Mar

17

Byoooo Byoooo!

Filed Under aggie stuff, family, school, sheep, sisters | 2 Comments

What a glorious day! Today marks the first time in my college career that St. Patrick’s Day and the kick off of National Ag Week have aligned.

Byooo byoooo byoo!

(That’s the sound of me using an air horn for effect.)

I actually celebrated St. Patty’s with my family on Saturday. We consumed a lot of corned beef and other delicious foods, including this beauty:



Lil made this delicious cake out of everything that normal people give up for Lent. It even had a 4-leaf clover on it and was covered in green, meaning I automatically loved it.



It got a resounding thumbs up for the family, except for the fact that we were all lounging around on the ground after consuming half of our body weight in delicious celebratory food and could not actually raise our arms or thumbs to give it a thumbs up (please note that this picture was taken before the cake eating, which is what sent all of us into a coma).

The highlight for the celebration, though, is the Leprechaun Basket. This is a tradition that is probably unique only to our family. My Mom gets a huge basket and fills it with various green treasures that have strings attached to them. A blanket is put over the basket and everyone chooses a string. We get to trade with people who get things that we want and one person lucks out over everyone.



The person who pulls out the pot o’ gold not only gets to keep the money inside, they also get to keep whatever prizes were not pulled out by other family members.

This year was my first year for getting the pot o’ gold. Lil usually gets it because she plans pregnancies around St. Patty’s Day so that she can pull multiple strings for her young children. This year I got to gloat and yell at her to look with her eyes, not with her hands when she was perusing what was left in the basket.

So that was that fun!

And then, I come back to school and it’s National Ag Week. I celebrated that by attempting to lead a slightly sheep up some stairs on our campus in order to get to the petting zoo where her lamb was being taken.

It turns out that sheep don’t lead up stairs.

I love National Ag Week. It’s so educational.

Sep

13

The Farm

Filed Under cattle, horses, sheep, university farm | Leave a Comment

Today Bradley and I headed out to the University Farm. My sorority was having a bbq out there with the ag fraternity as our final rush event of the week. I went out early in hopes of catching some good pictures in the pretty light. Unfortunately, this plan was slightly foiled as most of the pastures were to the west of me, so that required me to shoot straight into the low, bright sun.


This was the beginning of my journey. Well, kind of. It was the beginning of the picture-taking portion, anyway. I’d actually parked on the opposite side of the farm by the horse barns and had walked all the way across to the far pastures.
You can’t really tell from this picture, but that corn to the left is super tall! We wandered through it once in my Soils class (aka Crops part 2).

I hiked all the way down to that little white shed, trying to get some pictures of the cattle. Unfortunately, they were all back-lit, so the pictures weren’t great.


I did get a half-decent picture of one of the bulls, though. All of the cattle on our farm are Gelbviehs.


Finally, some unshadowed farm animals! These little guys are part of some research my friend Matt is doing.


I’m pretty sure these two are Katahdin sheep, hence the hair coat.


I didn’t tell them that I was well-acquainted with the people who would be slaughtering them next week, but I’m pretty sure I wasn’t fooling this guy.


This one wasn’t going easy on the judgmental stares, either.


“Why is she staring at us through that machine, Bahby?”
“I don’t know, Bahbahra. I don’t know.”

After chillin’ with my ovine homies for a while, I went back to the horse area.


This is D, owned by a classmate of mine.


These girls were riding some farm horses and said they didn’t mind if I took pictures.

After that, I made my way back to the classroom building where my sorority sisters and the AGR’s were starting to accumulate. We had a good meal and a lot of laughs, and Bradley begged several cookies off of people. All in all it was a good day.