Surviving the snow storm
Plus some new authors to try out!
Hi Dear Reader,
How are you doing? How has your week been?
For us, this week was fun. We woke up on Wednesday with 11 inches of snow and high winds. The snow had blown so high that Tank couldn’t get outside until Hubby shoveled him a small path. We took a snow day, which ended up being a blessing as our road wasn’t plowed out until 5:00 that afternoon. My work vehicle wouldn’t have made it to farm calls if I had any. Hubby’s truck handled the snow just fine. The kids loved playing in it and sledding. They also liked that we spent the day baking donuts and cookies and drinking hot chocolate. The snow didn’t last, though.
This weekend was warm enough to melt it into torrential streams. We had to ford water crossings to get our horses out of their pasture. Little Bock 1 received a very large, purple, stuffed bunny for an Easter present from one of our neighbors. If you ever saw Despicable Me 2, it looks similar to that rabbit.
The bunny has been going every where with us. She wanted to ride her horse up to the barn while carrying the bunny. Thankfully, Amber didn’t mind that there was a floppy purple bunny on her back, but I was nervous that either the bunny or the child with the bunny would fall into the water as LB1 decided to hold on to the bunny and not Amber’s mane. We made it up to the barn with only my feet getting wet since the water was higher than my boots. Bunny and child were both dry and safe.
Here in Minnesota, I’m lucky that I practice in dry barns and vet life isn’t as muddy and wet as other places I’ve worked. Several years ago, Hubby and I went out to a cow/calf client to work their herd in the spring, which meant that we gave vaccines, dewormed, castrated the bull calves, and checked the cows that were due to calve in the fall (fall calvers). A lot of my clients ran two herds: a spring herd that calved in the spring and a fall herd that calved in the fall.
Anyway, that spring we got a lot of rain, which isn’t unusual for that part of the country. The client’s pens were under standing water with a nice thick layer of mud underneath. Hubby slipped and slid our chute into place and it sunk into the mud a few inches. The client threw down sheets of plywood so that we had somewhere “dry and solid” to stand on.
We started working cows. It went okay for the first few head. They were the older cows and knew how to trudge through the muck to get into the chute and then out into the pasture. Then, it went sideways. The person moving the cows in to the chute wasn’t moving fast enough, according to the client.
Yelling started. A moment later, the person in the back pens was on sitting in the water and mud without any boots, having lost them somewhere in the sludge.
Everyone stopped to help the person out of the pen. Then, they stomped up to the house in their socks, muttering about getting a margarita.
We finished working the herd. But never did find the boots.
In writing news, I am still working on Cassandra and Trevor’s story. There is about 65,000 words in the story. Now I have to wrangle them into place. I did have a few posts on my blog, if you want to check them out. I am part of the Insecure Writer’s Support Group blog hop and this week we talked about if we could be anyone for a day who would we be. The other post is the short story I shared last week if you missed it.
What are you reading this week?
I am reading Tate by Linda Lael Miller.
I also have a giveaway that My Cowboy Crush is in. There looks to be some other good ones too! It is available until April 1st.
I hope you have a wonderful week. Hugs,
Allie
PS Feel free to email me or leave a comment. I’d love to hear your thoughts!