Life on the farm

We had a breakthrough tonight. Our little kitty, Pepper is a lot of work. She eats, screams, and then eats some more. Now I do like little kitties, but to be honest I’m kind of getting sick of having to feed this kitty all the time. We’ve tried to kind of starve her and then try to make her drink out of a little saucer, but absolutely no luck! She just wants to suck on your hand. So tonight – I thought there was no reason why this cat can’t drink out of the bottle by herself. So I propped up the bottle on a towel and Shazam! It worked. She’s a messy drinker by you feeding her or if she drank this way, and she insists on holding the bottle when she’s drinking.

This just isn’t right is it?

Her belly is like a tennis ball after she eats!

Other things that we’re working on is getting the lawn mowed. Even though I left some wheel marks from the lawn mower with all the rain last night, I mowed anyway. They are talking more rain this weekend and by then it’ll be way out of control. Kyle worked on getting the machine shed swept out from all the winter dirt and peacock feathers, and William is spending the days at his summer job. But don’t let it fool you. I’m not working all that hard this week. I took Tuesday evening and spent it with my golfing buddy. Not only did we go golfing (well kind of golfed – maybe only 5 or 6 holes) then we headed out to find some pizza in Lawler for supper. Tons of fun,  and I’m glad that even though we don’t work together anymore, that we still can get together to hang out at the golf course.

Eggs.  Well, we’ve got eggs. To be honest, we’ve got a LOT of eggs. I don’t know if the chickens don’t realize about the molting thing that their supposed to go through or what.. but we’ve got eggs. So the first thing that I did with the extra eggs was to ‘cook’ them in the fire barrel with the trash. Now I’m thinking that this is a good idea right? Well, it really wasn’t that good of an idea after the fact. What happened it that only part of the eggs got cooked and the rest just kind of rotted in the fire barrel and it stunk. So the other day I had again too many eggs and I knew that I couldn’t do the fire barrel thing again, so I ended up scrambling 14 dozen eggs for the cats. Do you have any idea how many 14 dozen eggs make for scrambled eggs? Let’s just say it’s a LOT! I ended up putting two tubs of these eggs in the barn for the cats and Reno to eat and I’m thinking that eventually they’ll get it all ate. Now tonight I took all the eggs from the last couple of days and looked at them to realize that it’s again too many for us to eat. With my options being a little limited at this point, I ended up putting the eggs in a 5 gallon pail and scrambling them with my hands. If you’ve had farm eggs before you know that the yolks are a lot tougher than ‘town’ eggs, so the process of scrambling them took some time. After being up to my elbows in eggs, I finally got it pretty much mixed up. I don’t know how many eggs I had, but I’d guess maybe 10 dozen? So now I’ve got a 5 gallon pail of eggs and I started to water them down. My thought was that if I watered them down, I could put them out in the field and that would be a good idea. That’s what I did and I guess we’ll just have to see if this was the best idea yet for them or not.

So after I got rid of the extra eggs, I could still smell the fire barrel. I decided that I should probably clean it out since I had the time tonight. Wow, that might not have been the best decision I’ve made for awhile. It was terrible! What I ended up doing was taking a sand shovel and a bucket and scooping it out. I laid the barrel out on it’s side so I could get to it better. Like I said, it stunk. But once I started, I thought might just as well finish it. Man I was glad once I got it finish because for some reason I ended up stinking just like it. Now I don’t know where my yard trailer went for behind the mower, but I couldn’t find it for anything. So since I made the commitment to do this, and I couldn’t find the trailer, I ended up pulling the buckets through the yard to the dumpster. They are coming on Wednesday to empty the dumpster so it only made sense right? The buckets kept getting heavier and heavier as I was dragging them across the yard, and I don’t know if it was because they were literally heavier or if it was the sweat that was now dripping off my face that caused me to think that they were heavier. Either way… I was getting pretty tired and sore dragging them through the yard and lifting them in the dumpster.  After I finally got done I jumped into the shower. And even after the very long shower that I took I could still smell the smell from those rotten eggs that were partially cooked. So I grabbed a lemon from the fridge and wiped my hands down to cut the odor. It worked for awhile, but not so much now again. Maybe by tomorrow it’ll be gone? I’m just hoping anyway.

The weather is still really crappy, I know – your’e surprised right? Anyway, there’s not that much to do in the fields because they are still so wet. Daryl went out today to just check them out, and he said that it’s so wet that you just sink in when your’e walking in the fields. The corn is really starting to show stress (along with the farmers!) and we are sure hoping that the weather forecast is correct for this coming week. It’s supposed to be in the high 70’s and almost 80 all week with only one day with a high chance of rain. Man, I sure hope they’re right about the drier weather.

