My assistant chef has four legs and a good nose.

     I have a huge sweet tooth, and today I was (or felt) lucky enough to find all the ingredients to make a coco pound cake this afternoon when I came home. I mixed everything up, put it in the stem pan and set the timer for ninety minutes. About thirty minutes in to the cooking I smelled something burning, but I knew it had a lot of time left to go. Right when I walked in to the kitchen I could see Bear's face, he was standing on the patio furniture couch looking in the window throwing a fit barking, not to mention all the smoke. Apparently my pan wasn't big enough for the mixture I had, it had risen and was all over the bottom of the oven burning. I opened all the windows to get the smoke out and I was trying to clean up the oven, but Bear was so upset I had to go outside and calm him down. The treats had more of a calming affect than I did, but whatever works. At least I know now I have someone else watching over the kitchen when I'm off doing something else.

You can learn a lot from a pound puppy apparently.

     Everyone has heard the saying, "it's not the size of the dog in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the dog." I haven't always agreed with it until today. Mama and daddy adopted a dog from the pound over a year ago, and from the moment she got home she took over 100%. She has the mentality that we belong to her, not that she belongs to us. Her name started out as Happy, then it went to chunky, and now she gets called anything from chub to chunk. She's a mutt with the body of a basset hound, the color of a lab, and has the attitude of a pit bull. She loves us and Bear but that's about it. Some dogs are born to be protectors and she is definitely one who takes her job very seriously.
     Every winter we sow wheat and clover for the sheep to graze on the other side of the road from where they stay, but now that we have so many they would it eat up in a few days so we've stopped moving them. The younger ewes don't remember the past winters  routine and are happy where they are, but the older sheep on the other hand aren't. Every now and then we have a group of sheep that find a hole in the fence and sneak over for a while. Today that group was pretty big and they were bound and determine to stay put and not go back home. We were having a harder time than usual moving them when Chunk came to help, but the thing is Chunk usually does more harm than good helping. We really have to watch her around the sheep dogs because they don't tolerate other dogs around the sheep well. For the most part they get a long, but there have been a few fights where we have to help her. We finally got the sheep together and moving when Chunk decides to run over to a sheep dog with an attitude. Every hair from the top of her head to the tip of her tail stood straight up, I figured she was being defensive because of the past, but this time the dog went on and ignored her. When we got done four of the seven dogs were standing around Chunk wagging their tales, and I thought oh great this is a relief they've got use to each other and we don't have anything to worry about anymore. Wrong. She starts a fight with one of the again, so we ran over to stop it and as soon as we got her seperated everything was fine again. Tails are wagging and no growling so I go back to the four wheeler and daddy goes back to the tractor, as soon as I turn around it starts up again. This time when I made them quit daddy hollered for her to come follow the tractor home so she could be put up and out of the situation. When she starts to leave with him so do the sheep dogs and she starts up another "argument", but this time I was able to get the sheep dogs to follow me one direction and daddy took  her the other. She thinks that the sheep dogs are on her territory and they think the same about her. Hopefully one day they will work out all their differences but until then we'll have to keep an eye on her attitude.
      I would have never thought that something so short, fat, and cute could stand her ground so well. She won't back up from anything or anybody, in most cases that's a good quality. The longer we have her the more I love her, she's always been an underdog and probably always will be, but you can bet she'll fight her way to the top everytime. The bravest most important battles are won when you have to fight your way out of a corner. Who would have thought that such a small beaten down little dog could teach you to never give up?

Miracles come in all shapes and sizes, today one showed up in a very small baby lamb.

     First off I believe in God, I have a strong faith, and most importantly I believe in miracles. The smallest miracle could be huge in someone else's eyes, they're all around us we just have to watch for them. As you can tell by the picture we have sheep, some days it feels like we have 5,000 and then other days it seems like there aren't enough. They love to stay in the hay barn on these cold windy days, as much as it sounds like a good idea it's not. They have plenty of other barns and places to go to stay out of the bad weather, but of course they have to be where you don't want them. The hay barn is a very tricky place especially when it's not full of hay. The lambs and even some of the younger sheep like to climb up the hay and run around, this is their form of mountains I guess, all the older ones want to do is eat it and get warm. Usually some one goes up and feeds the sheep dogs and checks through the barn to make sure there are no problems but, the last couple of days I knew the dogs were well taken care of so I slacked off. Nothing good ever comes from slacking off by the way. After dinner I got the dog food and went up there, while I was feeding I heard a lamb blat. I could tell by the sound something was wrong, so as I go around the corner there is one of the smallest lambs we've had just standing there. She's only a day or two old and looked like she hadn't eaten in several hours, when I went to pick her up I just happened to see a white nose stick up between two round bales of hay. The way it's been fed out of the barn and stacked it's sort of like a maze, so I crawled in there and there was a mama, two babies, and big ram. They had no way of getting out, the bales are 6 feet wide and 5 foot tall, I called daddy to bring the tractor and move some of the hay. I managed to pull the lambs out, but the sheep were to heavy, while I'm waiting on daddy to come I hear a noise a few feet over. Of course I thought it was a snake or a rat, but when the hay moved again I ran my hand down in the hole and felt another sheep. She had crawled in the gap between some hay bales, and was pinned in there when another fell.  Daddy had to be very careful picking up the hay bales so they wouldn't fall down in the holes and crush them. The more we moved the more little ears and noses were showing up. When it was all said and done we had four sheep and about ten lambs that we pulled out, thankfully they were all ok just very thirsty.
     If it hadn't been for this one small orphaned lamb there would have been no chance of us finding those sheep. I wasn't able to find the lambs mama, I have no idea how she made it this long without milk, but I do know that she was a hero today. I brought her home, made her a bottle and she's sound asleep now.  Most lambs like the one today will follow the sheep around blating until they get tired or found, but this one stayed in the barn, you can call it a coincidence but I won't. Miracles come in all shapes and sizes, today one showed up in a very small one or two pound hungry baby lamb. God is good.