Bad Day?

Wow! What a week! I still haven't had time to put anything else together about my darling red heads, but I promise I will. I have several letters found on the 'Net that I want to paraphrase.... for now, let me tell you about MY week!

It started OK, Monday came and went, Tuesday we decided we had to put down my favorite ewe. She has been sick for awhile, and I would have done it sooner if she hadn't been such a fine example of the tunis breed. I stood looking at her one day, with the tunis standard in one hand, comparing her to it. If you have ever raised any registered breed of animal, you know how difficult it can sometimes be to breed the right characteristics into your animals. Well with this girl, it was damn difficult to find a way she didn't fit into the breed standard! We have had two beautiful lambs from her, which we unfortunately sold because we didn't have a place for them in the breeding program at the time. Hopefully though, in the next couple years I can get her blood back into the flock by buying one of her lamb's offspring. If you have livestock, you know that putting animals down is sometimes necessary, so OK! If I want to enjoy the good things about raising livestock, I just have to live with it right?

Wellllll, on to Wednesday. This is the day I had decided I was going to finally order the marker for my oldest son's grave, so I was already planning on having a stressful day, when my younger son comes in from feeding and tells me that one of the locker lambs is dead. I didn't get over excited about it, I had other things on my mind. I go to work and about 9:30 my lawyers office calls and tells me they finally (FINALLY) received the accident report concerning my son's death. TWO YEARS it has taken them to get this report back! I know the reason it has taken so long, it involves the federal government and they don't want to let anything go, much less a document that implicates them in the death of a twenty year old young man. There were of course, several reasons for the fatal accident but the primary reason was that the last time the vehicle was serviced specifically for the emergency break, the person or persons working on it, forgot to tighten a bolt. Thirty seconds out of that guys day would have changed my future; well, in fact it did didn't it!?!
The day wears on.
Remember the dead lamb? My daughter called me when she got home from school to tell me it hadn't been one of the locker lambs. It was her prize winning (absolutely gorgeous, fancy, beautiful) suffolk ewe lamb.

I didn't realize until yesterday how horrible Wednesday actually was! I think that was the worst day I have had in almost two years! (The anniversary of Tad's death is the 27th of this month, so yeah, almost two years.)

I am hoping for a better weekend, my daughter and I are headed out to Reno this afternoon to take a couple of natural colored corriedales to a friends house, to be picked up later in the week by another friend who will use them in her wool program. I am excited that they are going where they are. When they are gone, my daughter and I can really start concentrating on our breeding and market programs with both her 4-H sheep and our tunis flock. Next year we should have quite a few tunis cross locker lambs for sale. I will say more about the delectable flavor of tunis later :)