Lambs, pigs, Trump’s D-Day speech

Tonight, I will attach the racks to the truck so that the lambs can be loaded and hauled to the sale barn early Saturday morning. I am still wrestling with exactly how to make the loading part of the operation happen. Mama will be busy with the girls at their dress rehearsal for the ballet performance tomorrow night. Victoria will be home and is willing to help, but in the past, it has taken three of us. Mama watches the gate I put over the barn opening. The sliding doors will be shut on the other side of the barn. Victoria and I lead the sheep to the truck and together load them one by one into the truck. One opens the gate to the racks on the truck then helps lift the animal into the bed of the truck. If there are only two of us, I will have to do the loading by myself. Fortunately, the lambs are only about eighty pounds each. Mama gave me permission to sell Little Bit along with the other three larger lambs. There is little reason to keep him. I do not want a pet lamb. She will not let me eat him. So, at some point he has to go. Now seems like the right time. One lamb we will be keeping until some time on October.  He will go into the freezer.

Later in the day Saturday, I will put the trailer in place near the pig pen so Mama and I can load the pigs up Monday afternoon. They are both over 250 pounds and with pigs you have to convince them to go where you want them to go. You cannot push or pull or carry them. They have to go of their own choosing. With that in mind, I will put the trailer in front of the pig building and allow the pigs to simply walk from the building into the trailer. Grandpa set the building up so that could be done when he built it. I will take advantage of that. Mama and I will not feed them much Monday morning. Monday afternoon we will put the feed in the trailer. Hopefully, they will be hungry enough to simply walk right in. I will need to spend a few minutes cleaning the mud from the floor at the gate inside the building so that it can be opened to allow them access to the trailer. Right now, there is so much mud on the floor of the building that I cannot open the gate.

Living on a farm is like putting together a puzzle. Each piece has a place. Each piece will fit as intended, but it may take some prep work to get all the pieces to fall into place. For example, the new paddock. A fence needed to have wire mesh fencing attached. A new portion of fence had to be built. Gates had to be added to the fencing in strategic places. A building needed to be erected. Pallets were repurposed. Lumber was cleaned and repurposed. Metal roofing was cleaned and reused. Water troughs will be repositioned. Feeders will be rehung. Feed barrels will be repositioned and refilled. Then, after all the pieces are in place, the animals can be moved to their new paddock. Lots of prep work for a simple goal of making an additional place for our goats.

After the lamb and goats are moved to their new home, Mama and I will clean and sanitize the goat barn so our bred does can have a nice barn to come home to. The manure and hay from that clean up will be set in a specific place to turn into compost. A year or two from now, that will be applied to the garden to enrich the soil. It all fits. It takes a lot of work, but it all fits.

If you have not taken the time to listen to the speech our President gave in commemoration of the 75^th Anniversary of D-Day. It is worth the time to search it out and watch or listen. It is actually better to see the video. His actions in recognizing the veterans who attend the ceremony, are noteworthy. Even the liberal media, who have chosen to hate the man, had to give him credit for his recognition of the event and those who revisited the field of battle where so many know to them personally are at rest in a cemetery holding almost ten thousand of their fellow soldiers. It was honor properly placed and properly bestowed. Those men truly earned it.

President Trump did an outstanding job of assigning that honor.