sheepdog

Once again we are building up hopes of getting to take a vacation this winter. We didn't get to last year, Christmas sales were pathetic, one of the worst Christmas season I have ever seen. We just couldn't afford to make the trip last year. But we are trying real hard this year. For one thing, the old man's family is not in the best of health, and we may not have that many more oppertunities to be with them. It's not the trip that is costly. We have a small economy car, the gas to drive all the way to California won't be the problem, and of course, we stay with family when we are there. The problem comes in when I have to buy everything 3 weeks in advance of the trip. We have to stock up on dog food, and pay the hired helps wages for all the time we are going to be gone. That really runs up a pretty good bill.So, I'm doing every thing right now I can think of to get ahead of the game. I've managed to save up a few dollars, and I'm thinking of every option, even to the point of eyeballing my pile of pop cans to sell for scrap metal! Wish me luck!

Gosh, I don't even know how to find the memory card in the camera, and I just looked over my computer, I don't see anything except a plug in for a usb cord and headphones and maybe a microphone? So far the old Sony is still hanging in there, but I've taken thousands of pictures with it, sooner or later it's bound to bite the dust. "Have you tried going to the Samsung website and looking for drivers?"Yes, I did do this, when I downloaded the instruction book for it. Didn't help.

If you want to get right down to it, I don't believe there is an organization, government, or fanatical group in existance that does not have grand designs on control or even complete world dominance as it's ultimate goal. This mentality is not limited to the Jewish folks. Take the radical animal rights group PETA. While they don't want to dominate the world, they want to force the entire world to their mentality of no eating meat or any use of any animal for any reason. How many petty dictators have come and gone in the history of this world? Napoleon, Hitler, many others have come and gone.

Well, it's probably too late to help you now, but I would answer in a quick professional manner and tell them you will be there promptly at that day and time. Their email was short and to the point, so make yours the same. I would say something about thanking them for the oppertunity to interview for the job. And what ever you write, don't forget to use your spell checker when you are done! You only get one chance to make a first impression.

The important thing here is to decide what makes YOU happy. If you feel your singing can bring enjoyment to others, maybe you can get past your adversion to formal training, especially since you already seem to understand it will actually make you better at it. Or, do you really enjoy painting, do you feel a sense of accomplishment when you complete a work and recieve praise for your work?

It seems my very own body conspires against me. The last few weeks have been crazy busy here, to the point where I hardly had time to eat, and when I did I mostly grabbed an apple off the tree right by the front door and scarfed it down while on the run. Needless to say, I quickly lost 5 lbs or so. And just as soon as I did my appetite went absolutly crazy! I feel like I am constantly about to starve to death. I spent a few days nearly eating the house down. Just couldn't get filled up. Ok, so much for the weight loss. It's really annoying me. I can hande minor hunger pains, but these were killer. How in the heck can I turn them off so I can loose a few pounds? Doesn't my silly body know what's good for it?

Well, you make a good point that you would need electricity to power the compressor, at least at the fill up stations, but they have an onboard compressor, if there was a way to power it from the engine while it was running, that might be a great solution, if you could more or less reclaim some of the energy created from the original charge, sort of like a perpetual motiion machine. But even so, from what I read they get farther on a tank of compressed air than an all electric car gets from a battery charge.

So, I've been mulling around in my mind for months now how best to add some information to my web site and would like some input as to which way it would best suite my customers. What I have now are individual pages on my site, a page for each of my breeds, and when I have pups available in that breed I activate the link to it from on the main page. Right now all I put on it is the basic information about the current litter of pups, date of birth, pictures that sort of thing. What I would like to ad is some personal information about the breed, not the stuff you can find on a multitude of other sites, like the specific standards for size height, weight, etc, you normally find. I want something more personal, like why I like that particular breed, or a funny story about one of my own dogs, or something important that prospective customers really should know about the breed they may not really hear or understand from another site. I just can't decide which would be best. Should I list this information at the top of the page, so they have to scroll down past it to actually see what pups I have available, or should I get right to the business at hand and have the pups and their information at the top of the page?

