I'm Not Dead Yet

I know it has been a while since I have posted. Not a whole lot has been going on around here because it has been raining for it seems like forever. I was getting so tired of the rain. Finally though, the sun came out today and it is supposed to be sunny for the rest of the week. I thought I would give you all a mini garden update. The garden has not been doing so well. It has just been so wet for so long. It has rained about everyday for the past 3 weeks. Some of the plants seem to do ok with all the rain but most of them were not growing as well as they should be. And some of the plants even rotted and I had to replant. I hope this week of sun will get the garden back on track. Here are a few pics.

Here is a tomato plant, I think I put in 26 plants


Green Beans


Sugar Snap Peas


Our strawberries have also been getting ripe the past couple weeks, although a good portion of them are rotting before they get ripe because of so much rain


And I will leave you with a flower. I planted these in the fall so this is our first year to have them bloom. I really like them. It is an iris

New Lawn Mower

We decided to try out a new lawn mower (aka cow) in the yard this past week. We are planning on butchering the cow in the next few weeks and we are trying to fatten him up. We decided we would let him in the yard in the evenings while we are home to let him eat grass in the yard. Out in the pasture he has to share grass with the sheep and goats. Our yard has lots of good grass that has been growing like crazy with all this rain. We thought it would help us not have to mow so often and be a good source of really good grass for him. So far it has worked out pretty good except yesterday when he found the strawberry patch and took a few bites out of it. We are not going to do this on a regular basis but we thought we would just experiment with it until we take him to the butcher.

Weekend in Mena

We took a little trip down to Mena this weekend. We wanted to go down and see all the tornado damage and see our friends. It is amazing how much damage the tornado did. There are so many houses and businesses that were damaged and destroyed. And there is debris everywhere. The really sad thing is where it hit is the older part of town and a lot of the people there did not have house insurance. We heard one figure that 35% of the damaged houses did not have insurance. Most of the people in that area are older and retired and don't have the money to tear down the old house and build a new one. So, it remains to be seen what is going to happen to all those people and all those houses. We really feel bad for all the people there. We did not take any pictures of any of the damage partly because there are so many pictures already on the internet and I felt bad taking pictures of people's damaged lives and them trying to clean up. I really hope that the town is able to recover and not become a ghost town because I really like Mena, it is such a nice place.
On a happier note, we were able to see several friends while we were down there which was nice. We stayed with some really good friends and had an awesome time with them. We took a drive on Saturday night in one of their old cars up on Rich Mountain (second tallest mountain in Arkansas) to Queen Wilhelmina Lodge and had coffee. I was a really pleasant and relaxing drive, I really enjoyed it. We took some pics of us with the cool car before we left that I thought I would post.

Last but not least

Our last mama goat had her baby last week. This goat was one of our babies that was born last year. She is a little over a year old. She may have been a little too young when we let her get bred but I think it was close enough. She had some issues having this baby. We got home last Wednesday and she was laying on her side on the pond bank and she was moaning. We went and checked on her and she was trying to have the baby, we could tell she was in real agony. We were not sure how long she had been trying to have it so we gave her a little longer so she could try to have. After a while she had not made any progress and I was getting worried so I decided to help her a little. The feet of the baby goat were just barely hanging out so I grabbed them and pulled. This did not help a whole lot, the mama goat's "opening" did not seem big enough to get that baby out but I knew it was not going to come out any other way. I kept pulling but no progress was made getting the baby out and I was even moving the mama goat as I was pulling. So, I got Margo to hold the mama goat's front legs to keep her from moving while I pulled on the baby. I also tried to stretch out the skin with my hand to make the opening a little bigger for the baby to come out. Finally, after a couple minutes of pulling and stretching, the baby popped out. And as soon as the baby was out, the mama jumped up and ran off. I had to run catch her and bring her back to the baby but she wanted nothing to do with it. I took her and the baby to the barn and penned them up. She did not want to accept the baby. When the baby tried to nurse she would move away and not let it. We had to hold her to let it nurse. To make an already long story short, she would not accept it and every few hours we would have to go down to the barn and hold the mama and force her to let the baby nurse. We hoped that after a few days the mama would get the idea and accept the baby and let it nurse. Well, today it happened, after 5 days she finally started letting the baby nurse. We are very happy not to have to go down to the barn every few hours. I wanted to wait to post pictures of the new baby until we knew how it was going to do and what it's fate would be. Here are some pics.

Mena Tornado Video

Here is a short video of the tornado that hit Mena in case any of you have not seen it.

