So yesterday we medicated and sometimes banded (i.e. neutered with a heavy duty rubber band meant for the purpose. More than you wanted to know about banding. is on that page, if you scroll down to castration methods. We don’t band tails to shorten them, we leave them long.

Then we actually started on the Cabin at long last. Today we’ve got to move the truck around from where it got left by the barn and start loading garbage in to it for a dump run. If it actually gets dry enough outside later on we’ll mow a bit. Then there’s filling bird feeders; sewing up wool bags to send off; goose proofing fruit trees; planting Logan’s flower plants and my herbs; and if we’re lucky doing some more work in the cabin. There’s stuff left in there from when we lived there, which I don’t even want to think about. Not because of the stuff, but because it makes me think about the fire and how miserable and stressful the first year after the fire was. We threw out bulk food yesterday which might have been good, but after summers in the heat, I didn’t want to find out.

All but six sheep and lambs are back out in the pasture, stuffing themselves on fresh grass. One lamb is sick, one Ewe needs to eat more grain, and one lamb is too small to be vaccinated or banded, so those pairs had to remain in the barn yard a little longer.

Wilma’s home from the hospital again and told to stop eating salty foods, again. Evidently congestive heart failure is ever-present, and was triggered to cause the heart attack. Everyone’s feeling the stress of family being sick, I think it shows the most in Logan, who doesn’t quite understand what’s going on, but hears all the conversations on the phone because there is no place to be that she isn’t unless it’s possible to talk on the phone when she’s in school. She’s hearing more about her Auntie Phil, Auntie Ruth and Cousin Katie, and seeing pictures of them to match up with the names she hears, and enjoys that quite a bit.

John talked to Cam after her Angiogram to hear that she was OK, and then we got pictures in email from Easter I think. John especially enjoyed the one of my dad fighting something off with a branch, although what he’s fighting is out of the picture. Then I talked to her some more to update her on Wilma in the hospital as well. I’ve had to talk on the phone more this week than I normally do in a month these days.

Logan is in and enjoying her swimming lessons now. She’s able to retrieve rings from the bottom of the shallow part of the pool without holding her nose if she wears goggles. Without the goggles she holds her nose. I don’t understand it, but it seems to work. The pool is a mix of salt water with a little chlorine in it, not fully at their salt and UV system yet, and heated to 92 degrees F.

We are at the point of getting outside to work, time to post this and get on with life.

Filed under: life, farm, sheep