Dairy Daze...and Now Beyond

Here is the pic of the turkey hen. I will try and get a better one later. Today is hot; as usual. Mom didn't get in until after 9 PM last night; had a plane delay in Los Angeles so they had to reschedule her flight from Dallas/Fort Worth. So by time we got the luggage and all we didn't get back here until after 11 PM. They have a completely new terminal at the Springfield airport. It's at the back of the airport property, so you have to take a different route to get there. You take I-44 to exit 72, turn right on 266 and then take another right onto the originally named "Airport Boulevard," and then straight on to the terminal, taking care to not get lost when you go through the little round-about halfway along. Before you do go there make sure you have your cell phone charged, as there are no public pay phones to be found at this terminal. However, to assuage your frustration over this they DO have a meditation room set up for you. This morning hubby and...

I couldn't come up with a catchy title for today. It's hot, it's sultry. Hubby has been hauling his hay bales from the creek bottom up to the hay shed. I did the dreaded grocery shopping trip this morning. Ellen loves going into the bank; it's where they hand out free little suckers. Not that she eats the whole thing. She likes to carry it around in the store, lick it a few times and then hand it to me. "Done." Tonight I am going down to Springfield to pick up my mom. And I am praying I don't get lost because they have built a new terminal at the airport and you have to go to a different freeway exit and all. We will see. At least they have I65 as a 4 lane for most of the way now.

This past spring and summer a turkey hen has adopted us. She wanders hither and thither at her own will; through the yard and fields. Once I came across her taking a dust bath in the driveway. And once hubby chased her out of the green bean patch. She has become quite tame and lets us get within a couple of yards of her. I actually got a pic of her yesterday but I am having trouble getting it posted. It wasn't a very good shot, so maybe I will try to get another some other day. Today I defrosted the outside upright freezer. At 90 plus degrees temp outside the ice melted really fast. Last night we had a thundershower. It was weird how the temp went from 95 to 80 something in less than 45 minutes. But of course that wasn't long lived. It wasn't a bad storm, but the power went off for about 2 hours; right when I needed to wash supper dishes and get ready for church. Oh, well. My friend from church who had her leg amputated is doing well, so far. They are playing t...

Today I harvested my onions; this is just one of 5-6 bunches I have. Dry onions they call them, though they are nice and juicy when you cut into them. It’s nice having them on hand. Hubby likes to eat them raw. Ellen liked them initially and would crunch down a few slices on her own, but now she leaves them alone on her plate. I don’t eat them unless they are cooked. We have a pretty big crop of them this year. I am going to do what I started doing a couple of years ago; chop up quite a few of them and freeze them. It’s great to have chopped onion on hand in the freezer for cooking; saves a lot of time, not to mention tears. Ha ha! Cry once and have done with it. Today hubby baled his hay from the creek bottoms. Fifteen bales, I think he said. Not a great amount, but it certainly helps. Sad news: We heard yesterday that my friend from church did have to have an amputation. She was in so much pain, her foot was actually dying, that she was begging them to go ahead and tak...

Well, actually I haven't had any ticks on me yet today. But "Tick-y" sounded better than "pea-y" which is what the actual theme of today is. The ticks have been really bad this year. I hate them. Ticks and chiggers the twin evils of Missouri summers. Anyway. Today we picked and shelled peas. I got about 15 cups in the freezer. It's quite a bit of work, but that is about 10+ servings of peas that I will not have to buy. I think there's enough left on the vines to get another round of them. The past couple days hubby has been "in the hay." This is not to be confused with "hitting the hay" as in going to bed or anything along those lines. But he has been out cutting and raking hay. He will probably bale it tomorrow or Thursday. It's a very good thing to have an air conditioner on the tractor.

Yes, as forecast, today is hot and humid again. This morning I pickled a batch of beets. I went straight from clean up in the milk barn out to the garden and pulled them, then went in and did the boiling, cleaning and canning. While we were still in the milk barn I told Ellen; "We are going out to the garden and pull beets before we go have breakfast." "Wellllll," she replied, drawing out the word well like that and pausing to think. "I have to get my boots on." I just laughed. In the mornings I get her up out of bed and just cart her out to the barn in the stroller in her PJs; then put her in her playpen out there. She wasn't going to go work in the garden without her boots. What a kid.

