Jeepers, creepers!

We now have some peepers! Gosh oh, gee whiz, surely must be Spring! Last night on the way back from church, on the top of the hill on Gulf Road, first place to hear them, the peepers were out, peeping away. NOW, I know it’s really Spring! The MRI showed some little deterioration/tearing of the meniscus, but not enough to merit surgery or write home about. Doc’s advice: sit on it, as in, do nothing for now, and see if it doesn’t totally heal itself, as it seems to be doing.  Good news, as I was trying to figure out what 6  weeks in the course of the year I could afford to be on crutches.  Hopefully, it will all take care of itself and this will not be a repeating pattern…It is/was not fun.

This morning, I ear tagged the last two penned up lambs and let them with their mamas, out into the paddock with the other sheep. Sheep mothers are like human mothers, with different degrees of “mothering” ranging from smothering to laissez faire.  This morning, one of each.  One mother kept close, made her baby stay right under her nose, didn’t venture any farther than the shed.  The second mother took off, her baby screaming after her, got out to the end of the winter paddock and started screaming for the baby. God forbid she should actually go looking for him.  I carried him out, she let him drink, gave him some advice, and took off again.  That’s been the way of it all morning, except I stopped being the nanny.  It is supposed to shower on and off this morning, looks like it will, and is very damp.  The sun is supposedly appearing again on Monday.  It was here yesterday as well.  We are really getting the April showers this year…almost seems like a monsoon season!  The dirt roads are interesting.  They’ve been regrading one section of our road almost every other day. Last time they put stones down and ground them in with the mud, which hopefully will keep the ruts from forming quite so quickly…

Yesterday, I spent the better part of the day making lasagna: sauce first, with our tomatoes and our sausage which I made and stuffed last September; then late afternoon, building the trays of lasagna with the lasagna noodles, sauce, sausage, and cheeses.  Three are in the freezer, one in the frig, for sometime this weekend. This is such a federal case that I only do it once a year, but try to make several.

Tomorrow is Easter Sunday.  We will have dinner with John’s Mom at the nursing home, which we do on all holidays.  The kids can’t make it up, because of work commitments.  So, we’ll have a pretty quiet holiday.  Which makes it easier to mark as a Holy Day, without all the hustle and bustle of preparing meals for guests and entertaining them.

Today, I need to go to the fabric shop and find some leopard print material to make Laura a leopard=patterned zebra fish costume for a class play, dealing with diversity.  I haven’t a clue how I’m going to do this, but it will come to me, I’m sure.

Next Sunday, I’m supplying for Susan, who will be away for a week, recovering from Holy Week (or as most clergy tend to call it, because of the toll it takes on our health and well-being: Hell Week).  Doing all those services and all those sermons, plus entering into the mystery and misery of Holy Week, being down in the pit and then somehow, rising up overnight Saturday night so that we can be resurrected on Sunday, is a difficult journey each year.  Renewing in spirit, for sure, but by the end of the week, all I ever wanted to do was sleep and not hear the world “church” for a week!  So, if I can give her the Sunday after Easter off, by doing the services for her, that is good, and I’ve done a good thing.  Now, I have to come up with a sermon for next week…hm…

Still two more ewes to lamb out, and then lambing is finished.  Some time in the next week, I get the goatie-girls back from the neighbors who so kindly took them while my knee was totally unable to cope with milking them.  I am still planning to sell them, though I haven’t had a lot of bites.  I guess I’ll continue milking them for a little while in the hopes of selling them as milkers.

May first or thereabouts, the sheep go out on pasture, which means between now and then, I have miles of fence to put up. The snow is mostly gone, though a bit still remains on my perennial garden, the last to melt, generally.  The ground is not quite totally thawed yet, but is getting there.  Soon I have to put the chickens on the garden as well, to till it.  Spring IS here, for sure.  It is good to have the knee healing.