Why we ate our last trout

I was hoping our last original trout would live out a normal life and die of old age, but at 6 years old, I suppose that is a long life for a trout, and today she decided to try to eat her young trout neighbors. The fish guys found her choking on a trout half her size. I don't know why I call her a girl - oh, well, she had eggs, but that was only seen on autopsy. They said they tried to resussitate her (I wish I could have seen that) because they know she's special to me. The last of 50 that came with the house in 2008.


Then they found half of a young trout halfway inside her. They called us with a cell phone and we came down there with some knives. And muffins, I wanted to see if I could get out of cleaning a fish with a bribe of muffins. They finally knocked her on the head. I sighed, "Death penalty for killing neighbor fish." Poor thing, I didn't want to do this.

My muffin ploy worked. They wanted to do a real autopsy to check out any health issues of a fish living in these ponds. She looked fine and I'd honestly never inspected all the organs before.

So now I've got a trout in the oven, full of lemon and garlic and butter. Our last. But it won't be long before the others are grown up. I hope to always have fresh fish.

We're not hungry for dinner though because my man's aunt and uncle visited us for the first time for coffee and cake. I had made two types of muffins (pumpkin and zucchini - I know, it's not Winter but those were the ingredients I had). The zucchini and walnuts came from the garden, the pumpkin from America (of course - there is no canned pumpkin in Germany).

Problem is, our aunt brought fresh baked sunflowerseed bread, and some sort of cake. The bread was great, I will eat the entire thing myself this week, but that cake (she called it "yeast" cake?) was so dry and plain, I couldn't it. When her husband tried my muffins he said, "I know why she doesn't like the cake, it's not sweet enough!"

We showed them our entire property and they met Bellis and Baasha and seemed impressed with both of them offered to shake hands for treats. My man's aunt said, "Ah, a grey. Grey horses are piglets, always getting the dirtiest." I said, "How do you know my horse?!": )

I'd just washed Baasha's tail with German "spray&wash" and it was finally white again, down to the tips. I washed his tail 4 times in the last 2 days, but it was the spray&wash that really made the difference. (Don't worry, I don't get it anywhere near the skin - only the lower half of the tail.)

Since her husband worked for the knife factory where the best knives in Germany originate, he brought me two amazing knives (that were obviously made for cutting through watermelon rind like it's a tomato skin!) and took my hoof knife to sharpen. He'll also sharpen our lawnmower blade later this week, it's so dull now it just carresses grass instead of cutting it.

They just loved our house and yard and pasture, what we didn't say was how many hours we spent cleaning and weeding before they arrived. That's exactly what I needed, guests, to get this house really clean.

Oh, in case you were wondering, we met with Isabel and her parents, our neighbors, and she will take care of our animals the entire 3 weeks we're gone, but she is allergic to cats so that might be tricky. Mercer will have to just deal with no people around for a while, I honestly think she'd prefer to stay here alone than be kenneled somewhere. Isabel will feed her twice a day, but won't be staying here as I'd hoped.

I cannot believe that I only have 4 more workdays, 1 day preparing, and then an awful 17-hour journey and then... reverse culture shock.