Rain

Three whole days of rain with a forecast of possibly 2 more days at least! How great is that? Dad had just over 2 inches yesterday and it's rained almost all day today. 2 inches doesn't sound like a whole lot unless you consider that the Billings area annual precip is 9-13 inches. My whole drive way is starting to look like a river. Luckily we are in really gravelly soil so it doesn't really get too muddy and most of the water drains right into the spring at the end of the driveway. Carter went over and visited Aunty Wynne today and Robert said when he left, Carter and Blake were outside catching frogs. I'm a little nervous to see how many of them she brings home. My flower bed right in front of the house is completely flooded and I'm pretty sure most of the new seeds I've planted have floated away. Oh well. I can plant those again pretty easy. (and since Robert thought he might have sprayed it with Roundup anyway, it's really not going to matter either way) I'm not sure how some of the new seeds in the garden are going to fair...it mostly looks like it's just soaking in right now. I'm mostly just enjoying all the rain!

I do wish I would have paid more attention to the weather reports and stocked more firewood on the porch where it would have stayed dry before this storm hit. Everything is now soaked and it's um, challenging to get a fire started to say the least. We do have our furnaces that we can turn on if we have to, but I just hate using up the propane because I was stupid.

On Thursday I spent the morning trying to train a new employee in the Colorado office over the phone but by 11 am we gave up. They were getting tornado reports all over the area and everyone was glued to the news. Our office in Colorado is about 30-35 miles from Windsor where the worst of the tornadoes hit. Robert was living in Windsor when I met him although I'm not sure how that area fared. My good friend Tenneile's house was only a mile away from a big tornado in Plateville which would have been WAY too close for me. Luckily they only saw some hail and had no damage from the storm. It gave me a good excuse to call her up and chat on the phone for an hour. I really wish I could pack her up and move her closer! We had some other friends whose family suffered some damage but no one was hurt. One more reason I'm glad I moved home!

This last picture was taken on Tuesday just one day before the rain started. It felt so hot that day, that I had Carter running around with a water hose. She that was high entertainment and soaked my car, the cats who were dumb enough to get close, me (probably same principle applies as the cats), and then decided to wash her trampoline. She really liked setting up the sprayer as a sprinkler and jumping in the water. Don't think she would need the sprayer today!

I'm still trying to get a picture of the latest new bottle calf. In the order of "Beware of Brothers Bearing Gifts" my brother found another baby who needed some love and figured he would kindly drop it off at our house along with a good hard luck story. My gramma found this baby while she was out riding and just in time too. He was down in the coulee about to get ate by two coyotes when she rescued him. I figured Clint must have told Robert about the new baby and they had agreed that we would take on another bottle calf. I am such a sucker! When finally started getting a bit suspicious and asked Clint about it, he laughed as said no Robert didn't know yet about the newest member of the Howell Petty Zoo. Gads...three bottle calves are much harder to feed than two. I feel like I'm head to toe slobber by the time everyone has ate. I'm starting to rethink the whole bucket training and it's certainly looking more appealing to just teach them to drink out of a bucket rather than feed bottles. Anyway, the poor little guy! He's all skin and bones, but he's starting to look a bit better if we can just keep him from getting scours now. We named him Lucky since it seems to fit. The other black calf, Carter officially named him Boo so we now have Sprinkles, Boo and Lucky.