animals

I SWEAR, SOMETHING’S LIVING IN THERE!

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We recently lost the last of our chickens.  This is not something new, as farmers we know there will always be predators that attack all parts of a farm.

  • Prairie dogs making leg-breaking holes in animal pastures.
  • Gophers-from-hell eating the roots of our asparagus.
  • Snakes popping up when you least expect them (luckily, I only had a Rattler once -knock on wood!).
  • Skunks hiding in the cat barn to sleep with a warm, furry, bundle of cats and eat their food (yes, one of them crawled out from the cat bed box on a frigid winter day and scared the snot out of me. I calmly said: “Good Morning.” Then backed out of the barn rather fast.).
  • An opossum choosing to hang out in our barn to avoid bad storms (the little sucker hung around for over a week, and popped up in a variety of places.).

oppossum

I want to find out what monster is living in my chicken barn, but a big part of me is also afraid.  Just my luck, it will lunge at me when I discover it (eeek!!). My sister was so nice and brought up the option that it might be a badger – great?!?  Yes, we do have those out here, but we have not seen any on our property since we first bought the farm (2000).  We initially had one living on the side of the hill by the pond.  We left it alone, and it left us alone.  Roughly four years later, it disappeared.  We have not noticed any living signs on our property since (would like it to stay that way – mean critters!).

badger

During cold winter times, we purchase the critter foods and put them immediately into containers.  Then the empty bags are piled up until spring and then put into the trash.  We usually put bags into bags and simply leave them until the weather is warmer for dragging the empties to our trash.  Things have been so strange this year, that the bags have piled up.  My fear is my monster is hiding in that pile.

I have left the barn door open the last several nights (since the loss of our last chicken) in hopes that whatever got stuck in the barn has now made its way out.  Today is the day of discovery.  My task, since the winds-from-hell have subsided, is to get in there and pull everything out.  We stored large dog kennels, that we used for various reasons, in there.  I have peeked into those already and no monsters.  I do want to drag them out so I can get back in the corner behind them.   Wish me luck that all meanies are gone!

Here’s to spring cleaning – eeek!

spring cleaning

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I’m Mad As Hell, And I’m Not Gonna Take It Anymore!

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We are so tired of theft we could just scream!  It is not because of virus issues; it is something that has been building up over multitudes of years.

I am not talking about money – I am talking about our critters.

Two more of our hens were killed in the last two nights.  It took me until today to figure out how the monster(s) is getting in.  The white hen disappeared, leaving just feathers – the first clue of the perpetrator.  This morning it was our red Hennie, and I found her gutted under some sheet metal in the back corner of the chicken barn.

We have gone through great lengths to make sure our chickens are safe from the monsters in the night.  It had been working reasonably well for the last year or so.  Apparently, they have created a new gap in a far corner that I would not have found had it not been for the corpse.

We try very hard to follow the live-and-let-live motto.  However, when we are down (sorry – were down) to only four birds, it’s just wrong for the beasties to attack them.  We have prairie dogs, rabbits, mice, and various other critters very near our barn on which they could have feasted.  That would not have bothered me at all.

So, today, to try to bring our thief to justice, we are sharing photos in hopes that someone will spot this thug (and its gang) and put an end to our injustice!  Here is the criminal:

Don’t be fooled by that innocent, cute look on its face – it is a natural-born killer!  You might even find it hanging around with this murdering mob:

coyotes

(Ragged bunch of gangsters if ever I saw one.)

If you happen into their local watering hole, you may find them with the lesser thieves who only nab eggs and babies:

Notice that one even wears a mask to try to hide its identity – but I know who it is.

Please, keep an eye out for these dangerous killers and help to bring them to justice.  In the meantime, we will be having a memorial this Friday to morn the loss of our dear Hennies (beers and Yahtzee will be provided – HOWEVER no more than one at a time in the porch please.).

Stay Safe!

(Yes, I did get stilly in here, and we did lose two chickens, but it is live and let live for us, so we will forge onward with humor wherever I can find or provide it.  My wish is that I put a little smile on your face for just a moment today.)

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TURKEYS – WHO KNEW?

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I just love when I stumble across something that I did not know before.  Anyone after the age of fifty can relate to this.  I love learning, so it is a pleasant surprise when something like this happens:

MMN.COM – Turkey Facts You Didn’t Know.

