Good Morning!

[WLLady]

People seem to be flocking to facebook....it is totally ridiculous on several of the sites so bad that i left them when there was yet another discussion about mites and why are there things crawling on my son the chicken onlyy sleeps in his bed....
Um....

[WLLady]

happy family day everyone!

Still waiting on that horrible snow that they said we were getting all day today....i don't mind. it's cold out. and the wind isn't so pleasant today, BUT it's a balmy -6 feels like -11 which is a darn site better than -18 feels like -25!

Not doing much this weekend. put the chains on the tractor and sure wish we'd done that 4 years ago. or more. and got the soil testing back from the farm. looks like we'll be liming this year. for sure. pH is all off. oh well. it happens. really should get the books done, but really hate that job. oh well. maybe this afternoon i'll sit down and struggle through it. argh. we did cut a few more dead ash trees out and one giant elm yesterday and got the logs hauled up and a wee bit of firewood (about half a face cord). the one tree was just covered in grapevine, so anything with vine on it can just rot in the woods...i don't want those vines anywhere near the house! discovered that when you take a dead skunk carcass from your dog that a year down the road one's workgloves still stink like skunk....so have had to order new winter work gloves because it's just not doable! gross! Horse is doing well....ducks are laying up a storm. still haven't managed to get the 4 to bayvista yet, and now the 2 flocks of 4 are 1 flock of 5 and one flock of 3 because the one hen keeps getting picked on....so. whatever....the one boy is still lame, not sure what his issue is. he had hurt his hip, and now it's healed the way it has and he limps along. hasn't slowed him down any from breeding anyone, and he seems happy.....eating drinking and hissing at the dog. lots of tail wagging going on with them preparing for spring. i sure hope the weather is warming up for syrup season now. i know the syrup farm down the road is going crazy tensioning lines and cutting firewood for the evaporator right now. it's coming. we did manage to (we.....read "DH managed") fix the tractor. put on the new hydraulic pump and then there was oil dumping out of this little hole in the fuel injector frame, because some little plug came out from some little hole..... so he got inventive with some wood dowel and silicone and we have a working tractor again. with 4x4 and 4 chains we are racing up and down the logging road on the hill with no problem at all. more than i can say for the 4x4 ATV LOL.

i have one little plane tree sproutling! whoohoo. just planted those a week ago! they're supposed to take 2-3 weeks to sprout so i may have to pot this one up and then leave the rest in the "greenhouse" (it's just a sprouting tray with a dome on it so i don't have to keep watering it) for another 2 weeks to see if anything else sprouts.

DH's birthday on wednesday....cake is made...lol. we have our anniversary, step daughter's birthday, valentine's day, brother-in-law's birthday, DH's birthday and then step mom's birthday all in a week. 1 cake is good. haha.
i need to get on the treadmill.

hope everyone has a great family day! might go and brave the cold for a walk or something, but thinking more along the lines of vacuuming the house and walking on the treadmill. lol. was going to clean the barn out soon but everything is frozen solid, so i settled for finding another 2 heated dog dishes that are actually heated, and giving everyone some cracked corn, and coming back in....guess i should check the birdfeeder.....

[ross]

Got 10-11” of snow here last night in a short time & more coming tomorrow . Our snow blower on riding mower tore all gears out of blower augers 3 wks ago still waiting for parts . Great neighbours one came in with tractor & blew 1/2 circle lane & another came in & blew a path to barn & back . Good folks & not even chicken people cept to eat .
Good fences & good neighbours.

[Ontario Chick]

Snowed in today, time to catch up with all the things waiting to do......
or not, took me 1/2 hour to dig myself out of the house, DH is snowplowing path so we can go for a real walk later.
The snow plow hasn't been yet, since the school buses have been canceled I guess everybody is on their own

[ross]

Yep for sure . All snowed back in again . Hwy snowplow going by reg . Waiting for neighbours to show up & move ours . Be Safe & don’t forget the dog hehe

[WLLady]

hope they get that blower fixed soon ross! took us 2 hours to get dug out this morning and it's coming down again....hard. we'll need to plow again before i leave for work tomorrow. I had a work from home day today....just too much snow to get out early enough. with the shifts for covid restrictions i would have spent over an hour driving (if the roads were passable) to just have to head home again pretty much an hour after getting there-i will not drive in blowing snow in the dark, and my shift starts at stupid oclock just about sunrise these days....sigh. so i caught up on some paperwork i needed to do.

hubby plowed out the neighbour too. i think he likes the ATV with the plow on it! i did some piddly shovelling with the big snow push scoop we have, since using a shovel is too much for my back these days. did the walkway and the porch and the door to the barn and right close to the barn door where the atv can't get close enough. then around the vehicles so we can get into them without standing in the 2.5 foot snowdrift! then filled the birdfeeders. Got instantly mobbed by a flock of 20 bluejays. i swear they were stalking me.....nuthatches, sparrows (barn residents apparently), juncos, mourning doves and bluejays. not sure where our cardinals got to, we used to have 2 pairs....haven't seen them yet this year.

our usually quiet neighbourhood had some excitement today. apparently a stolen truck from london ended up all the way out here, being chased by police and ended up turning down the dead end just north of us and ditching it, K9 units, police from london and the OPP, ambulances...friend of ours pulled an OPP cruiser out of the field for them....at least they caught the person.....if they'd got away the only way out is through our field-via the bush north of us! so i'm glad they got them....but who steals a truck 60km away and tries to run down a dead end country road??! obviously doesn't know the area....ha ha all in our very quiet out of the way piece of the world. lol.

stay safe and warm everyone!

[baronrenfrew]

Unfortunately the cold doesn't kill bugs LOL!

excuse me?

Lose the attitude! I'll delete the post but many do survive very well indeed. I am sure others will appreciate your post.

Ah, KB, I apologize if it came across as attitude. That was not my intention. The way my technical brain works I may come across as an expert at times (which i am not, more armchair quarterback then anything lol). Most of my attention is in forest issues and cold does kill a lot of nasty critters.

[baronrenfrew]

So - with covid and lockdowns - is it just me or does everyone have a short fuse? I know I am not as patient or as tolerant as I should be.

[baronrenfrew]

I guess I should say good day eh!

Update on me: aside from 4 mixed layers and a few guineas (which will be for sale), birds have been on the back burner. Keep in mind a fox hit hard two years ago, plus I messed up my knee and its been a very long recovery since last March. This has made firewood a challenge on top of covid and bunch of other things.

But a bright spot has been putting together the story of my father (who passed 2 years ago), and the stories he told.

So years ago I bought a touristy item with a general history of my family name Weiss. Its a German name, likely Jewish, though my father's family was German and from Silesia - a region on the far east of Germany now Poland - where the Germans were expelled as part of war reparations - Germans were kicked out of Silesia, Upper Silesia, and East Prussia, and Polish people settled there as Russia took a part of Poland. The ancient history includes a mixture of rulers, Polish, German, Prussian, and more.

As part of the banter between a bunch of friends on facebook, someone mentioned Genghis Khan, and I told him not to bad mouth my ancestor - keeping in mind an article from the early 2000's noting that 1 in 200 people on the planet can trace ancestry genetically given that the Mongols had an empire and ran over part of Europe.

So it turns out Ogedai Khan (son of Genghis) and his army fought and won a big battle in 1240-1241 in Silesia at Legnica near Wroclaw (former German city of Breslau) which is 70km's from my father's village of Sulistrowice.

So it's not out of line to claim Genghis Khan as an ancestor!

[kenya]

It's strange and sad really that the more vicious and barbaric a leader was the more history remembers them.
I'm sure we all have barbarians in our ancestry somewhere.