It's time for an update!

Happy New Year to everyone! Isn't it crazy that 2018 is 10% over already? I hope the new year is everything you all wanted from it!

There have been a few requests for me to do an update and I get them in email and not just on here. I guess it is time and here I go...

Steve is working a lot and that's a wonderful thing! The oil business isn't so busy right now and he's been in Texas mostly helping to rebuild from the flooding last year. He's also bought some houses that were uninsured and he's fixing them up to sell them again. I feel bad for the families that had to sell their homes but at least the homes will be fixed and someone else can live in them.

In the last year Steve has been hunting again and he's done a couple trips to Arkansas to hunt wild hogs and he's always really happy when he gets home from one of these trips and I hope he can get away again this summer.
Steve's first wife Shari started a new life in Seattle and she's got a boyfriend and they're doing pretty good from what we hear.

Steve and Shari have three daughters and they're Stephanie (who goes by Stevie), Lauren, and Hannah. Stevie and Lauren are both married, they have children, and they're both poly. They both live not far from here and we see them all the time.

Hannah went to a college in Michigan, graduated, and now has a job in the wine business in California. At Christmas she came home with her boyfriend and it sounds pretty serious like they'll be engaged soon. They will not be a poly family but Hannah's boy seems okay with the whole thing.

Christie is doing pretty good and so are her four kids. Her oldest boy turned ten this last year! It's so crazy to think he was just a toddler when I first met him and now he's like this little serious cowboy/rancher/man! Her two girls and her youngest boy are doing well. Christie has had challenges this last year with trying for another baby and she's just letting things go and if it happens it happens is what she says.

We do not hear from Macy anymore. The last we heard she and her two kids were fine, living in Ohio with her parents. And then that was it. The phone numbers for her don't work anymore and she doesn't return email so we don't hear from her. We're going to respect her decision but we still miss her and if you're reading this Macy, we love you!

Cydne and her three kids are doing great! She isn't avoiding getting pregnant but is also enjoying a little break after having her son last year.

Amy and her baby are doing great and we're pretty sure she got pregnant over Christmas and is now due with her second baby around the end of September and we're all very happy for her!

My kids are all doing pretty good. My one girl had eye problems when she was born and is wearing really thick glasses now but she's healthy. The eye doctor wants her to have cornea transplants when she gets older (like 16) to maybe get her eyesight to 20/20 and we'll see what happens.

Myself I had the flu pretty bad. I was actually in the hospital for three days last month it got so bad. I had a fever that got to 104 and that was when I went to the hospital. I seriously don't remember much from the day I went in other than my hands felt like they were all swollen up but they looked just fine. It was the strangest thing I think I've ever felt and I know it was a hallucination but it seemed so real!

Other people in the house had the flu too but I was the only one who got the whole stomach flu version of it. I lost a LOT of weight and I feel exhausted all the time right now but it's getting better. I am really blessed that we have so much help in the house because I can't imagine being as sick as I was and having Steve 1,000 miles away and seven kids at home!

With the end of the big oil boom the demand for construction crews cut off and we lost some families in the church that had to move away to find work. We also had some non-church neighbors move away for work.

Around the ranch things are what you'd expect. We've seen more wolves this year but so long as they just pass through we don't bother them. It's when they stop and stare at the children is when we get concerned and if they approach the house during the day they end up as feed for the hogs. I don't know why people worship these things! They're not just big dogs! Ugh. In any case we've only taken two of them in the last year and both of them were not tagged. Still have to report taking them but it's less hassle when they're not tagged and the two we took were not tagged.

This one ranger we see once in a while says the tagged wolves avoid people because they don't want to get captured again. If that's true then I wish they'd tag more of them!

We're still running bison and they're still the best kind of herd for the ranch! They're easy to take care of and they dig in the snow for forage when they have to so it saves on feed. We still managed to put out a lot of bromegrass mixed with hay and alfalfa for them. We put molasses on the feed so they eat it up or else we get pronghorn coming in to eat what the bison don't eat.

We have a herd of elk that come through and we've put out a few bales of feed for them, too.

I still have about a hundred chickens and we eat the eggs and I sell the rest to friends and neighbors. Not making much money from them but they're nice to have around and the eggs are pretty good.

We keep a few hogs around to eat up leftovers from the house and the dead things we find around here. They don't even care if it's a dead bird, they'll eat it! Right now we have eight of them and in a month or two we'll slaughter two of them and put up the pork and smoke the bacon.

This summer we'll have almost two acres for the garden and I am so looking forward to fresh veggies! Swiss chard, turnips, cabbage, cauliflower, beets, and we'll be putting up wires for the peas too! We have an orchard in what used to be about an acre of swampy land (mushy but not like a wetland area). Steve added a bunch of soil to the area and then we planted apricots, apples, pears, and cherries and this year we expect to get at least a decent crop of cherries. What we don't eat fresh I'll put up in pies and low-sugar preserves.

Steve has a hobby of a home distillery and he's got bourbon aging in what used to be four port barrels. It was a lot of work to make 200+ gallons of bourbon and I'm seriously glad he doesn't plan on drinking it all himself! He says the port should make for an interesting bourbon. I don't care much for strong liquor but I will try it when it's ready in a few years.

I still make the occasional quilt. It's relaxing to just work on something and not think about everything going on.

Church is nice and I attend women's Bible study on Wednesday nights. We're studying Isaiah right now and it's interesting, We'll be doing Corinthians next and I am really looking forward to it because it's a lot more challenging and we have much better discussions about that kind of thing.

That's about it for an update! I'm always good for questions but I hope this answered most of them!

Hope you all have a loving Valentine's Day!

- Megan