It IS easy being green!

One of my favorite lines of one of my favorite characters, Kermit the Frog, came to mind yesterday while perusing my Milk Jug Garden Starters. But apparently, at least GROWING little green things is working very well!

As promised, here is an update on my seeds. As anticipated, the red bell peppers are doing exactly zip. As these were grown from saved seeds of uncertain age, not surprising. I will probably stick something else in those spots. The others in the rectangular starter with the peppers are doing great! Bush peas -check. Green onions - check. Dill - check.

What I was really testing, though, were the milk jugs. Would they be warm enough? Too warm? Too wet? Light filtered too much? Inquiring minds were getting impatient to know.

I am happy to report Unqualified Success. So far, anyway. The only things not poking through the dirt yet are the ones that had the longest germination times and are not expected for another week - the cilantro and rosemary. I will consider it a personal victory if the rosemary comes up at all since it said starting inside was not recommended.

Everything else (Cucumbers, Radishes, Thyme, Italian Basil, Sweet Basil, Lemon Balm, and something else I am forgetting at the moment) are ahead of germination schedule!

The radishes win the prize - they are ridiculously precocious and 3-4 inches tall already!

 
All the basils and thyme and things like that are tiny but robust.

The cucumbers are not too far behind the radishes, and will be ready to set out in a week.

I know, simple pleasures for simple minds and all that, but I am absurdly pleased.

The downside? Now I really have to get the garden ready!

Sproing!

Well, hello peeps. It's been a while.

It hasn't been all that comedic around here for a bit, with ill parents, deaths, and the like. My brother died unexpectedly right after Christmas. On the upside, we also had a wedding (youngest daughter) and a first grandbaby (oldest daughter. Boys need to Get Busy. NOT REALLY. )  So writing had to get shoved to the back burner for a while. But I am back, y'all.

So for this first posting in the New Era I thought I would share something practical. If I were more patient and more tech-savvy I would post a video but the photos will have to do!

In case you hadn't noticed, the weather patterns of the United Stated have gone Stark Raving Mad. I say this because, well because they have, but specifically because while my kiddos in South Louisiana are contemplating a winter storm and my friends in the Northeast are contemplating suicide, I am sitting here in the supposed-to-be-gray-dank-and-wet Pacific Northwest contemplating the blossoms on my cherry trees and the fact that my daffodils have been up for weeks.

It is almost certainly a ruse.

We will be lulled into a false sense of Spring, go to a fat lot of trouble getting gardens ready and Stuff planted, and then - bam. It will snow or we will have an ice storm in April. I have seen it before.  So, while I did in fact spend a fair amount of painful energy yesterday ripping the godforsaken mess that was my herb garden out of the ground, I am not going to bust my hump getting a garden planted just yet.

In an effort to feel productive and because I am a sucker for producing little anythings (Let's plant tiny trees! Let's incubate eggs!! Let's get baby chicks or ducklings!!! Let's watch them poop all over the garage floor and remember why that is a Bad Idea!!!), I had the fairly brilliant idea. The lady at Wilco told me I was brilliant, so I will choose to believe her. If nine million of you out there have already thought of this DO NOT TELL ME. On the other hand, if there are nine million of you out there reading my blog you can tell me any damn thing you please.

I am also a Saver. I instinctively dislike wasting perfectly good bits of this or that, and when you live on a farm you can almost always find a use for this or that. To that end, I had been saving milk jugs. My original intent was to make scoops. If you cut around the handle you can make a dandy scoop for feed or dirt or whatever. One only needs so many scoops, though, and I am fairly well caught up in that department. So faced with nine perfectly good milk jugs in search of resurrection, I had the brilliant idea.

I personally do not like those little commercial seed starting thingies, the little disks wrapped in biodegradable cloth of some kind, that you stick a seed into and plump up with water. I find them pricey and annoying. My alternative is --ta daaa -- the Milk Jug Seed Starter! So here you are, complete with step-by-step instructions, as if you couldn't just stop reading now and figure it out all by yourselves. But hey.

Step 1. This is a milk jug, in case you have been living either under a rock or in the lap of luxury such that you have never had to pour yourself a glass. These are gallon jugs, but any size would do. Just remember the bigger the jug the more seeds you can stick in there!

