Dairy Daze...and Now Beyond

 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 project we jus

 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 of a couple different styles o

 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 samples from all of our hay fi

 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.  But there was this guy across the river from

 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 closer to the house.   Yi

 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 filled in around the kennel to