Hello, I'm Mary, book 6

Mary · Hello, I'm Mary, book 6

10 pages was enough, especially for those readers with dial up internet, so I started a new book. 99 entries was plenty. I don't know if these are long chapters or small books. What I do know is that I talk a lot!

Yesterday was a full day down the road at the neighbor's corrals. We worked with cattle all day, first sorting the cows and calves into different corrals, then putting the cows through a chute to receive 3 vaccinations. The owner's wife kept the syringes loaded, I opened and closed gates, prodded stubborn critters to go into the chute, kept a record of numbers and any problems we saw, For instance, 2 of the cows have developed very large udders, which get larger as they get older. Calves want to reach up, not down, to get hold of the teats, so a cow with a big udder full of milk can have a starving calf, as unlikely as that may seem. An overly large udder can also be a hazard in brushy country, being injured as the cow goes over logs or through a thicket. Those two cows might have a problem next year or the year after, so we'll keep an eye on them. I think they are sisters from a cow that had a worse udder than that when she finally was sold.

After lunch we put all the calves through a smaller chute and they all got a brand and whatever else they needed. Most needed to be dehorned, the males were castrated, those without an ear tag got one, and they went back to a holding area. When we turned the cows and calves back together we tried to match the newly tagged ones with their mothers, but that will have to be done another time, as there were just too many. The newly tagged ones got red tags with letters instead of numbers. The owner will watch through binoculars whenever he sees a red tagged calf nursing, and then will match that tag letter with the number tag on the cow. They got missed because he was too busy to catch them when they were too young to run from him, or because the cow was too protective to risk handling her calf.

Today I repotted my tomato plants from cell packs that hold 6 plants where they were planted as seeds, into 4 inch pots. They are so little they really look tiny, but I needed to get that done before we leave for 4 days on Thursday. My neighbor who borrows greenhouse space will be watering mine along with his, so I didn't want any of them to dry out in case he skipped a day. His plants are already in 4 inch pots. I also potted some geraniums that I rooted in water on the windowsill. They were pieces that were being trimmed off and thrown away at a nursery, so I rescued them from the trash. Nothing to loose with a situation like that. The colors will be a surprise.

My garden rows need watering again. I walk along them and water with a hose and hand sprinkler. It takes extra time but then I can look closely to see what is coming up and pull any weeds I see. I try not to water between the rows because I would rather not have the weeds sprouting so soon. There are already plenty of weeds in my flower beds.

We are still having freezing nights quite often, but days have been sunny. The wind is quite strong again today so I will need a jacket and a hat when I go to water.

The neighbor's sheep have been grazing in our big pasture for 3 or 4 days now. They go home at night to keep them safer from the coyotes who seem to have a runway though our pasture. Every year he looses both lambs and ewes to coyotes, so this takes a little time every morning and evening, but so far there have been no losses. I don't have a recent update on the wolf problem, but I did read last week that they had killed a calf not far from where they attacked the sheep. I hope they don't come in this direction.

Mary

Life really took a radical turn last Monday, April 27, when my hubby had chest pain and we drove to the emergency room, just to check in case it was something more serious than heartburn. In just a few minutes they confirmed that he was having a heart attack. I called our son and daughter in law who came to the ER with the pastor and another couple from church to pray with us before the Life Flight heilocopter took hubby to Boise, Idaho 150 miles away. The local hospital sends their serious cases to St Alphonsus Regional Medical Center.

Our son drove me to the hospital and we spent the rest of the night sitting in hubby's room. The next day, Tuesday, our daughter in law drove down, and stayed most of the day. We visited and watched hubby's heart rate and blood pressure on the monitor. The pastor and an evangelist who was holding special meetings at the church came to visit and pray. Son and daughter in law then went home and I spent the night at a motel next to the hospital. It's a Rodeway Inn, and they give a special rate if you have somebody in the hospital. So, the $93 room was $60. By the time I had a nice long hot shower and put my head on the pillow I'd been awake for about 37 hours.

Wednesday I was back at the hospital by 6am. At 8am the cardiologist performed an angiogram to locate and fix the problem area. Dye was injected into the heart via a tube inserted through an artery in his groin and it showed where the problem was, but the tube couldn't navigate the corners his artery makes to get to that place, so they had to withdraw without repairing anything. They did get a good look at how his heart was functioning and saw no other problems. The damaged area is fairly small. By mid day hubby was doing well, except for some bleeding from the incision which they said was fairly normal because of the medications in his system, and his condition was stabilized except for his blood pressure bouncing around, so at mid day I left and drove home to take care of things that needed to be done, and to get some paperwork to take back with me the following day.

When I started the car I noticed a dashboard light was on, telling me that I had a low tire. I drove to the dealership in Baker City, where we had purchased the car, and they adjusted the air pressure. Soon I was on my way again, drove to Boise without incident, and parked in the hospital parking lot where I could see the main door so that the car would be easy to find.

Hubby's bleeding had stopped early Wednesday evening, then started again when they got him out of bed on Thurdsay morning, so he needed to stay another day with a pressure device on the wound. He said that was more painful than the heart attack itself. The problem was that clot buster they gave at our hospital, before he was transported to Boise. It stays in the system for 72 hours to prevent additional heart attacks.

I stayed another night at the nearby motel, and at about noon on Friday, hubby was released to come home. When the nurse got him to the main lobby in his chariot (wheelchair, you know, hospital regulations), I went to get the car and discovered a flat tire. Oh great timing! But I figured the Lord was still in charge, so went back to the lobby and they called a security person to come with a tank of compressed air. A few minutes later we were on our way to a tire store a few blocks from the hospital, where the tire was removed, had a nail extracted from it, was patched, and put back on the car. I had asked that hubby be able to stay seated in the car because he had just been discharged from the hospital, so I guess that is why we weren't charged for the repair.

Prescriptions had been phoned ahead to our local pharmacy, so we made a quick stop to pick them up, then it was on to the bank to make a deposit at the drive through window, and on to home. Hubby was tired when we arrived, but a nap in his recliner and a light meal made him feel better. The best thing was to be able to take a shower!

Now hubby has had 2 nights of good sleep at home, and he walks around in the house between light meals and naps in his comfy recliner. Yesterday, between rain showers we went outside for a 10 minute stroll in our driveway and around the parking area, all level. He enjoyed breathing fresh air and listening to the birds singing. Today he seems stronger than yesterday, so as far as we can tell, he is making good progress.

I've been reading on the AHA website and others to find good recipes and tips for this new low fat, low salt diet. Today I cooked pinto beans and seasoned them with onion, garlic, and canned tomatoes. They were under salted, so hubby added some hot seasoning to his bowl. We had them with brown rice. The only thing missing was the sausage or ham I usually cook with them for flavor, so today we just had a different flavor. We'll get used to it, and he will loose weight. I might too.

CajuninKy

I can help you with the beans. This is how I do mine and they are delicious. You could never tell they were virtually fat free.

1/2 lb dry beans of your choice
1med onion quartered
minced garlic to taste
1/8 cup (or to taste) sweet green pepper
2 cans 97% FF chicken broth
1 can water

Cook in a crock pot on high until beans are done. I then mash mine with the potato masher because we like our broth to be hearty and thick.

*you could add Mrs Dash or some hot seasoning if you like.

So glad to hear your DH is doing so well.

Mary

Cajun, thanks for the recipe. I'll have to give it a try soon.

My life seems to center around this new diet for now, until it becomes second nature to cook this way.

It's been a few days since I was able to check in here. We had family here for the weekend. Saturday they mowed the yard, hauled the clippings down to the garden so I could use them along my vegie rows, weeded flower beds and hauled away the weeds, and when our son came out from town we put the shade cover on the greenhouse. It's a job that normally takes at least 2 people, but there was repair needed to the rail that holds it up off the peak of the roof, so I hoisted our son up there in the tractor bucket and he sat astride of the roof while he fixed it. We also devised a simpler and quicker way to tie the edges down. That improvement will make it easier to take off this fall and easier to put on again next spring. Or so it appears.

Saturday evening we ate grilled salmon, green salad, steamed spinach and baked potatoes. Sunday morning we were treated to crepes made with fat free egg substitute, then covered with no fat cottage cheese and strawberries. I rolled mine up to make a cheese blintz, do you think they knew it was my favorite breakfast? Oh yummy! Our granddaughters have learned to cook from their mother, and the 4 of them prepared the whole breakfast for 8 of us!

This morning hubby's breakfast was brown rice with his egg substitute, topped with very thin slices of fat free cheese. I sprinkled some Italian seasoning on it as it cooked, but that might have been better if I had put the seasoning in the eggs and let it stand a while to bring out more flavor. Tomorrow he gets oatmeal with a few sunflower seeds, some brown flax seeds and dried cranberries on it.

For Mother's day I recieved the American Heart Association Cookbook, 7th edition, copyright 2004. What a gift! It will be a big help. I've already learned a lot from it, including how to make blooming onions which I will try soon.

CajuninKy

I love blooming onions! Sounds like you have had a busy few days. Rest up if you can.

God's Warrior

Don't those have to be cooked in deep fat? What do you use to cook them? We use olive oil for our frying. Do you think that would work?

Mary

This one is sliced into the classic blooming onion shape, boiled for a few minutes, turned upside down and boiled for a few more (about 7 min total), then rolled around in the crumb/spice mix, and baked. There's more to it than that, so if you want the recipe I can copy it and post it on the recipe forum. Maybe you could do an online search and find it, the recipe in the book is called Crispy Baked Onion Flower.

Hubby is getting a bit stronger every day. Yesterday we went to town and I dropped him off at the post office on one end of town. He moseyed up the street taking care of a few errands, then parked himself at the library 9 blocks from where he started and waited for me. I was putting in some volunteer hours at the food coop. He had his cell phone with him, and people around him all the time, so I didn't worry.

Monday we have to drive to Boise, and hubby will see the cardiologist, then we'll know more about how the diet and meds are working, and how much exercise he should be doing. I have a lot of other questions. The next day he will see a GP in town who will monitor his progress, etc.

Today is another beautiful day, so I've washed clothes and hung them on the line, and am working on the flower beds. The granddaughters weeded a lot of it, but they would have had to work another day or two to get them all. The replacements pop up overnight.

Mary

Hubby saw the cardiologist today and he seemed pleased with hubby's weight loss (so far about 15 pounds in 3 weeks), and with the sound of his heart, and wasn't concerned about anything else. He answered a lot of our questions and said hubby could do anything he felt strong enough to do. We know it will take a long time for him to build up his strength because he was basically inactive since late last fall. Dr was pleased that we are following the low fat low salt diet, and said the low fat was the most important part. We don't use much salt anyhow, so he said don't worry about that. And an occasional treat is ok, just not too often.

They only weighed him and checked his blood pressure. No blood tests for now. Doctor wants another EKG in 3 months which might be done locally because there may be a mobile unit coming to eastern Oregon about then, and after that hubby has to see him Boise again in 6 months. That will be in mid November! Praise the Lord, it will be before the bad weather arrives!

Tomorrow the local doc will have a turn at him mostly to establish a base line for monitoring. No blood tests tomorrow either I think, but who knows?

My neighbor said the shearer was in the area now, and wanted to shear the sheep tomorrow (Tuesday) or Wednesday or maybe Thursday. I told him I could help Wednesday, but not Tuesday. And on Thursday I have jury duty. Whatever day it gets done, it would be nice if it is cooler than today. I think it was at least in the middle 80's here since Boise had 90 and it was still 80 here when we got home at about 6 pm. The sheep need to be rid of their wool.

