Dairy Daze...and Now Beyond

 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

 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 posted

 The past few days have flown right along.  I have been getting fall green beans and have fixed a few fresh, but I haven't canned any.  I just haven't had the time, or maybe I ought to say; I haven't made myself MAKE the time to can. I made cherry jam last week.  I forget if I talked about that here. Yesterday I cooked up 3 of the little pie pumpkins that I spent all spring and summer protecting from bugs. I baked them for about 50 minutes, but they were a bit crispy still.  So I chunked them up and steamed the chunks until they were quite soft.  Then I used an immersion blender to get them really smooth.  I lined my wire strainer with a clean hanky and let the puree drip for a couple of hours, stirring once or twice. Last Friday I went and met Janelle in person.  We've been pen pals for 40 years.  But that deserves its own blog entry. I substituted two days last week.  Once for half day at the grade school and one full day at the high school.  Both were great experienc