Dairy Daze...and Now Beyond

 According to what everyone else around us has been doing we are a bit late in getting anything out into the garden.  Many, if not most, local gardeners have had lettuce, onions and other cool weather things planted for a few weeks.  Gary's Aunt Kathy has had lettuce growing in a little planter in her front yard for a month or more.  We usually wait 'til the end of March to get going.  So all day yesterday was dedicated to gardening. I got the weed eater out and sheered off the garden beds here by the house.  Then I got out Little Brother, my rototiller, and tilled them up.  Later in the evening I planted every onion slip and bulb I'd bought in the second garden bed.  I am going to head to Greasy Creek this morning and get more. Gary was feeling much better yesterday; he's on the recovery end of this bout with COVID, so he did quite a bit of stuff, too.  He got the mower going, and mowed the lawn where it's been getting shaggy.  He spread some dairy dirt on the b

 Yep,  Gary got COVID again.  For this reason I haven't been on here blogging.  The only time I blog is when I am on the laptop here, and when he is sick this tends to become his domain.  I am quite, quite sure I am going to come down with the beast here in a few days.  This time he had like over a week of mild congestion leading up to it, and that is what I have had the past couple of days.  I am doing everything I can think of to keep Ellen from catching it here at the end of the school year.  I follow Gary around sanitizing everything he has touched or sneezed on; same for myself.  Every door knob, drawer handle, faucet handle, counter food container, door jams...whatever.  I have stayed "quarantined" more or less, in the bedroom.  Last time I caught COVID that seemed to work; no one else caught it.   In any case, in the past few days Gary has sold off all but two of the calves.  One has a sore foot and the other one is only about 6 weeks old.  I miss watching them out

 Last week was busy.  Seems we ran from here to there and back again.   Here are a few pictures from last week: This weekend is the Purim.  Last Sunday I taught my chidlers (you would have had to have read The Big Friendly Giant to catch that reference to calling children "chidlers") the story of Esther.  It was a fairly abbreviated lesson, as I only have 30 minutes for the entire class, and we have to get in greetings and prayer time and general organization, but we hit all the high parts.   This week we are going to bake cookies.  The formal name for these are Hamantaschen.  That is the name the Jewish settlement in Germany gave to them.  And there is a whole history in itself with these cookies.  But in Israel they are called "Haman's Ears."   Since we only have 30 minutes I baked these up, but kept a few of the dough rounds for the kids to fill and then bake.  They take about 15 minutes to bake. This should be fun!  These are super good!  This recipe is just

  This was a lasagna I made last week.  I used zucchini slices in place of the lasagna noodles.  Just make the meat sauce the same as always, but put slices of raw zucchini in place of the noodles.  It was delish. Everyone really loved it. It was super easy!    Well, bummer, I forgot to even post this entry.  Sorry.  

 Here I am back with a few updates and random observations. Yesterday we went to Springfield for Ellen's t1d checkup.  It went well.  Then we went to a couple/three places in Springfield. Gary parked in one place and then Ellen and I went our separate ways.  Ellen went to a thrift store; Uptown Cheapskate.  It was OK, but their prices were a bit too "uptown" for second hand clothing.  Ellen says she likes Plato's Closet better.  To me they are both much of a muchness, but Uptown Cheapskate was super spendy.   While Ellen was in Uptown, I went to Hobby Lobby, because I needed doll hair.  Haha...  Walmart has yarn, but just not the colors or types I need.  I love going to Hobby Lobby and just looking down their yarn aisles.  In fact I have only been through about 1/3 of the store because I really have no interest in looking at the other part of the store.  Usually we are in a bit of a hurry anyway.  So I enjoy the yarn: Yummy! That it was all on sale was a great bonus!

 The daffodils are really blooming now.  This is much earlier than usual, it has been so unseasonably warm.  I love these double flower ones.  I transplanted them from the old homestead on the back ridge over to here.  Daffodils are not native to the US, so I often think of who would have planted them over there on the old homestead.  Was in the sisters who last lived there...up until 1968, or was it the original Howard clan who homesteaded the place?  We shall never know...not in this world anyway.   Yesterday I got 3 bags of cow manure/compost and started working on my iris beds; combing the dead leaves and trash out of them.  Here in the bed closest to the house is this lovely flower.  I forget what it's called at the moment.  In any case it was one that was given to me when my mom died a couple years ago.  She would have loved it; she loved all flowers.   So far none of my irises have started to shoot up a bloom stalk, but they are usually a few weeks behind the daffodils.  Eve

