DUELLING DUGOUTS

The spring melt is underway and the low spots are starting to fill up. It's hard to tell how much water is actually in the snow until the end of the melt, but we're hopeful that this winter's snowfall will be plentiful.

Glen is busy trying to stay ahead of the melt just south of the house where he started digging a dugout last fall. He did get a nice start to it, and was building a bit of a ridge to hold water in a natural depression in the field too, when the CAT he had leased was needed elsewhere and he had to quit. A week ago the CAT was delivered back here to finish the job, but in the meanwhile the first hole he had dug had filled with water. Instead of inlarging that one he had to move over and start again - which, two days into that dig, is filling as well. We're not complaining about the water, but this project is going to be shut down by sundown tonight - CATs are not amphibious.

Over the Christmas holidays a year ago, our daughter Jesse wanted to learn how to run an earthmover so Glen had leased this CAT and showed her the ropes up on our pasture. It took her the better part of a week, but she ended up with a sizable hole. And that's all it's ever been; just a dry hole. All year she has taken a lot of kidding about this lack of water in her dugout. At one point we even found a deer skeleton at the bottom and told her that even the wildlife were dying of thirst in her "watering hole" (although it was more than likely the work of coyotes).

The truth is, that if we had had any decent precipitation last year, that hole should have been at least half full by now - it is dug in a low spot, right along the edge of a creek that normally runs every spring. Although we've given Jesse the blame, it's been Mother Nature who's been holding out on us.

This spring, though, looks more promising. I texted her this morning to tell her that she has three feet of water! Within the hour, her dad reported that he has three feet in his brand new dugout as well - hence he was still the best dugout digger in the family. As he races to finish his dig before he's swamped, I'm pretty sure that he would rather the water would just hold off a little longer. But he'll never tell Jesse that.

We have had our first new calf of the season. Two years ago we bought a bull that (according to statistics) was going to sire smaller calves - something you want with fist time calvers. He didn't live up to his stats - we had more trouble with calves too big to be born that we've ever had before. Every heifer needed assistance and we lost 1/3 of the babies. Last year we bought another bull and put him with the heifers, and it's his baby out there - definately smaller than usual, but bright, perky, and very much alive. I think this new guy gets all the heifers from now on.

Has Spring Finally Sprung?

It is the 10th of March and we have finally seen temperatures above freezing! For three days in a row! If the people of Saskatchewan aren't the ones most worried by global warming, you'll have to fogive us - this has been one nasty, cold winter.

We are still hauling water to the cattle. They've settled down to needing two tanks a day; one in the morning and another at sundown. I guess they've got used to the routine, and so have we. If I'm home I'll go, and Glen hasn't been called in to work for most of this week so he's been here to do it on the days I worked. I can't see the use of an expensive dig when Mother Nature will be making water from snow in the next few weeks, so we'll carry on like this.

One thing that Mother Nature did do for us last week was dump about a foot of heavy, wet spring snow on us. There will be tons of runoff in this year's melt - just what we've been praying for, and we're grateful. We hear on the news that just over a 100 miles west of here the snow ends and they are facing the drought nightmare we've just barely dodged. From Weyburn to the Alberta border there is next to no snow.

We will soon be bringing our cows in from winter pasture; their babies are due to start arriving the first week of April so we'll want them in where they're easier to check on. We've got last year's calves on chop rations now - it's hard to believe that they were cute little fluffy creatures just a year ago, they are huge, hungry beasts now. They are still playful though - when I step into the pen with the pails of chop I watch them pretty close. They tend to run and kick up their heels when food arrives which is nice, you know that they're feeling good, but I'm certain that a happy kick from an 800 pound animal is going to hurt every bit as much as a malicious kick would.

Glen has spent this week carting all three bulls off to town to see the vet this week. One of them has what they called "woody tongue" when their tongue swells up and stiffens so they can't eat properly - they're treating him with an IV infusion to boost his iodine levels. He's been to town twice and is taking a long time to perk up. Our biggest bull had to go in because he had stepped on something sharp and got infection in his foot, and the last guy had a boil on his jaw that had to be drained. This might have been caused by the sharp barley beard spikes in their feed that poked into his cheek and caused infection. It's just coincidence that they should all end up needing to see the vet in one week, and it's not a bill I'm looking forward to getting!

I'm going to make the best of this day of sunshine ... there will be laundry hanging out in the fresh air before noon and some windows open to move some of this stale winter air out of the house. My aunt in England writes of flowers already blooming in her front garden but by Canadians standards, this will have to do.

ENOUGH ALREADY

It has been a very frustrating, work-intensive past two weeks. And the deep freeze temperatures we've been enduring have had more that their share to do with it. They say that it's supposed to get to the plus side of zero today - I'm not convinced since the sun isn't shining and the wind is blowing a skiff of snow around - but it is more civilized out there than is has been for three weeks.

The first week at nearly 40 below is par for the course; we can usually count on that at least once a winter. The second week, it a bit much, but we're tough, we made it through okay. That last week was a case of ENOUGH ALREADY! I'm a pretty complacent gal, but that was just too long.

And, by the middle of week two, how humans were dealing with the cold took second place to how it was affecting other things. I did the chores after dark on Thursday last week and, although I didn't go right over to see if the watering bowl was working there were a couple of animals over there and they looked like they were happily drinking water so we're assuming that things were going okay then. The next morning when Glen fed them their grain he found the waterers froze up, but wasn't too worried about it as he went off to work - he was sure that it was just a fuse to change to thaw out the water lines in the well house. He was so wrong.

The cattle out in the pasture are eating snow for their water intake, but the three bulls, about seven cows that need some TLC, and 47 feeder calves are in corral systems that don't give them access to enough fresh snow for them to be able to do the same. We have to provide them water and we have a water system that does this automatically. Or, until last week we did.

The house gets its water from a well, but the barn is set up to draw water from the duggout (about 250 feet from the barns) up to where four heated watering bowls self fill as the animals drink. Any problems that we've had before was when the watering bowl froze because the heater failed. This time the water line froze somewhere along that 250 foot stretch, and it's not an easy fix at all.

