Dairy Daze...and Now Beyond

 Yesterday, February 27, 2024, she turned 17.  Amazing.  But of course I didn't get any recent photos.  Here she is from about 6-7 years ago when her hair went down to her butt.  This was when I was the one still brushing it for her.  She was in middle school, I believe; maybe 5th grade.  Her hair caused more stress in the mornings than anything I can ever think of.  I am not sure of the exact time, but not long after this picture was taken I advised her that she was quite old enough to be brushing her hair for herself.  It was not long after THAT when she decided she wanted it cut.   I think the above photo was from just last year maybe.  She has kept her hair about as above; short enough to handle easily, but long enough to do different styles with.  She has mastered French braids, and does other random pony tails or braids, along with curls and the like.   She keeps herself busy.  At the moment she is wor...

  That was the progression of the sunset while I was doing my evening walk last night.  The last picture, of the tree in the pasture, is classic.  That tree is in just the right spot to catch the setting sun this time of year.  Well, this was supposed to have been published a couple of days ago, but apparently I forgot to hit the correct button.  Sorry.  ... I took this series of photos of the sunset, then turned around to go to the house and found this scene...     The full moon coming up over the trees.  I framed it: A pitiful frame.  But there you go.  I needed something a bit more interesting to post than leaves and tree trunks.

 Sunny and warm. This does not bode well at the end of February.  Crocuses and daffodils are already blooming.  I am afraid that the fruit trees and berries are going to bloom early as well, and the blooms are going to get frozen some time in late March or early April. The weather is making me itchy to get to gardening though.  I already ordered a few seeds and am planning my garden.  The garden beds here next to the house are pretty much surrounded by deer hoof prints, so I know I have to plant stuff that the deer won't eat....or at least will choose last. Wednesday night my neighbor gave me an elderberry start.  I have to figure out where to plant it.  An elderberry bush can get quite large.  Plus, it's just the one shoot.  You are supposed to have 2 to get good pollination.  So I dunno.  We shall see.

  A few months ago a dead tree down by the former milk barn fell over into the path.  Three days ago Gary cut and split the final pieces of it, which you see here.  When I think about it I find it incredible the amount of memories I have that revolve around fire wood.  Where would I even start recording them? To begin with I'll say that up until the age of 22, which is the first time I left home for an extended period of time, I had never actually lived in a house that didn't have wood heat.  (This was in the summer of '91 when I lived as an exchange student in Mexico for 5 weeks one summer.)  Summers in Mexico don't generally require any sort of heating in the house at all, so I have no idea how they heated their house.  But in very rural coastal Northern California we almost always had to have some sort of heat in the house, year round.  Summer evenings can get quite cool, even in August.  It gets foggy, more often than not, in the afternoo...

 ...a couple of evenings ago when I was doing my walking.  Of course the phone doesn't capture how pretty it was in person.  But I am sure you get the idea.  I always associate the moon, in any phase, with my dad.  He was forever calling me to come outside and see it; especially when it was full.  He was fascinated with the night skies, and on the Northwest coast of Humboldt County CA; when you get a clear night sky, you'd best get out to enjoy it because it doesn't happen too often what with fog and rain.     Well, this is a short one today.  Laundry, visits with neighbors and other stuff is calling.

 About 2 weeks ago Gary went to work on a well at a place where they sell honey.  The lady gave him this jar of it.  It is quite different.  I am not sure how accurately this photo captures the color, but it is unusually dark.  She told Gary that this honey was from last summer. Last summer we had a drought.  There were few, if any, wild flowers blooming, so the lady said the bees had to source their pollen from other plants, resulting in a much, much lower honey production and much darker honey.  (And another note; I thought perhaps she had just bottled it up so something because it had a bit of foam on it, and bubbles in the honey in the jar.  But Gary said she had just handed him the jar, as is, straight off the shelf.) I took some of it over to a friend for her to sample, because I thought it was so interesting.  When she opened the jar the first thing she said was; "Oh, it smells like whiskey!"  This made me laugh.  Yes, it d...

 The following photo has little to do with the subject matter at hand this morning, but I thought I would throw it in here just because.  In fact, I might just throw in a couple more random photos just to get them off of my phone. Perhaps sunrises do have to do with transitions.  I am sure, astute reader, that you can draw the parallels quite well without my needing to enumerate them for you.  Whatever the case, let's begin. A few decades ago when I was in my upper teens and 20s I'd had the mistaken idea that when I was the elderly age I am today (haha) life would be quite, quite settled with no surprises or upsets and that I would know everything and all would be well and life would go smoothly. Fantasy never translates well into reality, as hard as we may try to force ourselves to believe.  I should know; I spent much of my younger years with my head in the clouds.  Those were my mother's own words, so I know that is true.  It is one thing to dream a...

 The Sheep and her calf, and Bella.   They are funny together.  Bella is compelled, by whatever inner instinct, to watch the cows as closely as she can.  And The Sheep seems equally compelled by her own bovine curiosity to come over and inspect Bella.  The calf also is curious, so it comes over to see what's going on.  And they will stand there staring at each other for quite some time before Bella loses her reserve and "boofs" a few time and bounces around.  The calf will cut and run a ways, as will The Sheep, but The Sheep will come directly back and duck her head at Bella right at the fence.  I think she would probably be the one doing the chasing, instead of Bella, were there no fence between them.

