Frosty Mugs & No School

The faces of these heifers and dry cows give new meaning to the term "frosty mug". If you can't see the frost on their "mugs", click the picture to enlarge it. As I've mentioned in another post recently, livestock get along fine in the extreme cold......they seem to take it in stride......except for those frosty mugs, of course. Vouching for that fact is this article from yesterday's Waterloo Courier.

Oh, boy.......wouldn't you know.......yesterday, on the coldest day of the year we were scheduled to haul a steer to the locker. That meant flailing around in the 30-below-zero windchill to load the big galoot. Thankfully, Husband and I had extra help with that.......school had been cancelled for the day, meaning our son was home. Hooray!

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I took one glove off for about 30 seconds to snap the critter photo above; pain gripped my fingertips after about 15 seconds. How Native Americans, early settlers, Arctic and Antarctic explorers ever survived such weather conditions, I will never know. While shivering and shaking, manning my spot as we tried to coax and direct the steer toward the trailer, I suddenly recalled that the idea for my blog's name was hatched in the exact spot where I was standing.......about 23 months ago. The first blogpost, entitled

"Initial Blog Post", explains how the phrase, "Midlife by Farmlight", came to be.

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OK.......Husband is ready to head down the road to the locker. He's dressed warmly and has hot cocoa and snacks for sustenance, and his cell phone along in case of trouble. With an old trailer, you just never know what might happen.

That means Son is finishing up the morning's post-milking chores, which included carrying a newborn calf to a pen in the calf building. Because of the extreme cold, we did not turn the cows out of the barn today......usually they go outside for awhile in the morning for exercise and so we can scrape the stalls and alleyways, and spread chopped straw and lime.

In dangerous weather like this, using the "buddy system" is prudent and necessary, for if someone became incapacitated for more than a few minutes, they could easily get frostbite or freeze to death. Thus, I kept a close eye on my son as he worked on the tasks Husband had instructed him to do, including grinding steer feed. In this next scene, Son is shoveling corn from the grain truck into the feed grinder, which---obviously---grinds and mixes the corn and other ingredients together to make the feed. It is quite simply a big, overgrown food processor.


I thought the cobwebs in this next photo were quite cool so I convinced Son to pose with them. He's an obedient kid, but he really doesn't look at all like himself here......could it be that he's COLD? Nah. Maybe its because of the "growler mask" on his face. For some reason, when the kids were little, someone started calling these face masks, "growler masks", and the name stuck. When cold weather comes each year, Husband will holler up from the basement, "Where are the growler masks?".

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According to the weather forecast, our temperatures are supposed to start rising today, to a high of 10 degrees above zero, which at this point sounds like a heat wave.
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STAY WARM!
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P.S. - My college daughter and I have been having some serious text message conversations about the laptop issue. She wants me to buy hers so she can buy a lighter-weight one.......only problem being that her checking account is also a lightweight. Hmm.......we'll figure it out soon.......my back and shoulders hope it will be VERY soon.
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