Finally catching up...

Help! It's going to harvest my brain!!!

AAIEEEE!

A lot has happened in our lives over the past few weeks. Some good, some not. So this post may be a bit like drinking from a firehose.

Let's see...

- We had one late night emergency room visit (for something neither serious nor interesting)

- Our 20+ year old cat Pepper was put to sleep. He had a good, long life.


- One of our chickens died - not from predators, but some other malady. The rest seem fine.

- Our cow got mastitis. She got it pretty bad and we had to medicate her and dump her milk for about 10 days. (A big thank-you to my wife for playing vet.) I was actually surprised that it hadn't happened earlier, what with my inexperience and all. But still it's a pain. As with many bacterial problems these days, it flared up again after the medication wore off, so we're back to new medicine and dumping milk for several more days.

- I took the twins to the county fair over the weekend, where much fun was had and my wallet was beaten to a pulp. And Amelia tried to escape that ride where your back is against the inside of a giant rotating drum, which then tips up vertically. Her escape attempt was basically to sit down, but that put the little safety strap above her head. My brain knew enough about physics to realize she wasn't in any danger, but I still held her arm with a death grip until the ride was over.

- Our hay was cut - though our neighbor who was doing the cutting couldn't fit his equipment through our 10-foot gates. Another neighbor stepped in and cut it for us. Unfortunately it's been rained on like five or six times since then. So, uh... hooray for compost!

- We harvested our first blueberries! They don't really grow well here because they are so picky about acidic soil. But I have such fond memories of picking blueberries with my grandfather in Connecticut (and my grandmother's endless blueberry concoctions) that I had to plant some. So I got three dwarf varieties and planted them in a big planter box full of peat moss and mulched with pine nuggets. Mmmmm. I hate to say it but they're even better than my grandparents' berries...



- Our gooseberries are almost ripe. Let's hope we get some before the chickens eat them all. The blueberries have bird netting over them. I may need to do the same for the gooseberries. And the currants. The grapes are coming along nicely. We'll have to wait another year (or maybe more) before we get apples, peaches, blackberries, or raspberries. Probably two more years for cherries. I'd guess even longer for any of our nut trees or paw paws.


- On the other hand, our "garden" is literally knee-high with weeds. I guess between the baby, the cow, and all this other stuff, something had to give. Thank you CSA for providing our garden veg, since my own efforts are doomed.

- I decided to abandon our worm bin. The chickens end up getting most of our kitchen scraps rather than the worms. A neglected worm bin generates fruit flies and the like.

- Speaking of which, I moved our "compost bin" (quotes because the chickens eat it all so I never have any compost) from it's old location between the house and the barn to a new spot right under the kitchen window. So now when cooking is done, you just crank open the window and dump the veggie scraps out. The chooks didn't have any trouble adapting to the new location.

- We saw our first eastern bluebird today. They might be my favorite bird, just because they're so rare at this point. Here's a really poor photo...



- We made strawberry jam for the first time. We got about 7 pints. Then we followed that up with five pints of black raspberry jam. Oh. My. Goodness. My mouth is watering as I type this.

- Our cow's been bred (artificially) to a Jersey bull. Our neighbor with the loaner Angus was taking too long. We're already a month or two later than we'd like. At this point I may be milking well into January. Next time we'll know better.

I did see something rather interesting the other day. I wandered out to the pasture to find Meadow. Usually when I go out to milk she's already waiting for me, with her head in the stanchion, looking expectant. But for some reason yesterday she wasn't around. I soon found out - she had a new friend. There was a red-winged blackbird perched on her back, gobbling up flies.

The flies have been a nuisance. but the home remedies didn't do anything, and the store-bought fly spray didn't do much either (and is a possible suspect in our chicken death). So instead of spraying anything, I've switched to closing up the barn to keep it as dark as I can get it. I also try to shoo the flies off her before she comes into the barn. Of course that doesn't work if she's already in there tapping her hoof waiting for me. I also hung some 3-inch wide strips of screening material in the doorway (which will make more sense after a future post). The idea was that as she walks through the strips, the flies are brushed off. It does seem to help a little, but I didn't have enough strips to go all the way across the doorway yet.

Another trick that Meadow came up with the other day, which was pretty successful, was to gallop and buck a little while swishing her tail, just before she runs into the barn. The flies all take off and she runs out from under the cloud. It's interesting what can happen when you leave the work to Mother Nature.

Speaking of which, I was talking to the vet about her mastitis problem. She said one thing that can help is to run cold water on the udder - it can get very hot and feel feverish. I thought, well, that explains why Meadow's been in the pond so much - right up to her udder.