Yesterday I saddled Patch for the first time this year, and we went to help move a bunch of yearling cattle. On the way some other neighbor's cattle broke through a fence and came along with us, so we went an extra mile to the corrals where we could sort out the extras, then brought the right ones back to our pasture where they were going originally. That added about an extra hour to our job, since they played hide and seek around haystacks and old farm equipment when they were supposed to turn and go through an open gate, and then they did the same thing on the way back.

Patch was working quite well, he got a lot of experience turning cattle back that were going the wrong way, and even got a good run down the road when a few of them took off at a run. The Quarter Horse half is coming out a bit at a time. If we had more opportunity to do cow work he would get better sooner, but this is ok. He was a pretty good boy for not having being ridden in about 8 months. My back muscles were telling me I haven't ridden a horse in a long time, but my legs were ok once I got off. My knee was bothering me from being in one position for too long.

Now I need to get out and put some miles on him to have him ready for some rides after the middle of July when our granddaughter gets married and we are finished with family obligations on weekends when I would otherwise be at endurance rides. By that time I should be comfortable with leaving hubby on his own for 3 days at a time.

CajuninKy

So glad your DH is doing so well. 15 lbs!! Iam a bit jealous. LOL You guys keep up the great work.

The cattle drive sounds like fun. Several of our gaited horses would do well with cattle. Very agile and always up for a challenge.

I'm sure you are itching to get back to the competitive riding. Stuff like that gets into your blood. We are like that with the trail riding and camping. We'd go every weekend if we could. It's not just the riding but getting to spendtime with friends, too. And, of course, seeing Knock have such a wonderfultime is also lots of fun.

Mary

The sheep got sheared yesterday and I'm still tired and a bit achey today. They aren't getting any more cooperative about their annual haircuts. It was a warm day, with quite a bit of dust in the corrals, so I definitely needed a shower and clean clothes when I finished.

Today I served on the Grand Jury for the first time. It is very interesting. I like it better than being on the regular jury. We dealt with 3 cases today. Now they will proceed through the court system, as we concluded that there was enough evidence to warrant having charges brought to court against them. Formal charges in a court proceeding are next, in a few days, then trials after that. Several bad actors will be spending time in prison I think. Meanwhile, some of them sit in the county jail.

A few days ago my neighbor found wolf tracks by his irrigation pond. An agent from the state Fish and Game Department came out and confirmed that the tracks were from a wolf, and that 2 were traveling together. One of them is probably the one that was caught and radio collared a few weeks ago. They are likely the same pair that killed sheep and cattle about 15 miles away. Most likely they are living on calves that are out in the hills with the herds, and it will be hard to document any kills out there. The sheep might be reasonably safe for the time being, but when winter comes there is likely to be more trouble for my neighbor. Or it could come sooner when his cattle go to his hill pasture which is closer to the National Forest land.

The game department is flying over the area to try to keep track of the wolf movements, and to try to spot them. I'm afraid the darned things are here to stay. We have enough trouble with coyotes, so we sure don't need wolves too.

Some friends of ours have come out from town after work and school for the past 2 evenings to work on taking down our east fence and replacing it. Earlier today hubby went out on the 4 wheeler, then walked along the fence and removed staples from the bottom wire. He stayed out there longer than he should have and was hot and dizzy when he came back. I guess I should have gone out to check on him. He stayed longer than he should have and had walked about a quarter of a mile, but then when he was feeling tired he had to walk back up hill to the 4 wheeler, and needed to sit down a few times because he felt dizzy. No chest pain, so that is good, and he did get some exercise. I hope he realizes his limits now, and will remember to take some water with him when he goes again.

CajuninKy

Sorry your DH had a bed spell but I'm glad it was no worse. Humans do tend to push the limits when we get down. I wonder why that is?

Scary about the wolves. Do they know where this pair originated from? They are beautiful animals but I would rather see them praying on wild game. A sheep must be easy pickings for them.

Mary

Yesterday after church we discovered a paper bag on our counter with a note written on it. Our neighbor had brought us 2 quarts of goat milk and put it in the referigerator for us. It is very good milk. He is the same neighbor who borrows greenhouse space from me, so he is glad to be able to give something in return.

Our veterans and police officers were honored at the service yesterday morning. The crowd was quite small for a Sunday morning service, most likely due to the holiday weekend and beautiful weather. A family in the church lost a 6 month old baby last week, so sad. I don't know what happened, but God knows, and we can pray for their comfort.

This morning I packed hubby a small ice chest with juice, water, crackers, string cheese, and an apple, to take with him when he goes down the fenceline to pick up posts that have no wire on them now. He takes our old pickup, and when he is tired he can drive back and bring back the posts which are being piled up to be made into firewood. He is working within sight of the house which is a comfort to me.

One of our neighbors said that fence has been there for at least 50 years. He remembers a fellow who lived on a homestead that he (neighbor) now owns, who built fences for everybody in the area. The wire on ours has been stretched so many times that now it just breaks and has been patched so many times that we've been patching the patches.

When the sun gets to the west side of the house I need to take a picture of the beauty spot I made last fall after I cleaned out the messy flower bed, added soil, planted and mulched. The panseys I bought for 10 cents each look healthy and happy, but the daffys have finished and I cut off the stems. Remember, I promised you a picture.

Cajun, the wolves came from the reintroduction program in Idaho. There have been a few that came over the border which is the Snake River in recent years, but this is the first that have killed livestock that we know of. One of the others was hit and killed on the freeway, another was trapped and radio collared, transported back to Idaho and has apparently not returned. The biologists say this is a pair of youngsters, probably a year or so old, a male and a female. The male was caught and collared, then turned loose right where they caught him. Dumb if you ask me!

CajuninKy

Being young explains why they are killing prey that is an easy target. It is not typical for a pair that young to be out on their own. It would seem the biologist would have taken them back to Idaho. That doesn't make any sense to me.

Glad your DH is able to keep busy with a "safe" project. My DH is taking it easy for a change. I think this bout took more out of him than he is willing to admit.

Is the old fence wire barbed wire? If so, you might be able to make a few crafts with it. Wreaths made of it are nice and rustic. The neatest Christmas tree I have ever seen was made from barbed wire. It was wrapped around an iron frame and sprayed brown. It had lights on it and the ornaments were horse shoes and stars. I have wanted to make me one ever since but haven't gotten around to it.

The goat's milk was a nice gift. I am still working on DH to let me get a pygmy goat to milk so I can make cheese. I think he is softening because he let me buy a little milk bucket that was on clearance sale at the TSC. It was sold as a grow kit for sweet peppers but I gave the seeds to my DDIL along with the little hand tools it came with. I only had eyes for the bucket. It's just the right size to milk a goat with.

I can't wait to see the pics of your pretty place. It seems I remember you posting about it when you first started cleaning the area. How is your garden coming?

Mary

Cheryl, I'm glad that your hubby is home. Will he require more surgery on his foot? Is he on antibiotics long term? Great find on the bucket, I hope you have a goat soon to go with it.

I was just down in the garden to get a tool I needed in the yard, but the "but firsts" got me and I watered my planted rows, then checked the potato patch and behold! I see them coming up. They are covered with barn cleaning straw, with a little stake by each one, and heavier straw between them for weed control, so it took close inspection to see the little clumps of green leaves. They got a drink too. We are eating volunteer lettuce, spinach and green onions. Some of the spinach is trying to go to seed. Oh yes, and my rhubarb plants are huge and making seed stalks which are now cut off and on the compost pile.

CajuninKy

With God's grace he won't need any more surgery. He will be on cipro fro 6 months.

Good job on the taters! Mine are doing well. I only had room for 5 but I'll be happy with those. I hope they do well. The plants look a bit spindly but I'm not suprised. All they get is afternoon and evening sun.

My rhubarb has nor made any seed stalks. Does that come when they get older?

Mary

Cheryl, I'm glad your DH is doing well. As for the rhubarb flower stalks, I don't know. I think mine have always done that. I break them off as soon as I see them, they just waste the plant's energy. Recently I heard about making juice from rhubarb, so I'm going to try it, just as soon as I have time! It's supposed to be good mixed with orange juice. We mix my canned elderberry juice with apple juice, so rhubarb/orange would be another unusual mix. Most of the canned or frozen juice sold in the stores is too sweet anyhow.

I was thinking that when your rhubarb gets too large for the barrel, you could make a raised bed for it where it would have more room.

Today I'll be helping my neighbor brand the last few calves and vaccinate the cows. I'm up to my neck in weeds, have barrels to plant (got the plants to put in them already) and about 100 other things to do.

Hubby is doing well, getting a bit of work done around the place and feeling a bit stronger day by day. He's being really good about not cheating on the low fat diet. We are eating a lot of fresh fruit, and green salads. I have a lot of volunteer lettuce and spinach in the garden. Liking vegies is a very good thing!

CajuninKy

I have tried to grow spinach but it bolts early. I saw something on an edible wild plant called lambs quarters. It is supposed to taste like spinach and can be prepared the same way. I have some growing in my yard so I'm going to give it a try. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

Glad your DH is getting back into the swing of things. Low fat can be very tasty with a bit of creativity. Did you try the crock pot beans with the broth yet?

Does your neighbor freeze brand?

I think you are right about the rhubarb outgrowing the barrell. It looks pretty tight in there now. I fertilized it yesterday because it is looking a bit yellow and puny.

Knock and I weeded and fertilized everything yesterday. Then I sprayed for bugs and of course it came a gully washer of a rain last night. I'll have to spray again. The roly poly bugs are eating my garden up. The trashy little nasties. There is also a striped beetle I am finding on my tomatoes and peppers. It's laying yellow waxy looking eggs. I hope the spray kills them. My tomatoes weren't looking too good but they seem to be coming out of their funk now. I think it was shock from being transplanted. I have a money maker with a small tomato on it. My cucumbers in the hanging pots are doing very well. They are covered with blooms and small fruit and they are just getting tall enough to lay over. My beans are starting to bloom.

Mary

My neighbor's plans changed so we haven't branded the last few calves yet. He is always behind, and his cousin came to help him with field work, so he needed to take advantage of that. His cousin is also a good mechanic, and works to keep the old machinery running.

We did move the yearlings out of our place and the cows and older calves in. There is a lot of grass this year, thanks to the rains we had in April and May, and the irrigation. The reason for the moves was to put the yearlings on a field he has that needs to be eaten down, and put them closer to the barn because one day soon they will have to go through the corrals and some of them will have to see the vet. Sometimes when we band the little boys they are too big to use an elastrator band to castrate them, so now there are a few that need attention because they are starting to act like bulls. The buyers don't want bulls, and they cause all kinds of trouble, fighting with each other and trying to breed the heifers instead of gaining weight. One more thing to take up a lot of the neighbor's time. After they heal up from that we will take them 5 miles up the road to another pasture.

He hot brands. Freeze branding is ok for dark animals, but most of his calves are too light for a freeze brand to show. Old fashioned method. I don't know anybody who freeze brands cattle. We also dehorn with a hot iron.

My battle with the weeds is showing some progress, but it seems that a lot of them regrow faster than I can get around the first time. I have to replant some of my vegies, again! My seeds must be too old. Darn, it is wasted time and effort.

