updates

some updates for you...
the great chicken experiment of '07 has been a bust. due to irreconcilable differences, we have decided to part ways. but fear not, dear reader, hopefully in spring of '08, we shall have more humorous stories about life on the farm. well, at least life with some farm animals. i don't think we would qualify as a farm, unfortunately. it would be great if we could (for tax purposes). anyway, come springtime, we should have a pig, haley will be taking care of a lamb or two, and we may do our own chicken thang.

the puppy has finally gotten a name. the kids still don't know she's going to be theirs. they just wanted to be able to call her something other than puppy. her name is "black sally". it was a combination of blacky and mustang sally. jeff wanted sally, the kids wanted blacky. i actually like black sally myself.

i forgot how totally awesome it is to housebreak a puppy. cleaning up the accidents, taking it outside every 15 minutes because she was sniffing around, teaching her not to scratch up the door, i can't believe i didn't want to try this sooner!

yesterday, i got to play hero. sami and black sally disappeared during an unplanned potty break (zack decided to help and let the dogs out with out telling me. and they were gone for like 45 minutes before i realized) and so we called and called, and then called some more. next we got volunteers and did a search (grandpa and alex rode the 4wheelers around looking for them), and they found sami in the creek bottoms, but no black sally. so they kept searching, i went to the neighborhood behind us and looked, but nothing. when i got back, i took the 4 wheeler and made alex stay with the little guys and went to search the creek myself. i guess when grandpa and alex searched, they never got off the bikes or even turned them off. being a woman (and therefore infinitely smarter) i got off the bike and searched the creek bank calling for her. guess what! i found her. when she heard me calling her, she started crying and i found her. unfortunately she was on the opposite side of the creek, so i had to climb in there and call her until she swam for it. it is, by the way, freezing here. so i had to hold her (completely soaked to the skin) and climb up the 10 foot bank, and then drive back to the house. she got a bath right away, wrapped in a towel, and put in a nice warm cage to warm up and feel puppyish again. now she stays pretty close to me when i take her out.