I just heard back from the Oregon Secretary of State, and our business is officially registered. Got a registry number and everything. So, Stewart Creek Somethings is officially open for business as a chicken egg producer. Yay! Now Steve wants to register a brand for the sheep too. I’m not sure why, exactly, other than he thinks it’d be cool to have and use as a logo. I’ve got a couple of designs sketched out, and the brand application is my list of things to do today. It’s off to a great start. I hope everyone else’s Friday is just as good.
So I dug out the barn some more today. Gonna be a theme for a while. Annmarie’s dad keeps telling me that the barn has never been cleaned out totally, because his father said it would fall apart. I have found three types of flooring already and today I found 6 inches of rusted metal fence post sticking straight up out of the floor!! No way I would have been able to use a piece of equipment to clean it out. Besides the obvious problem of the floor caving in!!! The weather was beautiful, not to hot and the wind was not blowing. Of course it still stinks like shit (cause it is), I stayed clean, did learn that I needed to keep my mouth shut when using the pick ax. Shit was flying everywhere and I ended up with some in my mouth. Doesn’t taste that great!!! Went inside and talked Annmarie into helping me hang all our pictures. We were marking spots on the wall and she told me I stank!!!! I told her I was really clean and smiled at her. She said I had brown stuff in my teeth and my breath smelled like crap!!! What a way to complement me!! I went and took a shower…
Back in October, we rescued a kitten from under a rock crib (you can access my LJ entry here: http://annmariehardin.livejournal.com/?skip=10). We’ve finally decided she was most likely abandoned my her mother because she’s quite a bit smaller than her siblings, and to tell the truth, she’s not exactly the sharpest tack in the pack. But, she’s in now and is turning out to be a very interesting cat. She and Sprout (the 10-lb dog) don’t either one seem to know they are different species, and play just like litter mates. He’ll even get toys for her, to the point of bugging me until I get them if neither one of them can reach them. Lately, she seems to have taken a liking to napping in a re-useable shopping bag that was emptied and not put away. She has relocated it to the middle of the morning sun pool and spends most of the morning curled up napping in the sun – inside the bag. When she’s not napping, she’s playing with the straps. The truly amusing thing is that we haven’t picked up the bag and put it away because the cat’s using it. Do you ever wonder who is actually in charge?
A few years ago, many of the wheat fields in this area were planted in native grasses through a government program designed to reduce soil erosion and try to eliminate some of the grain surplus in this country. There were a lot of requirements to qualify, but the land around here is all marginal enough to have been eligible. The result is that instead of being surrounded by wheat fields that alternate between plowed ground and “amber waves of grain,” we are now surrounded by fields of native plants. The change has had some unanticipated effects. We see a lot more wildlife, including these turkeys. There is a newly arrived flow of about 30 that is frequenting the area. I’ve only seen three that seem to be roosting in the trees along the creek-bank just down the road from us. Steve noticed them near the end of the day when he was taking Sarah to swim one day last week. He called me, and I took the camera down for some snap-shots.
Stewart Creek Somethings 