A few days ago we counted 3 baby owls that our owl family hatched this year. Their feathers are still so soft the slightest breeze makes them look like they are shivering. More summer birds are showing up all the time, we have been seeing Orioles and the Kingbirds have started to arrive.

Taste those lambs quarters before you cook them. They get bitter when they are too old.

I haven't cooked the beans with broth yet. I never think to buy the broth when I am at the store. Yesterday we shopped without a list and still managed to spend over $60.

Mary

Yesterday was a busy and somewhat frustrating day, one of my horses is sick. He was way down in the pasture, 1/2 a mile from the house and the corral where he needed to be, so I spent most of the day getting him to it, a bit at a time. His problem is too much green grass for too long, and the result is laminitis, an inflamation in the hoof. I had to get him to the corral so he could be eating hay. First thing I did was give him a dose of an anti inflamatory, then lead him for as far as he was willing to walk. After dinner I finally got him to the corral and gave him another dose of the medicine, a bucket of water and some hay, and taped a funny looking pad to the sole of his foot to relieve the pressure.

In between trips to the pasture to move him closer to the corral, I did get some vegie starts planted, planted a couple dozen flowers, did some watering and pulled weeds, pressure cooked some chicken and made soup from it for dinner, and went to town to get the pads for the horse's feet. I had to move the other horses out of the top pasture so my neighbor could move his cows and calves through and try to sort out another neighbor's bull who isn't supposed to be visiting. I'm glad he had plenty of help for the job, because he ended up taking the whole works down the road to his corral, removing the bull and bringing the cows back. Then I moved Breezy and Patch back to their own pasture.

Today I hope to put a pad on Bullwinkle's other front foot, if he can stand to have weight on the most painful foot while I work. Last night I only did the worst front foot. I didn't have much daylight left, and had to wait for his foot to dry after the trip through the wet grass in the pasture because tape won't stick to anything wet. My farrier will be here in the morning to trim the excess hoof wall, which will be a painful job requiring patience, but after it is done the horse will be much more comfortable.

Hubby is doing well. We got the last of the old fence taken down and hubby went over the fenceline with the tractor and front end loader, using it like a blade, to take off the humps and remove the sagebrush. Some of that sagebrush had trunks 8 inches thick, so it has been there a long time, probably since the fence was built over 50 years ago. He hauled the old wire to the dump and had almost 800 pounds!

There's a little section of fenceline that will be dealt with later, after the new part is rebuilt. It is the east line of Breezy and Patch's pasture. I will have to move them elsewhere while it is being removed and rebuilt, but only for a couple of days. Now that Bullwinkle is occupying one corral I have only one other one to hold a horse, and can't put another in with him, nor can I put the two together in the other one, so I might have to farm one of them out somewhere, maybe borrow the neighbor's corral for a couple of days.

This morning I need to go to my neighbor's to see what chores I will be doing for him over the weekend while he goes to his sister's wedding. He has a goat to milk, and chickens, so I will get to keep the milk and eggs while he is gone. Last week he brought me some milk and it is very good.

Mary

We've had rain and more rain. So far, in about 10 days, only 1 or 2 days without at least a shower. Lots of lightning too. A couple of nights ago it rained over 2 inches and the postholes we had drilled the day before were full of water. Hubby and a friend were out there trying to set railroad ties for posts and get enough mud and rocks into the holes to hold the posts up straight. Our fence project has had many delays. We have had 3x the normal rainfall for June in just a few days!

My horse seems to be doing pretty well and is moving around more. Still slow, still on the anti inflamatory (bute). I think he might need more space to move around in, but I still want to keep him in the corral. One corral has lush grass on one side of it, so I will move a few of the pipe panels and enlarge the other one to keep him from eating the wrong thing. Another project just got added to my list! I think I can do that without help, handling just one end at a time and pivoting it around.

For the last couple of days I have been doing chores for a neighbor who has a goat to milk and about 20 hens. I get the milk and eggs, and he also said he would give me a day of garden work to pay me back! He borrows greenhouse space from me to start his vegies and gave me a few plants to thank me for that. He will be back home this afternoon. The goat gives very good milk, and I have collected about 3 dozen eggs. I think he needs a pig to take care of the excess milk. He clabbers it and gives it to his chickens when there is too much for human consumption. It will come in handy at lambing time, if he gets the doe bred to be fresh before bummer lambs need the milk.

My potatoes are almost all up and looking great under their strawy manure cover. Several weeks ago I brought home several tractor bucket loads of sheep pen cleanings from this year's lambing season. Now that they are up I need to add more, and that will clear space for planting the tomatoes, which are still in the greenhouse due to the cool rainy weather.

Neighbors who had newly planted fields now have gullys across their land, and are hoping there is still seed in most of the ground to germinate. One neighbor has 6 inch tall grain, another had just finished seeding alfalfa. He was delayed due to wet conditions earlier, and lack of help to get his irrigation going. It's always something. The storm that dumped over 2 inches on us also caused culverts to pulg and water to run across the road near us. Yesterday was dry, and today looks good so far, but the forecast says we will have thundershowers for the next few days, again. Next thing we know we will be hot and dry and wishing for rain, but first the hay needs to be cut and baled. With all this rain there will be a heavy hay crop.

Mary

We are still in a wet and rainy pattern. It's hard to believe this is June. There are some sun breaks but I am willing to bet this June is setting a record for the most rain. Normal is 1.1 inch. We have had at least 4 times that much, and the forecast is for thunderstorms and rain for the next few days and the posibility of flash floods. We are on high ground so no worries about that for us. The weeds are loving it, some of the flowers and vegies too, other vegies need more heat and sun or they will just sit there and turn yellow.

I planted my squash and corn starts between showers a few days ago. No need to worry about transplant shock! Most years I make little tents from straw or weeds to shelter the transplants from the intense sun for a couple of days, no need for that this year.

My sore footed horse seems to be getting around a bit better. I wonder if he will totally recover. He's retired so I wasn't riding him anyhow, but I would like him to be able to walk normally and be comfortable. He still gets the anti inflamatory medicine twice a day, and we both hate it! It's apple flavored, and no I haven't tasted it!, but still must taste bad because he tries to avoid having the syringe put into his mouth and the medicine squirted onto the back of his tongue. He can really hold his head up high and I have to stretch to reach him, but that is ok because the medicine runs down his throat and he swallows it right away. After he gets the medicine, then he gets to eat.

The fence project is continuing, they are reaching the halfway point. Our friend and at least one of his sons will come out from town and work on it again tonight after work, and then about half a day tomorrow. The hard layer of clay and broken rocks about 6 inches under the surface is making driving the steel posts difficult. They still have a lot of railroad ties to set for the second half, more steel posts between them, wire to string and stretch, etc, but they are making progress! We need to have a BBQ or something when it is done!

Hubby's volunteer day has been changed to Thursday, so I volunteered at the coop yesterday and got in almost half the hours I need to keep my 30% discount for another month. I ordered a 25# bag of pinto beans and one of red beans. It's cheaper to buy that way than out of the bins, and definitely cheaper than a pound at a time from the supermarket. They keep very well in 5 gallon buckets in the basement. We are eating more rice and beans now because of hubby's low fat diet.

Woopee, the sun is out. Lookout weeds, here I come!

God's Warrior

Would you post some pictures of that fence and also of your horses here for everyone to see? I saw pictures that you posted elsewhere and the fence is charming in its construction. I would love to have some of those rocks. They probably look plain to you but they are beautiful to me.

Mary

Sure will, as they say, a picture is worth 1,000 words.

We will have our fence crew here again today, they'll finish putting the wire on the fence and then we will have a bbq, so I have to put together some food. This family has 2 teenage sons. They live in town but have previously lived on ranches, so the parents want their sons to know about country lifestyles, not just seeing but actually helping build the fence. When my hubby retired from the DA's office he trained this man to be his replacement, a job the man considers to be his dream job, and he is very grateful, and we are grateful for all their help. There is still a small section of fence to replace, the east side of the horse pasture, but it can be done in a couple of days. The major part is just short of a half mile. Then after that there is 1/4 mile of fence at the lower end of the property.

Many of the old fences in this country are A frame fences, with rock jacks. Often we have so many rocks both above and below ground, that digging holes is impossible. Even with modern post hole augers that are powered by a tractor, it takes a long time to bore a hole to plant a post.

This structure is called a rock jack. It can be used as a corner "post", a pair of them can support a gate, or about every 100 ft in a line of fence, one of these will add a lot of weight to the project. There is no shortage of rocks in this country. Rabbits and other small rodents often live under the rock platform, and snakes (rattlesnakes too), like them because there is shade under there, and often, food as well.

Mary

This is the type of fence we are replacing. The fence is over 50 years old, the wire is so old, brittle and rusted that it breaks easily, so it is time (past time really) to replace it. The new fence will be an upright type. When this old fence was built, there was no practical way to bore a hole to put in posts if the ground had too many rocks, or a layer of bedrock in the top 2 or 3 ft of dirt, so this A frame was developed. Some of the posts have a hole bored in them that the other side fits into, others were nailed or wired together.

God's Warrior

Many thanks Mary. Boy, that was a rapid response to my request. Good job! Neat Fence!

Mary

It's Sunday, Father's Day, and our pastor was out of town so had asked my hubby to preach. I think he did a good job, and there were several folks who told him so, but of course the results are up to God. Our son and daughter in law took us to lunch after the service, we went to a Mexican place, not my favorite, but hubby likes it and it was Father's Day, so who am I to say I would rather have a different kind of food? On Mother's Day I got to choose. Hubby ate some food that was not on his low fat diet, but will be back to the straight and narrow, so one fat meal won't hurt him in the big sceme of things.

Our morning temperature was 38! Yes, that is right, 38! It was rainy and windy, so the horse got his breakfast but not his medicine. I'll give him his evening dose early and hope he doesn't have any discomfort. I started giving him some applesauce in the syringe with the medicine, hoping that he will remember a good taste. Last night I think he took it better, and he sure smacks his lips and seems to enjoy it. The tricky part is getting him to let me stick the plastic end of the syringe in his mouth. Hopefully he will decide that he has to or better yet, wants to go though that part before he gets something that tastes like real apples. He just needs time to learn to anticipate something pleasant instead of unpleasant.

Last week we had company for a couple of days, two guys from the Seattle area came down to visit, and we put them to work. The horse in the corral got his corral enlarged with pipe fence panels we already had, and now he has about 4x as much space as he had before, plus access to a small shed, and can get behind the shed if the wind is blowing into the open side. Hubby had them help him distribute railroad ties along the new fenceline, and clean wet, sloppy mud out of the holes that didn't have posts yet, before it dried and hardened.

Thursday evening there will be a gospel concert at church so I'm looking forward to going to that. The group is called Heritage, or Heritage Singers. Their website is www.heritagesingers.com . I haven't checked out the website yet, I just have the flier that was in the bulletin.

Mary

We went to hear the Heritage singers and they were very good. They sang a variety of music from old time gospel to modern era selections, and parts of hymns. I'd certainly go to hear them again.

Praise the Lord, the fence is finished. This morning hubby put an extension on the neighbor's gate that was in bad shape and too short once the rock jack was removed. It's like a new gate now because he restapled loose wires and added a couple more stays to it. I've been wondering for years why the cattle stayed in, because at least the calves could have walked through it.

