Sheep dog, Zeke,  Annmarie taught him to hang out on furniture.

Baby girl twins

 Well Sarah and I went out yesterday and got all caught up on the sheep tending duties.  We retagged three of the ewes that had ripped out their ear tags.  I had to use the other ear, hopefully they won’t rip this set out.  We tagged two of the baby girls and then tagged the baby boy and banded him.  We banded him first and then tagged him.  The banding slows them down for a few minutes after it occurs.  Once every thing down below goes numb they perk right back up and run around.  We have three more babies to catalog and treat but they are too little.  The 2-3 week age limit makes them big enough to handle the trauma and not so fast that they are hard to catch.

Zeke is having a hard time.  He is starting to get aggressive toward the sheep.  We have encouraged this up to a point.  We don’t want him to be afraid of them, but he cannot be barking at them all the time.  He got rolled again by a pretty aggressive ewe yesterday.  She jumped up into the barn and chased him into the hay room just to roll over him.  He was running and barking for all he was worth, but she still got him!  I had to chase her out of the hay area.  She tried to get him one more time, but I smacked her on the nose with the grain bucket.  She is so aggressive that she keeps the other sheep four feet away from her feeding area on both sides.

We went out yesterday and decided not to build jugs up in the main section of the barn yet.  It is much cooler up in the barn as the wind blows freely through the barn.  The babies just curl up in the straw next to the feeders and stay pretty comfy where they are now.  This year when we redo the barn I am going to insert windows into the barn window openings.  Currently, there is a screen or nothing covering these openings.  We need the windows for the light.  Once the windows are in that should stop the wind.  If I have time I will trench over some wiring so we can have lights. I will only be able to take one 20 amp line to the barn and it will already have three outside lights on it.  I will be enough, I plan on using fluorescent fixtures and they take less energy.
I will build some jugs this summer.  We will have to decide on a location for the jugs, our chute and scale, and the dividing fence to split the barn in half.  

Baby boy, his mate vanished from barn.

Sarah and I went out at dusk to feed and lockup the sheep.  She actually only went because she knew there were baby lambs.  Ewe #12 had two baby boys.  They were both doing well and jumping around.  Sarah’s didn’t make a peep, but the one I caught started bawling for momma the second its feet were off the ground.  Newborn sheep don’t actually bawl, they MEEP.  After about a week they start to bawl.  We still cannot tell when the mothers are going to give birth.  I was certain that the lead ewe was going to have her babies two days ago.  I did get some 2×4 lumber at the hardware store for the Jugs Sarah and I will be building this weekend.  I picked up the stuff to install shelves in the furnace closet.  Annmarie wants me to replace our pull out cutting board also, the veneer is coming off suddenly after 50+ years.  I bought lots of odds and ends to finish out the projects for the winter.  I really want to get into the upstairs bathroom and build more closet/storage space, but Annmarie is vetoing that project.  She wants floors downstairs and window trim.  So I am just going to finish the spare bedroom and work on the attic floor after that.

 When I went out to feed this morning one of the Baker girls had just delivered her twin babies!  They were all cleaned off and dry but their umbilical cords were still bloody.  The skinny ewe in this picture is the mother.  The white headed sheep with horns is Lucky, the ram.  He kept harassing her, so I didn’t want to further traumatize her by stealing the babies for a quick look.  I fed everybody and they settled down.  I locked the horses out of the barn lot.  Sarah and I were going to build two jugs (mother & baby enclosures, used to allow bonding and isolating mother and babies for a few days) in the old barn and it looks like it is much needed so that is top of the priority list for this weekend. 

Both babies in the background.

Yesterday we finally got some needed snow.  Now we just need a few more feet in the mountains.

Snow, we need it, without it we are going to have a dry summer.  Here’s to hoping we get several feet in the mountains in the upcoming months.  Hard to believe our first snow was mid January, incredibly late for us.  The weather is definitely changing. 

We purchased a scanner designed for all kinds of negatives after Christmas and Annmarie has been scanning in the old negatives we found in the attic when we cleaned it up.  We found four more pictures of this house.  One of them is of the farm before the main house was built, so prior to 1910.  We also found a letter from one of her relatives written in 1896.  She spent the weekend scanning in negatives, so far over 170 have been scanned in.  I will try and get one on the blog occasionally.  Some of them are fabulous!   After looking at the old photos of the farm, I realized how important some of the bland landscape and building pictures are for comparison.  To us it is the same view, but in fifty years someone else may be looking at them and living in our home.  They might want to see what it used to look like and why things were changed.  We found a company that will print our blog (with pictures) as a book.  So we are going to have each year printed as a separate book.  It would have been incredible if we could have found a written diary of the previous owners, but we didn’t.  Therefore, we are going to create one for future generations.

I feel 100% finally.  Sucks to lose half my vacation to illness, I didn’t get the spare bedroom completed.  Which means I will have to keep after it over the next month.  All the inside house work needs to be done by early spring so I can hit the barn early.  The barn is a huge project and it is going to take me at least six months.

Farmall tractor

That really is the moon in the upper left corner.

Last winter for the barn roof to have a huge hole.

More fire issues, I was very careful to make sure this rock crib did not catch on fire, too hard to build.

Something dug under my chicken yard fence!  Annmarie just found this, I filled it with rocks and will watch for further activity.