Farming Update

Two factors caused me to spend a lot of time with the kids today:

- Jessica has been really sick over the last couple of days (appears to have eaten something that is not agreeing with her.)

- Our internet has been down all day (due to last night's storm.)

The kids spent a lot of time outside and we had some good fun - here's a synopsis of the good times:

• I went outside barefoot to tell Ginger not to walk across the clover barefoot (to prevent beestings to the bottom of the foot) and was promptly stung on the bottom of my big toe by a honey bee.
• Sterling was walking through some tall blue flowers in the pasture and got stung on the leg by a honey bee (yeah! not in the face!)
• Winter fell off the end of the dock into the lake - then kept jumping in for fun. She ended up with a tiny leech on one leg so she wins the prize as the first one in our family to get a leech.
• Ginger and I rode down to the mailbox on the lawnmower to get the mail and saw two rabbits (I later got the .22 out and took care of half of that problem)
• I only ended up spending about 75% of the working day with work
• We went fishing and caught a couple of small bass, but couldn't seem to get the big one to bite - so we switched gear to catfishing with breadballs (without any luck) and finally resorted to cooking angelhair pasta for dinner. Unfortunately, the kids had eaten most of a loaf of whitebread (catfish bait) and so they left most of their angelhair for Biggy Smalls (the pig) who was duly grateful.

And an update on the cattle situation:

• Josh's steer is growing (prolly 350 lbs or so now) and is doing fairly well with his halter-training
• Our little bottle calf is just starting to nibble on grass and sweet feed. He still takes two warm bottles per day. He spent the night in the shop last night due to the major storm that blew through.
• The two longhorn heifers are gonna end up as progeny-less old spinsters if we don't figure something out soon. I found a guy that has local semen from a fairly decent bull (pictured below) for $25 (no shipping charges!) and that looks like a good option (although I'm not a huge fan of his coloring and my heifers are already too white, so this isn't the most optimal breeding for increasing the odds of darker progeny.) The total cost for insemination per cow would be ~$100 which is approaching half-reasonable and we may go that route.

• The one longhorn mama still hasn't dropped a calf. She has fattened up noticeably since she came to live on our farm and from the looks of her, she must certainly be getting closer to birthing. We'll just keep our fingers crossed.

In other news, I was perusing the web looking at Ankole-watusi cattle and I now have serious horn-envy. The longhorns I once thought so spectacular now seem puny and pathetic when compared to the racks on these things. Check these things out:

Are you kidding me! I even saw a watusi heifer on CL for like $400. I have to admit, I like them big horns!