Wednesday, January 12, 2011

The Waiting

Don't wait for it to happen. Don't even want it to happen. Just watch what does happen. 
--Sean Connery as Jim Malone in The Untouchables

One of my favorite Facebook jokes is to reply "That's always the hardest part" anytime I see anyone post "is waiting" as his or her status. I'm sure most people would think posting the same Tom Petty reference over and over would become tedious, but it amuses me every time I do it.

That may be in part because there is some truth to those words. Waiting is hard. The anticipation of something good can often lead to an expectational build-up that reality has trouble competing with, while the knowledge of an impending problem or pain can often be worse than the actual situation associated with it. 

We're experiencing that right now with the pigs. Our first sow was due to have her litter on Monday and, as of 5:00 this evening, was still conspicuously pigless, as were the other three sows shut up in the farrowing house with her. We were really hoping for her to start yesterday, when the snow day would have made taking care of the new babies convenient, then we predicted that she would have them last night after the temperature dropped and the trip to the barn would have involved braving sub-zero windchill factors. (Swine gestation is approximately 114 days, which can be translated to 3 months, 3 weeks, 3 days, 3 a.m. and 3 below.)

As of this writing, the waiting continues. Hopefully, when the pigging starts, everything will be nice and easy for the sows, and the waiting really will have been the hardest part.



3 comments:

  1. It wasn't until I married into this family that I realized that "pigging" was a verb.

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  2. It's posts like this that remind, no matter how much we have in common, no matter how much we may think aline or share the same values, we live in different worlds.

    Ya gotta love a country or a planet big enough to hold both our experiences.

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  3. They certainly do have a talent for picking the most inconvenient (read cold middle of the night) times! I hope they all arrive without problems.

    Teresa

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