Saturday Slight and the blessings

I'm counting my blessings for the week, and, by golly, I might be able to use all fingers and toes. I couldn't see the fingers and toes through the catastrophes earlier this week. And, that's literally speaking with those toes. After all, they were submerged in snow, followed by water, followed by muck.

The sink-hole situation got better, though, with the freeze and with the dumping of a few 4-wheeler UTV loads of crushed rock. We figured that the worst of the cave-in soil was located around the barn and in the barnyard where the water draining from the north tends to congregate. The rest of the water line across the barnyard seemed pretty solid, even during the warmest of times.

We managed to fix the roof on the storage shed and have marked on our list of "things to do" to check that roof more closely next time 25 inches of snow, followed by 4 inches of rain, lands on it and decides to stay. We figure that might not happen too often, but we'll be ready.

We haven't been able to stop the series of lines forming across the wind shield of the Jimmy, thanks to a rock that pelted it Sunday while I was driving 35 mph down HWY 95 toward Spokane Airport. At the time, I remarked to my friend Mow that, at least, that startling plunk we had just heard did not crack the wind shield because Bill had replaced it just two months ago.

I should not have made that comment. An hour later, the crack began rising directly in front of the steering wheel and veering off to the right toward the passenger side of the window. It's still creeping along, and now could be called a "double lane" cuz two cracks are running nearly parallel to each other. Bill's tendency is to wait until after mud season to replace cracked wind shields, so we may have a complete network of roads by the time he's ready to spend the bucks again.

All those aside, the next possible disaster was averted Wednesday, thanks to Kiwi. Kiwi barks when things are not as they should be. She barked the other day when puppies pushed the door from the garage to the house open and went on in, unattended.

Just as I was about to chastise her a second time for barking at nothing, I noticed that this smart dog knew exactly what she was talking about. I apologized to her and then chased down puppies who were already being chased down by Mow who'd heard their grand entry from upstairs.

Well, on Wednesday, once more I erringly accused my smarter-than-human dog of making much ado about nothing. Again, Kiwi knew exactly what she was talking about. Lefty, who's Kiwi's self-appointed watching assignment, had been rubbing on the metal stakes serving as corner posts for the tenuous goat fence and had caught his horse blanket on one of the posts.

Lefty is also smarter than a lot of humans because he knew enough to just stand there, let his friend Kiwi alert the two-legged creatures lounging inside the house and wait to be released rather than ripping his blanket apart or racing off and taking out that tenuous fence. I've learned to trust Kiwi's alarms of late; after all, she also alerted us the morning last week when Gary Finney's 10 draft horses came for a visit.

That incident now seems like so long ago, especially after this week when I'm counting my blessings. Here are a few:

• Joyce has me looking undesheveled again. That means I went to her beauty chair yesterday and let her take over on the mop top which had grown grayer and longer. As always, her masterful fingers worked a miracle. There's nothing like a haircut and zap to inspire a brighter attitude.
• We have guaranteed no snow in the lowlands for the rest of the winter. This week, we took a dent out of our savings and bought both a Husqvarna snowblower and a Kubota tractor with a loader. Bill has already used the snowblower to remove a significant portion of the four-foot snow load that thundered from the roof onto the deck, and that snow was pretty cementy stuff. So, it's looking like a good snowblower.
  
• The new orange tractor arrives around 10 a.m. this morning. It's approximately the 2,500th Kubota that Cal Russell has sold from his Boundary Tractor distributorship since my dad, Harold Tibbs, bought the first-ever Kubota in this region back in 1973. Back in those days, the Kubota company encased their tractors in mahogany boxes. Seems to me that my brother even used some of that mahogany for his wood carvings.
• Our tractor in 2007 will arrive naked on the back of a truck, so times have changed a bit. But, I've heard the quality has not. Cal loves to tell that he has sold that same tractor, which Harold eventually traded back for some other farm equipment, five times. It's operating on a farm in the Paradise Valley south of Bonners Ferry.
• Having a tractor with a loader will make our lives a whole lot easier, and that is a good thing, cuz we ain't getting any younger. Shoveling crushed rock by hand into the back of a 4-wheeler can be pretty back-breaking for an old goat, so I'm looking forward to learning alongside Bill on how to use that loader for snow, manure moving and even some crushed rock distribution.
• It's not just the material stuff, however, that inspires me to count my blessings quite often at this place which tested our will this past week. There can be no better moments than standing in a field surrounded by trees and other expansive farm fields and watching a couple of Border Collies, an old, happy yellow Lab and a gray kittycat, who thinks she's a dog, cavort around with coffee cans or with the sheer joy of tranquil freedom.

Life slowed down enough during the past couple of days to allow me to do that several times, and in my book, life doesn't get any better than that.

Happy Saturday and many blessings to all.