cooooollllld!

Goodness, fellow shepherds.....I am sooo sorry you have all that cold. Fortunately, usually the sheep do just fine. But I hate drawing water and having it freeze over before it gets to the sheep....don't you?
From the looks of our forcast you are going to stay cold all week. Ish!
That means we have lots of days that may not get above freezing here. Bother.....ice cubes in the buckets. Frost on the dogs, and the sheep.
Snow.....snow! Argh!
Glad we have some freshly ground meat for the dogs. Our younger pyr doesn't know how to curl up in the hay on the barn floor. The older pyr does. We have to give them enough calories to keep them going this week. So many times....I will get up in the night, and go out to listen. What are those dogs barking about????
If our little dog in the house hears a noise.....especially a car....she barks and the other two dogs start to bark too. I have found the dogs barking at airforce jets, trucks miles away on the highway.....crows. The crows here are as big as chickens. And sometimes the dogs hear coyotes or dogs. We have only heard a cat once down here, but have lost more sheep to big cats than to other predators. If there are coyotes near-by feasting, we go out and shoot the treetops. It seems to move them away. I get up because I don't want coyotes or dogs to think my prys are their only problem.
I was glad to hear that I wasn't the only shepherd who didn't get all their wool skirted, washed, and sold. I had to work on fleeces this year because I needed the room in the barn for our hay. Unfortunately some fleeces got rained on before I got them clean and in boxes....I would have burned all the fleeces...except some of them were hauled from wisconsin to missouri. Now that I had them here....I sure didn't have the nerve to waste them all.
Maybe some year we will figure out what to do with all that wool.
Think warm thoughts...wear extra clothes....and keep your mittens on!
Almost February.