Lambchop

While we were on vacation, we had our first baby lamb. In case some of you don't know, we have 3 sheep- 2 ewes and 1 ram. They are hair sheep which means they shed their wool so you don't have to shear them. These sheep are used for meat, which I am looking forward to eating. It's mama is very skittish and therefore the baby is to. It is super fast for less than a week old, and I have a hard time catching it (even with my lightening fast speed). It is a boy by the way, he is really cute. Here are some pictures.

Tornado

My hometown of Mena got hit by a tornado last night. It destroyed a lot of stuff, and killed 3 people. There is a lot of damage to some major things like the community college, the hospital, the biggest factory, the junior high, city hall, and the courthouse. It is really sad. It is such a nice little town with lots of old houses and trees. I thought I would post a couple links to some pictures and video footage. Click HERE to see some pictures. Click HERE to see helicopter footage.

Last Day in St Louis

Today was our last full day of our trip, tomorrow we drive home. It was a pretty low key day for us today. We slept in, then went and ate lunch at a pretty cool Irish Pub. After lunch we decided to stop at the big farmers market here which is located in the Soulard district. We usually try to go to the local farmers markets when we take trips. It was a pretty big market but we were not impressed with this one. In most Arkansas farmers markets to sell stuff it has to be grown or produced in Arkansas. At the Fayetteville Farmers Market, it has to be produced in the three county area. This means the stuff you are buying is coming from actual local farmers who produced the goods and supports the local farmer. Based on what we saw at this market, I don't think hardly anything there was produced even in the state and sometimes even in the U.S. We saw maybe two things being sold in the whole market that would be in season right now in Missouri and I am not even sure those things being sold were grown locally. They even had things there like avocados that are only grown in California, and bananas that I don't think are even grown in the U.S. I think it is basically just vendors buying stuff from farmers in other states and marking up the price and selling it at this market. This is basically the same thing grocery stores do, not that I am against grocery stores but I don't think this is how a "farmers market" should be. As a side note, the Fayetteville Farmers market started last week so all of you in the Fayetteville area should go check it out. You might just see us there this Saturday.

Next we went to the Budweiser Factory for the brewery tour. It was pretty impressive to see how big they are and how much beer they make. Their facilities are really nice. The tour was not that exciting, we definitely liked the Coors brewery tour in Colorado much better (and the Schlafly tour was the best).

Tonight we ate at Zia's for dinner which is a Italian Restaurant in the part of town called the Hill which is an old Italian Neighborhood. It was good, especially their fired seafood ravioli. Later after dinner we went to a place called Bailey's Chocolate Bar, I think you can guess what their specialty is by their name. Besides chocolate dessert their specialty is also martinis. I had their signature chocolate martini that was pretty good even though I am not a fan of martinis. Their desserts were really good. Margo had their brownie with ice cream and it could have been the best brownie I have ever had (and I have had a lot of brownies). This has definitely been the trip for eating out.

Tomorrow we head home which will be nice.

Learn to Farm Day

Margo and I will be coming home from our trip tomorrow sometime. I wanted to let you all know that we are planning on planting in the garden on Saturday. We will probably put in most of our veggies this weekend. So, if anyone is interested in helping or learning in the garden come on out. We will probably work on it some in the late morning and in the afternoon. just let us know if you are interested and when you want to come out. Hope to see you Saturday.

Another day in St. Louis

Today was another busy day on our trip. First thing this morning we went to the Missouri Botanical Garden. It was awesome. I think it might be one of the best things we have done. They have all kinds of plants, it is a huge place (79 acres) and really nice. They also have a home gardening area that gave me some good ideas. One really cool thing they had was a huge biodome type thing that had a rain forest in it. I have always wanted to go to the rain forest but never have. It may sound kind of boring to some of you to go to a botanical garden but it is really good and I recommend it to everyone.

After lunch, we went to the St. Louis Zoo which is in Forest Park. Forest Park is a 1300 acre park (50% bigger than Central Park in NYC). Some of the things that are in the park are the zoo, the art museum, Missouri history museum, planetarium, and many other things. The zoo is rated one of the best in the U.S. It was a good zoo, I don't know that it is our favorite zoo we have been to but it was nice. But the best thing about it, it is FREE. I think that is great and the way it should be for all zoos.

In the evening we went to the Loop. It is their cool street in St Louis (kind of like a big Dickson Street for you Fayettenamese people) that has cool local shops, restaurants and music venues. We met up with one of Margo's good friends from high school and her husband and ate at Blueberry Hill which is a famous restaurant and music venue. Chuck Berry plays there regularly. It was alright. After dinner we went across the street and got root beer floats at Fitz's.

It was a good/busy day overall. To see some pictures from today and the rest of our trip, click here.

