Update

Well, there has been a lot going on around here. The cows keep having babies and getting into trouble, we had one of the mom's impale her front leg on the loader the other day. So she went into the vet to get stitched up and we have to give her shots for a week. It has also been slightly rainy, we repainted the kitchen the other day because we were bored. Water has finally started up, and we are finding all the problems that we need to fix, mainly the pasture pump. The planter is having issues as usual, but they are not as big as last year. Just the usual stuff that happens in the spring, and whatnot.
But that is all that i know about since i have a job now. I keep pretty busy, but they have to find things for me to do, and mostly that is re-organizing the shelves, checking inventory,receipting papers, answering phones, and filling parts orders. That's all that they are letting me do for now so i don' t have information overload. I will eventually get to the billing and filling out stock orders and things like that, but not for a few months. At least i hope so, I'm having a hard enough time remembering all the acronyms and shortcuts. And that is about it for the updating, if anything new comes up, you will probably find out about it before i can put it on here!

Baby Calves!

Well, we are about half-way through this years calving already. Surprisingly we also have more calves that have white on them, or they are a different color. But that could change, and it probably will.

This is Bryson's bull calf for this year.

This is Daisy (standing) and Dipstick. Daisy is the one that we had in December, and Dipstick got his name because the last inch of his tail is white. We have another calf that has the last six inches of her tail is white.

And here is what the majority of the babies are going to look like probably. So far we have had more boys than girls again, but that is a good thing, and we added a few more heifers to the herd. There is another white one, two Pinzgauer's (one is red & white, and the other is black & white), a black with a white splash on her head, and a chocolaty colored mousse one.

In January we went up to the elk farm outside of Nachese to go watch the elk and the bighorns get fed.

This one practically walked right up to the fence. The feed trough was only ten to fifteen feet away from us. He must have broken his leg at some point because he walked very slow and had a very bad gait, that is also why his leg sticks out like it does. The rest of the sheep were hiding out on the hills and you could only see them with the camera's zoom lens, or the binoculars. But there must have been at least thirty bighorn sheep laying around.

So on the way up there I was thinking that there was only going to be around 50-100 elk. Well, needles to say I was way off. There must have been like 1,000 elk wandering around. And that doesn't include all the elk that were on the other side of the feeding station that was over the hill.

So in our wanderings around the walk ways, we kept counting the points on all the antlers that we could see and looking for the 7/8 point elk that was said to be up there.

We finally found him and also saw about 3 or 4 babies that had been born late and still had their spots.

There were also about 5 Bald Eagles that were flying around and landing on the rocks. We got a few pictures of them but they're not very good.

Adventures in Skiing

Well, we decided to go skiing on Wednesday because Heather was going to go with her YW/YM group, and the rest of us didn't want to be left out. So even though they eventually decided not to go (they couldn't get enough of the girls in on it, and they heard it was really icy), we decided that we were going to brave the supposed icy conditions of the mountain and enjoy a day of skiing. And I don't have pictures because we accidentally left the camera in the car.

So when we got there we found out that the mountain was sorta icy, and warm. We all had to leave a layer of clothing in the car because we are used to it snowing and being only 8 degrees. that seems to happen every time we go, with the exception of this time. But there was a reason for it being so warm. It seems that there is a gigantic air inversion hovering over our heads. We looked at White Pass last night and they were 51 degrees at the summit and only 31 at the base. That is what it was like on Bluewood as well.

So we started skiing and having as much fun as you can when you are skiing on ice and having to wait for people to make it to where you are waiting, just so you can ski another 100 ft and do the same thing again, to be fair it was an even mixture of waiting for Heather, Ryan, and Bryson, I'm OK at keeping up with mom, dad usually stayed at the back behind the stragglers. We all had our share of falling on the ice, because it would grab your ski's and shove them one way while you went the other. So we are all nursing sore muscles and slightly sore legs but we can't complain at all compared to Bryson.

He was learning to snowboard the hard way, take the lift up and go down the "easiest" green slope that Bluewood has. Well after he biffed it hard a couple of times, he really injured some of his abdominal muscles, and was hauled down the rest of the hill by ski patrol. (This was about 3:30 in the afternoon and we had been on the mountain since 11:30 that morning, and Bluewood closes at 4 so we practically skied the whole day). But he tore or pulled some muscles and was hurting pretty bad, so we packed up and went home. He laid around in dad's chair and slept for a while, and ended up sleeping in the recliner because his stomach hurt more when he laid out flat vs reclining. But he is feeling better now, he just has to watch what he does or he is going to strain those muscles all over again and will be really hurting.

So that was a first for all of us, really icy slopes and run ins with the ski patrol. It's always an adventure going skiing up there. anyone who says other wise, is not paying attention.

The last two Babies!!

So the last two cows in the herd FINALLY had their calves, one on the 7th(boy) and the last on the 12th(girl!!!). Personally, I think they are the two cutest ones out of the whole bunch because we can tell them apart from all the others. And of course it had to be the last two who had white on them. We have been waiting all year for calves that look like this and they made us wait, and wait, and wait.

