How satisfying to have showered early, be in my PJs, and have a gourmet Memorial Day dinner almost ready to enjoy--grilled trout, baked potatoes, roasted veggies, and salad. Um-umm. While lingering at the window, to enjoy evening light illuminating the bench to the northwest, I noted an odd shape in the sheep pasture, a shape that looked wrong. The magnified view through our mono-scope confirmed what I feared: a black-faced ewe lying in the ditch. Her head was up, a positive sign, but, if she'd been able to stand and move, she would have traveled with the other ewes and lambs out of the pasture and to our corrals for the night. Using higher powered binoculars, Jim double checked me. Yes, we had a ewe down. We turned off the grill and oven, hurried into chore clothes, and headed out, me on the 4-wheeler with a halter and ropes to tie her legs and immobilize her for the ride home, and Jim in the skid-steer with its bucket for loading and carrying her. What we discovered, recumbent in the ditch, was a sheep lookalike, a galvanized hot water tank that had been converted into a culvert. Its galvanized surface, oriented diagonally to our window vantage point, was just the right size and color to be a sheep's body and the dark shadow cast on the interior looked exactly like a Suffolk ewe's head. Since our evening rush to rescue (followed by a delicious, if delayed, dinner), I have carefully observed that offending culvert numerous times and in all sorts of lighting. It continues to look disturbingly like a black-faced ewe who has given up on life. We lease the pasture, so the culvert is not ours to move, but I make a point to count off our black-faced ewes each evening when I move sheep to the safety of our corrals for the night.         

Yes, who'd have thunk that lowly bullsnakes romance for hours? Should you wonder how I might know that tidbit, let me explain. In tending my gopher traps, I regularly plod up and down our long driveway. During one of my recent forays, it was hard to miss the two 5' long bulls cuddling, as only snakes can, midway between two of my traps and inches from the wheel tracks in which I was treading. Oblivious to all dangers--raptors, vehicles, herpa-phobic humans--they carried on in broad daylight. I don't know when their ritual began, but I first noticed them shortly after 9:00 AM. Not wanting to catch a snake in one of my traps (I did that last year. The snake survived and so did I.), but eager to nail the rodents I had seen dive into holes fore and aft of the writhing pair, I checked the traps more often than usual. At 1:00 PM, the bull pair was still carrying on. At that point, I decided to seek further knowledge. Scholarly articles with factual details were hard to find in my quick Google search, but YouTube's generous smorgasbord of videos provided a wealth of visual affirmation that my observations were commonplace. I tell myself that snake videographers who focus on mating behavior must be an unusual lot. That said, I must confess to taking the camera on my 3:00 PM sojourn. A good thing, too, for the pair was wrapping it up, so to speak. In conclusion, I look forward to discovering a nest of bullsnake eggs in the near future. None of my sources suggested the time frame from mating to egg laying to hatching, but I did learn that the eggs can be up to 4" long, so I'm keeping my eyes open, tending my traps regularly, and hoping to spot eggs before I welcome multitudes of young wrigglers.   

1. Affirmation that teaching is the best-ever career. Last week I returned to school to introduce Fairfield High School Art I students to watercolors. What fun! I hope the students were encouraged by what they accomplished. For me, the week was energizing, frustrating, rewarding, exhausting, and too short, as it should be. (Thank you for entrusting your charges to me for the week, Mrs. Mathison.) In what other career, do clients/students stay in touch, come to your home to visit, send graduation/wedding/birth announcements, visit with you for an hour at chance grocery store meetings, and fill you with pride when they tell you that, yup, they are still making art?

2. Days that are so full each one requires a to-do list. Today is representative. As always, it began with a cup of coffee and then feeding chores; we then went to Choteau for a cafe breakfast before delivering our wool to the Front Range Wool Pool. Extension agents, from the counties within the Front Range group, operated the machine that loads and weighs wool bags and collects core samples; Hutterite colony members baled the wool that came in small or underweight bags; MSU Extension specialists sampled each bag, micron tested fiber samples, and directed each bag of wool into a particular quality category. The wool from our white faced ewes was more coarse and variable than I would like, a result of cross-breeding that began years ago, during daughter Katrina's 4-H years. That fact is embarrassing on Wool Pool delivery day, but I remind myself that we market 90 pound lambs at four months of age--lambs that have reached that weight on ewe's milk and grass, with no creep feeding or ewe supplementation--a testament to hybrid vigor achieved through cross-breeding.

Back at home, I moved ewes and lambs into a pasture for a few hours of grazing, part of their transition from hay to green grass.

I then weed-whipped some patches of cheatgrass that have invaded corral edges and fence lines. Such efforts may be my version of windmill tilting; I know that cheat is the grass that won, and continues to win, the West, but I remain optimistic that if I'm diligent about whacking off seed heads before they mature, I can outlive and vanquish such foes.

Next, Weed joined me to check gopher traps. We gloated about one fat rodent eliminated from the gene pool, detoured around a big bull snake doing his/her best to sound like a rattler, and pocketed a few spears of wild asparagus to add to our gleanings, to be roasted tonight and made into creamy soup tomorrow. 

3. Have I mentioned that retirement has given me time to paint? Included is my latest, entitled Prairie Island Kaleidoscope. It is one of three paintings that I submitted to MT Watercolor Society's national juried show. Stay tuned regarding acceptance. Notification will be forthcoming in July. 

I've run out of time for this post. Afternoon barn and greenhouse chores await; afterward, I hope to get 3 - 4 rows of corn planted before dinner.

If anyone reading this is mired in a rut, bored, or apathetic, please stop by.  Enjoy a cup of coffee and join me for THE CURE.     

Don't ever question my vigilance or credentials as an amateur scatologist! WARNING: Read no further if squeamish or weak of stomach.

Having completed Weed's prednisone treatment last week, a regimen of steadily-diminished doses that began in mid-February, I am observing her closely and hoping that her auto-immune disorder has been cured. I noted early this week that she was passing segments of parasitic tapeworms. That called for a weight-based dose of an appropriate dewormer that we duly administered. Not being one to assume success, I observed her post-treatment deposits, just to make sure that her dewormer did what it ought. One such recent deposit filled me with horror. It contained what appeared to be a large, green, circular worm, of the sort that one occasionally finds in garden soil. I call them cutworms; they roll into a ball and demand quick response, a lethal squish between two rocks. In the case of Weed's sample, I sought out a stout twig to probe and more thoroughly inspectigate the offending worm. What I discovered brought a chuckle and total relief. Her dreadful exotic parasite was, in fact, one of the rubber bands that we use for docking each lamb's tail, the undigestable remnant of what we call Wooly Pops, dessicated delicacies that she seeks out after they drop from lambs, and that she eats like, yes, popsicles.