New Week!

I am SOOOOOO ready!

We have had a good weekend. We didn't go camping. I don't regret it. It would have been fun. Kids continued to fight and bicker into Sat. It was a lot of petty stuff that was driving me nuts! Funny it drove dad nuts too! So he was coming down on them as hard as I have been... OK, harder! Finally they had a wake up call! From there the weekend went great!

We had a great visit with oldest son and his family. His wife is due about Jan. 1. We are talking bets on when she has this little boy. His daddy was 6 weeks early and hasn't been late for anything he could help since. Daddy says if this baby isn't early it is his mama's fault! I admire her, she is working to finish this semester of collage, be mommy to a busy 5 yo, wife, my ds's secretary and be pregnant all at the same time.

We did a lot of working in the garden this weekend. I bought a weed eater this summer that I really liked. It had a cultivator attachment you could buy. We talked about it and decided to buy it. WOW! I am impressed! For what we want it works great! I have a raised bed garden so no huge areas to till, but lots of about 3 ft by 9 ft areas inside cinder blocks. A regular tiller wouldn't work. This worked great. Three passes and it is tilled. I plan on covering the beds with gin trash (cotton husk, stalks and burrs). I have a couple of piles of it from the last two years that we used for livestock feed. It has decomposed nicely. A friend said one year he dumped a bunch in his garden wet it good, then covered it with black plastic for a few months. On cold mornings the steam would rise all winter. The next spring it would grow anything! It was the best garden he ever had. I am thinking of doing something along this line to kill out a lot of the weed seeds in the beds. The beds that I plan on using for winter food I will just add some of the decomposed gin trash.

While part of the kids and I sorted my sheep the rest worked on some fence repairs then on to cut some fire wood. My sheep are all looking rather fat. They should start spitting out babies soon. I moved them to the front side where it will be easier to watch them. I have about 80 head. I sorted off my late lambs that were boys. They will be going to the sale in the next few weeks.

We managed to get our next beef sorted out so he can have some extra feed to finish him off. DH put a bail of hay in the pen and I will be sharing my cow feed with him for a few weeks. Then we will have beef! I am ready! We are down to not a lot of beef. The fact that this calf wants to act snotty has nothing, well very little to do with the fact I want him in the freezer.

DH has us enough fire wood to last a while. Not enough for all winter, but for a while. We haven't built a fire yet. We have turned on the electric heater in the living room a few mornings. I have shut my bedroom window to about 4 inches and moved the fan out of it. :)

Tomorrow we are having an un-school school day. MN has decided she wants to donate one of her goats to Rehab, which is the West Texas Rehabilitation Center http://www.westtexasrehab.org/ She found out they help kids and she wants to help kids so she is donating one of her angora goats. To make it even more "special" the girls are decorating it. They have so far painted her toe nails and horns and combed her hair. In the morning they plan on covering her in ribbons. They have a bunch made into bows already on tiny rubber bands. She should be cute. I hope she stops the show so to speak and brings a huge amount for rehab. MN would be thrilled to help so much. I will try to get pictures of the whole process tomorrow.

For now I am off here to spend time with DH.