December 27, 2008 Hooray, Brad finally had a day he could redo the pictures on the website. We have had many persons e-mail that the Barn picture we had as a background was too difficult to read past and finally he has had time to replace it with a beautiful picture of a young round of cheese. At last, some new visions. We have been busily upgrading , changing, and renovating our computer arsenol at the house and office. I have a aged mac that I like for the accounting program we use. I recently spent three days on dial-up to upgrade the operating system to the highest level it could go before replacing it. Well my highest is not enough to use with the aircard we got ourselves for Christmas. The aircard works fine on our son’s computer and the large PC we have in the office for the family to use. My desk is cluttered with old mac’s that don’t wear out fast just become dinosaurs. I will have to figure out how to get the musings from my comfortable mac to the web site but that will be my problem for the next few months. I did look at a new laptop and was filled with computer lust but it would be the first domino to send the stack rolling. If I do that then I would need a new accounting program and a new payroll program but the aircard would work in a new computer and could be networked on a wireless system......In time. For now I will enjoy the new pictures on the website and will look forward to Brad making more available as with that aircard we will forsake the dial-up internet connection and things will hopefully move along much faster. It is so interesting what can be done and accomplished on the internet. I have found the musing section of our website fun to do as well as useful. When the flood hit and we had so many friends and family to give information to at once it was very helpful to expound on progress and needs via the musings. I started these in 2006 when we had the website up and going for several months and nothing changed.....I really wanted the wesite to be enjoyed by those who were interested in finding out more about our farm, our cheese, and our animals. I started the musings in response to the questions and experiences I had at the Farmer’s Markets I attended. It was a way to give people a glimpse into what it takes to put cheese on the table. It begins several months before that cheese is unwrapped and enjoyed by our customers. Did the Chicken or the Egg come first? Does Breeding, Lambing, or Milking begin the process of making cheese? I have a few ewe lambs in the barn who were not big enough to be bred this year, as we feed them and watch them grow we will be planning to make cheese from their milk in 2010. These musings have been my little way of inviting people to share the process of cheesemaking from thier home, in a manner that has become such a major player in our lives. The computer! I am working on bringing my mac up to the new era of aircards and we will go to a wireless network with a router when to plunge is taken to upgrade to the next level....and in a matter of months that will be outdated as well....so goes life but it all works. In the meantime enjoy or lives as we can share them, lambing starts soon, shearing sooner and we thank you all for your interest! December 22, 2008 Merry Christmas to all. We are loaded with snow here in the Pacific Northwest.....too much for many places as traffic jams and clogged airports abound. But on the farm it is beautiful! The sheep all have their winter woolies on, they have the barn to snuggle up in so they are faring well. The Dogs are playing with each other in this powdery white stuff and having a blast. The cats have chosen the house, even Black Cat, who moved home for three months last winter in the cold, has moved home again. About three days before the snow fell she moved back into the house from the barn, animals seem to know before we do what to expect. The animals are faring well. We are too. Lots of cocoa and snow ice cream for the boys. They had a toboggan run around the driveway and into the back field. the Christmas lights along the driveway are about 3 inches deep now and show a pool of light below the white snow. Best news is that we may get that White Christmas we always sing about. It is beautiful and fun I remember one from my childhood and not many others....except for the years we lived in Spokane. The sheep are thankful that our shearing date will be January 10th. One year we had a frigid cold snap three days after shearing and they were cold.....not so cold they did not venture out and lie down in it but their little tails shook when they were in the parlour for their grain. We are at the time we need to start graining the ones who are to deliver early. That means they all get grain as they are greedy girls and they know what clanging gates in the milking parlour means. They line up and immediately start bawling for food. Graining the pregnant ewes gives them just a bit more energy and protein for the growing baby and for the ewe lambs who are pregnant it gives them the energy they need to grow and also grow their babies. Hopefully a single. It will be much easier to grain the girls after they are sheared, in full wool they often do not fit through the parlour gate. It was made for the width of and average ewe not a pregnant one in full wool. Often those who cannot fit through the gate before shearing will be fed a pan of grain in the holding pen after all the others have made their way through the parlour and back to the barn. It is a one way chute until the end and Brad reopens the in gate and those that are left behind will be shooed back into the pen that leads to the barn and their buddies. This is a sign that lambing season is soon to be upon us!

