Listen. I have what you want.

For about 95% of our married lives, David and I have had a wood stove.  And I have two opinions about wood stoves:

1.  I hate them.
2. I love them.

Oh, they are so high maintenance, what with your felling and chopping of trees, and gathering of wood, loading the wood box, keeping the fire going, cleaning up wood chips, and so on.

But they heat the house unlike any other heat source.  And it is helpful in case the power goes out.

We had the same style of wood stove for years and I was a pro at it.  But then David decided on a whim to switch it out with a different wood stove.

The new wood stove has not one, but three dampers, as if it could not be more full of itself.

Anyways.  If you are home all day and keeping the fire going, the house can get a bit too warm, so you want to close the dampers to slow down the burn.  I was doing just that when I forgot that David’s stupid new wood stove’s dampers are hot to touch, even though they are not supposed to be.

So.  I burned my pointer finger and thumb.

Yes.  Let’s pause for a minute so you can feel badly for me.

DO YOU SEE THE LITERAL BURN MARKS ON MY POOR FINGER?

5 seconds after I burned my fingers, David called me.

Me (acting like my world was ending):  Hello?

David:  What’s up with you?

Me:  I burned my fingers on that stupid new wood stove you put in.  I forgot the damper gets hot to touch.

David:  Well, there should be gloves somewhere down there.

Helpful.

Anyways!  I stuck my hand in ice water for about a half of an hour and it totally helped.

So, there you go.  A little helpful nugget for you.

Also.  Let us compare David and my personalities:

David falls off a ladder at work.  Breaks ribs.  Tells no one.  Keeps working.

Taylor burns her finger.  Feels really badly for herself.  Tells everyone.

***

Let’s talk about calves.

So, we knew that two calves were orphaned, but we currently have seven total calves out in the main pen.  Each calf has a tag in its ear with a number. And because we have other full time jobs, we do not have extensive records on which cow belongs to and so on and so forth.  And we don’t have a squeeze chute, if you even know what that means, and we have no way of tagging the mothers and yada yada yada, just trust me.  We mean well, but we are not the A Team over here.

And the calf I had FF wrangle was NOT the orphan calf.  Bummer.  So we let that one back out and we had to try and figure out who was who.

I spent what daylight I had yesterday after teaching writing down calf numbers and which mother I believed they belonged to until I could figure out who the two orphans were.

Ladies and Gentlemen.  I would like to present to you . . .

The Orphans.

The one on the left is a heifer and she is younger than the other one.  She is handling her life situation much more calmly than her pal over there to the right.

Pal on the right is a castrated male and he cries all the time for his mother.  And he goes to her dead body and stands there and cries, as if the world isn’t full of enough sadness and woe.

Today, I checked on all calves again.  We were kind of hoping one of the nursing mothers would adopt the orphans, but we have no evidence to prove that is happening.  So we have a two step action plan that we are putting into place.

1.  Corral them up and bottle feed them.
2. List them for sale so we don’t have to bottle feed them for long.

The problem is these two are strong and wild.  I don’t really know how we are going to get them to take a bottle.  It will be an adventure.

Me to calves:  Listen. I have what you want.  Milk!  But you have to let me come near you!  I am on your team!

Calves run away, mooing, acting like I am Godzilla.

***

I am happy to report that the puppy brothers have a very healthy self esteem and imagine themselves to be fierce, herding dogs, as evidenced here in this video:

Boy.

The horse and cows sure look intimidated.

Happy Friday!