So at my customarily early time slot of around 4am, I awoke to start the day of cow delivery. I went over to the home office to get a little office/computer work done. I needed to pay my sales taxes, work on the books, go through some emails, and try out the wood stove which we’d just spent a bunch of time restoring. When I arrived at the office with Cotton in tow, I found that my computer had failed to update properly from an OS update and was stuck in neverland. I restarted it a couple of times. Nope. I booted into recovery mode. Nope. I reinstalled the OS. Nope. Sigh. I could do some work on the laptop so I did get a couple of things done, but my to do list pretty much didn’t move.
I did make a fire in the wood stove only to discover that I can control the amount of fire in it, but only barely. I have to work on closing off more air to the thing. I thought maybe I’d find another wood stove and just replace this one even though it is so cool. However a quick look online at antique wood stoves (what this one is) showed they were in the $3000-$5000 range restored. Yikes! I think I’ll work on this one instead, but not this morning.
As I realized that the wood stove was still over firing, I noted that it was past time to milk the cow. Our neighbors have been handling the milking but Dottie acted a fool herself (full moon as well?) the morning before so I wanted to go down and see what was going on. I baby sat the stove for a few minutes to make sure the barn didn’t burn down, then went down to check on milking. Turns out it was progressing nicely. As that finished, I checked on our new baby chicks which had just arrived and were snuggling under the heat lamp.
Turns out we’d lost a few on their first night on the farm but that’s not unusual for day old chicks. A bit of work with the chicks, and it was time to load the cows. I set up the gates and chutes so the cows would hopefully walk right onto the trailer. They were calmer this morning and weren’t too much trouble to get onto the trailer. Of course there isn’t much they can do once they are in the corral anyway. That’s the point of a corral.
I got two of the cows onboard but because I was single-handed I couldn’t close the door quick enough and #26 managed to get on the trailer and then get back off. I shut the other two in, closed the center partition to keep them in the front of the trailer, then went back to deal with #26 who was now facing backwards in the chute, staring at a gate I had closed to keep the cows from backing back out of the loading chute. After some brief consultation with her (yes I talk to my cows), I figured there was no way to get her to back onto the trailer so it was best to let her out into the open corral, turn her around, and try again. I opened the gate in front of her, which she took as a sign that the devil must be ahead and then she backed her way through the chute, around a tight 90 degree turn, and onto the trailer without pausing. I hopped up and closed the door and marveled at how jumpy these cows were. Normally a cow would have been happy to walk back the way it had come and the gate I had opened never bothers the other cows. Either way, she was on the trailer and that part was done.
Emily showed up and we covered what was going on that morning. I then headed to the house for a quick breakfast. Spork was already up, as usual, so I made him a quick breakfast as well and he asked if he could go with me to deliver the cows. Let me go ask mom. Turns out there is a stomach bug in our house and The Princess has it and was throwing up all night. Maybe the day won’t be a normal school day anyway. After some conversation, it was established that yes indeed Spork could go with me so the two amigos took off to go deliver cows.
Two hours and much awesome conversation later, we arrived at Acre Station and unloaded our three cows.
Now that the cow delivery was done, it was time to go have some fun. Acre Station isn’t very far from Little Washington (Washington, NC) and in Little Washington is Bill’s Hotdogs.
Spork had never been to Bill’s before, and that was something we had to rectify. Normally he is a plain hotdog, or even worse, a hotdog with ketchup (his mother’s influence!) kind of kid. But I explained to him that Bill’s had a special chili that is at least worth trying. Up and coming man that he is, he said sure so we got him one plain and one with light chili.
The verdict? The plain hotdog was good. The chili hot dog was better! Ahh, it’s good to see your genes passed on and not overridden by the wife’s.
After a walking tour of the waterfront, we called our next appointment and made arrangements to head to Bethel to look at some pigs. But that’s a story for tomorrow.