road a few minutes after a multi-car collision. The cars were pulled off to the side and a police officer was on the scene, but their were bits of junk all over the road. I tried to steer carefully, but rolled over something and punctured the right front tire. I heard it flapping and luckily there was a nice big area where I was able to safely pull off the road. I jacked it up, but could not get the bolts off (apparently the trick is to step on the lug wrench). Hubby was working from home that day (providentially!) and was able to come help me get the spare on. Phew! So many blessings.
It has been a wild couple of weeks. It reminds me of our lesson at church today. Whether you believe in Jesus Christ and are living right or not, we will all have to go through hard things (Elder Anderson's talk "Wounded"). However, I can definitely see how each tough thing was made easier by Heavenly Father through many tender mercies, the kindness of friends, safe places to park, and people being at the right place at the right time.
