Ideas for COVID Quarantine, VI

Deep clean one room of your house per day.

So ... I don't have any pictures of me actually doing that.

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Ideas for COVID Quarantine, V

Take up a hobby like painting!

I was suckered into buying these Arteza watercolor pens early last year, or maybe it was some time in 2018.  I had never painted with watercolor and didn't really need them, but ... their ad was good.  So, I had the pens and hadn't ever done anything with them because, basically, I know nothing about watercolor.  I did do a couple of painting just to test them out.  I usually paint with acrylic, but watercolor is completely different.  I didn't feel like I had control of where the paint went.  I'm kind of a control freak, which didn't work out too well with the watercolors and my lack of ability to control them.  I've seen some artists do amazing, very detailed work with watercolors, but I'm just not there.

The watercolor pens are great, but I'm not sure what I'm going to do when they inevitably run out of paint.  I tend to want to paint a lot of animals, so that means using mostly blacks and browns.  I guess I'll have to switch to painting something else.

So, with extra quarantine time on my hands, I broke out the pens and these are some of the pictures I've done.

Pug 6x8: $25.00

Golden Retriever 6x8:  $25.00

Buckling 6x8:  $25.00

Curious Goat 6x8:  $25.00

Pensive Goat 6x8:  $25.00

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Ideas for COVID Quarantine, IV

Learn to milk a goat!

OK, so this is not something that everyone has access to.  But, this is my world.

So, I do have a milking season and usually start milking one or two of my goats when their kids are two weeks old.  But, this girl has had a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week, which has resulted in me also having a (slightly less) horrible week and I've had to start milking early.

This is Tulip.  She's one of my 2016 babies, so born and bred on our farm.  She's usually a slim sleek statuesque goat.  She's even fairly slim while pregnant.  I knew all my pregnant does were due to kid between March 30-May 15 and I already had one doe have triplets.  Tulip is too sleek for her own good.  Usually, the girl's udders fill up pretty good right before they kid, but hers didn't, so I thought she was a week or two away from kidding.

For example, 

Violet is very close to kidding.  Her udder will probably get even bigger than this right before.

Anyway, since I didn't think Tulip was close enough to kidding, I left her out in the pasture with the rest of the herd.  She chose the coldest night of the month, 39 degrees, to have her kids and she did it out in the field instead of in the shed.  I didn't discover her until late the next morning.  One of the kids was dead and the other just barely alive and very weak and cold.  I rushed them to the barn and did everything I could think of for the baby.  I bottle fed him (he could barely suck) and I warmed him up.  He lived about 24 hours, but ultimately, we lost him.

So then Tulip was full of milk with no babies to feed.  I had spent some time last season training her to the milking stand, but she had never been milked.  So, she had a crash course in getting milk.  Poor thing.  Just lost her babies and having to suffer the indignity of having her milk taken.  But, we were getting into the rhythm of it and she had progressed enough that she was no longer kicking at my hand and the bucket.

**sigh**

I usually only milk in the morning and leave the kids with their mamas for the rest of the day so I don't have to milk more than once.  But, since she has no kids, I'm having to milk morning and evening.  It's a pain, but it couldn't have happened at a better time.  I mean, I can't go and do anything else, so I'm always around morning and night.

So, I went out to the barn on Monday morning to milk and took a peek in the stall to see if Violet had kidded yet (I learned my lesson and brought Violet into the barn early).  But, what do I see?  Tulip..hanging from the hay net by her foot.

Obviously, I was too panicked to whip my camera out, but this is exactly what she looked like.  (Seriously, y'all, I can draw better than that crappy picture, but just so you get an idea of what I faced.)

I thought she was dead.  She could have been trapped up to 12 hours.  I touched her leg first and it was cold, but when I touched her neck, she stirred a little so I knew she was still alive.  I tried to get her foot untangled, but was having no success because she was too heavy to lift to take the pressure off.  Tom had chastised me just a couple of days before this for not calling him when I need help.  So, I got my phone out of my pocket and tried to call.  I'm telling y'all, it was just like a nightmare I've had many times in which I'm trying to call the police in a dire emergency and my fingers don't work and I don't know the phone number and I can't find it and I fumble and fail multiple times.  

I finally made the call, and shouted "help me!", then dropped my phone and went back to trying to get her untangled.  I did manage to get her foot out before Tom made it to the barn.

So, she couldn't, and still can't, use her leg and it's all swollen.

It's hard to tell what this is, but it's her eye.  It was completely swollen shut, probably from banging it against the wall for hours trying to get loose.  Poor thing.  I hope there's no permanent damage.  She's on anti-inflammatory and pain meds and I'll confer with the vet again on Friday to see if further action is warranted.  

