All in a week!

The past week had its ups and downs, though nothing too drastic. Here are the highlights!

Valentine's Day Dinner--we went to our favorite Italian restaurant for a special dinner with 4 courses, a tenor to sing and a pianist to accompany. Our good friends Mike and Natalie joined us and it was a great time. The main course was lobster tail and steak, both were melt in your mouth great! (yes we probably looked like tourists taking pictures of our food, but that is what foodies do!)

Earlier in the day Vera and Lizzie posed for a Valentine's Day picture. Was it a cows way to say "we love you" or perhaps "we love hay!"?

Sunsets this week were few due to clouds, but the ones we saw were gorgeous!

Dave and I worked on re-bordering some of the existing raised beds, and we put in an irrigation system to these beds (something we have been talking about for at least 5 years)! The end result is very nice! A few days later I checked the weather forecast, no frosts or freezes for the next 10 days. That was all the incentive I needed to start planting seeds and transplanting fruit trees (and the poor camellia that has been living in the barn for months!). The hyacinth are blooming, and the radishes I planted were up and poking out of the ground 3 days later.

Josh had his first track meet this week, he ran the 400m and the 800m, here he is in action (on the left)! A couple of days before he asked that I cut his hair into a Mohawk, for speed of course. ;-)

The hens are laying fairly steadily, we are blessed with 5-7 eggs a day. Below is an example of a first-timer egg and a couple of experienced-hen eggs. (as our friend Dan said on FB "proof that there is no substitute for experience!". The ducks are so friendly, cute, personable and have been enjoying their pool. We ended up not getting any chicks this week because when they were sexed they were all male, we will try again in a few weeks.

Oh yes, and an honorable mention to the first snake of the year, found when I uncovered the black plastic from one of the beds. It is a Rough Earth snake, a nonpoisonous variety, so he received the royal fling to the back pasture.

The cows are doing well, though none too happy with me yesterday. I pulled tail hairs from each to send in for DNA testing (to determine A1/A2 milk status). For more on that read here: http://emineral.info/a1a22.html
I also drew blood from Lizzie, (something I should have done at purchase time for ease of mind), she does not look  like she is 60 days from calving, and I need to know! I also tried to get the magnets down them, but could not manage it single handedly, so will wait until Dave and I can tackle it together.

No fishing this week, though we did go out on the maiden voyage and put the boat in the water! The good things--we found a free, easy to use boat launch onto Lake Conroe, we know how we need to work together to launch and to load, and we learned a few extra things. The bad--the boat had a leak at an inlet pipe, which would have flooded the battery well if we had not noticed and used the bilge pump; the gas line was prohibitive in some way so the motor was not getting full juice, and finally that we didn't stay out for very long!
Dave has since worked on all these issues and we will try again in the next week.

I wish you all a great week ahead!!