Life on the Farm and the 6 million dollar dog

This has been an interesting week. On Sunday the dog, having been left alone in the house, and out of her crate at my recommendation took her time to tear the kitchen apart and in the process injure herself. more on that later.

My Son has been busy in his garden. He planted several varieties of potato. He dug the rows by hand in some VERY rocky soil.  And he had to mulch the peas which were sprouting because of the freeze warning. he already has many of the vegetables he will be growing started (in his room) and a couple of weeks back we purchased a small green house that he is now moving some of the starts into so they can begin to “harden off”.

Also on Sunday we moved the chicken coop to it’s semi-permanent location. we did not let[mudslide:picasa,0,mike.essinger@gmail.com,5604325149071343777,8,320,right] them out into the yard until Monday because of the cold, but now they are proud, free-range, bearded lady chickens, learning how to exist out-of-doors.

We planted the easter lilies we brought home from church and I finally received my order from the seed company and got the luffa, two varieties of pumpkin and goji plants planted. I will have to see how this seed company does since I have never used them before.

The big goats (Connie and Rosie) each got a “spa day”, that is we trimmed their hooves. Rosie’s hooves were terrible and she had started limping slightly on her back left leg. I realized that I need to just schedule a monthly hoof trim for all of the goats and just get it done. Connie’s hooves were not quite as bad and did not take as long, and I have not gotten to Abby’s hooves yet.

My Daughters project to install a patio with gazebo back by the “orchard”  had somewhat stalled because there is a lot of digging involved and she was trying to do it all on her own. She has dreams and lots of heart, but her arms just could not complete the task. Anyway it is better to work with a partner, so I dug in as it were, and in the process used the dirt we dug out to do some landscaping I had been thinking about. We were also supposed to get the base gravel delivered on Friday, but they lost our paperwork/order and we were forgotten. We should get the delivery on Monday.

So back to the dog….. it turns out that while she had been ripping apart the kitchen on Sunday, she brought down something heavy on her leg and broke it. The Leg I mean. She was limping, but as we probed the leg we could not feel anything unusual, nor did she indicate she was in pain. The Vet said it probably started out as a hairline fracture, but as she continued to use it during the week it became worse and finally completely severed the growth plate at the knee joint. We got the updates from my wife as we were working on the patio and now came the decision. Do we JUST splint it and she will NEVER be the working dog I bought her to be? Or do we spend more money than we have right now to have the break “wired” in place so she CAN be a working dog?

First it cost us to buy her from the pet store, then it cost us to have her cured of parvo, then it cost even more to have her spayed and chipped and now this! I really love this critter, but DANG is she expensive!

OK on to the geeky stuff… just prior to my first post I had upgraded my GNU/Linux laptop from Ubuntu Maverick Meerkat (10.10) to Ubuntu Natty Narwhale (11.04) there was a slight glitch wherein the upgrade hosed the boot sector of my ‘puter, but with the excellent help from the Ubuntu forums I was able to get it back in working order quickly.

My wonderful children got me a new weather station for my birthday. the old one kind of works…most of the time. The new one is a Ambient brand weather station with a touch screen monitor and gives me temperature, humidity, wind speed and direction, and rainfall. The cool thing about it is it comes with a CD of software to control and view the data from a Windows PC or a Mac. The cooler thing is that it works with a Open Source software called Wview which allows me to plug the touchscreen console into a usb port on my laptop and view the historical data and weather trends! But the coolest thing about it is I can share that information with you, dear readers! Just follow this link and you too can know what the weather is like at my farm!

A few clarifications, first the web page only updates when my computer is up and running and plugged into the console. Second I have set the program to update the webpage YOU can see, only every 20 minutes. I get updates every time the console surveys the instruments outside, you don’t. Thirdly not everything I can see is being uploaded to the web, and I am working on that problem, but you can still see all of the data, so be patient and I will get the minor glitches resolved.

Also I don’t know if my web hosting service will allow continuous updating, so if they object this may go away. I was going to try posting pictures with this entry, but realize just how large they are. I will work on getting a gallery up soon.