And finally, a photo I took of Amelia one day while Lori was out all afternoon with the boys.

I call it, "Bad Father":
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A flurry of posts, part III

Top Ten Things to Do When You're Snowbound

10. Lay around in your jammies and vej out.
9. Pretend you are a flamingo

"Cold! Cold! Cold! Cold!"

8. Make Doughnuts
7. Take cover until the sun comes out

7. Bask in the sun when it does show up

6. Take advantage of a ready-made snow fort


5. Do some renovation and remodeling on the snow fort's front entryway4. Install a personalized "Memory Snow(tm)" bed for your snow fort

3. Try a new formulation for soil blocks that is, hopefully, somewhat further from concrete than last year's batch. (Sorry, forgot to take pictures.)

2. Forget your Tech Break commitment twice, by watching the bonus features from The Business of Being Born DVD, and the last five minutes of an exciting basketball game involving your alma mater, both of which your wife was watching and that you got sucked into. Then get two calls from work requiring you to get online briefly, really throwing off that whole low-tech thing.

1. Find out your blood pressure is rising and your extremities are getting puffy while you are 39 weeks pregnant and really hoping to have a home birth, once again riding the Emotion Roller Coaster; Consulting with the experts who advise bed rest and various other possible remedies, and keeping fingers crossed.

I don't recommend that last one. It's kind of a pain.

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Ups, Downs, Skunks, Rain, & Ducks

My Tech Break Sunday was pretty good. The weather was nice for the first time since, oh, September, so I spent the day outside working my butt off. I was sore and exhausted by sunset, but that's not a bad thing. Like I told Lori - I don't mind hard work; I just get frustrated by work that isn't productive. Luckily it was pretty productive. I moved a ton or two of hay, I started on a small pen, and I hauled some fencing materials from where they were to where they needed to be. And in the process e5 and I got to meet our newest barn resident - a skunk.

He was nesting in behind the hay bales, and since it was mid-day at that point, he was snoozing. I'm glad I didn't startle him. He seemed pretty nonchalant about the whole thing, which seems typical of the few skunks I've known. And so far his worst crime has been making the local barn cat - and our car - stink to high heaven. The cat and the skunk have had several encounters, and I'm not sure why the cat hasn't learned. Maybe a role-reversal from the Pepe Le Pew cartoons or something. The skunk hid under a wooden pallet, and Kiki was actually batting at the little tufts of skunk fur sticking up through the cracks. Anyway, apparently they must have had one confrontation near the back of our car because it's been skunky for a week. The good news is it's now very hard to forget where you parked it.

Things are going pretty well for us in general, but today was definitely not the best.

On the baby front, Lori found out that despite extensive countermeasures, her blood pressure is up and her hemoglobin is not. This defintely lowers the odds of a home birth. It may not sound like a big deal to most people, but it's become pretty important in our house, so it's been a discouraging and disappointing development. And tomorrow morning Lori gets to go to the O.B. to get pressured for various medical interventions.

We're also in the midst of the most significant flooding we've seen since moving here. Our driveway was nearly impassible, at least without oars. There was a good 100 yards of water almost up to the bottom of the car doors this morning, and it was hard to know if you were still on the driveway or veering out into the Mud of Doom. Our truck had to be pulled out of the Mud of Doom just yesterday, and then promptly towed to a service station. It entire exhaust system has fallen out, and it's starter seems to have gone bad.

Our big pond overflowed it's banks a bit and flooded the area in and around our barn (which was already pretty spongy from the snow melt). We're actually in better shape than our neighbors, who appear to have an actual river running through their barn at the moment.

I was surprised to see the chickens actually wading through the swamp, rather than hanging tight in the high and dry Chick Shalet. Our small pond (a.k.a. Crater Wetland) is usually dry or nearly so, but it's full to the brim and backing up the drainage ditch toward the house. I wonder how much longer our sump pump can keep draining water down that way. There's alternating rain and snow in the forecast for the foreseeable future, so it may get worse before it gets better. I'll try to take some pictures sometime soon.

And to top it all off, some things didn't go well at my job today, to the point that I'm writing this blog entry between work tasks. It's about 10:30pm, and I've been periodically pushing work buttons almost all night.

And nobody got enough sleep last night. So Grumpy is the order of the day.

But at least the red-winged blackbirds, the killdeer, and even one of those lovely hooded mergansers are starting to arrive, so Actual Spring must be close.

(Not my picture - Thanks ODNR!)

We should start hearing those beloved peepers before long!

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Mirror, Mirror on the wall....