New Beef

It's been a while since my last entry.  Over a month, in fact (as has been pointed out to me by several followers - thank-you very much!). 

First our satellite internet service went down and we were without service for almost 2 weeks waiting for the repair guy to come out.  Our service is with WildBlue and I'm not shy about saying that their customer service sucks. That said, they are the best of a bunch of bad options for anything above dial-up internet in our extreme rural area.  When we learned how long we were going to be without service we immediately called WildBlue's biggest competitor in the area; Hughes Satellite.  They told us they could be out in 2 to 5 days so we signed up.  We've got a business we're trying to run here and email and web site work is an integral part of it. Well, their customer service is even worse than WildBlue's and, despite numerous calls to them and their designated installation company it was several days AFTER we finally got WildBlue service back that they finally called to set up an appointment to eventually come out. Arrgh. 

I also had several trips off-ranch, including one to Phoenix to ship and pick up a couple of goat kids and a trip to Kingman AZ ( 5 hours each way) to pick up a small goat herd that was being disbursed.  Some of the goats and almost all of the genetics came from our herd so we were happy to welcome them back to the Ranch.

Then my sister and her husband arrived for a visit from Philadelphia.  We've been having a great time with lots of food-related tales I'll review here soon.  They leave tomorrow.

But TODAY we had a new arrival on the Ranch that I didn't have to go anywhere to get.  A brand-new calf was born to our Belted Galloway cow Bertie.  This calf will be our beef for 2013 (talk about advanced meal planning).  At least we're hoping it will be our 2013 beef.  We have yet to determine the sex of the little cutie but we have our fingers crossed that it's a bull we can castrate to a steer.  If it's a girl (heifer), we'll probably have to sell her as we are not set up to keep her from getting bred too early, and by her father before it is time to butcher.

Calf gets a drink

Bertie and new calf (LGD Donna stands watch)

Bertie (mom), new calf, and Boone (dad)

      Anyway, Bertie calved with no problems at some point during the day despite it being very windy(sustained winds in the 20-30 mph range all day with gusts over 55 mph).  This is Bertie's 6th calf for us in as many years.  You gotta love those heritage breed animals: tough, thrifty, great mothers and fathers and all-around easy to manage. Oh yeah, and very, very tasty!