The underlying problem is probably the extremely low water table. Our duggout is only about half full. The line is buried at least eight feet deep so that the frost can't get down far enough to freeze the pipes, and normally, if the duggout was full, the water would cover the line as it enters the duggout, too. This year there just isn't enough cover to do the job. Possibly, if we had anticipated this happening, we could have spread bales for extra cover, but that's just a case of hindsight now. And, there's no time to sit and think about what should have been, there's water to haul!

It took Glen and Mitchell two days to get set up to water the animals with an above ground tank. They had to find a tank to haul water in, and one to haul it to. They had to insulate the watering tank so that it didn't freeze solid too, and those animals need about three truckloads per day to keep them happy. All this was done at 40 below with the wind chill, remember, but waiting for a better day wasn't an option.

Yesterday we three (Glen, Mitchell, and myself) spent the day trying to implement Glen's plan to thaw the pipes out from the well house end, but although it would work on paper, there are just too many feet of pipe to go through before we can get to the problem, and starting at the other end (chopping a hole in the ice and fishing out the other end) isn't an option. It was a very disappointed Glen who finally conceeded last night and will have to hire someone to come dig down beside the duggout and install a new intake pipe at a lower level than the one that froze, and splice it into the rest of the line. That'll cut into our profit margin this year!

But, as I said, the past day or two has been a little bit more bearable so at least we aren't freezing fingers and toes off when we're hauling water anymore. We are praying for lots and lots of snow though! I hope every single slough and pothole is full of water this spring.

Dreaming of Sweetpeas

The winter must be starting to wear long on me; last night I dreamed of a whole hedge of sweet peas I had planted. Of course, looking back the whole thing was surreal - I had planted the seeds in a window box and they had spread downward, not up toward the sunlight. Actually, the craziest thing of all was that they had grown in the first place - I never have any luck with sweet peas. Regardless of how unrealistic the details of the dream were, though, the message is clear enough for me - my mind is starting to toy with the promise of spring, the colour of green, the scent of fresh-tilled earth. I know we're only about to start February, but the daylight hours are beginning their stretch, we're on the right track.

Another sign that winter has been long enough is that I can't wait to hang the laundry out on the line to dry. The best part of a Saturday is bringing in those sheets and towels, and with them, the smell of FRESH. They can try all they want, no chemical perfume is ever going to be able to recreate fresh air and sunshine.

We still have two more months before our calf crop starts to arrive. At the moment the cows are all out on the pasture, and sheltering in a bale enclosure that Glen built for them. Other winters they've spent the whole winter in the barns, but Glen had planted grazing corn for them last spring so in order to utilize it they had to go to the feed, not have Glen bring it to them. We had to wait until the ground was good and frozen so they wouldn't trample it all into the ground and waste half the crop, and we needed a good supply of snow for them to eat because there is no water in that field. We didn't know how that was going to work out - this herd had always had access to water in the winter and we weren't sure how they would adapt to using snow instead. There was a week or so that they were pretty sure they needed to come home for water, but then they just settled right down. To tell the truth, we were aprehensive about it too. I know in the wild animals live off snow all winter, and our neighbour has been wintering his cattle like this for years, but when you've never tried it yourself, you just aren't sure.

Sometime this month Glen is going to start making chop for the herd again. The feeders have been getting whole oats and peas all winter, but closer to calving we'll be bringing the herd back to the corrals and stepping up their diet too. I'm kind of looking forward to this in a way - last year I set my mind to losing some weight. Although I cut back what I was eating right after New Year's Day, until I started helping fill and carry chop pails, nothing seemed to be happening. By the end of summer I had almost reached my goal, but there just wasn't enough physical activity to keep burning significant calories once the feeders were sold and I parked the lawn mower. Exercising for the sake of exercising just doesn't seem to be a good use of my time, but give me actual work that needs to be done, and I feel like I'm accomplishing something of worth. It may sound silly, but I can't wait to get back to doing chores.

The weather has been playing with us this week. We've had really cold temperatures - and we've had two or three days at well above freezing. The last two days have had the wind just howling out of the northwest, picking up snow and blowing it across the highways where it stuck because the pavement was so warm. I was glad that I didn't have to go any further than to town and back.

Baby, It's Cold Out There!

It has been one nasty week here on the prairies - a time to tuck into a nice, warm house, and just stay there.

We arrived home from sunny Mexico late Saturday afternoon with our daughters picking us up at the airport. We spent the evening with them and my sister and her family (our fellow travellers), eating pizza and sharing our holiday stories. After a while Jesse wanted to know why we hadn't taken our kids with us, and to tell the truth, I had started to wonder the same thing halfway through the week. I guess I had always felt that this was a "grown up" holiday so you left your kids at home. I regret that decision now; it's a great way to introduce kids to travel, different cultures, and how to behave as an ambassador of their own country while they are there.

After temperatures in the mid twenties for a whole week I was surprised that the cold at the Winnipeg airport wasn't more of a shock to the system. I guess we can thank our lucky stars that we didn't land on Thursday of this week - with windchills of more that minus 40 degrees, we might have frozen solid in one breath.

In our corner of the province, we escaped the blizzard that totally shut down the city of Saskatoon mid-week; we only received a few centimetres of snow and the really cold winds, but the news casts from places north and west of here certainly kept us in tune with what was going on. I can remember some pretty significant winter storms in my life - a blizzard in January of 1978 that lasted the better part of a week and left snow drifts so high that we couldn't let the kids play outside afterwards because they would have been able to walk right up to overhead power lines and touch them - but the weather office insists that this storm doesn't have a rival in history until you go all the way back to 1955. It must have been something else, alright, to have zero visibility inside a city is pretty bad.

As a child of the fifities and sixties I grew up hearing stories about how the pioneers coped with blizzards by tying a rope between the house and the barn so that they could find their way home after tending to their animals - and woe to anyone who left that saftey line because it was so easy to get disoriented in the cold and swirling snow. People died then, and Mother Nature is no kinder today - three people died this week in Saskatchewan. It is a very sobering lesson to have to re-learn.

