Lively ladies lose their lunch

My nieces visited for a day last week. They had never been here before & I thought the best way to introduce them to useless ranching was to take them through my normal chores.

1st: we fed & watered the emus. As an extra treat (for the emus), I chopped some apples-past-their-prime into small chunks. They go crazy for those.

2nd: we gathered eggs in the henhouse. We were a little late, so at least one egg had been cracked. Many hens clicking eggs around in one nesting box will do this. We threw the cracked egg against the back wall & watched the cannibals scramble for a beakful.

3rd: we moved Becca, the old Appaloosa, around the round pen a bit. In this cold weather, she gets very stiff & it helps to have her warm up, even if she is not always in the mood. Also, this meant the girls could do a little horseback sitting (you really could not call it riding).

4th: we collected some seeds from the Coontie. Zamia floridana is a cycad native to Florida. For whatever reason (neglect!), mine seem to do better than others through the winter & I always have an abundance of seeds to share.

After (& during) this arduous list of duties, we admired the horses & goats, walked to the back fence to see where the smoke was coming from (& got to meet the firemen who responded to our call), checked on the early azalea blooms, stared up at the redbud tree, stalked the barn cats, & of course, tested the trampoline.

I am told that the ride home was a lot like the end of a pub crawl; the one that managed to sleep it off felt much better than the one that did not.

I am thinking maybe I need to get Mike Rowe out here so he can see just how filthy doing nothing-at-all can be.