Hi All - Well I'm back. On Monday, July 6th, my wife, Kelly, went in and had Gastric Bypass surgery, up at El Camino Hospital in Mountain View. It was a little rougher than either of us were expecting, but the good news is she is home!
I bet the picture for this post caught your attention. The picture is an old one, maybe even taken 20 years ago. It is of my Son, Rocky, riding his late friend, Bacon. You see, at one point in our lives, we lived out in the hills of Prunedale. To understand this, we need to go back in time, way back to the late 1980's. We owned a cute little tract home in a great area of San Jose. Our kids were young and I was working at Lockheed Missiles and Space in Sunnyvale. We were spending a lot of weekends visiting friends in Monterey County. One day we checked out a house in Prunedale. To make a long story short, we ended up buying a big, beautiful home in little Prunedale, about 20 miles south of Gilroy, off of Highway 101. This place had a one acre, back yard pasture, that was all fenced and crossed fenced. I guess it was set up for horses.
Once we moved out there, we kind of became countrified. We went to a garage sale one day, and came home with 3 little pigs. We were going to become pig farmers. We named our first 3 pigs, Bacon, Sausage and Pork Chop. The idea was to get the kids to think of them as food, not pets. Well as you can see from the picture, they became pets..... before they became food.
It turns out pigs are really smart animals. I could go out in the back yard and throw a tennis ball. My dog at the time, Huckleberry, would just look at me. The pigs would run for the ball, bring it back and drop it at my feet. They also made up games to amuse themselves. I had been told to throw an old bowling ball into the pasture. The guys at the feed store told me the pigs would push it around the yard for exercise. Well not only did they push it around, they made up a game. They would push the bowling ball up the hill, then chase it down the hill. They would amuse themselves that way for hours on end.
Once the pets, I mean pigs, reached about 225 pounds, we called Ray the Butcher. Ray would come out to our pasture and slaughter the pigs. He would shoot them, then field dress them in the back yard. He then took them away, and brought back these little white packages with the best tasting meat ever. Over the next couple of years, I think we raised 8 or 9 pigs. Not too long after this, Rocky became first a Vegetarian, then eventually a Vegan. A coincidence?
We eventually left Prunedale, and moved over to Santa Cruz County. We lived in La Selva Beach for about 15 years, Seascape for a couple of years, and last September we bought a real nice place out in Watsonville. Suburban Watsonville. Tract Homes and no livestock..... or so we thought.
Kelly had a tough time at the hospital. The anasthesia is really hard for her to process out of her body. It all goes back to her childhood and being in a coma for a couple of months (but that is another story!). Well I was finally able to bring her home on Wednesday afternoon. That afternoon, I took the dogs for our normal afternoon run. We were getting pretty close to home, when I saw one of my neighbors standing at his front door talking to one of his buddies. As he was standing there, the screen popped open and a head stuck out. I was expecting a dog, but was shocked to see a pig!
Stay tuned for Part 2 to learn how this pig became a motivating force in Kelly's recovery!
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