We had sort of a typical mid winter week. Mary went off to Florida to visit her mother and the new grandchild. She reported both to be doing quite well. The young lad is reported to be a great sleeper already. This is certainly an admirable trait which will soon lead to the new parents being much more rested than they might have expected. Mary had the experience of walking bare foot on the beach in the morning and coming home the same day to great piles of snow.

The animals continue to be quite content. Other than looking after their food and water and bedding there is not much to do. We are now at the time when we start to do oil changes and such on the tractors and think spring can't really be that far away.

We had a pretty good snow storm on Wednesday. Jim got yet another snow day. This is his mid term exam week and that caused his English exam to be delayed a day. For some reason, it has also enabled him not to have school Friday or next Monday. There was quite a lot of plowing to do Thursday morning to get the roads passable again.

Thursday night, Jim and I went over to the neighboring county to the beef meeting. The group is trying to reach consensus on which vendor to select to DNA test our collective herd. Each meeting includes a great pot luck supper so it's also a great time to meet and visit with new friends. We stopped on the way over at a feed mill in that county. We don't have anything exactly like it in our county. We bought some lickable mineral supplements. These are made in the bottom half of 55 gallon barrels. The minerals are mixed into a hard molasses base which the cattle lick. We put them out Friday morning and it didn't take the cattle long to find them.

Friday afternoon the weather was pretty good so Jim and I decided to corral our and Verne's bulls and get a sample for the DNA test. As I might have mentioned previously, the sample requires catching the bull in our chute and yanking out some hairs from his tail. They have to be yanked because the important DNA information is in the hair follicle.They seem oblivious to the hair yank. It's important that the hair but as uncontaminated as possible. The hair follicle end first is put into what looks like a match book with sticky clear paper. The DNA lab uses this sample to predict a number of traits such as tenderness, marbling, grade and several other parameters. It's pretty hard to understand the science behind analyzing a tail hair but it seems to be a reliable indicator. We also weighed them and they all show steady gains.