Busy St. Louis Day #2

We did a lot today, almost too much to talk about. First we went to the old historic courthouse building. It is run by the national park service and gives a history of St. Louis and the westward expansion. It was not anything amazing. Next, we went to the Arch. It was amazing. I think it is one of the coolest architectural things I have ever seen, right up there with the Eiffel Tower. We took the tram ride to the top of the tower which was a little scary since you ride in the huge steel barrel type things that I have to duck in the whole time. It was a pretty smooth ride overall and it was cool to see out the top. It was also very cool to see some of the pictures of them building it. I took lots of pictures of the arch. Next we went to this really old cathedral down the street, it was the first Catholic cathedral west of the Mississippi. They had lots of pictures of the church dating back a long time that showed all the changes that had happened around it which was pretty interesting.

It was then time for lunch. We went to the Schlafly Taproom. It was really good. Margo had a steak sandwich and beer cheese soup and I had a roast beef sandwich with mashed potatoes. We really like their food. It was the restaurant of the brewery we went to yesterday. Have I mentioned that their beer is really good, especially the APA.

After lunch we went to the City Museum which several people had recommended to us. It was amazing. It is probably the coolest place for kids that I have ever seen. It is really hard to explain. It is like a huge McDonalds playland but 1 billion times better and made with wood, cement, metal, and recycled materials. There are all kinds of amazing places to climb and explore and they have some amazing slides. I highly recommend taking your kids there if you are ever in the area.

Next, we went antiquing a little bit. There is a street we read about called Cherokee street that has lots of antique shops. It was pretty good, we bought a couple things. I think I like our antique shops in Arkansas better. As a side note, the best antique stores I have ever been to where in Pennsylvania.

After antiquing we went to Ted Drewes Frozen Custard which is a famous place on old Route 66. It was really good but I did not think it was much different than Shake's in Fayetteville.

After relaxing at the hotel for a little while we went to hang out and have dinner with an old high school friend of mine who lives here, Travis and his wife Emily and their son Owen. It was really fun to hang out with them and reminisce about old times. Travis was president of our senior class and I was vice president. Our 10 year high school class reunion is this year so we worked on planning that a little bit.

We took lots of pictures today but I am having problems uploading them to the blog. I think it has something to do with the crappy hotel internet. I was able to upload the pictures to our Picasa web album so you can check them out there. Just click HERE. Some of the pictures have captions to tell you about them.

We Arrived

Today was the start of our little getaway to St. Louis. We arrived today and we are returning to NWA on Friday. It was cold today so we did not have much planned for today except getting here. The drive was pretty uneventful. We did stop on the way to our hotel at a smaller St. Louis brewery called Schlafly. They do a tour of their brewery and have tastings. They also have a restaurant there and a restaurant downtown, we are going to the downtown one later on in the week. The beer that we tasted at the tour was really good. The hotel we are staying at is the Millennium Hotel which is across the street from the arch. We got a super good deal on it by bidding for it on priceline. We were hoping for an amazing view of the arch like they show on their website but instead we got this view.

Pretty nice, love seeing the interstate and a railroad bridge. I am not complaining though because we got such a good deal on the hotel.

As some of you may know, we love eating out and when we travel to somewhere we love to try out local restaurants. Thanks to my old high school buddy Travis (more about him in a later post) who gave us several suggestions of places to try. We have several places we are going to try out while we are here. Tonight we tried out a pizza place called Joanie's Pizzeria in a part of St. Louis called Soulard which is an old Irish part of town I think. It was really good. We had a double crust pizza which has a crust on top and bottom.

As a side note, we made one of our best purchases ever a few weeks ago. We are realizing how great of a purchase it was on this trip. We bought a Garmin GPS thing. It is awesome in directing us to where we want to go and if we get off our route for some reason, it automatically recalculates to get you back to where you should be going. It has already saved like ten fights between Margo and I because I am usually yelling at her for not being able to read the map while I am driving and tell us where to go. We downloaded from google maps all the places we wanted to go while in St. Louis so all we have to do is select one of those places and it takes us there. It is amazing.

I think that is all I have for today. Stay tuned for updates throughout the week.

Deer: 1 - Margo: 0

Well, Margo went deer hunting with her car tonight. The deer won. She was coming home after dark and said it was foggy. Apparently, there was a whole herd of deer on the road and she could not stop in time. She did not hit it that hard because it did not do tons of damage but it is going to have to have some work done. Luckily it was the CRV which we have full coverage on so the insurance will pay for it all. It does not look like it messed up any vital parts, just messed up some exterior pieces. Looking at it in the dark, it looks like the front passenger fender, the hood, front bumper, and grill will all have to be replaced. She didn't kill the deer, so we did not even get any meat out of the deal. The bad news is we are going on vacation leaving Monday. We are driving to St. Louis and we were going to take the CRV but I don't think I want to take a messed up car just in case it does have some problem I can't see. So, we might have to take a rental car on our trip. Be sure and give Margo a hard time when you see her, maybe you could call her the deerslayer.

