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[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

Elbonia, you know, that country that appears in the Dilbert comic strip 
where all the citizens are always up to their waist in mud.

After those years of drought the water table is back in spades.  Rain on 
top of melting snow ... the TVA lake that us usually lowered by 40 feet in 
the 
winter is within 8 feet of being full.  Flatlanders my have a hard time 
visualizing this, but with extreme saturation of the ground, water will 
appear 
to stand in pools on steep hillsides.

The biggest homestead news for us here in the Elbonian winter is that we 
got a new cow two days ago, Jersey bred to Jersey and due in June.  She's 
still lactating about a gallon a day and so we will dry her off completely in 
six or eight weeks.

In order to rearrange pastures and pens to accomodate Ushi (the girls are 
learning Japanese so all the farm animals now have Japanese names, ushi = 
'cow'), I needed to move a dozen or so T-posts.  These are in hard clay 
ground 
and I was not looking forward to it.  I'd had in mind to move some of them 
late last summer, but a ten foot pole used as a second class lever would not 
lift them out of the ground.

But the ground is so saturated with water that I lifed each t-post out of 
the ground with one hand and almost no effort.

James</HTML>