December 2, 2008    Tomorrow is the anniversary of our flood.  It does not seem real.  It seems to me that the flood was a long time ago.  A lot of people and projects and animals and funds have passed under the bridge.  A lot of gifts and hugs wellwishers and backbreaking volunteers have been here, blessed us, and gone away again to bless others.  We have had a successful farming season.  We have met a lot of new friends.  We have said goodbye to some of our sheep and hello to a multitude of new ewes who have blessed our barn with their presence and soon with their babies.  We have limited furniture in the house but a new refinished floor throughout and a new patio going in.  (“The place where the mud is to stop before coming in to the house” says mama bear!)  We have a comfortable home full of our family and cats and anyone else who tags along with the children.  The kids’ friends know that Meg can always cook more spaghetti so as long as you eat noodles come on in!  I knew the anniversary was  coming.  but months are so sneaky.  If your event is in the first part of the month it is upon you as soon as you turn the calender page to the month you are to be living in.  Yikes.  December 3rd is here tomorrow.  But, God is good and here we are with our family, our herd, our friends and numerous new friends.  I have been blessed with three part time jobs in November and that helps us to get along till lambing season is here.  Just around the corner....or onto the next page of the calender.
Dan Schreiber, a reporter for our local paper, was just here for his anniversary trip.  He was in the boat that rescued us from our porch last December.  He was interested to know how much help came to the rescue of those here in the river valley.  He remembers looking at all the destruction last winter and wondering what all these people would be doing with the mess left in the wake of the flood.  I think he has a lot of respect for the community and how it pitched in.  He had only lived in this area a month prior to the flood last December.  I had lived here many years and have been  respectful of what the community has done for it’s own.  I hope others affected by the flooding have the same impression. 
Ours is a much greater community than Lewis County or Centralia/Chehalis.  Good wishes and monetary help came from all over the country.  Groups from Oregon and all parts of Washington came to physically help out.  It is humbling to be the recipient of so much good.  It was my pride tripping me at first when others came to help out....”oh, we can get by”, or “things aren’t that bad”.   Oh yes they were and we would still be mucking out the kitchen with a rubbermaid spatula if those of you that came to  help had listened to me.  I learned to accept other’s kindness with more grace.  I think as opportunity knocks to help others it will be out of my fullness and not just my excess that I can give to others.  It is easy to give when you “have”.  But to give and recieve when you haven’t is a whole new feeling.   I have witnessed that generosity in other cultures time and again and now hope to spread that, gracefully, in ours.
My anniversary digression has me considering what each and every one of you has done to make our lives better after the flood of 2007.  My challenge to myself is to never forget the generosity of others and to look for opportunity to share with those around me.  My mantra’s for the year have been God is Good and People are Great!  Things are just things.  God has a plan and it is bigger than me.  And, you can live through anything for a short while.
Thank you one and all and may God Bless this next year with all that He has planned for our lives and our world.

October 27, 2008 It has been a glorious fall here in the Pacific Northwest.  The colors are splendid, yellows, oranges, reds, browns, gold, greens.  The evergreen backdrop makes the colors only more vivid.  The sheep are also full of color as the rams have been marking the ewes as they are bred.  We are on orange and blue, meaning the clean up rams are in the pen.  Then breeding season is almost over and now we all settle in for winter to get fat and happy and look forward to early winter and spring lambing.  Don’t we wish.  The list goes on and on.  The to do list that is.  We all have them and isn’t it just amazing that to get to working on the job you want to do you have to back up and play dominoes with other chores and jobs till you free up space, time, or materials, to get to what was supposed to be at hand!  Whew! on Saturday I wanted to clean out the laundry room to make way for painting the trim boards .  I needed help as the last few items to move were bigger than I could do alone.  So to move the extra fridge out to the garage, we had to move the flooded cupboard to the burnpile but, the truck would be needed for some of the moving.  But, the temporary fencing was in the back of the truck and we wanted to put the fencing up in the barn so we had to sweep out a section for storage.  But, then the dinning room table was in the way out there and it needed to come back to the house to be sanded and painted and then we could move the fridge and extra shelving out of the laundry room.  We all have those little jobs that you have to play dominoes to get to because of all the other projects in the way.  but we did it!~  I painted some more trim boards for the laundry room, the coat racks will be hung this week so we can get those off the floor and perhaps we can extract some order in the house.......It sounds good.

We have had a beautiful fall season.  I wish I had been able to be at market it has been so pleasant but, we have gotten a lot done around here without the constant pressure of readying cheese.  We needed that this year.  Brad has disced and planted the mudded over pasture, He is now reseeding some of the regular pasture with the leftover seed.  We have had some trees felled in order to get equipment in to remove the leftover mud in other areas in hopes of planting grass in 2009 so we will have lamb pasture in 2010.  The sheep are in the barn yard now and will be till the new grass really takes hold.  Unfortuneatly the muddiest part from the flood mud was the most used pasture we have.  the sheep are okay with being in the barn but the gaurd dogs get a bit of cabin fever.  They will adapt.  The farm has been busy this fall getting ready for winter and praying it is a normal year.....no excessive rainfall, no log jams to dam the river.  It has been almost 11 months since the December flood and it is a distant memory, I hope it stays that way.