Katie's Journal

Just for my friend Mike, I’m throwing up my apparently now once yearly post. Although, I cannot fathom why Mike is not busy planning his wedding. In doing so, he certainly shouldn’t have time to so casually point out the flaws of my blog. Maybe he’s just incredibly multi-talented enough to plan and wedding and find flaws at the same time. I’m not sure that’s a good thing.

At any rate, the time I once had to blog is now taken up by 6-7 hours in the barn every day. Yep - every single day. With no help and 60+ cows to milk, it takes a while. That is and of itself probably wouldn’t be so bad. After all, a normal work week is 40 hours, and that puts you 42-49 hours. Above the norm, but not outrageous. The problem is all the work that needs done in between. There’s hay to make, fence to repair and build, we have thousands of feet of water line to put in, equipment needs repaired and moved, the list goes on and on. I don’t remember the last time we were able to actually stop for breakfast (although we do occasionally eat “breakfast” around noon, so I’m not sure if that counts as lunch or not). When you’re running full speed day after day on 6 hours sleep (as the kind of person who really, really needs 8), blogging just doesn’t end up high on the list of things that get done in the hour of free time I might get in a day.

Ernie swears to me that we will not go through another winter with as much livestock as we had last winter, so I’m hoping very soon things will start to go. And maybe when they do I’ll find time to actually post some of the few pictures I’ve somehow found time to take over the last year. You never know - sometimes miracles happen.

My friend Mike swears to me that the spam stopper reCAPTCHA works really well to stop spam. I’m willing to give it a try. So I have it installed, and I’ve reopened comments on all posts. I’m hopeful it will work well.

While trying to organize my photos a bit, I found some butterfly photos I took the end of last summer and never posted. So here are a few of my favorites.

I’ve been saying almost since I met Ern that I’d like some chickens of my own. Right now, we get our eggs from Ernie’s aunt Suzie. I’ve always wanted my own, just never had the facilities to keep them. Well, just before Easter, Reuben (Ernie’s dad) went up to Southern States to get some minerals. He came home, and told me he had a surprise for me in the truck. I go out to look, and low and behold, there’s a box of 15 chicks. I cleaned out an old water tub, and got them set up in the shop. They’ve grown like weeds ever since. Barely a month later, they have all their feathers in, and look like full grown chickens almost, albeit very small ones yet. Ernie’s helping me fix up the old hog house, and turn it into a chicken house. We’re not done yet, but need to finish up soon – the chickens are starting to fly out of their tub and run around the shop! Sadly I didn’t think to get before/after pictures of the hog house, but the difference will be dramatic. I’ll get and post pictures of the chicken house when it’s done.