Our Christina is Back

This morning we woke up to a familiar cow.  Christina was standing by the fence looking at us, with ears aimed toward the house, the same place as she was every morning last summer.  She had that look on her face, I'm ready, you can come now.  When we opened the gate to the milk parlor she hurried in, gave her calf a lick and then enthusiastically headed for her candy (molasses covered grain).

Jerky was pretty enthusiastic too.  We let him nurse on the quarter that we're worried about while we milked the other three.  He emptied it out faster than we ever could.  We didn't fully milk her out, just took the pressure off, but it was still almost three quarts.

With milking done, we turned to cleaning out the shed.  It had lots of cow pies, more than we've seen in the last three days combined.  A high functioning GI tract is another sign that she is recovering.  In the short time we were out there, she pooped twice.  Normally I would have been bothered, but this morning it was welcome.

Remember that trench we made on Monday before this all started?  It's still there and a big storm is heading in.  It's supposed to rain and snow for the next four days and get really cold — a forecast low of 5F next Tuesday.  Yesterday my husband made it to the store for all the pipes and fittings.  This morning he'll get them all put together in the garage and we'll all help lay them in as fast as we can go.  Hopefully we can get it all laid today, but it won't be hooked up.  I guess we'll be carrying water out to the cows for a while.

On Monday night I also started some tomatoes.  They were all frozen and Monday I scalled them and slipped their skins off.  I filled two buckets and hung them in cheese cloth to drain overnight.  I didn't get back to them until Wednesday.  By this time, almost all of the water had drained out.  I put the resulting pulp in a pot and heated it up.  In less than 30 minutes, we had thick paste. Those six or seven gallons of tomatoes reduced down to three pints of paste.

Today we praise God for Christina's health, we watch to make sure it sustains, and we thank God for all the people who have helped us through it.