Hello!
Farm Update Time! Lots to talk about this week in the weather category. I should warn you, the pictures are not great, as they were afterthoughts while I ran around trying to deal with the weather. You’ve been warned. Also, side note, I was so bummed, I had literally just plugged in my Go-Pro to charge (I’m the worst, always have at least one dead camera battery) so I could potentially time lapse a storm in the future, and about two minutes later the storm, that you will see in a minute, came on through. How cool would that have been? Ugh.
Oh my goodness, you guys! So, Monday, I had some errands to run, and I noticed some seriously dark clouds, but I figured, no big deal, we have weird stormy weather come through all the time around here. Especially in the spring, it can be sunny one minutes and just miserable the next. I figured, worst case scenario, I’d have to chill a moment and let it pass. Nope! No, I walked out of the CPA’s office and it was starting to rain and thunder some, barely made it to my last stop, and decided it was in my best interest to make it home before it got worse. Super glad I did because the rain was coming down so hard my wipers could not keep up while on the highway. It doesn’t really rain here a whole lot, so it really threw everything for a loop. I normally don’t mind driving in the rain, unless it’s really dark or stormy, but this one was super difficult.
After we got home, it rained a little longer and then calmed down. We could see some clouds forming again in the distance, but the very cool thing about my specific piece of property is that I sit between two forks in the valley, so while I get a lot of storms, usually I can watch the most intense parts in the distance, but they avoid my home and either crawl across the valley toward town or break off behind the hills towards our nearest major city. So, I wasn’t worried at all, the horses were in the daytime pasture, the chickens were out clucking around, and I was heading in to get cleaned up for the evening.
Smash cut to walking into my bedroom, I see this absolute crazy cloud moving incredibly fast towards the farm with the craziest lightning. I have never rounded up the horses in the corral and accounted for all the critters as fast as I had that night. I think it also helped that it was freezing, and I was in my pajamas (I’m going to need you to reserve judgement here, sometimes when you live on a farm you gotta do what you gotta do, and that sometimes looks like chasing horses into the corral in polka pajamas and hair in a towel). I barely made it to the porch before the storm hit.
I’ve seen some fun lightning since living here, remind me, some time I’ll post my old picture of the lightning bolt, it’s blurry and I took it purely by chance, but my point is that I’ve seen some cool lightning. This storm was really spectacular. I, of course, remembered to document literally none of it, which is very on brand for me.
It then started hailing, which immediately changes the storm from “fun, somewhat dangerous” to “ah shoot, this is bad”. We don’t get hail all that often, and we certainly don’t get marble sized hail. The foothills and mountains do, but here on the valley floor its not common. It hailed enough to look like snow, and had not melted off the next day, which made my commute a little sketchy. All in all, it got to a point on Monday that I was beginning to have concerns about riding the storm out, which usually is not a big deal, since we’ve got something of a storm routine.
In non-weather-related news, we’ve been trying to get back into working shape around here, and Ro is not sure she’s into it. She has been running into the arena wanting to play, but she’s not been enjoying the less-than-ideal weather and the fact that she needs to behave while working. She has been enjoying all the cookies, brushings, and picture taking sessions that have been happening again, although she thinks she looks her best when she’s about 2 millimeters from the lens.
Joe has been particular humdrum about the weather, because he loves to be outside. He’s made quite the nuisance of himself, but he’s also Joe so we really can’t be mad at all. I’ll introduce you properly to all the canine critters in a future post, but for now all you really need to know about Joe is that he is a 90-pound black standard poodle. We forgot to tell him to stop growing so he’s all knees and elbows. So, when he intends to be the center of attention, he absolutely succeeds. Like, I said, I think the pack needs an introductory post to truly capture the dynamic here.
Other than that, not much has been going on, it’s been rainy and windy all week, we were able to pull off the socially distanced wedding of my cousin’s dreams (well, the wedding bit, I doubt anyone dreamed of socially distancing), no pictures of that though because privacy. It was so much fun, and mostly DIY, so pretty economical. But I have been exhausted since, it was a mad dash to set up everything, have the wedding, and then tear everything down. But it was beautiful, and my cousin was beautiful, and her groom was so nervous and excited he practically floated everywhere. And I’ve been taking my week kind of slow to recover, which means for a fairly boring blog, but a fairly happy soul overall.
I hope you all are having an amazing week, and that you enjoyed the farm update.
Until we chat again, my friends!
The Farmer's Blogger 