Step 2. I actually used a knife here, but that was before I decided to take pictures. When the time came the scissors were what I grabbed for illustrative purposes.  Start near the base of the jug handle and cut around to the other side, leaving about an inch and a half. This will be your hinge.

Step 3. Fill the bottom half with dirt. Potting soil, dirt from your garden, pick your poison. Actually, do NOT pick any poison, I am an organic sort of gal.  Plant your seeds. I plant generously, about nine little spots per jug, knowing they may not all come up and I can thin them as needed. You could poke little drain holes in the bottoms, but if you do you will need something sizeable to set them all on. Otherwise you will have brown water all over your rug, table, wherever.

Step 4. Seat the top back in place after watering gently.  I taped the seed packets (not completely used) to each jug to easily keep track of what is planted where. You could mark on the jug with a sharpie, but since I plan to reuse mine I did not want them permanently marked.

Step 5. It is important to save the caps - when you first start, the cap will be on. As the seedlings get started, you can vent the container by removing the cap. When they get well started, you can tip the top half over as shown in Step 3.

Step 6. Pretty maids all in a row! Mine are in a windowsill in my Purple Couch Room (we are wildly imaginative with room names around here) which gets primarily morning sun this time of year. You can easily move them around to suit your own sunny spots. Just, ahem, remember NOT TO PICK THEM UP BY THE HANDLES. Doh.

Step 7. Because I am occasionally a teensy bit OCD, and because the research scientist in me didn't completely die, I made a whiteboard chart for mine.  The Force (of Habit) Is Strong With This One. I still have all my research notebooks. So I recorded, for each seed type, the planting date, the days to germination, the anticipated and actual germination dates, the days to maturity, the plant spacing for when they are transplanted, and the mature height for garden planning purposes. Yeah, I'm a little bit a geek that way.

So, for all my friends huddled under blankies and shoveling your way to freedom, NEENER NEENER NEENER. Actually, stay warm and safe, and I will keep you posted. In the meanwhile, as you sit around plotting ways to assassinate Punxsutawney Phil, Milk Jug Starter Gardens are a great way to keep on believing Spring will eventually be sprung. Sproing!!

Chicken Math

So, hello friends! It's been a while. The last year has been a bit tough between a couple personal illnesses, my dad's cancer diagnosis, and associated life stresses. So I have had to find my way back to a sense of humor with which to write.

What has not changed is my love of the farm life. In particular, I am a self-confessed chicken lover. Could I have seen this coming earlier in my life? Not a bit. When I pictured that beautiful farm life I lusted after since my first conscious thought, it was a specific thing I wanted: horses, horses, and more horses. A big red barn. Lots of hay. And a tractor. Well, I have the big red barn (just not a livestock barn, something I hope to remedy one day), adequate hay, and a tractor. Looooove my tractor. And I do have a couple horses. But chickens were just never in the calculus.

 I had never spent any appreciable time, in fact any unappreciable time, around chickens. I knew people who used to have them (including Farmer John, to whom I am married, who has vowed to never again have anything to do with the "processing" of a chicken), and they never seemed to comment too much one way or the other on LIKING it or not. Chickens were just something you had and chopped the head off of for Sunday dinner. NOT appealing to me in the least.

 Somewhere along the way, I got interested in chickens just a little bit. I live in a small town in Oregon, there are lots of granola types around here (which, by the way, I love, classifying myself vaguely as a former hippie and basically earth mother type), and a couple years ago while I still lived in a subdivision house there was a flapdoodle over backyard chickens. It would have made no personal difference to me, in that the subdivision I lived in is LOUSY with CC&Rs and militant enforcers of the same, and no way in hell would anyone in that neighborhood have a chicken in their back yard, sorry to say. The powers that be in that place are very hoity-toity, which is one reason I no longer live there, being neither hoity nor toity to any degree. But my friend Drew, who lived just outside my subdivision on a regular street in a regular house where normal people lived, was a passionate chicken devotee. So I got swept up in the controversy, and wrote a letter. And began to see the charm - and practicality - of chickens.

 I do love eggs, but I had never had anything but store-bought white eggs, except occasionally store-bought brown eggs. I hadn't a clue what I was missing. When the opportunity came to move to the farm where I now blissfully make my home, chickens loomed on the horizon sooner than later. My husband, the aforementioned, was not especially enthusiastic. He also left home for 4 months to work on our house in Louisiana. This is a very dangerous thing to do, leaving me and my equally animal-mad daughter alone in charge of the farm. Chickens were coming, baby.

