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| S announced last night that she needed to visit her parents this week before her schedule gets crazy again. Last Saturday she and K6 auditioned for a comedy play that starts rehearsals next week and will run two months. |
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| She took K6 and K7 along on her trip. |
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| K8 and I will stack some more firewood in the house as the temperature is supposed to drop into the teens tonight and be very cold for a few days. Milking the next few mornings will be exciting. |
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| Brought "Syrup" home from the butcher shop - 40 one pound bags of stew meat, and 78 one pound packages of hamburger. A total of 118 lbs. of beef for $117.35 processing costs, so I paid about $1.00 a pound. |
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| We received a large truck-load of red cedar chips as part of our garden make-over, but I decided to move it to a different project. |
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| K7 used a pitch fork and many wheel barrow loads... |
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| ...moving it from there... |
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| ...across the front yard... |
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| ...to the new designated area... |
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| ...and dumped it in "The Park". I want to prevent this area from being over run with weeds as well as kill off the ticks that inhabit the weeds (ticks that get on our dogs all summer). I had the 2nd truck load of cedar chips piled just out of view of this photo. K8 and I were shoveling it out over the area while K7 moved the first pile. It smells great! My goal is to get a 3rd load today and finish covering the entire area - the only thing you will see are trees, the top of rocks and red cedar mulch. Cedar chips drive away not only fleas and ticks, but also poisonous copperhead snakes. We put a layer of cedar chips under our front porch and filled the dog beds with it. I need to put some under our firewood storage in the backyard which is a good hiding place for snakes. Next step will be to plant flowers and flowering bushes to beautify our Park. |
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| We have been clearing brush lately and then trying to burn various piles, but most of it is still too green. Which means K7 added an extra ingredient... |
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| ...by splashing a little diesel fuel on the pile. |
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| The bigger piles are beyond the pasture fence, along the stream bank we have been clearing. K7 added paper trash as well as diesel. |
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| His magic worked to a degree, but we will wait longer to burn the rest of our brush. |
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| K2 packed his gear and headed back to law school. It was great having him home. He is a wonderful role model for his younger brothers and always gets lots of projects done on the farm. Good thing the school has week-long breaks in February and March, so he'll be back soon. |
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| K8 cleaning up the back side of the pond. |
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| Our church youth group had a blast last week solving group leadership challenges. Here's K8 using one method of escaping from the "Spider's Web". |
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| Our fairly new clothes washing machine stopped functioning - with a large pile of dirty laundry waiting to be washed - disaster! It's under warranty, but the regular method required waiting a week for a technician to come out to the farm. Solved the problem by taking the machine 45 miles to them. The problem turned out to be minor, got it temporarily fixed and back home in operation on same day. They had to order parts which they will bring out next week and install. Moral of the story is don't let the dirty laundry pile up! Yeah, right... |
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| There weren't that many games I was interested in, we don't have TV, and the weather was too good to pass up the opportunity to go outside and work, so I only followed 2 games by listening to them broadcast by radio via the internet. That's life out in rural America. "Watch Parties" aren't the same with dogs instead of real human football fans. |
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| K2 and I stayed up late on Friday night, 30 December, and Monday night, 2 January, to listen to the OU vs Iowa game, then the OSU vs Stanford game. Both teams from Oklahoma won and we went to bed happy. |
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| I am still aggressively pursuing lots and lots of wood chip mulch so I can start a "Back to Eden" type garden this spring. I called the electric company and got on their list of places to dump their tree trimmings. I got some from other places in town, and... |
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| ...I rented a wood mulching machine last Saturday, and K2 and the boys worked hard! |
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| One day I got the truck stuck in the mud and had to call K2 to come rescue me with the tractor and chains. |
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| He pulled me right out in a flash. |
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| Had to drag the truck about 65 feet. It is great having big sons and tractors around. |
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| K2 also finished trimming the master shower since I had not done it. He loves using his drills and saws. |
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| We also put our first cow in the freezer. She was much too big for us to process the way we do sheep, so we hired Mike the professional "on-farm butcher" to come do it. |
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| This cow had a crippled leg and back, and had never put on much weight, so we are only getting hamburger and stew meat. |
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| After long busy days, K2 and the dogs were very tired late at night. What a great New Year's vacation! |
