Cold Front: Enterprise Retrospective

Yes, I still have a lot of these episodes to review. I actually got the first season on Blu-Ray for Christmas, which is nice. Three more seasons to go...

So, Cold Front was the 'mid-season finale' (although they weren't called that back in 2001) for the first season of Enterprise, and it brought back the Temporal Cold War that was introduced in the pilot, Broken Bow. It wasn't very popular with fans, adding an unnecessary complication to the prequel series and one that obvious never reappeared in any other Star Trek show. But it's here, and we have to deal with it.

Here's the plot recap from Wikipedia:

Enterprise investigates a stellar nursery with several ships inside. Hailing one, they encounter a group on a pilgrimage to the Great Plume of Agosoria. Every eleven years, one of the protostars emits a neutron blast that the pilgrims consider a sacred event. Captain Archer invites the pilgrims to visit Enterprise. In Engineering, Commander Tucker explains the Warp 5 engine to the pilgrims. One alien discreetly disconnects an antimatter junction, and his arm morphs, revealing him as Suliban.

As Enterprise tries to go around a plasma storm, a bolt strikes the ship and causes an antimatter cascade that almost reaches the reactor, but is stopped by the disconnected junction. Tucker detects the sabotage in the junction, but does not suspect any of the crew. Crewman Daniels informs Archer that he believes one of the pilgrims is Silik, the Suliban whom Archer previously encountered. In his quarters, Daniels tells Archer he is not Starfleet but from the 31st century, commenting that the people who command Silik in the Temporal Cold War are from an earlier century. He comments that he has been sent to capture him, and asks for permission to tie his tracking technology into the ship's internal sensors.

Silik appears to Archer in his quarters and claims that Daniels' group was responsible for the antimatter cascade, and that the Temporal Accord is a lie. In Engineering, Daniels detects Suliban bio-signs, but is surprised and vaporized by Silik. T'Pol and Tucker summon Doctor Phlox to revive the now unconscious Archer. Archer asks Tucker to use Daniels' sensors to locate Silik while he and T'Pol visit Daniels' quarters to study the database that Archer saw earlier. It is gone. Silik escapes to Shuttle Bay 4, and refuses to surrender the device, so Archer shoots it from his hand. Silik opens the bay doors and freefalls to a waiting Suliban shuttlepod, and Archer asks Lieutenant Reed to seal off Daniels' cabin and any temporal secrets it may hold.

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So, there's some shipboard action in this episode, and more questions than answers about the Temporal Cold War. Is Silik telling the truth? Of course not, because he's the bad guy, but it's not always obvious, particularly when dealing with someone like Daniels, who is from nine hundred years in the future and most definitely has an agenda of his own.

There are some amusing bits in this episode, such as when Trip tries to explain the Warp 5 engine in extreme layman's terms, only to have one of the aliens ask him direct and points questions about technological sophistication and making him look like a bit of a fool. The reveal of Daniels' 'archive' device is pretty neat, and the ominous ending when the cabin being sealed off suggests that there will be more to this later on.

I liked this episode, although it didn't really jump out as anything special. The alien cultures were interesting, having their own motivations and understanding of the universe. Archer gets to be heroic again, T'Pol gets to be very skeptical, and Silik gets to save the ship. I'll give it a 6 out of 10, and let's see what the second half of the season brings us.

I wrote my own far-future science fiction, Bard Conley's Adventures Across the Solar System, which is available in e-book and paperback format at an Amazon website near you. Check it out, and see another view of the far future.

The Shackled City: Introductory Episode

As I mentioned a couple of days ago, we had our first D&D session for the new campaign. Here's a recap of how the game went, with much more detail than I put in the first time. I'm going to keep a running commentary on the game as we play it, for those who are interested.

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For those who aren't familiar with the Shackled City, it was the first 'adventure path' produced by Paizo in Dungeon Magazine just as the switch from D&D 3e to 3.5 was beginning (they are now on 5th edition and switching to whatever they will be calling the 6th edition). The main locale is the city of Cauldron, a sub-tropical city built inside an extinct volcano with a deep lake in the center of the crater. It was originally given a generic setting, but was retroactively set in Greyhawk (particularly when the third Adventure Path, the Savage Tide, came out a few years later). I, however, have set it in Mystara, on the continent of Davania. Because, as everyone knows, Mystara rules.