So I began my research. I love hanging out in farm stores, they are like libraries and hardware stores - repositories of endless stores of information which is both foreign and appealing. I can peruse for hours, just wondering what in bloody heck some bit of this or that is used for, drooling over saddles, boots, gates, barn hardware, you name it. And in farm stores there is a book rack, and a large assortment of books on chickens, and indeed fowl of various types. We bought books, we bought baby ducks, and we bought chicks. This is what you call a commitment. My husband would say a commitment of a different kind might have been in order, but he wasn't here. Ha.

 When I was a child, my Uncle Jack used to require some act of commitment to start a project - he wanted to make a passthrough to the kitchen so he punched a hole in the wall, he wanted a patio so he dug a big hole outside the back door. Buying 15 chicks committed me to providing a henhouse. Now the easy way would be to buy a henhouse, and I did in fact peruse Craigslist relentlessly, but there were seldom structures available designed to accommodate more than 6-8 hens. So it became clear I would have to build a henhouse. I had never really built anything before, so this was an adventure. This was enough of an adventure it will merit its own blog. Suffice it to say, I learned by trial and error, but my daughter and I took an unused ancient former garage structure and built a raised floor, insulated the walls, cut a window and door, and created a snug, warm, safe henhouse. Not a moment too soon.

 In the course of all my research into both hens and their lodgings, I came across the concept of chicken math. Chicken Math basically states that you can pretty much expect a mature laying hen working to capacity to lay 2 eggs every three days, or looking at it on a daily basis, to get 2 eggs for every 3 chickens. It has been a while since college algebra and calculus, but I think that works out to about a 67% production rate on average.

 After several bouts of predator attrition, replacements, and additions by adoption, I have currently ended up with 12 laying hens and one rooster. I have an additional 13 babies coming up for this year, so that when my adult girls do their first moulting thing this winter and stop laying for a time, the newbies will pick up the slack just in time. But currently, there are 12 layers. So I would expect that if they are good layers operating up to capacity, I should be getting about 8 eggs per day on good days. Well, my hens obviously suck at math. In a good way. Maybe they are just exceptionally happy hens, or maybe they are physiologically freaks of nature. But they are consistently batting 83-92% instead of 67%. Today was my first 100% day - out of a dozen hens I got a dozen eggs. The impressive thing is,
this happens day after day. That 67% is a slow day!
.

 The other "chicken math" is how much it costs to raise a hen to maturity and keep feeding her, compared to the value of the eggs produced. When the hens are as productive as mine, that helps a lot with the other chicken math too! My husband loves to say our first 12 eggs were over $500 a dozen. This is an exaggeration, but not by much. When you calculate the investment of housing structures, feeders, as well as feed, there is a reason farm fresh eggs cost more. The other reason is that my beautiful girls eat no "other stuff" - only pure feed and the grass and bugs they get while free-ranging every day happily around the farm.Those store-bought eggs: TERRIBLE by comparison. Anemic in color and taste. I have come to expect a golden yolk and a rich taste, which you simply do not get at the grocery. What you don't get with farm fresh eggs is a bunch of animal-based feed and drugs. I am, like I said, a little bit of a former hippie. I am not a rabid organic only eating totally granola crunch-monster, but there are some valid points in all this food debate.

 So here is to chicken math, and my hens complete ignorance of same. Keep popping 'em out, girls! And if you, dear reader, live nearby and want eggs (or pasture raised chicken meat, which we also now raise) Red Box Farm has a facebook page and its own email at redboxfarm@gmail.com, for ordering. Oh - and Farmer John? He loves his chickens. He built a chicken tractor for meat chickens, he feeds them every day, he happily collects eggs and socializes with the hens. Neither of us expected to enjoy them as much as we do. That is the incalculable part of chicken math - like those credit card ads say: the happiness a well-tended sociable flock of chickens brings to your life-pricelss.

Poultry Pandemonium

Sooooo - here's the thing about raising fowl of various sorts. They grow.

I know this seems obvious to the uninitiated, but seriously - they GROW. I remember when my own babies were small thinking there were weeks or even days when they seemed to change in front of me, but not like this. This is like, blink and gain five pounds. I thought only I could do that.

