A Pleasant Surprise

Hello!

I just came in from outside helping my brother Andrew pull an old moto-ski snowmobile out of the snowdrift by the semi trailer. He wants to get it going now using parts from the other two we have.

I guess you might be wondering what our pleasant surprise was? Thursday evening we got a call from the Bornneman family saying they were going to be in the area the next day to look at a grain cleaning rig near Landa. We generally don't get to see many of our friends very often so we were exited to get some company! They said they were coming in the afternoon and that Andrew Bornneman would like to stay at our house until Sunday. Of course we said that would be fine with us and Mr. Bornneman and Cora, Jacob and Andrew all came for a short visit the next afternoon. They stayed to visit for a little bit and then had to leave to get home before chore time so we didn't really get to visit a whole lot.

We all had a fun time with Andrew and he helped us figure out what we need to do to get the old cream separator going again as well as fixed a few things on the snowmobile to make it run better. He sure knows what he's doing when working on engines! We played some games in the evenings and music too. Thanks for coming and staying with us Andrew!
This afternoon Dad and Jonathan were going to town so I rode along with them to go vacuum at Metigoshe Ministries. I usually get dropped off there to work but when we drove in we could tell there were a lot of cars in the parking lot so I ran in and checked to see if I should vacuum. Nope. I will have to come back on Wednesday. There was a bunch of people quilting and something going on in the church area so I ended up riding along to town with Dad and Jonathan. I can't remember the last time I went to town, but I think it must have been almost two months ago or so. I'd rather be home working on something here.

Peter

I just came in from milking... One of the goats had a kid this evening and it seems to be doing just fine. It was a goat that was born this spring so both the mother and the kid are small.

Petzl, TIKKA XP Head lamp

Here's a few pictures of the head light.

It tilts ratchets down if you want to aim towards the ground more.

With the diffuser...

...without the diffuser. When it is not in use it slides to the side.

Here's the booster light (brightest) without the diffuser.

This is the same light only more spread out. It is hard to see much difference when it is so light out already.

It's a great tool to have when it dark out!

Peter

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

Bartlett Farm on the Web!

This will be a short post because I've been staring at a screen so much lately I can't stand to be on the computer much longer!

You'll have to check out the new website, bartlettfarm.us to see all the products we have available. Dad and I have been working on it mostly. There are some things that will be made easier to understand later, but the basic idea is there. To order, people will have to print out the order form and send it to us through the mail because we won't have a online shopping cart for a while yet.

I thought I should write now so you wouldn't think I quit!

Peter

More milk, less time

We have been getting a little over 5 gallons of milk each day now and I'm getting pretty quick at it too! I strip her out in a little more than 20 minutes.

We made two churns of butter this morning. We got a old electric butter churn from someone and it is made not to use paddles. The butter is churned by a little metal tube with four holes at the top that spins at the speed of the motor, it is not geared down at all. We put three quarts of cream in and had a little over two pounds of butter in 8-10 minutes. It sure beats shaking it in jars!

We are starting to see the beginning of a storm that is supposed to hit us tomorrow. It is pretty windy and foggy out right now.

This is me playing a guitar tune called "Song for Emily". I learned it from a instructional dvd by a guitar player Kenny Smith. There are a bunch more complicated songs I have yet to learn because they are a lot harder. I would like to learn them all before spring comes.

I took these pictures of Samson today...

I thought the second one was cute! He is trying to get me to throw his deflated basket ball!

Peter

Tuesday afternoon

This afternoon I went down the hill to spread some fresh straw in the barn for the cow and goats to bed down in. It is supposed to get cold with a big snow storm so the animals will be inside more.

Our barn we built with a few new ideas we had to make cleaning it out easier. We made some of the walls removable so we can customize the layout of the barn. We had the back corner divided off for the cow to be in but it was only 10x10 feet and she didn't have enough room to do much moving around. This afternoon we just un-nailed a few boards and moved the divider wall so now she has a 10x20 foot area where we will keep her when it gets colder out.

Peter

Snowball weather

Today was sunny and warm like yesterday.

The snow by the house was good for snowballs so me and David practiced our snowballing skills this afternoon. I started out pretty bad and couldn't hit a five gallon bucket at 10 yards (David said I hit ten times out of a hundred) but I increased my accuracy and hit it a little better later on.

Dad and Mom went to town for a home school gathering with some other people and were gone most of the afternoon.

I have to go get ready to milk now.

Peter

Sunny days

Hello,

I guess it has already been a few days since I wrote last! The weather has been really nice so we've been outside.

