Thank you Everybody!

I guess I should start by saying that yesterday we celebrated my 16th birthday! I opened a few gifts in the morning and I had a good day overall. I thought Jonathan came up with a neat way for me to have to search for one of the presents from him and my other two brothers. He gave me a box with a little piece of paper in it that said:

"Thou must do what thou art told.
Even if thou must be in the cold.
Search a brother's boot!"

And then when I found a slip of paper in one of the boots in the entry way the note said:

"Smart though thou must be,
even now thou dost not see.
What dost now give thee light?"

There was a piece of paper on the light fixture above me that read:

"Oh man, how thou wilt proceed?
You can only go where'er I lead.
Advance to a lonely quad of wheels."

There was another note in the cab of the truck:

"I give thee heat, but I am cold.
I eat what'er you feed me.
To guess my nature may be bold,
But it is I who holds the key!
Delve into the midst of my belly.

I found the note in the barrel stove in the shop:

"Ha! Ha! Though now you art at my side,
I still will not disclose.
But search the dust to find a guide,
it is there where you will learn to follow your nose.

There was a note in the sawdust under the table saw that read:

"Follow your nose, follow your nose.
I really do mean what I say!
Are you impatient? Do you be weary?
Well don't wet this last bit put you down.

I am part of a circle.
I make things better that take me.
Into one end, out the other.
It's really quite simple, you see.
1/4 of this. 3/4s of that,
maybe a 1/2 cup of some ______
When it's all together, a taste good (to some).
Look in my plastic white soft container!
(dig below the surface now...)"

On each of the notes there was a letter and when they were all put together it read, "GRAIN."
So I ended up finding my present buried under a layer of grain in one of the grain totes in the farm building! Thank you Jonathan, Andrew and David!

We had extra special meal of pizza for supper last night too. There is a lot of work that went into it but here's a few of the points that made it special. It was made with mostly organic (at least as far as we can tell) ingredients, whole wheat, homegrown tomato sauce, cheese (lots of it!) made from our milk, delicious pork sausage from our pig and even a few of the spices were grown right out in our garden! When you wash it down with a glass of milk you wonder how we were able to like eating store bought pizza! Thank you to the Grandparents too for their gifts to me as well!

Now I guess I'll write what came in the mail today... My Uncle sent me a present and said on the note I'd better update my blog! So I tell you about what I got. It's something I've wanted/needed for making chores easier. When I go out to milk, at least right now, it is dark out so I need light. I've been using a very inexpensive 5-bulb LED headlight, that only one of the bulbs works, when I go down to the barn to milk. Well now I have upgraded! My uncle gave me a very nice super bright LED head light that has all sorts of different settings on it for brightness.

I tried it out tonight and it worked really well. It has a sliding light diffuser on it, that spreads out the beam of the light to illuminate a wider area, besides having 4 different light options. Normal brightness, medium brightness, and a low setting. It also has a flashing setting plus a booster light button that is brighter than the normal one! I really like it. Thank you Uncle Mark! It also tells you how much battery is left by a small blinking light that changes to orange and eventually red when it's getting low. It is supposed to last 120 hours on the lowest light setting (perfect for milking) and it runs on three AAA batteries.

I will probably put a few pictures of it on here later...

Peter