A HOT TIME IN THE OLD FIELD TONIGHT

You'll have to forgive me for being late with this blog - things have been pretty crazy around here lately.

We are into haying now - full force. Glen has the first 80 acres baled and had a guy with a bale mover truck haul them all home so I guess you can say Part One is done. The second field he is working on is half cut and the hay has been curing for most of this week now. The humidity is out of this world these days so the plant matter is taking a long time to dry out. It was finally ready to bale on Thursday afternoon so Glen started his work day (running grader to build an access road into an oil well site) at 4:00 AM so that he could get home early to bale. When I got home from work I did the chores and then tried to call him on his cell phone to see if he wanted me to pick him up at dark. I got the usual recording - that he was out of the service area - which is pretty hard to take when he's only a half mile away and I can hear the tractor from where I was standing on the deck. So, I jumped in the truck and drove down to ask him in person. Well I told him I had tried to call him he said that I would probably never call him again on his cell phone - he was pretty sure it had gone through the baler.

He even had staked out which bale it likely was in and we tried calling it to see if he could hear the ringing, but no dice. I'm telling you - he is one sad puppy these days - with all the people he works with in the oilfield he had his number memory just about full. He is due for a free up grade of the phone, but he'll never get his information back. He never is very sympathetic when my computer crashes and I lose my stuff - maybe now he'll understand. Mitchell and I have hauled his suspect bale home and opened it up and found nothing. I don't know where it is, but the battery has gone dead in it now so it can't even tell us where it is.

Glen went off to work on Friday and Mitchell came out at noon to start baling. He was barely even started when I got a phone call at work from him saying that he had smoke coming out of the baler! Glen was unreachable, remember, so it was good old Mom who got the call. He used his thermos of drinking water on it but that didn't seem to do any good so I told him to get the whole tractor and baler unit over to a slough with some water in it and get ready to unhook, and I left my part time, Rhonda, holding down the fort at the post office and tore home. Another neighbor had come to help and between us all we got the fire out but couldn't really decipher what had caused it. It was just best to leave it and let Glen figure it out.

It had cooled down enough for him to get right into it by the time he got home and he found a bearing that had gone to pieces, so this morning's job was to get new parts and put it back together again. After an early dinner Mick went baling and Glen filled the chop bin while I tried to clean up flower beds and do a week's worth of house work. The weather is just plain ugly with the heat and humidity. I should be mowing grass tonight but I just can't face going outside again. So far the nights have been cooling the house off nicely - I sure hope it keeps it up. I just plain don't do well in heat.

Mick was having trouble with the baler again in the late afternoon so Glen went out and took over ( I think he wanted a turn in the air conditioned cab, myself), but the humidity had come up so much that he didn't keep at it for long. Damp bales are just a fire hazard because they rot, and heat, and then combust into flames. It always seems so strange to think that something can be a fire hazard because it's too wet, but the last thing you want is a couple of hot bales in your hay stack - you could lose your whole feed supply for a year that way. I hope we've already had our one fire of the year.

It's another steamy day out there today. I managaed to get some of the lawn cut later on yesterday afternoon, but there is still so much to do - hopefully the temperature will drop later on and I can get at it again. Meanwhile I'll hide out in the house and find other things to do.

We celebrated Canada's birthday last night by having family and friends over for a bonfire and fireworks after the sun went down. Being as we're not exactly fireworks experts, we are never sure of what we're getting until we light them. This batch was really nice with lots of variety in colors and design. The little kids were impressed, and the cattle right across the road were not. After the first few went off we could see them in the twilight, turning tail and running for the other end of the pasture for saftey. There was absolutley no wind by that time of the day, so the smoke just hung in the moist air - it was a neat effect to see the fireworks shooting out of the low smoke cloud, and up into the clear sky above. After the pyrotechnic show was over Mother Nature took ove with dozens of fireflies drifting around the yard showing off their natural glow, and the full moon rose just before midnight. There were a few mosquitos, but not enough to drive us inside.

Glen has been gearing up for haying. He has a neighbor's son hired to come and cut the hay with his crimper. This machine cuts the crop and makes several crimps in the stems so that the moisture can dry out faster. To make the best hay, you need it to dry out just enough to hold the nutrients but as quickly as possible so that it doesn't have time to get rained on, or start to rot or get moldy. Last year the weather was perfect for making hay - I wonder if we can manage two years in a row? We have a lot to do this year as Glen has planted another whole quarter section done to tame hay now. He will get the guy who is cutting it to leave a day or two between aech 80 acres or so. It would be a very bad thing to have all 300 acres laying on the ground if it rained.