The champions in this race to adult birdhood are the ducks. I mean holy cannoli. You get these adorable little balls of fuzz that cheep and cuddle and next thing you know they are a foot tall and their voices are changing. Literally they are expanding as you watch. I do love me some ducks, and we have gotten them many an Easter during the course of raising my kids. Always before, we had to raise them up and then go find a home for them - a friend who lived in the country, or more recently taking them to the LSU lakes. Now? Voila! Home pond advantage.

So in my fondness for ducks in particular, and my newfound enthusiasm for raising fowl in general, I MAY have gone just the TINIEST bit overboard in the procurement of ducklings. We started with two. They were precious, grey with pale yellow chests and multicolored feet, and in an attack of Trekkiness we named them Sulu and James Tiberius Kirk (or JT). About ten days later, we were in the farm store and they had more ducklings, different varieties than we had already gotten. They had the quintessential Easter ducks, yellow puffballs that are white when they get feathers. We decided to get two more, but the yellow ones were already spoken for so we got two really cute ones that were brown with dark facial markings. These four are now enormous. Absolutely enormous. And of course, then, well.....they were just so CUTE. When we went back to get feed there were more yellow ones. So we decided to get two more, only that only left one and I didn't want him to be alone, so we brought home all three. So now we have seven ducks. I am insane.

In a desire to get the ducks into their natural habitat (and out of my garage) as soon as possible, my daughter and I built them a spiffy duckie play yard next to the pond. In a feat of determination and questionable engineering prowess, we even "fenced in" part of the water so they could get in there and swim but still be contained. I was just not up for wading hip deep into the pond to chase them down when it was time to go back in the garage! They loved it. But we cannot leave them outside until they can fly out of harm's way, so they are part of the ridiculously expanded bird operations in my garage.

The "big boys" (Sulu, JT, Scotty and Spock) were kinda mean to the little yellow babies (either Uhura, Data and Jean Luc or Larry, Curly and Mo - we hadn't decided) so we had to separate them. Unfortunately, we were out of containers. This is of course pre-ordained, in accordance with the rules of farming that require that every initial expenditure engenders at least 6 additional expenditures that you didn't think of. So we bought a "chick enclosure" - basically, a set of plasticized panels and little rings to put them together with, which you then set up in a ring to contain up to 15 baby chicks. As I am discovering, 15 baby chicks and 4 rapidly-approaching-adulthood ducks are not comparable quantities of fowl mass.

The ducks are as tall as the enclosure. It is pretty ludicrous, really, to view them as contained at all when they are looking over the top of the thing at you. But here's the thing about large-ish ducks - they are strong. And those adorable webbed feet? They will FIGHT YOU with them. Like, to the death. Not in any sort of mean-spirited way, you understand, they are just not the brightest of birds and they will FREAK OUT.

So today, lovely morning, gotta feed and water the birds because Kate is farm-sitting elsewhere and John is not at home. No problem, takes like 5 minutes to rinse out all the waterers and fill them and dump some food in their feeders and put 2 scoops of bunny food in the bunny feeder and give everyone a little conversation. Hah. I open the garage door and there are 4 maniacal ducks running around, having used brute force to simply pop apart their enclosure in search of greener pastures. Or more water. Or whatever. Duckie masses yearning to breathe free.

So just try and picture this, if you will. If you know me, it will be even funnier. I am not a lithe, graceful, picture of athletic elegance. So here I am, dashing around the garage trying to change direction as quickly as my tiny horde of freaked out ducks in an effort to herd them through a small triangular opening in their enclosure. They, on the other hand, are moving as one, like those schools of fish you see that all magically change direction at the same time, waving their stubby little wings, necks extended, and "quacking" for all they are worth. I had to stop myself from expostulating loudly, something on the order of Steven Tyler's favorite expletive concerning the copulatory habits of waterfowl. I finally herded them into a corner and made a grab for the smaller ones. This is where I discovered about the feet. They are sharp, they wave around a lot, and they are like little jackhammers. Really nasty, poop encrusted jackhammers. So much for my clean shirt.

When I finally contained them, I was a mess. Had to go and change before going in to work, making me late, and then on the way I was too distracted to look at my dash and ran out of gas. Good thing I love ducks.

