Wow, spring is busy here! Jeanne worked to finish up the taxes, Linc continued renovating the rental property. We also prepped and started planting the garden, installed an in-ground big gun sprinkler system for watering our paddocks consisting of 1100 feet of buried 2" pipe, 8 standpipes, and 2 gun sprinklers.
Somewhere in there, Linc fell off his e-bike and suffered a 3rd degree shoulder separation. It's actually kind of a funny story, so here it is. It was starting to rain and we were both in a hurry to get down to the fixer-upper rental house on our e-bikes to get some work done. It started to pour as Linc started down awhile after Jeanne, carrying a backpack full of tools and a huge Blue Hubbard winter squash (to bake in the oven at the house while we worked). He was also towing a BOB trailer full of carpentry and tiling tools behind his bike. At one point, heading around a hairpin at 15 mph or so, he noticed a stick between his front tire and fender. Rather than do the rational thing and stop to pull it out, he decided to save time and just pull it out while riding. As he pulled it out, it caught on the fender, causing the fender to catch on the tire and get jammed up between the forks, locking up the front wheel. "We're going down!" thought Linc, and so he did, scattering tools, pieces of broken squash, scraping his face and separating a shoulder in the process. Only, he didn't know it was separated, he just knew he couldn't seem to use it, so got everything loaded back up with one arm, rode down to the house, and worked on tiling the kitchen floor. A week or so later he finally got the x-ray and found out what had happened. The doctor's advice was, go easy on it, but don't stop moving it, so he kept on working. Other than a strange looking bump, it mostly healed just fine. Moral is, don't be in too much of a hurry, especially when you see that stick in the wrong place!
We did suffer what was for us, our biggest loss of our homesteading career. Our beloved herd queen and first goat we ever got, Phoebe, had complications in labor, lost her kids, got torn up internally in the process (they were REALLY tangled), and died a couple days later. Her absence still feels like a huge void on our farm. Here's a couple of photos of her, one posing for our 2010 Christmas photo with Eggplant, and the other with her two doelings, Flicker and Wren in 2011.
We did take a break or two to recover from that. Here's one of us hiking to the pass up behind our cabin. In the middle of the photo below you can just make out most of our goat paddocks in the green portion of a large brown field.
And Jeanne took care of all of the chores for a couple of days while Linc went backpacking with the guys into Big Dominguez Canyon.
Then it was back at it. Here's a photo of some of the 1100' of trenching Linc did to install the sprinkler piping.
Followed by a nice sunset shot!
What did we learn this month? Let's see, don't be in a hurry to pull out a stick, things happen in life that hurt a lot, there's more strength in each of us than we know until we need it, and there's unexpected beauty when we stop and look.
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