They actually have things that I had never even thought to think about before…

  • Where and how the turkey got its name.
  • Ben Franklin did not suggest the turkey as our national bird (this one threw me!).
  • And this one just is not right – You can tell male from female by its poop?!? (No, we had/have turkeys, and I NEVER checked this out. I can tell male from female just by looking at the bird.) What I want to know is who discovered this and why?
  • I never knew it was called a “snood” – the thinking on the top of their beak. I have seen the males get quite long when they are excited.  Hint, dead give-away it’s a male.

They listed other little factoids, but I knew all the rest.  You may find them interesting if you have never been around a domestic turkey.  Oh, and a been there-done that word or caution: YES, THEY CAN BE VERY MEAN!  Then again so can a rooster.  We had a rooster that would purposely hide behind anything the minute he heard my daughter’s voice.  When she got close enough he would come charging out at her, head down, wings flailing, and ready to throw spurs first into her legs.  Scary, but I burst out laughing every time because he never bothered me.  Could be because he came at me once, I kicked him and told him he would be freezer meat if he didn’t knock it off.  He never tried to attack me again.

We had one turkey, Whiskey was his name, and he would follow me around everywhere outside.  The first time I sat up in the garden after weeding away and found him squatting behind me, it freaked me out a bit.  Then it dawned on me that we raised almost all of our birds from babies.  He was one, and so I was kind of his mom.

My daughter was afraid of him too.  Not because he would try to attack her, but because he was big and scary when he would “fluff” (as we called it).  Males get all poofy, the tail feathers go up and spread out, the snood gets huge, long and droopy, and their whole body seems to swell up with pride in themselves.  Then they make this weird puffing noise (This site: http://www.wideopenspaces.com/sounds-turkeys-make-and-what-they-all-mean/ provides all the different sounds.  The cluck is the closest to what it sounds like.) while they follow you.  I just wrote it off as having too much air from being all puffed up like a balloon.

This lovely Thanksgiving Day, make sure you give thanks to this wonderful bird.  They are a real wonder of nature – like how can something that fat get all the way up in a tree?

(These two are wild ones.)

Whiskey with guinea

(This was our prize – Whiskey.  Oh, and if you read the full article, it mentions Guinea Birds in Turkey.  That is what the white bird is behind him.  Close up they have the head of a dinosaur.)

PLOWSHARE THURSDAY 9-28-17 – extra eyes.

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There are several things I wanted to share today, but my best bet became “an extra pair of eyes.”

This is not really something you can buy through Amazon, but some days I wish I could.  There are a number of times, during any given year on a farm, where some extra set of eyes would come in handy.

We do a large amount of bartering with a variety of friends and family.  We were lucky in the fact that our in-ground planting in the greenhouse provided us with a ton of food.  This year it was needed more than ever as it is the first time since we bought the farm that we are without fresh farm eggs.  Fricken coyotes and foxes picked them all off (even my beloved turkey) in one afternoon.  Brazen jerks did it in broad daylight too.

Whiskey 4-20-16Some days you just cannot make sense of something that happens, this was one of those occasions. We took major precautions over the last several years to upgrade our poultry pens.  We taught them all to go into the barns at night where they were closed up tight.  We added a 360-chicken wire, attached enclosure for them to wander in and out of at will.  The only thing we did not consider was human intervention.

Xcel Energy and W.A.P.A have access through our property to get to their overhead power lines.  Both have been down in the lower neighbor’s field making all kinds of racket changing out poles and lines.  The best part of this is that they had managed to scare off all the wild critters that were hanging out in the swamps – including foxes and coyotes.

Roughly three years now we have not heard a yip or howl from either of the two groups to our joy.  This turned out to be a curse.  Yes, it was great we did not have to worry about them attacking our critters, but we became complacent.  I would open the doors up and let the critters roam all over the farm because I believed their predators to be gone.  Oh stupid me!

Once nice summer day with none of the worker crews around, and our whole flock (except the two chickens that hung in the cat barn) was taken out by the monsters.  It took no more than an hour for the chickens.  The turkey was nabbed by a coyote later that same afternoon. (He was carried off, and he was huge!)

So my share today is to get more eyes on your property.  Friends or neighbors driving by.  Neighbors close enough to notice strange movement.  We are even thinking about installing motion sensors with cameras in all of our hard-to-see areas. 

