Sheepherders

Linda reported that the sheepherders who live cross the creek in Mom and Pop's old house had a couple of their goats out on the ice on our pond this morning. The goats are usually in a pen next to the shed I built for our horses twenty-nine or thirty years ago. Meanwhile the noble shed has been reduced to being a shelter for two exceedingly dirty off-white sheep and one less obviously dirty brown sheep. Bah!

The horse shed has held up amazingly well over the years, and I'm pretty proud of its post and beam design. I suspect that the trunks of the cedar trees I used for its supports have rotted off underground by now; but the thing still stands proud. If only I had built it on our side of the property line rather than on Mom and Pop's side. It would make a great drying and storage place for wood although it wouldn't be very well sited for that.

It's been about as cold as it gets around here for the past couple of days and we've been burning wood at a prodigious rate. Jas was talking yesterday morning about those electric space heaters they've been selling all over the place; but those surely can't hold a candle to a nice hot woodstove. It's not only physically luxurious to sit near; it's also morally luxurious to contemplate. The trees take the carbon out of the air and we put it back into the air.