There are six PCs, using Players Handbook rules and everyone at 1st level (no Unearthed Arcana yet except for weapon specialization, and I have house ruled a few things). Most of the characters don't have names yet; this group is mostly teens, and they're stuck in video game mentality where their avatars aren't named. I'll work on that with them. In the meantime, though, here are the PCs:

Half-elf fighter, on the bard path
Human paladin
Elf fighter/magic-user
Gnome illusionist/thief
Human magic-user
Ms. Taskerhill, Human fighter

The last one is named simply because she took the Nobility trait, and I gave her the option of which noble family to be affiliated with. There is no cleric, which made them a tad nervous at first. Note that only the last, Ms. Taskerhill, is a new player (the mother of the elf, in fact), and so she was learning as she went, and I gave her the fighter pre-gen just to save time.

So, the party is somewhat spellcaster heavy (eventually having four casters once the fighter gets to bard levels, plus the paladin at 9th level). But they have good fighter capability (the half-elf and Ms. Taskerhill have specialization in longsword and battle axe, respectively), and the gnome has decent stats for a 1st-level thief.

The game began as the party was traveling together back to Cauldron from Sasserine after several months away, and they spent the night at the Lucky Monkey. This was mostly a role-playing opportunity, which had mixed results. Ms. Taskerhill was the best at getting into character, while the magic-user was virtually silent throughout the game. He's shy; we'll work on him. While they spoke with the innkeeper, they learned that there had been a series of kidnappings in Cauldron over the past few months. There were no suspects, just rumors flying around, and none of the victims had yet been found, not even their bodies.

The highlight of their stay at the Lucky Monkey was when a very attractive woman entered and went to the bar; the half-elf made a crude pass at her involving a wolf whistle (my son insisted that he was doing it out of character, but I couldn't resist). In response, she touched the wooden tabletop with her finger, and the wood reshaped itself into a hand and slapped him across the face (no damage) before returning to normal. The paladin was much better at personal interaction, and she introduced herself as Shensen, a local druid who often visited the Lucky Monkey.

Not much else happened at the Monkey, so in the morning the group continued on their journey home. It was a dismal, dreary, drizzly day with grey skies. They arrived at Cauldron close to nightfall, but before the gates were closed for the night. With the exception of the elf, the party is comprised of Cauldron natives, so only the elf had to pay the gate tax (1 sp) to enter the city. The group was going to break up and go their separate ways when they heard the sounds of scuffling in an alley nearby. Being eager adventuring types, they all went to investigate and found three men wearing assaulting a man on the ground. The men wore jester-like masks, the identifying mark of the Last Laugh thieves' guild. When confronted, the jesters warned the party off, but their intimidation was more effective in a three-on-one situation than in a six-on-three.

The paladin swung his bardiche at one of them, but just barely missed as the thug dodged at the last moment. Ms. Taskerhill slipped on the wet cobblestones and fell, unharmed but for her pride. The bard-in-training fared much better, swatting one of the thugs with the flat of his blade and sending him spinning to the ground, unconscious. The gnome did him one better, hitting the two remaining thugs with a color spray and knocking them out cold.

Shortly afterward, a patrol of the town guard came by, alerted by some locals who heard the sounds of fighting in the alley. Led by Corporal Skylar Krewis, the town guard took their statements, relying on Ms. Taskerhill and the paladin as the most reliable-looking members of the party. As they were finishing, one of the town guards realized that the thugs were themselves town guards. Concerned and angered, Corporal Krewis took them into custody and marched them off to the nearest guardhouse for questioning.

Meanwhile, the party assisted the assault victim, a low-level priest in the Church of Diulanna, Ruphus Laro. Ruphus informed them that the thugs were warning him not to investigate the latest kidnapping: Four children had been taken from the Lantern Street Orphanage. They had been in a locked room inside a locked building, with the only key around the neck of the Orphanage's headmistress. There were no clues as to their disappearance, and when Laro had gone to the Orphanage to speak with the headmistress, he had been attacked on his way back to the church.

Laro asked the party to accompany him back to the Church to report to his superior. They agreed, and met with Jenya Urikas, the current senior priest in the Church as the high priest was away in Sasserine. Jenya informed them of the kidnappings, and explained that it was a city-wide issue; the orphanage was simply the latest place to be hit. She had used a church artifact, the Star of Justice, to cast a divination spell and asked where the missing children were being held. She received her answer in the form of a cryptic riddle:

The locks are key to finding them. Look beyond the curtain, below the cauldron. Beware the doors with teeth. Descend into the malachite 'hold, where precious life is bought with gold. Half a dwarf binds them, but not for long.