We have been able to exchange fresh fruits and veggies, canned goods, and homemade goodies for eggs and the like.  The pantry is not looking too bad, but I still feel totally bummed about our loss, and missing the wobbly birds that would come running when I called them.

 

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DO YOU HAVE ENOUGH DAYS IN YOUR MONTH?

/ helbergfarmstories / 5 Comments

Me – never enough! I always start out with the best of intentions – 1st of the month, I have plans, I have goals – FANTASTIC – I’m ready!! Then by about the 5th of the month (sometimes as early as the 2nd), the month figures out “Hee, hee, it’s Rachel trying to be organized again – let’s get her!” Then it all blows up.

silly-planner

puppy counts as baby!

This being a new year and the first month of the new year, silly me decided to make “better planning and organization” my main resolution for 2017. Very silly me! I swear that all my loved ones up in heaven are sitting around laughing at me and thinking up ways to mess up my plans. Pretty sure I heard one of them laughing just last night before bed!?
So these are my new resolutions for 2017:
1. No deadlines – at least none that I will state out loud. This way, not even I will know what I am doing until it is done!
2. No goals. Nope, not a one! I have tons in my head that I would love to see reached (read a book a week, make more cards, so they will be ready for the occasion instead of last minute rushing – easy right?), but I dare not share them out loud. Maybe I will try to sneak them into my nightly journal instead of actually “saying” them and see if the spies will leave them alone?
Simple right? Not!! It is already two weeks into the new year, and I have had to run around doing unexpected things since the very first day of the month. No planning, no way. The unexpected deep freeze caused a bunch of vehicle switching, and (of course) a new battery in my Subaru. It is the newest, nicest yet the battery is shot – only three years old?? Once replaced ($170 later – ouch) I realized that my sweet grandson was playing with the dope light (oops, sorry – dome light) over his seat and had it switched on. Exactly when he made these changes, hmmm, I guess about three months ago. Jerk! Funny how a little thing like that can completely ruin a car battery – grrr.
We have also received about 5 million (ok, not that much but it is more than 20) gardening/seed/plant catalogs just since the first. I am a bit relieved on this since, two years ago. They started sending them back before Halloween? Pretty sure that was a “duh” moment for them because most people tend to (I do) lose things over the holidays. Sending them out before the first of the year would be stupid – to me.

pic of pile of garden mags

Trying to figure out and map what we would like to grow and where this year has been a nightmare. My grandson (whom I have custody of) is ADHD/Autistic and has major abandonment issues. His mother is moving again. This started up all of his inner demons again, which just love to take out their anger on me.
You know, I have always considered myself pretty tough, tough skinned too; but when he starts falling apart, so do I. Trying to plan or organize anything during these moments is a challenge, to say the least. I did get him to help me for a while cleaning out his older books and toys. Then he got bored, and I had to finish on my own (sometimes that is best cuz I got to throughout some extra stuff. Oh, and we do not “throw” out, we actually give them to local charities). Then I switched to my craft room (total disaster due to the last minute Christmas card fiasco.) which, again, he loves to start helping but then gets bored and leaves stuff incomplete. Grandma picks up – but grandma’s getting tired of it now that he is eight years old!
My final woo hoo for the start of this month is our new addition – a boxer puppy. My sister has always wanted a boxer, and I just happened across a Facebook posting from a friend on a couple of babies his boxers had about Halloween. One of them was even brindle in color (her fav also), a boy (again fav), so we decided to get him. The current dog is wonderful. She was a pound hound and has done fabulously protecting me through the fire mess and my six consecutive surgeries. The problem with her was when we got her they told us she had bruised her foot – but should be fine in a little while. Three years later and she is worse. We believe she was hit by a car, left to heal on her own instead of being cared for by a vet, then dumped at the pound with lies on her well-being. She has been the most aggressive dog we have ever had. This is good and bad. Her aggression sometimes is too much, and it scares me. Anyway, she is doing worse. Can hardly get up on a warm day and almost not at all on a cold one. She is losing bladder control too, and I hate to see any animal suffer. So this was another reason for getting the puppy.
The timing for potty training a puppy could not have been worse! The big giant pansy (another of her favs) doesn’t want to go outside when it’s cold – boo hoo. So, I have been trying to do this on my own – ha ha. The gods are laughing at me really hard now! On the few 50+ degree days we have had, he will follow me outside, but refuses to be out there alone – great! Oh, and she got to name him. After several days deliberation and many ideas from friends, she shouted it out at him one morning when he was missing the potty pad…”You little Wiener Pig, knock it off!” So, his name is now officially Wiener Pig. Fully name if he is ok, just PIG when I get mad at him (most of the time). “Pig, get out of there. Pig stop it. Pig – NO, NO, NO, NO, NO!!!”
Can’t wait to see what wonders the rest of this year brings.