THAR BE CHICKENS!!!!

Well, whaddya know. When I named this blog, I had it in mind to build a chicken house and have chickens. There has been a whole lotta blogging since then and no chickens. Today that finally changed!!!

I am one of those people who can usually use a little, shall we say, incentive. I sometimes need a little something to force me into finishing (or even starting) some project or other. I would probably have spent the next year planning my chickenhouse and not building it, but now I am forcing my own hand. Unless I want 8 chickens in the living room, I gotta build the thing.

I really didn't want to wait until next year, and it was getting a little far along in the chick season apparently - our local Wilco went through 1800 chicks in 2 weeks - and it was starting to look like spring, and all that. And I made the mistake of letting my daughter take me to not just one but two farm stores in one afternoon. Soooooo - we have taken the plunge!

I actually did do a little reading about chickens in my Basic Country Skills book. If I had been in possession of Chickens for Dummies I would have read that. But at least I knew there are laying breeds, and meat breeds, and dual-purpose breeds, and what some of all of those are. I knew a pullet from a cockerel (I know you are DYING to know, so pullets are girl chicks and cockerels are boy chicks. While we're at it, let me just inform you that hens are woman chickens, cocks are men chickens, and capons are eunuchs. As if it weren't bad enough just being a chicken. I digress.)

I had a fairly sizeable enclosed dog kennel I could set up in the garage, and I figured this would do for the time being. So armed with my newfound knowledge and a preference for laying breeds off we went to Coastal Farm and Supply. What you need to understand about me is this. My heart does not race at the thought of a trip to Tiffany's or Sak's. But give me an afternoon in Coastal, or a good hardware store, and I am one happy camper. I mean, what can you DO with diamonds anyway, except pass yourself off as a poor imitation of Elizabeth Taylor? But there are so many things you can DO with stuff from the farm store. Plant things, grow things, build things, feed things, ride things, ahhhhhhh. And in the spring, there are babies. Chicks, and ducks, and bunnies, and turkeys, and some ugly strange birds of various kinds I am not too sure about.

So having gotten this far, we were then faced with the quantity question. Basic Country Skills told me to overbuy by 25% to allow for deaths and culling. Coastal told me that the female rate is about 70% (I plan to EAT any males that crop up. I detest roosters. There is a story there.) BCS also told me to anticipate 2 eggs per 3 chickens every day, or that each hen should lay 2 eggs every 3 days. All this is beginning to be A LOT OF MATH. So I just picked a nice round number and went with 8. I will probably get more. But I felt like 8 was good to start. Then there was the matter of STUFF. What my book told me was protein concentrations, not what kind of feed. Not anything about grit. GRIT? Not the kind they serve in the south, apparently. Electrolytes for the water? What kind of feeders? Yikes! So after a nice long chat with the chicken guy, we got a feeder, a waterer, a heat lamp, some chick food, some grit, and bedding.

Then we went to Wilco. My other fave. There, we were lucky enough to snag the last 2 ducklings at either store, bought MORE feed (ducks can die from chick feed), another feeder and waterer, and some electrolytes for the water.

Ducks are a big tradition in our family, starting when my oldest daughter (now 30) was 3 and we got Puddles. Puddles bought the farm in like 3 days, and ML cried herself sick, so we went back and got Puddles 2. P2 grew to adulthood and went to live at a friend's pond. In subsequent years there was a succession of Puddleses, then one year we got 2 and had to come up with another name. So it was Puddles xx and Aflac. Today I just could not bring myself to enter the 21st iteration of Puddles, so we named the ducks Sulu and James Tiberius Kirk, or JT. I know, I know. Just deal, they're my damn ducks.

Naming the chicks took a bit more thought. I mean, there are EIGHT of them, so just remembering them all could be a challenge (never mind telling them apart). So it seemed logical to name them something related to make it easier. The only thing that came to mind in the appropriate numbers were the von Trapp children. SO we now have Liesl, Friedrik, Louisa, Kurt, Brigitta, Marta and Gretl. And Maria. Yes, I know, we are very strange.