Hubby has loaded up all the old wire, bent nails, staples, etc to take to the dump. All metal is free to dispose of because they can resell it when the price of scrap goes up, so he picked up a lot of misc stuff that was around the place to add to the load. Where does it all come from? We'll get rid of that today and pick up a prescription while we are in town, plus do end of the month banking.

My annual battle with itchy insect bites is in full swing. Last night when I was weeding I got into a nest of teeny weeny ants. I didn't feel the bites until they started to itch. Ice seems to settle them down, plus I am taking antihistamine. Anti itch creams and lanacane do nothing for me.

God's Warrior

I am glad you finally have that fence done. It feels good to get something that major accomplished for another 30 years or so. Everything major that we do I tell hubby that should take care of it until we are in a nursing home or gone. He now looks at me with that silly grin and says the same thing to me. We have a wooden fence that has been with us for years, My daughter who just turned 53 helped her dad build it when she was about 15 or 16 years old. He is now replacing it. Guess how long we want it to last! Smile

Mary

We will be traveling to the other side of the state to our granddaughter's wedding, leaving tomorrow morning and returning on Monday. The wedding is on Saturday afternoon, followed by a big reception at the home of the bride's family, then Sunday evening we have a missions board meeting, so it will be a full weekend. The trip is close to 400 miles each way, and takes us 6 or 7 hours. I often think of the pioneers along the Oregon trail, traveling about 15 miles on a good day, following that same route for much of the way, and how amazed they would have been to make the trip at that speed.

I've made arrangements for my neighbor to do chores while we are gone. He is the one who has the chickens and goats that were in my care about a month ago for a weekend. Our daughter in law will come out from town twice daily to give Bullwinkle his medicine. She is the nursing student, and volunteered to do it since she has summer classes and can't attend the wedding. Last week she came out to take a trial run. Bullwinkle got extra applesauce that day. He takes his medicine well because he gets about 1/4 cup of applesauce with each dose of medicine. He is looking better all the time but the medicine is what keeps him comfortable while his feet are healing. Daughter in law says she never had such a large hairy patient!

Finally, it got to be summer here! My vegie garden is getting a very thorough deep watering using the hose with a hand held type of nozzle that I lay in a little ditch beside the rows. It has to be moved every few minutes, so I weed nearby while I keep watch on the water. I've also got water from the spring overflow running through a series of miscellaneous pipes to water the grapes, asparagus and elderberrys. The potatoes look wonderful this year, under their straw mulch cover, and using new ground where I built compost piles about 10 years ago. Tomatoes are being grown in two places, one of them a new patch of ground beside the potatoes, and the ground by them is covered with black plastic. I watered 10 plants yesterday and will get the rest watered today. One group has a leaky soaker type hose under it, that's the easy one. All of them got tied to supports and pruned a bit yesterday while I was tending the water.

Today, more watering, and packing. I wanted to start packing last evening, but was just bone weary tired and didn't do it. It's obviously on the "must do" list today!

I may have mentioned that another feral cat has adopted our place. He showed up about 2 months ago, and has a crippled front leg that doesn't seem to be getting any better. Either he is a very good natured cat, or he feels at a disadvantage because of his leg, but he isn't being a problem. He sneaks out of hiding just before dark, eats near the back door and now isn't running every time he knows he is seen. I hear his yodely voice if I am outside when he is moving around, and this morning, just after daylight I heard it again. He was sitting on the front porch, a few feet from the door which was open, with the window on the screen raised. I looked at him, he just sat there, and was still there a minute later. I'm sure it's a tomcat, they are usually the wanderers. He's coal black without any white markings, and has yellow eyes.

Mary

Our granddaughter's wedding on was on Saturday, followed by a big outdoor reception, complete with a sit down dinner, and live music from a lady playing an electronic piano! Sunday morning we went to church, then there was a Romania Outreach Mission board meeting on Sunday afternoon. All the board members attended the wedding. They only have 2 meetings annually, so it takes a good block of time! Board members are from Wash, Or, and Calif. I didn't have to be there, so my friend and I were able to visit for the whole afternoon. She and her husband formerly worked with that mission, but came back to the states to be caregivers for their elderly parents. Sunday evening we all attended a nice cookout, but it rained so we ate inside. Burgers tasted just as good! We all praised God for the nice weather for the outdoor reception the day before!

My friend's father is in a nursing home because he has Parkinson's disease and dementia, and requires more care than the family can provide. He doesn't know the Lord, but he is asking questions and doing a lot of thinking. God also gave him a dream recently where he saw himself as a very ugly man covered in warts. He could see Jesus standing by waiting for him to ask for help. He understands that the warts he saw are sins, but says he doesn't want to be a hipocrite. I don't know his first name, but his last name is McClanahan. Please keep him in your prayers, he needs to make an important decision before he looses his mental capacity to do so.

We brought Fritz the Jack Russell Terrier home with us, because his real owner is the young lady who got married, and the rest of the family leaves for summer camp ministry in Romania this week and will be gone a month. We will make another trip back across the state to take him home when the family returns. By then, the newlyweds should have a dig proof pen built for Fritz.

I've been moving sprinklers and doing laundry today, and feel just a bit tired from all the travel, late nights, and activity. It seemed like a great day for a pot of bean soup, so I pulled out a bag of a soup mixture containing several kinds of beans, split peas, lentils, and barley. I added some brown rice, and cooked it all with some dried hot peppers to add a little zip to it. Before Hubby's heart attack we ate such things with Polish sausage or ham for flavor. There is enough left for another meal.

God's Warrior

Praise the Lord that things went well and you are back home safely. We look forward to seeing pictures when your daughter shares them with you. Speaking of pictures, please post that darling picture here of your cat and the dog together. The cat looked so happy to see his pal again.
You have said that your daughter is the only one who can solve your picture loading from camera to computer problems for you and she won't visit for several months. My son can control my computer from his home by using Windows Live Messenger. Maybe there is a way for her to talk to you on the phone and instruct you on loading the program and then letting her take over control of the computer to solve your problem. Just a thought. We want you to once again be able to take pictures to share with us as soon as possible. Smile

Welcome home. You were missed!

Mary

That's interesting. Technology is so amazing, but I will just wait on the computer fix because she is the one who is just about now arriving in Romania for a month of very intense summer ministry. Thanks anyhow. Meanwhile, yes, I can post the dog and cat picture because it is in my picture file. New ones, stuck in my camera, I can't download because I might be missing a disc or something essential for one gadget to recognize the other.

Here is something I copied from an email this morning:

Life is not about how fast you run, or how high you climb, but how well you bounce!!!

And the picture of two little critters who sure do love each other! Neut is trying to have all of his body in contact with the dog, even his tail, and the expression on his face just makes me smile every time I look at the picture. He just oozes love!

I hope the picture transfered to this post. When I clicked upload file nothing seemed to happen. Sigh.

Mary

I'll try that again. After the big build up, you deserve to see something!

Mary

Yesterday might have been the hottest day so far this year, it was at least 92. I was in town part of the day, and bought a bunch of herbs in gallon pots, plus other flowers for 75% off. I will get them all planted this afternoon when the barrels where most of them will go are in the shade of the shop building. My daugher in law gifted me with a cute little wooden planter for my birthday, so I needed a few plants to fill it. She also made an apple cake from a recipe in the heart healthy cookbook, and left it on the counter, a nice surprise when we came back from our trip.

The fence crew is coming this evening to put wooden stays between the posts and staple the wires to them. Our old pickup has a big load of stays in it, sawn at a mill a fellow and his son operate in a neighboring community.

My daylilies are just starting to bloom. That is the domestic ones, the old ditch lilies have been blooming for a couple of weeks. I've got one gold one that is a real standout. Maybe I can locate a picture of it, will try. My picture files are not well organized, they are in folders that say the date, or just summer pictures, fall pictures, etc. It made sense when I did it that way, but in hindsight, it wasn't such a good plan. The hollyhocks are also putting on a good show. One especially hardy group of plants is along a fence near where the computer satelite dish was installed later. I might have to tie them to the fence or to a stake or two, but that is better than taking the clippers to them if they interfere with the signal.

Oops, time to change the sprinkler, again! I'm watering something, or several somethings every day, most of the day and until dark I have a sprinkler or soaker hose running somewhere.

Mary

My favorite gold daylily.

God's Warrior

Two great pictures! Thank you for posting them. I particularly love the one of the dog and cat together. That cat looks so blissfully happy.

Mary

I itch! Saturday when I was deep watering the asparagus, I was also pulling some tall weeds growing near the row. Apparently some 6 legged creatures living there were upset with the changes I was making in their neighborhood, and although I was watching for ants or other crawlies on my shoes, pantlegs and arms, I got 4 bites. Two are on my knee, one on my side just above my waist, and another on my chest where I can almost put my chin on it. They all itch. Why do I taste so good to the bugs? Maybe I should try a garlic juice bath to deter them next time. Actually, I do understand that they probably were just trying to defend their home from a two legged monster!

So today I'm doing laundry and inside domestic things and staying out of the sun and trying not to move much because my clothes rubbing on the inflamed area makes the itching worse. I could weed on the shady side of the house, but instead here I sit moving an icebag around to whichever bite itches the worst. The antihistamine makes me sleepy but should begin to take effect tomorrow or the next day.

On Thursday I will be on Grand Jury duty again. The DA has a case he wants to have us consider. I have a feeling it has something to do with the Miner's Jubilee that was held in town over the weekend. Not everyone celebrates in a civilized manner. Every town has it's local festival to try to bring money into the town, and Miner's Jubilee celebrates the Baker City's early years. There are still some working gold mines in the area, but I don't think anyone is getting rich. The people who provided goods and services to the miners often made more than the miners who came to town to celebrate their sudden wealth. Most of them left town for another hot mining strike with the clothes on their backs and little else unless they were wise enough to invest.

Our pastor's father in law, who retired from pastoring several years ago, is in failing health. A few months ago he could still walk unassisted and was talking about growing a community garden on part of the church property. Now he is in a wheelchair, bent over, held to the chair by a chest strap, and so weak he is almost unable to raise his head. Most people just walk on past him. My hubby got down on his knees in front of the man, greeted him with a hug and a smile, and prayed with him. I don't think he will be with us much longer. It's sad to watch the decline in his health which seems to be picking up speed. His body is giving up, but his spirit is ready to soar.

I was just reminded of a fellow in our church 30 years ago in another state. He had kidney disease, had transplants, when the proceedure was very new, and was on dialasis for years. One night, as he and his wife lay in bed, he suddenly said "Vickie, I hear angels" and in a few minutes he had gone to join them. It the story gives me goosebumps just to type it. We should all make the transition so joyfully and easily.

Mary

This morning I went to move hollyhock stems back behind the satelite dish so I could get a signal, but ended up snipping them off since they wouldn't stay back there. They only had a couple of flowers left and NO leaves (grasshoppers are eating everything!), stood up and looked right into a wasp nest from 2 ft away, in the pipe that supports the dish.

Out came the can of Raid and the hunt was on! I got 25 nests killed this morning, several in and under my horse trailer. I had thought about going for a ride this morning, cancel that! A few stray wasps are flying around the trailer confused and not too happy. My tack room is in the trailer, and the rings on the outside are the only places I have to safely tie the horse while I saddle him. It's not worth the risks of either getting myself or the horse stung!

The itches from last week's bites have settled down and the last 2 days have been comfortable. Praise the Lord!