It is hard to see the damage in this picture, but it is messed up

Free Firewood

Yes, you read that correct....FREE. I am not giving away all of our wood, just a little. I cut too much last year for us to use in our wood stove during the winter. We are just about at the end of the wood burning year and I still have 3 or so rick of seasoned wood left. I don't really need to save it for next year because we have tons we have been cutting up after the ice storm to use next year. I just thought that some of you might like to have some if you were going camping sometime or you needed it for your home firepit this spring. The wood I am giving away is seasoned and ready to burn. Let me know if you want some and you can come get it sometime or if I am going to see you, I can bring some to you.

Easter Goats for Sale

These really aren't any different than regular goats, it is just that it is close to easter. We have been seeing people trying to sell "Easter bunnies" so we thought it might work to sell our goats as "Easter goats". We have decided to change around our goat herd a little this year so we are selling three of our grown nannies at this time. I will have some of this years kids and our billy for sale coming up in a couple months as well. I am putting pictures and description with prices of the goats up on our website. On the for sale page, click on animals for sale . If you know anyone that might be interested send them our way.

New Birds

On Sunday we acquired some new chickens and ducks. We had been looking for additional ducks for a while. We were down to one lone duck because something had caught our other two. We didn't really want to have to get babies and raise them but we were about to that point because we could not find adult ones for sale anywhere. Finally last week someone on craigslist advertised grown ducks for sale. When Margo called her she said she also had chickens for sale. So we bought all the ducks and chickens they had because the price was so good. We got 5 ducks (3 males and 2 females) and 9 chickens (1 rooster, 8 hens). Now we have a total of 15 chickens and 6 ducks. We are going to get rid of three of the chickens soon, I have traded them in exchange for borrowing a wood splitter for a few weeks from a friend at work. I am not sure if we will keep the rooster or not, it just depends on how annoying he is. We are getting a lot more eggs now. And I really like having ducks around, I like the sounds that they make.

Here are the ducks


Here are some of the new chickens

Learn to Farm Day

Tomorrow (Saturday), we will be having another day for people to come out and learn on the farm. We are actually not doing anything that involves a lot of learning but it is more of a fun thing. At least to me it is a fun thing and I thought some other people might enjoy it as well. I have borrowed a hydraulic wood splitter from a friend and we are going to be splitting a lot of wood, weather permitting. So, if anyone has any interest in helping split a bunch wood with a wood splitter come on out Saturday morning. If it rains we will not be splitting but will be doing inside out of the rain type things.

First

We had the first fresh veggies of the year from the garden yesterday. And even more exciting is this is the first time we have had this vegetable from our garden. Any guesses? That's right....ASPARAGUS. I planted it last year in a special bed I built for it in the garden. It takes it at least a year to get established and produce pieces big enough to eat. We got three pieces and they were yummy. Hopefully we will much more in the weeks to come. We are looking forward to the months ahead of gardening and more fresh veggies.

Happy St. Patty's Day

I hope everyone has a good St. Patrick's Day. I wanted to post a St. Patrick's related video that a friend, Travis, had on his blog last year. This video is so funny to me and is one of my favorite videos of all time.

Springtime

We are very excited that spring is well on its way. Even though it snowed some today, it has been getting a lot warmer and some of the trees and flowers are starting to bud out and bloom. Another sign of spring that I really enjoy is the frogs are back at the pond calling. One big project we have been working on is planting grass seed the past week or so. I have cleared out some areas this past year in order to get more grass growing for the animals. I have been moving around the hay feeder all winter and throwing out grass seed around it whenever I move it to a new area which has worked well for me establishing grass. Some of the grass from doing that is already starting to come up. This past week or so Margo and I have been going around spreading grass seed on bare areas and then raking it in. Some of it that we raked in a week or so ago is already starting to come up. Hopefully a lot of it will do well so we will have more grass for the animals and maybe even be able to have more animals. Another exciting thing about this time of the year is it is garden time. I have been planning out the garden and deciding what I am going to plant and what is going to go where. I have already planted a few of the cool season veggies. I put in my onions and planted some lettuce seed last week. The lettuce I do is a mesclun mix. Last year I had problems with lots of grass and weeds getting in the bed with the lettuce. I decided to do it in containers this year in hopes of preventing that from happening so I thought I would try making some planters. I cut down a oak tree a while back that was hollow and I did not cut it up in case I wanted to use it for something. I cut a section out of it and split it in half with my froe. Then I cut some thin sections off a solid piece of wood and attached them as ends. It may not be pretty but I hope it works well for my lettuce. Here is a pic.

