Dairy Daze...and Now Beyond

 The past 3 weeks or so when I have taken Bella for an evening walk out in the West pasture up here on the ridge, she has found an armadillo that seems to have taken up residence in a series of abandoned groundhog dens over by the former milk barn. In this pic he has retreated from her to a place of relative security between two large tires on a truck that has been parked out there for a few years.  Groundhogs have excavated a den under there.  I've no clue why Gary has that mall there.  I need to snag it and bring it back to the house. Bella is by breed a herding dog, so it is in little danger of being killed or injured by her.  It is rather funny because when she comes across it out in the field she will freeze, duck her head, and creep toward it.  Armadillos have poor vision and are always preoccupied with foraging so you can usually get quite close to them, especially if they are in the weeds.  So sometimes Bella will hover over it for a few second...

 This fall I haven't taken many long walks in the trees as I would have liked, and by now the colors are past their peak.  But I have taken a few pics this past week. This one was taken close to sunset here on the place looking north toward the road. I took these yesterday morning on a walk with Bella down along Four Mile Creek.  With this drought the creek bed is bone dry. But the rising sun through the fall leaves made for a pretty sight. This set of trees is unique.  At certain spots where the winds rubs them together and they have formed scarred spots where they seem to be growing together as they heal.   I couldn't resist getting pics of the sun between them.   To end with, here's another sunset shot.  It looked like everything had been doused in light that had shone through a bottle of golden honey.  

  So. Today I don't really have any new photos to share but here's a picture of Ellen and her friend at a wedding a few weeks ago. This was a wedding of one of the boys from church that they sort of grew up with.  It was a sweet ceremony; his grandpa performed it.   ********* In other news, I survived my first half day subbing gig as an "actual" teacher in a 3rd grade class.  The kids behaved pretty much as I'd expected; unruly at first, but fortunately for me, there was an IT tech working on their Chromebook charging station, and she reamed them out for me.  After that we did fairly well.  There are paraprofessionals and others coming and going all day, so I was never really alone with them.   The great thing, too, is that they had their "special" class, music, in the morning from 9:55-10:45, so I was able to be alone in the classroom.  I walked them out to the trailer, then went back and got them at the appropriate time.  Then the...

The number of days between blog posts are lengthening.  Ugh.  I've been pretty consistent all year, now things are getting busier. My vendor events at an antique mall this past Saturday wasn't a stellar sell out.  But I made my booth rent back well enough.  On Nov 9th I'm signed up for a table at the Long Lane Lions Club Christmas Bazaar.  I think there will be a great deal more customers come through.  I hope they will want stuffed octopus toys...teddies and what not. ****** Today I subbed for the first time at the middle school.  I just followed a 7th grader around.  He was fairly well able to do for himself, at a lower level, he just needed a bit of help staying on track. ****** Last week was the third Thursday of the month, which means I attended my writers club meeting.  I love them all, they I spire me to keep writing.  We were to write a something spooky to share.  I began a story which I didn't finish.  But I wrote a po...

That title sounds like a potential work of fiction, with a bit of alteration.  Night before last we had our first frost, a pretty heavy one.  The rose was so pretty with the frost on it; a rather bittersweet sight.  This time of year the bugs are dormant, so it was able to bloom very prettily, and you can see another bud there in the background. But I guess that one isn't going to get a chance to bloom. At the moment, 6:30 AM, it is 34 degrees out, and might be a bit frosty, but at least it's not a hard freeze.   I'd brought in everything that needed brought in; the sweet potatoes, onions, spaghetti squash and all of the pumpkins, decorative and otherwise.  I need to get on top of it and get the pie pumpkins baked down and in the freezer.  I just haven't had the time.  Seems like every week there is another project or two or three to get done.   Today I am going to go help Gary with a well job because the guy who usually helps him, Doug, is p...

 You know what I mean.  Every day is a day, of course, but sometimes days come along that are DAYS.   Yesterday was one of THOSE. (Long Story Warning) It all began with the dreaded question a spouse with A PLAN asks of the other: Have you got a minute? Gary asked me a version of that day before yesterday: "Have you got some time tomorrow?  It'll only take about an hour." Hahaha... Ha has been working on his corral in the West pasture, making it more sturdy for the handling of cattle, like when we have to vaccinate or weigh or whatever. He needed to set the head gate in concrete so they can't knock it around when being run through it. He had the hole dug and the head gate placed in it, he just needed help with the concrete work. Gary's had this concrete mixer he got off of the neighbor decades ago, like back in the 70s.  He has used it several times for different bigger projects in the past 20 years of our marriage.  If it's just a small concrete projec...

