June 15, 2004

Well, summer is here and with it comes steamy days of 100+ heat index and mosquitoes. The bugs do not seem to be too bad yet this year though. A little surprising, since the annual rotation of crops means that the malathion is being sprayed on cotton that is no longer right next to the house.

The chickens are all in full production, and we see from six to nine eggs every day. I should probably put together a cookbook of 101 ways to eat them!

Cotton, the Red Pyle English Game Bantam, lays the tiniest egg with the thickest shell. And Bunny, the Araucana, lays the pale green “easter egg.”

Milton’s barn cat had a litter of kittens in our garage on March 21. She delivered two beautiful bobtails (like herself) and two with super-long tails (like their father). Sadly, one of the bobtails died after about two weeks. Madra and Mascot helped me check on them twice every day when we went to feed the chickens and horses. On Easter morning, however, we realized that Bobbie had been hit by a car on Good Friday night. I immediately wrapped up the remaining three-week-old kittens and began bottle feeding. Mascot was delighted, and stood guard to assist. Those kittens had the cleanest backsides in the county! After four weeks, we had a porchful of the sweetest babies around. I found a great home for “Fat Santiago”, but had a hard time finding anybody else who didn’t already have four cats—or more! As you can imagine, I was also going to be very picky about the homes they would go to. These were housecats—not allowed to be banished to a barn to fend for themselves. So, here we are now with two more cats. I guarantee that JW never imagined that he would be living with four felines! Little Nicholas Bobtail and Baby Girl (aka Mouse) are quite settled in to life on the porch, with outings every day and some quality time inside as well.

On another sad note, we lost one of the cows in the pasture. Annie was due to deliver her first calf a couple of weeks ago. We watched her for several days as it became obvious that it was coming. We didn’t realize that she was going to have trouble one evening, and found her dead the next morning. The front feet of the calf were all that had made it out, but we could tell that it was enormous. Poor little Annie. She was weaned when we first moved here and hauled her mama to the sale barn. From then on, she became very tame and would walk right up and lick your hand. Let this be a lesson to everybody not to run a big Beefmaster bull on first year heifers! Stick with a nice little Angus. The second lesson, of course, is that it does no good to try to tell a Bohemian farmer how to manage his cattle. Especially when his bull is already producing calves every year with its own mother…

We found two beautiful black lab puppies last week. On our way back from Victoria, we saw them ahead of us running down the middle of FM 616. JW pulled over and we got them off of the road and into the truck. In case you’re wondering—we do NOT have four dogs now. They only spent one night before we found out where they had come from. We brought them back safe and sound the next day to a delighted family. There’s really not much to this story, except that they were so stinking cute that I had to take their picture. I am now convinced that we are some sort of magnets for lost and homeless animals. Dare I ask, what’s next?