It won't be long until goat breeding season is here. I made up my mind this year was going to be different and much more successful than the last 2 seasons. Last year was a total waste, I burned my foot and was in so much pain I didn't even get out and get a buck, so basicly we feed a whole goat herd for nothing last year, no kids at all. The year before that wasn't much better. I waited until the season was here and then picked up a nice looking Boer buck at the local livestock auction. Big mistake. Big mistake. By waiting till late in the season the buck I ended up with was worn out from all the does he had already bred, and my kidding season ended up running for nearly 3 months instead of the normal 3 weeks it should last. Kidding season is very intense and a busy time, I can maintain for 3 weeks, but when they are spread out for so long it's hard to keep constant watch on them to make sure the kids arrive and are delivered properly to survive their birth. To complicate matters, I decided I wanted 2 bucks this year. I am nearly out of purebred Alpine dairy does, we have been cross breeding my original herd of dairy goats with a Boer buck as the kids sell so much better. But my dairy does have died off to where I only have 3 purebred does left. I really need a few more milkers than that, so this year I decided to get both and Alpine buck and a Boer. And I decided that I would get them early in the season, and pen them seperatly from the girls so they would be well rested and fit to do their job when the time came. Early in August I found a really nice young Alpine buck at the small animal swap meet, and at a really great price, so I grabed him up. Considering I went to by a Rhode Island Red rooster and came home with a Rooster and a goat is another story, just glad I had the forsite to take a fairly large dog crate with me. Sadly, I had the new buck only a few hours before the dogs somehow drug him under the fence and killed it. So, obviously I needed a better plan. We spent most of one week cleaning up the little lot next to the barn over at our place next door, and the fence around the pasture. I planed on leaving them in the barn lot for a few days until they got used to the place and I had them tamed down. There hasn't been anything on that place since last winter, so there was plenty of grass, even just in the little lot for them. So near the end of the month, on Thursday we headed out to the monthly Highlandville Sheep and Goat auction. Picked up 2 nice bucks, both young ones, I was afraid the dairy buck was a bit too young, but since I only have 3 does for him he should be fine. We introduced them to their nice newly remodled lot early friday morning. I started checking them twice a day, giving them a little grain and getting them used to me. I missed the sunday morning check because we usually go to the swap meet, and sunday night when I went to check them they were gone. Without a trace. Couldn't even tell how they managed to get out. I looked all over the property, and then did the usual thing called the sherriffs office, the local radio station, check with all the neighbors, all that stuff. It was like they had just completely vanished off the face of the earth. It wasn't until tuesday that anybody even saw them, I finally got a call from a lady who spotted them across the highway from our place on her way to work. But finding them was only half the battle. There was still the delema of how to get them home. The Boer buck is pretty wild and wants absolutly nothing to do with humans. Lucky for me the little Alpine wasn't quite so crazy. After running them around on the bluffs for an hour or so and somehow managing not to fall off the bluff and kill my silly self, I convinced the young buck that he should have a bite of the apple I was carrying in my pocket. Once I had the rope on him, with some helpers pushing the other buck I was able to lead the little guy back across the highway to home, and the other buck followed him. Another miricle occured then, the traffic on the highway had been really busy and I didn't know how I'm manage to the the loose buck across before he got smacked by a car, but as I said, a small miricle held back the traffic long enough for us to make the run across the road. So now, both boys are locked away in a very large dog pen, with 6 foot fence all around it and they are staying put. Of course, if they did escape now, I don't suspect they would go all that far. their current pen is right up along side where all my girls are, and now every so often I see all the girls standing on their side of the fence making longing looks at the boys.

NateP, you've hit the nail on the head! Kids today are just unbelievable to my way of thinking. I never thought I'd live to see the day that you had to make your kids go outside and play! What on earth is this crazy world coming too? Pogo balls and slinkys were great, and remember those balsa wood toy airplanes you stuck together? Boy you could really run your legs off flying them around. I wonder if they still even make those? They used to be pretty easy to find and the five and dime store, but hey, are there even any of those left around, or has everything gone to giant superstores like Walmart where you could't find it in the maze if they did have it.

