home alone on a soon-to-be-snowy evening

matt is off at bee school, so it is just me, jake, and earl hanging out and getting ready for what might possibly be our first snowstorm of the year here in the greater boston area. i am so confident that we will have snow and the accompanying bad driving conditions that i have not even started to prepare for my class at dean tomorrow night. because most of the evening classes are primarily populated by part-time students who have to commute to campus, evening classes are the first ones to get canned when the weather is bad. having still not outgrown the inability to resist optimistic dreaming of snow days, i will probably spend the rest of the evening checking weather.com every five minutes for updates instead of actually preparing for class. let it snow, let it snow, let it snow. let it not backfire, let it not backfire, let it not backfire.

yesterday afternoon, we had a surprise arrival here on the farm- clocking in at just over seven weeks early (according to the farmer's anticipated date of first lambing), a little black lamb appeared in the pasture. i am sure my father will feel quite gratified to learn that the slacks are not the only ones who can completely fail to recognize when a sheep is about to give birth. it turns out that the ram snuck into the sheep pasture much earlier than he was supposed to and knocked up at least one and maybe more of the ewes. fortunately, the lamb was discovered during afternoon chores and both mother and baby were brought inside the barn and put in a stall under a heat lamp- temps were in the single digits here last night. jake and i just went out to check on them and they are all curled up in a corner under the eerie red glow. this is a picture i took of them yesterday afternoon. the lamb has been out of the womb long enough to be all licked clean, but the ewe has not yet passed the afterbirth, so the baby can't be much more than 30 minutes old in this photo.