Life on the farm

We’ve been trying to get Sassy in the barn for some time now and as you know it hasn’t been just too successful! We’ve tried showing her the little calf, we’ve tried to trick her into putting hay and corn in the barn, we left the barn doors open for a couple of days, all just to try to coax her into the barn so Scarlet can nurse from her. Well, nothing worked… until today. Daryl only put corn in the barn for the cows again tonight thinking that eventually she’ll have to come in when he’s out there.  Like clock work of course Ed was the first one in. He sure has the male dominance thing going on! Then No Ears and Tango aren’t too far behind. When they were done, they all went outside. All of a sudden Daryl just couldn’t believe it. Here Sassy puts her front legs in. She kind of looks around and obviously doesn’t see Daryl,  and then she slowly puts her back legs into the barn. Well that was enough for Daryl to hurry and shut the door. Surprise! Poor Sassy didn’t know what happened to her! But now she was in and she was going to stay for awhile. Once Scarlet saw that Sassy was in the pen, she started to bawl like crazy. She knew what she wanted, but of course Sassy wasn’t ready to give it to her just yet. I checked on her later and when I came to the house I told Daryl that I had the worst time trying to get out of the barn. He looked a little confused on why I would say that and I told him that Scarlet just kept following me around and I couldn’t sneak out. She was just literally one step behind me the whole time. I found out that Scarlet wasn’t supposed to be out of Sassy’s pen and it didn’t take long and Daryl went back out and put her in the Milk House for the night. I guess we’ll try to see if Sassy is ready tomorrow.

When you live out in the country there are some people that you want to make friends with. And one of them is the Road Grader Man. Even though his friendship in the summer is still important, it can’t beat his friendship in the winter. Now I don’t know if you live out in the country and have a road grader go by your house – but this is how it works for us. On cold and stormy days, we lay in bed and try to listen for a noise coming up our road. Since we remodeled it’s become a little bit harder to listen for, but you can still hear him coming if you listen close. It’ll be almost to the minute of  5:30 am when you hear a faint noise and then you can start to hear some scraping outside. It’s the road grader man clearing our gravel road and you wake up smiling knowing that the road will be clear. You always want to stay on the good side of this person because he’s the guy who will say that either you’ll get to work on time, or you’re going to be staying home for the day. Every time I meet him I make sure that I give him plenty of room or I even stop at the end of the road just so he can do his job and I won’t get in the way. And as he drives by I give him a big smile and a wave to say, Thanks!

Miss Scarlet is doing really good and I had to laugh when Daryl told me tonight that he was going to take her outside so Sassy would see her and hopefully let her drink. When Daryl opened the milk house door to take Scarlet outside, he said that she followed him all the way through the barn and to the outside cow yard. He said she was so good and then she stood in the yard and just bawled for her mother. Sassy came over to her and let her drink for just a second and then off she went again. Now No Ears om the other hand does want to be her mother, so I don’t know what we’ll do. The weather did get up to around 20 degrees above 0 today, so that’s tons better than where we were a week ago. But it’s still too cold for the little calf. So back she followed Daryl through the barn and into the milk house for the night. Daryl did buy some milk replacer for the calf and that’s what she’s been drinking twice a day. It would be so much easier though if Sassy would just cooperate!

Mixing up the milk replacer this morning

OK, first things first.

