Last day of January and winter sure has arrived

Surprise, surprise, this is Marv and my first attempt at writing a Blog. This is usually Betty's venue, but what the heck, I'll give it a try.

Winter has sure arrived here with a vengeance. Temperatures have been around -10 to -20 for the last week and we are expecting the same for the coming week.

In spite of this, first thing every morning we run from our bedroom across the snow to our 105 degree f. hot tub where we spend about a half hour and consume our first pot of coffee.

Following this, Betty generally heads for her desk and gets started on mail and orders and fielding phone calls.

My early morning chores include checking the heifers and cats in the barn, ensuring they are fed and watered. Frozen water lines can be a continuing irritation at this time of year. Then I check the greenhouses. We have only one heated, and presently it is kept at around 5 degrees just to keep alive the annual plantings for next year.
If it has snowed, I get out the Kubota tractor with front-mount snow blower and clear out around the house and down the driveway. If you have high speed Internet, check out out cameras. They are presently working, but we have had major problems with our camera hosting company, and they have been quite unreliable at times. We're still working on it. You can find them at

http://www.videoprotein.com/videoprotein/layouts/drivecam/listing.html
http://www.videoprotein.com/videoprotein/layouts/TowerCam/listing.html.

You need to have Java 2SE installed to view the cameras. If you don't have it, you can get it here for free. https://sdlc3d.sun.com/ECom/EComActionServlet;jsessionid=0BDB1ED2319F1C669E5951431C81D5FE

We are going to attempt to be more diligent in making regular posts here. This blog will now be used to communicate with you, and the long E-gardener newsletter tradition (started by Ron and Dianne Crawford) will sadly be dis-continued. It will make it much easier to update you more frequently. Sending out thousands of emails was not only very time consuming, but at each mailing dozens of them bounced due to address changes.

Betty says HI