It's hard to believe that we are into July already. Now that we don't have kids in school, summer holidays kind of sneak up on a person. I have been trying to talk Glen into some kind of a holiday in the next two months, but he's a pretty hard guy to get off the farm. Too much depends on the weather and how fast the hay can be put up and hauled home. He tells me that if I want a holiday I will have to make my own plans, so it looks like I will head west and go camping in the mountains with my sister for a week. I'm looking forward to it.

THE PRAIRIES IN JUNE

Last time I was hiding out from too much heat and humidity, this time I can't mow lawn yet (it's almost 10:00 in the morning) because the grass is just saturated. It will do nothing but clog the mower and make a terrible mess of the yard. I guess it's a good thing I have these setbacks outside, or I'd never get anything done inside, eh?

We have had some serious rains this week. Monday was a night of wild weather, but mostly to the west and north of here. We sat out on our deck and watched the light show all evening, and knew that there had been hail somewhere because of how the temperature had dropped so much, but besides about a dozen hailstones about the size of marbles falling just at sunset, we didn't get anything to speak of. It wasn't until the next morning we heard that Carlyle (40 miles to the west) received quite the beating with egg sized hail, and friends of ours 20 miles northwest of us had almost three inches of rain. It's always interesting to see how the lay of the land works - There are those twenty miles between us and it took from Monday night until Thursday morning for the water to work it's way downstream to where I cross the creek to go to town. I'd already had time to forget about how much rain they had, and then suddenly, there was a small lake at the bridge! With the creek running with more force that we saw at snowmelt this spring.

Everything is so green right now. Especially my garden - which is another thing I would like to be doing, but it's also too wet to weed. Thursday afternoon, just after I arrived home from work, the skies opened up and we got a half inch of rain in ten minutes or less. It was coming down so hard I couldn't see out of the yard. Needless to say, there are some parts of our lawn that are still under water, and although the water isn't covering the garden anymore, to try to walk on it would be silly. I would just sink to my ankles.

Glen and I went up to check the cattle on 21 the other night. He has cut the larger pasture into four smaller chunks and is trying to get more grazing power out of the land by restricting where they can graze. Cattle develope their favourite spots and over-graze them while leaving other spots untouched so if you don't let them have their own choice, they do a better job of utilizing the whole pasture. Our walk that night was to see if they needed to be moved again. With all the rain, the pasture is in fine shape so it will wait for a while yet. What we did discover was that something had pulled all the wires out of the solar power panel and battery apparatus that runs the electric fencer. The wires were completely chewed off as well. It's still a mystery what happened, but likely it was a bunch of coyote or fox pups teething on the strange stuff left in the field. Glen went up to fix it and built a separate little live-wired fence around the system to discourage a second attack. They'll think twice about getting too close this time!

You can tell it's really summer on the prairies now - when you sit outside at night around the fire pit there are fireflies to watch drifting around the yard, foxes and coyotes yipping and howling in the background, and humming birds buzzing back and forth to the feeders. We're not all about huge tractors and fields of grain.

TOO HOT TO BE OUTSIDE

After weeks of cool and rainy, someone turned up the thermostat out there. For all the plant life the heat and sunshine are fantastic, but for at least this one human being, the heat and humidity is more than I can adjust to in one day. I'm hiding out inside and trying to think of things to keep me busy so I don't feel guilty about the unmowed grass and unplanted bedding plants.

Almost eveyone is done seeding their crops in this neck of the woods, although, to the north a couple hundred miles, it's quite a different story. They were way too wet last year, and the heavy snow pack they got this winter didn't improve their conditions any. We had that in 1999, we remember it well.

Glen is finally back to work in the oilfield after almost two months of breakup. Every spring, when the frost comes out of the ground and roads get soft, road banns come on restricting heavy traffic. This pretty much shuts down the oil business until the roads are back in shape again. This year, with all the rains we've had, the roads have remained soft, and the men have remained off work. This past week, rigs are finally drilling again, and here's hoping that secondary industries can be up and running this week. Mitchell works for a company that installs pipelines between well and tanks, or does reclamations which means that they return the land at old oil well sites back to farmable land - both of these jobs require dry conditions, so they haven't been back to work at all. This week looks better. So far.

I spent last Sunday planting my vegetable garden and with the heat of the last two days, things are just popping out of the ground. Looks like the potatoes are all coming at once and the radishes, lettuce and onions are all above ground as well. Can't wait for that first fresh salad!

I've also been mowing lawn (well, mostly dandelions at the this time of the year) steady since the middle of May. I have all my bedding plants sitting on the deck waiting for their move to real soil, but if the heat today wouldn't kill them today, it sure as heck would finish me off. I've never been the kind of person who could tolerate much heat - and the sun just leaves my skin crispy fried.