A few days ago I went down to the barn and found John (the goat) with his horns all wound up in the carpet hanging on the door of the barn. I had to use my gerber to cut part of the carpet that was wedged between his horns in order to get him untangled. He was wound up pretty tight.

Sandy is doing well. When it got really cold her teats got a little scabbed on the tips because it they got cold (-60 with the wind chill) but now they have healed up and are fine. Last night and a few nights before I only took about 30 minutes to milk. That included walking to the barn and back and washing and dipping the teats before and after milking and drying everything off after that. I was noticing how shiny and healthy her coat looks and that is due to the mineral mix and copper that we've been giving her. I'll post more about our experiences with copper sulfate in another blog post sometime.

Samson likes to ride in the truck with us and watch out the windows. He doesn't like the car as much because he can't sit up and look around but he loves going for a ride in the truck. In the picture we were going down the road a ways to dump the leftover goat skins and heads on the back road for the coyotes.

In case you're wondering why my blog got messed up it was because I tried to upload a different template and lost the old one and now I can't get the header to come back. Sometimes blogger is frustrating....

Peter

Goat butchering

Hello again,

We went out after lunch and cut up a few of the goat kids that were born this spring. It went pretty quick and we were done with five of them in a little over an hour. I gutted two of them and Jonathan did the other three. We carried them up from the barnyard and hung them on the gambrel beside the house to skin them. Our friend Steve came over yesterday and sharpened a bunch of our knives for us on his electric sharpener and then came over here to help us with the goats today also.

Four of the goats were young bucks that we had wanted to get rid of for a while but we were waiting for a nice day to do it. I don't think we could have asked for a nicer day! It was around 35 degrees this afternoon so our hands and feet didn't feel too cold. The other goat was a little doe that we kept for us in the freezer. The bucks weren't castrated so we didn't want to keep the meat.

We "dispatched" the goats with the .22 in the back of the head and then slit the throat to let them bleed out. After the animal is dead it doesn't seem to me that it is any different than a pile of meat with the hair on. We have a handy little saw we use for cutting the bone between the rear legs and sawing through the rib cage that makes gutting really easy. It has a plastic end on the tip so that there is very little chance of puncturing the intestines.

Speaking of gutting, this summer while we were butchering chickens Jonathan and I timed ourselves to see how fast we could gut a chicken and do a fairly good job. I think my fastest was a minute and a half and Jonathan got one done in a minute and 20 seconds. We had quite a few to practice on!

Peter

A bit about our Goats

Well, today turned out to be a pretty nice day. We don't have a thermometer outside that works so I'm not sure how warm it got but it felt nice! We spent this morning singing some songs and did a Bible study focused on 1Peter chapter two. We have been working together on 1Peter chapter one to memorize it but I think I've only gotten 12 verses down.

I was thinking of what to write about and decided I'd say a few things about our goats.

Everybody seems to think that all billy goats butt. None of the bucks we've ever had have even tried to butt any of us! We have had quite a few different ones and they are all either really friendly, or they keep away from us (I prefer they stay away!).

Also, everyone seems to think that all goats are hard to keep in. This is only true for unhappy goats! (in our experience). We have had goats that will stay in a pen that the bedding has built up so high that there is only a 18 inch fence keeping them in and they don't jump over. I guess that when they have got plenty of water and food they don't feel like going anywhere.

Through all of this summer, we had the dairy goats held in by one strand of electric wire (that was not electrified!) and only had a few times where one (the same one every time) would lead the rest back to the barn when it started raining. Goats don't like rain.

I guess we did have one little billy goat that wouldn't respect the electric fence (even with 7000 volts) and would get out pretty frequently but he will be butchered soon.

We have pretty friendly goats. They have all got their personalities too. It is funny so see how they all react differently to things. Some get mad, some get curious, and some run away!

The goats have their pecking order just like any other animal. The bosses get the first of everything and the rest have to wait. It seems that the low end goats aren't allowed to fight back when they are banged around and just have to get out of the way.

John (the big buck) is the highest ranking goat and gets his way with everything. He has got a set of horns on him that are probably about 30 or so inches across and he rubs them on anything he can get his hooves on! OSB sheathing doesn't last long when they are constantly scraped on with sharp horns.

Peter

Warmer weather hopefully

I just came in from outside to warm up my feet. It was warmer today but still not really warm so Andrew and I were out in the shop. Yesterday we were out there too and started the wood stove that Andrew and Jonathan put in. That warmed up the shop pretty well. It is made of a 30 gallon oil drum with legs and a door that my Grandpa welded together. I think is supposed to get warmer for the next few days. I hope so!

