Yucky Gloomy Tuesday

Today was quite a gray, gloomy day on the farm.  It drizzled outside all day, until it finally started picking up around 4.  I had a super busy day on the farm, since Dad was gone this morning making his deliveries around Northern Virginia and Fredericksburg.  He also had to stop at Miller's Farm Market in Spotsylvania to deliver some sausage because they were just about out!  They wanted to come get some last week, but after our huge orders I had to deliver we were completely out of bulk sausage as well! 
Matt and I had to get up and go move pigs this morning.  Once pigs get to be about 75-100 lbs, they are ready to move out of the cold nursery (which isn't really cold, it just doesn't have additional propane heat in it) up to the finishing barn.  We took about 25 pigs up this morning.  The road was just slick enough that Matt had a very hard time getting the trailer backed up to the barn.  Sometimes the pigs can be really hard to move around and get on the trailer, but I have found the calmer I am, and the more I just talk to them and wave my arms (I look pretty funny) they are much easier to move and stay much calmer.
Then I had to move 50 bales of hay from one field to another, with some other hay bales.  I started yesterday and did it for about 3.5 hours, and then finished it up today after another 1.5 hours.  We use the hay bales to feed all of our cows in the winter.  We start feeding hay sometime around the end of October/ early November and go all the way through March.  With 125 cows they eat a LOT of hay in those months!  We spend all summer making hay so that we will have enough to feed our cows in the winter.
I also had to spend a lot of time trying to get a fire started in our wood stove.  In our farrowing room (where the babies are born) we use a wood stove as some added heat.  When it gets really cold, and we have really little babies, we also have a huge propane heater that we use as more heat.  But right now, since we have some older pigs in the farrowing room that don't need as much additional heat, we can just use the wood stove to heat that barn.  I must have had some wet wood I was trying to burn because it took FOREVER to get a fire started!  Luckily, I must have put enough kindling in and newspaper because it finally took of and went.  When I left it was quite warm in there!
Hopefully we won't get too much rain and wind tonight!