Whew! It's really hot and sticky here...and it is supposed to be so all week; in the 90s with a heat index in the 100s. Lovely. It will keep me busy watering. We are praying that it will cool down a bit for when my mother is here. She's not really heat tolerant. This afternoon I took Ellen down to the creek. When it flooded it created this nice little pebbly beach at one of the crossings down there. We sat on the bank and she threw stones to her little heart's content. Then we went wading for awhile; she loved that. Just now I gave her some supper. It included a little bowl of yogurt and a sippy cup of water. I do this Sunday evenings to keep her busy while I am on the computer. She was rather quiet for longer than it would usually take for her to eat. So I turned around and watched her. She was dribbling her water into the "oh-grit," actually dunking the drinking spout into the yogurt, then drinking from it. Then she was squishing the bottom of the cup into the b...

I can't seem to get out more than one blog post a week lately, it seems. Things here are hot and humid. We had a series of thunder boomers come through last night starting at about midnight or so. They mostly passed north of us, but still kept me awake. Ellen slept through them thankfully. Then at about 6:20 AM or so we had one come straight for us while we were out in the barn doing chores. It knocked out the power for a couple of hours. We only had 8 cows left to milk so hubby just let them go. He didn't want to get the generator out for them. Ellen was awake for this one and kept crying; "I want to go home!" every time the lightning would strike really close. This past Saturday we went down to Silver Dollar City. Ellen did really well. We took her to a Veggie Tales show. It was kind of loud, but she was enchanted by Bob the Tomato, and perked up for the whole show. She talked about him all the way home. My mom will be here in less than 2 weeks. Right n...

The tree that is. We had a nasty thunder-boomer (as hubby calls them) yesterday afternoon. We were eating supper when one particularly close one hit. I saw it strike just a couple hundred yards from the house, to the south of us. KAWHAM! There was a flash and a boom all at the same time; then there was a fireball, with sparks and everything. We went out there later and saw what it had done to the tree. The top pic is kind of dark, though you can kind of see the light colored stripe of bare wood from top to bottom. This bottom one shows what happened: It pretty much peeled the tree from roots to crown, and there are slivers of bark blown away from the tree up to 100 yards or more. You can't really tell in the pictures, but the bark is actually just hanging from the tree, it's not attached any more. The tree, as you might expect, is a goner. It can't survive naked. But we are so thankful no calves were under it; or that the lightning bolt didn't hit US instead ...

As most of you know, hubby has a rental house here. He wouldn't have it at all if it weren't pretty much smack-dab in the center of our property; well, it is right on the highway and our fields encircle it. So he bought it when it came up for sale just so he could control the place. He has owned it for over 10 years now, I believe. The first folks who rented it were there for over 5 years. The guy was a chiropractor and was frequently 3-4 months late with his rent...but he always paid. Since then there have been a series of renters, none of whom have lived there longer than 2 years and most of them less than a year. One had 2 large inside dogs, which at one point got up on the sofa back, stood up against the plate glass window and broke it out. "What should I do?" the renter asked my husband. "Get the phone and call someone out to repair it...at your expense," he replied. One guy went through the house and, for whatever reason, cut random holes in the walls,...

This one would have been good for Mother's Day, but I didn't have it then. I found it in a copy of "The Budget." An anonymous person from Ohio sent it in. A Young Mother I saw a young mother With eyes full of laughter, And two little shadows Came following after; Whenever she moved They were always right there, Hanging on to her skirts, Holding on to her chair, Before her, behind her, An adhesive pair. “Don’t you ever get weary, As day after day Your two little tagalongs Get in your way?” She smiled as she shook Her pretty, young head, And I’ll always remember The words that she said; “It’s good to have shadows That run when you run, That laugh when you’re happy And hum when you hum, For you only have shadows When your life is full of sun." Anonymous