Thursday, March 19, 2015

More lambs



I managed to catch one of our students' colds -- an occupational hazard. Students are routinely disgusting when it comes to colds. They come staggering into class, just dripping snot and spreading it on everything they touch. I sometimes wish I could just spray them down with an anti-viral solution.

I wish they'd stay in bed, but I expect they worry about keeping up with the work.

This one was mild, but primarily involved a snotty, itchy, sneezy nose. Not the best thing if you are trying to keep quiet so as to not wake a sleeping baby. I felt fine as long as I was outside, in the shower, drinking soup, or sipping scotch. The rest of the time my nose itched and I sneezed my way around the house. Just like one of my students, in fact.

I managed to drink all the actual scotch in the house. It sounds like a lot, but there was probably an ounce-and-a-half left in a bottle I'd been nursing for nearly ten years. Even that was enough for two of my normal "drams." I'm not a big whisky drinker.

I tried some of Aimee's Bourbon, but it wasn't the same. It dried up the nose just fine, but the flavor was all wrong. So I bit the bullet and went to the supermarket to buy another bottle of decent scotch.

I wanted an Islay malt, and they had Laphroaig, one of my favorites, but at $47 I just couldn't do it. I settled for a $22 McClellands faux-Islay, which turned out to be quite up to the task.

But then I got better. No excuse for drinking whisky now! I expect we'll still have the McClellands in ten years time.

In other news, Roo is eating bread-and-butter "soldiers!" It turns out that Americans, or at least Aimee, don't know what bread soldiers are. This is when you cut up a slice of bread into sticks just small enough to fit in a child's mouth, or the top of a soft-boiled egg in an egg cup.

Our old mum used to make me and my sister Carol bread-and-butter soldiers to eat with soft boiled eggs. You crack the top off the egg and dip the buttered bread inside so it comes out covered in yolk. Yummy.

Roo is not yet eating the egg part. She can have egg yolk, but not egg white, the doc says, something about avoiding allergies later on. But she loves her soldiers.

Two more lambs were born early yesterday morning, to lead ewe and head cuddle-sheep Nellie.

Nellie is our all-time tamest sheep and has been my favorite for years. She gave birth to two strong ram-lambs, one of which has a black pirate's eyebrow patch. No pictures yet. I'm not taking my own sheep pictures this year -- I've already dropped two cameras in the sheep's water over the years, as well as broken quite a few, and now I have a nice camera, albeit one of Aimee's cast-offs, as well as a (secondhand) iPhone, I'm trying not to do the same. All my sheep pictures are stolen from Aimee this year.

The weather has been cold and clear and windy since the weekend's snowstorm. It will get a little warmer today. We now have our deck back -- all shoveled off for the first time since Christmas Day, and when it's warmer you can take Roo out there for a little sun.

We're sort of done with winter but it keeps lingering on. Maybe spring will come next week. We should know after long experience that April is the month that winter ends in Maine, but hope lingers on.

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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.

The earliest posts, at the very end of the blog, tell the story of the Great Farm, our purchase of a fragment of that farm, the renovation of the homestead and its populating with people and animals. Go all the way to the last post in the archive and read backwards from there to get it in chronological order.

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