Dairy Daze...and Now Beyond

 According to what everyone else around us has been doing we are a bit late in getting anything out into the garden.  Many, if not most, local gardeners have had lettuce, onions and other cool weather things planted for a few weeks.  Gary's Aunt Kathy has had lettuce growing in a little planter in her front yard for a month or more.  We usually wait 'til the end of March to get going.  So all day yesterday was dedicated to gardening. I got the weed eater out and sheered off the garden beds here by the house.  Then I got out Little Brother, my rototiller, and tilled them up.  Later in the evening I planted every onion slip and bulb I'd bought in the second garden bed.  I am going to head to Greasy Creek this morning and get more. Gary was feeling much better yesterday; he's on the recovery end of this bout with COVID, so he did quite a bit of stuff, too.  He got the mower going, and mowed the lawn where it's been getting shaggy.  He spr...

 Yep,  Gary got COVID again.  For this reason I haven't been on here blogging.  The only time I blog is when I am on the laptop here, and when he is sick this tends to become his domain.  I am quite, quite sure I am going to come down with the beast here in a few days.  This time he had like over a week of mild congestion leading up to it, and that is what I have had the past couple of days.  I am doing everything I can think of to keep Ellen from catching it here at the end of the school year.  I follow Gary around sanitizing everything he has touched or sneezed on; same for myself.  Every door knob, drawer handle, faucet handle, counter food container, door jams...whatever.  I have stayed "quarantined" more or less, in the bedroom.  Last time I caught COVID that seemed to work; no one else caught it.   In any case, in the past few days Gary has sold off all but two of the calves.  One has a sore foot and the other o...

 Last week was busy.  Seems we ran from here to there and back again.   Here are a few pictures from last week: This weekend is the Purim.  Last Sunday I taught my chidlers (you would have had to have read The Big Friendly Giant to catch that reference to calling children "chidlers") the story of Esther.  It was a fairly abbreviated lesson, as I only have 30 minutes for the entire class, and we have to get in greetings and prayer time and general organization, but we hit all the high parts.   This week we are going to bake cookies.  The formal name for these are Hamantaschen.  That is the name the Jewish settlement in Germany gave to them.  And there is a whole history in itself with these cookies.  But in Israel they are called "Haman's Ears."   Since we only have 30 minutes I baked these up, but kept a few of the dough rounds for the kids to fill and then bake.  They take about 15 minutes to bake. This should b...

  This was a lasagna I made last week.  I used zucchini slices in place of the lasagna noodles.  Just make the meat sauce the same as always, but put slices of raw zucchini in place of the noodles.  It was delish. Everyone really loved it. It was super easy!    Well, bummer, I forgot to even post this entry.  Sorry.  

 Here I am back with a few updates and random observations. Yesterday we went to Springfield for Ellen's t1d checkup.  It went well.  Then we went to a couple/three places in Springfield. Gary parked in one place and then Ellen and I went our separate ways.  Ellen went to a thrift store; Uptown Cheapskate.  It was OK, but their prices were a bit too "uptown" for second hand clothing.  Ellen says she likes Plato's Closet better.  To me they are both much of a muchness, but Uptown Cheapskate was super spendy.   While Ellen was in Uptown, I went to Hobby Lobby, because I needed doll hair.  Haha...  Walmart has yarn, but just not the colors or types I need.  I love going to Hobby Lobby and just looking down their yarn aisles.  In fact I have only been through about 1/3 of the store because I really have no interest in looking at the other part of the store.  Usually we are in a bit of a hurry anyway.  So I enjoy the ...

 The daffodils are really blooming now.  This is much earlier than usual, it has been so unseasonably warm.  I love these double flower ones.  I transplanted them from the old homestead on the back ridge over to here.  Daffodils are not native to the US, so I often think of who would have planted them over there on the old homestead.  Was in the sisters who last lived there...up until 1968, or was it the original Howard clan who homesteaded the place?  We shall never know...not in this world anyway.   Yesterday I got 3 bags of cow manure/compost and started working on my iris beds; combing the dead leaves and trash out of them.  Here in the bed closest to the house is this lovely flower.  I forget what it's called at the moment.  In any case it was one that was given to me when my mom died a couple years ago.  She would have loved it; she loved all flowers.   So far none of my irises have started to shoot up a bloom stalk,...

 So this photo is apropos of nothing really, just something to stick in here.  The only thing it really has to do with anything is that I see the sun setting behind this tree most every evening while I am walking.   During the six years I cared for my mom I really neglected my health and, as a result, gained a deal of weight.  The only exercise I really got was dairy chores, and they were not significant enough to do much practical good.  Unless you count tossing random buckets of grain into feed bunks and wrestling the occasional new calf to get a bottle into it.  But there wasn't much consistent effective exercise going on.   I have blogged on here about exercise before, and maybe that humorous entry is one of the ones I listed to the side.  But here is my practical entry on the subject.  I have found it difficult to get consistent exercise, even with gardening, due to random reasons...mostly excuses.  But the majority of the...