Thursday, An Email Exchange with Roger Shaw, author of "The Commercial Dexter"

It was cold but sunny and very beautiful.

Sherry came to clean today. She's got a new pickup. It looks really good, mostly blue with one black front fender where it got bashed in an accident. The black fender is a replacement. I guess it's a 2000 year model but she got it for a pretty good price. She and Pat had to go all the way to Monroe, WA to buy it from a private party. I was excessively jealous since I want a used pickup for picking up feed at the feed store, carrying small animals around and generally being able to move or pick stuff up. I was definitely jealous.

Good thing I went to the Farm Store and picked up 4 bags of feed. I have enough to last me till Dave H can deliver Friday night.

Chas used the tractor to push together the remnants of the brush pile. It was still burning when I looked a few minutes ago (9pm).

I emailed Roger Shaw who wrote an article in The Record titled, "The Commercial Dexter." He was kind enough to reply. We exchanged phone numbers and I expect to be able to contact him by phone in the next few days. His article talked about his breeding his Angus heifers to a Dexter bull to produce smaller cows that he then bred back to a low birth weight Angus bull. The article also discussed the amount of feed you'd provide to 2 large cows vs providing the same feed to three cross breds and getting three calves that are just slightly smaller than the giant cows would produce.

I found some old green tea that I decided to try out tonight with my flavored soy milk. It actually tastes pretty good considering how old the tea is.

Dinner was some dish I got from the January edition of one of Oprah's magazines. It involved cannelloni beans, shrimp, green onions and garlic over couscous. It was really flavorless, disappointing actually. I guess I prefer spicy dishes.

Work at LCHD tomorrow. More data being organized for easy retrieval.

Dave from the Farm Store comes tomorrow to drop off my feed and 4 hog panels around 5pm.

Those are the panels I will use for chicken tractors as soon as I figure out how wide and long to make each tractor. I want something I can move easily. Since the panels are 16 feet long, I will need to cut the panels into one small and one large section and then trim. I was thinking of 4 feet x 10 feet. I still haven't decided.