You Know You're a Farmwife...

...when your husband brings you home one of these...
...and you're excited about it. :)

As long as I've been feeding square bales of hay to the sheep, I never knew there was such a thing. (We'll just say they're new.) It's kind of hard to see in the picture, bit there's a razor blade down at the bottom of it kind of like those letter openers. You use it for cutting the twine on the bales. I'd been using a knife, when I remembered to bring it, or just pulling the twine off over the sides if I didn't. If you've ever tried that, you know how hard it is to do, especially when the bales are packed tight. I'd been leaving a knife up on the barn shelf, but something got up there one night (I'm thinking raccoons after Geronimo's cat food crumbs) and knocked it and some other stuff off. The knife either disappeared down into the hay on the floor, or the coons ran off with it.

(I'm not sure if this is connected, but my husband brought this to me the next night after I borrowed his knife.)

Anyway, these things work like a charm, and you can hang them up on the wall to keep the coons away from them. :)