The barn was finished a couple of weeks ago and we have been busy moving in and getting the stalls situated. It’s definitely not going to be the Taj Mahal, but it is functional and the animals are glad for the shelter. Especially tonight, as we are going to have negative temperatures with a – 20°F windchill.

We had to level the dirt floor and lay rubber stall mats for the horse and then the ewes. We haven’t finished placing the stall mats in the rams’ stall yet, but we did finish their stall. We call it Fort Knox. It was a lot of work to build that, and we practically built it by shoplight after work on weeknights! A lot of shopping done at Lowe’s, also late at night, in the snow and sleet!

It took the horse starving herself for 60 hours before she would come inside to eat. I guess she thought the floor was hot lava. An apparent throwback to that morning in Tuscaloosa when she wouldn’t load into her horse trailer. Well, she loves her stall now and spends the majority of her time in it as the weather has been bad.

I thought having the rams inside with the ewes would be bad, but the rams with the great horns have been pretty docile. They occasionally spar with each other around feeding time, but they haven’t organized a concerted effort to try to get over to the ewes’ stall. We do run the tertiary ram (the one with the scurs), Coon, across the alleyway over into a pen next to the ewes as the rams with the great horns kept damaging his scurs when they would spar. Coon loves being next to the ladies and wears himself out endlessly flirting.