We woke up to a dazzling sunrise this morning. It had been foggy through the night, so when the sun peeked over the eastern horizon shining through pink clouds the light high-lighted the hoar frost. The whole world was pink and white. We are again billeting a Katimavik participant, this time a girl from the west coast, who came to the prairies expecting flat and boring but is being pleasantly surprised. I hope I can pass on to her an appreciation for the understated beauty of the wide open spaces, and our extreme weather. Hopefully this group will get the taste of at least one blizzard before they move on to Drummondville in January.
I'm trying to catch up on projects that I promised others (and worse yet, myself) that I would have done by the first of November. I don't know where time ticks by to. My most important job to get done today is to have a package ready to go to Australia by tomorrow morning. Our son and daughter-in-law have moved back to the Land Down Under this fall and there is a little girl who is having her fourth birthday on the other side of the planet, in less than two weeks. It's going to cost Grandma a bit of money to send her gift Air Mail, but there is no choice now. I also have a few things ready to go for Christmas so I'll stick them in too. I may as well take the weight of the parcel right up to the allowed two kg if I'm paying the price anyway!
I also promised to write the history of the rural municipality for the Redvers History book. At the last meeting everyone was asked to bring a draft copy of their section to the next meeting so that they could judge how many pages were going to be needed. Way back in early October, that seemed like it would be no problem; now there are only four days left, and they are not free days. I wonder if an outline will suffice?
We spent a few very noisy days and nights this past couple of weeks after we separated the cows from the calves to wean them. The calves are kept in the barn and corral system and the cows are put out to pasture. They managed to break down one fence to get back closer to the pen that their babies were in and stood along that fence bawling until they were hoarse. The calves raised a rucus for a day or two, but they are getting grain and hay and lots of water so they settled down pretty quick. I think the last of the cows only gave up a day or two ago. They can see their babies just fine, they just can't come in to nurse them. We do have about a half dozen late calvers that couldn't be separated yet. There always seems to be a few stragglers every year.
Well, it's back to building a package for OZ. Grandchildren take precedence over everything else.
4 comments:
Hi Jocelyn
You do have a busy life!
Funny, but I have no memory of cattle fussing over separation from their calves. I think it was done at birth and the calves were trained to drink skim milk from a pail. This enabled the farmer to sell the cream to a dairy.
Keep blogging.
Farmboy
Hi Jocelyn
You do have a busy life!
Funny, but I have no memory of cattle fussing over separation from their calves. I think it was done at birth and the calves were trained to drink skim milk from a pail. This enabled the farmer to sell the cream to a dairy.
Keep blogging.
Farmboy
Jocelyn;
How sorry I am to hear about your granddaughter being all the way in OZ...ouch!
The program you speak of where you host urban youngsters sounds especially interesting to me-is this something that you do every year? I think that it would do some good for urban kids to get a taste of rural life-I think it would help the U.S. deal with some of our hard urban-rural divisions in society.
Hi Dave,
The program is called Katimavik - i think it was a brainchild cooked up for Canada's centennial and has been going strong ever since. All kids (aged 17 to 21) are elligible and if accepted into the program will travel the country doing volunteer work in three different communities over a nine month span. They do get a cash settlement at the end, but during their travels make on small change in spending money. They live in group homes of around ten kids plus a project leader and each take turns at being house managers where they do the shopping (on a tight budget)as well as all other household duties. They do without TV and learn to make their own bread. During each rotation of their journey they are billetted out to families to experience life as a local. It's good for them, but it has been quite an eye opener for us as well. Just because we're all Canadians doesn't make us all the same - what we consider normal is not all the same!
jocelyn
Post a Comment