So what have we been doing ? Well, we did actually spend all afternoon on Saturday mowing the lawn where we could. The ditches are so out of control with all the water standing in them, but we did get the rest of the yard finished. Daryl mowed part of the ditches where he could and he said he saw 3 snakes again. YIKES ! I said, that’s why I call it the snake ditch. Totally gross! Our gas weed eater is not working very good, and I’m going to see this coming week if there is someone who can fix it. We do have an electric one that we can use, but if you live on a farm – some of the spots that you want to clean up have some pretty tough weeds! The weed eater does start pretty good, but then it only stays running if you hold it a certain way and … Well, let’s just say that it’s not the most user friendly machine that I’ve used in awhile. And since we’re having a family reunion on the farm at the end of this month, we’ll need to start thinking about getting the yard all cleaned up. Now that I’m thinking of the family reunion, I’m wondering if one of the ‘fun’ things that we can plan would be to pick rock? Yea, it probably wouldn’t go over so well would it.

As for the farm animals, one of the things that I’ve noticed lately with our chickens is that they’ve been walking around in kind of a chicken mob. Now normally they all just scatter by themselves, but just this past week or so, they’ve been all hanging out together and I’m not sure why. Also check out the peacock in the following picture. I’m thinking that he’s glad that Daryl got his tractor fixed so it’s a high place to watch everyone, but I don’t think Daryl would be too happy about that.

On top of the tractor, Sam the peacock is just trying to stay away from the chicken gang

And talking about high places – I was outside early yesterday morning and this old Tom Cat caught my eye. He was just hanging out up in the hay loft just watching what’s going on in the yard I guess. It looks like a pretty good spot to me and too bad Sam the peacock doesn’t sit up there instead of the tractor.

In the small window of the barn is the Tom Cat

And for our new little kitty, Pepper. Well, he’s been spending the afternoons with our dog taking naps.

Reno and Pepper taking a nap

Well you remember those little kitties that we found the other day? We had some bad luck with them, and by this weekend the only one that survived was this little orange kitty. Everything was going OK with her even though we had to feed her constantly! But still, everything was going pretty good. Then all of a sudden we were trying to figure out if she ever went to the bathroom. We couldn’t remember her ever doing this, and then the worrying started. Now I don’t know how long a cat can go without going to the bathroom, but this little thing’s belly was getting pretty big and when you touched it, you could tell it hurt. OK, so now what? So Kyle and I went to the grocery store and thought we’d look around to see what we could come up with. We ended up in the refrigerator section and found ourselves standing in front of Activia. Now to be honest, I don’t know too much about this product other than it’s supposed to have ‘digestive health benefits’. Just look how good Jamie Lee Curtis looks right? So standing in the refrigerator section, Kyle looked and me and we both shrugged our shoulders and thought that it really couldn’t hurt right? I mean if people can eat it, why in the world couldn’t little kitties. So home we went with our 4 pack of this yogurt. Once we got in the house, the little kitty could hear the door slam, and even though she’s in a big container in the laundry room – the VERY loud meowing started. So I warmed up some milk and mixed it with the yogurt stuff and spooned it into the bottle. Now for the true test, will this kitty like it? Yea, that’s pretty much an understatement. She drank the whole bottle. Her belly was almost wider than her whole body length after she got done. So after she fell asleep, back into the container she went for the night. We figured it was either going to help her or kill her – but either way I’m sure we’ll see some result in the morning.  And what did this morning bring? Well, this must be some pretty good stuff! Yea, she was a lot lighter this morning and it worked! So now we’ve been having to bottle feed her almost every two hours and I”m just saying that for this kitty only being a couple of weeks old, she sure is a lot of work. But you know what? She’s also pretty darn cute.

Our peacocks have been the nosiest that they’ve ever been! I have no idea what’s going on, but they seem to be screaming most of the days lately. Along with the screaming back and forth during the day, I’ve also got some trouble with Lucky. For some reason, he’s thinking that he wants to claim the front porch as his porch! Now peacock screams are loud and what I found out when I’m out running, is that you can literally hear them all the way up our road. Take my word for it, they’re loud. But as I was in our living room this morning, all of a sudden Lucky started screaming – at me I guess, and when I looked where the noise was coming from, he was looking in the french doors at me! So after the first, and second time that I scared him away, I decided it’s after 9 am in the morning and if the boys weren’t awake by now – maybe it’s a good alarm clock for them!

Not sure why Lucky thinks the porch is his