Mary

Patch and I have been out riding in the hills twice and had nice trips both times. He wants to go faster than I want him to go for now, but we will work up to his speed soon. We scared a few deer out of their beds in the sagebrush and under a juniper tree, saw some elk tracks, watched for rattlesankes, and got HOT! I'm trying to go every second day. There are a couple of places where the Scotch thistles are so thick we can't walk through them without getting poked a lot by the spines, so I will have to do some cutting. Hubby found and sharpened our machette' which will do fine to clearing paths. It has a heavy canvas scabbard. I will wrap it up in an old jeans pantleg so I can tie it behind the saddle.

The weather is perfect for making hay, that is to say hot and windy. Our neighbors are all busy with cutting, raking, baleing, and hauling it to stacks. Some day soon I expect my neighbor to tell me he has a load for us.

My itchies have been replaced by new ones. I was reading something on an alternative health website about taking extra vitamin B-12 to keep the bugs from biting. The vitamin-mineral formula I take every day has that in it of course, but not enough. So, now I am taking vitamin B-12 every day. I wonder how long it will take me to taste bad.

The website I found is http://www.earthclinic.com/CURES/insect_bite.html There are a lot of things to read about on that site which will be good for when I'm hiding out inside the house on hot afternoons when it is 90+ outside and I am wilting!

Yesterday we went to the farm store to get more staples for the fence project, and I bought some herbal anti inflamatory for Bullwinkle. Last night I skipped giving him the chemical stuff and just fed him the new pellets. This morning he was quite uncomfortable, so I gave him Bute again and now he looks better. I'll double up using both medicines for a few days until he gets enough of the herbs in his system to work. I remember, when I started taking an herbal supplement for hot flashes, it took about 3 weeks before I noticed the difference. The main active ingredient in the anti inflamatory is commonly known as "devils claw root". If it will work for him it will cost about 1/3 compared to the cost of the Bute paste from the vet and it will allow me a bit more freedom when I want to go somewhere, as not everyone would want to administer an oral medicine via tube to an 1100 pound patient.

On one of my endurance riding websites there was a posting about a fellow endurance rider who is suffering from the final stages of bone cancer. I have ridden hundreds of miles with him, and haven't seen him for a couple of years. Now he is staying at his daughter's house, she is a nurse, and he isn't able to stand or walk anymore. It's hard to think of him in such a weakened condition. I found a card to send him, a plain note showing rimrocks and a bobcat looking down at something below. One ride we used to do together went along a trail under rimrocks like that, and once we did see a big cat up there, silouetted against a blue sky, looking down as we passed. So, I wrote a few memories on the page, and said goodbye old friend. I'm sure he is comforted by his faith, and by having his daughter and her children nearby for his last days.

The wasp nests I have been spraying are small disc shaped ones, about 3 inches in diameter, with not many occupants. The queens overwinter in sheltered spots, emerge with warm weather, build a paper nest and lay eggs. They raise the first few themselves, and the next generation produces workers who tend rest of the eggs that the queen will lay over the summer. I should take a picture, which you will not see this summer because of my camera to computer incompatability problem. No doubt I have missed a few active nests somewhere. When I find one that will photograph well, that is not in a really inaccessable place like under a rock jack or under the barn roof 25 ft off the ground, I will attempt a picture.

Mary

Yesterday I went riding again, earlier in the morning than before, to beat the heat. Well, in snake season, that's a mistake, because they crawl out of the sagebrush on to the jeep road and lay there soaking up the sun's rays. The first one we encountered was rattling and leaving the road. Patch heard him and moved to the other side of the road, which is only the opposite tire track, so not very far, and stopped. We watched the snake crawl away. I looked for a big stick or some rocks to kill it with, but there were none so I stayed on the horse.

Half a mile later, there was another one. I saw him and stopped Patch. Since the snake didn't seem to have heard us, and he was only a few feet away in the middle of the road, I had some time to consider what to do. There were no rocks or sticks handy, so we turned around and went back down the hill to where there were fist sized rocks.

I converted the reins to a leadrope by unclipping both ends from the bit and clipping one end to the halter ring. Now I had about 8 ft of rope between myself and Patch, enough for him to feel safe I hoped, and not pull away from me and run home. I picked up half a dozen rocks and we walked back up the road. Ten feet from the snake I stopped and started throwing the rocks. The snake woke up and started crawling toward the bank that went up from the road, and disappeared under a sagebrush, rattling his warning all the way. Patch kept a respectful distance and didn't pull on the rope at all.

Once the snake was clear of the road, we moved to the other tire track and passed by him. He was still rattling so I could tell where he was even though I couldn't see him. I walked, leading Patch until I found a place where I could get back on, which I can't do from the ground. My legs just don't go there anymore, so I need a bump. I wasn't about to stand in the sagebrush beside the road, where there might be other snakes lurking. We continued our ride for a few more miles and didn't see more snakes until we came back, and there was snake #2 crossing the road again. We waited, he crawled and rattled, then after he went down the bank we moved to the other tire track and went on home.

After dinner, when the sun was getting low and the temperature was a bit cooler I took a .22 pistol loaded with birdshot shells, and the machette', got on the four wheeler and went snake hunting/thistle chopping. I thought maybe the snakes would be out in the open and I could eliminate one or two. No snakes, lots of thistles, and now I have a path through one of the thistle patches and a sore shoulder and arm. Progress usually comes at a cost.

I'd like to get those snakes before they migrate down into the hayfields, pastures, and possibly my yard. In the last few years we have killed 2 in the yard, one was about 15 ft from the back door, and last year I killed one about 2-3 ft from the door, way too close for comfort!

Tonight, or more likely tomorrow morning since it is 96 degrees now at almost 6pm, we will go out into the neighbor's field and pick up broken hay bales. His old baler is giving him fits again this year, and it is being repaired again. Sometimes it makes itty bitty bales, sometimes it makes big, double length bales, and sometimes it just refuses to tie them, resulting in a pile of hay that has been chopped into pieces too short to hold together if it was chopped and baled again. The baler picks up a windrow of hay and it is chopped to the width of the bale. That's great if it works the first time! The bales need to be a uniform size so they can be picked up with another big machine and stacked. Haying season has got to be the most frustrating time of the year. The hay is getting overripe, or dried out, or being eaten by grasshoppers, and the equipment keeps breaking down. We are both glad we don't do that for a living!

Mary

I've been up a while, since 1am in fact, and have already been to Boise and back before breakfast. Why? Taking hubby, son and daughter in law to the airport, they are on their way to Alaska to fish with our other son for a few days. And hopefully they'll bring home lots of fish. They'll have plenty of fun anyhow.

And so, I have a few days to play without having much laundry or cooking to do, and can get some major jobs done. Also I'm going to be riding more, and I spotted a package of chicken legs and thighs in the freezer, which is going to be FRIED!

Yesterday afternoon and evening we got a series of thunderstorms, which left us without power until after 9 last night, including enough rain to green up the fields, water my garden (which I had just spent a couple of hours in the hot sun doing) and get the hay wet. For dinner hubby fired up the grill and threw a cube steak on it, and I made a big salad.

I'll call my neighbor and tell him that I'm available to turn bales to dry when it's time to do that. He has a lot of hay baled but not picked up because he was repairing the bale wagon. It's not just a wagon, it is a mechanical pick up and stacking machine. Drive the truck up to the end of a bale, it goes up through a chute, is turned and lined up on a deck, when two rows are filled the deck raises up and stacks it against what is already on the truck, lowers down and is ready to recieve the next bale, all without stopping the truck. It will pick up about 5 tons in less than half an hour, which is 87 bales. It's an uneven number because several bales are manually turned to lock the load together. That takes up a little more space.

And then, the operator backs up to the haystack, the whole load is tilted, set down like a big block, and the truck is ready to go get more. The load, when it is set down is 2 bales wide, 5 bales deep and 9 bales high. Mechanical feet come out from under the bed to push it off while arms hold it together while the truck is driven out from under it.

It's fascinating to watch, but then I'm the kid who, when I was in the second grade, was so intregued by the bread wrapping machine at the bakery my class toured, that the teacher had to come back and get me. I was all alone, watching those mechanical arms wrapping, turning the bread over, glueing the ends together, and sending the loaf off down the conveyor. I never noticed that 30 kids and a few parents and teachers had left me, and when I found out, I didn't care. Most of us here are old enough to remember bread wrapped in waxed paper with the bakery logo on it, before plastic bread bags.

Sometime during my short night of sleep between 9pm and 1am, I woke up and smelled smoke from a forest fire that I couldn't locate in the dark and clouds. Today when I was driving home I could see it, high up behind a ridge, probably 30 miles away, maybe more. The wind was bringing the smoke to us, which was better than the skunk smell we had the night before. Today the breeze is from the south so somebody else is enjoying the smoke.

It's cool here this morning, and that feels very good! This morning as I was driving home from Boise, just after I crossed the state line into Oregon, the sun was coming up through bright pink clouds, shining through forest fire smoke. The reflection of the pink clouds on the east was projected on to the gray clouds on the west, causing a kind of overlay effect, bright pink on an almost charcoal gray background. Quite striking! Then as I turned toward the northeast about an hour later, the sun was behind a big dark cloud, with two roundish holes near the top, and a curved streak near the bottom, with shafts of sunlight shining through that streak. A big smiley face to start my day!

Mary

Hubby is home from his fishing trip, and he brought back lots of frozen fish. While he was gone I defrosted the freezers so there would be room for the fish and for the lamb we are getting, a gift from our neighbors. This was one of those big jobs that had been put off time after time, until it became a ridiculous situation that just had to be addressed. Partial clean out and reorganization jobs just weren't taking care of the frost build up. I'm not sure after all these years if it was supposed to be a self defrosting freezer, but I can tell you this for sure: it doesn't!

We have a big chest freezer in the basement, the largest one Sears sells. Chest freezers are nice because things don't fall out of them, but at the same time, things get lost in the deep dark corners because the new things tend to be placed on top. I had to have a plan to tackle the job and keep everything frozen while the built up frost and ice thawed enough to remove it.

I put a thick rug on the cement floor, then 2 large boxes into which I began to unload the freezer. More boxes went on top of the original ones, plus I used the ice chests, and then the whole stack was covered with the blankets I use to cover tomato and squash plants in the garden to keep the frost from killing them. I didn't take time to sort, figuring that the larger volume would help the stack stay colder.

I did find some nice surprises. One was a half gallon of mint chocolate chip ice cream which I knew was all mine! It went to the upstairs fridge freezer so it would be handy. Another nice find was a package of chicken thighs and legs that I had bought before hubby's heart attack and diet change. Since he was gone for a week, I had a plan for it. Having had nothing fried for about 3 months, I looked at that package and "fried chicken" immediately came to mind.

After meltdown and ice removal, the freezer was wiped clean and dry, and then I sorted bad from good as I put things back. Two wire baskets that came with the freezer hang on the edges of the freezer and will slide from side to side, and 3 more that came with a different freezer sit on the freezer floor because they are narrower. Miscellaneous items went on the shelf over the freezer motor. A couple of small cardboard boxes were also employed, so I could keep similiar items together. The compost pile recieved outdated donations, and there was space to spare!

After giving that unit a day and night to get everying solidly frozen again, I unloaded our extra referigerator freezer, and put the good stuff in the big freezer, and did the same with the referigerator freezer in the kitchen. After those were defrosted and cleaned out, I did more organizing as I refilled them. It all looks good!