Jenya asked the party to continue the investigation on her behalf, since it was too risky for a single cleric such as Ruphus to undertake this task alone. The Last Laugh is a dangerous group, after all. They accepted her offer, and each of them received a healing potion from Jenya, and a promise of payment for successful return of the children. Ruphus would accompany them; the half-elf was particularly pleased, since that meant they had a cleric with them now.

In the morning, they all met at the church before going to the Lantern Street Orphanage together. There, they met the headmistress, Gweneth, an elderly woman who was suspicious about them until she saw Ruphus. At that point, she invited them in and answered all their questions as best she could. The group did some investigating, and the gnome tried to pick one of the locks just to see how good they were. It turned out that they were very good indeed (-25% to his lockpicking skill, meaning he had a 0% chance of success). Eventually, they discovered that the locks were made by a gnome artisan in the city, Keygan Ghelve. With no other leads, they went to the locksmith's shop to ask him some questions.

Keygan was welcoming at first, thinking they were potential customers, but as they began to question him, he became unhappy and uncooperative. After several minutes of fruitless attempts to get Keygan to talk, the elf surreptitiously cast a charm person. Keygan rolled a 1 on his saving throw, so he was done. He still wouldn't say much, although as he spoke, he kept slipping a gnomish word into his speech, a word that means 'in the back'. At first, the gnome illusionist/thief thought that meant there was something outside behind the building, but then he noticed the curtain behind the counter. To distract Keygan, he cast an audible glamer to make it sound like a window had broken elsewhere in the building. When Keygan went to look, the elf and half-elf slipped behind the curtain to investigate. The half-elf spotted the secret door under the stairs, but before he could look for a way to open it, something jumped from the top of the stairs and landed on him.

The timing was perfect, as we ended the session there, right at 9 pm. All in all, it went really well, although there were times when some of the players got a little too much into the 'out-of-character' banter, distracting from the game. Ms. Taskerhill, who has never played any sort of RPG before, said she had a great time and couldn't wait to do it again. The rest of the group also enjoyed the game, and everyone is looking forward to finding out what jumped on the half-elf, and what's behind the secret door.

Who's Yer Father? (Movie Review)

I have to talk about this movie; it's very much a PEI sort of thing, and people outside of the Maritimes probably didn't even hear about it, let alone watch it. And if they did, they wouldn't have understood half of it. But I have to say, it was a hell of a good time.

Even Wikipedia doesn't have much to say about it:

Who's Yer Father? is a 2023 Canadian crime comedy film, written, produced, and directed by Jeremy Larter. The film stars Chris Locke as Larry Constable, a bumbling private investigator in a small Prince Edward Island town who teams up with convenience store owner Rhonda Perry (Susan Kent) to investigate a black market lobster smuggling ring.

And that's about it, aside from some more cast info and a brief mention of when it was filmed and released. It doesn't really do the movie justice.

I wasn't sure about going to it at first, but my wife really wanted to go, and it was on a limited release. So, we made a date of it, and sat down to one of the funniest movies I've watched in a long time. It's funny because it is so dead-accurate to life on PEI. I've been asked the title question many times when people find out I was born here. And it was quite cool seeing a couple of places I've actually been to appear in the movie. Charlottetown and Summerside aren't featured at all in this movie; it's very much a rural thing. Which covers 95% of this island, really.

The movie suggests that PEI doesn't actually have any private investigators, or rather only has the one, which I actually had to look into to find out if it was true. I've never required the services of a PI before, so the question of whether or not there are any on this island never came up until I saw this movie.

It's not exactly family-friendly; the language is coarse at best, and there is a lot of suggestive sexual references, although there's no nudity. Still, it's quite...earthy. The violence is either suggested and not shown, or it's absurd and played for laughs. Overall, though, this movie is definitely not for kids.

There are a few loose ends that never get tied up, such as what ends up happening to Larry's ostensible client, or whether or not the black market lobster ring (that still sounds funny as hell in my mind) is ever broken up. Let's just say that Larry will not be mistaken for Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot any time soon. But at least he can play the guitar, which those other two couldn't do, so he gets some bonus points for that.

I'm going to rate this movie an 8 out of 10; it's flawed, and as I said it's not for families, but it's a great little slice of the humorous side of life on a small island province. If it shows up on one of the streaming sites, check it out.

