Saturday, April 12, 2008, 17:24
Thunder Snow
Since Thursday, it has either been raining here at Rural Route 2 or snowing so hard that you cannot hardly see across the yard.
This is the same weather system that produced a blizzard in northern Wisconsin and northern Minnesota. We don't have blizzard conditions around here, but it has been rather wet over the last couple of days, and it was still snowing Saturday morning. Not much has accumulated, only a couple of inches of snow, but what little there is quite wet and heavy and slushy.
I was supposed to cover an event for the newspaper Thursday evening. It started at 6 p.m. I would have had to leave at 5:30. Randy got home from work at 5:20 and said he'd had to stop three times to clear the slush from his windshield on the way home. The roads were slushy, and he had seen where one car had already gone into the ditch. It was snowing very hard at that point. I had taken Charlie for a walk up the road a ways at 4:30, and when we got back, my fleece jacket was white with heavy, wet snow. I had to leave the jacket and my stocking cap and gloves in the basement so they could drip off. I don't know how long it will take my jacket to dry.
So, I ended up not going anywhere Thursday evening. In the afternoon, it thundered a little bit. And then the snowflakes turned to the size of 50-cent pieces for a while. I have never in my life seen chunks of snow falling like that and so many so close together.
The snow continued Thursday night. And then it began to thunder and lightning. In the afternoon it was only one or two rumbles of thunder. Thursday night there were flashes of lightning along with the thunder and it continued off and on for maybe an hour. This is the first incident of "thunder snow" we've had so far this winter. Except I can't really say "this winter" because it is April -- and it is supposed to be spring. After that, the snow changed to rain and sleet, and it rained and sleeted all night.
Friday morning and for part of the afternoon, the rain continued. Then it switched back to snow in the afternoon, and it continued to snow for the evening and during the night. But yet again, the ground is warm enough that not much snow accumulated. Sure, everything is white around here. But all things considered, not much snow has built up on the ground.
Isabelle and Kajun have been spending much of their time over the past few days in their respective barns. Isabelle comes out long enough to gobble down her grain, then she runs back to her shelter to get out of the snow or rain. Kajun doesn't even come out of the barn but instead waits there for me to come to him. Usually he runs out to the fence and then trots along the fence when I am headed to the barn.
Seeing as Isabelle had spent all day Thursday, Friday and into Saturday standing in her shelter, I had quite a mess to clean up Saturday morning. She really does not care to be out in any kind of precipitation. I carried manure and wet hay and mud out to the manure pile for a long time until I finally got her shelter cleaned out.
The horse pastures *were* starting to dry out a little bit, but after this, it's going to take lots of sunny, warm weather to make any progress in getting the pastures dried out, not to mention the garden and the fields.
A disaster of sorts
If I don't have to cook hamburger again for another 10 years, it might be too soon at that.
A few weeks ago, Randy got -- oh, I don't know -- maybe 150 pounds of meat from a friend. We had some room in our freezer, and we asked my brother and sister-in-law if we could put the rest in their freezer. They obligingly said we could. It was an old freezer they were no longer using and had moved out to the garage, but it still worked.
Friday about noon, my sister-in-law called. Their old freezer had given up the ghost and had quit working. Many packages of the meat were already thawed out by the time she discovered it.
So, I went downstairs, got a cooler, wiped it off, and headed over there. They had cleaned out the freezer above the refrigerator and had put the meat in there. I ended up with 2/3 of a cooler of thawed-out one-pound packages of hamburger to deal with.
I left the meat in the cooler outside. The temperature was right around freezing, so I figured it would be all right there for a while. I called Randy and asked him to buy some freezer bags on his way home from work. Friday evening, Randy and I started cooking hamburger. While he cooked, I stirred the cooked the meat to cool it off and put it on a flat pan to cool it off even more. Then I started packing hamburger into freezer bags.
All together, we cooked 44 pounds of hamburger.
I cleaned out the little freezer above the refrigerator to make some room. It is amazing what accumulates in a freezer that you forget you have and then it just sits there. I made enough room to store the flat packages of cooked hamburger. Each package has about 1 1/2 pounds of cooked meat in it.
