Late Sunday evening my husband announced he didn't have to go to work yesterday because of President's Day, so when I woke up and he was here, it felt like another chunk of weekend had been grafted onto our week.
Even going into my office last night didn't do much to shift that notion. It feels like Monday today!
First off I have to apologize to yet another reader/commenter, jme. I am suddenly getting many spam comments for both this blog and mystic-lit, and when I moderate, for the first time ever, I am hitting "reject" regularly.
And then my dyslexic thing kicks in, and I reject a string of spam comments, read a wonderful one, and as my brain thinks "publish" my finger hits "reject."
There is no way to get those back!
I'm not sure where the spam is coming from. There are many Chinese ones, and then lots of fake "normal" ones that are anonymous and sort of sound like maybe they're genuine. But their very blandness gives them away.
I guess if I employed the word verification system I might make life easier for myself but I wanted commenting here to be effortless. If it gets to be too much, and I keep making mistakes in my moderating role, I'll add it in.
On another note, I realized I'd left out a sure sign of spring here on November Hill. Our beloved hay man is now out of his gorgeous, non-sprayed, organically grown hay. This affects us on a number of levels. His hay is easy to balance minerally. It's reasonably priced so we can throw hay to horses with wild abandon and not stress the bit of wastage we get from using the big round bales.
We get eggs and some meat and vegetables from our hay man, so when we're no longer going out there for hay, it puts a snag in grocery shopping. I've realized I don't want the store eggs any more. They look... fake. Fortunately this weekend the kids had a party to go to out near the hay man's farm, so we got our stash of beautiful eggs.
Meanwhile, I bought one small batch of timothy hay from the feed store last week. The horses have been scarfing it up - the one up side of having to change hay right now is that they are already craving something green, and a new hay seems to satisfy that a bit. But the feed store hay is not cheap, and while we could go get small loads each week and enjoy ease of transport and loading, it's a big hit to the budget.
We bought a slightly bigger load of timothy from our secondary hay supplier. Normally her prices are just slightly cheaper than the feed store but this year it's the same. But alas, this morning my husband informed me these bales are wrapped in wire, which I really don't like.
Fortunately, awhile back, I came upon a new hay source and although we didn't need it at the time, I wrote the info on a scrap of paper and tucked it away. Of course I forgot about it. But on Sunday I was cleaning off my desk for no real reason and there was the hay info. I called and the hay sounds like a nice mix of timothy and orchard, and it's significantly less expensive, so we can transition onto that as we use up this timothy.
billie hinton’s camera-obscura:
life and lessons on November Hill Farm
10 comments:
Spam is really annoying. The word verification thing cuts out most of it, I find.
My annoyance at both spam comments and wire-baled hay leaked to nothing this morning when I actually got my hands on this new timothy.
It's beautiful!
We likely won't have it long enough for me to send off a sample for testing, so I don't know if the numbers are as good as it looks and smells. In any case, horses are happy and it's a change of pace for them in this dreary time of year.
The hay sounds great, glad they're enjoying it. Everyday has felt like Sunday to me since last Thursday. My husband has been home since then taking back to the doctor for checkups on the eye and whatnot. Today it is snowing again so he closed the office and he's home again. I'm not used to so much human company for so many days in a row!
The word verification does help. I was getting the Chinese spam almost everyday. I never published it because I figured it had to be an advertisement or a porn site or whatever. How obnoxious. I haven't gotten any more for a few weeks now. I'm sure jme will understand the reject button.
Arlene, funny about the Chinese spam - I am not sure it's spam, but can only assume such. In any case, I can't read it, so I just hit reject for those!
Glad you have company and I figured j would understand!!
i finally broke down and added the word verification too. i was getting chinese comments too! ;-)
i feel off today too - after the 3-day weekend, i'm taking off for a snow day today, so i'm really messed up!
i know what you mean about that time of winter when hay is scarce - i just had our local guy bring me by 100 bales to hold us over until i can get a big load, but i'm sure there's not much left... wish we had more space for storage and i'd get 20 tons at the end of fall and be set until spring! oh well :-\
and no worries about the comment! (actually, i think i might still have it on my clipboard - i wasn't signed in and i thought i might have trouble posting, so i copied it - but it wasn't anything too genius you were missing out on ;-)
i feel terrible too - i was just sorting through some jumk/spam that had piled up in my inbox and i found a comment kate left on my clinic post that i completely forgot to post (sorry!) it was apparently buried in a bunch of spam but i still have no idea how i missed it!
One thing we definitely need here is hay storage. If I could stock up on the round bales earlier in the season we wouldn't run out of our favorite hay!
Billie, I'm pleased to hear of your preoccupation with hay supply. We all know how quickly donkeys begin to waste away. We will be having hay grown on our farm this year rather than potatoes and corn. The woman says it's a much friendlier crop because there is no spraying but I will sorely miss the gigantic spider sprayer and the red combine. I suppose I can supervise the hay baling.
Regarding spam - so that's what those strange comments are! I wish my Mandarin were more fluent. Or perhaps the comments would make a donkey's ears wilt.
Sheaffer! Although you will miss the big equipment, I think it's wonderful you will have hay grown right there on your farm! Wow! Sheaffer Hay!
Ahhh.....the hay man. Nothing gives you that sinking feeling quite like learning that your supplier is no more.... When you find a great source that is reliable and trustworthy (and organic!) it's hard to lose that. Hope the new one pans out.
Michelle, if he were out of business I'd be freaking out!
He's simply out of last year's cutting and is right now growing his first 2010 cutting - so only a couple of months to wait. He grows hay for his certified organic cattle, so there's not much chance of him going out of the hay business, thankfully!
Right now we are feeding a timothy/orchard mix. It's not as nice as I'd hoped for, but I have another source for the same mix that I'll look into next.
It's wreaking havoc with my mineral balancing, but for right now, I'm ball-parking that and hoping to find some hay that has analysis done and enough of a stash to get us through 'til the end of April.
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