Saturday, February 19, 2011

Get your cramp on

Aimee and I have been on a slippery slope recently -- the one outside our front door.

An ice storm came as forecast on Thursday night after a day in which the sun shone and temperatures approached 50 F. Then after the ice storm Friday we had rain and drizzle and fog much of the day.

That 45 degree fog we get this time of year eats the snow and makes it go away, which is good and what we want to happen, but the combination of ice and fog and drizzle and general melting and refreezing made for a slick mess in our dooryard this morning.

Aimee could barely walk out to the car to go do the shopping.

So before I could get any other thing done today, I had to take care of it. I put down sand with salt and it's now possible to move out there.

To get this job done, and indeed just to take the dogs for a walk, and do every other chore, I've been wearing crampons on my snow boots the last couple of days.

These are not the ice-climbing crampons I used to wear for mountaineering. They're just rubber stretchy-thingummies that slip over your boots. They have small metal studs about 3/16ths of an inch long, just enough to get a grip.

It's fun to see Haggis sliding around on these slick surfaces. He gets going just fine, but then when he tries to stop, he can't and somehow his back end catches up with his front end and he ends up in a messy pile on the floor.

Haggis has worms, so he and Mary will no doubt get dosed today when Aimee comes back. He doesn't seem to mind, and hasn't lost any energy. But he was chewing on the fur around his bum for a few weeks before we noticed the worms.

Funny that they get worms this time of year when there is zero biological activity outside. They must have been carrying the nasty critters for quite a while and just recently experienced a population boom.

Poor puppy. But at least he's not lonely.

He's carrying quite few new friends around, actually.

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Welcome to our Farm Blog.
The purpose of this blog is for Aimee and I to communicate with friends and family, with those of our students, and other folks in general who are interested in homesteading and farming activities.

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