Sunday, December 23, 2012

Counting Sheep and giving thanks for great friends

It takes a village, according to Hillary Clinton, and I sure know we get by with a whole lot of help from our friends.

This Thankgiving, our dear friends Wayne and Leesa Thompson pulled into the driveway from Leighton, Alabama, with 5 huge round bales of good, sweet, Alabama hay. That's more than 10 weeks of feed for the whole flock. And they wouldn't accept any more than a "Thank you."

Higgs and one of the hens say "Thank you!" for the yummy hay.
Thank you Wayne and Leesa, you are the most incredible friends!

This week, we made a trip to Little Rock to see a specialist for Shawn's headaches. Lena was taking a well deserved few days off, visiting her brother in Hot Springs. So some more dear friends, Josh and Missy Epperson came and fed all the sheep, goats and chickens in the middle of the worst weather we've had so far this winter. Thank you Josh and Missy!

While I was writing up the chore list for Josh and Missy, I was trying to count the number of animals in each pen. Most were easy, the chickens we count every night when we lock them in - 1 rooster and 7 hens. Dan's pen has 5 total sheep, Boomer shares his pen with just George, and we only have 8 goats. But the main ewe pen... I just couldn't figure out how many sheep there were in there (jokes about exceeding number of fingers not needed!). Finally, I wrote on the chore list - "lots."

So, yesterday, as Lena and I checked eyes and body scores, I determined I was going to figure out exactly how many sheep we had. We checked and wrote and counted. There were 12 on the list, but 14 sheep in the pen. We counted again. Still 14. We had checked everyone. The I realized that Higgs was at the top of the page, we checked her before we came into the pen. Higgs isn't really a sheep. And then Hocus nudged my leg. We had checked Hocus before we penned the sheep. She's a people, not a sheep. So that's 12 ewes, a Hocus in sheep's clothing and a Higgs particle (who is now rather large, but still goes where she wants.) That's how many sheep we have.

And that might explain why I have trouble communicating with numbers people in manager's meetings :-).

No comments: