Down on the Farm

During my brief sojourn in Logansport over Christmas break, I trekked (as is tradition) to the Star Nail down by the BMV to have my lungs assaulted with chemical fumes and my nails turned into vicious plastic talons. I know that this is terrible for my nails and, after a few days of nail growth, slightly ratchet-looking, but I like to get acrylic nails put on once or twice a year to help curb my nail-biting habit. The plain white tips I get are fairly inoffensive and cute-looking as fake nails go, and, believe you me, they keep me from biting my nails. Have you ever tried biting through a fake nail? It is impossible. I imagine that the insides of bulletproof vests are actually just giant sheets of acrylic nails, because these things are bionic.

Acrylic nails serve an important purpose in my nail-biter's life, and I've rarely regretted having them on.

As I stood in a pile of ankle-deep mud in a barn in my first week back in Ireland, holding onto a metal fence with all four limbs and attempting to fight off a swarm of angry, pregnant sheep, I regretted my nails.

After my week at home, I spent my second week of Christmas break traveling Ireland, including a three-day stint on my relatives' farm in County Tipperary living out a real-life episode of The Simple Life with Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie. 

The Logansport Cahalan family has long been in contact with the Cahalan family of Ballingarry, Ireland, and it has been tradition since the seventies that most of my family's visits to the Emerald Isle include a stop at the Ballingarry Cahalans' farm. This is a great, fun tradition. I learned a lot about my Irish ancestors, my (very) distant relatives still living here, and about the actual pronunciation of my last name.

But I also did a lot of work out on the farm. Me. Haha. Hahahahahaha.

As you read these tales of my work on the farm, remember that it is in fact me, your friend/loved one Sarah Cahalan, doing these things, and get in your quota for laughter for the better part of 2015.

The first task of my big day on the farm was helping the veterinarian in "scanning the ewes." (Word to the wise: "ewe" in this circumstance is pronounced "yo," as in "yo, dawg" or Yo! MTV Raps, so in other words, this whole ordeal is the most absurd thing I've ever been a part of.) All of my relatives' 270 ewes are supposed to be pregnant at the moment, and on this particular day, the vet had come by with a very fancy machine to determine how many lambs each ewe is carrying. Of the 270 ewes, only three were not with lamb, and this is a Very Good Thing.

To complete the scanning of the ewes (reminder: yoes), we had to create an enclosure using hay bale piles for two sides and cattle fences for the others, herd the ewes into the enclosure, and keep them there until they had gone through the sheep-gyno machine. If you think this sounds like an easy task, you are stupid and wrong.

In theory, it really isn't that hard, but in practice, the ewes want desperately to break free from the enclosure, and the amount of rope you have on hand is not enough to attach the final two fence segments to each other. To keep the enclosure closed, then, you have to throw your unsuspecting American relative on this fence vulnerability and have her guard it.

I don't understand animals.

I learned this as I stood in the corner, literally ankle-deep - I can't stress enough that this is not an exaggeration - in a mud substance that I'm certain was mostly fecal, and attempted to keep these 270 sheep from escaping through this clearly understaffed hole in the fence.

My relatives told me that throwing my arms in the air and shouting at the sheep would generally keep  the sheep at bay. "Generally," however, is not always, and in the instances where arm-waving doesn't work, they advocated gently hitting or kicking the sheep. This makes me nervous. I don't want to hit these sheep. Two of them, inexplicably, have horns! I've never met them before! This seems deeply inconsiderate! Instead, I attempted to reason with the sheep. "Please don't do that," I would say to them. "Why you gotta do me like this?", I pleaded. I wish I could say I was lying about this. I am not.

As the sheep kept closing in on me and my life flashed before my eyes, I thought about sheep and about children and realized that I don't do well with creatures that can't understand logical requests between adults. "Can you please not chew on my yoga pants? They are not made of food" is lost on sheep, and therefore, sheep are lost on me. I don't get them. But darn it all, I kept them in that enclosure.

Later that day - either right before or right after my relative pointed to the three non-pregnant, auction-bound sheep and said, "Have you ever had a doner kebab? There's three live ones"- we sent the ewes through a different set of contraptions to weigh and disinfect them. My task was largely the same as it had been in the morning, but somewhere in the middle of Gategate round two, the realization hit me that acrylic nails are a deeply stupid invention. Things one can do with fake nails: type, poke stuff, much more easily open pop cans. Things one cannot do with fake nails: everything else on earth.

On my last day on the farm, the relatives brought me along on a fox hunt. As most of you know or could guess, I don't particularly condone hunting. But a "hunt" in which a bunch of people don fancy equestrian gear and drink wine on horseback at a rich person's house for several hours before joyriding their horses through the countryside with the end goal of maybe finding a fox somewhere is a hunt that I can get behind. It also gave me a chance to make a lot of Taylor Swift references. It was a good day.

So, my friends, if you're ever looking to re-live the Paris and Nicole glory days of The Simple Life, just read back through this post and think of my time on the farm. You may call me Nicole.

Loves it.