We're left wondering what the rest of the winter holds in store for us. It is still very cold, but they are promising better temperatures by next week. Mid and northern Saskatchewan have had lots of snow, and we've had more that we ever got last winter, but we'll happily take at least double what there is out there at the moment. Farmers are looking forward to the coming crop year - the "what to plant to make big bucks this year" and "the newest equipment that you can't possibly farm without" advertising campaigns have begun. Spring can't be far off now.

HAPPY HOLIDAYS

And, here we are at the end of another year. Due to things that have to be done at work, I've already written "2007" a few times. It felt strange, as it always does when that milestone is reached, but I know that it will only seem like the blink of an eye, and we'll be putting "2008" down on paper and wondering where that year went.

The past few weeks have been very busy. Mitchell's surgery was rescheduled for the following week, so he and I were off to Brandon bright and early the morning of the 12th. I was the same age as he is when I hade my gallbladder removed, but what a difference in the way we were taken care of! I checked into the hospital the night before - he had to be there two hours pre-op. My surgical scar runs from my breastbone to my belly button - he came home from the hospital with four small holes, stapled shut. I had the chance to talk to the nurses who were in the operating room, who explained to me what they had done, how long it had taken, and showed me the gallstones that had given me so much greif. My hospital stay lasted three weeks. Mitchell wasn't there three hours! They packed him into the car for a 100 mile ride home, gave me a perscription for his pain, and told me not to leave him alone for 24 hours. I fully agree that my hospital stay was too long, but surely one night in the hospital would be a good idea.

But, all's well that ends well; he is back on his feet and hopes to be working again real soon, although he discovered that he had better stick with eating little meals more often, rather than full meals three times a day.

Come to think of it, that wisdom would probably suit all of us after the feasting that has gone on here over the holidays. Glen and I are getting ready to spend a week in Mexico so I've been trying to finish up the goodies before we leave. When I realized that there were still five pies to go, I started to give them away last night. None of my clothes are going to fit if I keep that up!

Christmas Eve and Christmas Day we celebrated with the traditional turkey meals, but on Boxing Day we repeated the hay ride Glen initiated last year. There were around 30 family and neighbours who came over for the ride up to the pasture on 21 where we lit a bonfire and the kids toasted marshmallows while the adults sipped coffee and Baileys. The older kids all trooped off to the dugout hill nearby and tobagganed until the sun was setting. When we got back to the house there was a gigantic pot of chili ready to serve - it was a grest day. So far Glen has been borrowing the hay rack for this excursion, but I don't think anybody is going to let him quit this annual event; he may as well buy his own. I wonder if the weatherman is always going to be so kind?

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas ...

The Prairies have finally made it through the deep freeze we've been in for the past two weeks. It has been nasty cold with significant wind chills to make a trip outside even more - shall we say "bracing"? Yesterday and today have been absolutely balmy - decent weather for washing my car except that there's been enough melting going on that I would just be trading old dirt and salt for new mud and slush.

We have received a good bit of snow in the past couple weeks. The ditches are filling up - might even be enough to close roads if the wind blew right. Glen had to clear out the yard last weekend or I would have never made it out to work on Monday morning. That's something that he didn't have to do once last winter.

His project last week was leasing a Cat (earthmover) and using it to deepen an exisiting dugout and use the dirt to build up a sort of dam across where spring snow melt usually flows toward a small creek. This will give him a decent sized pond if it fills, and take away our water worries. He and Jesse have long ago decided that they want to name our farm "Skull Ranch" (I think mostly because I don't like the sound of "skull" in a name), and now he tells me that this new body of water will be dubbed "Skull Lake". Could be a world class resort some day, he tells me. Remember folks, you heard it here first!

I've had a very disjointed week. We were to Dauphin, Manitoba to a wedding the Saturday before and came home to try to do two day's work in less than one. I went off to work on Monday morning not even realizing that the Christmas rush at the Post Office would be kicking into high gear - to say the least, it was an interesting day! And an exhausted evening.

Tuesday the hospital in Brandon, Manitoba finally called that Mitchell could book his surgery date for Thursday. The poor kid inherited his mother's lousy genetics as far as gallbladders go, and is every bit as anxious to get rid of his as I was to get rid of mine. We set the date for Thursday, my staff was super about rearranging their week so that I could go, and then the hospital called the morning of the operation and "bumped" his surgery for a more life and death case. It left poor Mick even more stressed about it all, and me with a day off in the middle of the week. I decided that it wasn't going to go to waste so I tied into my Christmas baking.

By the end of the day I had two kinds of tarts, a double batch of cookies, and enough poppycock to feed an army. I've hauled a big part of it down to the deepfreeze so that there might be something left by the actual holiday, and I threatened to take a picture of it with today's newspaper so that I could prove that I had, indeed, done Christmas baking for 2006.

Today I house cleaned all morning and then asked Glen to climb up into the attic and bring down the Christmas decorations. I had plans to get a whole bunch of that job done, but it just didn't seem like much fun all by myself. Jesse and Jenn will be home after their last exam on Monday afternoon - maybe they'll help me. Sandy won't be home till the following week as her exam schedule is different. And Mitchell should be minus his gallbladder by Tuesday afternoon. Hopefully, while he is sleeping off the anesthetic I'll have time to get out to the stores and get the last of the things I need for gifts. I know what I need so it shouldn't take me too long.

Then there should only be the tree to put up, the gifts to wrap, and maybe a bottle of wine to unwind with ...

The Difference Between Tough and Stupid

It was another busy weekend - it's time to put my Christmas letter together and get serious in the gift buying department - but all the other jobs that need doing around here just don't seem to be letting up.

Glen had a few days off work this past week so he put the time to use arranging for a local contracter to come out and dig a well up on our quarter of pasture on 21. We knew that we'd find water for sure - there has been a well up there for at least two generations - but the cribbing was too narrow to get a decent sized pump down to bring the water up, and Glen wanted it dug deeper than the actual layer of gravel where the water is. They went down about eight feet into the clay so there will always be that many feet of reservoir to feed the watering trough when the cattle are all drinking at once.

With his next days off Glen wants to dig another well south of our buildings - again at a place he knows that there was a well before. His father talks of these wells and how they watered 100 head off them, even in the really dry years. We're trying to be as prepared as possible for the possibility of no run-off next spring, but along with everyone else who has cattle, we're praying for lots of snow as well. So far we've had one small dump of snow, and with the mild weather we're still enjoying, it's all long gone.

