happy (belated) new year! 21 January 2024
I hope everyone had the chance to relax with loved ones and eat some delicious food over the month since I last checked in! I think you'll see why I didn't have an extra minute to write, there has been a LOT going on! Please enjoy a walk through my camera roll starting in mid-December!
- I finally got up the nerve to move the all of our dead dogs from the urns that the crematorium provided into these beautiful new ones that my pottery teacher made. Moving the ashes of the dogs we lost years ago was kind of a nice walk down memory lane, moving the dogs we lost more recently was tough, but we made it through. It's creepy, but I think they look beautiful there and it's a nice reminder of some of my favorite creatures and one of my favorite people.
- Out of curiosity I set up the ballroom for dinner for 50 people. I think it would work! 2024 Resolution: Make 47 new friends!
- For my birthday we went on an historic house tour - pretty much my favorite thing - and they had spray painted dried hydrangeas to put them in pine garlands. Actually, I did get yelled at by a volunteer docent for touching them. When you give people just a tiny bit of power, they are ready to wield it! Anyway, this is definitely my kind of craft! Not to brag, but I am super good at things that take zero time and zero skill. These hydrangeas were allowed to go brown on the plant and then sprayed GOLD! This photo doesn't really do them justice, but you'll see them again from me!
Then the superdog had to be hospitalized for a few days which was awful..
He is in remission from liver cancer and still gets chemotherapy every 3rd day (it's a pill). It's a miracle that he's still with us and I should be so thankful because in early 2020 we didn't think he was going to survive another month, but I am GREEDY and I want him to live forever.
When he didn't seem interested in going out for evening chores we were very worried and since it was Thursday and the weekend was coming, we took him to the emergency clinic. They thought he was like medium-sick, but decided to keep him overnight so the oncologist could see him first thing in the morning. We were there until after midnight which is late for a farmer! During the night he got significantly worse (we tried to tell them!) with a high fever and nausea. The next couple of days involved a lot of testing to try to figure out what was up, but in the end nothing was conclusive. His cancer wasn't back, and he didn't have a new cancer. He had a mystery infection and he responded to antibiotics and came back home. Thank goodness for modern medicine!
Realistically, someday his cancer will come out of remission and when he isn't feeling well it will be because his cancer has returned and spread, so naturally this is what I assumed was happening. It was a hard couple of days. There was a lot of worried weeping and supportive phone calls from my close friends. Also, a lot of comforting long walks with the savages...
- Each year I make some kind of homemade Christmas gift for my friends. Usually it's pottery which I fill with chocolate to ease the burden of taking yet another amateur pot. This year I didn't have any pottery to give so I decided to make salt scrubs and bath soaks. I love these things myself and face it, everyone needs a little exfoliation this time of year. We experimented with a bunch of different essential oil combinations to settle on what we ended up making.
- Mixing up the bath soak.
- A shocking amount of chocolate we received from my mom and stepdad - mysteriously addressed to only Chris? As if I wasn't going to have any!
- The Superdog back in action! Before Christmas we had a week of glorious snowy days with clear blue skies. Gorgeous!
- 1. To my knowledge this has never been captured before on film. Border collies do require sleep!
- 2. Christmas cookies! These are Belgian chocolate and dried cranberries with cornflakes - super easy! Sadly too hard to eat for someone with sad adult braces, maybe next year!
- 3. These are the Christmas cookies of my childhood, we called them kolaches. I know that there are jelly doughnuts called kolaches from other parts of the world, but my Slovakian grandmother called this a kolache. It's a yeast leavened pastry which is rolled out in confectioner's sugar and filled with any number of fillings that are suitably Eastern European (i.e. vaguely disappointing). We made plum filled and poppy seed filled. My grandma also made a nut filling which I was planning to do, but it will have to wait for next year. Oh, I should have said that this is my first attempt at making them! Anyway, they were good, but they weren't exactly right. I wrote up what I did in my kitchen notebook, so hopefully next year I'll edge a little closer to what I remember.