Farm Life in the Winter

Well, with winter finally in full swing, it's hunkering down season for the chickens. We've got three sets of them: one in the barn, one in the coop I built this summer, and one in the chicken house we bought a couple of months ago. For a while we weren't getting any eggs from them, which sucks, but lately they've been producing more. I'm not sure what brought it on, but maybe it's the variety in their diet, including the organ meat from the pigs we butchered last month. Hey, if they like it, I'm not going to complain.

The rabbits are still doing their thing in their hutch; I let them out at Christmas for some grass and fresh air, and it took three days to finally catch them all and return them to the hutch. I don't mind them being outside during the day, but we still have predators around here, and I'd rather not find rabbit guts or blood trails leading into the bush in the morning. Call me old-fashioned, I suppose.

The pigs, meanwhile, are doing great. They were happy to move back into the barn after the other pigs became freezer-bait, although they still spend a good chunk of time outside in their old shelter as well. At night, though, it's back to the barn and the warm straw. As to when they'll have babies, we're looking into that and trying to figure out how long it will be. We know that whatever babies Delilah does have won't be old enough to go to the butcher for at least a year, so we'll be bringing in some more meat pigs this year one last time.

The only other animals we have to worry about on the farm are the damn rats. I've tried a bunch of ways to kill them off, with limited success. We just bought some play-doh pellets laced with poison in hopes they will work on them. We'll see what happens, but I know I haven't seen a reduction in the rat population yet. In the spring, I'm going to take a more drastic measure.

So, things should be quiet on the farm for the next few months; things will ramp up again in April and May, once we get the greenhouse going and get the gardens planted again. There's a lot of planning to do before then, so I'll leave things off here and come back tomorrow.

The Game's Afoot!

Now that my wife isn't virulently opposed to Dungeons & Dragons, we got a game going tonight with the local RPG club. I'm running a 1st edition AD&D conversion of the 3rd edition Shackled City campaign, set in the gaming world of Mystara. We got off to a good start, with six players. I won't go into a lot of details just yet, but everyone had a good time, and we ended on a cliffhanger as one of the PCs got jumped after finding a secret door in a locksmith's shop. They'll have to wait until next Saturday to find out what happens next.

I prefer old school games, and I really don't like the proliferation of weird and ever-more-powerful races that later editions have come up with. Maybe I'm too much of a traditionalist, but give me a mostly-human party any day of the week. sure, the occasional gnome or elf works, but as spice, not the main course. And forget dragonborn, goliaths, warforged, and all the other really strange stuff that started back in 3rd edition and still goes on to this day. I just don't find them inspiring. Maybe I'm just old.

Anyway, the game started with an introductory encounter at the Lucky Monkey Roadside Inn, where they got to do some actual role-playing and get a feel for their characters. It was fun, particularly when the half-elf bard-to-be (1st edition, remember?) jokingly tried to hit on the good-looking woman that showed up. She responded by touching the table in front of him, which formed a hand and slapped him across the face. Don't mess with druids. He kept insisting that he was joking and talking out of character, but I couldn't resist the opportunity. I hoped it would help cut down on the silly non-game bantering, but I was disappointed in that hope.

The game moved into Cauldron, where they soon found out about the rash of kidnappings, and rescued a local priest from being mugged and threatened by some thugs, warning him to stay away from investigating the kidnappings. The PCs took them down in a hurry, and got involved in the investigation at the behest of the local cleric of Diulanna. They investigated the orphanage where the latest kidnapping had occurred, and then moved on to the locksmith who had made the orphanage's locks.

When they got there, they found a nervous and uncooperative gnome who tried to send subtle warnings in gnomish to one of the PCs (a fellow gnome, obviously). They ended up investigating the back of his shop, and had just found a secret door when suddenly the half-elf got jumped...and we ended the night's play.

As I said, everyone enjoyed the game, including the newest player (one of the other players' mother and the host of the gaming club). We'll be reconvening in nine days' time to see what happens next. It's going to be fun.

Getting Back on Track

As I mentioned a couple of days ago, I didn't do much writing after I left my job and became a full-time farmer. It sucks, and it's the second time a major change in circumstance has messed with my writing; the first was when we moved out here. I finally got back into the swing of things at the end of 2022, but the farm took over completely by May of 2023.

Well, it's time to rectify that, and I've already started working on something new. It's a story I've had in my head for a lot of years. It's a 'shared universe' story, set in the same world as the stories of Kane. It's set in a different part of the world, and Kane won't be making an appearance. It's another 'fish out of water' story, but with very different circumstances. I won't give any more details just yet, but I'm looking forward to it.