I really liked your post, and I agree with you completly. Teachers are a very important part of our socielty and the foundations for future generations to grow up and learn about how a decent society works. It's not really just about 2 + 2 equal 4 anymore. Our children need someone to inspire them and move them to have the desire to learn and to make the world a better place.Sadly, truely good teacher are far and few between. It amazes me that something as important as the education of our yought can be so badly screwed up by rules, regulations, politicians, labor unions, etc. We need sensible rules. Not crazy overzelous labor unions that make certain that a piss poor teacher cannot be fired, no matter how incompetent and uninspiring she may be. While unions are important to getting a decent pay rate for teacher, which considering their importance in the way the world works, is hardly all that great, some of the union tactics are harmfull to student and society in general. I say pay 'em good but cull them hard. If they aren't up to the job get rid of them.

I do love the smell of sandlewood, but honestly why would you worry about a little bit of tan to the point you would sabatoge your skin to remove it? It generally fades away far too fast for my likings anyway, just a couple weeks of winter and poof, it's all gone and I'm back to pasty white looking skin. I think a little tan looks good on a person and is probably actually healthy for one's hide.

Yes, I agree with you completely. And it's not just limited to gyms and restuarants. Any business you enter should appear clean at the very least. As you say, old equipment is excuseable, new stuff may be expensive, but soap and water are CHEAP CHEAP CHEAP!!! There is no excuse for a dirty business of any kind. If you don't have enough pride in your place to keep it clean, how can you expect any customers to enjoy coming in and spending their hard earned money with someone who doesn't appear to give a hoot about how the place looks?

It has been a very interesting growing season to say the least this year. If you had access to water for any gardens or other plantings, it wasn't too bad, but boy if you didn't have a way to water this year you were really wasting your time and energy trying to plant anything. Fortunatly this year I remembered to string the soaker hose down threw my flower bed before I seeded it, unlike last year when it somehow slipped my feeble mind. I wouldn't of had a single flower if I hadn't remembered it this year. All things considered my flower bed was spectacular this year. I started getting some new colors of zinnia blooms that I have never seen before, there were some big flowers that were absolutly drop dead gourgous. Even though I seeded it late, I had a really long bloom season. I normally dig my cannas ever fall, but didn't get that done last year, so when we tilled it up this spring we just tilled a much narrower path next to the cannas, and then I seeded that part. It worked out really well because I had a lot of volunteer flower plants come up, Cosmos mostly, that added a lot of nice early color, though oddly, none of the early volunteer plants ever set any seed, which I thought as reallly strange. I have strong tendencies to lean toward the organic style growing, but this year I broke down and used a fungcide on my zinnias, which always before sucumbed to rot long before the growing season was over, and boy did that ever make a difference this year. They are still going strong and are showing no signs of the black rot that has taken them out every year pryor to this year. I only did one spraying about middle way during their growth cycle. According to package instructions you are supposed to spray every 2 weeks or so, but hey, if once gets the job done I'm happy with that. I did get smart and ran a hot wire (electric fence) on the pasture side of my flower bed. In past years they have done a lot of damage reaching threw and over the fence to munch my flowers. Not this year! Matter of fact, I think a few of them must of got zapped real good the first few days I had it hooked up because for several weeks they even completely stopped grazing in that little pasture! And when they did come back to it, I noticed I got a lot of dirty looks from the herd while they gazed longingly at the pretty green flower plants while their pasture turned brown and dead from the drought. That must of been pretty terrible temptation for them. But it worked and I didn't have a single leaf nibbled by my cantankerous goats. But the most amazing part so far this year has been my seed harvest. In just the first 2 pickings alone I had more flower seed saved back for next year than I got from the whole growing season year before last. I am going to have plenty of seed this year, I can probably even sell a little, if I can ever find the time to go to growers market with it in the spring. I am out there every few days picking the mature flower heads, and looks like I will be at that for quite awhile yet. And the regular cosmos hasn't even started making seed yet, it always comes on much later than the zinnias, last year I was afraid it wasn't even going to beat the frost, but it did, and I had lots of seed after all. I'll try to attach a couple pictures one is the length of the bed, it's 194 feet long, and sadly you can't see the glorius color it has in the picture that you can seeing it up close and in person. It really looks great. And I have a close up of one of the blooms. This one was a fantastic color that also doesn't show up real well in the picture, it was a pink/salmon color fading out to a pretty sunny yellow color. I saved that particular flower seed by itself. I want to do some experimenting to see if zinna's breed true color from the flower or if they produce different colors from the same flower seed. I am dissapointed that we didn't get an actual food garden planted this year. We managed to actually get the spot plowed this time, but then things just got away from us, and we never had the chance to get back into it and get it planted. Really bad, since it looks like the drought is going to wreck hell and havoc on grocery prices this year. At least we had a good fruit crop this year. I guess the mild winter made life easy for the fruit trees. I should be peeling apples right now instead of sitting here typing all this stuff!

