Here’s Rosemary’s somewhat unremarkable udder. Instead of being thin and empty-feeling, like it used to be, it’s fleshy and thicker inside. And the milk vein is feeling more pronounced.
What Do You Think?
Here is a picture of a very pregnant cow that I found online at this nifty site:
She’s pretty huge! The calf should be mostly represented by the bulge on her right side, and the left is her full rumen, displaced, of course, by the calf. Now here’s a picture of Rosemary I took this morning. Please bear in mind that her rumen is not full, as I had just given her her morning hay, which she was just beginning to eat:
What do you think?! I’m really starting to think she’s not bred. Though I have to remember the bull was a miniature, so maybe the calf is pretty small. Also, it’s her first calf, and if she’s anything like humans, she won’t show as much as if it was her second or third. I just don’t know….
The Cow
What, you may be wondering, is going on with the cow? The cow that is supposedly due to have a calf. Supposedly the day after Thanksgiving. Well, the answer is…your guess is as good as mine, or possibly even better!
She is wide. She has a pink udder that looks different than it used to, though certainly not bagged up. She doesn’t seem to have heat cycles. Her last possible due date (because we sent the bull home after that) is Christmas day. They tell me she could go two weeks past that. I guess we’ll wait and see.
Tonight’s Chores
Me, Dump Truck Operator
We have a guy here today with a track hoe and a dump truck, digging out a place for a cowshed and cutting a new driveway in on the other side of the woodshed. It’s very exciting. I had to help him out a little by driving the dump truck. Good thing I was here, huh? So now that I’m a dump truck operator, hopefully I’ll command a little more respect from friends and family. Probably.
Fraser Firs and Sundogs
We set off yesterday in search of a Christmas tree. We’ve never bought one before, though DH and I ran a tree lot down on the NC coast several years running, up until the arrival of ED. Our last farm had been a tree farm in earlier years, and there were still enough trees up on the mountain that we (and lots of friends) were able to find a serviceable tree for the past several years. Actually, serviceable isn’t quite fair—-they were lovely trees with crooked trunks and birdsnests, and we loved every one. But this year we couldn’t face the 40 minute trek up that carsick-making road, with the final climb up an axle-busting driveway to hack through blackberry hell …well, you get the idea. So we took off yesterday for a ride towards Erwin, TN, and at the top of the mountain just before the state line, there was a Fraser Fir Cut-Your-Own Christmas tree farm! (Well, not quite cut-your-own—thay wouldn’t let us play with the chainsaw). But for a relatively minor fee, we came home with a sweet fat little tree. It has maybe five times the number of branches as one of our wild trees, with an equivalent increase in fragrance. It’s a delightful tree. And Bernard, after DH brought it in and hung it from the ceiling and put the lights on, decorated it completely herself. (And took this sweet picture.)
The sky was unbelievable while we were riding around yesterday. There were lots of high cirrus clouds, and we saw lots of sundogs, one of which was so bright we couldn’t really look at it! We also saw a spectacular display of contrail shadows, and DH and I saw something that looked like a very colorful circumzenithal arc, but just below the sun! It was an astounding sky! And I’m certain there were moondogs later, but we went rushing out to see about two hours late.