I don't know about where you are...but here...it snowed.

Maybe it didn't snow at all for you.  Maybe you live in the southern hemisphere and you are enjoying your summer holiday.  Maybe you live on the equator and are enjoying summer, as you do every day.  Or maybe you are somewhere else that is being pummeled by unpleasant weather.  I know, it could be much worse.  I could be in Australia, about to be hit by a cyclone, having only recently made it through horrendous flooding.  So really, I ought not to complain.  However, I am going to complain anyway, because I'm having that sort of a day.

I worked from home yesterday because it was a blizzard day.  It was the sort of day when I would prefer that my home desk was positioned such that my peripheral vision wasn't constantly barraged by snow swirls that looked like a herd of polar bears passing by my window.  (Do bears come in herds or flocks?  Or posses?)  I made cornbread in the afternoon and ate some with fresh butter and felt like a period of hibernation would be well advised.  I retired to bed a little early and lay in the darkness for a time watching the continued polar bear migration past my bedroom window, and wondering what it would all look like in the morning.

This morning, the wind was practically gone, there were no more polar bears, and the view outside the window was a still whiteness, with small ridges on the clean white surface.  Some areas of deeper drifting were visible, but overall, it didn't look all that dreadful.  I had a coffee, and contemplated the prospect of snow removal and getting to the barn.  I then had yogurt, and contemplation on the side.  I read my email for work, answered a few, spent some time on a work project, and then thought it might be time to actually feed the critters outside.  Considering the fact that by it was nearly 10 am by then, I should have been clued in to the fact that I had not seen or heard any goat or rooster yet.  Smart cookies, my animals are!

After donning my insulated coveralls, earmuffs, scarf, hat, insulated gloves and my "tall" boots, I opened the garage and surveyed the polar wasteland driveway before me.  Not to be discouraged, I started up the snowblower (thank you for the "easy start" feature, Honda) and dealt with the concrete part of the driveway.  The gravel part is not so easy but fortunately my kind neighbour had sent over his truck with a plow blade to help me with that part.  I determined, somewhat to my surprise, that the snow was a bit deeper than I had expected.  In fact, it was deeper than the height of my snowblower.  This made for some interesting "double layer" snowblowing feats that took quite some time, not to mention dexterity, to accomplish.  Not to worry though, I looked very stylish doing it, because I am a winter fashionista, of course.

I peered around the side of the house and decided that the walk to the barn looked quite manageable, so I hefted a 50 lb bag of sweet feed from the garage and proceeded to walk down the side of the house.  I began to mutter a number of words, none of which have anything to do with "manageable" and most of which I can't even put on this blog because my mother reads it.  Stumbling through the snow with a 50 lb bag of feed is never enjoyable, but it's even worse than usual when the snow is deep enough to push the legs of your insulated coveralls up over the top of your boots, such that when you heave your leg out of the snow, a copious amount of it enters your boot in the process.  I was less than impressed when Lucky Nickel made her appearance and came dashing through the snow like a legless ball of wool (since the snow was so deep it hid her legs entirely) only to stand in front of my leg each time I tried to take another step with the aforementioned bag of feed.  I cannot tell you how long it took me to get to the barn, but it was too long.

Upon recognizing that the food-giver was actually present, the rest of the animals began their usual chorus and I spent the next half hour trudging about with buckets of feed and water and hay bales, occasionally stumbling on hidden blocks of ice under the snow, or other unseen obstacles.  It wasn't difficult to determine that the snowblower was needed in the backyard too, so I retrieved it and plowed out nice little paths for myself (and a certain small white goat.)

This was no easy feat either.  First, the snow was again too deep for the snowblower, and second, I was on grass, so it was a harder job to push the snowblower.  My calf muscles were disgruntled about the entire experience and my knees complained about the incident where I tripped on an unseen chunk of ice and abruptly fell knees-first into the snow, tipped forward, and wallowed about like a beached walrus for a while in an effort to recover.  Of course, Lucky Nickel felt that this was an opportune time to jump on my back and try to play "pull-the-hat-off-the-human" before I managed to heave her off.

Fortunately, all the animals seemed to have come through the storm unscathed.  Kenzie the lamb is loosing some of her old fleece but new, thicker fleece has come in underneath so I'm not worried about her "patchy" looks at the moment.  She is one of Black Pearl's offspring from last June but she still doesn't really look like a full blue-faced Leicester to me, so I don't know what she is.

The donkeys don't seem to give a hoot about the snow.  The goats are in fine form and Osmo, despite the fact that his 'spare brain' has now fallen off somewhere, persists in grunting and sticking his tongue out at the girls despite the weather.  He even tried to get out to Lucky Nickel today, but she was having none of that.

The angora rabbits are probably the warmest animals on the farm, given their thick coats and unruffled expressions.

After all this, I came inside, showered, and dressed in nice new, clean pajamas and my pink "Snuggle Sack" purchased some years ago from Lands End, a silk scarf, purple fingerless mitts, non-matching socks and slippers, and went back to work at my desk.  When one keeps the house at 58 degrees, one must dress appropriately.  And as always, it is important to be a winter fashionista.  Until next time....stay warm!