Sunday morning we brought all the cows in again and sorted out the cull cows which will be making the trip to the auction barn this week. We've been lax in this department the past few years, keeping cows that should have "gone down the road" long ago. A few are leaving because they are too old, some are feeders that have reached butcher weight, and one or two are leaving because of their disposition. One in particular, Crazy Cow, is taking that last ride because she is one dangerous Mama. On the one hand, it was too bad she had to go - she raises a wonderful calf - but on the other hand, you didn't dare take your eyes off her when you were out in the pasture. If you inadvertantly found yourself between her and her treasured calf, you'ld better be able to get back to the truck before she could get to you.

Glen is sporting a magnificent bruise tonight, compliments of loading a cow into a trailer this morning, and it wasn't even Crazy Cow that landed the blow. He started out the day with a nasty toothache (something that he's been let build since the middle of last week) but about 9:30 this morning he called me at work to say that his tooth wasn't bothering him hardly at all anymore ... since the cow had kicked him, his leg definitely hurt more! I'm betting they both hurt a lot. I think he's off to the dentist tomorrow morning (although he continues to say that the cow "cured" him, I saw how tenderly he chewed his supper tonight), and I've seen the leg - it's going to be a technicolor beauty in a few days. He has commented more than once that "if he would have known he was going to last this long, he would have taken better care of himself." I've pointed out that maybe he could maybe start going easy on his poor old body even now, but what do I know? He says "A man's got to be tough." I say that there's a pretty fine line between "tough" and "stupid".

Weekends Are Never Long Enough

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.

WHAT A FARM WIFE CONSIDERS AS A DATE

Another full week behind us. Every morning the sunrise is a little later, and even though we do chores at the same time each night, there is less light to do them with every time. It's never the cold or the snow that makes winter unpleasant for me, it's the lack of sunlight. I'm sure thatI must be solar powered, and my "cheerfulness" batteries just don't stay boosted during the deep dark months of winter.

Coming into the dark time in late October and November isn't too bad. Socially it's a busy time of the year. It starts out with a whole string of birthdays that we usually celebrate with meals out with family or friends, and then moves on to Redvers' and district's annual fundraisers. Tonight we will be attending a dinner theatre and auction benefit for the local Health Foundation. By Redvers standards, quite the gala affair, and a lot of fun. This is the year we get to see the burning of the mortgage as well. Redvers is the proud owner of our own Health Centre (they aren't supposed to be called hospitals any more), a beautiful new building of which we are very proud. The trick these days is finding enough people to keep it staffed.

In November there will be another big evening put on by the Wildlife Association. It is a supper and auction as well with proceeds going to further conservation efforts in the area. By then, we roll into the Christmas party scene and the year comes to an end. It is January and the first half of February that really get to me. I drive to work in the dark. I drive home in the dark. The day I actually arrive home while the sun is still shining is one that I celebrate! I wonder if this year will be any better as I will have a full week of sun to start the year off with. We're off to Mexico for New Years with my sister and family. If it gets me through winter without my usual "low battery" warning, we'll just have to make it annual pilgrimage, don't you think?

Some people would consider these occasions "dates", but I'll bet that most farm wives would agree with me that, while they are great reasons to perk up your wardrobe and get your hair done, a typical date is a much more low key affair. Glen and I went on a "date" this week. After work and a bowl of home made soup for supper, we pulled on all our warmest clothes and headed out to do some fencing in the dark. This is not the same thing as dancing in the dark. Except for the romantic glow of the dashboard light as I hunted for a spilled can of fence staples, there was no mood lighting. The "music" came from a herd of 90 or so cattle who heard the truck and came running and bawling to see if there was chop being offered. Glen pounded staples and I moved the truck forward so that the headlights shone on where he was working - the culmination of this adventure was when we opened the fresh pasture up to those poor, starving beasts (they always think they are so hard done by) and watched them scatter into the darkness, 160 acres of ungrazed land at their feet.

Other dates I've had with my husband are things like crop checking during the growing season, cattle checking when the cattle are up on 21, returning a brother-in-law's cattle trailer after we've used it ... you get the picture. Strangely enough, I don't mind these kinds of dates - back in the day when the house was full of kids, it was a quiet time to ourselves, and now that the reverse is true, and we are always just the two of us, it still seems kind of special to "go" somewhere together.

The sunshine looks deceptively warm outside this morning, but I've been out to take the garbage out, and I wouldn't want to spend too much time there unless I had a warm coat on. It's 9:00 a.m. and the grass is still white with frost. On the other hand, at least the sun is shining. Last week, when we had a whole day of working with the cattle planned, it was rainy, cold, and windy all day long. I think my fingers only started to thaw out about Wednesday.

With a crew of Glen, myself, our two daughters Sandy and Jesse, and friend Jenn, we brought the whole herd in from pasture, and got them ready to push them through the cattle handling system we had rented from the CO-OP in town. We had to innoculate all the calves for Blackleg, and tag them all with radio frequency ear tags - there were 55 to do, but somehow with all that was going on we missed the two smallest. How this could have happened sure had us scratching our heads on Sunday morning when we discovered that we still had two tagless calves out there. The only way we can figure they managed to dodge the tagger was to duck under the corral gates before they got to the crowding pen. As we have to get them all back in for a booster shot in the next month, it will be taken care of then. Maybe by then, they won't fit under so easily - besides, we'll be on the lookout for escapees next time!

Besides the calves, we had to trim hooves on a couple of adult animals, and cut back the horns on one cow whose horn had curled back into her face and was pressing into her skull. This can be a messy job as, even though the horn is just like a fingernail and doesn't have nerve endings so there is no pain, it is supplied with blood. The last time we did the job (on another cow) she bled a lot and the clotting powder the vet had sold us was totally ineffective. Jesse had a different plan this time - from her feedlot experience she had learned to touniquet the horns with a bull bander. We just pulled one up snug around her horns, trimmed the horns right back, and took the touniquet off the next morning. I don't think she lost a tablespoon of blood. Glen, on the other hand, will remember the experience for a while. When he went to pull the band off it snapped on him just like the gigantic rubber band that it was; his finger was still throbbing hours later.

