Crafting, hay delivery, sales, the weekend

I was very proud of Mama yesterday. She spent the entire day crafting. In doing so, she completed over a dozen items that will be offered for sale tomorrow at Trade Days. Those crafts along with her Color Street nails will be on display. What was kind of funny is that Mama was showing her crafts in Facebook and one of her friends asked to purchase one of the items. Cha-ching!

Today, prior to possibly going to my visit to the imaging center near Costco, she is concentrating on baking some cakes and cookies for sale. That type of product seems to do well at Trade Days. If the baked goods do not sell, we have plenty of friends to give them to so we will not have to consume them. Our Extended Care housed Church member love those type of handouts and we enjoy sharing with them. In fact, if they knew about the possibility of being given the cakes not sold tomorrow, they would probably be praying that those sales would not happen. I have mixed emotions on that. In deference to those individuals, I think I am finding that I have more of a sweet tooth as I grow older. It might just be my imagination because Mama and I have largely eliminated sweet snacks from our diet.

Our neighbor who is going to put calves on our property has not done so to date but he stopped by Tuesday late morning to talk to me. It turns out that Mama had talked to him earlier that day and asked if he had any contacts for Sudan hay. He did and he talked with the seller to negotiate the sale of ten bales for now. I let him know that I would not be available to pick up the hay until Thursday evening, so he went by the seller’s and picked up the hay for us, delivering it at about 5 pm Wednesday evening. I off loaded the hay in the front yard and reimbursed him for the purchase. A very kindly act on his part, but he assured me that he has nothing but time. That hay was put into the barn after work yesterday. It is beautiful hay. I wish we could have gotten ten more bales, but the seller was reluctant to part with too many bales because we have no idea what the winter will require in feeding out our respective herds. As it turns out, Mama has several friends looking for the Sudan hay and we have been able to make two or three contacts with seller’s that are close by and appear to have ample to sell.

Mama also negotiated the sale of tree of the ten little goats we need to sell. Our tiny boy will go to a very good home as a pet. He will make a great pet for a youngster because he will stay small, he is very gentle and extremely tame. In fact, he is constantly underfoot as I work in the enclosure with the goats. Two more, a potential breeding pair, will go to a family at church as a gift for a grandchild. All will have really good homes for the years to come. We were planning to keep only one of the three girls but none of the boys. However, there is one brute of a boy that we would like to see how he turns out. At just a few weeks old he looks like a three-month-old. The issue we have with him is that he is horned, and his horns have sprouted so quickly that we are too late to have them removed without it affecting his looks significantly. The process that we would need to employ now would leave two large knots on his head at the base of the horns. A very visible anomaly affecting our potential to market him and making it impossible, we have been told, for him to be shown. Show goats of this breed do not typically have horns.  Three times Mama knocked it out of the park yesterday. Hopefully, that is a portend of how things will go tomorrow as Mama markets her wares.

Meanwhile, I have been feeling pretty rough. Hopefully, the diagnostic imaging today will lead to a diagnosis that will start me on a path to recovery. Time will tell. I do not have extensive plans for this weekend – setting up Mama at Trade Days, tending to the bees, cleaning the coops and goat barn, organizing in a couple areas and taking the trash removed from those areas to the dump. So far, I have reorganized a couple walls in the shop, cleaned and organized the sunroom, and cleaned and rearranged the wellhouse.

For now, things look like we actually take care of our property.