Sad day

Allie lost her calf.

I found a little black heifer calf dead in the corral today. She must have had it either late last night, or very early this morning.

I'm not sure if the little one froze, or had some other trouble. It looked like Allie only cleaned off one side of the calf, and there were no signs the calf had ever nursed. She may have been born dead, or simply very weak.

I wish I'd been more vigilant! We just weren't really expecting her to calve so soon, and she hadn't been showing any new signs of being close to calving.

At least Allie seems to be okay. She kept going over and licking the dead calf, but once I removed it she settled right down and started eating. She's wandering the corral a bit and checking all the corners, but she hasn't been calling. I think she's less bothered than I am.

I wonder if cows would be jealous....

... if they knew human pregnancy tests just entailed peeing on a stick?

Vet came out to the farm today. We had him check out a bunch of stuff, but most importantly we had him pregnancy check Alvitr(Allie). Allie is indeed pregnant! He figures she should give us a calf before the New Year. I'm kind of hoping for a bull calf - this calf's grandmother was 1/2 lowline angus, which would make the calf 1/8th lowline angus, I believe. If it's a boy, then there's no hard questions of "should we keep it or eat it?" XD

Clearly I fail at blogging....

... but I'm just going to ignore that, and continue on like I haven't missed posting for over a year.

Roy and I went into town early today to try and get a garage door opener for his new machine shop. Not like early early; we made it to Home Depot by about 9:30am. They had one of their "one day only, no rain checks" sales on openers, so it was rather surprising that they still had most of a pallet full of them left. Guess not many people are thinking of installing a garage door at -15C?

Breakfast at Denney's (and the first coffee of the day: sweet, sweet coffee), then various shopping to kill time until our massage appointments at 1:45pm. Most useful purchase of the day: I got insulated coveralls from Peavey Mart. They should (hopefully!) make doing the outside chores rather more bearable this winter.

We got home just before the farrier arrived to trim Frejya the mini donkey's hooves. Scrambled around a bit to get suited up, then held Frejya while he trimmed. Those coveralls I bought? Best $99 I've spent in ages! Freja still needs another session to get her feet back to a reasonable length, but she looks SO much better already. Hopefully she won't develop ice balls in her hooves quite so badly now, either. He'll be back in 8 weeks to trim again, and to do Poppy's hooves as well. It's possible this will get me off my butt and working with Poppy to lead/tie and pick up her feet!

Today seemed to be a cow day. Got a couple e-mails regarding Sage, the Dexter heifer we have up for sale/trade, and a couple of messages on the phone about a Dexter we bought a couple months ago, and a Scottish Highland cow/calf pair I'm hoping to buy (I'm not sure why, but I'm just craving a Highland or two to meander about the pasture with my Dexters). Lots of phone tag this evening!

Oxo the frosty Dexter steer, and his half sister Sage hiding behind him.