Laughter is the best medicine

Let me start by saying this. I...love...my...family!

As my family and friends can attest, I sometimes come up with some crazy ideas. And those friends and family usually get taken along for the ride as well.

Now, let me explain the pictures with this blog. About three years ago, I convinced two of my younger cousins to do a funny video for another cousin's birthday. For the video, they reenacted stories from our childhood and also high school years. It involved two muscular high school aged boys, one wearing a strawberry blonde wig and the other a long blonde wig, and acting like girls. The cousin we did the video for loved the video and it became a family conversation piece.

So, of course, we had to do another one. When that same cousin was in the hospital awaiting the arrival of her wonderful daughter, we thought it would be a great time to do another one. Again, hilarious and a family conversation piece.

Since Star Wars has been a bit of a tradition in our family, we obviously had to complete our trilogy so we just recently filmed the third installment and we called it- "Return of the Cousins: Episode III". However, this one had an extra twist. The older cousins donned some wigs as well and reenacted stories about our younger cousins. In the above picture we are wearing the wigs appropriate for our characters.

There are so many things I LOVE about my family, but one of the biggest ones is having a family that LOVES to laugh. That's why they put up with me I think.  So, when we arrived tonight to watch the video we had a wonderful red carpet reception. We do things up right in this family!

The night was filled with family, laughter, food, laughter, good times and laughter!

Throughout a stressful and drought filled summer my family and faith has kept me grounded. We find the joy in the people around us and I'm so thankful that those around me love to laugh just as much as me ;-)

Mooooving Cattle

Drought is hitting our family hard. Our cattle have learned to crawl through nearly any and all fences and we fight to keep them in every day. We have next to no grass left near our house so it became necessary to move them.

The first thing we had to do was to get the cattle out of their current pasture and divide them up the way we wanted them. We only had four people to do the job, so to assure they went the right direction we made our version of a redneck fence leading them out of the corral. That's some nice lookin' farm equipment...um, I mean fence ;-)

To account for the horrible drought, CRP (ground enrolled in the Conservation Reserve Program) has been released to allow cattle to graze on it. Ground in the CRP program is ground that land owners set aside for various reasons. It is ground that is more or less untouched during the years it is enrolled in the program. However, at this time, it is almost the only ground around that has any grass on it to graze cattle. This is what it looks like where we moved part of our cattle to. Isn't it sad that this ground looks awesome compared to where they were?

Since it hasn't been used for cattle before, we had to set up a fence. This meant literally miles of walking and stringing out wire for an electric fence. We use a home-made wire roller to roll out the wire. My dad and his brother can pretty much rig up anything...it's fun to see some of the stuff they have built over the years. In this video you hear me talking about the wire having too much slack in it. If it does have too much slack, it can actually break the wire because of the inconsistent pressure being placed on the wire while pulling it...and not too long after this video was taken, the wire did break.

To anchor the wire, dad placed wooden posts in the corner and attached the wire to it before driving the pickup to roll out the wire.

As soon as he had a section rolled out, we were in charge of placing the posts on it. The posts were 30 steps apart...so there was a lot of walking. These are the posts. They are metal posts that are driven into the ground with big hammers and then the wire goes on the plastic insulator. We would take five at a time and step them off while the person behind got to the mule and moved it to the next spot before doing the next five.

Once we got the field all fenced in, it was finally time to unload the cattle.

Sometimes it was a bit difficult to reach them. So, we improvised ;-)

You can tell that even this grass is incredibly dry. It didn't take long for the pen to become powder, as is proven by the dust.

Moving cattle to a different location creates some different challenges. One of which is a water supply. This field has no well with it, so we will be hauling water around 8 miles every day. And yes, this is our Coca Cola truck...we take what we can get ;-)

Now, we're continuing to pray for rain. We know God doesn't give us more than we can handle, and we are praying for patience to deal with this trying time. I'm also praying that all of you are dealing with the heat and drought the best that you can and maintaining a positive attitude during such a hard time. 