It was a long, cold, full day. I had made a big pot of chili for noon, but when we all trooped back up to the house after 6:00 there was nothing ready to eat. Glen said he was buying us all steaks at the bar so we cleaned up and headed off to town. After all that fresh air and exercise it was all we could do to stay awake long enough to eat supper and go home. Oh well, there's no better sleep than after a hard day's work.

Glen is working today, building another oil lease up so I have the day to myself. This whole summer has been out of the ordinary - the weekends spent doing things other than gardening or housework. I haven't got my windows cleaned, the flower beds are still all cluttered with dead plants, and the house needs a thourough cleansing. To be quite honest, I don't even know where to begin - hence I sit, sipping coffee, in the office writing my blog and thinking of other projects I'd have more fun with. But ... I'd better get back to the real world.

WHO'S HIT THE DIMMER SWITCH ?

You can sure tell it's fall - it gets dark so early these days! Glen got home just after 7:00 tonight, but I'd already gone out and done chores for him because it's just so much easier when there is still daylight to see what you're doing. It won't be long, though, that it will even be dark when I get home shortly after 5:00. It's my pet peeve about winter - I can take the cold and the snow, but I need sunlight! I'm sure I must be solar powered.

Much as we're not overly excited about winter setting in, we are hoping for something more wintery than that sissy stuff we had last year. Oh, for sure, the mild temperatures were easy to handle, but we didn't get enough snow to make things white. On the one hand, Glen loved a winter that he didn't have to clear the yard of snow to be able to move machinery or get the car out of the garage, but there wasn't enough snow-melt to fill any of the watering holes on the place. All summer long - a very hot and extremely dry one - we've watched what water there was go down, down, down. We moved the cattle back from 21 because of no water. We can't use certain fields for grazing because there's no water there. And even the watering hole that the herd has been using is next thing to dried up. They can still wade out through the mud for a drink, but that's not going to last much longer. We've had a few inches of rain through September, but not near enough to replenish the surface water.

We have the main duggout left. It is the biggest and has only been used by a few animals over the summer so it's looking pretty good right now. We're really having to think about what to do with our calves this fall, though. Most cattle producers sell the calves off right after weaning them. They go off to feedlots to be "fed up" to market weight. Up until this year, we've kept ours and fed them out ourselves; we have the grain and the set up to handle the animals and the price we get for finished cattle is significant. This year, though, we don't know if we want to risk watering a whole bunch of feeders when we don't know if the snow situation is going to be any better this winter. We could end up having to decrease the size of our cow herd next year if there's not enough water. We haven't made the decision yet, but the plan is to separate the calves from their mothers next weekend, so we'll have to come up with a plan pretty soon.

I've got the yard work pretty well done up for another year. I spent last weekend out cleaning up puppy debris. I don't know what the thrill is to haul everything movable (and some things I don't even know how he does move them) up on the front lawn. It's like he's into exterior design and the mess is his own personal touch to his property. Unfortunately, I really don't care for his "look", and it's all been carted off. He looked pretty sad while I was doing the cleaning - taking time out occasionaly to tell him not to do it again - and to his credit, the front lawn has remained clear of his treasures. The space down near the garden, on the other hand, seems to be growing its own collection of empty pop bottles this week.

WET, BUT WONDERFUL

The prairies are getting rain today - it's about time, it has been dry for way too long. I'm sitting in the office (which is right off the garage in this house) and listening to the rain fall on the metal sheeting roof. The whole house is covered in metal, but of course the ceilings are all insulated so the sound of falling rain is muffled. The garage, on the other hand, has just the bare roof and the sound amplifies like being in a drum. I suppose it could get annoying to have that sound thundering down constantly, but after this long dry summer, the sound is like music to our ears at the moment.

The rain gauge says we've had over an inch so far, and the weather channel says we can expect at least another 24 hours of the same, so we're happy. There are a few acres of crop still out there - some late flax - but rain won't hurt that and it will do wonders for the fall seeded crops and the pastures. I can't see it filling up the duggouts and watering holes though, the ground will drink this all in - there will be none left over to lay on top of the ground.

I spent Monday and Wednesday evenings our digging potatos as fast as I could in the fading light. It was a toss up if I should even be harvesting them yet - on the one hand the skins were just barely toughening up - will they keep well like that? Or, if I leave them in the ground and have to dig them up later, wet and almost frozen, will they keep any better then? I guess time will tell, they've all been dug and hauled up to the house. I wish our cold room was a few degrees colder - its "keeping" ability is not the best.

While I was digging on Wednesday, Glen was busy cleaning out his quonset so that he could get his machinery in. I went over to help him back the combine in - in order to make room for the other things that have to go in, it had to be as far against the back wall as possible without scraping the lights off the ceiling, or bending the auger on the sloping walls. By the time I got back to the garden, I could barely see where my last row of spuds were. I'm sure glad that job is done! Muddy potatos are no fun at all.

The leaves have make their turn now, and some trees have begun to shed. I love the way that poplar leaves look like golden coins tossed across the green carpet of grass.

We've put our two herds together now and the bulls are all getting along pretty well. The first day we kept a pretty good watch on them, just in case they got to serious fighting, but it was just a case of seeing who was the toughest - and there is no contest there. What they do is mostly make noise - bawling or a kind of gutteral noise like growling - and locking heads together and pushing each other around. We have two younger bulls who are about the same size so they actually have a contest going on in the strength department, but when they're feeling really full of themselves, they go over and challenge Big Louis. That's good for a laugh - he outweighs them almost two to one, and when he digs in and starts to push, they are just along for the ride.

The bull we've had the most trouble with is our neighbour's Texas Longhorn. Now there is a nasty animal with big horns and bad attitude. Twice he's been over to "visit" and been sent packing. Jesse gave Glen a 20 foot long bull whip for Father's Day this year - it's come in handy.

