Friday, September 28

Got up and went for my walk. I'm starting to increase the briskness of the walking, easing the arm movements back in. Breakfast: soaked oats, plums, yogurt. Mocha to go.

For lunch we had leftover ground beef stew and whole-grain toast. Later I snacked on peas and had a piece of plum cobbler from the freezer.

Hubby left for his night shifts shortly after lunch. Because he'd been home (sick) for two extra days, I hadn't done the FlyLady house blessing, so I started on it Friday afternoon. I tidied up the living room, dusted and vacuumed. Tidied up the kitchen and vacuumed.

I reheated chili from the freezer for supper and had a tossed salad.

I spent several hours online researching the new farm use idea hubby and I have been talking about. It sounds like it could be reasonably lucrative for less work than the cows. Part of the problem with the cows is our local elk population, who have decided that our back pasture is on their daily (weekly?) migration route. They hop over our electric fences--or just plow through them. So even if the cows aren't in the back pasture, the loss of electric power in the fenceline causes shorts throughout the system, meaning that the calves in particular wander in and out of the pastures at will (in a bad week, anyway.) It seems like fixing fences is permanently on hubby's to-do list. Also, the price of beef cattle has been low most of the seven years we've owned the farm. A couple of years extremely low (during the mad cow crisis), but it's never gotten anywhere near the first year for dollar-per-pound. This year the cruncher is the fact that the Canadian dollar is so high versus the American dollar. Apparently the price-per-pound has sunk 25% in the past couple of months, just as our calves are getting to market weight. It has become increasingly clear to me that raising beef cattle, particularly with hubby out of town half the time, is just beating our heads against a wall. Hubby is not quite on board with my realization, so we'll see what happens. He is pretty excited about some of the research we've been doing, though. Of course it always costs money to switch gears and use land for a different purpose. And spare cash is something we don't have a lot of.

No, I'm not going to talk about the specifics at this time.

Cleaned up the kitchen in the evening, then watched What Not to Wear and finished the novel I've been reading: The Evidence by Austin Boyd. Jean, have you heard of him? I'm suspecting you might enjoy this trilogy.