A few days ago I came in from milking in the morning and I couldn't feel the ends of my fingers! It wasn't seriously frozen but just cold so I let them warm up by the wood stove.

We've been doing a little more practicing music together lately, getting ready for a few places we will be playing at in February.

Mom has been making cheese today to use up some of the leftover milk that is in the refrigerator. After making one type of cheese (we call it pizza cheese because it melts) she uses the whey and boils it down and makes another type of cheese called mysost. It is a brown cheese that can be made with cows milk or goats milk. There are a lot of Norwegian people around here that like it because it was originated in Norway and the only place to buy it is mail order from Norway! I guess they charge a dollar an ounce for it if you buy it. I like it on toast for breakfast with a little raspberry jam on top of it and it goes down real well with a bowl of fresh yogurt!

Peter

What is it?

The light from above bounces off a shiny object. It is sitting quietly on the floor to my left, a dark shadow covering the side close to the box of potatoes next to it. It is comprised of mostly a cylinder, fitted with various attachments clinging to the outside in a useful arrangement. On the straight sides of the cylinder, close to the floor, there is a depression in it's surface that continues all the way around and smoothly slopes back to the surface of the object. Approximately eighteen inches off the floor the sides of this curious object make a sudden bend inward, forming a sloping cone for a distance of about three inches, and then continues upward.

From the floor to its top, this metallic object measures about twenty inches, including a dome shaped piece made of the same material that can be fitted into the wide opening on the top of this object. Attached to this inverted dome is a pipe, bent to form an arc reaching from one side to the other which makes the placement of the dome onto the main compartment quick and easy.

There are two solid bars attached firmly to the edge of the main compartment, lined up directly across from each other and two hinged latches located near the rim of the opening.

The interior of this object is similar to the outside except that the finish is not as reflective. There is no seam in the construction of the main compartment and it is very clean.

What is it?

Please leave a comment and let me know what you think it is.

Peter

Risk: game of global domination

Hello,

I guess it's been a while since I wrote last so I will sit down and write now.

I'm in the middle of a desperate game of Risk right now. I guess I'm not doing too bad though, I have conquered all of north and south America and am moving east through northern Africa. I have fortified my continents pretty well too and now I just captured all of Africa! Now everyone else (Jonathan, Andrew and David) are starting to conspire against me to wipe my army off the board. Next time it is David's turn he will be trading in his set of three cards for 45 additional armies and will attempt to re-take the land I conquered. We don't play Risk too often but when we do it can take a few days to finish it. We have been working on this game for five days now!

The weather is supposed to get a lot colder now starting tonight so we will keep most of the animals inside the barn for now. We don't want frozen teats. We started using a homemade teat dip for sanitizing the cow's udder and teats before and after milking. We found the recipe at http://www.fiascofarm.com/. There is a lot of helpful information on there and it is more focused on goats but the information is similar for cows.

We had some trouble with the wood stove pipe rusting (because it was cheap galvanized tin stuff) but this afternoon dad set up some triple wall pipe and got the wood stove running again which is nice because the floor heat was costing us quite a bit to run. With floor heat there isn't any place for you to warm up when you come in from outside because all the heat is the same through the whole house.


Just now as the sun is going down I can see "sun dogs" on each side of the sun so it must be getting colder out.

Peter

End of 2009

Well, today is the last day in the history of the world that I can blog and say it is 2009! For our family there is not really anything special about today.



Dad just got done frying a double batch of donuts so we ate some and we will freeze the rest. They are great as a snack or for breakfast. I was over at Metigoshe Ministries for a while this afternoon to take down tables and chairs from a funeral this morning, vacuum, then set up 120 chairs for the church.


Andrew has been creating some pretty neat 3D drawings on a new program we got called "Blender."

You start out with a mesh frame and construct the basic shapes and then you can add fill colors and lighting and textures and look at it in 3D. I guess you can animate your drawings as well and make a movie of them. It is a pretty complicated program to use but once you figure out how to run everything it goes pretty fast.

This is the screen you edit and shape the drawings with. You can create landscapes and all sorts of different drawings with it.

Peter

P.S. I think I'll wait to blog until next year :0) !

Back to work...

Hello again,

We had a fun few days with my Uncle and Aunt who drove out here from Minnesota on Monday. They live a few miles down the road from where my grandparents live where Mom grew up in Carlton MN. We played games with them and visited mostly. They hadn't been here since the upstairs of the house was just being shelled in so there was a lot to show them around the farm.

Today I had to go to Metigoshe ministries to vacuum again after going yesterday and I will need to go tomorrow also. They had an event called "Nights of Christmas" held there and there was a lot of stuff for me to vacuum up and sweep off the kitchen floor. There is quite a few spruce trees set up in the church sanctuary that are always dropping needles on the floor so today I used the shop-vac to clean up all of them.

