MY WEEKEND

The job has been going very well. Friday all I did was office work and entered a lot of information into the computer system. All the staff is wonderful to work with and it doesn't even feel like a job. It feels like 20 friends just hanging out for the day. On Friday, I was the last one to leave Hexagon and I decided that it was the managers turn to get his fair share of the pranking. I took some sheets of paper and stapled them three across and ten high making one super giant sheet of paper. I then taped it to the front of the managers office door and drew a square with a stick-figure man in it and wrote the word MENS across the top and then shut the door. The manager was not working on Friday because he has to work today. The weekend employees got to look at it all day yesterday without the manager being in. I cannot wait to get to work on Monday and find out what the manager thought of his door.

The kittens were finally able to leave the house. After I got done with work on Friday, the girls and I took one kitten into town to a friends house and then we took the others over to a neighbors place near York. The girls got me talked into keeping one of the kittens, but I am almost regretting making the decision. He is cute and cuddly, but he's still a kitten and likes to tear up things, claw my furniture, and he is starting to get a little anti-litter box. I think I may let the girls play with him a little bit today when they get home, and then explain to them that he really needs to be with the other two kittens at the neighbors house and see what happens. I am hoping they will understand.

Yesterday, my mom and I jumped in her Jeep and went to Devils Lake. We stopped by Wal-Mart and then we were going to go over to the Dairy Queen and pick up sundae's and take them over to my Grandma at the Good Samaritan Center. When we were leaving the Wal-Mart parking lot, a noise that sounded like marbles rolling around started to come from the bottom of her Jeep. We pulled over in the Wally's parking lot and checked the bottom of the Jeep. We didn't notice anything unusual, so we called my dad, who just happened to be in DL at the same time. He came over and checked it out. Turns out that something happened to the crank case and we were not going to be able to drive it home. We had to call Cowboys Towing and have him come over, put it on a trailer, and have it hauled all the way back to York. Around 9 o'clock that evening, mom and I headed back into town with a different vehicle so we could get our shopping finished. We didn't get home last night until close to 11 pm. Our family has completely exhausted our extra vehicles. My dad is driving his little blue wagon, I am driving my dad's blue Reliant, and my mom has her escort that she takes to work and back. If anything else happens to another vehicle, someone is not getting to work. I am going to call Cenex Monday and see when they can get my car in. It has to get done soon...and now will will be working on moms Jeep as well.

Today I need to get my house cleaned up. Since starting my job I have been neglecting the home a little bit. When I am finished with that, I need to go outside and move the bale feeder so I can clean up some of the old hay that the horses haven't been eating. I also need to get my wire ran on the new posts I put in. I haven't been able to put the rest of the wood posts in because the slough water is still overflowing into the pasture, but I should be able to work around it and get what I have up finished with minimal difficulty.

HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY to all the wonderful moms out there. I know there is a bunch of you!

MORE PIG STUFF

Today was another good day at the hog farm. This morning I got to help load the 25-day-old piglets onto the semi for transportation over to the nursery barn. I had a blast herding 500 piglets down the hallway and up the semi ramp. They hop when they run and their ears flop all over the place. They are really cute and fun to watch. I also got to worm the pregnant pigs that are close to giving birth, and vaccinate the piglets we pulled off the sows for weaning. Only downside of today was that the Storage King bin outside the building ran out of feed. The feeders run on an automatic system that fills tubes with feed at a specific time each day. A tube comes down from the ceiling and hangs above each pigs feed trough, so at feeding time, all we have to do is walk by and hit the release latch that lets the premeasured feed fall into the troughs. Rooms 24 through 16 had feed in the tubes, but we had to go through rooms 1 through 15 and fill the feeders by hand with huge carts full of feed. There are 24 pigs in each room, so we had to hand-feed about 360 pigs. I still thought it was fun though. Barn work definitely suits me. Tomorrow I will be with Kevin, the barn manager, and he will be showing me how to enter information on all the pigs into the computer system. When I start doing my data entry, I hope I can still help out in the barn. I am glad that we only have to enter the information on the pigs in Hexagon (the barn I work in) and not all the barns. Hexagon has close to 6,000 pigs. The entire farm had about 40,000 pigs. The barns are at different locations and each barn is set up for different stages of the pigs. In Hexagon, we artificially inseminate the sows, take care of them while they are pregnant, then move them to farrowing stalls when they are 5 days away from giving birth, help the sows deliver if needed and watch over the piglets while they are tiny, we take care of the piglets and then wean them when the are 17 days old, and once they are 25-days-old, a semi comes over and we load the piglets up where they are moved down the road to the nursery barns. There is a lot of stuff to be done in between that needs to be taken care of too, so it really keeps you moving. I am finally having fun at a job that really doesn't feel like a job to me.

THINGS ARE LOOKIN UP

My dad's car has been running pretty good, but the fuel pump doesn't work right. I haven't taken the car on long trips just in case something should go wrong. I cannot wait to have my car fixed and get it back. I miss it.

Last week I applied for a job at the hog farm in Cando. The same day I handed in my application, I was given a tour of the barns and all the facilities. It's a pretty big place. They currently have about 40,000 pigs and there is 6,000 pigs in each barn. They deliver 450 to 500 piglets a day! I started job shadowing on Friday and it was pretty good. It definitely wasn't what I was expecting.....in a good way. I got to help feed, tag, vaccinate, and deliver pigs. The day flew by fast and I learned so much about pigs in 6 hours then I ever have known before. All the stuff I thought I knew about pigs and the new stuff I learned was almost ridiculous, but I did enjoy it. I will finish job shadowing on Tuesday. When I finish work on Tuesday, I and the manager of the barn I have been working in will discuss how I like the main functions of the barn and where I fit in best at. It sounds like he wants me to do most of the data entry work in the office and help out two or three days a week inside the barn. However, they start work at 7 am and my daycare doesn't open until 7. We will have to see if they are willing to let me work around my daycare hours. If not, I won't be able to take the job...if they do, then I am all for staying working there. So far, they have been allowing me to show up at 8 o'clock for the job shadowing.

On Monday, the kittens will be six weeks old. They have started to eat dry cat food, drinking water, and using the litter box. I think I am going to keep them for about another week and then give them to their new homes. One of my friends in Leeds wants one, and "home of the pillow fish" is getting the other three. I think the kittens are adorable, but I cannot wait for them to be gone. I am definitely a one-cat-woman.

Today my mom and I took the girls to the Just For Kix Spring dance show in Devils Lake. It was really cute to see all the little kids dancing their routines. I also discovered that a lot of people that we know have children in Just For Kix. My girls want to start going to Just For Kix, but it's very expensive. I will have to think about it. One thing that I feel bad about being a single parent, is that my girls miss out on a lot of those fun activities because I do not have the money for it. I wish I could be able to pay for dancing, Clover Buds, camps, etc...but I can't. I hate thinking about how my girls have to miss out on those kinds of things. I almost started crying today at the Just For Kix show when Jessie looked at me and said, "Mommy, I really want to dance." Hopefully, someday, I will be able to say yes without having to worry about where the money is going to come from.