I need to concentrate on the business at hand--preparation for Western Art Week--but I am distracted by the need to keep one eye on our ewes, several of whom look imminently ready to lamb. We continue to feed them in the front pasture, despite its distance from the safety of their barn and our return to wintry weather. The cold NE wind gives me anxiety, but the distance the ewes must travel gives them healthy exercise, the location of their feed ground provides a good view of them from our kitchen windows, and the pasture is relatively clean.  Thus, I shift focus frequently from lambing watch to preparation of paintings that I intend to display during Western Art Week in mid-March--cutting foam core backing, attaching labels, shrink wrapping the unframed pieces, etc. Additionally, I have promised myself that I will complete several small originals on note cards to sell individually. I'm not inclined to make prints or copies of original paintings on note cards to sell by the dozen, but I love to do small, one-of-a-kind cards for special people and occasions, like several of my former art students who received original watercolor graduation cards last spring. I have no idea whether such cards would sell at a venue like Western Art Week. I welcome feedback as to potential for sales and reasonable pricing. The posted pictures are examples of my students' graduation cards.         

Our Weedy dog is home and how glad we are. She is on a full dose, 50 mg., of prednisone per day for 21 days, will then be on a 1/2 dose per day for an additional 21 days, and finally, on a 1/4 dose every other day until the prescription runs out. Dr. Nydam said she should be cool, calm, and restful for at least one week, with NO livestock work. Thankfully sparrows are not livestock, because Weed is giving them her earnest best. Nor are gophers livestock, (although I did have a long ago student declare them to be "awesome" when grilled over open coals). That clears Weed to dash ahead of us on an otherwise sedate walk to check our first trap set of the season, signal success, grab the dead rodent from the trap, give it her fiercest, but unnecessary, death crunch, and parade triumphantly down the county road dangling her trophy from her teeth. So goes our little dog's convalescence.     

Super Bowl Sunday 2017 may be memorable for Lady Gaga's bungee jump and a come-from-behind Patriot OT win, but it was shearing day at Prairie Island. The weather forecast called for 38 degrees; the weather reality was cold fog and a high of 12 degrees. The day was long, though everything went as smoothly as possible. Thank you, Brent, for your smooth, careful, and conscientious shearing; thank you Heidi, Conner, and Bruce for helping to boost resistant ewes into the shearing lane. Jim vaccinated, gathered fleeces, and stomped wool into wool bags. I did the pre-planning and set-up, helped push/drag/bamboozle/cajole ewes into the shearing lineup, and had lunch ready in a jiffy--veggie/burger soup, pumpkin pull-apart bread (Thank you, Katrina.), cranberry/orange relish, dilly bean pickles, and lemon bread for dessert. We all worked to get the Klick contingent off-loaded, on-loaded, and homeward-bound safely, sans wool. Only Heidi and I know of the mothering-up scene that occurred just before lunch when five jolly lambs scampered willynilly, bleated frantically, and temporarily defeated our best efforts to connect them with their concerned mothers. Ultimately, we allowed them all to suck, then popped them back into their portable dog kennels for safe keeping during our lunch break. After all was done, Jim and I deconstructed our barn set up, constructed a pen large enough to hold all of our ewes, spread a generous bed of straw and locked the ewes inside for the night, a cold one. Lastly, Jim held our "house ewe" while I milked 2 1/2 quarts of milk from the swollen half of her udder that became obvious only after she was sheared, a half that looked dangerously like it was infected with mastitis. Whew! Milking returned it to soft symmetricality. Later that night the lamb was nursing from that side and the ewe seemed comfortable.

You may wonder why we shear in early February. Importantly, that is when Brent is available for our small job, but for multiple other reasons, it is best for ewes to be sheared before they lamb. First, ewes are more likely to lamb in a sheltered spot if they are not wearing five inch thick, storm-proof woolen insulation; second, shearing exposes the udder and removes wool tags that newborn lambs may waste precious energy sucking when they're first figuring out how to nurse; additionally, sheared sheep release a great deal of heat that serves to warm a properly-sized lambing barn to temperatures survivable by newborns; finally, lambs are easily smothered when ewes in full fleece lie down nearby.

So, here are our ewes the morning after Super Bowl 2017, greeted by snow and zero degrees. Yup, they're cold. Now, however, as I compose this segment, they are nested into straw in the barn and stoking their inner fire with contented cudding.