Fri Feb 20th… Driven from the barn by winter again……

Wow, winter is relentless this year… slinking around… re-appearing regularly every week or so now. We get a break in the temperatures and start to let our guard down, by talking about spring and what we’ve been waiting all winter long to do and as we continue to become psyched…… BLAP… we’re hit between the eyes with winter’s reality all over again. Thus, it has been this week!!
Even yesterday… I went out the front door to the garbage tote and it was beautiful. It was sunny, had warmed up to about forty degrees and the warmth was melting the newly fallen snow of Wednesday evening. The three inches were reduced to almost nothing where the sun was hitting it and down to one inch in the shade. I told Vick I would finish her outside lights, as soon as we made the trip to the Vet, which she had called to schedule. We wanted Kurt, our Vet, to take a look at some worms expelled from the turkey’s and give us a medicine to treating them. We left the house with two of the fat, white, ugly worms, measuring about two or three inches in length and headed for the Vet’s office, down the road. Upon seeing it, Kurt mumbled “hummm, Lungworm…… now what’s the med I used last time…oh…ahh… been awhile since I treated a turkey… hummm.” He then spit out a twenty dollar word and took off for the med cabinet, returning with four hypodermic needles filled with the stuff. Twenty bucks and we were on our way back to the barn, to shoot the turkey’s with the medicine to eliminate the Lungworms and stop their chronic cough.
On the way back, the temperature dropped like a rock, along with a bunch of snow and sleet. That continued until we had about a half inch of the new white stuff on the ground. We still put up the lights, be we were almost frozen solid until we was done. Anyway, we now have outside fluorescent lighting, on a dusk-to-dawn controller now………… just what Sweet Vicki always wanted.
After that, we warmed up and I finished my re-writes for all of the poems. Vicki is now doing illustrations for my book, which I think is a beautiful addition to the effort and is bound to give it some of the added pizzazz it needed. Once Vick is done illustrating, then it’s off to the publisher. We Can’t wait…that will be an excitement that I never envisioned happening…… Being a published author……WOW! Now that the poetry is that close to being ready for the publisher, I’m going to return to my other big book and complete the re-write on it. I was going to call it “An Uncommon Journey “, but have since settled on the title of, “It all Began With a Puppy”. It’s the story of Vicki and I, how we met because of a puppy and finally ended up together in Upstate New York, with five dogs, all the critters and a farm on almost nine acres of land. It’s chocked full of excitement, disappointments, adventurous day trips, errands for supplies, tender moments and lots of funny happenings. I’ve finished the original book and am now doing the re-write which is adding pages, but enriching the content. When completed and proof read by Vicki, my editor in chief, it will also go to the publishing house. Then…… I will start on another book about the finished barn, the spring arrival of the Alpacas, expanding the new barn already, for the Angora rabbits coming this summer, selling eggs and hatching young chicken peeps to sell and the trials and tribulations of New York farming as we continue to acquire our farm status and expand…… It’s an adventure.