Friday March 20th… The first day of spring and it’s cold……

We’ll take it… twenty-nine degrees is far better than the howling, blowing winter winds we came from a month ago. The snow is gone and the sun is trying to push old man winter back up north again, until fall beckons his return, but he’s a stubborn old coot. Today we cannot leave the critters free to run, because we have a spring concert to attend this evening at the Tannersville high school, where our niece, Katie is performing along with her classmates. After leaving there with Kenny and Katie, we are going to take them home so we can visit with family and have coffee and desert. Anita called Wednesday evening, around five o’clock and asked if we wanted to meet them in Kingston for dinner, but we couldn’t go because all of the animals were out, free ranging on the property. Once they are out, you are committed to be home until dark when they go back into their barns. It is impossible to get them in before dark…… as they will not go. It would be like trying to catch a bag of marbles, rolling on a cone roof, all of them go in different directions at once. Last evening just at dusk…when you could barely see, we put the ducks, chickens, guinea hens and turkey’s away while listening to the coyotes in the field next to the yard, squalling and yelping as they ran a deer or some other animal down. They were within one hundred or two hundred yards of us at the time. We could hear them plainly and I fear sometime that they will burst into the yard and start grabbing chickens or the turkeys which are sitting turks. ( same as ducks, only different…ha, ha ) Anyway, I keep the shotgun loaded, right inside the kitchen door…… a Remington 1100 autoloader, with about a 36” full choke turkey barrel and a magazine that holds five shells, at the ready all the time. If it doesn’t get them while in our yard, it sure as hell will scare them and you can empty it of all five rounds, in about two seconds. I’d feel bad about shooting them, but we gotta protect our animals.