12-2-16-new-addition-to-family

Wiener Pig

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THE FIRST TIME I TRIED TO DIE (no, not on purpose!).

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To this day I cannot keep my hands off baby animals.  Don’t care what kind of animal it is, just as long as it is in baby form.  Adults, not so much.

On a farm, there is always some type of babies being born.  If it wasn’t my 4-H rabbits, it was the cousin’s pig.  Well, one fine year we had a Welsh Pony, her name was Dolly.  She was a booger!  The meanest pony I ever met.  Once you got the bridle and saddle on her, she was fun to ride.  Trying to get them on without her stepping on your foot or trying to nip you was another story.  I don’t know where or when it happened, but she got pregnant and had a colt.  A beautiful black and white spotted thing just like her.

dolley and baby

I can’t tell you how many times dad warned us NOT to go near Dolly.  She was very protective of her baby, as a mother should be.  Did I listen?  Nope!  I would go out there for hours and try to get close enough to touch the baby.

There was a small shed out in their pen with the door and window blown out.  Dolly would hide in there with her baby, and I knew it.  I would crawl up to the side of the building and try to reach in to get to touch the baby.  Never worked.

One day I decided I was just going to do it!  Just who did this pony think was the boss anyway?  So, I put on my little cowboy boots, grabbed my coat and off I went.  I marched right into that pen, right up to the pony and that was the last thing I remember of that encounter.

Apparently, she knew she was the boss and the moment I got too close, she decided to show me.  Swung her butt around and planted a hoof square on my head – knocked me out cold.  I was lucky for two reasons:

  1.  Dolly did not want to come after me for more damage once I was down.
  2. Dad saw the whole thing.

He managed to get me to the house (back then you didn’t just rush off to the hospital or doctor, you tried to handle it at home first.) where mom took over and eventually I came around.

Now, I’m not going to say I was okay.  As far as “ok” – that is still left to be determined (sure hope not)!  However, I was an idiot back then, and I will continue to prove this to you in my future family stories. (FYI – Dad’s nickname for me was “Dumb Shit” for a reason.)

headache dog

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THAT DAY MY YOUNGER SISTER “ALMOST” DIED?

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This is the start of something new for my blog.  These are still Helberg Farm Stories, but they are from our family past.  I have decided to share some of my fondest memories one day a week, then current happenings another.  Hope you enjoy reading these as much as I loved living them.

This first one happened when my younger sister was 4, and I was 6 (and yes, I do remember it very well).  (F.Y.I.  my younger sister will be “D” and older will be “M”, in case they do not agree with my humor – hee hee)

It was a normal spring day in Wisconsin.  It had rained the night before, so everything was very wet (a Wisconsin natural state of being).  Mom was tired of hearing us fight – AGAIN – so she kicked us outside.  Looking around for a bit, riding became the order of the day.

Now that I think back on it all we were pretty lucky.  Our farm was eighty acres of rolling hills, woods, creek, and pond.  We also had great neighbors that would let us ride on their properties.  John’s Woods (the name we gave it) was an excellent place to ride and let the child imaginations run wild.  It was about 2 miles long with a perfect square cut out in the middle of it.  This is where a ton of our stories happened.  But for today, this one was actually up by the house.

The family garden was about 100 feet long and about 25 feet across.  We had to grow enough to harvest and process to get us through the next fall.  A wooden fence protected the two sides to the field.  We had horses but also raised beef calves and wintered YMCA horses, so we needed the pasture land for all of them.  Our riding this wet morning took us to that area of the pasture.

Mom was in the kitchen cleaning it up which included doing dishes.  The window over the sink for the dishes faced the garden and that part of the pasture – or most of it.  The far end corner could not be seen clearly from this window.  This, I believe, is what made this story most funny (for me anyway, mom didn’t think so.).

I do not remember what game we were playing that day.  I just remember the race.  There was a huge apple tree next to the long side of the garden, but on the pasture side of the fence.  Our goal was to run our horses up to that apple tree, touch it, and race back to the barn.  First back, of course, wins.

