Mama, Victoria, Cori and the grandkids made it in safe last night. It was a little before 11 p.m. Blake and Mykenzie were awake and ready to play. Blake found a tennis ball on top of a box of blocks and was ready to have Dodger fetch it for him. Dodger was ready too, but him mama insisted on his going back to sleep. Today they will wake up on the farm.

Today the larger of the calves, nine of them, will leave the farm for the stock sale in Windthorst, TX. The last thing Grandpa did last night was to pen the group in the calf lot where the trailer was parked at the end of the loading chute. It should be a fairly easy task to get them loaded but I will get the details later today. I am praying all goes well. It is a big step up for the young steers to get into the trailer. We will have to work on that by building some type of adjustable ramp in the chute.

On my way home yesterday evening I drove past the farm to the Montague County Courthouse so I could get the tags for the trailer. It was not too difficult or too expensive and it puts the trailer on the books for a year – plus it gets the paperwork correct in case Grandpa is stopped for any reason. The rest of the evening I spent helping him get the trailer lights working properly. I think we got it all worked out. He was planning to load and leave at first light. We will see if that happens or not. He is not a morning person.

On the way home from Cori’s Mama called me to ask if I wanted to keep the internet provider Victoria had been paying for the last year or go ahead and cancel. That day was the due day for the payment. Why she waited until that moment to make a decision will remain an unanswered question since I have been asking her every week for two months to call and set up another provider. But that is how it got handled. She spent 45 minutes on hold while the current – soon to be terminated – provider set up the team to recover their hardware from the farm.

How soon we can get a replacement provider will be answered this week. I doubt that will happen today; too much going on. In the meantime, Grandma is without a phone and she has been on the phone with various persons all evening long for the past several weeks. It is her lifeline to the world since she is hurting and does not get out much. She and Grandpa did drive over to see Tom (the dairy man) and his wife on Sunday. It is about 45 minutes there from the farm. Church – where we attend – is about 35 minutes from the farm, but too far to drive for them to attend services there. Anyway, she will be without a home phone until internet service is restored; which may be after they are already in West Virginia.

Mama will find out today if they are still planning on going to West Virginia. I know Grandma wants to make the trip but Grandpa is hedging because the weather in Ripley would keep them from doing any of the things he and Norman have been planning. It has been either snowing or raining almost daily for the past several months. We would trade, but God does not offer that as an option. With the expense of the trip, the difficulty for him and Grandma to travel and the work remaining here, I do not think Grandpa is overly excited about the whole idea.

If the grandkids are up in time there will be two calves to feed bottles to this morning. The good part of the fun is that if they miss the morning feeding we repeat the exercise in the evening. It may be late in April or early in May before we get any more calves, so the four we now have will be all we have for several weeks.

That is probably good news for me and Mama if Grandpa and Grandma do go north for a month.