My other purchase at Coastal was a whole book on chickens, so I have some bedtime reading. And I think we will take a photo of each chicken and write their name on it and put it on the kennel for reference purposes. We have, in no particular order, a white chick of unknown type (which may turn out to be a white turkey that got in the wrong bin - we just thought it was pretty), 2 barred Plymouth Rock, 2 Rhode Island Reds (my fave), a black Australorp, a black sex linked, and a Buff Orpington, which wins the cool name award.

We are pretty excited. And now I absolutely have to go out there and build a chicken house!

O Death, Where Is Thy Sting?

Ha. Lovely, poetic, somewhat hypothetical question. To which I have a pungent, painful and not in the least hypothetical answer. In my thumb. Death is stinging me in my thumb, my thumb is dying, I am not kidding you.

So after a lovely sunny day yesterday, in which I even managed a quick trip to Al's Garden Center, an experience of orgasmic proportions on a sunny day, today the clouds were back. Yesterday I was in shirtsleeves, today it is hailing and snowing again. And raining. All in the span of a few minutes. Again. So as you might imagine, with the whole snow and hail thing, it is a bit cooler. Again. So I decided it would be lovely to make a fire in the woodstove, if I could get it to stop being cantankerous and draw worth a damn.

Enter my friend Rod, woodstove zen master. He even has the same exact stove as mine. He dropped by, to see if he could help figure out the new airflow problem. He brought an axe. Now there are not a lot of men I would be comfortable showing up at my house with an axe, but Rod is one of them. So not only did he educate me on the finer points of my stove, he tightened a screw on the door handle (while pointing out it was mounted upside down), and then went out to my woodshed with me and split wood. I am not kidding. I didn't know men even still did this, it was awesome. Life is good when a nice man with an axe shows up at your house and splits wood.

Armed (literally, our arms were full) with logs and split kindling, we went in to tame the beast. I thought I was a pretty decent firestarter, but Rod elevated it to an art form. It was great. And now that I know about the thermometer on the top of my stove, and how hot it is supposed to be, I realize my fires were just little baby fires, practice fires, not really house heating fires. Flame on.

So the fire was blazing, the stove was functioning, I had my instructions on when and how to add wood, and Rod went home. I went about my business of the evening with an occasional eye on the fire. When it looked like the middle had fallen in like it was supposed to, I opened the door to add wood. I reached down and grabbed a nice chunk from my cool brass woodholder thing, and instantly was in searing agony. Amazing agony. Agony that takes your mind to another plane, where half of your brain is screaming obscenities and the other half is cooly marveling at how something can actually feel that exquisitely bad. Right in the little thin web of skin at the base of my right thumb, it was total Armageddon. In other words, a yellow jacket.

My devoted readers may recall the entries from last summer about the yellow jackets and our efforts - largely unsuccessful - to eradicate them. I am quite sure this was a sole survivor of some little group of yellow jacket cronies who has been lying in wait for months for the opportunity to extract revenge. In my WOODSHED? In the WINTER? While it is HAILING? Are you FREAKING KIDDING ME?!?!?!?!!? Don't these damn things ever die, or at least hibernate?

It is actually quite stressful to hurt that bad. You want to peel your skin off or jump out a window or plunge your hand into a tub of ice (which for me is usually as appealing as the other two). I have only hurt that bad one other time, when I suffered a severe burn on my same hand from steam coming out of a kettle. I remember plunging my hand into ice, screaming because that hurt so bad (I have Reynaud's) so pulling it out, then the burn hurting so bad I plunged it back in, doing all this while rolling on the floor clearly entering another plane of consciousness. And no, I am NOT a wimp. Can you say 11 pound babies and no epidural??? But this is sudden, exquisite pain that takes your breath quite literally away.

I sought chocolate. I know there are those of you out there who will understand. Chocolate is a perfectly appropriate stress response. I am a doctor, I should know. Trust me. So I alternated running my hand under REALLY cold water, cursing, and eating chocolate dipped wafer cookies until I could breathe fairly normally and think rationally.

Now I think I will go get a pair of forceps, pick up the yellowjacket who is still faintly writhing on my living room floor after my stomping on him and thwapping him with my slipper, and throw his detestable self into the fire, a burnt offering to the gods of pain.

And in case you wondered, I typed this mostly one-handed, thanks for asking. Because writing is the next best thing after chocolate as a stress response. Besides, of course, Margaritas, which I do not have the wherewithal to make. But if anyone feels like bringing their blender over, I won't stop you.

