Here is Kirk, kayaking in our pasture! It’s not too often you can say you are boating in your yard!
His report of the sights out there: pumpkins everywhere, from our neighbor’s pumpkin patch farm. And the nursery tree farm, their irrigation tubes are also everywhere, in a huge tangled mess. Our ex-neighbor Nick’s port-a-potty is stuck on our fence- ugh! I’m hoping it wasn’t full of “stuff”, chemical or otherwise.
Below is another panoramic, this is taken from the hillside near our silo, looking across the valley. It’s really hard to capture the magnitude of the flooding in photographs, it’s really something you have to see in person to grasp just how MUCH water comes through. But, this does a pretty good job of showing how there is water as far as the eye can see. It literally does spread across the entire valley.
I stopped by my parents’ house Saturday to bring more feed for the llama and check out how she was doing. She is looking just fine. I could find no swellings, cuts or other damage to her, she’s not lame, not coughing, or anything. Amazing! My mom took this photo of me in the stall. You can see that once I am able to get a hold of her halter, she is calm. But she avoids it as best she can. I even managed to pick up one of her feet this time to look at her toenails, which I haven’t been able to do before. Her toenails look good, I don’t think they need any trimming.
They must have turned on the pump station last night, because this morning there is a good 1-2 feet less water in our pasture. I can see fence posts, gates, nursery trees and the sheep shelters emerging. And the road is reappearing, now it looks like maybe only a 100-foot stretch is still under water. We saw a man out there wading in it with hip waders on, to see how deep it goes. It seemed to still be crotch-deep to him in the middle. People are starting to drive large tractors through it to access their homes. The road is much higher than the pasture though, so I think the pasture still has about three feet of water.
And now, a little bit of summer. I can’t wait for the pastures and the sky to look like this again!
We live on a major migratory path for birds, so we get to enjoy a lot of them during the fall and winter. Lately there have been hundreds of Trumpeter Swans and Snow Geese coming through. They are noisy- day and night- but I enjoy the sound.
Wow, we have a lot of snow– at least for us. I think it’s about a foot deep. Which, I’m sure, seems trivial to people in the Midwest or the East. But in the Northwest, that is a ton– I don’t have many memories of there being this much snow here in my lifetime. We’ve had snow falling for the last week, and more in the forecast for the whole next week- incredible! Usually it doesn’t stick around more than a day or two before melting into a muddy slop. Here is a panoramic photo from the pasture, in which Maggie appears twice– she got in the frame more than once!
The temperatures aren’t bad– a few days it’s gotten into the teens, but it’s mostly hovering right around freezing. We got our first official complaint to animal control about our animals- from a well-meaning citizen who felt concerned for them. An animal control officer came out to investigate, and chuckled to himself, “well, the DO have wool, after all!” A friend of mine teased me that we should get wool coats for them!
They really look like they’ve grown more wool in the last week or two, they are quite bundled up and puffy. The llama has so much wool insulating her that snow accumulates on her back and stays there– it doesn’t melt! Once a day I break the ice out of their trough with a pickaxe, though I suspect they are getting their water from eating snow and not going to the trough.