I have about 3 gallons of frozen berry and grape juices that will be made into jam this winter. No straining, no drip bags, we like pulp and seeds, so I'll just cook it and it will be great. Making jam in the dead of winter makes the house smell like summer!

God's Warrior

I got tired just reading about all of your hard work. Isn't it great when we can get all of our "ducks in a row" for a change? I only have a refrigerator freezer and an upright one but I can say honestly that both are due for the job that you have just completed. You have inspired me to "take the bull by the horns" and get that dreaded job done. Wish me luck.

Mary

Not only did I inspire you, but on another forum somebody else took the plunge and cleaned their freezer too!

No sooner had we arrived home after church today, and the phone rang. Neighbor had a cow emergency situation. He had two groups of cattle, each with a bull, and 2 fences between them. Somebody found, or more likely, made a hole in the fence so today he had one big group, two bulls fighting, and still had some of one group back in the pasture they came from. Could I help? Yep, I could, and did.

Patch wasn't too comfortable with the bulls fighting, but we managed to stay out of their way. The combined herd was moved to our place for a few days, since it was the handiest place to put them that had enough grass. When there is lots of grass they aren't looking for a way to escape. Then we went back to where the breakout group had been and rounded up the remainder of that group and added them to the others.

The reason they were in 2 groups was that the breeding heifers were kept separate with a Black Angus bull since they are known to produce low birth weight calves, easier for the heifers at delivery time. The older cows are with a Piedmontese bull, a breed that produces very meaty fast growing calves. Even when they are born the bull calves look like little weight lifters. The bulls have been with their groups long enough that there are probably no open cows left, so it is probably pretty safe to put them all together. The bulls fought long enough to establish which one is dominant, so now the looser is avoiding the winner and we hope they will not decide to have another showdown.

The fighting bulls made me think of another situation from a few years ago. I had driven our car over to my sister's place, about 60 miles away, to help her with moving some cattle. I took my saddle and met her up on her rangeland. She had driven up there with her trailer and an extra horse for me. So I parked the car on the edge of the meadow next to her trailer, saddled the horse and we went to get the cows rounded up and moved.

Several hours later, when we came back, two bulls were fighting in the meadow, dangerously close to my car! I tried to keep the horse between the bulls and my car which was looking very small. I had very little influence on the directions the bulls were taking, because I had to move out of their way to keep from being hurt, but prayers did, and they started shoving each other in another direction. Our car was spared! I had been wondering if insurance adjusters (or whatever you call those you call to say "my car is wrecked"), ever had a claim for a car totaled by two fighting bulls. Thankfully, I didn't have to make that call.

Mary

The cattle are peaceful, the weather is heating up again, and all is well here.

In 2 more days, we will be taking Fritz back to his family. They had a very good, intense month of ministry, with many decisions for the Lord made at the camps they conducted. The first week included an outreach trip into Albania which the Lord blessed and used to open hearts. A church in Albania has started an English school as an outreach for their ministry to the town, so an English camp was held there, then there was a soccer camp which attracted more people. A baptism service was held to baptize 3 boys who were attracted by last year's soccer camp and began attending church after that.

Back in Romania, closer to home base, they held a teen camp for 55 teen age campers. Eleven accepted Jesus as their Savior, and 25 or 30 dedicated their lives to serving the Lord. Some of them became helpers for the kids' day camp that was held the following week, with attendance of 95 for the biggest day.

Now the family is on their way home, and will arrive in Portland, Oregon late tonight. We are giving them a couple of days to get their days and nights reoriented for the western hemisphere, and try to catch up on a little sleep.

Mary

We had a great trip to see our family, and Fritz is happy to be back home. It's not that he doesn't like us and our place, but he is much happier with more activity, more snacks, and a bit more freedom since they don't have livestock or rattlesnakes, so doesn't have to be on a leash whenever he goes out the door. We think he does miss the kittys though.

The weather was great for traveling both ways and while we were there as well. Friday evening we had a nice dinner, followed by viewing of pictures from their ministry trip, and wedding pictures, all of which so far have been only moved from the camera to the laptop so the camera could be filled up again and again. We looked at them all rather quickly, with the laptop set for about 2 second intervals, but it still took more than an hour! At some point daughter will transfer them to her desktop and begin to edit and organize them. She just has to find the time.

On Saturday we were treated to a wonderful Belgian waffle breakfast with fruit and yogurt to put on them. Our daughter was celebrating her birthday a month late since she was in Albania on the actual date, so the girls did the cooking all day. We scalded and sliced peaches for drying, and when both dryers were full we went back to the fruit stand to get more to scald, slice, sugar, and freeze for pies! We also bought corn for dinner and some other vegies for salads.

The girls baked 2 chickens with tasty herbs, made a green salad with about 6 things besides lettuce in it, cooked potatoes and green beans, and the fresh corn on the cob to go with it, and served 9 of us with a pleasant candlelight dinner, complete with fancy glasses of sparkling cider and a bouquet of flowers on the table. After dinner, we went outside to the fire pit where they had a very small, 1 presto log fire, because it is fire season and the grassy fields are quite dry. After a lot of visiting, as more guests arrived, there were more refreshments, gifts for the birthday lady, and the cake which one of the girls had made. By then it was after 10pm.

They are all still fighting jet lag, but was is getting better after being home already for 2 days. They all stay up late, so we were glad that everyone was ready to call it a day before 11 pm, which is late for us.

Sunday we had another great breakfast with Scottish Oatmeal Bread instead of toast, plus a great variety of fruit, yogurt, and scrambled eggs for those who wanted them. We went to church, then had lunch with them before going to see the newly married couple's house which is about 10 minutes away, and sort of on our way back home.

Traffic was very heavy in the Portland area, with summer winding down and not many more free weekends before school starts, it seems that everybody who had fled the scene was returning home on Sunday afternoon. Once we got out of the Portland area, traffic thinned out and there were no more delays. We arrived home just before 10 pm.

All the animals were taken care of by our neighbor, and I could see improvement in Bullwinkle's feet from when we left. AmandaPanda kitty was very happy to see us. She romped around the house and rubbed on our legs, and even seemed happy to be held for more than 10 seconds!

Night before last the deer got into my vegie garden and sampled a few things, including the grapes which are not ripe enough for them yet so they didn't eat many. Netting is now in place as of this morning, so we think we will get the grapes when they finally do ripen. The stinkers also like my yellow summer squash, and had chewed holes in three of them. I think I will spray some deer repellent on the leaves of the plant, and hope it will discourage them from sticking their heads back under it to find the goodies.

Yesterday morning I took Patch to the vet to have a follow up ultrasound done on his leg. After almost a year with very limited riding and lots of rest, the vet says it has healed up very well, in fact, he couldn't even find the injured place in the tendon. I watched the screen as he searched over the leg about 4 times, and it all looked perfect. So now, very late in the season, I will take him to a couple of rides before the season is over for our region. The next ride coming up is a very hard mountain ride, so I will probably skip that one and go to a desert ride later. He needs more conditioning before we do 50 miles to minimize the possibility of a new injury. Meanwhile, he has been getting his vaccinations updated.

Mary

This picture is from last year at our granddaughter's college graduation. The color is a bit off, possibly due to the heat, sunburn, and all the red gowns and hats in a small area. This is the granddaugher whose wedding we attended about 6 weeks ago. The old folks in the picture are my hubby and yours truly.

God's Warrior

What a beautiful picture of a precious and quite lovely family. I can hardly wait to see how beautiful she was as a bride. How are they doing, by the way? More pictures wanted when you get them from your daughter, PLEASE.

Mary

Cooler and partly cloudy, outside temp is 55, inside is 68, so not a bad start for the day. Last night we had a nice breeze, so just opened the house on both ends and let God do the air exchange without any fans running. The box fan we use in the dining room window for an exhaust fan is noisy, so it was nice to have everything quiet enough to be able to hear the crickets. I also heard a coyote yapping and the neighbor's guard dog barking at it. He is one of those big white dogs that stays with the sheep. My hubby built a doghouse on wheels for him, and when the sheep are moved, the doghouse and dog also go to the new pasture.

The tomato plants need to have the tops clipped out of them and water reduced to tell the plant it is time to ripen all those green ones. I read about the water just after watering them very thoroughly, so kinda bad timing on that. They are all growing under plastic so will take a while to dry out.

My homemade, improvised mellon rind traps are not catching much anymore. It's hard to believe, but I think between them and the yellow plastic traps that are designed for catching wasps, hornets or whatever bad bee types are around, I might have just about wiped out the population in the vegie garden. The homemade trap was nothing but a cottage cheese carton lid turned upside down with a piece of mellon rind on it. When it was covered with wasps I carefully put the carton down on the lid, made sure it was secure, picked it up and put it in the freezer. Frozen wasps were poured into the burn barrel, and the trap went back to catch more.

I baited the plastic traps with watermellon rind, and they were much slower to attract than the chunks of rind on the cottage cheese carton lids, but now they have started to work, possibly the first few captives made noises or sent scents to attract others. Once they had a few, others showed up much more quickly. I'll freeze them to kill the critters, then rebait them to attract wasps away from the grapes which are starting to get a bit of color.

Bullwinkle was found to have a draining abcess in one front foot last week, so I have been soaking it in a bucket with epsom salts water twice a day, then packing the wound with brown sugar and iodine. I do this when I feed him so that he his willing to stand with his foot on a pad of hay with the medicine for quite a while before he wants to move. If you are curious about the sugar remedy, you can find a lot about it by doing a Google search for brown sugar remedies, or for sugardine. It's antiseptic, and draws out infection. Nothing can live in it. Besides that, it's cheap!

His progress has been up and down, up and down. He is now walking fairly comfortably, and yesterday was standing at the fence when I went down the hill to feed him, pawing the ground impatiently with what was originally his worst foot! Pawing was a very good sign! While that foot was healing up, he stood on the other front foot and made it sore. That is the one I'm treating now. His hind feet did show signs of leakage around the coronary bands, but that has dried up now. Hopefully, we are over all the bad stuff. Today I plan to enlarge his pen with a hot fence allowing him the use of some of the dry part of the pasture. He will not be allowed green grass or green weeds, as that may have contributed to or caused his problem, or it might have been the Cushings Disease which has a side effect of laminitis and founder. I planned to enlarge the pen before now, but thought I had used up all the fiberglass posts to anchor the grape nets. Then I found a few more.

It's a good day to take Patch and go out into the hills for a long ride. Last time I went it was 95, and I was sunburned and feeling the effects of too much heat and not enough water, not quite sick from it, but getting close. Yes, I will be more careful.

Mary

Here is a link to an article in our local paper which is another chapter in the story from April, the continuing tragedy of wolves killing livestock. The ranch where most of the livestock was killed is about 15 miles from me. Wolf tracks (probably from the same pair) were seen by my neighbor at his pond and confirmed that they were wolf tracks by the state fish and wildlife department, less than a mile from our place this summer, but they didn't do any damage in my neighborhood. Thankfully my neighbor's sheep were a mile away in another direction when the wolves made their exploratory visit, apparently they only wanted a drink of water, and turned around and went back the way they had come. It did make us all nervous for a while though.

http://www.bakercityherald.com/Local-News/Rancher-issued-per...

