The Blogging Farmer

There’s no surprising most Eastcoasters with massive snowfall this year after the series of blizzards that battered the Eastern seaboard over the past couple of months, but Central NY has been relatively left out of the party. The snowstorms that dumped feet of snow over places like Virginia and North Carolina gave us scant inches. I haven’t even been out cross-country skiing this year. Until, that is, today.

A good gauge of just how much snowfall we got: that car was clean last evening. In the picture, it has about 8 inches of snow on the bed cover. The snow is still falling as I write. 

Shark, our Great Pyrenees is just back from his daily walk with my mom and my aunt. He’s a little upset that I’m going skiing and not taking him. I’ve tried. It does not work. It quickly turns into a disaster when Shark chooses a direction of travel not congruent with my own.

My brother Serge is using an exercise ball to herd the dog home. For some reason, Shark really hates that ball. Yes, Serge isn’t wearing any shoes. I took this because I just love the contrast of the exercise ball against the snow.

There is a story behind this battery of snow shovels (count them… 8!) The first winter we spent in this house, in true democratic fashion, we bought 5 — one for each able-bodied member of the family. Over the summer, in a frenzy of organization, I put the shovels in the barn. Come the next snowstorm, I happened to be at school and the family failed to find my cache. Instead, they purchased another 5 shovels. When I got back, I didn’t realize anything was wrong… I assumed they were using the old shovels (how was I to remember what the old shovels looked like?) The mistake was discovered some time in subsequent years.

The chickens are settling in for the night. They are doing fine. The snow doesn’t really bother them: it’s the cold that gets to them, and it has been a relatively warm winter. Temperatures of -10 to -20 are not untypical for our neck of the woods, but we haven’t seen anything much below 0.

I can’t say the same for this sad group of pigeons, huddled on top of one of our silo towers. You’d think they’d find cover or something?