I've also got another story in the world of Meterra on the go, which I was working on last year during the April A to Z blogging challenge. It's the story of Bartinus of the Royal Rangers and his efforts to solve the mystery of a growing swamp. I know, but it's fantasy; why expect normal?

And yes, I have a couple of ideas for Cameron Vail mysteries, although they're both in the larval stages right now. I'm going to try to plan them out a little better this time instead of the usual 'just write it and figure it out as you go' method. I don't know if it will work out better, but we'll see.

So, there's plenty of writing to be done, and I'd best get to it. I said I wanted to get at least ten books published this year, so I'll need to get them written first. Wish me luck.

To get a taste of the world where the first new book is set, check out the first Book of Kane, Crimson Moon, available now at an Amazon website near you.

Filling the Gaps

Some people say I have an obsession with books and collecting them. To those people, I laugh and say, 'obsession is such a mild word.'

While 2023 wasn't a banner year for collecting books, I did get some nice prizes from both online sources and used book stores here on Prince Edward Island. One of the things I have is a complete collection of L. Frank Baum's Oz books, all fourteen of them. Garrett (the youngest) has read a couple of them with me, but he's lost interest lately, so we're still working on the third book, Ozma of Oz. I remember it being a fun book to read when I was a kid, but he's somewhat flighty with his reading choices.

I also started re-collecting an author I enjoyed when I was younger: Terry Brooks. I know, a lot of old-school fantasy readers blame him for basically copying Lord of the Rings with the Sword of Shannara and making 'epic Tolkien pastiche' the dominant genre of fantasy for an entire generation until J.K. Rowling published Harry Potter and started a new trend. Well, that's basically true, although he definitely has his own style, and the rest of the books in the original trilogy were very different from Sword. And he's done a lot of other books in the world of Shannara, including some prequels that confirm that Shannara is just our world in the distant future after a massive nuclear apocalypse. Not the most original premise, no, but it still reads well. I've got about half of his books now, thanks to a great find at the Salvation Army where I picked up about ten of them at once for about five bucks.

Not to neglect the mystery genre, I picked up a few books at thrift stores by Agatha Christie, Rex Stout, and Erle Stanley Gardner. By no means do I have even a majority of the books by any of those writers, but it's nice to have some of them back after a long time without. It's great inspiration for the Cameron Vail books, after all.

Back to fantasy, and I found a bunch of books collecting Fritz Lieber's Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser stories from the 1930s and 1940s. I'm only missing one book to complete that set, which of course is a foundational work for Dungeons & Dragons. Good stuff, very gripping. I've also collected a few more of the 'Appendix N' books, although they can be hard to come by since gamers have been collecting them for a long time now.

Finally, I mentioned yesterday that we're taking a trip to France in 2025. One of the stops we will be making is to Vimy Ridge, one of the most important historical battles in Canadian history. And to prepare for that, I picked up a copy of Pierre Berton's Vimy. I read it years ago, and it's a great book with tons of detail provided by men who were actually there. For those who don't know, Berton is a Canadian author and historical writer who wrote a bunch of books on Canadian history in his lifetime. Older Canadians will remember him; he was a familiar face on various TV shows during the 1970s and 80s. I grabbed a few more of his books over the course the past year, and I have six or seven of them now. They are great reads, covering all sorts of topics such as the Canadian Railroad, the Depression, Confederation, etc. I highly recommend them for anyone interested in Canadian history.

No big-ticket books this year, although I'm hoping to get some of the missing volumes from the Great Books series; a flood back in Ontario ruined about half of the set, and I haven't been able to replace them yet. Here's hoping. Ideally, if I could add a few things to my library this year, I would want to get some more of the writings of the Early Church Fathers, finish the Terry Brooks collection, fill the gaps in my Great Books set, and some more mysteries, particularly by the aforementioned trio of authors.

How about you? Any books you added to your collection, or things you're on the lookout for in 2024? Let me know. Maybe we can help each other find them.

Another New Year...

Okay, I see that people have actually been visiting the blog despite my lack of activity over the past six months, so I guess I really need to get back to it. And now seems as good a time as any.

So, a quick review of 2023: I published four books at the beginning of the year, then fell off the writing wagon as my work situation drastically changed and I became a full-time farmer. We raised about 125 meat chickens, learned how to butcher them ourselves, actually DID butcher some of them ourselves, and raised five pigs from weaning. Three of those pigs are now in the freezer; two of them are breeders, and will be giving us bacon seeds in the spring. We also got a bunch of chickens and a coop from a homesteader who moved to North Carolina last month, so we currently have about forty egg-laying chickens, two pigs, and three bunnies. And a crap-ton of rats, which stubbornly refuse to die off.

