The Long Winter

We’ve started on a lot of new projects since we moved in October.  October is the time of year when the last vestiges of the warmth from the summer fades into fall.  The breezes are cool, the nights are cold, the rain starts to fall and winter is near.

I usually don’t mind the winter so much.  Snow is fun, rain is tolerable, and the grey skies usually entertain me.  I tend not to do too much complaining about what winter has to bring.  Try as I might, I have not been able to refrain this year from wondering why the bloody hell is winter dragging on so long?!?

In the past, I have been really good about posting on my blogs.  In fact, I have been continually blogging since 2004.  This winter has driven me to thought and contemplation and little about sharing.  We have been through SO much this winter.  First of all, we moved, which is a crazy thing in and of itself.  Immediately after moving, we had work to do on the house.  For the first two weeks we lived in our new house, we had contractors coming and going non stop.  The doors were left open and the dirt on the floor was plentiful.  We even made a giant mess outside because we had to dig a new well.  With all of that over, we started to realize that to keep the livestock in, we were going to need to do some work outside.  I went to work repairing the barn and we had to get some fencing put up.  It all started to come together, certainly, but it was exhausting work.

Jared and I recently watched an old Kary Grant movie called “Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House.”  It was a great movie about this couple that moves to an old farmhouse but there are SO many problems with the house.  Living in an older house definitely has it’s quirks for sure.  Jared and I have taken them all in stride, often with a laugh.  Our hot water heater doesn’t have enough water for two showers in a 3 hour period or one of them will be cold.  Many of our outlets are not grounded and are only two prong plugs.  The water pressure in the shower is somewhat like trying to take a shower in a light drizzle.  We even have a very mysterious problem where the light bulbs blow out within a months time.  We have been through about 8 boxes of bulbs since moving!  Many little things like that and learning how to heat a house with a wood stove have definitely kept us on our toes all winter.

Then, there are the problems with the livestock.  When it rains, it POURS!  No need to get into gory or sad details here, but suffice it to say, I’ve had my FAIR share of bad luck.  I could go for another 5 years with no bad luck and still have gotten more than my fair share.  Unfortunately, I think that bad luck is really just my own stupidity.  Call it learning or bad luck or what have you but it’s been downright sad around here.  We’ve lost lambs, goat kids, kits, etc.  Each time I tell myself that it is going to get better, but the problems keep persisting.  It all came to a head when I headed outside to discover one of my adult goats had dropped dead with no explanation.  She was not ill the day before, in fact, she was my fattest, happiest, healthiest goat.  I was shocked and devastated.  But, the truth is that these things happen and what is done is done and the only thing I can do is work to improve everything that I can right now to reduce any more bad luck.

Then, suddenly on Thursday, the sun was shining and it was like a MIRACLE had happened.  The farm was a completely different place.  That one sixty degree day did a lot to restore my spirit.  I got out and groomed my Angora goats and trimmed their feet.  I even got them washed down.  They had recently been shorn and they had come with a bad case of lice.  I was actually able to wash the lice away and treat them to prevent any more.  They went from looking like sorry overwintered goats covered in mud to gracious, beautiful animals that are going to give me a beautiful fleece come September!

I got to do a whole bunch of other work as well.  I cleaned all the muck out of the barn and put it in the garden that I am about to plant.  I even picked up all the loose straw and hay all over the barn floor and took it out with some rock and some scrap fleece to reduce the mud in the goat pen.  And what do you know.  Not only is the goat pen free of mud now but the green grass is actually starting to grow and they look like happy goats.  I even put another nice layer of straw down in the shed for them so they are living in luxury!

I even got to head on over to the bee hive to check out what was going on.  The bees were very busy.  We’ve got two flowering plum trees in full bloom right now and they are working away collecting nectar.  I can only imagine what the apple trees are going to give to us this year with the bees buzzing around the orchard helping them out.

Things are definitely starting to look up around here.  I was convinced that if I wanted to be a farmer that I would be slogging around in the mud and the cold and the lice.  It turns out that that is the case only half the time.  The other half of the time it’s sunny and warm and the kids run around naked blowing bubbles followed around by jumping and leaping goat kids.  Dare I say that spring as sprung?