The weather has been prolongedly freezing, with temperatures being cold but the humidity insignificant enough to remain substantially dry. This has led to a definite snuggliness on the part of the barn cats, who take every opportunity to get close to us and indeed, to one another. The scarcity of small game and vermin has added to this, although when the little sparrows come to peck at the waterfowls' leavings, their attention is often roused from their daily naps.

The waterfowl remain unbothered by the cold, which has in fact been significant enough - combined as it's been with the lack of rain or snow - to extract ice from the ground, creating interesting and esoteric patterns of ice crystals. While this has been passing with a recent warmer spell combine with rain, we expect more of the colder weather this coming week.

The waterfowl may not be bothered by the weather, but it is contributing to their continued barrenness. A duck laid an egg - on the pond, right when the thaw had begun. As of yesterday, the egg had finally fallen out of sight as the last of the ice melted from beneath it.

Their lack of progeny is contributed to in other ways - while a drake was busily trying to court two hens at once, one of the ganders decided to join in, pouncing upon a supine duck hen. While the hen seemed unmoved by her violent possessor (ganders being heavier but actually lacking the virile and downright frightening equipment of male muscovy drakes), the result was surely infertile. Meanwhile, the one goose with a nest of her own loses interest long before the eggs are hatched; they are highly inefficient at this entire 'breeding the next generation' business.

Today it is raining and the geese and ducks are wandering about, eating no longer frozen vegetation. The cats are curled up together, all five of them, in the moon chair on the porch, while the sheep continue to exist without reason to comment upon them. Next weekend we will be fetching Hercules back from his stud duties, and we'll see some real warfare as he's reintroduced to the flock.