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October 25, 2005

Cows. Are. Dumb.

Wow....to bookend all the combining we've been doing, Mo and I have been working with cows. October 25th and Nov 3 (for Mo - I sat that one out with a sprained ankle) were spent chasing, kicking, wrestling, yelling, and staring down 1000+lb cows and their calves. It's quite a workout. Basically we take horses and/or 4-wheelers and go tearing out into the middle of the herd, trying to seperate a couple hundred cows and their calves and herd them into a corral. At that point we try to break them off into smaller groups and wade into their midst on foot and try to seperate the calves from their mothers as it is time for them to be weaned. This often turns into a game of chicken where we try to make ourselves seem bigger and louder then we really are...usually we win but sometimes it means getting out of the way in a real hurry before getting run over. At that point we chase the calves down a chute into the back of a cattle truck....often the most frustrating part of the whole procedure as it is a real battle to get them to load up. More than a few times Mo (who was trying to chase them along from behind) would have to scale the fence lining the chute to jump out of the way of calves that were backing up. A couple of times she didn't make it, and we both got our share of kicks in the butt and shins from rowdy calves...I always kicked back. Anyway...dumb critters, but it makes you feel a lot less bad about eating them. And enjoying it :-)

Posted by David at 12:37 AM

October 24, 2005

Town Day

Hey all...I had some errands to run in town today...and seeing as I was here I thought I'd use the high speed to put up a few pictures. Not much for new ones, but some old good ones that weren't posted before. Mo and I will be chasing cows on horseback tomorrow though, so there should be some good pictures posted from that in the somewhat near future...check the photo gallery...THERE ARE TWO PAGES...

Posted by David at 11:20 PM

October 18, 2005

October Thus Far

.........Sorry for the technical difficulties...but with the new gallery I'm trying to figure out how to get everything to work. Anyway, there are a pile of new pictures in the photo section. And hey, WE BOUGHT OUR PLANE TICKETS!! Vancouver to Bangkok, Bangkok to Kathmandu, Bangalore to Sydney, Sydney to Vancouver...pretty cool eh?

FOR MORE PICTURES FROM THE LAST COUPLE WEEKS, CHECK OUT THE GALLERY

Posted by David at 11:58 PM

October 14, 2005

Birthday Girl

We would like to take this opportunity to wish Julia Thiessen a very happy 16th birthday!!! Sorry we missed you on the phone tonight. Hope you a great day....AND NO, SHE IS NOT AVAILABLE!!!!!!!!!

Posted by David at 11:46 PM

October 10, 2005

Like a kick to the...um...teeth with a golf shoe!

.........That's how painful it is to be using dial-up internet after having been using high-speed for the last couple of years.....or at least that's my excuse for why it has been so long since I've updated our blog. Anyway, things have been really busy lately, but I'll do my best to fill you in on what's been happening

Last week I (Dave) was teaching grade 8,9, and 10 at Bert Bowes school - it was kind of a gong show as I was scheduled to cover 1 class for every teacher in the school (to give them an extra prep block) which meant I had to teach everything from Math to PE to Drama...I was scheduled to teach foods as well, but the BC teachers decided to go on an illegal

strike on Thursday night. While it is just a messy situation for all involved, at least it absolved me of having to teach on Friday........by then I was more than ready to get back on a tractor where nobody could tell me off and I didn't have to worry about getting pegged in the head by a volleyball kicked by a scrawny 13 year old boy. Mo spent the week working around the farm - chasing bulls, fixing piles of canola, moving fescue between bins and taking care of Mom.

Saturday we spent the better part of the day working around the yard before chowing down for a big "Hockey is Back!" night...sadly, Vancouver lost and I'm in a house of Edmonton fans. ouch.

Sunday we celebrated Thanksgiving with the Esau family...all 55 of us in one house. Our new brother-in-law Justin brought out several 4-wheelers from town so we went out with 9 bikes for part of the afternoon. Lots of fun to be doing that again!! We'll have pictures up soon (if we can get to town). It was a great night - Happy Thanksgiving all!

Anyway, that brings us up to today.......combining Canola. It was a long day, but we've finally got some good weather again so we'll be going pretty hard this week to try and get a couple of fields done.

Other than that....I'm not sure what else to add at this point, other than that I'll try to update the blog a bit more over the next while.

Posted by David at 10:48 PM