Preparing for the winter months

It is extremely important for us to renew our food sources for the cattle during the summer months. The crop of choice this year so far is oats. Dad baled some in round bales, but because of lack of moisture, they aren't exactly pretty. As long as they hold together they will do the trick though. Fluffy is not supposed to be the term of choice when describing round bales ;-)

We have also done a lot of square bales and they are a little more labor intensive to pick up and put in storage. For our smaller loads, we prefer to use the car trailer which means we have to load them all by hand. I can help to a certain points, but it gets too hard for me to throw them up about three or four rows, so I primarily stack them while someone else throws them on.

These are partially unloaded, but as you can tell we had them at least four rows high. I think we had around 90 bales on this load.

In order to not wear yourself out quite as quick (each bale weighs anywhere from 40-70 lbs. and in this case I was handling every single one...so that's somewhere around 4500 lbs. if these bales were around 50 lbs.) it is important to learn the technique. Learning how to use your knee to "buck" the bale is the biggest secret for me. It takes a lot of stress off of your back when you are trying to throw the bale or lift it up.

The "bounce bale" is another key. If you situate a bale just right at the end of the trailer you can throw the bale you are carrying so that the edge hits the bounce bale and rolls the other bale about 6 feet further than you could throw it. It saves a lot of walking while carrying the bale.

Dad or someone with more upper body strength than me usually stacks the bales inside. There just really aren't any shortcuts. The picture is a little blurry but dad shows his technique for "bucking" the bale up and guiding it into the correct spot in the stack.

He's an expert and always makes a much nicer stack than me or any of the other people we have help us.

These are some of our "helpers." It's fun to have them along, but they often get in the way, so they got put in "jail" in the barn so they weren't in the way of the flying bales and our feet ;-)

We still have some wind rows (rows of cut oats) to bale, but they were pretty skinny so dad taught our hired hand how to rake the other day. Raking is driving a tractor with a large rotating rake behind it so it takes one wind row and combines with another to make a larger wind row. This makes it so the baler can pick up the crop easier and make less trips back and forth to pick up the necessary oats to make a bale.

First they had to set the rake at the right height to catch the oats.

Dad drove the tractor on the way down, and our hired hand drove it on the way back. That's another thing I admire so much about my dad. He is incredibly patient while teaching us on the farm. He knows that it's a skill that will be helpful for us to know and he understands that it will take us a while to get it figured out.
Here is our hired hand on his way back, I think he's getting it figured out...although we did have to giggle at how crooked he was driving at times ;-)

He got the hang of it after a while and did an awesome job! Just another day of learning on the farm ;-)

Where I have been

I haven't posted for a while, but frankly, it's because I have been exhausted. This heat will wear anyone out, but it's even harder when your job is dealing with everything outside. So, here is a hopefully quick summary of what we have been doing. I'll do a slightly more in depth post on one of those activities, but this one will sum up our life here on the farm trying to beat the heat. I don't have pics of everything, so some things I'll just tell about.

1. Building Dad's office

By now the walls actually have plywood on them and we have a roof on it for storage above it with a railing. This has been in the plans for over a year, so the hot temperatures gave us an excuse to hide inside and get it done finally.

2. Fixing fence...again...and again...and again. The cows aren't thrilled by the dry grass they do have, so they were breaking off fence posts and tearing up our fence to get into the neighbor's corn field...so we just finally moved them to a different pasture ;-)

3. We filled a grain bin at the house with wheat during harvest. These pics are the lovely process of cleaning the bin before we put the wheat in it. Fun stuff. Then after it is filled, someone has to crawl into the top of the bin and level off the top of the wheat. We broke in our hired hand by having him do this ;-)

4. Irrigating and just trying to maintain some sort of crop. My dad is extremely responsible with how he irrigates and I appreciate that so much. He only puts on only what is absolutely necessary to keep our crop growing and alive during this extreme heat. Along with corn, we grew oats on the irrigated land this year. That resulted in a lot of round and square bales which are a HUGE component to keeping our cows healthy throughout the year.

The oats are in the front of the picture and the corn is in the background.

The nozzles are kept low so that less water is not needlessly evaporated. It's all about efficiency. And if you are wondering...they aren't actually on in this picture.

5. I've been having a little fun ;-) I've wanted this motorcycle fixed for years. It finally is! I have a lot of childhood memories of dad using this motorcycle and letting us ride with him or pulling us on a sled. So it's a lot of fun to finally have it working again!

Here's to hoping that you are able to find a little bit of joy during this terrible heat ;-)