So hard to believe yet another year is coming to an end! And this was a big year, as Sam and I celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary and both turned 50 years old. I think that makes it a year to remember. I have a niece who is planning her wedding for September and she is excited and it just can't come soon enough. She will be stunned how quickly the next 25 years will go.
I know I missed my post last week. To be honest, I was busy and did not get any photos to post and there was not much of interest going on around here. Things have changed since then! Of course, Christmas Eve and Day have come and gone. We spent some time on Christmas Eve at the neighbors' home, enjoying food and drink and family. They have a new great-grandchild, a little boy who was 11 days old on Christmas Eve and I got to hold him for a little while. So wonderful and special. The older kids were excited and in the usual "waiting for Santa" stage, so I did get my kid fix.
On Christmas Day, we went to Sam's parents house and enjoyed the day with Harry & Mary and Sam's brother, Tim and his daughter, Jessica and her boyfriend Alejandro. Both my sons called, Ian on Friday, and Zac on Monday. It was so nice to hear from them both.
The day after Christmas, my mother and my 12 year old niece Haley arrived to spend a few days with us. My first batch of dish towels, which I did in November, were for my mom and they match the colors in her kitchen.
And since Mom had expressed some interest in weaving when she went to the Wool Gathering with me back in September, I just had to snap up a 20" rigid heddle loom that one of my spinning guild members brought in for sale to our November meeting. So we spent some time warping up Mom's new loom.
We just went through my "stash" and found some yarn she could use to do a sampler with and we kind of learned together since I have never used a rigid heddle loom before.
Haley and I dyed some alpaca roving because her other grandmother would like some yarn and Haley said she wanted some green. I did not have anything in green, so we dyed and I will spin it up. Haley chose the colors and we did it up yesterday. It is GREEN let me tell ya!
I hope it is not TOO green!
And of course, other things have been happening, too. First, Apache had been on and off lame on his front right leg for a few days, so Christmas Eve I decided I had better clean out his foot and see if there was something in it because I could see nothing wrong with the leg. Once I got the foot cleaned out, I found a very tender spot that had a small hole and was draining. So I knew he had a bruise that had abscessed up inside the hoof. And I just wasn't about to call the vet out on Christmas eve or Christmas day, so I got some Epsom salts from Sam's dad, Harry (no drug stores open here on Christmas!) and soaked the foot on Christmas night and had the vet out Monday. She dug into the foot to drain the abscess and then applied pine tar and copper sulfate to a dressing that has to stay on 3 to 5 days and he is on stall rest and 7 pills 2 X a day for 7 days. Once the dressing comes off, the foot needs to be soaked at least once a day for another 5 days before he can go back outside. Oh, so much poop to scoop and water to haul.
Also on Monday, a foster dog arrived to stay with us for a while. She is an abuse case that will be going before the judge in a couple weeks, so I won't say much about her for now except that she fell in love with my niece, Haley and will miss her. We didn't really try to re-name her, but since it was obvious to us all that she looked just like Harry Potter's house elf, Dobby, we started calling her that and she started answering to it.
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| Dobby |
I had hoped to get a photo showing how her ears stick out and this kind of shows it.
This morning on the way to work, I (with Sam's help) loaded Buck into the back of the Honda CRV and dropped him at the vet's office for his long overdue neutering. Poor guy was so scared. He has not been off-farm since he arrived almost a year ago. He weighed in at 111 pounds. He'll stay overnight and come home tomorrow. Keeping him "quiet" is going to be hard to do since he is so hard to contain.
Sam took our big 4 X 4 pick-up truck in and had it fitted with a natural gas tank, so it is now dual-fuel like our white Cavalier. We will likely actually drive it now. It was just so expensive to drive that it mostly sat in the garage unless we needed to pull a trailer. It will only go about 100 to 150 miles before needing to be re-filled with natural gas, but it will certainly help keep the cost of driving it down.
Otherwise, our weather has been terrible for the most part. We did, to be fair, have nice sunny days on Sunday and Monday, but then it poured rain all day Tuesday, again, and with 4 dogs in the house, we went through all my dog towels more than once. The forecast shows that we will be ringing in the New Year with lows below 20 degrees, Brrrrrrrr! At least the mud will all freeze!
In January, I start "Bee School". I will have a class every Saturday in January from 9 am to 1 pm. It is about an hour away, close to where my spinning guild meets, which is handy because we have a meeting on Saturday Jan 7 and I will swing by there after Bee School.
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