The Farm of Hale is Worldwide

Sorry it has been a while since I have posted anything. We have had lots of stuff going on here at the farm but nothing too exciting. I will try to do better at posting more often. I wanted to tell you all something I think is amazing and really cool. On my last post about learning to farm I got a comment from a lady that said she was excited about the learn to farm opportunity but sad because she would not be able to attend because she lives in the UK. That's right another country, across the Atlantic. And it is not like this is one of our friends that lives over there, like Walt and Annie who live in Germany and read our blog (at least I think they do). This is someone I don't know and have never met before. Her name is Danielle Gohin and she is a science technician (teacher type person maybe?) at a school. She has a blog, click here to see it. Our blog is on her list of blogs she follows. I think this is really awesome that somebody that does not know us in a different part of the world follows our blog. It makes me wonder if there are other people out there who don't know us that follow our blog and I wonder how they came across it. If there is anyone else out there who reads our blog, who we don't know, I would love for you to leave a comment so I can find out if there are others out there.

Learn to Farm

I had an idea the other day. We often have people tell us that they would like to learn some of the stuff we do on the farm such as taking care of animals, gardening, etc. It gave me the idea that when we have stuff that people might be interested in helping with, we should plan on doing those things on Saturdays and invite people to come out and help/learn if they want. This isn't a situation that we are saying we need help to do these things (although extra help is always nice). We just thought we would open it up so if people had interest in what we are doing they can come check it out. So, this weekend will be our first "Learn to Farm" Saturday. This Saturday, we are planning on doing goat care. We are going to check all the goats to see if their hooves need to be trimmed, check to see if they need to be wormed and worm if needed, and castrate the baby goats that need to be castrated. Sounds like fun doesn't it. If this sounds like something you might be interested in checking out, send us an email or leave a comment and I will let you know what time. Who knows we might even let you stay for dinner. If it rains all day Saturday, we will do it a different day.

The Reality of Farm Life

Farm life isn't always good times. Sometimes unhappy things happen. This evening one of those things happened. A baby goat died. I am not sure why it died, it was very unexpected. Yesterday it was doing great and today when I got home from work, it was mostly dead. I tried to save it but I don't think it was anything I could have helped. I don't think it was sick. The only thing Margo and I can think of that might have happened is that it got butted really hard by one of the bigger goats or it got stepped on or kicked accidentally by the cow. The reason we think that might have been what happened is because it could not stand up or control it's body but it still looked healthy, it's eyes looked fine and it's ears were still perky and moving around. It would not nurse or swallow when I tried to force feed it. It seemed to me like it was a brain injury, spinal injury, or other major internal injury. I guess we will never know for sure. I don't always make a big deal out of a baby goat dieing since that kind of thing tends to happen but this was a special baby goat, and that is the extra bad news. This baby goat was everyone's favorite. It was the baby goat we referred to as Yoda, the brown one with the ears that stuck straight up. We are very sad, we really liked him. We had even talked about wanting to keep him even though he was a boy and we only keep girls. But, that's life on the farm.

New Cabinet

Sorry it has been so long since the last post. Not a lot of exciting stuff has been going on around here. We have still been trying to get the place cleaned up from Mr. Ice Storm. I will have a few posts to make this week though so be sure and check back. One thing I started working on before the ice storm that got interrupted was I was building a new cabinet for the house and more specifically the dining area of the house. Those of you who have been here know that we have one big open room that is the entry, living room, piano room, kitchen, and dining room all in one. One thing we wish we had more of is kitchen cabinets/storage. I built a cabinet for the kitchen a while back that matched our kitchen cabinets to help with this. This new cabinet was the next piece to help solve that issue. I finally got time this past week to finish it up and I was able to debut it for our Valentine's Party at our house on Friday night. I built it with oak so it should be pretty solid. I tried to stain it close to the same color as our table and chairs, barstools and behind the couch table. They are all a dark walnut/cappuccino color. This proved to be more difficult than I thought it would be because those things are all built out of different woods (even thought they are all basically the same color). The table and chairs are out of parawood, which is a type of wood I really like but isn't readily available around here in lumber form, the barstools are pine and the couch table is mostly veneer. I am going to pause here in talking about the new cabinet to talk about parawood since I am sure lots of you don't know about it or have never heard of it. Parawood comes from the rubber tree which is the tree they extract sap from that makes natural rubber. After many years of harvesting the sap for rubber, the trees get old and stop producing very much sap and so they are useless for their primary purpose. Someone discovered that this wood of the old rubber trees is great for making furniture. It has a dense grain (comparable hardness to maple), minimal shrinkage, attractive color and acceptance of different finishes. I am a big fan of it and wish I could get it to build furniture. Now, back to the cabinet. I could not find a stain that would match the color of the other furniture so I had to use 3 different colors of stain layered to get close to the right color: first coat of dark walnut, next was red mahogany, and then dark oak. It is not an exact match but it is close. I think this might be my best piece of furniture I have built to date. The design I came up with worked out well, it came together really well and it looks good without very many mistakes. I think it is definitely something that we will hang on to for a long time. I enjoy designing and making furniture. Maybe one of these days I will get some more and better tools to be able to make all kinds of furniture. Since this post is getting long, I will get to the pictures.