My horse, Folly, was a beautiful red and white pinto.  And she was fast!  My sister’s horse was an off-white buckskin with black mane and tail.  Her name was Highstockings because she had four black legs from hoof to knee.  Looked just like she had on high stockings (duh!?!).

pinto   buckskin

Well, we got out to the tree just fine, but on the return trip Highstockings did not make the far garden corner, she lost her footing and rolled over my sister (remember she is only four years old).  Folly, into the moment, ran straight for the barn.  I jumped off and ran to the house and yelled “D.’s dead.”  Mom freaked out as she only caught the tail of the horse making the corner, but did not see the whole fall.

barrell race horse

(yep, we pretended we were this fast!)

Mom and dad both ran out across the back yard and leaped the fence – then stopped dead in their tracks.  Not only was D. just fine, but she had the reins of the horse up to its mouth held firm in her tiny fist.  She had pulled the horses’ head down till its nose was even with her face, which was now covered in mud.  Her little 4-year-old fist was punching the horse in the nose while she was yelling, “Don’t ever do that again!” (Like it was the horse’s fault we were so stupid?)

To the day they died, my parents loved telling this story.  It took all they had not to laugh hysterically at this mud-drenched, 4-year-old little girl, punching a full grown horse (not a pony mind you, we had HORSES!) because it had lost its footing due to her stupidity on taking the corner so fast when it was this wet.  Of course, now it is one of the thousands of great stories we love to tell when the family gets together.

pony vs horse

(Ok, regular horses not Draft horses – but you get the size difference!)

(My only regret sharing these is that the amazing pictures I had saved from back then were all destroyed in our house fire in 2014 – maybe some of my extended family back there will read this and have some to share with me?  Yes, Cousins, that is a hint!)

muddy kid

(This is pretty close to what she looked like, just darker hair and a bit more mud on the face.  The puddle looked the same.)

 
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HAVE YOU NOTICED THE CHANGES?

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I would love to get some input here please!

Has anyone else noticed any weather, seasonal, insect, reptile, bird, or critter changes?  I’m not really talking about the change in an insect or animal itself, but more in their natural movements.

We have noticed lots of little changes over the last few years.  Small things like when the Robins show up in spring (This last year they never left, and we had a very unusual winter here.).  We already have seen a full size flying grasshopper, and a large number of butterflies – – they are not supposed to be here for a while yet?  Usually the tiny baby browns show up first.  Then the multi-colored one-inch-ers (yes that is a word in my dictionary – ha ha).  But not this year, the big ones are just here – AND FLYING?!

flying hopper 1    flying hopper 2

The weather has been strange enough, but the oddities in the critters is just wacko (yep, another Rachels’ dictionary addition).

  • Mega blizzards in April that did not go away in 3-days or less.
  • An opossum right up in our yard just after one of those blizzards.
  • Grasshoppers at least a month too soon.
  • Robins that never left.
  • Barn Swallows before all the leaves on the trees are out.
  • No foxes or coyote’s – not a sound.

These are just a few of the strange things we have noticed.

I know that some can be blamed on the ocean current patterns, but that seems to mainly affect the weather.  I also know about tectonic plate shifts.  That may be why there have been (or seems to be) more volcanoes erupting.  But how do you explain all the critters?

volcano

Their natural instincts are way better than mine.  I just get the feeling that they are trying to tell me, or us, something and we are not listening.

see and understand sign

So, my hope here is that some of you will have a response for me.  Are you having the same issues?  Have you even noticed anything different?

Ok, before you all freak out and want to have me committed, NO – I AM NOT A DOOMSDAY PREPPER!  I do believe in being prepared (it’s the 4-H-er in me), but no end of the world stuff yet (Oh and we love watching The Walking Dead – the human condition side of it is awesome!).  I/we do things like canning, buying in bulk on major stuff like coffee, sugar, flour, toilet paper etc.  We have our own chickens for meat and eggs.  A cow is in our field right now and half of it will be in our freezer by winter.

We are striving to get off the grid, just because we like to be independent.  Everything takes time and money to obtain, so we just move along one step at a time.  But the critters are freaking me out!  Normal patterns do not seem “normal” anymore.

Please let me know that I’m not crazy (ok, just tell me gently if I am – LOL)!  Do you see what I see?

owl peek

 

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IT’S NOT SMART TO MESS WITH MOTHER NATURE-MAYBE?

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This morning was a wakeup call for me and my attempts at taking pictures.  There had to be a couple of thousand Snow Geese flying north over out little farm and these are my shots:

3-3-16 snow geese 2

snow geese 1

3-3-16 snow geese 3

Pretty pitiful – but there are 2 major things wrong pertaining to these pictures:

1)      Winning a great Nikon D3200 Camera with extra DX lens does not make one an instant expert photographer

2)      All the Snow Geese flying north on March 3, 2016 is way abby-normal!

The first one I can fix by actually taking classes (I think they even have some online under Nikon?) to learn how to take better pics.  I could also splurge on a neat little video camera (Walmart has several to choose from, at pretty reasonable prices), then I could have also shared the cool sounds they were making with you.

The second one is the thought that worries me a bit.  This winter has been way to different, and I don’t think it’s just here in Colorado.  It’s normal to get 70 degrees one day and 30 the next from October through January, but to get 60+ and stay there IN FEBRUARY – and no Freeze at all –  now that’s just not normal.  We prep all year for the one to two week period of below freezing day and night, not this year.

Have I also told you that I am an amateur Nature Enthusiast?  I say amateur because I have never taken formal classes on the subject; however, I have lived on a working farm most of my life (My folks purchased the family farm when I was about 2, and my sister was born after we moved there so she has been at it since birth).

I am fascinated with all things nature and natural.  The critters that show up unexpectedly in our yard (can you say opossum!).  The deer that come out of the woods almost every sunset to frolic in the lower pasture (especially love watching in spring as they chase each other all around till dark).  The increasing numbers of good bugs that are showing up here every year (Praying Mantis, Ladybugs, Monarch Butterflies – and some are endangered species).  We do not use chemicals of any kind on our property, so maybe we have become the Favorite Bug Restaurant for the good guys (I can only hope!)?  Who knows why they come, I’m just glad the come.

The numbers of sightings have increase about 10-fold since we purchased our little property in 2000.  Then again we cannot take all the credit, the first 3 years we were here were the worst drought years Colorado had seen in 100+ years.  That may have been a contributing factor (oh sure, blame the drought).  However, all I know is that they are here now and in growing numbers.

So the geese flying north in masses makes me wonder what old (yes she is “old”) Mother Nature is up to now?

Mother Nature 1

Is she in a playful mood and deciding to bring a nice early spring?  Is she in a vengeful mood and going to trick us into thinking it is nice, then zap us with a wicked deep freeze in April (after everything is in bloom of course – happened before and not long ago.)?  I cannot blame her for wanting revenge, we the people have abused her for too long.  Some of us (wish there were more- boo hoo) have actually been trying to help her all our lives. 

I guess there’s no way to predict what she’s up too, so we will just keep doing what we do – garden naturally, and hope for the best! 

Maybe I will put a totem up for her in the gardens to try to appease her – how’s this?

totem 1

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FEBRUARY 17, 2016 – WHAT IS THIS?

/ helbergfarmstories / 2 Comments

Ok, now I am officially shocked, and a bit worried! Only a short 10 days ago:

  • 3-6foot snow drifts (the middle horizontal bar in our greenhouse is up about 10 feet; just to explain how high a lot of the drifts were.)

blizzard 2-3-16-2 (2)

  • Minus single digit weather at night (we have a heater in our fish pond so it doesn’t freeze – 2 huge fish in there!)

frozen pond 2-3-16

 

  • Wind gusts more than 50mph (I can always tell how bad the wind is by how much of the road you can see – AFTER – the plow as gone by!)

snowplow 2016

Then this week:

  • Only specks of any snow remain

barely snow left 2-17-16

  • 65°F today and expecting 70+°F tomorrow – February 18, 2016

green grass 2-17-16

  • Grass and flowers are starting to show up

paperwhites 2-17-16

 

 

 

 

 

And my Christmas Cactus is flowering?

20160217_072923 (2)

WWWWHHHHAAAATTTT????

This has got to be the freakiest winter I have ever seen – here or in Wisconsin! Colorado can have 60’s in January, and it’s not unusual. But to get this warm in February – now that’s down right abby-normal (I love Young Frankenstein!)! Not sure if I should let my spring fever run amok or batten down the hatches and prep for the apocalypse – oooohhhhh (that’s a ghostly ooh by the way – LOL – too spooky!)

oh no ghost

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