Dairy Daze...and Now Beyond

It was built for Ellen's benefit, of course, and she was delighted with it, though a bit put out because it didn't have arms so that we could put the mittens on it. However I wasn't going to trek around searching for the perfect arms for it. This is good enough. You can see in the background that we didn't actually get much snow, just barely enough to cover the ground, and it has melted off of the roads already. But I really wanted to use the snowman kit, for her benefit, so I scraped snow off of the porch and whacked it together really quick. For Christmas I got her a snowman kit, and this is what it consisted of; felt hat, mittens and scarf (all of which could easily enough be made at home), wooden eyes, nose, mouth, buttons and pipe (yes, I realize it's upside down in the pic, but it wouldn't stay right side up)all on dowels that you shove into the snow. A cute concept; they all came in a decorated wooden box, which will probably take up space on a closet she...

I can't believe it's been almost 2 weeks since I have blogged. To be fair, I did work on a post, but saved it because I didn't finish it. That ought to count for something. Anyway. Ellen had a wonderful Christmas...thank yous are certainly in order for many. She loved her gifts from afar. This is a pic of her in her Christmas dress, sent to her by her California Grandma. Here's one thing to be thankful for, sure enough; she did not get ONE gift that required batteries. Isn't that funny?! I am glad of it. Weather has been below freezing for the past few days. Actually today I think it DID get up into the mid 30s, but is supposed to plummet again. Is supposed to snow again tomorrow night, but not much accumulation. We had a bit of snow on Christmas Eve and day, but again, not much stuck around. The Big Christmas program is over at church. This means that I am back to teaching my teens on Wednesday nights. Frankly I am glad of it. I looked forward to sit...

This year it really has, anyway. Usually I have most of my gifts bought and wrapped by Turkey Day, but not this year. This past Saturday the weather warmed up into the 40s and had you gone down K you perhaps would have seen our truck parked down between the heifer/bull lot and the dry cow lot. That would have been me. Yes. My husband tends to forgo any non-productive types of work and one of those would be getting a Christmas tree. Therefore, it has become our Christmas tradition that I be the one to bring in the tree. So to make a long story short; the fence-row up the road is now minus one slightly lopsided cedar tree. In keeping with tradition I took the dull, rusted, nearly useless handsaw and hacked it to death, then drug it up the road back to the truck. Ellen and I decorated it that night. She was enchanted with the decorations; especially the banana, the peanut butter and jelly sandwich and the ice cream sundae. She also loves to jingle the snowman bells and play with...

What have I been up to on the dairy? This morning we had a bit of a calf rodeo. These cows seem to come into season in clusters, like grapes. So I had about 5 calves to wean at once, (keeping in mind these are all the heifer calves, the bulls went down the road a a few days after their birth)and a hubby who is nursing a bum shoulder so we had to be original in our changing pens technique. Usually we rope them, then push/pull/drag/shoo/gallop them from their bottle feeding pen to their tiny pasture out in the woods; hmmmm....a hundred yards or so. (I am terrible with distances) This time we decided to do this en masse. We opened the gate and carefully shooed them through. They went a few feet and stood nosing around a bit, sniffing unfamiliar things. Then...BAM...the rodeo was on. They all five took off like rockets...flying past the gate they were supposed to go through. Hubby himself went galloping over to the 4-wheeler and chased them back towards me. Four of them went charging the O...