 So somehow I took leave of my senses and signed up for 3 vendor events in 3 months.  This unexpectedly has created a bit of a panic for me after the first one.  I've had to go into frantic knitting mode.  Haha As a general rule I do my loom knitting in the evenings after the day's chores are done, usually an hour or so before bedtime.  It keeps my hands busy and I enjoy creating cute, or functional, things for my own enjoyment.   In the past few years I have done mostly hats, dish cloths and scrubbies.  I'd go to vendor events and sell enough of them to pay for the booth space and maybe make a small amount of pocket change to boot. This didn't bother me because I just enjoy the whole vendor events atmosphere; the hustle and bustle and yakking with the public. It's fun to people watch and just chat with random folks who stop by.   Then in the past year or two I've started making more stuffed dolls and animals.   I'd had a bunch...

 An odd title, I know.  Not sure how else to put it. Here is a photo I took Wednesday morning when I was helping Gary with a load of hay.  He had to take both the truck and hay trailer and his tractor to a different field, a few miles apart to get the hay from that second field.  So I drove the truck with the trailer whilst he brought the tractor...really he uses the old backhoe with a hay spike on it. This is along one of the gravel back roads.  You can see how dry it has been here by the amount of dust coating the trees and plants alongside the road.  Gary says this dust is basically lime dust that people pay good money for to put on their hay fields as treatment. Over the years he has been pleased that on this particular field this is how we get our lime, rather than having to pay for it to be spread by machine. However, in the past few years he'd noticed that we weren't getting the same good quality of hay.  So this past Spring he took in soil samp...

 We took Sunny, our little RV, on an overnight stay to Bennett Spring the last weekend of September.  Let's see...I think it was Friday evening Sept 27 th, maybe?  Anyway, that Saturday was Ladies Fish Free day.   We got a great spot in the camping area up on the hill.  This was our view on the east, where we caught the sunrise.  I think that's my favorite part of camping; a leisurely morning get up.  I also like walking around to see the other camping outfits.  Some people get all jiggy with their camp site setups; flags and signs and lights.  Some of them have campfires going continuously.  Usually there are scads of pets and kids, but that wasn't true this time. Anyway, we caught a fish each...except Ellen.  She left early for a date with a guy in her psychology class. That went well.  But this is a rabbit trail that I could go off on for another paragraph or two. The fish just weren't striking much at any bait we tried...

 It has been a while since I have mentioned our happy beef herd. The past couple of months cows have been dropping their second calves.  Today Gary and I moved them from one field to another.  It was like old dairy times again.  I went down and opened a gate that I would open every morning of this world for seventeen years...unless I was on vacation. I don't miss it.  But it did remind me that I'd catch some spectacular sunrises and clouds. Gary drove the truck with the trailer full of all of the calves into the field.  Then we went back up the road and got the cows. Well, Gary did his "comeoncomeoncomeon" holler at them and they followed behind his four wheeler up along the pasture, through the gates and into to other field. There they go: We'd thought we had the whole herd right behind him.  But then we heard a deep bawl and here came the bull.  Lazy outfit, almost got left behind.  Haha... Now Bella and I can go for walks in the fields clo...

 I guess that is a crude way to title a blog post, but it is nonetheless accurate.  Due to Hurricane Helene's rampage through various states on the Eastern seaboard last weekend, thousands, if not millions, of people are grieving catastrophic losses beyond what I've ever been through in my life. I'm not belittling that at all here.  My heart and prayers are with them.  But I'm also struggling with my own very minor loss here. After a week of agonizing over it, I decided that I had to return Hope the Hound to her previous owners.  I just can't handle two dogs at once and give them what they need.  Plus, however sweet of a girl Hope is, she also has a very, very bad habit of escaping.  She is not content to stay kenneled.  Even after a long walk and lots of attention she wants out to roam the neighborhood.  She was damaging herself, her paws from digging the rocky ground for one thing, in trying to get out.  Then when I had all the holes f...

 Usually I try to have a photo with every post, but I'll just have to do without this time, as I can't very well take pics in a classroom. So far this year I have had minimal luck with substituting, partly my own fault, partly someone else's fault.  Haha .. To explain a bit first: I have an app on my cell phone called "Frontline" to which I have been assigned a log in for our local school.  This app presents to me sub job openings that teachers or paraprofessionals have posted on it.  I am not sure if the app presents these job openings to the pool of subs on a seniority basis or not. It sends me text alerts when a job becomes available for me.  I go in and check what and where the job is and can accept or reject at my own sweet will.   A couple of weeks ago a job called "health services director," or something similar, popped up for the grade school.  I know that there are 2 nurses at the grade school so I thought, "well, they have obviously post...