Foggy December Weekend

Our part of Minnesota has been having some unpleasant weather lately.  Not so cold but damp and down-right gloomy… we haven’t seen the sun for a week or more.  I will take 10-20 degrees with sun over this damp cloudy 30-40 degrees anytime.  Everything outdoors is wet; the dirt roads like ours are a sloppy mess.  Grumble, grumble. Yesterday and again today have been very foggy.  The picture I have here was taken yesterday at 2:30 PM.  Today it's even foggier, but a lot of the snow has melted.

Here at the farm we have settled into our winter pattern.  Feed the animals.  Water the animals.  Feed the stove.  Cut and haul wood whenever time allows.  Go to bed early; some of us anyway!

Our Lily, arguably our most beloved cat, developed a troubling eye condition in November and appears to have lost the vision in that eye.  It does not seem to bother her a bit but it’s pretty unattractive to look at.

Rollie and Ardis dispatched the three roosters last week.   There is an optimal population of birds that I like to keep over the winter; too many and the air quality suffers, too few and it just doesn’t stay as warm in the coop as I would like.  Because of some miscalculation on my part, I sent too many birds to be butchered this fall. After the extra gentlemen left, the Winter Coop census was a bit low. I know, you’re thinking “and you call yourself The Chicken Lady”… well I actually never called myself that, other folks do, but I can’t help that!  Anyway, yesterday, four young hens arrived to fill the vacancies.  I believe that there are now twenty-eight hens plus Javier out there now.

The newcomers did not travel far, just from my cousin Richard’s place about three miles away.  He and Lisa have a pretty assortment of birds.  The ones that came home with me appear to be a Rhode Island Red and three Red Star layers. 

Richard hands over a bird

Four new residents of the Winter Coop

Over in the goat pen, the odor from Ranger is a much more tolerable.  We’ve been putting off giving him a hoof trim, but he got one today.  Daisy is completely done milking for the season, but Vinca is still giving us milk twice a day.  I intend to cut her down to once a day soon, maybe even later this week, and then dry her up completely sometime in January. She needs to take a break and just grow her new kid(s). 

Spooky-eyed Ranger!  Here is a little trivia for you.  People sometimes get "red-eye" in photographs.  My Kodak software has a fix for that that works pretty well.  Goats get "blue-eye" and the fix does not work! 

A little Christmas related activity as we chose a tree yesterday from the Scout 52 lot in Aitkin.  Kurt and Kori got it set up (not without a few tense moments) and decorated.  Thanks guys!

And so life goes on.  Rollie is due for a knee surgery on Monday; please send good thoughts his way.