Not Your Typical Saturday

Well it's my birthday and I am pecking away at the Branching Out Scarf and finishing up a little old ball of some rainbow dyeing I did a la twisted Sisters awhile ago. This must be the leftover singles from some 2 ply I made awhile back. Now that I know how to Navajo ply I am doing it for this ball to perfect my techinque and cement it in my brain until the next time. I have no clue what I will use such a small amount of yarn for.

The day started off in an annoying fashion. Finally we have snow that needs to be blown/plowed. This is a record for us here...making it through all of January with no snow clearing. But that's not what was annoying. The snow blower just suddenly conked out halfway down the driveway on the first pass. Now for those of you who haven't been here, our driveway is 600 feet long and narrow. Oddly enough I had swung into the the little driveway by the pasture gate and it happened to die there, out of the way so we could still use the driveway. This damn Cub Cadet has been nothing but trouble since day 1, 14 years ago. We used it for mowing back then as well until we purcheased the Kubota with a much wider mowing deck, a bucket, a blade and lots more horsepower. A real compact tractor. I use the Kubota to do the top of the driveway so I don't blow all the gravel off, and the Cub for the rest. The conditions have to be perfect, with not too much snow and no previous snow banks piled up on the the sides of the driveway, in order to plow the entire driveway with the Kubota. This time I had to plow, as the Cub was out of commision. Fortunately the conditions were just right, but it's still hard on the neck and back, being twisted around for an hour. I also invariabley dig up some grass and driveway as well. So we pushed the Cub with the Kubota up into the garage and had a look. Nothing obvious stands out yet but the thing hasn't been dismantled yet for a serious look. Other chores are taking precedence today. So just one more thing to wonder about and I see little dollar signs floating around over the Cub every time I look at it.

Meanwhile Friday, Brimble gave birth to two lambs. A black and a white one. One was deformed, the lower jaw was much shorter than the upper one and her intestines were leaking out so she was a goner. Unbeknownst to us, the sac that we thought was the afterbirth, actually contained the other twin, and so it died from suffocation, as the sac did not burst as it usually does and mamma was out of it. We always leave the afterbirth alone until it is fully delivered. So we basically were looking at a lamb suffocating and didn't know it. We have been doing this 13 years now and still we screw up. Perhaps the lamb was not meant to make it since it didn't have the strength to break the sac?

But the good news is sometime between 6pm and 10:30pm one of the ewes, Patricia, lambed and had a healthy bouncing baby boy! So now we have two, a ewe and a ram lamb, both black.