Just to clarify a bit about the wolves, no they are not starving. They have several million acres of wilderness where there is an ample population of deer, elk, moose, mountain goats, bighorn sheep, besides smaller critters such as racoons, beavers, squirrels, rabbits, other various burrowing types like mice, and ducks, geese, etc on the mountain lakes. They will also catch fish in shallow water. These have been their traditional food. The west is a very different place from the eastern part of the country. The wildlife experts say this pair of wolves are rogues, and that they are not behaving normally. They are young and healthy. One of them was trapped, fitted with a radio collar and released. The biologist took blood and other samples, and determined by those and the appearance of his teeth, that the animal was healthy and young. The other wolf is a female, about the same age. Sort of a Bonnie and Clyde pair.

A few years ago, the starlings were stealing the cat food from the dish I keep by the back door. So, I put a 5 gallon bucket over it, on it's side with the opening toward the house, and the cats have to go into the bucket to eat. No problem with the birds any more. But last night when I was going out to bring in the dish for the night, there was a raccoon's hind end sticking out of the bucket! Time for the live trap again. And I had better call my neighbor who has chickens and warn him that we have one lurking about. It's always something.

More wasp nests have been located and sprayed, and I've replenished my supply of cans of wasp killer thanks to the local store that has them on sale this week. It's a different kind, it makes a foamy place for a couple of minutes, trapping the wasps in the mess while the chemicals do their job. The other brand was just a liquid that dripped immediately, but the dead wasps came down with the drops.

This afternoon and tomorrow morning I'll be helping my neighbor round up and move cattle. The yearlings need to come about 6 miles down to the ranch to graze for a few weeks on the hayfields before they meet their destiny, and the cows with calves need to go to the pasture where the yearlings have been. I'll go a bit early today so I can work Patch on the hills before we start to move the cattle.

Mary

When I got up the temp was 50, the sky was bluish with a few streaks from jets from Mt. Home AFB south east of us in Idaho, a couple of stars still visable, a tree along our driveway and some utility poles silouetted against the sky, and the earth still looking very black. Now the sky has lightened to a peachy pink. The foothills in the distance have pine tree silouettes against it. Mornings can be really beautiful.

Now, I'll warn you, this next part will make you sad. You could just skip it. I wish I could.

I've been on the phone with the vet's office and others. I woke up at something after 1am, and didn't sleep much after that. Thinking about Bullwinkle. He has an occasional better day but none of them good, and none of them will ever be much better. It is just the nature of Cushing's disease. He has spent more time off his feet in the past few days than he has since I brought him out of the pasture 3 or 4 months ago. Winter is coming, and we just can't go though it with him in failing health, snow, wind, below 0 temps, no stable, etc. So, the time has come to face the unpleasant event and get it done. When I fed him this morning, I told him he wouldn't have to hurt and stagger around fighting for his balance much longer. It took a long time to come to this decision, I do not give up easily. His appointment is next week.

Other factors come into making this decision. He is at least 20, maybe as old as 25. Horses don't have a normal life expectency much beyond that. His weight has dropped considerably in the past 4 months, although he eats more than the other 2 horses. It's harder for a thin horse to keep warm, so he would have to wear a blanket all winter because he only has a shed for shelter. He is loosing strength and coordination in his hindquarters. Keeping water thawed out for him would be a problem. If the snow is deep this winter, he would have a very hard time getting around. There would be no place without snow or frozen ground to lie down. It's best to end it now. I'll certainly miss him, I've had him for at least 10 years and he's a real sweetheart.

My neighbor came by to settle up our lease/work agreement. Grazing is figured by the head per day, then there is my lambing hours, other misc days like when we shear the sheep, minus the price of the hay we get from him. He owes us enough to pay for taking care of Bullwinkle.

Ok, now happier things again.

Today I have been doing a lot of weeding in the big flower bed. Weeding is good therapy, but now it is 90 degrees and too hot to be out there for very long. I'll work on it more after it cools off, and tomorrow before it gets hot again. The last forecast I read said hotter tomorrow than today. And we thought summer was over when we had several days when it only got into the middle 70's, and down to 38 one night. It will happen soon enough.

God's Warrior

It is so sad when we lose our animal friends. There are lots of special ones in our lives that we can thank our good Lord for letting us have and enjoy for however many years they have to live on this earth. My prayers are with you at this sad time and I know that you know that what you are doing for your 4 legged buddy is the best thing for him. We can't do more than that no matter how badly we might want to. I am shedding tears of sorrow for Bullwinkle and for you.

Love you.

Mary

Yesterday was a sad day here. We finally had Bullwinkle put to sleep. He had suffered far too long while I tried to fix him, and last week when he was barely able to walk on level ground, I decided we just had to do it. So, yesterday the vet came out at the same time a big truck with a box that has wheels on the rear and a hydraulic hoist on the front arrived. The box was pushed back so that it was only a few inches off the ground at the open end, I lead Bullwinkle in, we turned him around to face the door so he could not try to back out when he got the injection, and about a minute later he was gone and not hurting any more.

It was a hard thing to do, and I am still crying, but it was the right thing, just maybe not soon enough. I had planned to take him to the vet and have it done there, but was afraid he would fall in the trailer, and also was pretty sure he could not step down out of it. So, I had to have them come here, but the last thing he saw was home. He also got to eat green grass for about half an hour while we waited for the truck, and he got one last carrot, too.

He was such a good natured horse, and even though the months of painful feet, he was the same sweet guy whenever I went to doctor him, feed him, or brush him.

We picked the elderberries this morning, so now I'm making juice. I'll have about 6 quarts when I'm finished. It's going into glass gallon jars which I will freeze until this winter when a lot of it will become jelly to be given away to the neighbors for Christmas gifts instead of so many baked goodies. The house will smell wonderful again when the snow is flying past the windows!

Somebody on another forum said it is just 100 days until Christmas. That doesn't seem possible after 3 days of 90 degrees when I was weeding.

God's Warrior

I am sitting here with big tears flowing down my cheeks. You did the right thing and the only thing that a good pet owner could do. Our four legged friends don't live as long as we do and it is so difficult letting them go but such is life if we want to have the enjoyment of pets. Some of our pets turn out to be the ones we remember the best, just like people, and that is only natural. Bullwinkle will go down in your mind as one of the very special ones and so it should be. It is good that you can say of him that he was a wonderful horse and that you shared many great memories with him. I am praying for you and for the sorrow to ease up really soon and then there will just be good memories. Love and hugs to you my friend.

Mary

If you read my 2009 Endurance Ride entry, you know that I had a painful ride last Saturday. On Monday I went to see the chiropractor, and today had a follow up appointment. Not so many things were out of place today. I had been thinking about doing another ride since I am more comfortable again, but he says it would be the wrong thing to do before my muscles, ligaments, etc, get accustomed to my bones being where they belong again, and it would probably be a painful ride and would set me back to square one. Well, then, so much for that goofball idea!

The gardens will get a lot of attention again this fall, they certainly need it. I've been working on a 3 ft wide strip with a few rose bushes in it, and a lot of grass and weeds. The ground is so dry I have to water it, wait for it to soften, then pull or dig out the weeds. Slow going, but I did manage to fill the big wheelbarrow. Those poor rose bushes need more tlc to produce much. I always think I'll take better care of them next year. That is one bed where I should use that Preen with the herbacide in it next spring to prevent the weeds from sprouting. If I put annuals in, they will need to be decent sized plants. In the last few years we have just let the sunflowers from the birdseed sprout there. Under it all are roots from a big tree. The poor rosebushes hardly have a chance!

Today when we were in town I resisted the urge to buy any more mums. They look good for such a short time, they are not worth the money. Last fall I dug up and potted about a dozen of them to save them from winter kill. This spring only one sprouted any leaves, and it is wimpy, with only 2 stems and a handfull of flowers.

Yesterday, hubby and I built a cute little rail fence around a flower bed that is at the end of the greenhouse. It's not part of the yard, and is in a class by itself. Several years ago I planted lots of gailardia, Blue Queen Salvia, a large fall blooming sedum, some calendula and a whole corner has a variety of succulents. It's reached the stage where I only need to water it about every ten days, and it requires minimal maintenance. I've wanted to fence it for years. The fence is made of old fenceposts salvaged from the pasture fence that was torn down and replaced this summer, so the materials cost nothing. It looks cute. You'll eventually see pictures, just not today.

God's Warrior

AWWWW! I want to see pictures. Yeah, I know. When you get the camera'computer glitches fixed you will post more pictures but can I stand the stress of waiting? Yeah, guess so but it won't be easy.

I am glad you are holding off on riding for now. You take such good care of the horses but you have to remember to take care of YOU also. Smile

Mary

Brrrr! This morning our thermometer said 32 degrees. Snow or rain showers had been in the forecast, but it didn't happen here. We did see snow on the lower hills between us and the 7 to 9,000 ft mountains. It's definitely getting to be fall here, even though we had 3 days of 90 degrees and one 85 degree day last week.

We picked the grapes today, and got more than we ever have, by far. Usually from our 3 vines we get about 30-40 pounds. Today, we filled 5, 5 gallon buckets, weighed them and it added up to about 125#. We'll weigh the buckets when they're empty, probably about a pound each, and figure the difference. I have 14 quart jars getting a bath in the dishwasher, and will process juice tomorrow, and maybe the next day and the day after that...

The last of the green beans were picked this afternoon. Surprisingly, there was no frost damage that I could find in the garden, but tonight is supposed to be 4-5 degrees colder. I cooked ham hocks with green beans for our dinner, yummy good without much fat. I think I will cook the rest of them that way, then bag them up in zipper bags and freeze them. It's easier than canning and I have space in the freezer. Meanwhile, the beans will be happy enough in a big bowl in the downstairs fridge, until I get more ham hocks.

Tonight before it got dark we were watching it snow on the hills between us and the mountains to our northeast. The maple tree in our yard has brownish leaves, the lombardy poplars are turning gold, and leaves are dancing in the wind, both on the trees and on the ground. The Virginia Creeper vine on the rail fence is bright red with blue berries.

Breezy is starting to grow a fuzzy looking coat, Patch still looks slick. The outside cats seem to be eating a bit more, they put on weight and grow nice thick coats for winter. Just before dark I saw the black limpy stray cat coming up the hill for his nightly raid of the catfood dish. When I went out to feed the horses, I saw a fox hunting in our neighbor's field. He saw me and froze, then lay flat on the ground like Border Collies do in the down position when I turned my head toward the horses. When I looked back, I had to hunt for him.

I went to the chiropractor for another adjustment this week. Not too much was out of place. He said come back in a couple of weeks for a tune up. Today I was very comfortable, and fairly active. I'll keep doing those stretching exercises every morning and night. He says I can ride the horse, only to limit my time to an hour, and come back soon if anything seems to be out of place. Progress!!

Mary

It seems that I have a pet ladybug. Yesterday when I was washing grapes to make juice, I saw a ladybug, so I rescued her and put her on a plant on my windowsill where I have seen mealybugs. She crawled up a leaf and found her lunch, then later I saw her in another place. This morning I saw her again. She seems quite content to crawl along on this one plant, eat a bug, take a nap, and do it all again.

So far, from 4 of the 5 buckets of grapes we harvested, I've got 35 quarts of juice, and still have another bucketfull to do tomorrow. I appreciate the bountiful harvest, but frankly have to admit, I am getting just a bit tired of grapes!

