Signs, signs, everywhere are signs.

 No new news on the raw milk front. No copy of a potential contract to sign from Company B, no letter to "cease and desist" the selling of raw milk from our current milk buyer , Company A, so instead we just farmed.

Today that meant sleep for me in the am since I picked up an extra shift last night, and a trip to Watseka for Keith to visit his mom in her new apt. In the afternoon I worked in the office on accounts receivable, accounts payable and accounts confuseable, (the ones I forgot to enter earlier and now I have no idea where I should post them.)

When Keith returned we visited the hogs and attempted to measure them for approximate weights. Its done by taking a cloth measuring tape and measuring the hogs length and girth just behind their front legs. Then you enter the measurements into this formula. Length times girth times girth divided by 400. You have to give them a  brief but tender little hug to get the tape around their girth. The crossbred hogs don't stand for this much, they don't go in for the touchy-feelly stuff. The Red Wattles not only stand for the measurements but ask for more hugs as you leave the pen. Of course this might be because our boar Mad Max is entering his adolescent period and he is all about the PDA * right now.

After that we wandered into the sows pasture to check on status of still pregnant Lady Anne. Baby pigs were all snuggled in the hogcienda, so we fed the sows their grain for the evening. We walked about 50 feet over to the little hog shed to see if perhaps Anne was making a nest in there. That's when big sow Spot came running at us, thinking she wanted more grain Keith tried to get her to follow him but she took off the other way at a dead run with her overinflated udder flapping in the wind (She's fast I tell you). Crazy pig, I thought. Just then I heard expletives coming from the husbands mouth. I looked up and down our lane and their, far far way in the neighbors yard were our 15 little piglets. Even more shocking, they had the neighbors dog cornered on the top step of the porch. Poor little 100 pound ROTTWEILER didn't know what to do. No wonder mama sow Lassie, I mean Spot ,was upset.

Keith took off running while I sorta walked faster towards the pickup, thinking I could cut them off at the pass. But before I got down the lane, Keith had reached the neighbors yard, yelled at the piglets like the misbehaving children they were and they came running back up alongside the pasture and into the main pasture with their mammas. Bad pigs.Baaaaaaad pigs. We fed them grain to keep them home. They were counted by the mommies and they settled into a big pile to take a nap.

Keith went immediately to the internet to check on pricing of hog fencing. Seems the electric fence that contains our 1200 pound cows and horses just ain't strong enough for the little bitty piglets. If only someone had warned us about this...10 or 12 more times. We might have caught on earlier. Maybe.

*Pigs Dig Affection