Mid June, lambs are growing, pastures flowing!

This post is part experiment:  my cousin Jean just notified me that the blog was missing.  Blogger agreed, and with a few button pushes, it was back up.  A mystery.

I haven't written much lately.  What's been happening?

I got all the outbuildings painted by an old friend who is, incidentally, a painter, and coincidentally, I  ran into in the vet's office mid-May.  So... one barn (lambing barn) was entirely re-painted, while 8-9 other small-to-huge, smokehouse-to-machine-shed barns got doors and windows and roof trim painted.  All fresh!

A friend, Trish, my daughter, Emily, and my mom all helped me to plant the vegetable garden and flowerpots around the house. 

The farmer who plants and harvests my tiny, tillable acreage remarked that he loved having another local guy mow his farmstead lawns, and I said, "give that guy my phone number".  For $55 I get 5 hours back each week of my precious time, not spent on a mower.  The guy with the zero-turn radius, 51" cutting deck machine does it all, well, in 90 minutes.

Love that.  The theme here is, "getting help" on this farm, since my husband was diagnosed in March with a scary form of cancer-- malignant fibrous histiocytoma-- I'll say its name.
Howard has to take chemo monthly for 4 months, then surgery, then radiation for 2 more months.  You can see how just running to doctors and clinics would take up all available extra time, hence, the need for extra help.

Most all is planted and mowed and taken care of right now, so I should get out and take some sheep photos before the lambs are all grown.  But we had a 6" rainfall overnight last night.  For the first time ever, the lambs' and ewes' current shelters were in water up to the sheepies' knees last night, and it was raining, lightning, thundering so constantly that they wouldn't follow us to a dry shelter. 
Water ran like a wide creek through their pasture, between trees in the pine windbreak, and into the rams' pasture. 
I found the (4) rams in their plastic port-a-hut, similarly up to their knees in water, and when I called, they popped out of it.
I could only hope that all sheepies found higher, dryer ground at the end of the pasture.

This morning, the sun was shining brightly, with lakes in fields and yards all around.