 So this photo is apropos of nothing really, just something to stick in here.  The only thing it really has to do with anything is that I see the sun setting behind this tree most every evening while I am walking.   During the six years I cared for my mom I really neglected my health and, as a result, gained a deal of weight.  The only exercise I really got was dairy chores, and they were not significant enough to do much practical good.  Unless you count tossing random buckets of grain into feed bunks and wrestling the occasional new calf to get a bottle into it.  But there wasn't much consistent effective exercise going on.   I have blogged on here about exercise before, and maybe that humorous entry is one of the ones I listed to the side.  But here is my practical entry on the subject.  I have found it difficult to get consistent exercise, even with gardening, due to random reasons...mostly excuses.  But the majority of the property here is dedicated to livestock and is, in sea

 This little fellow wouldn't cooperate with me for a good photo, but he is the first of our calves to go to a new home.  Gary registered all of our pure bred Angus calves.  This one is going to a place near Elkland, MO to a guy who is raising him to breed his little herd of Angus.   We have two Angus/Holstein cross calves; both heifers I think...one might be a bull, I am not sure.  We are not sure what we are going to do with them, but they will be privately sold.  As in; we will not take them to the sale barn.  Gary listed the calves as for sale on Craig's List yesterday morning and got a call just an hour or two later.  There is also a different guy who was interested in buying all of the registered bulls as he raises and sells them himself.  But he wasn't going to come look about them until the end of the week.  I'm kind of glad the guy got this first bull yesterday.  I like to know they are going straight to their new permanent home from here.  I've not let myse

 Sometimes I go through my camera pictures on this phone and wonder; What in the world was I trying to get a photo of with this picture?  Usually I have to think a bit, but then I figure it out. I took this picture above when I was out walking in the fenced in garden.  This weed is the first to bloom in Spring, so the bees just flock to it.  I took this because somewhere in there is a honey bee and I was so pleased to see her flying around collecting pollen.   Just last week Gary was up cleaning out around the old Homestead house on the back ridge with the bulldozer.  He pushed an old dead tree over and discovered it was a honey bee tree.  He was heartbroken that he'd done that to them.  I told him that they would find a new place and recover.  The queen would find a new dead tree and they'd make a new hive.  I have heard that they will even transfer all of the honey over to it.  Those old dead trees can't stand there forever and must eventually fall apart on the bees anywa

 Yesterday Gary had me come out and help him at the new corral.  We set up the new corral a few months ago and now he has added a squeeze chute on to it for the purpose of sorting, vaccinating and what not.  Gary attached a scale to the chute to weigh them as well.  He wanted me to help him set up and calibrate the scale.   It wasn't hard, so it didn't take long.  Then he wanted to test it, so he got some feed and tolled the herd up to the corral.  Most of the calves wouldn't go in...that would be this group here that you see.  A couple of them did though, and we got them in the chute and weighed.  Calf #286 weighed 575 pounds, and calf #284 weighed 560 pounds. Both of those are the calves from the Angus/Holstein cross cows.  They are not registered.  The other calves have been registered with the Angus association. I think they are all so stinking cute!

  After 3 months of dinkering around I finally have a certificate to be a substitute teacher in Missouri.  It is, of course, my own fault it took so long.  I really ought to have called in to the main admin office and asked about the whole application process from the get go; but doing things in a logical manner has never been my M.O.; hence my rather disorganized life.  But, I have persevered and conquered; at least to this point. In December I talked over with Gary about my becoming a substitute teacher in our county here.  Gary was for it, so I did what the random FB posts say to do; went onto the school's website and clicked the link to apply for a job.  Then I waited maybe 3 weeks to be contacted.   *crickets* So I started asking around, asked a friend at the admin office, where I should have started in the first place.  She advised that they never did get my online application.  So I got a paper packet application from her and learned from her coworker who handles such that I

 The past 2 or 3 Saturday mornings a few people from church have been meeting at the church and going running.  Today 2 walkers joined the group; that would be me and my neighbor.  Another of the runners joined us in walking.  A---  took this photo of the runners with her phone, as she was in the center of the road.   The runners went 2 miles down the road and then back for a total of 4 miles, we walkers just went one mile back and forth for a total of 2 miles.  It was fun.  But I really need new shoes.  I just wore my old broken down shoes and now my feet hurt.   It took us walkers a bit over 40 minutes to do our two miles.  The road is pretty rolling, as you can see.  You don't really notice it that much when you are driving, but when you are on foot it's a bit of a pull up and down them all. After 3 days or so of rain and clouds it was nice and sunny today; fairly crisp actually.  It was in the upper 30s at 8 AM when we met.  But we were pretty well warmed up by the time we