We had the snowplow come up and plow us out (finally) but he didn't get it plowed all the way up to the house so we had to blow the snow for a driveway to get the car down to the front door.

Milking the cow has been getting easier now that my hands are getting used to it. Sandy has been giving us about 2 1/4 to 2 1/2 gallons each time. I'm still slow at milking her (not fast enough for it to foam) and it's been taking me about an hour to strip her out. We are getting about a quart of cream off of each one gallon jar that has been sitting for 12 hours. We haven't made ice cream yet but we've been using our own butter. This afternoon Mom made a batch of simple soft cheese that we tried melting on pizza for supper. Taste was perfect! I got the first pieces because I had to go milk.

You can't beat the taste of pizza made with pizza sauce made with homegrown tomatoes, crisp crust made with (mostly) freshly ground whole wheat, locally grown organic beef and fresh homemade cheese!

I guess it's time to go to bed now so I will be done with this blog post...

Peter

Truck stuck

This afternoon I was supposed to go vacuum at the church but we're stuck here until the grader makes it through. We shoveled the truck out and loaded the back with a stack of heavy firewood and tried to make it but even a four wheel drive pickup won't go through an 20" snowdrift very well. We shoveled some but that didn't work for the whole driveway. If the plow makes it in tomorrow I will go then.

Andrew started up the snow blower and cut through the snowbanks by the house for a walkway. The temperature is not too far below zero but the wind makes it seem worse.

Dad went down the driveway to check the road to see if the county plowed that but they hadn't so far.

The animals in the barn are doing well. I've been milking Sandy at 7:00 and we've been getting a little over two gallons each time. There has been a little blood in the milk but it is clearing up now. We are looking forward to making cheese, butter, ice cream and more, all things that don't taste the same if you use goat's milk.

Yesterday we sent in a few orders for some stainless steel milking equipment to keep the milking process clean and sanitized. If you're planning on getting anything stainless steel be prepared to pay an arm and a leg for it! As soon as we feel sure about the milking procedure and system for cooling we will start to advertise locally for selling cow shares. We have most everything figured out for how to handle the contract and bottling and pickup of the milk.

Calliope stays outside even through the snowstorms so this morning she came up to me and asked me to help her scrape the ice off her coat. :-) She is the boss of the barnyard. Second in command is the billy goat John. The the cow and the other 15 goats pretty much stay out of their way.

This is a logo I drew on the computer to go on the post cards we plan on sending out for advertising. We may even have nice labels on the milk bottles later on. We will start with regular one gallon jars to trade back and forth each week when people come here to pick up their cow's milk.

That's all for right now- Peter

How much can you learn in 24 hours?

Hello,

If you've checked any of my family member's blogs you have probably heard our heifer had her calf. Well, she had it. This afternoon it started showing signs of pneumonia and not long after that it ended up dieing. Even when it was first delivered it did not make any effort to raise itself and we probably should have warmed it up quicker than we did. We decided to leave it in the barn for an hour at least and see if its mother would get up and dry it off. Sandy the mother didn't want to get up at all and we read that early signs of milk fever can start to show soon after birth and so we suspected she might be down for that reason.

We took the little bull calf up to the house to warm it up and we thought it might recover. It was shivering a little so we covered it in blankets and it warmed up some. We milked out a little colostrum from the cow and used some powdered stuff and tried to get some down the calf but it wasn't able to suck on its own from a bottle. We tried using a save-a-kid syringe and that worked and we got about 2 quarts of colostrum down it in a few hours.

We have had some experience with milk fever in goats before and knew what to do and had the IV supplies on hand so it went quick and easy for the cow. Even if it wasn't milk fever for sure we thought we'd try it anyway to be safe. I have read that jersey cows can have more problems with milk fever because of the high milk to body weight ratio and it isn't rare to see it it soon after birth. After the (subcutaneous) injection was done the cow seemed to perk up a lot and was back to normal again.

We didn't feel we could leave the calf alone until we had fed it enough so Jonathan, Dad and I worked with it and ended up going to bed at 4:15 this morning. I had been up since 6:45 yesterday morning to get ready to go help with the sheep so I was up for about 21 hours. Probably a record for me. I chose not to look at the clock to see how late it was and nobody told me what time it was so I didn't feel too tired until about 1:30 and then was glad to get some rest when we were done. Jonathan and Dad were up every hour after that to check on the calf but I didn't wake up until it was time to go out and milk out the cow again.