This is Moony, with proud mama #24, (I didn't put a name because we all have a different name we call her). Born on a semi-cold Sunday, we were not really expecting him to come first, seeing as mom didn't look like she was ready. But she surprised us and and then we found out he had white on his face and then we didn't care if he surprised us, he was cute and has a very good mama, who watches her baby like a hawk.

I really like his nose and ears, and you can't see it in the pictures, but he has white on his belly and in between his front legs. He is a little smaller (about 70 lbs) than all the other bull calves were when they were born, but mama is a smaller cow so that was kinda expected.


And this is Daisy, she was the one we thought would come first seeing as mama looked like she would explode if you touched her, she waddled around for about a week before she gave birth and just looked dang uncomfortable. Daisy was born on Friday afternoon, we would have liked her to have been born earlier in the day seeing as it was chilly and supposed to get colder and VERY windy (25-35 mph winds), but what can you do? So, we had to put her and mama in the pen and make a wind block so she could get warm and survive the night. And mama was being kinda ornery and wouldn't stand still so we had to bottle feed her her first meal, but that got fixed, and thankfully, she nurses off mama now.

Another thing that we liked about her was that she is brown and white, not black and white. But we will have to see if that sticks around, we had some other calves who were a reddish black color that turned all black. We didn't get a picture of mama(#22), but she is a bigger cow and she had a big baby, 85-90 lbs. She is one of the biggest heifer calves that we had this year. And so we are looking forward to having more little ones in about two months, and starting off a new round of watching, waiting, guessing, hoping, and everything else we do in preparation for new calves.

Book Recommendation

As most of you know I am an avid book reader, and most of what I read is a bunch of crazy fiction. But I came across This book called "The Last Lecture" by Randy Pausch. I would recommend this book to anyone. And if you want to watch the last lecture, here is the web address, http://www.thelastlecture.com/, the link is on the sidebar. And although the lecture is an hour long, I think it's worth it.
Here is the Summery or Synopsis or what ever you call it, I kinda borrowed it from the Barnes & Noble web page because they say it way better than I could have, and it would have taken me forever to type.

"We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand."
—Randy Pausch

A lot of professors give talks titled "The Last Lecture." Professors are asked to consider their demise and to ruminate on what matters most to them. And while they speak, audiences can't help but mull the same question: What wisdom would we impart to the world if we knew it was our last chance? If we had to vanish tomorrow, what would we want as our legacy?

When Randy Pausch, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon, was asked to give such a lecture, he didn't have to imagine it as his last, since he had recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer. But the lecture he gave—"Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams"—wasn't about dying. It was about the importance of overcoming obstacles, of enabling the dreams of others, of seizing every moment (because "time is all you have…and you may find one day that you have less than you think"). It was a summation of everything Randy had come to believe. It was about living.

In this book, Randy Pausch has combined the humor, inspiration and intelligence that made his lecture such a phenomenon and given it an indelible form. It is a book that will be shared for generations to come.

4th of July

The 4th of July this year was a little different than in years past. For instance, we didn't have any hay to cut or rake, or any cherries to pick. So we kinda had a lazy holiday. We still went to the Ward Breakfast and had a fun time. Mom and Dad were enlisted to cook again and I think that they are going to be helping next year as well. Dad got to use his giant stove griddle and was pretty happy with the results. The only thing was that we had big breakfast at 9 with fruit, pancakes, sausage, eggs, bacon, and tootsie rolls. Then we had the family BBQ at 2, so needless to say some of us were not very hungry when lunch rolled around. It was a very nice day outside to have a BBQ

But we did get together over at Grandpa's for a BBQ, and the Hospital was nice enough to let Grandpa come out for the party. I think that he was very happy to be there with both families, Grandma Melba's side of the family was there as well, so they would go back and forth visiting both parties. We stayed for a couple of hours and then went back home for about an hour, then it was into town to watch the fireworks. Dad wanted to try out the camera's night settings, and so he took about 200 pic's of the fireworks, give or take a few. I'm only going to post a few because most of them were blurry. But the ones that did turn out were pretty cool looking.

The fireworks this year were on the side of the river in the Hydroplane pits because the company that rents its barge out for the fireworks weren't sure it was sea-worthy. We were wondering how the show was going to be, and it was longer than it usually was. Another nice thing was that since the pits are closer to the bridge, most of the people moved farther down river. When we got to our usual spot on the Pasco side, it seemed like there was no one there, because they were all packed in like sardines down river.

On another note Heather wanted me to post pic's of her new dog that she got a couple of days before the 4th. She looks like a Jack Russel/Schnauzer, and her name is Luci. She is the whiniest dog that we have ever had, she follows Heather around all the time and if Heather is out of her sight, she whines until she finds her. Or she follows me around, but she is still funny and she plays with Heather the way Sadie plays with dad. She also sleeps with Heather on the bed and since she usually goes to bed before I do, whenever I come in the room she wants to play and starts barking and whining, which tends to wake Heather up, and then she gets to calm her dog back down. Fun times.