November 27, 2006

he day started ... Ok.. no.. I need to back up to last night. I had about 2 hours of sleep last night. Around midnight, after I was done working on the computer, the cow "Daisy" started bellowing and "Cyrus" the bear dog was barking non-stop. It was gross and dark out. Think monsoon winds and brutal cold. Crystals in the air made it look like snow, but it wasn't. At midnight, no one would go outside with me, so I lobbed off a few paintball rounds, hoping that the noise would scare off any predator there was. Quiet happened afterwards. Frankly at those temperatures and time of night and if there were any large predators out there like a cougar, it was not safe for me to go out by myself in case something happened. As multiple hours would happen before anyone would have missed me and with that bad of cold.. a person could be dead in hours from exposure.. or a cougar snack.

At 4 am, Amy walks into the house as she was going to go to work with my boyfriend. I vaugely talked to her and noted she was doing something with milk in the fridge and then I went back to sleep.

This morning, I had to go pick up Amy as she went to work with my boyfriend so she could see the area he worked him and how that part of the logging industry worked. I got the call to go to the place he was dropping her off at and as I was heading out the door, "Kid" comes running up the driveway saying the bus never showed up and in mid sentence, starts yelling the calf is out.  Ah-ha.. that is what "Daisy" was hollering about.. but I still did not see the calf. Then finally I see an ear twitch.. he is laying in the round bale hay staying warm. "Kid" and I herd the calf back into the front pasture as the bus finally shows up 30 minutes late. The bus scares the calf and then "Kid" shuts the front gate so the calf does not run out and we keep waving the bus to go on.. I may as well take "Kid" to school if I have to pick up Amy anyway. Finally get everybody where they are supposed to and we get going.

We pick up Amy, and I am sure you can read about her adventures of this day on her website, some of her day was good and some bad as well. We then dump "Kid" off at school and go to the post office to mail more magazines, then there was a problem at Amy's and my hon left his gas card for the logging truck here, so I had to go to his shoppe and then to the farm store, and then fuel and then out to Amy's to help her.

The root cellar got below zero today. I brought home 250 pounds of potatoes from the organic growers not far from here. We had to buy some due to the reduced yield due to the lack of water this last summer with the well problem. So between quilts, -30C sleeping bags and Amy's heavy canvas draft horse blankets.. we covered the squash and the spuds. I need to build a interior wall and insulate it. I knew I had to do this before.. but the main concern was to just get the thing built before snow flew. Even though it is slightly below freezing in the cellar, it is still 24 degrees warmer in the root cellar than outside. We stuffed a towel into the hot air escape vent to help keep more heat in. Tomorrow I may heat up buckets of hot water to take into there or hot rocks. The deep freeze is supposed to leave us fairly soon.

I popped 2 bags of shavings in the chicken pen and 1 into the turkey pen to give them more  bedding. The floor is frozen solid. It is going to be horrible to clean in the spring. I knew I should have had more of a base of shavings down to help with the cleaning. I have 4 bales of straw as a base, which could have been a huge mistake.

Dinner tonight I just tossed chicken breasts into a roasting pan, added potatoes and carrots, a bit of powdered garlic, curry, a bit of chicken broth, 2 cans of organic coconut milk and 2 handfuls of almonds and cooked at 350F for 2 hours. Yummy!