  Well, it isn't new, technically.  I believe it's been growing there for decades.  But I'd never noticed it before.  It appears to be a quite old thorn tree.  This is what the trunk looks like. At first I thought the thorns were coming from the vines running up and down the trunk, but no, they are coming straight from the trunk itself.   Here are what the ends of the limbs look like: You can see the hairy, thorny-looking trunk on the left, but the limb in the foreground originates from the trunk.  Fascinating.  I'll bet not many squirrels shinny up and down THAT tree.  And no buck has ever used it as a buck rub.  Haha... That is the fun thing about nature; even when you think you have seen everything, there is always more to discover.

 Seems hard to believe but winter will soon be drawing to a close.  Spring is on its way! Spring means several different things aside from gardening.  One of those is it now means is the beginning of vendor events season.  The first one I go to is the Buffalo Art Walk in May.  At least I believe it's in May; the first Saturday.   I am therefore trying to come up with new loom knit patterns to sell at said events.  The above Peeps Bunny pattern is from loomahat.com.  Denise, the lady who IS the loomahat lady, also has a YouTube channel where I get her patterns.  She has beautiful patterns; scarves and hats and shawls and all sorts of toys and dolls.  I have yet to try any really large project, even a scarf, because in my observations at these vendor events, large items like scarves, shawls, blankets...etc, rarely sell.  And even if they DO sell they usually don't go for what they are truly worth.  I have more luck selling l...

 Princess is my "cat-in-law" I guess you could put it; Gary's sister's cat.  This past Monday she became a bit under the weather, so on Wed I took her to the vet because Gail had to work, of course.  This picture is when were we in the exam room waiting to see him.   Princess is less than impressed with going to the vet.  Normally she is a holy terror to get into the carrier.  Before she left for work Gail shut the bedroom doors, which was the cue for Princess to go berserk and hide under an armchair in the living room.  She had to be rooted out from under there and corralled in the bathroom with food and water until time for me to pick her up for her appointment.  When I got down there she wanted out of the bathroom, of course, but she didn't put up much of a fight.  The carrier was hidden behind the shower door in the bathtub.   To bring a long, pointless story to an end; she was given some antibiotics and is feeling much bet...

 Yesterday Ellen took the bus to school.  Sometimes she drives; sometimes she takes the bus.  When she first started taking the school bus we decided to not use the bus route that goes directly by our house, for various reasons, the main one being that friends from church lived across the river and their bus time pick up was a smidge later in the morning.  At this point, the bus going by our house, if she rode it, would be picking her up at 6:20 in the morning; which is absolutely ridiculous, because he gets to his first school building early and can't even let the kids off because the building isn't open yet.  The bus route across the river at the neighbor's place picks up at 6:50ish.  But all that aside.   We are up on the ridge, and drive down and across the river to get to the bus stop at the neighbor's place. (Lord, it's 6:18 AM and there went the bus right now!)  We get to see some pretty sun rises coming up over the ridge to the East o...

  Yesterday the Future Business Leaders of America club had their district competitions in Bolivar.  Ellen was disappointed that she and her fellow classmate only placed 5th in their competition.  But they got medals for participating.   Plus she had to give a campaign speech because she ran for district secretary.  She was the only one running, but still.  She sweated over that speech because she had to give it in front of over 500 people.  But she did great.  

  Most every Saturday evening I make two meals; one for that evening and one to serve for Sunday dinner.  This is for the simple reason that I don't want to come home from church and mess with making a full meal from scratch.  I used to make Sunday dinners in the crock pot, but I gave that up when I learned crock pots have lead in the glaze of the lining.  I used plastic crock pot liners for a time, but then there you have the plastic potentially leaching into your food.  So I changed my MO for Sunday dinner prep a few years back. Now on Saturday evenings I just fix two meals, more or less.  At least I fix two main courses, or proteins.  As long as I have the kitchen revved up to cook, it only takes a few minutes more to prepare another main dish.  I can bake two things in the oven.  Sometimes I will prepare a meat to marinate overnight and then cook it early Sunday morning, like ribs or a roast chicken, but for the most part I just cook Sund...

 Yesterday Bella and I went on our long walk despite the temperatures being in the 20s.  You can see the white frost on the grass.  The sun had melted the white from the trees, so it made an interesting contrast.   We don't go far when we are down there, usually I just walk back and forth along the tree line.  Gary mows and "hay" this particular field down there every year.  This past summer he'd left a mown strip of hay along the far edge of the field, so I have just been walking that.  It is interesting to note that the coyotes also like to use that hay as their pathway.  When it snowed that was where their tracks showed up.  There is also quite a bit of canine scat piles along that hay line.  I am pretty sure it's coyote scat because I can see fur in it; sometimes grass wads. I am sure they, the coyotes, do a great deal of their hunting for rodents down in there.  In the one little section that Gary doesn't mow the grass gro...