2011 Baby Count

February 16 - one ram lamb to Dorothy
February 13 - one ewe lamb, one ram lamb to Emma
January 29 - twin ewe lambs, to Mabel
January 5 - one ewe lamb, Flora, (bottle fed) to Cathy Gale


Saturday, February 6, 2010

Finally up to date - February 5, 2010

It snowed last night - about 2 inches. That brings us up to about 1 foot of snow this year. I suppose I shouldn't complain too much - after last year's ice storm, snow is a welcome alternative. However I have shoveled snow out of my living room THREE times in the past month. I mean, it's good exercise, but it's very demoralizing.

All of the roof rafters were finished the first week of January (before the first snow), and then we worked on the plywood wall cladding for the upstairs. Last weekend we put house wrap on most of the upstairs walls, and started installing the overhangs for the roof at the front and back of the house. I suppose that if we were being filmed, it would be a comedy. It might be R-rated, though, because there's a fair amount of swearing going on. I hope we're getting the hang of it, because we're only 40% complete, and we hope to get done tomorrow. We had to take today off because it was too cold, wet, windy and icy to work upstairs on ladders and scaffolding.

We took two trips down to visit my mother in Tennessee in January. The first was the weekend of January 15 - 17, when we combined Christmas and Charles's birthday celebrations. We ate out with friends, went shopping in Birmingham, Alabama, and played on the Wii a lot! The following weekend, we stayed with Ma and Scott while we attended the Southern Sustainable Agriculture Working Group conference in Chattanooga. It's the third time in four years that we've attended and we get something really good out of each visit. Around here, I'm known as the weird farmer - small livestock, bees, market garden, near-organic or natural practices. At the SSAWG conference, I'm way on the side of normal compared to some people!