SEPTEMBER

This is my favourite time of the year. The leaves haven't started to turn yet, but the feel of fall is in the air. I don't know how many times I've tried to describe what makes autumn so special to me - it never seems to go down on paper very well. The smells of ripe apples on the trees, wheat at the peak of perfection, the almost wine-like sent of canola pouring from the combine ... if the reader has nothing to compare it to, how are they going to know what I'm talking about?

And there's the sounds of fall ... grain augers filling bins, harvesting equipment going non-stop to bring the crop in, and the sound that grasshoppers make in the dry grass - nobody has ever come up with a word to describe that one. I think to call it a "sizzle" is the closest I can come up with, although it's very soft and soothing.

The sky at this time of the year goes an incredible "September" blue. I know, I know, there's a perfectly scientific explanation for that - it would have something to do with the angle of the sun's rays through the atmosphere - but to me it's just the perfect backdrop colour for geese to fly across in their giant wedge formations.

There's nothing better than a meal served off the endgate of a halfton truck in the middle of a field - golden crop laying at your feet, a breeze keeping the insects at bay, and little kids insisting on pouring their daddy one more cup of iced tea - each. And, at night fall, watching the combine (a machine so huge it could pass for a small house) gracefully gliding from swath to swath, dipping its header, making its turns in wide swoops, all of its actions enhanced by the lights that twinkle from its frame. It always makes me think of a grande old dame in a ballroom doing a stately waltz.

The other night one of our neighbours phoned to tell me to check the stars out that night. She had heard that there was supposed to be a special alignment of planets to see. She called back shortly afterward and said that she had got her information wrong, and not to bother. There would be nothing to see. I decided that I should check it out, just in case - I sincerely hope she did too. She had been right- there was nothing unique happening in the sky that night, but it sure as heck was special anyway. The sky was so clear it felt as if I could reach up and touch the stars. The Milky Way was there in all its powdery glory. The constellations brilliant in the dark sky. It seems ridiculous that I had to be told to go outside and look at such a treasure - why am I not out there every night? People in the cities have no idea what they're missing - they really need to drive outside the city limits from time to time, just to get an idea of where we are in the Universe.

Harvest is getting very close to being done. We finished more than a week ago and Glen has been baling more straw nad cattle feed since then. We've brought the young herd home from 21 and will be mixing the two herds after the weekend. The bulls have yet to make each other's acquaintence so there'll be a few noisey days as they try to tell each other just how tough they are, and things will settle down again. The Farmer's Almanac says this winter is going to be a nasty, cold and snowy affair. Usually we don't pay that book much mind, but this year other things are giving the warning more merit. Mother Nature is someone you don't ignore and she has her creatures getting on with fall preparations much earlier than usual - geese are already flocking up almost a month early, crows too. And the humming birds that usually stay a week into September have been gone for 10 days already. I don't know what that means, but it doesn't seem like good news.

AND WE WERE OFF TO THE RODEO

The summer of 2006 is coming to an end, and I for one, have no desire to slow down the time machine. The heat of summer is not something I enjoy and this summer has been hotter than usual. And so dry - we had an inch of rain last Friday night, the first real rain since June.

The trees are still green, but everything else is brittle and brown. Harvest is in full swing - probably two weeks ahead of schedule - because the crops just cooked in their tracks this summer. I haven't heard a lot of talk on the yeilds people are getting; that's probably pretty telling on its own - people brag when the news is good.

We have very little to combine - Mitchell was out swathing the barley today and then moved over to forty acres of oats which he'll finish tomorrow. Both crops were grown for cattle feed. We also tried about 80 acres of field peas this year. Glen started swathing them about 10 days ago but chickened out after about five rounds - he was scared that if the wind ever came up the swaths would just roll up into huge banks and it would be impossible to do anything with them. He knew what he was talking about - the storm we had last weekend had some wild winds with it and we have a significant mess where the peas all rolled up in banks too big to feed through a combine. Thank goodness he stopped when he did. He tells me that plan "B" is for him to swath the rest right in front of Mitchell running the combine. The wind isn't going to get a second chance.

Our problem with the dry conditions is the state of our pastures; basically they are done. The older cows have been let out onto a section of the oat crop for extra grazing, but the younger herd has nowhere they can go. As soon as we can get the crop between them and home harvested, we will be bringing them home. Glen is not too crazy about having to start feeding them in September, but there is nothing left for them to eat, and the water holes are better described as mud baths at the moment.

It's not just the feed situation either. When we checked the cows the other night, one of the younger cows was limping really bad - probably she has stepped on a dry stick and drove it up into her foot where it has caused infection. Not only is her health affected, but she has a calf who will suffer if the mother is sick and not able to get to food and water, so tonight we borrowed my brother-in-law's stock trailer, loaded up a bunch of corral pannels, and drove up to 21 where we build a temporary corral to catch her, and her calf, and load them up in the trailer to take home so we could treat her. We all went thinking this might be quite the rodeo by the time we were done, but her being lame made her a lot easier to deal with - and once we had her, the calf followed without too much trouble.

I spent today trying to catch up on a whole summer's housework. This is the second weekend I've been home all summer (hence the really spotty blog entries - I plan to be much more on top of things from now on!). This buying a house for the students of the family got to be quite the oddessy by the time we were done! We moved them in last weekend and have one more trip to Winnipeg for a nephew's wedding on the long weekend and then I'm not leaving here again for very long time! Heck, I've even decided I'm going to find the time to read a book - just for the pleasure of it all!

Garden overdose

This summer is just rolling along - it kind of feels like I'm being "rolled over". There haven't been too many quiet relaxation hours since the snow melted.

I have accomplished, finally, purchasing a house in Winnipeg for the kids to live in while they go to school there for the next few years. The actual deed was much harder to do than I had anticipated. By month two of searching, viewing, and bidding on (unsuccessfully) houses all over southwest Winnipeg I had begun to mutter under my breath "How can it be so hard to buy a house in a whole city of freaking houses?" I think I was even talking in my sleep - when I actually managed to get to sleep. This has not been a low-stress summer.

