Gully-washer

It rained yesterday.  Boy, did it rain!  I'd let the girls out into the pen and had Inga, first in line, up on the stand when the clouds started to drop their load.  No soft opening, Nature turned the faucet on full blast.  The girls have a small shed for shelter even if the play yard gate is closed, but they still moaned their distress, a sound I'd not heard from them before.  As soon as Inga was finished and I'd brought Sheila around, I couldn't stand it any longer and shut the door to the back stalls and let the girls into the play yard.  That put a crimp in the schedule as I couldn't get through the huddled goats to clean the stalls and fill the feed bucket, but one night wouldn't hurt them and I could not, in good conscience, leave them out in the downpour.

It rained without let up almost all day long, hard enough at times to wipe out the satellite TV dish.  Taking a chance that the power would stay on, I made Russian Pie for dinner.  Certainly not difficult, it takes a fair amount of fussy prep work, shredding cabbage, slicing onions, mushrooms to saute with a lot of herbs, and peeling and slicing hard-boiled eggs to spread over a layer of cream cheese in the pie shell.  I thought I had it timed so that it would be ready to come out of the oven just before Camille and Honey were due, but the top crust wasn't browned yet.  Knowing dinner would be somewhat delayed, I dashed out to put all the critters to bed while it was still light, sure I'd beat Cam to the house.  Yeah, well.  It was a mob scene down at the barn and difficult to let one at a time into the back stalls.  The chickens had enough sense to stay indoors, but I wasn't about to move fast in the slush in their pen.

Honey and Bess ran to meet me when I headed to the porch and I'd scared Cam when I didn't answer the door.  Living alone out here in the boonies, we are both aware of dire possibilities and she'd gone in to check on me, which I greatly appreciated.  By then, the pie was done.  I dried the soggy dogs, gave them a milk bone each, and we ladies enjoyed that flavorful, rich pie before going in to watch a little television and listen to the nonstop rain.

We've been asking and waiting for the badly needed rain, but I think we should have refined our request so that it didn't come all at once.  It was a very wet day.