That's 2023 in a nutshell. Now, on to 2024.

So, what are the goals for this year? Well, I have a few. First we're going to be getting a greenhouse in the spring. I'm going to be growing a LOT of tomatoes and peppers for sale, as well as a bunch of other veggies. We're also planning to ramp up our chicken flock, particularly in the meat-bird category; the goal for 2024 is at least 200 chickens. We're also going to get five or six more pigs for meat, since Samson and Delilah's kids will take a year to grow.

Why are we ramping up like this? Because I'm going to be selling the veggies to a local business that will turn all that fresh, naturally-grown produce into meals for people to buy. And we grew our customer base for our meat as well. We're only selling to locals and friends, since we're not a commercial farm. But it definitely provides us with some income.

So, that's the farm. What about the writing? I candidly admit I failed miserably to meet any of my writing goals after publishing that fourth book in April. The switch to farming really upended everything, and I found myself constantly putting off the writing in favor of other things that seemed more important. I'm not going to make that mistake this year; I'm still aiming for ten books to be published in 2024. I'm starting the first one tonight; I don't have anything nearly complete that I can just whip off in a few days and get ready for publication.

I'm also going to take the books I've already published and get them on other platforms besides Amazon. I'm not sure how much work that will take, but if I can add them onto Indigo, that's the main Canadian book seller (like Barnes & Noble in the States). It will certainly increase my potential audience, which can't hurt.

Another interesting development is that my wife finally gave in on playing Dungeons & Dragons. Not that she's going to ever play, but since our middle son wants to play, she finally relented, and we've got a biweekly game going at a local place with some of his friends. I'm the DM, at least for now, and we'll see how long it goes on for. We're starting a new campaign, a conversion of the Shackled City campaign from twenty years ago, converted to 1st edition Advanced D&D. It's going to be a blast.

I'm also going to be more diligent in keeping the blog going; I really wasn't expecting this many people to come see what I've been doing, so it's really great to see some traffic. And I'll have to give people a reason to keep coming back, so it's time to get this done. I don't know if I'll be able to keep it up consistently all year, but I'm certainly going to make every effort. And I plan on doing the A to Z challenge in April again as well, with another writing theme.

One more thing that we have going on: My son and I are going to France next year, April of 2025. It's a school trip, with a strong history theme. We'll be going to Vimy Ridge, Normandy, Versailles, and a day trip to the Netherlands as well to see how much they love Canada there. I can't wait to go; it's going to be amazing.

Alright, it's another new year, another set of resolutions, and it's going to be the biggest year yet for me, for the family, for the farm, and for the blog.

Bob the Piggie

 

Meet Bob. He's a Berkshire pig, bred for fairly quick growth for meat. We picked him up about a month ago, to give us some bacon for this year's meat harvest. Bob was the runt of his litter and was malnourished. The prior owners managed to get him from a neglectful home into their own dairy farm, where Bob (then called Bones because he was so skinny) thrived on their waste milk. When we picked him up, he was doing pretty well.

Bob isn't alone now; we picked up a couple of pink piggies from a big growing operation, similar to Peppa and George last year (fast-growing meat pigs). When we got them, they were the same size as Bob. Now, however, they've both outgrown him by a significant amount. And I found out that Bob isn't eating the hog pellets we put in their pen. So, he's not growing at all. In fact, my wife thinks he's actually lost weight. That's not good.

So, we consulted with some friends, and we picked up some milk replacement. After some quick instructions on how to mix it and give it to him, we tried it for the first time tonight. Well, Bob definitely loved it, and gulped down quite a bit. We're going to give it to him a couple of times a day for about a week to see if there's any improvement.

You can't tell in the picture above, but Bob's spine is protruding; there's no back meat on him at the moment. So, we're hoping the milk replacement will give him a bit of an opportunity to catch up to the others, or at least keep pace with their growth so they don't muscle him out of the food altogether.

We're also going to be looking at a replacement feed; the other pigs all like it, but Bob's not thrilled with it; he barely eats it, which is the main reason the other pigs are surpassing him so quickly. We're not giving up on the little guy, though. We'll try the milk replacement and a new kind of feed and see how that works for him.

14 Years

The love of my life, now and forever.