 There really isn't any new news here with us; nothing exciting anyway. This coming weekend is the prom at the high school, so Ellen is gearing up for that. She also is working on a FBLA project, as well as several other projects for her classes.  Last month she'd had to do a research project for her government class. This week she got the results; an 89/90.  So she was pretty pleased about that.  She is still struggling in her math class, the trig section, but as far as I am concerned compared to me in high school she is a math genius. Gary has been busy delivering gravel, fixing wells and doing random jobs here.  He has been dozing and cleaning up around the old homestead place on the back ridge.  He's going to fix the fences up there and let the beef herd down into the bottoms to graze....eventually.  It's going to take a while to get the fences fixed and everything cleared off.  Our first beef calves are getting really big.  They are 4 or 5 months old now.  But one

 As a general rule on here I try not to complain much, but for a lack of anything interesting to post today and the desire to post something current instead of memories, here goes: The past year or so we seem to have had a plethora of stray cats roaming around and it is annoying.  We have a cat; Smudge, of whom you have seen many photos if you have followed this blog for very long.  My sister-in-law up the road from us has a cat; Princess.  They both tend to keep to their own territory and, as of late, have preferred to stay in the house to avoid the feline drama outside. However up the road, maybe 1/4 of a mile, our neighbor has a literal herd of cats, none of which he fixes, and all of which he leaves outside in his sheds.  They are for the most part orange, so when we see an orange one down here we know to whom it belongs.  He has had this herd of cats for several years, and their numbers have fluctuated from the starting number of 3-4 up to 15 or so, give or take a kitten or two. 

 Here is an old photo of my Grandmother Davis standing out in her garden.  I have no idea of the date of this, except that it was probably early to mid 60s, before 1966 anyway.  I believe it was in 1967 when she had her right arm removed due to bone cancer (?).  I was born in July of 68, so her surgery could have been in early 68, I am not sure of the dates.  At any rate, I was just about a year old when she passed.  But my mom always said that she believed Grandmother Davis was partly the reason I turned out left-handed; when she held me in her lap she always used her left hand to move my left hand around, due to her having lost her right arm.   She was a character, from what I gather from my mother's stories of her.  A devout Christian lady, but still with her quirks and foibles, as we all have.   She loved her garden; both vegetables and flowers.  I believe her main love was flowers.  She had various blooming bushes growing all over the 5 acres they owned there in CA, as well as

 Lawrence (on the left) and Riley Davis.   I don't know if I have shared this photo on my blog before or not.  My father, Lawrence, was a lumberjack in his younger years in Northern California, there in the coastal redwoods of Humboldt County...he probably worked up in the mountains of the neighboring counties as well, but I am not for sure of that.   Perhaps I have shared stories of his before on here.  I am sure I have shared some on Facebook.  I wish I could hear him tell them again.  I don't remember him telling much about Riley working with him felling trees.  Riley was a sea man.  He and his second wife owned a ship and spent many years sailing up and down the East and South coasts of the USA. He had plenty of tales too.  I remember Shirley, his second wife, telling how she was swimming in a bay in Louisiana, or maybe it was Florida, and a gator was in there with her and Riley started yelling at her to swim faster.  My memory of her telling that is very vague, so I am not

 This is my favorite picture of Ellen.  This is in fact from a professional photo shoot I had done of her when she was 6 months old.  The only professional photo shoot we ever had done.   When we brought her home from the hospital, she was the sweetest baby.  From the beginning she would sleep well, almost through the night.  I would have to wake her up to feed her.  But I must have had some sort of mild postpartum depression because I remember sitting on the sofa holding her and just sobbing because I was worried I wouldn't be able to love her as much as I should.  This seems silly now because of course I love my daughter with all of my heart, of course.  I can't imagine life without her.  She is my sunshine and I love that we laugh together and understand one another so well. I am so proud of her, of who she has become, of her goals in life; that she loves the Lord and that she knows what she wants to do in life.  I pray every day that she overcomes all of her fears and self-