You know... I work really hard to try to learn and to do the best for the animals and the best for the land and then something like this comes up and it's really hurtful... (wink).
Remember earlier when I said we had a week or gorgeous snow and blue skies? Well that ended with a splash. In addition to a few inches of snow melting, we got 2-1/2" of rain in a day and our basement became an indoor water park.
- 1. I really loved how our Christmas decorations turned out this year! This was a kind of restrained year for us... still more decorations than normal people, but less than a hallmark movie set. With the ballroom project looming on the horizon, I didn't want to be taking down decorations until March.
- 2. Our Christmas Eve lunch - Smorgasbord! I don't have Scandinavian ancestry, but you couldn't tell that from how much I love pickled vegetables, cured fish, and dill! And that's right, the woman with the extensive china collection ate Christmas Eve lunch on paper plates. It was a rough year (see below).
I was really sick over the holiday which meant that we missed a lot of time and delicious food with our friends. It also meant that Chris got stuck with all of the farm work. Running this place with one person is not really possible if that person also expects to sleep. At some point the sheep all escaped into the area with the wrapped bales and started tearing into them which is BAD NEWS. When haylage spoils, it can be deadly to sheep, so it's important that it stays wrapped up tight. On the first day that I could breathe well enough to feed the chickens, Chris ambushed me in the barn and chirped, "Do you want to work sheep?". No.
I didn't at all. And I wasn't dressed properly for the muddy nightmare we were faced with - hip waders might have been the right choice, but the work needed to be done. As an aside here, we got almost 6 inches of rain on the farm this December. We had a wet October where we received 3.5 inches for comparison. The mud was intense, it was hard to walk on and it's a miracle that neither of us had a spectacular fall.
We chased these jerks out of here and taped up the holes to prevent further spoilage. As I write this now, we have fed out most of the damaged bales and they were fine. It could have been much worse.
Then it was time for the breakup! We had to sort out the ram and his wing men to mark the end of breeding season. The boys went out the side door of the barn to go to their newly renovated winter housing, and the girls went out the front, to reunite with the ewes who weren't bred this year. It was pretty orderly given that they aren't usually allowed in this part of the barn.
And here we are, in 2024! We have some before photos of the shop which I'll post about again soon; the chandelier drama for the ballroom project; and Prue and Mary started laying again after a long molt! Maybe it was the leftover pumpernickel from the Smorgasbord that inspired them...
Remember above, where I said I was surprised how orderly moving the sheep out the front door of the barn went? This video is a more typical sheep interaction. At the time of this mayhem, the indoor pen needed to be bedded and because of my world class videography skills, there's a long shot of sheep manure for your enjoyment. Of course the manure shot is in addition to a significant amount of grunting on my part. I climb in and out of this pen at least twice a day and if you asked me before whether I grunted like a power lifter while I did it, I would have said no. Wrong.
At about 45 seconds, I start to greet the sweetest sheep in the world - Freckles, but then I'm distracted by whatever other nonsense that a bunch of wooly nihilists can inflict on a cluttered storage area.
And here's what's going on now! (clockwise from top left) Winter persists. The superdog and the sheep are still watching each other carefully. The first Cadbury creme egg of the season marks the official end of Christmas. This blob of clay - mid wedging (kind of like kneading dough) - means that the pottery is up and running. The bale squeeze finally arrived! This will move wrapped bales without damaging the wrapping. However, there's something wrong with the hydraulics on the bobcat, so we aren't functional yet. Repairs in progress! And lastly, one assembled chandelier. This place is getting fancier by the minute!
Honestly, I tried to break this into multiple posts, but for some reason I couldn't select anything to copy and paste. If you are still reading, thank you so much. I am looking forward to 2024 with a mixture of terror and excitement, and on that note, I better put on my barn clothes, it's time to get to work.
Happy New Year