Ok, for starters I didn't know you could have more than one homepage. You guys never cease to amaze me. How can you have so many, my internet browser, Explorer just has the one little house icon for a single home page? Anyway, my home page is hotmail, my email account because I check my email so often during the day its always the place I need to go first. I do an awful lot of emails. Of course, I have my favorites list too, where everything else I check out is listed, like good old Xisto.

Balancing work and raising a family has always been a real challenge for women. You just have to pryoratize and figure out what will work in your situation. Can your husband contribute more to the family raising job with taking care of the children or helping you around the house? Can you take some classes online, to save time and let you learn from home rather than spending time on the road going to classes that take time away from your family. Could you find reasonable priced care from someone else to help with your kid or home while you concentrate on your career and education and can that cost be justified by the income increase you will have from your new profession. Lots to think about, and as they say, where there is a will there is a way.

I noticed that recently my computer will not "remember" things that I have typed before on websites that I visit frequently, like the dog registry site I always use that already had lots of my dogs listed in the memory and all I had to do was scroll down highlight and click to enter the information on the form. It enabled me to do routine work quickly and efficently. But now many of the sites I use don't have this feature available. So I'm not really sure if it's some setting that has changed in my computer or the web sites are designed that way to not allow auto fill. Anybody have any ideas or can you tell me how to check my own computer to see if the setting has changed?

Hey, has anyone here every made it to the 51 posts per day limit here at Xisto? it's a rainy day, I'm stuck inside, and actually pretty low on hosting credits, so I'm wondering if anybody has made it yet. Wonder if I can do it. I'm still way off, about 28 more posts to go before I could make it, and frankly, I've typed today intill my fingers feel like they are going to fall off and my back is killing me from sitting in this chair. I suppose it would be possible if you just made little short one line replys, but that wouldn't really do much of anything for one's hosting credits, and would kinda be cheating too. So lets see just how long I can sit here and pound away on this keyboard.Hopefully some of you will pop in for a visit today, because frankly, I am running out of posts to respond to and pretty short on new ideas too.

You've certainly got that right, the advances of modern medicine are truely amazing from way back when in my day when they were using leeches to suck illness out of the bodies of the unfortunates who became ill. But I have noticed what I believe to be a rather alarming trend in medicine today. It seems that far more reasearch is being made into drugs that mask the symptoms of illness rather than to go to the root of the problem and cure the actual illness. I suspect it is because there is no money to be made if a pill could end a disease, but tons of money are to be made if you have to take some type of pill that makes it possible for you to live with the disease that you have. And to complicate matters even more, Or in this case, to make the doctors and hospitials and drug companies even richer, then they have to come up with new drugs to fix the problems caused by the first drug you took that caused lots of side effects that made you sicker than you were with the single disease that you had in the first place. Quite a racket isn't it? I even hear rumors of cures for cancer that they don't want to use because then there is no more ways to take money from you. Disease treatment is a huge part of our economy, look at all the hospital staff, drug companies, scientists, hospitial equipment manufactorers and deliverys, home health care companies, drug stores, the list is long and huge.

