Around 9 PM in the yard I found a first-time mom with a small lamb that had a  plaintive, hungry baa that told me it might not be alive in the morning.  I had to get mother and lamb inside the barn and into a jug, a 4'x4' plywood cubicle, to milk colostrum from the mother and to tube the colostrum into the lamb with a 60 cc syringe fitted with a rubber tube that I slide down the lamb's throat into its stomach for delivery.

Flashlight in hand I trailed the ewe and lamb (holding it  before her, a carrot to her maternal instinct) through the crowd of gestating ewes about 50 yards to the barn door and inside to a communal pen which held the jugs. 

Fortunately the ewe had milk and I tubed the lamb probably saving its life.  I then color coded it to the ewe, 3 purple dots sprayed on the back of each, and I dipped the lamb's navel in iodine, then gave the ewe good hay and water before I said good night.  Tomorrow should be busy...

I guess I can't count as well as my sheep can.  Lambing is marked on my calendar to begin on March 17, but here they come on March 11, 150 days from when the rams went in with the ewes. 

When I got to the barn this morning I found a ewe lamb born during the night to the ewe, who'd had a vaginal prolapse, spray marked with  a "P".  Two days ago I moved her inside the barn to keep an eye on her and pushed the prolapse back in—surprisingly it stayed without a retainer.  

While I was dipping this lamb's navel in iodine, another ewe lambed outside.  A second healthy ewe lamb and another attentive mother, so far so good.   I'll post this and go back to the barn; it's almost 8 PM. Chances are good that I'll have more babies. I'll keep you posted on the lamb action.

According to Zyggy, all ideologues, especially the most worthy, hate.  I puff on my Groucho Marx cigar, wagging my bushy eyebrows, outside the private club that I refuse to enter because I've been invited to become a member.

"We need someone to hate because we need someone to blame for our abominable and unendurable condition and the defeats we suffer when trying to improve it and make it more secure. We need that someone in order to unload (and so hopefully mitigate) the devastating sense of our own unworthiness. For that unloading to be successful, the whole operation needs however to thoroughly cover up all traces of a personal vendetta. The intimate link between the perception of the loathsomeness and hatefulness of the chosen target, and our frustration seeking an outlet, must be kept secret. In whatever way hatred was conceived, we would rather tend to explain its presence, to the others around and to ourselves, by our will to defend good and noble things which they, those malicious and despicable people, denigrate and conspire against; we would struggle to prove that the reason to hate them, and our determination to get rid of them, have been caused (and justified) by our wish to make sure that an orderly, civilized society survives. We would insist that we hate because we want the world to be free of hatred."

Zygmunt Bauman, from a recent essay for the prospectus of the new Munich production of Alan Berg’s opera, Wozzeck.

Aaron & Tom shear lambs on the third day of shearing. 

For a week, Dominique and I had been getting the barn and sheep ready for  shearing,  but Wednesday into Thursday it snowed over 2 feet.  The sheep were outside in the storm; Friday night we put all 205 ewes into the barn to dry off, feeding them inside with more snow forecast. But come Monday they were still too wet to shear—what to do—fortunately it had not snowed over the weekend and had been partly sunny.

The rams, who were outside, were drier than the ewes.  We could shear them skirting off the parts of the fleece which were still wet; but the rams were  a 1/4 mile away, near the lower barns.  With Poem we trailed them up  to the shearing barn in ruts I'd made in the snow with the tractor tires (sheep can't move well in snow) after fenceing the ewes outside to dry in the sun and wind. 

When I told Aaron that he'd have to begin with the rams, he good-naturedly groaned.  Shearers don't like shearing rams, especially to start, as they are big (usually outweighing the shearer) and  are sometimes uncooperative.  Getting a late start due to the sheep shuffle, Aaron sheared 49 big rams on day 1 and 120 ewes, who were now dry, on day 2.  Tom came in from Towanda on day 3 to help him finish the ewes and to shear the remaining 145 lambs.

The usual & good roustabouts were there: Chris & Dominique skirted the fleeces; this year Ryan and Jeremy, a stout young lad from the nearby Bruderhof community, manhandled the sheep to the shearers and kept the shearing boards clean. 

If you need a good sheep shearer, see my Links page to contact Aaron Loux.  Shearing is a team effort; this was a job well done, thanks to all. 

We sheared 398 sheep on March 1, 2 & 3.

He goes by DeKooning

Robert Altman, director of M*A*S*H, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Nashville, The Player, Prêt-à-Porter, and Gosford Park, was in the U.S. Army Air Force and piloted B-24s in fifty bombing missions in the Pacific theater during World War II.

"I don't think anybody remembers the truth or the facts. You remember impressions."

In Adobe Lightroom, I darkroomed this photo as shot.  The exposure was decreased using graduated filters to bring more definition to the rams' faces and to contrast them with the blue  sky, which was adjusted for hue (I love chicory bloom blue), saturation and luminance, to increase the illusion of a third dimension on the two dimensional plane, seeing as we do, through perspectival discoveries of Quattrocento painting. 

Yet both versions of the photograph have little to do with what I saw in the viewfinder when I released the shutter. 

Reality, which in many cases is language dependant (opposed  to seeing your mother which is not), is chameleon-like with no fixed repository of meaning.  Specifically, does reality reside in your eyes, in the Nikon D700, in Lightroom, in my eyes, or in medieval eyes who had not yet seen painting by Sandro Botticelli?  All locales have their say here.  Perhaps a  (see)saw from Williams Carlos Williams can help us, “It is not what you say that matters but the manner in which you say it..."  (see for say)

What I saw from behind the camera was none of the above; what I saw was a picture taken by someone else.  One that I'd seen years ago where the ram's head was above the photographer's while standing.  I had longed for the  majestic feeling of that  photograph and now I might finally get something similar to it—circumstances were permitting—I framed the rams with the  Nikkor 24-70mm zoom at 42mm; then shooting Aperture Priority at f/7.1, the camera adjusted itself to 1/250 sec at ISO 2000 and I got 6 exposures (all slightly out of focus, unfortunately) in 2 seconds before the rams changed position in the low, flat light of  the afternoon.  Jean Luc Godard often expressed to Raoul Coutard, his long-time cinematographer, what angle he wanted by referencing another filmmaker's shot, "comme Hitchcock à fait dans Rear Window..."

The rams look over my left shoulder at Poem who is sitting 20 paces behind me.  And you can bet she's looking back at them waiting for the word.

Hello Laurie, Anne-Katrin, Caroline, Jacqueline, Galen et al

Thank you for being brave hearts and contributing captions to the BEK photo; other readers have told me they will make hats for Haiti but coming up with a caption was hard for them to do, even for me.   And yes, it's really about Haiti.

Please email me your postal addresses and I'll gladly send you the promised yarn; we'll put your knittings up for sale in the stand as you finish them.  Tell me of your favorite charities too.  My father worked for the Red Cross.

CNN has been covering Haiti while the other networks seem to slowly ignore the continuing pain as time goes on.  TV correspondents in Haiti have been concerned about their viewers switching to the Winter Olympics now underway; and  warning that international aid and medical personal will be called home before the crisis is over.  Our help will arrive when it's needed most: when the world has moved on to other interests.  What else can we do.

Thanks,

Eugene

PS: caption or not, if you want to knit a hat for Haiti, or know someone who does, email me your postal address and I'll happily send you a skein of yarn.