I wasn’t sure if I was going to get to work today, and I don’t know about you but I worry about it all night. You watch the weather out the front door all night,  you listen to the 10:00 news for the forecast, and then you lay in bed listening if it’s getting better or worse. I did do better than I have in my past job, but I did still stew around the house tonight. It’s like your unsettled or something. So this morning? It was still blowing some but the road grader went by at his usual time of 5:30 am, so I thought I was safe. Daryl took off in front of me with the pick up and called me when he got to the highway. He said that the roads weren’t bad, but be careful when I turn North. This road has some good drifts on it but you could still get through.  OK, off I went. Well, it was snow covered and did have some pretty good drifts, but I made it. Then the phone rang and it was work. Hardly anyone could make it in and if the roads were bad just stay home. I had no idea what I should do and I literally just sat at the stop sign for a minute or two to think about it. I thought to myself that I was dressed and I might as well go in. A quick stop at the gas station for a piece of breakfast pizza and a big Diet Coke and I was on my way. As I’m driving I’m thinking ‘Is this really something that I should do?’  The highway wasn’t bad at all, but I wasn’t so sure that in a couple of hours that I’d get back in on the gravel roads. So I drove for about a mile and then turned around to go back home. But then I started to think is it really worth a vacation day? You really would have swore that I was trying to figure out world hunger or something. My final decision was to go back home while I could still drive on the gravel roads. Man oh man was I glad that I chose to do that! My tracks were already blown shut and about half of the drive was in white outs. This weather is just crazy! So I got home, ate my pizza, but still stayed dressed for about an hour.. you know just in case. I finally changed clothes and headed outside to check on the cows. With all the winds and snow, it did make some of the most common things on the farm really pretty. I mean, who would have thought hay would be so cool looking right? And even though the front porch will need to get cleaned off later this morning, it still had kind of a magical look to it. Even the sundogs were out this morning. I wasn’t sure what the sundogs really meant so I looked it up quick. There’s really a lot to read on sundogs on the web, but I think this information kind of sums it all up. It goes like this  – – As it got past Christmas and into January and the temperature started dropping in the late afternoon, the old-timers would squint up at the sundogs and say, “Tonight will be clear as a bell and cold as hell.” And you know what? I think that saying is accurate for us tonight.

So even though I was off today, I wasn’t very focused at all in the morning. I wasn’t planning on being off, so I didn’t have my day planned. But as the afternoon rolled around things got better. Our furnace has been making a clunking noise lately and I called the repair guys to stop over to look at it one of these days. And if they’re coming into our basement, I thought that I’d better get it just a little bit more organized than it was. So I spent most of the afternoon working down there and when it got to be around 3:30, Kyle headed out to check on Sassy. When I was doing chores this morning I could see that she was so close to having her baby, that we wanted to make sure that we know about it if she does. The wind chill today was around -40 and a poor little calf couldn’t survive in that type of weather.

It didn’t take long and he was back in the house. Sassy did have her baby! Oh no! So I grabbed my overalls and boots and headed out to see just how cold this calf was and what we should do next. We also gave Daryl a quick call at work to see how long he had to stay and if he could come home to help. They were having some trouble at his work and he promised that he’d be home as soon as he could. So off Kyle and I went to get the calf in the barn to get her cleaned up and warm. She was just shivering and I’m thinking that her ears might have gotten frozen. But she was walking and looked pretty healthy considering she was born on a very cold day. Kyle ran and got the heat lamp and some twine string and soon the heat lamp was above the calf and her coat was just steaming. We kept rubbing her to try to get her warm and then we grabbed some paper towels to dry her off more. I called Daryl again and said that we couldn’t get Sassy in the barn and No Ears wanted to claim the calf. Our next thing was to try to get the little calf warm faster. So Kyle went to grab the nipco and we plugged it in. Nothing. We unplugged it and plugged it in again. Nothing. We changed extension cords. Nothing. It WAS just working in the Roadhouse. OK, so I called Daryl back again and he gave me some ideas on how to try to get it working. I thought I fixed it to how he said and then we plugged it in again. Nothing. After quite a few calls to Daryl, he finally pulled into the yard and was able to get it working again. I guess I plugged the one wire inside into the wrong slot. If I need to fix it again, I’ll know the trick the next time. So after the calf was dry and warm we worked for quite a long time to get Sassy into the barn. This is her first calf and let’s just say that she’s not so good at it yet. We knew that getting her into the barn tonight was just not going to happen, so we moved the little calf into the new milk house. This has a heater that is going and will keep her warm tonight. But without any milk in her we had to figure out just what we could give her to keep up her strength. Daryl gave his cousin a quick call to see if they had any heifers lately that had any calves and we were in luck. So off he went to get some milk from those cows. Baby calves when they are born really need to have mother’s milk to get them off on the right start. So at the end of about 3 1/2 hours, the new little calf is doing well sleeping on the rug in the milk house with a full belly of milk. And if you’re wondering what her name is – her name will be Scarlet. I think that’s a perfect name for her and isn’t she the prettiest calf that you’ve ever seen?