This afternoon Dad and David decided to run to town (not literally) and pick up some things from Nodak and see what the vet carried for supplies. A little while after he left we saw the calf start to get a lot worse and called the store and asked them if they had seen Dad there. The owner and most of the employees know who we are and got Dad on the end of the line for us to talk to. We had looked up pneumonia and saw a we needed to have vitamin C injections to give the calf and asked him to pick that up and come back home soon. The calf died fifteen minutes before he got here so it was too late.

I guess the conclusion of the birth was:

not to calve for the first time in December, to feed a more rounded mineral supplement going up to calving and have a higher percent calcium content, warm up the calf immediately even if it is pretty warm outside, keep vitamin C injections an hand as well as everything else needed and keep learning everything you can about cows and calving.

We'll do better next time,

Peter

Sheep herder

Well, this morning was an adventure!

Jonathan, David and I hopped in the car after doing chores and headed to the neighbor north of us to help him with his sheep. There was a professional sheep shearer coming at eight o'clock to shear his 75 head of sheep.

We pulled in the driveway a little early even though we drove slowly on the way there. Mr. Pozarnsky (our neighbor) had all the sheep sorted into his various small barns and had 35 of the black-faced sheep waiting in the barn where the shearing was going to be done. When Mr. Gietzen (the shearer) came we helped him unload his equipment and set it up in the barn. He had a chute with a spring loaded door where the sheep would be let out of and a wool packer and few other odds and ends along with his electric shearer.

We started the process by herding the mass of sheep towards the opening of the chute and a few of them willingly entered but most of them dashed past us as they were driven into the corner. David hopped over the short divider wall and chased the few sheep in the chute down to the other end to be sheared. When we tried again to get a few more into the chute, the pressure of 20 sheep pushing against each other forced the small door on the end of barn to give way and six sheep got out before I could get the door to close again. Propping the door shut (it wouldn't stay because the latch had broke) I helped clear the sheep away from the corner and Jonathan helped Mr. Pozarnsky corner and pen up the runaway sheep. Meanwhile, David herded the animals that were in the chute down to the other end as Mr. Gietzen finished up all the ones that he could reach. We left the ones that escaped outside until there was fewer in the main pen and then chased them in again. Even in the short time they were outside some frost had formed on their wool but I guess that was okay. The wool is supposed to be as clean and dry as possible.

After the pen of black-faced sheep was done, I helped herd a pen black-faced ewe lambs in to be sheared. The young ones were eager to follow each other and that made the job of chasing them down the chute a little easier. Some of the older ewes had to be either picked up or shoved the whole way down the chute in order to get them to move. After the young black-faced sheep were done, we herded a bunch of adult white-faced sheep into the barn. The wool is finer on the white-faced sheep so the wool had to be kept separate. These sheep were much easier to herd around and we didn't have to do much but stand behind them and keep the line moving.

Mr. Gietzen was really fast at shearing and could get a sheep done in about 2 minutes and not nick them at all with the cutter. He does it a lot and according to his website he has sheared sheep all around the world!

After the older white-faced sheep had been sheared we brought in the white faced lambs and he sheared them. When each different group had been sheared, they were herded into the different pens and barns that they had come from to keep warm.

After the sheep were sheared I thought they reminded me of peeled potatoes!

When the wool was cut off the sheep, Jonathan took it and stuffed it into the hydraulic packer machine and it compressed the fleeces of about thirty sheep into one big burlap bag. Mr. Pozarnsky keeps the wool until later in the year and then brings it to Bismark and sells it there.

Fun day!

Peter

Tired...

Right now I feel like going to bed. It's dark out. I feel like I didn't get much done. I sat inside and did home school all morning. I was at Metigoshe Ministries all afternoon vacuuming. I was there from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. My legs are tired from walking. The wood stove is hot. The air the wood stove is blowing is hot. Now I'm hot. I don't know what to write. I only write what I know. So this is all I know. I am thinking of what to write. What I've written is all I am thinking about. Goodnight.

Peter

14 Hour drive

Hello,

Last night Dad and Jonathan got home with a trailer full our wood siding. We would have liked to have picked it up sooner but we had to wait for the weather to be better so it could be milled. We borrowed a 16' car trailer from our neighbor to haul the wood back and Dad checked over everything in the truck the day before so yesterday morning they left here at 6:00. They got to the sawmill in Bemidji Minnesota after a 7 hour drive, loaded up, and headed home and got back here about 11:00 last night. That means they were sitting in the truck for about 14 hours! They said it was a long day.

We still need to get the stain, but after that we are ready to start putting it up. That will be exiting!!!



The cow still hasn't delivered...
Peter