But, as I said, that's all behind me now and possession day is the 12th of August - in plenty of time for the kids to get settled before their classes start. The girls are enrolled at the U of M for this fall and Mitchell will have to wait for what he wants to take at Red River College next year. He admitted that the extra year was a good thing as he wasn't 100% sure if he still wanted to take computer graphics after all. But, he still wants to be in the city! It doesn't make sense to either one of his parents that he would rather work for minimum wage there than stay in Saskatchewan and rake in the money with an oil patch job for the year. You can't tell them anything when thy're 20 and invincible! Oh well, the main thing is that he will work for the next year, and if he's not sure about school, the more contact he has with other ideas, the better.

At the moment I'm trying to stay on top of my garden produce. I always plant one, but success is not guaranteed. 2006, although very dry, seems to be outstanding for vegetable production. There is no way we can eat it all ... and it just keeps coming and coming and coming. Glen and I plan to be away this weekend at a camping weekend with my family, so I've offered the kitchen and supplies to the daughters to come and pickle to their heart's content. Sandy took me up on it right away because she is trying to unload belongings and she has boxes of jars from her "canning phase" that she wants to be rid of. She is happy with the opportunity to come out to the farm, fill the jars, and leave them, knowing full well that if she ever wants some of the produce, she can come right back and get it with no guilt attached.

The rest of the summer is stacked with committments: move furniture to WPG next weekend and arrange for the rest of what we need there, home to get harvest underway, ship the feeder cattle we've been finishing off all summer, and haul the bales home. Come the long weekend in September we're back into the city to a nephew's wedding and then our son Wayne, and his family are coming to stay with us for a week before they leave the country for her native Australia ... and then there will be the farewells. By the end of September I'll be ready for a padded room - or at least some down time all alone in my own space.

PARCHED

A month ago I mentioned that we hadn't had any rain for quite a while - well, here I am saying that no more than ten drops have fallen since then. The pastures are done. The crops are stopped dead in their tracks. The gardens are withering daily. And it's so hot! Up until this weekend the days have been hot but at least it has cooled off at night enough to keep the house liveable. Last night the temperature hardly went down at all, and we started out the day at almost 30 degrees. The weather forecast says we're in for another whole week of this at least. It's not something to look forward to.

Glen has most of our hay baled. It wasn't a fantastic crop because of the lack of moisture, but the quality is good. We have our neighbour, Earl, custom growing some for us, and Glen is cutting greenfeed to bale as well. It's easy to see that there won't be an abundance of extra feed out there to buy this winter, so we'd better be making sure we have enough of our own to last us through.

The pastures that the cattle are out on are suffering. Glen and Jesse fenced off some of the greenfeed feild so that we could let them out there to graze and this morning we're going to chase them over there. They opened the electric fence up almost a week ago but the cows haven't discovered the hole yet. We have to leave the fence open between the fields because there is no source of drinking water in the new part. I can't believe that they've not moved over on their own. Cows usually can detect any weakness in a fenceline anytime, anywhere. I guess the electricity has them wary of even going near it.

We haven't had such a great calving year. I think we're up to nine calves dead and still have two more to go. Other years we've never lost more than one or two. Glen likes to calve later in the year so we don't have to worry about the cold, but babies being born out in the pasture has it's own set of dangers - it's much harder to supervise them, and the coyotes are never far away to move in on the weak and vulnerable. We did get one surprise this week, though, Jesse had bought a cow last spring and had insisted she had to have twins for her as Jesse has had really bad luck with her animals in 2006. Be darned if we didn't go out and find Buttercup with a set of bulls a week ago! At first we left them out on pasture , but one of the little guys is weaker than the other and we didn't want to lose him so Thursday night we herded them all back to the barn. this way the mother will get a better diet to help her produce milk for two calves, and the little guys will be safer. Besides, no one wanted to be the one to call Jesse and explain how she was back to only one calf again.

We have a city girl, Jenn, staying with us for the summer while she works in crop inputs at the local Coop. Seeing the country life through her eyes has been fun and Glen promised her some other country experiences while she was here as well. I think we're crazy to go out in such heat, but there is a rodeo at Kennedy, Sask this afternoon, about an hour from here and it sounds like we're off to the rodeo. Oh well, the other option is staying home and trying to work in this heat!

Spectacular Sunsets

There's always a silver lining to any misfortune. Up in Northern Saskatchewan people are being forced out of their villages because of forest fires, certainly a terrifying experience for them and not something I make light of. It always amazes me that the smoke can travel so far, but we're only forty miles from the USA border and the air has been blue for most of the week. We can't smell that it's smoke, but the colour tells us that's what it is. It was very hot here on the prairies today, but the smokey haze seemed to make it feel a little cooler - I guess it was just that the sun wasn't quite so glaringly hot. But, it's the evenings that really work magic with the smoke in the sky. The lower the sun sinks in the west the more smoke the light has to travel through. the sunsets are fabulous, firey reds and the western skies are pink or orange or a dozen colours in between. I guess lots of people would say "all she's doing is describing the effects of air polution." and they would be right. On the other hand, forest fires happen and if their smoke at sunset gives us a spectacular view, we may as well sit back and admire the show.

I've been trying to stay ahead on the lawn mowing. It's been a few weeks since we've had substantial rainfall so the grass has slowed considerably. Yard-wise that's a good thing. On the other hand, we have all those cattle (self-propelled grass cutters) out on the pasture that will run out of food way too soon this summer if the rain doesn't come and replenish the plants that they're eating. The news is full of the troubles farmers a few hundred miles north of here are having - it's so wet there that maybe only 20% of the crop even got planted. We understand all too well how that feels; that was the year we had in 1999. What a crazy counrty we live in! Every year is a crap shoot.

We only have about ten more calves to come this summer. This has certainly been our worst for losing babies - I think we're up to 8 now. It's so discouraging to see them die - it has all been for different reasons, but with the big pure-bred Charlais there seems to be an underlying failure to thrive tendency. Glen says he's read that they've spent too much effort in larger cattle and some just don't seem to have a will to live. With three that we've lost this spring, that seems to be the only answer. We worked with them, we treated them, we hand fed them, but they just didn't have the gumption they needed to fight to live. Those cows are out with Angus bulls this year - we'll see if there's a little more fight in the calves next spring.