We have two calves that we have to bottle feed again this year: Circle Bob, (don't ask, it's a long story) whose mother doesn't have any milk for some reason, and Itty Bitty, who is so tiny that we thought we'd augment what her mama gives her. They are becoming real pets.

A SOGGY LONG WEEKEND

I can't believe that it's already been almost a month since I sat down to catch up my blog. They say that time flies when you're having fun, but I don't recall all that much extra fun going on around here lately. Maybe I'll have to own up to being lazy!

Spring is a busy time with my job as postmaster in Redvers. Not that the actual work in the office increases, but it is when my supervisor plans her annual meetings or training sessions. I've been to Estevan twice, one of the trips an overnight stay, and last week saw quite a few postmasters from rural Sask. in Regina for a day's training on health and saftey as well. It is always good to get together with your peers, so I always look forward to the meetings, but three in one month takes a lot of time out of what I spend on my jobs at home. I would normally have my garden planted by now, and all my bedding plants bought, if not planted, but this year all I have in the ground are the potatoes.

This weekend was going to be when I got the rest in but it's been taking turns with either rain or drizzle all weekend. Saturday afternoon, with Sandy's help, I managed to get 90% of the lawn mowed during a semi-dry period of the day. She had wanted to help me plant the garden too, but that just didn't work - she's back in Winnipeg, and it's still raining.

Sunday - morning and afternoon - Sandy, Mitchell, Glen, and I brought all the cattle in from the calving pasture and sorted them into smaller herds according to which cows go with which bull for the summer. It was a cold, damp job with the odd little hold up to make the day interesting. Glen had the list of "who goes where" in his head, so once we had them all crammed into the sorting pen, Mitchell manned the gate and Sandy and I stood by to push the animals he chose through to the gate. First he would go into the group of animals and bring out the mother he wanted, and once we had her penned on the far side, he would go back in to find the corresponding calf. They are all ear-tagged with their mother's number as soon as they are born, so this should be no problem.

All except for the time when we discoverd we had two cows tagged with 421. How on Earth we've gone for years not noticing this before is anyone's guess, but it sure stumped us yesterday. My theory is that, at some time in the past, one of them was 427 but the numbers have faded and the 7 was taken for a 1. At least we discovered this before we sent a calf with the wrong mother. As it was, there was at least one calf that kept running back to the yard all afternoon, and we went out before sunset to double check that we hadn't made a mistake. Mother cows will not let a strange calf nurse off them, so if you make a sorting mistake you could have two calves starve to death, and two mamas bawl themselves hoarse looking for their rightful babies.

We have just a few more acres of ground to plant. Glen had ten acres of corn that he swath grazed after freeze-up last fall, and it worked so well he has enough seed for thirty this year. Corn is pretty susceptable to frost so we won't put it in the ground until it warms up a bit more. And, as corn also needs a longer growing season, if it gets too late before it gets warm, he'll save the seed for next year. Corn seed is just too expensive to throw away at a poor weather year.

Tomorrow Glen heads back to working off the farm preparing oil leases; break-up is over. In the spring, when the frost comes out of the ground, the roads can't handle the heavy traffic of oil trucks and the rig moving equipment so road banns go on about mid March. It stops the oil industry in its tracks for at least six weeks. It gives the rig workers a break and the companies time to do some maintenance, but by now, everyone is raring to go again - it's a long time between pay checks.

We've had two beautiful days in a row his week. That might not mean much to some readers, but here in Saskatchewan, in April, it's pretty special. Late this afternoon it clouded over and we've had the odd sprinkle since then. As most farmers have been gearing up for seeding, this weather is not all that welcome. I don't think anyone would turn down a really good soaking rain, but drizzle will just hold up seeding and not contribute real moisture at all.

Anyone watching the news is probably wondering why I would be talking about needing rain. The areas hit by the flooding are hundreds of miles to the north. Here, in the southeast, we could use a rain, and out west they are desperate for it. This province is a very big place.

This past week we've been cross fencing the pasture on 21, cutting it into four pieces so we'll be able to control where the cows graze, and for how long. With just one fence around the whole thing, they can go where they please which means they don't graze it to its full potential. They have their favourite plants to eat, and favourite places to spend the hot summer afternoons. A lot of the nutrition value of the pasture is left, or trampled, in their daily trecks. Once this fence is done, they will have to graze one quarter of it at a time. The literature that we've read on this intensive pasturing method says that the vegetation also responds to the heavier grazing by becoming more vigorous. Of course, we'll have to keep watch on the land and the cattle and switch the pastures when necessary.