In the meantime, the milk production doesn't stop.  It seems cruel, but there's a possibility of getting mastitis if I don't keep her milked.  So, Tom has been helping me with the milking, mostly getting her on and off the milking stand.

So here I am in all my morning glory, bed head, and coveralls over pajamas, and sexy crocs, milking my lame goat.

She has an appetite, so that's good.

You can see that right front leg just dangling there.  I'm helping support her weight with my knee since I'm sure it's difficult for her to stand still that way with all the weight on one front foot.

So, if you want to come stay with us, I will teach you how to milk a goat for free!  And, you can practice twice a day.  😊

Any takers?

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Ideas for COVID Virus Quarantine, III

Stock your woodpile!

We heat our home with a wood furnace.  Not a wood burning stove, but a furnace that sits on the back porch and is hooked up to our A/C ducts.  So, we got through a lot of wood.  Husband spends a great deal of time throughout the year making sure our woodshed is stocked for the winter.

We're wood scavengers.  No trees are ever harmed in the heating of our home.  We never chop down a perfectly healthy tree.  We find dead trees on our property to harvest.  And when a neighbor has a tree down and doesn't want to use the wood himself, husband goes and gets it.

This one was a huge oak tree that died of natural causes on a neighboring ranch.  I counted the rings and lost count around 100.  So this was a pretty old tree.  I'm so sad for it, but it will heat our home all next winter.

The neighbor had already cut it into tractor manageable chunks.  He loaded it into our dumptruck which husband drove home and dumped out back. It took about five trips.  Then he cut it into shorter pieces that would fit on the log splitter.  Just think, it wasn't very long ago that men had to do this whole process entirely by hand.  I can't even imagine.

I don't always help with this task, but it does go faster when I do.  Husband splits the wood, tosses it into a wheelbarrow and I take it to the woodshed and stack it.

Jasper Cat likes to hang out in the woodshed and peek over the edge like a spy.

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Ideas for COVID Virus Quarantine, II

Macrame!

Break out your old jute twine and dust off your rusty macrame skillz.  If you're from my generation, you may remember the big macrame fad back in the 70's.  Funny how things like that come and go, but macrame is big again.

Modern macrame is much more than jute, now, though - new fancy knots, new mediums, and new uses.

It's been about 40 years since I've done any macrame, but I don't know why I ever stopped.  It's so fun!  And Pinterest is loaded with tutorials for knots that I never dreamed of.  This is something that anyone can do.

If you don't want to DIY, but you want a macrame planter, I will sell this one to you for $35.00, free shipping.  Just leave a comment if you want it.

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Ideas for COVID Virus Quarantine, I

Put in a garden.

Like all other "non-essential" people, I'm stuck at home in quarantine.  Fortunately, or not, my regular lifestyle is nearly quarantine anyway, so it's not so much a problem for me.  I do miss getting out every once in a while to have a coffee at Starbucks and pretend I'm essential while I sip my drink and read on my iPad.  And, I miss getting to see my grandkids, not that I'm over there every day or anything like that.  But, it's nice to be able to go see them when I want or when I can get away from the farm.

Otherwise, we non-essential farmers are just carrying on life as usual.  My goats will start kidding any day now.  I have a hen that's been sitting on a nest for a month.  The problem is, she keeps getting off the nest and while she's dashing around trying to take care of business before the eggs cool, other hens are getting on the nest and laying eggs.  **sigh**  And, while hens get on and off, eggs get broken.  So, the original five eggs that I gave her are long gone and keep getting replaced.  I finally had enough and got her off the nest and gave the eggs to another broody hen.  I'm about fed up with them all.

Husband and I have spent a great deal of time on the garden so far this season.  We hadn't really had a garden the past two years, so it was an overgrown, weedy mess.  So he tilled it up and got busy making mulch with his wood chipper.  We've saved our paper feedbags for the past couple of years, too, so we laid down feed bags and topped them with mulch.

Our garden is half the size as it usually is.  I'm OK with that because it's less work, but I'm wondering if this year is not the year, of all years, to have excess produce.  If the economy doesn't rebound after the quarantine, we may need much more.

Obviously, not everyone has room for a garden like this.  But there are lots of ways to grow your own food.  You can do raised beds or pots.  There are all kinds of ingenious products on the market in which to grow food.  I've even seen people plant their seedlings or seeds directly into bags of potting soil.  Just lay the bag on its flat side, slit open the top, or cut a square out of it and plant.

See my other ideas for using your quarantine time wisely.