The weather has been cold then warm then cold again.  Every little snowfall accumulates some more snow.  The wind blows and the snow drifts.  This is the third trail I have plowed with the tractor to get to where the cows are.

We have had warm weather lately and this trail has stayed open for almost a week.

The sheep shearer called and had kids home from school that needed something to do and asked if they could come and eye our ewes.  This is the process of shearing the wool away from the eyes of the sheep.  The wool grows long around the eyes and when is snows or ice accumulates in the wool the sheep can't see.
So we shear it off and they can see until it is shearing time to cut all the wool off.  This won't happen till mid-April.

So Tammy and I went up and set up a catch pen and alley to funnel the sheep into to catch chute.

Tammy is driving some steel posts and I am setting up a wool pack to hold the wool that is shorn off of the eyes.

Here the crew is working  shearing keeping the ewes going down the chute.  They sheared over five hundred head in four hours.  That is like a  sheep getting her eyes shorn and getting let out and the next one caught every 30 seconds.

After the job was done the finished product looked like this.

Tammy was trying out her new camera.  I told her don;t take a picture against the sun and she said her new camera could.  Here is a picture of the sunset on all the ice on the snow.  It is not water.

I just found this picture.  Before Christmas we went up into the Black Hills and cut a Christmas tree. The boys enjoyed the fun of cutting their own tree.

Brooke was in school that day and she told Grandma she liked her Black Hills tree.