I have made a rather amzing discovery over the past several weeks that I believe is rather interesting.I had heard about circadian rhythums ( think thats spelled righ?) and the effects of day length on humans, but one study I read didn't seem to make much sence to me. The study reflected that if you go to bed at say 10 pm and sleep the normal number of hours that what ever your own particular body required, it was healthier for you than if you went to bed at say 2 or 3 am and slept exactly the same number of hours. Now how could that be? Sleep is sleep right? I have to admit, I have always been something of a night owl, and now having a computer and all those emails to answer and web site to maintain I seem to find that the easiest to do late at night when everything and everyone else is quite and I can concentrate. But circumstance dictated for the past few weeks that I had to change, the summer heat was just too much for me to do the kind of work I have to do in the heat of the day. So I found myself rising early for several weeks, and by 10 pm I was just so wiped out instead of fighting it and staying up and doing my computer work I just gave up and went to bed early. Low and behold, although it took a few weeks of adjustment, I am now finding out that if I do get up early and go to be early, I have one heck of a lot more energy during the day. I have been able to acomplish an awful lot of work in the past few weeks, and have not had the spells I've always had before of having days when I just couldn't make myself do anything. So maybe there really is something to the old saying "early to bed early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise."

Yes, Bambi is responsible for a lot of human deaths. I would expect human fatalities in traffic accidents where they swerve to miss (or in some cases hit) the deer that can pop out of no where and jump right in front of you. In our neck of the woods it is unusual to drive many miles without seeing a dead deer along the road. And you would not believe what a full sized deer can to to a car, especially these newer lighter for fuel economy fiberglass car bodies commonly on the road today. Not long ago our son hit a raccoon in the road, and it did over $2,000 in damages to his car! Imagine what a big old deer would do. Bambi also contributes to human deaths ever deer season when crazy hunter are crawling around in the woods with high powered rifles and end up shooting each other instead of Bambi. There are probably nearly as many of those as there are shark kills to humans. But back to the shark thing. If there are 20 species of sharks that do eat people, would we not be ahead to continue to prey on those particular species? If the other 330 species of shark have some commercial benifit to humans for food or whatever why not take advanage of them? Do you think the sharks worry about us? Do they swim around in schools talking about how long it's been since they've had a tasty human and maybe they should start leaving any humans they find alone because we might be going extinct? Ok, sorry, enough of me being silly. What we need is common sence in our approach to the enviornment and all the creatures we share this planet with. Species have been endangered long before man learned to walk upright and type on a computer. Face it, when was the last time you had to dodge a Stegasaurus out in the road on the way to work? It is the natural evolution for species to grow and adapt to the changing conditions of the world or go extinct if they cannot. What we need to find is a healthy balance for the planet.

Great post. What an elegant way to describe the human condition we have all at one time or another found ourselves in. I'm sure we have all had those times when we wondered if we were meant to walk alone. I think those moments are simple to give us a better appreciation of the good time that you know sooner or later are going to come along when you do find that person that is the right one for you.

I think you are quite right, sometimes just talking about a subject and writing it all down and seeing it in print has a way of making you see things in a different light and just the release of sharing your feelings can help ease some of the burden of pain you may be carrying from whatever bad experience life has thrown at you. As the saying goes, whatever doesn't kill us makes us stronger. We have to learn to get past these experiences and move on with our lives, and if we don't ever have any bad experiences, we can't learn how to get past them.

I won't say I'm a firm believer in reincarnation, but I have done a lot of reading on the subject, and I think there is a very good possiblilty that it is in fact true. I've read too many accounts of people who know about things that they should of had no knowledge of any other way. And sometimes when I look at humanity in general, I see how some people seem to be as they say, old souls. People who are confident in their actions and at peace with whatever lot in life they have recieved, as if they have learned some important lessons many others of us have missed out on. And then met other people who are just the opposite, shallow, self centered greedy people who care not one whit about anyone or anything but themselves and what the world can do for them. They haven't figured out something like the simple pleasures of life like laughter or love. It's like they need a few more turns at the earth before they figure out what is really important. It does seem that reincarnation could very easily be a natural progress of life and learning and evolving into something better than we were.

No, don't think your carzy at all. Your mind is trying to tell you something, that's for sure if you are having the same dream that often. The problem is deciding what it actually means. Interputing dreams can be a very unreliable project. Everyone has different emotional needs and feelings and desires so it is hard to come up with any standard values in which to judge dreams. Things can be very complicated to figure out. And then there is just the possiblity that you over think things when trying to analize dreams. Maybe it's not some deep dark secret thing. Maybe you are just lonely and need a new boyfriend? Anyway, I wish you the best at figuring this one out so you can deal with it. Dreams like this can really be frustrating sometimes.