Mud

No surprises here. After 2 warm days and 1 warm night that included 6 hours of rain it is officially muddy around here. What makes it worse is that it is also icy and snowy along with the mud. Talk about miserable. Not only for me and mine but for the critters that have to live in it.<br />n<br />nWhere there is no snow, not too many places, it is nothing but mud. Where there is snow,there is still 6-8 inches here, it is supersaturated with water and is like moving around in a giant slushy. Then in places where I had scraped the snow off or the cattle have been living it is water on top of ice which makes it so slick that you can't stand or move on it. SO here is the dilemma I faced this morning. Where do you feed the cows?<br />n<!–more–><br />nIn the mud, where they will grind there feed into the mud making it inedible. In the supersaturated snow, which is like throwing there feed on a plate full of water. Or the ice, which is dangerous for the cattle since they might fall and hurt themselves on such slick terrain. None of the choices are good but I opted for the snow. At least they were able to pick a little more feed out than if it were in the mud.<br />n<br />nThen there's the heifers I am calving here at home. The corrals are a muddy lob lolly so it is extremely difficult for them to find a decent place to calve in all that mud. I like to let them try to do it natuarlly instead of getting them all in the barn and helping them but when it gets this muddy sometimes I have to get them in just so the calf can get dry once. What a miserable mess. BTW calving is going real well. Ten days from when they were supposed to start, 1/3 of a cycle, and I already have 40% of them calved out. A record number around here. Usually my percantage by this point is not that high so I am not complaining.<br />n<br />nThe person I really feel sorry for in all this mud though is My Darling Wife. She goes in and out twice a day delivering our oldest girl to the bus and then picking her up. Our road is nothing but a dirt two track that is 10 miles long. No gravel, just dirt. So it gets very muddy and she deals with it like a trooper. I am very proud of her. Eventually when the frost goes out of the ground she will have to move to town for a week or two since our road literally becomes impassable at this time of year. Hopefully that will not happen for a little while yet. If it happens too soon it could happen that it will refreeze later and she would have to move in a second time. The first time she gets grumpy enough, I don't know that I could deal with a second time.<br />n<br />nWell I guess I need to look at the bright side of this mud now. It's moisture for another year. That I can always use.<br />n<br />n<b>Two men look out the same prison bars; one sees mud and the other stars. Beck</b>