morning ramblings

Cliff and I went to pick up a motorcycle for his brother yesterday, and I noticed these dogs in a pen. There are two dogs and three doghouses, but that one fellow would rather spend time on TOP of the occupied doghouse. It just struck me as amusing.

I milked Bonnie this morning for the first time since the freezing rain before Christmas. I've bought milk twice. It's good to be back to normal, and I do believe Bonnie was happy to have her can full of sweet feed. In dry weather I take a kitchen towel that's wet and soapy on one end and dry on the other; I wash the udder and then dry it with that towel. Today, knowing how messy cows can get in thawing weather, I took a bucket of soapy water with a rag in it, plus a towel for drying. That way I had what I needed to make sure my milk would be clean, and indeed, it was.

Anyone who has ever milked a cow knows that no matter how clean the cow and how clean the milk, you are going to smell like a cow after you've milked one. In sloppy weather, you REALLY smell like a cow after getting up close and personal with her. I'll be hopping in the shower soon.

This reminds me of a man Cliff and I encounter when we patronize Pizza Hut in Higginsville. He's an older gentleman, and he obviously has a hog farm (a very rare thing these days, what with mega-farms producing most of the country's pork). When he walks in the door at Pizza Hut, he could almost clear the place with his odor; there are few smells on earth as bad as a hog farm. It certainly takes away some of the pleasure of eating pizza.

When I did that entry about "Missing Persons", I had a specific person in mind. She isn't one of the old J-land group, by the way. As far as I know, she doesn't post on Facebook. She had a much larger following than I do, and had giveaways sometimes. I doubt if she reads my blog.

It's just troubling when you follow somebody's life online and then they totally disappear. In the case of this lady, she has even closed comments and did away with the email address given on her blog. She has a relative who still is blogging regularly, but I'm not going to ask her if everything is OK, because she shouldn't be held accountable for her family members.

Under these circumstances, I know there's something wrong; I don't necessarily want to know what is wrong, I'd simply like to know that the lady is all right.