Here it is.


Side view


Open View- it holds lots of stuff which is what we needed


As you can see I made the top part of it a 6 bottle wine rack, I like that part the best.

The Hills are Alive with the Sound of Electricity

Finally, on day eight after Ice Storm 2009 we came home to electricity. It was a very welcome sight. We have really enjoyed staying with friends this past week but it is nice to move back into our house. It got really tiring going back and forth everyday and not being in our own bed. I wanted to say thanks again to everyone who let us stay at your house and fed us meals. And to everyone who offered help to us. I wanted to give a special shout out to Adam and Sarah who we stayed with most of the time and who let us store our freezer and refrigerator stuff at their house. It is really awesome how great everyone was in offering to help us out, I think we have some of the most awesome friends in the world.

Here is a great old music video for all of you to watch in celebration of us getting our power back.

Chainsaw Massacre

We still don't have power. The power company said they hope to have 90% of the customers back with power by the end of the week. I hope I am in the 90%. I want to give a special thanks again to everyone that has helped us out and let us stay with you and cooked us meals. I also want to give an extra special thanks to everyone who came to the farm and helped us out on Saturday cleaning up limbs and trees. We had five people besides us helping out. We got a lot of stuff cleaned up, it would have taken Margo and I like three weeks to get done what we did on Saturday. I cut up trees for five hours straight while everyone else stacked brush. We also have been going around helping other people get their trees cut up and yards cleaned. I am so sore from sawing up trees, that is all I have been doing the past 3 days but there is so much more to do. I have never seen so many trees and limbs down.

Here we are out on the farm cleaning up on Saturday.

Still No Power

Things finally started to thaw out today around here. There are still tons of streets closed because of trees down and still tons of people without power. All the schools are closed including the University because of no power and downed trees. My neighbor talked to the power company today and they told him it would be 1-3 weeks before we had power. So that sucks. We transported all our freezer and refrigerator stuff to our friends' who we are staying with freezer and refrigerator so we would not lose it all. I wanted to say a special thanks to everyone who has called and offered help and to let Margo and I come stay with you. You may be sorry you offered because we may be calling you when our current house hosts get tired of us. Several guys have called and offered to come help us clean up on the farm. So, we are having a clean up day on the farm tomorrow. Margo and I will be out there all day working on cleaning up trees and stuff. If anyone is bored, come on out and we will put you to work. We will have at least 2 chainsaws going. I am sad about losing so many trees. I had cleared a good portion of our land to get grass growing and help it look nice and I left all the trees I really liked and now they are mostly destroyed. I guess that is all I have for an update today on ice storm 2009.

Pics From the War Zone

We still don't have power (of course). We are staying with some awesome friends (Adam and Sarah) who have power and internet. We go home after work and work on stuff out on the farm and then come to town at night and spend the night.

This is shed and barn


A limb on the back yard fence, this one got within a couple feet of the house. I worked for a few hours today getting our fences back to at least where they would hold in the animals, there is going to be a lot of repair to the fences.


This is the the corral by the barn, you can see a goat under the tree


This is an area I cleared out last year between us and our neighbors to plant grass, normally you could see our house looking this way


This is another area on the far side of the house that I cleared out last year and was working on planting grass this year, notice some trees are bent completely over, some are broke at the top, and some are uprooted.


Our county road.


This is me trying to stay upright on the ice while carrying a chainsaw (sounds safe doesn't it), it took me about 2-3 hours to clear our 1 mile of county road up to the highway.


This is a shot of the state highway that leads to the interstate, it was mostly one lane in and out of trees for the 7 miles. We drove over 4 downed power lines along the way.


