Quality vs. Quantity

My little sister came to visit the other weekend.

We had a lovely visit of doing nothing.

We walked around and took pictures of the cows.

My little sister takes lovely pictures.

I take tons of pictures of the farm. So occasionally I stumble on some good ones. But Little Sister's pictures always seem to turn out beautifully.

Introducing: Oscar

Allow me to introduce the latest addition to our Seasame Street themed petting zoo.
This is Oscar:

He came to the farm a few weeks ago and my landlady emailed me to tell me he was here. Her exact words were "He's in the field with Bert and Ernie. He looks like Ernie. He is #52"

Well, I thought to myself "cool, another white faced cow" assuming, as I have been that Ernie is the white faced one. However when I went to find him, I discovered that #52 is actually all black. Meaning two things:

1. I have been wrong all this time about which is Bert and which is Ernie. Bert has the white face. Ernie is all black. My bad
2. That my landlady's comment is actually comical. Oscar "looks like Ernie" in the sense that he is all black....like every other cow in the field. Not a helpful comparison at all.
   

Anyway.

He's a scruffy fluff ball. And I like him.
He is definitely the new cow in town. No one seems to be hanging out with him yet, and he seems very tentative about everything. Hopefully Bert and Ernie will take him under there wing.

Rite Aid

For a long time now, I have known that I needed to break into the world of drug store rebate shopping. I have read all about it and seen some of the fabulous deal you can get from the drug store. But because I have never been drug store shopping, it just wasn't on my mental list of sales to check every week.

Well, it was time to fix that. For my first trip, I decided to go with a good friend and expert deal shopper. Together we headed off to Rite Aid - armed with a print off of their corporate policies on couponing, etc. In case things got ugly and we needed to pull out the big guns. (Fortunately, we did not have to, everything went quite smoothly)

It was not a huge trip in terms of stuff purchased, but it was monumental nonetheless.

Here is what I got:

Total Cost (after my rebates come in): $0.00

Yup, it's not much, but it was all free. And it is all stuff I will use - toothbrush, shampoo, lightbulbs, and who can refuse free chocolate.

I will spare you the details of the transaction, but it was a combination of mail in rebates, SCRs and manufacturers coupons. For more info on how to work this kind of deal for yourself, go here.

Cute faces

I love these little cows.

They just have the sweetest faces.

They are so shy, but curious at the same time.

So cute.

Soy Bean Harvest

For a long time this was parked in our yard.

Just waiting for these to show up so that they could start the soybean harvest.

Once they arrived it only took about 2 days.

They soybeans are gone now.

There is nothing left to harvest. It may as well be winter.

New born

Most of the baby cows (all 20 of them) were born a month or more ago. But just this past week, there was one last new addition. It looks very tiny next to the others.

Here is its mother giving it a little bath.


It is super cute.

They grow fast. The other "little" cows in this video are just a month ish older than the pint sized one.

Time for a frost

In general I am not a huge fan of cold weather. Winter is much too dark and cold for me. But, since there is no stopping the arrival of winter, I vote we skip this middle ground. It's cold, but not freezing. Which means that all the flies on the farm are very sleepy, but not dead.

They like to sleep on the side of our house:

All the little black dots are sleeping flies.
When ever you open the door, a few particularly groggy ones who have landed on the door, just kind of fall into the house, where they warm up and wake up.

We have way too many flies for November. It's time for a cold, hard, frost.
Sorry flies, its not personal, but I am tired of swatting flies like it's July.