Dairy Daze...and Now Beyond

 We finally had our first strong frost last night.  The frost was on the peppers. It sure looked pretty this morning, but by this evening of course the plants are all blackened. I’ll have to get out there and clean it all out.  It’s small loss this year. I don’t know whether it was the long drought this summer, along with the prolonged super high temps, stunted the plants, or what happened, but we only got a very few full-sized peppers in mid-spring. Since then all that the plants would produce were these stunted, puny peppers. It was so aggravating because usually every fall we have tons and tons of pretty peppers. Not this year. Ugh.  I put a 5-gallon bucket over a zinnia that is just now blooming. It came up volunteer from seed from one this summer. I’m going to try and keep it going for as long as I can. Poor little feller. There were a bunch more volunteer zinnias that were killed, but I saved two. 

Today I set up at a local vendor event. It was not well attended as far as customers so I didn’t even recoup my set up fee. But it was nice to sit and chit chat with the other vendors. It was like a community catch-up. I am going to try and get a booth at the local Y next month. They are actually in town so they will very likely have lots more customers. That is on my to-do list for Monday.  And that’s all for today.  Hope everyone is having a great weekend    

How time flies.  We always say that; how time flies. But seems like when we are in the thick of things time seems to go so slowly.  There was a point where I was for sure Ellen would never get potty trained.  Now Ellen will soon be 20. She’s a sophomore in university and doing so well!   There was a point when I thought I’d be toting grain to cows and bottle feeding calves at 5 in the morning for the rest of my life. Now it’s been 5 years since we retired the dairy.  There was a point in my younger years, in fact up until just 3-4 years ago where I was aghast at the thought of teaching as a profession. Now I’m subbing with the local school district.  There was even a point when I was in my 30s that I was quite sure I’d never get married. And time as a single person seemed to drag on.  Now I’ve been married TWENTY TWO years!  It doesn’t seem possible! I am so thankful for my husband and family   As I grow older, I have learned to cherish every...

 I already missed a day. Haha….  That’s what comes from trying to post on multiple different devices.  Oh well. Yesterday wasn’t productive day. I mean, I did the things that needed done, but nothing more nor less.  The end of September I began a sourdough starter and have been making crackers from the discard. I think I have been eating too many of them and have been overloading my histamine bucket. I can tell because I get tinnitus, which I have had a mild case of the past two days, plus last night when I went to bed I could feel my pulse racing a bit and even after a long day I felt really wired.  So for today I started off with ginger tea, coffee has high histamine levels, and am going to avoid the sourdough crackers. I do feel a bit better. At least my ears aren’t buzzing this morning.  Tomorrow I am subbing at the high school in the English/drama class. Ellen works with this teacher at a local float company, so hopefully it will go well.  And tha...

 On occasion I have to help Gary with my personal Kryptonite. Haha! Here we are a few days ago vaxxing our newest calves against blackleg.  Blackleg in cattle is a particularly nasty bacterial infection that they get that almost inevitably leads to death. The symptoms are pretty much unnoticeable until it’s too late. I’ll spare you the details.  This particular fellow above almost slipped out of the new head gate Gary bought off of a guy for $15. Haha. There was a reason the guy sold it for so cheap. But Gary always has a way to fix things. Tinkering with equipment is his forte.  On another note, I no longer even attempt to touch the cows and calves, even though it’s very tempting to reach out and pet them. I end up with contact hives. I always wear a mask too. The LDN helps with my fume reactions, but I don’t like to take chances. 

 It has been since May 2025 that I was diagnosed with AGS, I will trust to your perspicacity to do that math on that one.  Well, over a year, nearly a year and a half, I guess.  What an up and down journey this has been.  If you go back to my blog entry on June 22 of this year, it will describe some of my AGS journey as far as the medical happenings this year.  As a follow up I will add that since I have eliminated rosemary extract exposure I have done fairly well.  I am still quite quite sure I have MCAS, mast cell activation syndrome, and/or histamine intolerance due to several different symptoms; including the fume reactions. But the reactions are so different between mammal exposure and high histamine exposure.  Last month I had an accidental exposure to some sort of mammal because after trying a new brand of supposedly ground chicken, which in texture behaved suspiciously like ground turkey, I developed the heart palpitations and tachycardia that ...