Porcine Paradise?

I guess they'd have to know how to talk to be able to tell me if they thought it was paradise, but I can't think of anything else to make it so.
A week ago Sunday, I was sitting in front of the grocery store, looking at the bulletin board, when out popped a sign that said pigs for sale. We'd been talking about raising piglets for the freezer for six years (we'd done this before and I had not enjoyed the experience, but the results were tasty), and the subject had just a couple of days prior, come up again. This time it had more of a chance of succeeding because of the drastic flock reduction I've implemented here. All we needed was a pen and some pigs.
I'm one of those that lets things happen, I 'roll with the flow' if you will :)
If I have to work hard to over come obstacles in order to achieve my goal of acquiring something I don't necessarily need, I will let it go until fate again gives me an opportunity to do so. This may sound lazy, but its the difference between something coming together smoothly, and working out superbly in the long run, and the frustration of trying to make it happen when 'someone' doesn't want it to, and it turning into if not a complete disaster, then at least something that no one is quite happy with. A lesson I learned from my Texas-raised Dad; he would say "If it was meant to happen, it'll happen."
So with the conversation about the pigs a couple of days before, and how we would work out the pen, seeing the ad 'pigs for sale', it just felt like it was coming together.
I called the number later that day, talked to the woman about where she was, when we could come look at them, and decided on four o'clock. Turns out she also has a couple of sheep, although she's very new to them, and would talk to her husband about trading the two pigs for my last terminal ewe lamb. Jari had decided when she took the rest of the lambs to butcher a few weeks before, that this one was just too small to go yet.
So it would seem that this had been coming together for at least a few weeks, it looked like I was in the pig raising business again.
I ended up picking up three pigs, going to raise one for a friend, and they do better in groups anyway.

Introducing the Three Little Porkers!

 The pen didn't go up quite like we thought it would, but surprisingly it was still a smooth process. I have several sheep panels that I had thought I would use, but the friend who the third pig is for had these panels lying around in her back 40. We dug a trench about 6 inches deep to put the panels in (with the help of my friends son, we couldn't have done this without him!), this is suggested as a precaution against the pigs rooting out under the fence as much as it is to keep dogs from digging in. We wired the corners together, put T-posts up for stability, set the railroad ties up as the walls of the shelter, and laid plywood across the top bolstered by posts to hold up the corners.

We put straw in for bedding. I figured they'd have this scattered all over the pen by the next morning, but apparently, they like it just where it is!

Joy's First Pumpkin!

 HAPPY HALLOWEEN!