Dairy Daze...and Now Beyond

  Behold above my daughter’s earthworm interest. I don’t know why exactly but on occasion she likes to find them and hold them for a bit.  I can’t say anything against this. Back when I was a kid in California I used to keep them in glass jars. You know, I’d fill the jar with dirt, poke in a worm or two and make sure to keep it moist and topped with dead leaves and such. They’d live for weeks like that. But I’d usually dump them out after a while.  ******** Last year Ellen decided she wanted another ear piercing so she booked an appointment with Qui Qui, a very popular piercing artist in Springfield. He is usually booked solid several months out.  Anyway, as you can see she had an appointment this past Saturday to get her right conch pierced.  It’s the little green flower above. It’s still a bit sore today, the Tuesday after, but is much better. As for myself, I have not one piercing. I think earrings are pretty, and Ellen has a bunch of super cute ones, but I’v...

Ok. I will begin this by saying I readily own up to not being the most stellar housekeeper in the world. There always seems to be something more interesting to do than dust, vacuum, or mop, especially in the remote corners. The great outdoors and the garden call my name more loudly than the vacuum cleaner does. We live in the country so, yes, we fight mice, spiders and random bugs and dirt and whatnot that gets tracked in.. It happens. I have little room to criticize other people regarding their housekeeping skills. However this story takes housekeeping, or lack thereof, into realms I cannot stomach.  March 15th our long time tenant passed away. He’d lived in our little rental house for about 9 years. He was a very nice guy and always paid on time, always had a joke. We rented it strictly to him. But his daughter would bounce from living with her mother, his ex girlfriend, to living with him… at least for the first couple of years he was there. Then the last 5 or 6 years, or longer...

 Happy Resurrection Day!  It’s a wonderful wet Sunday morning. We’ve got a series of storms going over today. One woke us up at shortly after 5 AM this morning. It didn’t last too long, but made a bit of a racket going over. It is supposed to rain off and on all day. My mother-in-law always used to say that if it rained on Easter Sunday it would rain for the next seven Sundays.  We shall see… *********** Lasts day Ellen went to her last FBLA(Future Business Leaders of America) state competition in Springfield. They stayed in a motel down there. Her team placed 6th and was the only team from Buffalo to place in the top ten .  The teacher, Mrs Rice, is debating whether or not they can go to the Nationals in Anaheim CA in June.   Here is a series of pictures Ellen shared with me from last weekend. This is when the group of them made their FBLA bears.  It is actually a red panda.  The kids were able to earn vouchers for one reason or another then got to go...

Frankly I am not as enthused about gardening this year as I usually am. I am hoping my enthusiasm will grow as the weather warms.  I have a row of onion slips planted out in the big fenced garden.  In the closest garden bed by the house I’ve got onion bulbs, two kinds of radishes and some lettuce planted. Today I got another bunch of onion slips and beet and okra seed. Oh, and some Top Crop green bean seeds.  It has the potential yet to freeze, so I haven’t bought anything in the way of flowers or other plants to set out yet.   Last week I went to visit a friend and ended up getting some iris bulbs from her. I did set those out. They won’t bloom til next year, or even later, but they will be fun to watch bloom and see what colors I got.  Here’s a daffodil bloom from last month because I don’t really have any other interesting garden pics to share; dirt with green onion stems poking up aren’t really thrilling, I guess. Although I am pleased that they all seem to ...

 This kitten is liable to be the end of my very last nerve.  A couple of nights ago I had just gone to bed and was at that blessed brief moment before unconsciousness sweeps you away into the land of Nod, when I heard this dreadful chewing sound.  I knew straight off that it was the kitten, but what in the world?  I fumbled for the flashlight and went to inspect the living room.  Not a cat in sight.  So I crawled back in bed, only to hear it again almost immediately. Further inspection showed this:   Chica had crawled completely inside this box Ellen had abandoned and was chewing on the inner flaps. She lives to chew on cardboard. I deliberately keep one out for her to play with and chew on, because it saves the furniture. But 10:30 at night isn’t the best time to sound like a rat on steroids, no matter if you are a cute teething kitten. Ha!  

To continue my tree felling story: The first one came down, but only after a chain broke.  To get the first one down Gary sat a ladder against it, climbed up and put a chain on it, then attached lengths of heavy chain out 60 ft or more and attached it to the dozer. Then he sawed notches on the tree; a wedge from the front and a straight cut partway across the back.  His words: “Getting the cuts in the right place is the trick.” The first tree above…well, he didn’t get the back cut through far enough, so when he went to pull it the chain broke. So he cut a bit further, found another chain and down it came.  The second one was a bit trickier; he decided to just push it over with the dozer instead of using chains on it.  So below you can see the dozer bucket is against it, putting a bit of pressure on it to get it to fall away from the building   You can see him up there making the cuts. Take note of the positions of the barn, tree and dozer.  This time he got...

 It has been a busy and distracting past few days, so sorry there had been radio silence on my blog. And I had been doing so well for the past year or so.  Well. I have a tale to tell. Read on… For the part 3 or 4 years or so our trees have been dying off, out in the fields and around the house and outbuildings.  Around the former milk barn we had a couple of trees die. Well, one died a couple of years ago and one was in the process.  This one was the worst one Then there was this one right at the front corner.  I didn’t get a close up of it, but it’s at the corner of the building on the left   And now I have to get ready for church so I will finish this later. I guess it’s been a couple three weeks since I blogged, another day won’t make much difference.