Song of the Month: Hard Rain's A Gonna Fall

This is a new feature for the blog - our idea here is what song most closely ties into the mood or theme of the month. We'll pick and post one at the end of each month.

July 2009 - "Hard Rain's Gonna Fall" - Bob Dylan

Easy one to guess, right? July was one of the wettest months ever for Albany, NY, according to the Northeast Regional Climate Center - my county received between 200-300% of the normal July precip total. Hard rain feel several times, but pretty much every day had some precip, even if it was light.

click here to see full size version

Dylan tells stories about the origin of this song (pre-Vietnam, even pre-Cuban Missile Crisis) and in typical Dylan fashion the song has lines and phrases that leave a lot of listener latitude on applying. He says that it is not specifically about a nuclear war, but just the End. Perhaps even he didn't want to nail it down for us, leave it to our febrile imaginations to adapt it for every dangerous moment.

In any case, here it is sung by Dylan in 1964:

And here it is sung by Edie Brickell and New Bohemians (our fav cover version)

Bucket Math

OK, I will admit that those two words in the title do not go together all that well - buckets are solid, tangible objects and math is abstract. For us, the number of buckets in rotation tells us something about where we are in the year.

To wit,

1. Winter - we keep 12 does, 4 bucks, and 20 chickens over the winter. The does get 3 buckets of hot water, bucks get 1 hot, and the chickens get 1 hot. So 5 buckets in the morning. Then 2 more in the evening with the evening hay. So we need only 7 buckets that day.
2. Spring - as the does get more and more preggers, the water goes up to 4 buckets in the morning, this is especially true on those odd days in April that are warm and humid. No evening buckets, so we stay at 6 buckets till kidding season.
3. Summer - with no pigs or turkeys, the chickens stick at 2 buckets (chicks + hens) for the day. The boys seem to need 1 1/4 buckets, so they now get 2 buckets. And the does + kids (12 does + 20-some kids) move up to 6-8 buckets, depending on how hot it is. Now we are up to 10-12 buckets.
4. Late Summer - today was the last pickup (aside from our buck Cody if a buyer picks him) of goats. We are back down to 12 goats in the doe area (7 seniors and 5 juniors) and 4 bucks in the back buck pen. We are back down to 10 buckets per day. Whew.

At the end of the day, we like to keep 2x the number of buckets, so one set is cleaned for the next morning.

This is how the infrastructure creeps up - all the small things that are almost impossible to account for ahead of time. Adding an extra doe or buck has a cost (their price) and then the estimating the other costs becomes fun. One more doe needs - an annual CD&T, feed, hay, minerals, sundry medical supplies and her annual blood testing. Those are the costs that are really hard to nail down - blood testing is easy, but feed and hay depend on the goat's size and age, the weather's effect on the pasture, and how many babies she is or may be nursing.

Bucket math is the guide - becoming a good guesser is the point of the game.