Another shot of the highway

No Words

We are alive. I can think of no word that can express how bad things are here in Northwest Arkansas after the ice storm. This post is just to let all of you who don't live around here know that we are okay and it is really bad here. Hardly anyone has power here, the latest report said an estimated 150,000 don't have power just here in NWA. I am at work right now and we have power today here at the hospital (there wasn't power yesterday) and I have internet here at work which is nice. Our power went out on Tuesday night and by my best estimate it will be weeks before we have power. The people in town were told it would be the weekend before they might have power. This area got between 1.5 and 3 inches of ice. There are no trees left untouched, I would say 60-70% of my trees on the farm are completely destroyed. My fences are destroyed, there are limbs on all our buildings, our house had 3 limbs hit it during the night. It was really scary. Limbs and trees were breaking constantly yesterday. The good news is that so far all of our buildings at the farm are intact, the falling limbs have not caused major damage. We did have one baby goat die. I cleared our mile of county road yesterday morning and it took me around 3 hours to get a car path to the highway, there are two power lines down just on our county road. Last night we fed the animals and then we came into town before it got dark and stayed with some friends who had their power back on. The state highway between our county road and the interstate is one lane only because there are trees covering a lot of the road. I drove over 4 downed power lines on the highway. It basically looks like a tornado came through but instead of just a limited path, it took out all of Northwest Arkansas. Apparently, last night Obama declared Arkansas a Federal Disaster Area so hopefully that will help get some relief here. I will try to post pictures when I can. The Farm of Hale has changed. Please pray for all of us here, it is really bad.

Everyone's Favorite

Sorry I have not been posting much lately, not a lot is going on around here. People have been asking for more pictures of the baby goats. They are all 2-3 weeks old now and they are growing like crazy. They are being very playful at this stage which is fun. We have had lots of people come out to see them and they have been a big hit with everyone. We have one baby goat in particular that seems to be the overall favorite. It is our little brown one that I have talked about before that has the ears that stick out. It's mom has smaller ears than our other goats but they don't stick out like this baby goat's does. It just got the freak ear genes. Margo calls it our "special" goat, and one of our friends, Ashley, nicknamed it Yoda. I kind of wish it was a girl so we could keep it around but since it is a boy and won't do us any good to keep it, we will have to part with it in a few months. Here is a picture of it from today.


It's ears are like this all the time. It is even better when he runs because then his ears go straight up like a rabbit. That is his brother next to him and that one's ears are more like their mom's.

In other big news Margo's brother and sister-in-law had their baby January 15th. Her name is Ella and she weighed 10 pounds 10 ounces which I am told is very large. The only picture I have of her I took with my cell phone in the hospital the day she was born. It is not super high quality since it is from my phone but I think it is a nice picture.

Baby It's Cold Outside

As I am typing this it is 11 degrees outside with a wind chill of 3, which is pretty cold for around here. We decided to put up a couple of heat lamps for the baby goats tonight. We usually only provide heat lamps for the baby goats at night for the first day or two after they are born and only if it is cold outside. After the first couple days of being alive they can withstand pretty much any cold weather that we have around here, but it is extra cold tonight. We figured as long as we have the heat lamps and because it is unusually cold tonight we might as well turn them on for the little ones. Margo went down to check on them a few minutes ago to see if they were taking advantage of the heat lamps and almost all of them were snuggled up together under the lights. It made for a cute picture (you don't hear me us the word cute very often, so enjoy it).

+4=11

We had two more baby goats yesterday and two this morning. This brings our total up to 11. We have one more goat that has not had babies but she will probably not have hers for another month or so. We started out good having equal numbers of girls and boys but these last four were all boys. So we have 4 girls and 7 boys, sounds like a future barbecue to me. We got some action photos of the goat having her babies last night, so they are a little graphic.

Here is the goat starting to have the second baby, those are little feet sticking out.


Here is the baby freshly out, still mostly in it's fluid sack


Here is mama cleaning it up, and that is it's brother in the background


This is one of the boys born today while we were at church


Here is other brother that was born today. He was our biggest baby. We averaged around 6 pounds for most of the babies. He weighed in at a hefty 9.1 pounds.


We had several friends and some of my co-workers and their families come out this weekend to see the babies.

