Come rain or come shine...

With Lori still under the weather (and what weather it's been!), my duties have been expanded. I hope she'll forgive me for saying something nice about her, but my wife does a lot. We wouldn't be nearly as far along with our plans and dreams if it hadn't been for so much effort on her part.

While I've been sitting around all winter getting out of shape, Lori's been out there every day, working out feed rations, taking a hammer to the water buckets, giving de-worming shots, and creating well-worn paths from one paddock to another. Not to mention laundry, meals, groceries, child care, cleaning and a hundred other things that keep this place from falling apart.

My feeble attempts to take up the slack have left us with a kitchen sink that looks like the start of a landfill, a pile of laundry towering majestically like the French Alps, and a house that could receive funding as a Federal disaster area.

I'm exhausted.

But everybody is alive and fed. That's about all I can say for sure.

With the wacky weather, Amelia's been in school only one day so far in each of the past three weeks. After a few days of watching movies and making forts in the living room, and wearing our jammies all day, the kids are bouncing off the walls.

Until Lori's back from the dead, I've taken over all quadruped responsibilities, which includes thrice-a-day trudging through ice, snow, rain, wind, sleet, mud... fog... even "freezing fog." I think I've seen every type of weather in existance. Well, other than sunshine, of course. And let me tell you, a hundred yards gets much longer when you're hauling feed and water over alternating layers of snow and ice.

Strange things happen when the cold weather really hits hard. The animals' five gallon water buckets are so frozen, that only a grapefruit-sized sphere of liquid water remains, encased in inches of ice. The moisture on my scarf actually froze to the metal gate two different mornings, as I leaned down to chain it shut.

Now, as temperatures head toward normal (whatever that means any more), all the ice and snow are decomposing into a slushy, slippery, mucky mess.

But please don't take all this as complaining. We went into this with our eyes open. The point I'm going for here is that I have a wonderful spouse. She just does all this stuff day after day, week after week, and keeps on going.

So here's to all those spouses out there who keep everything running, and doing everything that needs to be done, however tough it gets. And get well soon, dear!