We were out checking calves last night and found a new mom and baby - this one had lots of life and the mom looked like she was going to be a problem to even let us near him. Glen tries to get their ear tags in them in the first 12 hours before they're too sure on their feet, but this guy looked like he was more than a day old and had too much fight for one farmer at the end of a long hard day. The main concern to do it right away is so that you can keep the cow-calf pairs straight, but there was no worry about remembering which calf this was - I nick named him Panda because of his black and white markings. He'll get his ear tag in the fall.

Schooling Sam

We have a new project on the go these days - or rather, Glen does. Ever since we started back into cattle a few years ago he has been talking about getting a cattle dog and as of last week we have a six month old collie/blue healer cross puppy called Sam calling the place home. What these dogs can do is amazing; I've seen them on TV and it's almost like they can read the mind of the cattle and the farmer at the same time.

This talent doesn't happen by accident, of course. The dogs are born with powerful insticts to herd, but without the proper training the instinct goes to waste. Glen has asked someone who has trained other dogs to help him with Sam. She told him that the dog will only take a short while to train, it's always the human part of the equation that takes the most time. At the moment we're just getting Sam used to where his boundries are and being around the cows. I don't know when the formal training will take place.

I think Glen said the other night that we only had 15 more calves to go. While we like to have the cows calve after the really cold weather is past, it would be better if this calf crop didn't stretch all the way from March to August. Part of the problem is that we've bought cattle at two different sales over the winter months and therefore had no control over when they were due to calve (the auction barn does try to pinpiont how far along their pregnancies are with testing, but it's not always the most accurate science there is). Another factor in trying to syncronize the birthing part of the year is to make sure the bull hasn't got too many cows to service at the same time. With this in mind, we bought our third bull this spring - we're now at a ratio of three males to 75 females. We're kind of worried about this new bull, though, when they delivered him he had a swollen leg - probably an injury from young bulls pushing each other around. He doesn't seem to be bothered by it at the moment but the potential for arthritis is very real. Bulls are not cheap and we want at least four years out of him. Thank goodness we bought insurance on him! There are other ways of arranging that the cows all cycle at the same time, but we try to stay away from using chemicals and hormones with our cattle.

We're hoping that by this time next week we'll be the owners of a house in Winnipeg. With the girls both headed to university there in the fall, we've decided that it makes the most sense to purchase housing for them. To rent is to just throw money away. At least this way, when they're done school, we will be able to sell the house again and still have the principal of our investment and they won't be saddled with a huge debt to start out with. Obviously, we're not looking at anything fancy, and even that wouldn't have been possible if I hadn't won some money in a local lottery this winter, but it just seems like the money showed up just at the right time for this so it's just the right thing to do with the $50,000.00 prize. There are two different properties we're looking at and the bids have to be in by the end of this week - maybe we'll be running back into the city to sign papers next weekend. We don't need it until late August, but it sure would be nice if it was all taken care of, the sooner the better.

It looks like I'm spending Father's day all by myself. Glen is off to build an oil lease, Jesse and Mitchell are working, and Wayne and family are in Winnipeg. I think Sandy may come out for supper so I''l make a big meal with Glen's favourite dessert to mark the day.

It's been a rainy cool day today. Not that we're complaining, it was good to have some moisture, things were getting pretty darned dry out there. I think the rain gauge is showing three quarters of an inch since it started (with a lot of noise and light) at about 2:30 last night. There was even five minutes of hail to start the whole thing off - I got up to see how big the stones were and decided that the planters on the deck were going to stay there. I wasn't interested in being peppered with marbles falling from goodness knows what height. As it was, the hail ended and the rain took over about the time I had made up my mind that the plants were on their own.

This morning Jesse came up from Moosomin for her day off to help her dad with the cattle. Nothing makes them happier than a farm day together. They also rounded out their crew with Sandy and a friend/neighbour, Jenn. I should have really taken a picture of them when they came in at the end of the day ... four muddy, dripping drowned rats. If it wasn't a steady drizzle it outright rained all day long. While this is great news for pastures, the humans could have handled a little sunshine in their lives as the day wore on.

First they had to bring all the cattle in from where they were grazing about a mile away and get them into some improvised sorting pens. That took until dinner was on the table. Then they sat over their tea while Glen went through his records to make a list up of the cows that had to go in a separate pasture from where their sire (the bull that fathered them) was going to be this summer. That done, they went back out and fine-tuned the sort even further and then did a double check to make sure that the mamas and babies were all together in the same herd breakdown before they pushed them out the gate and up to summer pasture on 21. As they had all the vehicles already manned for that trip I stayed home and made a batch of chocolate chip cookies for when they got back to the yard. After lunch they went back out and finished up the chores and got the bulls back where they belong. I'm pretty sure that those big boys thought they were getting to go along with the cows this trip, but that would have meant that we would be having calves way too early next spring. We much prefer late spring temperatures and conditions for the newborns, so the bulls are just going to have to cool their heels for a little longer yet.

My vegetable garden is all planted now - the last of the potatoes went in yesterday morning, and then I cut grass (well, mostly dandelions) all the rest of the day. I was glad I got it all done before it rained. It sure looks nice when it's all done at the same time. There's a lot to do - the immediate house yard is probably as big as three city lots and the front yard, including garden, is at least as big as a baseball field - with a large outfield. I do the biggest part with a riding mower, but the part up around the house has fruit trees and evergreens to work around so there's lots to push mow as well. I'm not complaining - the exercise is good for me.

This week we're off to Winnipeg to see the kids and take in Wayne's convocation from the University of Manitoba. We're also going to be looking into the housing market as both girls are enrolled there this fall and need a place to live. Mitchell, our youngest, is also interested in schooling in Winnipeg, at Red River College, but will probably have to wait another year to be able to get in to what he wants. At the moment he's working on the crew that is building #1 Highway the last piece through eastern Saskatchewan and western Manitoba.

This coming weekend the town of Redvers is hosting the Relay For Life Cancer fundraiser and I'm on one of the local teams. I'm afraid I haven't been the most active member as I was away when they did their major fundraising project, but I'll be there with my sponsorships and I'm looking forward to the all-through-the-night walk. Hope it's got this rain out of its system by then!