Not a good day...

Thursday was not a good day, and not just because I made a terrible batch of rice to go with the stirfry I cooked for the visiting team last night. Really should have tried to cook it in a bigger pot, but this is my best one (3 qt size) for cooking rice...so I tried. Next time, less rice or try out the new pot I bought on Tuesday after burning the soup on Monday. For three years I have been using a thin-bottomed pot for a soup pot, and so most of the time I used the smaller one (4 L) that was better made. Everytime we have a big group, I'd think, it will be OK, and it burnt more stuff than not. So I decided 300 grivna for a well-made stainless steel five liter pot was a good investment. It will get its first work today, as I attempt canning salsa (the freezer is full, and I found some lids I think I can can safely with, in a more North American style that I am used to, so I am improvising a water bath canner. We picked about 2 bushels of tomatoes yesterday...

Back to the point of my story today. Yesterday morning Garry woke up to bad news. The fresh cow who got sick on Monday died. Rather unexpectingly, as she was looking really good on Wednesday, ate all her feed and gave a lot of milk in the evening before the ladies went to bed, everyone was upset to find her dead in the morning, she was a black shiny (healthy looking) cow. Garry thinks it may have been hardware, which is sometimes agravated by claving and recover as the cows body adjusts and changes (and pushes).

 She didn't want to get up Tuesday morning in the barn, and Garry gave her a bottle of calcium dextrose in the vein. Max had had a new vet out to treat her on Monday while Garry was gone to Crimea with the guys. He told Garry he would like this new vet, he took care of cows like Garry. Garry got to meet the new vet later on Tuesday afternoon. He was impressed when he took the cow's temperature and checked her for mastitis with a CMT test solution paddle (you squirt milk into a plastic paddle with four sections and add a few drops of a liquid that indicates if that quarter (the milk came from) has mastitis, and even listened to her lungs and heart with a stethoscope. He said she had a little fever, a little mastistis and little pnemonia, and should recover nicely. They had put her outside under a tree, and she was looking so good, yelling her head head off the next morning when her buddies (the dry cows and heifers) went out to join the village herd, she was hungry and so Garry got her a wheelbarrow of feed. We were going to Zaporosia for the day (more about that on the trade school blog when I find time today) and so Garry told them to put her inside if she was still looking good at noon. She did, they did, and she ate, milked and looked great until Thursday morning, when she looked dead! The butcher came and got her body- for the hide- he said.

Last night after dinner and talking with the members of the team and watching the Olympics for a while, Garry got a shower and went to bed. Then there was a knock at the the door, I talked to Yana, and decided she was telling me a cow was having a calf, so I told Garry, he got dressed and went out. Infessa (the strange colored cow) was having a calf, or was trying the ladies had noticed she was pushing a bit but no calf was coming, while they were doing the evening milking. Garry had to hunt for the calf jack, for some reason it was in Maxm's van, and pulled the big bull calf out with some of the visitors watching. So he ended up getting a second shower before going to bed.

It seems to be doing fine today, one sore leg maybe, and so is the cow. It was however the fifth bull calf in a row! Back to my current job, the canner timer just rang...