We have Jesse's friend, Jenn, a fellow Ag student, staying with us for the summer while she's working in town at the Coop. She may be from the city, but she dives right in when it comes to doing farm chores. On Sunday Jenn, Glen, Mitchell, and I spent the day fencing ... and collecting woodticks. There's nothing like a warm, spring day to bring them out of the woodwork. It only takes one of those nasty little bugs to show up, and pretty soon every little tickle you feel (and imagine) is another one. Glen was out fencing by himself today and said he hit one stretch of fenceline that just seemed to be crawling with them. This evening, having gone out to check cattle with him tonight, and sitting on the seat where Sam, the dog, sat I can't shake the feeling that I, too, have been infested with creepy crawlies. I think that this calls for a shower.

Yucky as woodticks are though, Glen says there is something worse. It is just ridiculous that a grown man can be so freaked out by a tiny little garter snake, but he really can't handle them. I don't want them anywhere near my house, and I'm not too crazy about being surprised by one, but I'm not afraid of them! The reason Glen took Sam with him today was for snake patrol - I wonder if Sam realized that? He probably thought he was on some kind of holiday or adventure on land he'd never explored before. Glen said it didn't matter - he didn't see one snake all day, and that's what counted.

Calving season is going along nicely - we now have 30 calves with another 22 to go. The really unusual thing this year is that the ratio of heifers to bulls is so lop-sided. There are only six bulls out there! Glen says he's going to blame Global Warming - he has no basis, of course, it's just a really good conversation starter.

EASTER WEEKEND ON THE FARM

It's Easter Monday, and the weather is the usual fare for Saskatchewan in April - it's windy out there. Our family's gathering was on Saturday night and we hosted the feast here. There were sixteen of us so there was lots of noise and laughter. It's hard to tell who makes the most noise though, the three kids who were present, or the uncles with their jokes and wisecracks. It's always entertaining, though.

With the big meal behind us and the girls gone back to Winnipeg for their end-of-term exams, Sunday was a very quiet day. It must be more than three decades since the Easter bunny started coming to our house, but this year there were no eggs to be had. It seemed very strange.

I went to church in the morning- it was a longer service but we got to sing the joyous Easter hymns so it didn't seem long at all. After lunch Glen and I spent a good part of the afternoon outside doing chores and checking on the animals. One really cold night last week there was a calf born who was nigh on to frozen when Glen found him. We brought him and his mama into the barn and worked on warming him up. He didn't have the strength to suck even a bottle so we had to tube him to get some warm milk into him. Usually once does the trick, but he just couldn't seem to get it together enough to look for mama and her milk on his own. He had to be fed (tubed) 4 or 5 more times. The last two times Glen had to rope the cow and tie her solid (back and front) to the corral fence so that he could milk her. We have powdered milk that we had been mixing up for the calf, but there comes a time when if the cow isn't milked out she will shut down milk production and then when the calf can suck, she doesn't have anything for him.

Milking a wild cow is an adventure, even when she's tied solid to sturdy wooden posts. Thank goodness he only had to do it twice - this morning when we went out you could see that she had been milked out on the side Glen hadn't touched last night so baby must have finally figured it out. He is looking a lot perkier today; I think he's going to make it.

I have today off from work too, so we spent all morning out there again doing chores and sorting cattle out. Somehow one of the bulls got out into the cow herd this morning. That's not a good thing because chances are his incentive for the breakout was a cow in heat. We don't like having calves in January but we better be on the lookout for that next year. With all the new mamas out in the pasture, there is no telling who, or how many, were ready to be bred again.

We are having a good calving season so far this year. The slow learner I mentioned being the hardest trial we've had so far. We did have to go out and walk the pasture this morning because one mama was frantically looking for her baby and couldn't seem to find it. Turned out that another older cow had had her new baby close by where the lost one was laying and she wouldn't let it's mother close. Those new mothers are very territorial for the first little while after birth takes place. We were sure relieved to find the calf - there are coyotes all around and I while I was walking the fenceline I was very worried I was going to find leftovers from a coyote breakfast.

All the dug outs are full to overflowing now. Glen's has even starting filling in the low area around the actual holes he's dug. We're really surprised that there was that much water out there, it didn't seem like the snow pack was that great. The weather people are busy telling us that we could get another four inches of snow tonight so before dark we'll be back out there taking extra staw out for bedding for the babies out in the pasture. We don't want any more frozen calves to have to mess with - better that their mamas can provide all the one-on-one care - just leave the humans out of that equation if possible.

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.