As soon as we started cooking the hamburger, of course Pixie came out to the kitchen to see if she could be of service. It did not take her long to find out she did, indeed, have a job to do. As I was spooning hamburger into the freezer bags, every great once in a while, a chunk of cooked hamburger would escape and land on the floor.
Faster than you can "summer" -- Pixie would pounce on it like a duck on a June bug. By the time we were finished, she was pretty well convinced, I think, that it had been a long time since she'd had so much fun.
Randy says he can foresee many meals of hot dish in his future. He suggested that I stock up on Tater Tots, seeing as that's his favorite kind of hot dish. I pointed out that I can use the cooked hamburger for spaghetti and chili and tacos, and when the weather gets warmer and my Red Sails lettuce is growing, for taco salad, too.
Well, one thing about it. At least I don't have to *cook* the hamburger before I use it. I have to say, too, that this was beef hamburger, and remarkably lean beef hamburger at that. Not as lean as venison, but very lean for beef hamburger.
LeAnn R. Ralph
Thursday, April 10, 2008, 14:06
A Two-in-One Trip
I took Pixie and Charlie to the vet clinic Wednesday morning for their annual vaccinations and their heartworm tests.
In the past, I have always made an appointment for one dog, taken the dog in, and then made another appointment a few days later or the next week for the other dog. This year I decided to take them both at once and save a trip. Randy drove my truck to work, and I used the Silverado with the extended cab to take the dogs.
Charlie rode in the back seat and Pixie rode in the front seat. It was a challenge getting Charlie into the truck. He loves to ride in the truck, but he is now experiencing some difficulty getting into the truck. He has had Lyme disease five times, in spite of getting the vaccine every year, plus he had that horrible infection in his hips from an abscess after surgery for fatty tumors two years ago. So I think he has some arthritis in his hips. It was quite a job to get him into the truck, even with the back seat up. Charlie weighs 70 pounds, and I basically had to lift him up into the truck. Not great for my ribs. But we made it.
Pixie only weighs 30 pounds, so it was so big deal to lift her onto the front seat.
The vet agrees that Charlie probably has some arthritis in his hips. I have noticed that if I can't get him out for more walks on one day and he lays around a lot, the next day he is stiff and has more difficulty moving around. We are going to try another pain medication for him called Metacam. Charlie was on Metacam after his surgery when he was in so much pain from the infection in his hips, and it was like a miracle. It's expensive, $77 for a 100 ml bottle, but I know that it works.
Charlie also has some more of those fatty tumors developing on his belly, and the one in his groin that caused so much trouble with the infection is coming back, too. I told the vet that in view of the trouble he had with complications after the last surgery, I was not going to put him through surgery again. The poor dog was sick all summer, was on antibiotics all summer and was in so much pain he could hardly move around.
As for Pixie and her injured left leg, the vet thinks she has a soft-tissue injury and probably pulled some ligaments when she was running around on the snow and ice in the hayfield two weeks ago. I didn't see it happen, so I don't know what happened. Pixie's leg appears to gradually be getting better and she is not limping quite as much.
Both dogs tested negative for heartworm. The new test they have also tests for Lyme disease and ehrlichiosis. Both dogs tested negative for the tick diseases, too. I was surprised Charlie would test negative after he has had Lyme disease so many times, and the people at the vet clinic were surprised too.
By the time I got the dogs home, I was exhausted. I am really, really hoping that the lingering fatigue from the flu and the sinus infection clears up SOON. The sinus infection is better than it was, but I don't think it is gone completely. I have two more days of antibiotics, and then I'm done with that. I am happy to say that so far, I have not broken out in hives from the medication.
What happened to spring?
The weather has been cloudy and rather cold all week with highs only in the upper 30s or into the 40s. And now the forecast says we might get some snow again. Spring does not appear to be in any particular hurry. Many of the spring birds are here already, including the woodcocks, but I have not yet seen or heard a meadowlark. Usually the meadowlarks are among the first of the spring birds to arrive back here.
I have also noticed that the pocket gophers are digging new mounds, both out in the hayfield and along the shoulders of the roads. The cloudy, snowy weather has not stopped the pocket gophers from doing their spring cleaning to clear out their tunnels or to dig new ones.
LeAnn R. Ralph