Too Late....

It's too late to be writing.

How many of my journal entries begin that way, all the way back to 9th grade when I started journalling. Old habits die hard. And yes, I'm a night owl.

Never enough hours in a day. I WANT to stop and smell the roses, watch the lambs play, listen to the complex chatterings of the purple martins checking out the freshly-cleaned martin house, admire the nest the barn swallows are building in the galvanized shed where I store feed, tools, and fencing supplies. I NEED to plant potatoes, scrub market totes, deal with the last few things in the freezer that went into terminal melt-down last week. So, what do you think got done today?

In addition to smelling the roses, and picking some petals to add to a salad of fresh garden lettuce and spinach, green onions, and the three radishes that actually survived the freeze, for a potluck in the city park this evening, I:

--Mowed the front yard with the power mower and fed the clippings to the chickens and sheep.
--Mowed part of the garden lane with the scythe and fed the mowings to Cleo, who's in isolation with her lamb. The lamb has erysipelas (joint ill), a disease that can enter through the navel if the umbilical cord isn't treated promptly at birth. This lamb was born on an utterly miserable mucky rainy night when I was out of iodine to dip the navel. He's responding very well to injections of long-acting tetracycline, under the vet's instructions since it's an off-label use. The 40-day withdrawal will be long over before it's fime for him to be lamb chops.
--Strung a wire for the front yard grape vine, a seedless reddish-pink grape (Reliance?) I started that project about 6 years ago. The benefit of the delay is that during its years of lounging around the ground the vine has rooted in several places and I can transplant them to other locations.
--Visited with a friend and her 4-year-old grandson who came to gather eggs and see the lambs.
--Went to the cell phone store after not being able to make (or receive, I later realized) phone calls all day. The clerk opened the phone, dumped a small pile of hay and gravel onto the counter, dusted off the SIM card, and the phone worked fine.
--Listened to and returned calls to all the folks who'd been trying to get a hold of me on my day off.
--Had a friend come help put the big industrial 3-hole stainless steel sink that I use for washing vegetables back up on its concrete blocks in the washhouse, after a sheep got into the washhouse by crawling in the back and under the sink, then of course not figuring out how to get out by the same route. So he sat there awhile, pooping and eating green onions. At least seeing the sheep in the washhouse clued me in that there was a BIG cleanup job ahead before picking for market....

That doesn't seem like much for one day. But I guess I need to add a few things, like:

--Blew my nose copiously a couple dozen times, still recovering from the cold I had last week.
--Walked several miles, just back and forth to the shed for tools and parts and supplies as I worked on various things.
--Answered half a dozen e-mails and read many more than that.
--Punched the "retry" button on the cell phone a hundred times before figuring out that the phone wasn't working.
--Randomly pulled up tree seedlings everywhere I saw them, which is to say everywhere I went. Ash, oak, redbud, and elm are the dominant self-seeders. My worst weeds really are trees, closely followed by wild grapes.

Sometimes it's amazing that I make any progress at all!