Hard work

Last weekend we rented a Bobcat to finish our driveway and get some random tasks done. A friend came over to help and jumped at the chance to climb the windmill tower to take photos of the action.

Here is Chris driving the Bobcat and preparing a site for a new 30 foot diameter cistern that will store water and provide a place for us to raise our own fish.



A view of the house from above.


The cistern going in.




The driveway is done!


Most of the piles of construction materials are gone from the front yard. Our vegetable garden will be primarily to the East and Southeast of the house. Chris moved in a lot of sand to mix with our natural clay soil.


He also dug out a pond in the front area which quickly became the world's best sandbox ever.

Great timing

This is what happened the day I got my camera back! It had been cold and blustery all day but the sun decided to break through the clouds just as it was setting. In the East it was still raining. So we had a full rainbow right outside the front door. Of course, the photos don't do it justice.

Time with Nino

We spent about ten days living at my Mom's house at the beginning of March to help her recover from surgery. It was a nice change from farm life and while it wasn't any less work, it was a fun time. The kids wasted no time in making it feel like home.

Ouch!

The week before Mom's surgery we found an enormous chicken egg! Scotty was sure it would have a double yolk so we hard boiled it because we thought that would be a cool way to see it.

That must have hurt!

It's been over a month.....

since I've posted here! A lot has been going on, including my Mom's cancer surgery and recovery (she's going to be fine--they got it all!), literally one whole month of severe allergies for me (with a cold thrown in), and frantic preparations for Spring (as in, we have a whole lot of plants to put in the ground but no beds prepared for them yet). All this has apparently resulted in an unseemly predilection for parentheses (and large vocabulary words) on my part.

To make matters worse, my camera suffered the double whammy of son and husband this month. First, Scotty filled the memory stick with about 30 mini-videos, most of which contain anywhere from 5 to 180 seconds of him chanting "taking video, taking video" over and over again, but some of which contain real gems of brilliance that I can't bear to lose (and don't even know about yet) so what that means is that I have to watch every single one and delete or save them as I go. I'll post one here when I can. The second whammy was that Chris borrowed the camera for a couple of weeks to take photos of ecological evildoings in the river behind our house (which only took him an hour but the "borrowing" lasted longer while the camera was misplaced and finally retrieved).

So I have had no pictures to share, which is akin to a death sentence for the blog because I rely heavily on the photos so I don't have to write very much.

Look for fully updated farm happenings and lots of pictures this weekend!

Winter visitors

For the last several seasons we have been visited by what we think are the same four Sandhill cranes. Many of the farms in our area are the winter home for cranes, but in our case there have been four that seem to like to return to our fields. They have been out there every day for at least a month.

We can watch them from the house which is great entertainment.



For the past few days the crows have joined them on the field. I love crows so I really enjoy it. Click on the photo for a bigger picture so you can pick out the cranes. Use your browser's back button to get back to the blog.


And the large field across the street from ours is full of cranes. Enlarge this photo too so you can see these beautiful birds close up.

Eliza's animal carrier

She found a sticker that she wanted to put on her carrier.