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We made it through! Today was a refreshing 97, but for the next week, we’ll be topping out in the low 90s. There’s even one day where they’re planning for a high in the 70s! Yippee!

It’s amazing how absorbing the weather is when you have livestock.

Here’s some more lighting from yesterday. I have to admit the Kansas lightning never ceases to mesmerize me. I remember driving through it for hours on the way back from Yellowstone when I still lived in Texas, white-knuckling it and thinking that any moment a vampire or a werewolf or a bloody psychopath was going to pop up in the middle of the interstate.

Tonight we had hours and hours of lighning. Here’s 90 seconds:

 

Caught a few early Perseid meteors tonight. I’m going to set an alarm for 3am and see how meteor prime time compares. This is the first Perseid shower since we’ve been out here that it’s been a clear night with almost no moonlight, and it’s also the first shower since they put a shield on the security light. There are still some pretty serious light leaks out onto the pasture, but it’s dramatically improved.

Hopefully by August 12 of next year, we’ll have our deck back up over the barn, complete with a little light barrier shade so we can watch the shower in excellent comfort, with no bugs or concerns over random skunk encounters.

One more ultra-hot day (my weather widget claimed 106° very briefly this afternoon), and then we’re supposed to drop down to the more regionally appropriate 90s. The nights are lovely, though, high 70s to low 80s and breezy.

Created with flickr slideshow from softsea.

The really good photos were taken by Julie McCarter. The other ones were mine. :)

Yes, that is a sheep sleeping on the floor of my office/fiber shop. It was a hard day for Uncle Honeybunch, but hopefully whatever made him sick is on its way out of his poor gut. I kind of panicked and let (read: dragged) him into my office, knowing the heat wave was going to be rough on him when he was off feed and feeling poor. Poorly? Poor? Grammar Girl, where are you?!

I lost the whole day to fretting over the animals in the heat. Notorious pig Uncle Honeybunch was off his feed since last night, and not eating or burping (burping = life for ruminants; otherwise they can become big bloated gas balloons & die, no kidding). I know the vet thought I was out of my mind, bringing a sheep into my office, but it was crazy hot, so I was way more cautious. If he’d been off feed in 85-degree weather, I’d’ve been a lot more wait-and-see about it. It’s unlikely I’d have even called the vet.

He’s back outside with his posse now, though still little interested in eating. But his poop is now looking more like proper sheep poo (what comes out of either end of the sheep is quite important); and he can’t really live in my office. One day of being stuck in here was enough for me. I was worried if I left for too long, he might run amok. You know, pissed off at all the bags of wool everywhere….

As for the other sheep, I put up a big coolarool shade today and kept their water cool with frozen jugs of water to encourage hydration, a very clever idea I learned somewhere on the internet. They seem to be hanging in there, and thankfully the nights are reasonably cool, because it’s only going to stay hot.

Liz left today. I really enjoyed her work, and it made me wistful about the residency program. We’ve had to let it languish somewhat because with money as it is today, we just can’t afford to promote it overall (it’s awesome but doesn’t earn anything, and we still haven’t found a magic goodies machine to pay the bills).

I’d really love to have a residency coordinator so that our workshop-free months would be  more peppered with people making good work. It’s nice to have little clumps of folks; the solo residents have to be highly motivated and resistant to boredom/block, but with little groups, you get the flock feeding vibe that keeps everyone making.

With Ron’s new shop on the horizon and my new workshops brewing, I suspect our time and money will be gobbled up and we’ll have to wait until 2012 to really put our backs into promoting the residency program again. But time does tend to fly, so it should be here before we know it. We do have something of a master plan, but sometimes all the little pictures interfere with the big one.

Really, really freaking hot. We’re okay–peachy in fact, because we broke down and bought a couple window units a few weeks ago, and we pretty much just stick to the two rooms with AC and the basement, which is always comparatively refreshing.

But the poor animals are just miserable. We had a couple 100+ days last week, but this time it  looks like they’re scheduling a full week of misery. I’m going to try to rig up some shade cloth first thing in the morning. Short of running a sprinkler over the barnyard (would that work?), I don’t know what else to do. If anyone has brilliant heatwave sheep/chicken management plans, I’m all ears.

(ETA next morning: Ah, I just read on sheepandgoat.com that you specifically should not spray sheep, as it interferes with their heat dissapation. I put up the shade cloth and I’m currently freezing some bottles of water to throw in their troughs to cool it down mid-day.)

Spidey snack:

The Art Share block printing class was great! Several of us even made suicide blocks!

Each of the participants donated a print. We’ll be selling them on etsy to start a litle fund to buy supplies for the next class!

The final stage.

Here are some of Liz’s wood block prints and her proof press. The toad demons are the newest, and I think she said they still have one more layer to go. The multi-color prints are reduction prints. After each layer is printed, subsequent prints/layers are  made by carving away more and more of the original block. By the end, you just have your outlines/shadows. If you make a mistake, you’re just screwed. And once you’ve moved on to the next layer, that’s it–you can never make another print, ever.  It’s crazy and completely awesome! I don’t know if I’d be capable of creating with that kind of abandon.

Liz is teaching a free linoleum block class this Sunday, and there are still a couple spots left. Details on registration are here.

The blocks she prints from are beautiful in themselves. You can see a print from the bear wood block (above) below. She carves both sides of each block. The reverse for the bear block is the woman below. The reverse of the man in the tie is the toad. The double-sided blocks make me unaccountably giddy.

This is my very sad old hay shelter,which is not long for this world. It did a more or less fine job despite its shortcomings. But a wicked winter wind ripped on of the posts right out of its concrete footing, and from there, it was pretty much a goner. As of this morning, the only thing holding it up was a ladder. By the end of today, it will have a total of 4 upright posts, and next week, the hoops will be gone and it will have a proper tin roof! Ed’s going to make it a little wider as well, and I’m hoping to fit the new mower inside.

In other hay-related news, I’ve got a date with our county extension agent next week to see what’s growing on our pastures and get some help with a management plan. Right now, I’m thinking of trying to establish some native grass for the future, but skipping a couple years of haying, and doing some winter grazing and buying supplementary hay for the mid-term. But we’ll see (more boring details about our pastures here).

We found this in the shelter. I hope it finds a good place to relocate. It’s current home is now just flopped over, off the posts, but it didn’t seem interested in moving. Maybe we can help relocate it when the new roof’s up?