Thanksgiving Gift

On Wednesday I received a surprise box in the mail.  David helped me open it up, and we discovered beautifully decorated cookies from my cousin, Peggy.  She should start a business creating cookies, don't you think? 

Thanks for blessing us, Peggy!

Sundogs Explained

I found this sketch of sundogs in today's Fargo Forum online newspaper.  Before reading the chart below, I didn't have a good explanation regarding what causes them. 

In our area, sundogs seem to occur most often during the winter months, but we saw them as well just outside of Bismarck on a fall day the end of September.

Sunrise

This was the view from my kitchen window yesterday morning. 

This time of year the sundogs mean one thing:  It's going to be very cold.  And it was very cold.  And it's still very cold.  The windchill factor brought the temperature down to 20 degrees below zero. 

And tonight it's snowing, with a prediction of approximately 6 inches of snow.  The local newspaper stated we've already had close to 30 inches, so winter is off to a roaring start.

How to Move Hay Bales: Improvising

Our family has been living in the country for 6 years, but we still lack some equipment most farms consider essential for a successful operation. 

Andrew includes a video of how we picked up our hay bales this week.  Check it out here. 

For quite a while we didn't even have a truck, so we used our station wagon to pull a small utility trailer and took only a couple of bales at a time.  This proves you CAN make do if you have to. 

It's certainly a good thing our neighbor's equipment creates the smaller round bales, or we might have had a problem.

Samson loves it when the guys move bales ... Lunch is just underneath.  He loves mice.

Pushing On

Looks like our guest cabin is hosting alfalfa bales ... 

This past summer our neighbor was 6 weeks late in baling our hay, so the alfalfa was way past its prime.  Peter had to resort to purchasing alfalfa hay bales from someone in the area to supplement what is missing in our hay.  Hopefully it will help.  Sandy our milk cow dropped quite dramatically in her milk supply after Peter was forced to switch from having the cows grazing in the field to being in the barnyard eating our hay. 

The guys didn't want to keep the bales in the barn since they would be easy prey to wandering goats.  Instead, they are being stored for the time being in the guest cabin. 

Peter, Andrew and Jonathan have all had their hands in constructing this hay feeder which will go into the barnyard for the winter.  This one will keep the goats and anything else off the hay and reduce spillage.  They plan to get it down to the barnyard tomorrow.  It's heavy, and with the snow and mucky conditions it will have to be manually carried down there.

Andrew took some end of the day photos, and you can see that in spite of the warm weather today we still have lots of snow to melt.

Our friend Steve came over yesterday and used his Bobcat to dig us out.  The snow plow still hasn't come in to finish what he started the day after the storm, so this was a great blessing to us.  David has been busy trying to convince his older brothers to have a snowball fight.  The large piles of snow are great for hiding behind!

Another beautiful sunset over the lake.

I'm having all kinds of trouble with Blogger tonight, so I will post this before I lose it!