DAMN it hurts!!!

It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas

Yeah. So, all that stuff I wrote a mere 2 days ago about SPRING? Yeah, well, not so much. Shoulda known! So both yesterday and today, I have had in the span of several 5-10 minute intervals, these crazy cycles of rain-snow-hail-sunshine. I am not kidding, in like 5 minutes time.

This is charming in its way, but it makes it really difficult to get anything done. I look outside, it is raining, so I scratch off the list getting my outdoor work done. Three seconds later - just as I am starting to gear up for, say, sewing - I glance outside and the sun is out. Fantastic! Run out, pull on the boots, and head to the pasture to feed the animals (oh dear Lord, more on that in a few). By the time I get halfway across the pasture, it is snowing. Big fat flakes that melt on my head and drench me in wet loveliness. And cold. So I finish the bare essential and get back to the house where I proceed to start a fire and a cuppa (hot tea) and then voila! It is bright sunshine streaming in the window making my office uninhabitably hot, never mind the fire in the woodstove just around the corner. So I throw open the window for some air, whereupon it promptly starts to hail. In the sunshine. This seems to be a peculiarly Oregon phenomenon and still just cracks me up.

So this confounding cycle has continued pretty much the whole weekend, and as a result I have given up on most of my projects because I got tired of vacillating between them, and just tended to paperwork in my office and started a new Patricia Cornwell novel, which seemed as productive as anything else I could do while watching our full-on panoply of precipitation options playing outside the windows.

So today, after church, Kate and I decided to check out the higher elevation of Silver Falls after a friend posted there was snow up there. I am a sucker for snow, sorry guys. Don't even mind shoveling it, but I never have to. It just doesn't accumulate like that here. And I don't exactly have sidewalks anyway! So we took off driving, and about 500 feet higher than us it was snowing consistently, and there was a little accumulation on the roads and fields, and it was lovely. At our house it was raining. We drove for about 45 minutes, by the time we got back to town it was bright sunshine - in fact it was bright sunshine to the west as soon as we got around the Falls, and it was breathtaking. To the east, snow, and to the west, blue sky with streets of cumulus clouds, and long strands of low misty cloud hugging the hollows between the ridges we were driving along. I love that about Oregon. It makes you almost want to cry it is so lovely. But I commented "Gee, I wish it could snow at our elevation for a change."

Well, guess what. I am sitting here looking out my office window at the rapidly accumulating whiteness on my garage roof and truck while big fat flakes are flying around everywhere.

(And, I might add, it smells wonderfully yeasty in here since Kate made rolls to take to youth group) Then it stopped as suddenly as it started, and we got a lovely sunset. You just never know what you'll get around here.

So now, about those animals. It is a good thing I am a basic pacifist, non-hunter, animal loving sort. Or they would all be shot at sunrise this morning and that would be the end of that. You may recall that in my last posting I mentioned moving them, and their feed, down to the run in shed and how Mac attacked the feed bins, so I had to move them. SILLY ME, I actually thought I had secured them. Never, never underestimate the maniacal cleverness of a big male-ish horse and three goats of any gender, and normal peace-loving llamas who are operating under the influence of bad animals. I got out there this morning, in the snow, and there were trash cans, buckets, and soggy blobs of feed everywhere. Everywhere. I was NOT PLEASED. In all honesty I wasn't surprised either, but still. So I took the empty trash cans and buckets into the run-in shed (after smacking Mac in the head with a lid for good measure)(it's plastic and lightweight people, don't go calling the ASPCA) and then the goats all got in there and so did Mac. I chased him out without too much trouble, but the goats were comically resistant. I had to resort to throwing things at them to make them move, because they just kept wanting to hide under the workbench and were not interested in being enticed. Finally one of them headed for the gate so the others followed and then I shut the gate and locked them all out. No food, no shelter, how do you like them apples. I do not feel the slightest bit guilty. They are animals, this is not a harsh climate, they can eat grass and lump it. I am DONE.

And for good measure, in my struggle to get all this done I sank up to my knees in the damn mud, I am not kidding, it was like quicksand. I had to half climb the posts of the run-in shed to pull my foot out and my boot came off - and it is knee high! SERIOUSLY???

Sigh. I shall go drink my Calming tea and watch the Oscars. Merry Christmas.