This is one of my co-workers, Cathy, holding one of the babies born last night. For those of you who know our goats, this is Crazy's baby. Crazy has smaller ears that stick out a little. Well, this poor baby got the ear stick out gene and her ears are longer, it makes her look a little "special"


This is some friends of ours daughter, Sophie

When it rains, it pours....goats

Holy baby goats. We are growing like crazy. We have two goats that I thought were going to be our first goats to have babies but they weren't. I thought for sure these two were going to have them today because they are looking close (if you know what I mean). But they didn't, it turns out they are going to be almost the last ones to have theirs, because three(yes three) more goats had babies today. Two of them were a complete surprise because we thought they were another couple weeks off. The first one we discovered that had babies today was one of our goats we have had since we moved out here (thanks Trav). She had two babies that might be the cutest babies ever. They were all dry and up nursing and walking around with no problems when we got home. We took them and put them in the barn with their mom and then Margo went to feed hay to the rest of the goats and cow and I went to go cut some wood. Margo came running back from the hay feeder to tell me we had a surprise. One of our other goats we weren't expecting to have babies yet had two babies. We have a set of white twin nanny goats we got last year that this is their first year to have babies and it was one of those that had the babies. I thought it was crazy not only that she had them this soon but also that she had two babies. Usually the first year goats only have one baby, and she was not that big either. When we went over there to catch them we noticed that both of the twin nannies were bleating like they were calling for their baby. And then it hit us....the pregnant twins had their babies on the same day. How crazy is that. They each had one baby and we had no idea which one went with which goat because the twins look a lot alike and the babies looked a lot alike and they were all together and the babies weren't for sure who they belonged to, they were going to both mamas. It was very confusing. We took them over to the barn and just had to watch them until we saw which baby nursed which mom and then we separated them into separate stalls. We will make them stay separate for a few days so they can all get figured out who belongs to who. I just hope we got it right. We now have 7 baby goats total and I am expecting we are going to have 5 more. So, I need all of you people out there to help. I need you all to come out and pet and play with the baby goats. The more they are handled by many different people now the more tame they will be when they grow up and I want them pretty tame. Please come help. I am sure you are all saying, get on with it, we want to see pictures. Well here you go.

Here are the twins that were born today, they are super cute. The boy is chocolate brown with one white foot and a white place on his head and the girl is mostly white with brown splotches.


Here is one of the twins' baby. It is a male


Here is the other one's baby, it is a female

The Brother

I am finally getting around to putting up some pictures of the brother to the little female goat we had in the house the other day. The brother did not have any issues after being born and is doing great. By the way we were able to leave the little female with her mom and brother last night in the barn (with a heat lamp) and all day today. She is doing just fine so far, maybe a little behind her brother but I think she will catch up. Here are some pics.

Here is the brother


And here they are together

Next

Well, we had more baby goats born today. It was kind of a surprise. We knew this goat was getting close but thought two other goats were going to have their's first. There is a story to go along with these though, one about did not make it. One of the problems with having baby goats at this time of year is if it is really cold the babies can get hypothermic quick, especially since they come out all wet. It is especially true for the first baby to come out with twins because the mama does not work on drying it off until she gets the other one out and that few minutes makes a big difference on a 5 pound wet baby goat when it is 35 degrees outside. Back to the story of these babies. When we got home I went and checked on them and one of the baby goats was standing next to the mom and the other one was laying all sprawled out not moving. I thought it was dead at first but when I got up close to it, it let out a really faint sound and then I saw it's eye move a little. I picked it up and it was freezing cold and a little stiff and could not move. I ran it into the house and we dried it off good and put it in a plastic bag up to it's head and put it in the bag in some really warm water to try and get it warmed up. After several minutes of that we took it out and rubbed it really good with a towel to try and get it's blood pumping and we set it in front of a heater. It starting to perk up a little and make more movements and a little noise. I went out and milked it's mama a little and squirted some milk in it's mouth and it swallowed it which was good. We kept warming it up for an hour or two and it finally nursed from a bottle with a nipple on it. After a while we took it down to the mama and let it nurse from the mom, which it did, which was a really good sign. We brought it back in and put it by the fire, which is where it is now, and let it watch the Fiesta Bowl game with us. It is starting to stand a little on it's own now and wag it's tail. I think it is going to make it, it is a little girl by the way. I think we will probably keep it in the house tonight out of the cold and if it keeps improving we will put it with it's mom tomorrow. It's sibling is doing just fine, it is a boy, and is out in the barn with his mom. The boy weighed just over 6 pounds and the girl is 4.5 pounds.

Here it is nursing from a bottle. It kind of looks like I am strangling it but I am just holding it's head in place.


This is when it was first starting to stand on its own.


I will try to post pictures of her brother tomorrow when I can get some while it is light outside.

Big News

Yes, our first kid. I hope you are all as excited as we are. We thought it would never happen but last night it finally did. It was born around 6pm and weighed six pounds and it's a girl. There were actually two born but one did not make it. The mama birthed them in a place with a lot of loose dirt and we think the one that died got dirt stuck all to it and around it's mouth when it came out wet and got choked. Very sad. The other one is doing great though. We have four more mamas that are due any day as well. So, before too long we will have lots of little ones running around. Now for some pics.

Looks just like Margo




Here is mama with the baby nursing