Today I unpacked 6 large boxes of freight at the coop. It was almost all bottles of vitamins. Every item needed to be checked against the invoice, then have a date label stuck on it before it can go out on the shelves. I never know what I will be doing when I go there. I just show up and ask the director what job is on the top of the priority list.

God's Warrior

Love the ladybug story. You need a bunch of those in your greenhouse. Do you still have your bug eating frog? Our frog finally left our under the house plant area and came out by way of the door that we leave open in the hot summer time. He had completely gotten rid of all the basement crickets that had plagued us for years and he had kept all of my houseplants cleaned out from bugs and slugs also. We are getting a substitute for him soon. My granddaughter who is in elementry school has a frog that has been her school project for quite some time and she is bringing him to our very special frog paradise and he wouldn't even have to find a place to hibernate this winter.

Mary

Several frogs live in my greenhouse. When I see one elsewhere I move him. They are little guys, some almost an inch long, so it takes all I can find to do the bug patrol. We still see the lady bug every day, but now have to hunt for her because she is expanding her territory to other plants. I wish she had stayed where I put her because there are still mealy bugs on her original plant, and if she doesn't eat them I'll have to get out the Q-tips and the alcohol so they don't become a problem.

The total grape juice tally is 47 quarts, plus about a pint or more that we drank as soon as it cooled. I was very happy to put the last of the jars on the shelves in the basement, clean up the juicer and put it away. After our apples finish ripening I might be getting it out again, or I might make applesauce, but in the meantime, the flower beds are getting my attention. The tree that produces the most apples has a lot of fruit on it, small apples, not tasting good yet, but after a few frosts they will be better.

Frosts, oh yes, we have had 3 or 4 of them already. Early this morning the thermometer said 26, but one recent morning it said 24. The vegie garden is toast except for a few beets, some swiss chard and the potatoes, and some kohlrabi that might not have turned into purple rocks. A few of the deer got brave and came back, are now eating the leaves off the grape vines, and leaving me a bit of fertilizer. It's not a bad trade. They have also wandered through the yard and left a present there, although they don't appear to have nibbled anything. It isn't because they are hungry, it's just because they can.

The leaves from the maple tree in the yard turned yellow and fell in great profusion on the lawn when we had a couple of days of rain and wind. It still surprises me to see gold there instead of green, even after a couple of days. I don't rake them, they'll blow into flower beds and become insulation for winter, then mulch, then fertilizer. God's plan is a good one, and it saves me work, too.

Hubby got new hearing aids yesterday, and now tells me that the world is a noisy place. Running water makes noise, plastic bags make noise, I slam doors and stomp my feet, the cat meows, birds chirp, he talks on the phone with a normal voice, we can have a conversation in the car, and the best part of all, the TV volume is turned way down and not blasting ME out of the house. More than once I went to bed and put the pillow over my head just to be able to go to sleep while he watched the rest of a movie or a game. Life is good!

God's Warrior

I had a much bigger frog doing duty under my house but he probably got tired of living there all alone and went seeking companionship. He did a fantastic job. Wonder how long it will be before the basement crickets overrun us again. All that grape juice just sounds wonderful. We gave up on grapes because the birds just made it impossible to gather them and covering them meant always getting birds untangled from the netting. Alas and alack, we now have to buy our juice and jelly.

Praise the Lord, your hubby has a good hearing aid. It will make such a big difference in his life and in yours also. My mother was hearing impaired almost all of her life (childhood illness caused the problem) and hearing aids were not very good back then. The batteries were a real nusience and ran down quickly. She died in 1962 at 52 years of age and I don't think she ever had one that did a very good job for her. They make really good ones these days so that is good.

Mary

Rain. And wind. And only 38 degrees. It's not what I wanted, but what I got today. The cows and calves in the field just to the east of us are clustered in a corner near a gate, have been there for a couple of hours. The storm drove them in that direction and they would like somebody to open the gate for them so they could just keep going. It isn't going to happen, although one little guy managed to get to the other side of the fence through a little gap, and now he can't figure out how to get back.

One of my recent, and thus far unfinished projects, has been to dig out and dispose of a patch of very large weeds that grew up in my vegetable garden while I was looking elsewhere. Soon I will be needing to rototill the garden plot, and I sure don't want those thousands of weed seeds in the soil. Just the ones the wind dislodged and those that fell while I carefully dug and removed the plants will be enough to supply me with weeds there for the next few years. Two of the worst offenders are a mallow that is known here as buttonweed, and elsewhere as cheesewheel or something close to that name, and pigweed which is in the amaranth family and has quite large, almost feathery seedheads. Another, less abundant one is lambs quarters.

When I got tired of weeds, there was another project waiting: transplanting asparagus plants from an old row next to the grapes, and far too close to them. Of course, before I could plant them in the gaps in my newer asparagus rows, they needed to be dug out. It wasn't an easy job, but eventually I got about a dozen of them moved and gave them a good drink of water in their new locations because the soil is quite dry. There are still a few more, but for next year at least, they get to stay where they are and I will try to keep the weeds and quackgrass around them to a minimum.

The flower beds have also recieved some attention, and parts of them look better, which makes the untended parts look worse. It's something like washing part of a wall. Hubby helped me cut down a couple of lilac bushes that were making one corner of the yard too crowded and too shady. At first I was only going to trim the old wood out and shorten them by half, but as I got started trying to cut the 1-2 inch in diameter stems with the loppers, I decided the job needed a chain saw. I have 7 more lilac bushes, all the same color, so they won't be missed, and meanwhile, the iris and daylilies planted near them will have a good chance of blooming next season. The lilacs will come back up from the roots, so it will take some diligence to keep them cut down. Like weeds, they aren't likely to give up easily. As I have said often, gardening is the art of causing some plants to live and others to die.

God's Warrior

Speaking of weeds, and we have many healthy ones right now, I am often amused at how hard some of us work to grow plants that are pretty much considered weeds in some other parts of the country. Beauty is truly in the eye of the beholder.

Mary

Today is going to be pickled beet day. I dug and pulled out the last of them this morning. I wish I had done it yesterday because last night we got more rain, and the soil was quite muddy. The water trough that catches the overflow from the spring makes a good place to wash and scrub them, even through I have to bend over in an akward position to do it. Spraying them with the hose on the lawn would get me almost as wet as the beets, and even though it is a sunny day, the wind is blowing and I got cold enough doing it the way I did without being wet.

Now the house smells quite earthy with the beet roots boiling in my soup kettle on the stove. The kettle holds 16 liquid quarts, and is almost full. I think I'll just put them in gallon jars, pour the vinegar/sugar/spice mixture over them and let them sit in the referigerator for a few weeks while we eat our way though them. I've done that before, nothing bad can live in that much vinegar.

My neighbor's three horses are in a field on the opposite side of our driveway from my horses, so they visit with 30 ft between them. When I looked out the window a while ago, all of them were sleeping in the sunshine, almost lined up along the fence with heads all going the same way. I thought about taking a picture, but decided that if I had walked out there, they would have stood up. Mine are happily picking at the green grass that emerged after we had some rain last week followed by a couple of warm days. There isn't much there, but is is fresh and green. It keeps them busy trying to get a mouthfull.

Hubby has been cleaning up a row of miscellaneous things that have accumulated along the fence line in the orchard pasture. When we don't know what else to do with large, outdoor items that might be useful some day, that's where they've gone. So, over the years there was been quite an accumulation of 55 gallon drums, pipe of various types, cement forms that we thought we might use again someday, partial rolls of field fencing and barbed wire, old barbed wire that was salvaged off an old fence years ago, etc. It was a good sized pile when we moved here in '93, and we just added to it. Weeds have grown up through it, and the large cottonwood trees along the fenceline have dropped limbs and leaves on it. What a mess! But hubby loves to organize things, loves to clean up messes, so he is having a great time. The local dump will take all the metals, no charge. The cost of hauling it to a scrap metal place would cancel out the price we could get for doing it.

Just think, our rusty wire and pipe could come to you in the form of a shiny new car! I always wonder what things like that used to be.

Mary

We got rain today, not like most of you folks get, but it is the wet kind. It started while I was working at the coop, sometime between noon and 3pm. Today was a little bit interesting there because I worked with a different product. Gelatin capsules. Empty. People buy them and put ? in them. We have them in the department with the bulk spices. I know some use cinnamon and also red pepper. Not sure why, but that's ok. 100 of them weigh .03 pound, counting the plastic bag I put them into. I just got curious about that and the scale was right in front of me.

Anyhow, they come in a bag that says it has 1,000. So I made 10 labels on the computer, and started pouring them out onto a tray and pushing them into a bag with a knife. 5-10-15-20-oops, now they are building up some static electricity and extra ones want to follow the ones I have counted. Basically they act almost like styrofoam beans and in addition are much smaller and transparent. What a labor intensive job! The bag of 1,000 actually had 1,192 in it, so I made another bag and another label. I had thought ok, count out 9 bags of 100 and just pour the rest into another bag. Wrong. I could see that there were a lot more. So I had to count them, and put the extras in another bag in the office to save in case the next 1000 is short. The other bag had 1,021. I'll probably be pushing those things around in my sleep! They come in 2 different sizes, 0 and 00, both small. The thought crossed my mind that these things behaved something like cows!

The big news at the coop today was that we have the possibility of moving the store into a different building, closer to the center of town! There will be a membership meeting next Monday evening to vote on it. I plan to be there. It sure would be nice to have more room and better storage, maybe a walk in fridge, who knows. Just having more space would be nice. I'm not sure if they see this move as a permanent thing or temporary until we build a new building on property the coop is buying near the present location. Either way, better facilities will probably increase our ability to supply the public with some unique products, like gelatin capsules! Actually, most of our inventory is unique.

Chiro admitted he might have overadjusted me last time. I need to back up here to say that I went in Tuesday for a minor tune up and in a couple of hours was very stiff and sore. Time didn't help it, so I went back today and he twisted me into a pretzel again and hopefully has everything lined up right now. Fold this leg over that one, pull this arm out and fold over the other, push here, pop! Nothing hurts when the bones move, but I can hear and feel them, sort of like a large version of knuckles popping. Shudder! I always hated that sound. I still have sore muscles tonight. Hopefully they will settle down in a couple of days. At least I am far more comfortable than yesterday!

Yesterday afternoon I rode Patch for the first time since my painful endurance ride last month. The neighbor needed to move a bull who had jumped a fence when they tried to move him a couple of days before. Patch and I got there a few minutes early and moved him for about a quarter of a mile, but then we came to a gate and waited about 20 minutes for the neighbor to join us and move him the rest of the way, including across the county road. During that time the bull decided he wasn't going any farther. He turned around and went at a hard and determined trot back to the corner where he jumped out, and rather than run him through the fence, or give him an excuse to jump it again, or to run over Patch and me, we let him go.

Plan B to get him moved is just to leave the gates open into adjoining fields and let him get curious and move himself. 2,000 pounds of lightning fast beef on the hoof is definitely something to respect! You might remember the joke about the 500 pound gorilla being able to sleep anyplace he wants, well, this fellow is times 4 and is capable of moving very fast! As the saying goes, the ball is in his court.

God's Warrior

Those gelatin caps have saved my sanity more times than I care to tell. If you have an animal that is good at managing to upchuck bitter tasting pills, they can be worth more than gold to you. My cat can salivate to the point of almost drowning anyone nearby and having all that foamy mess to look forward to every time you have to give a pill they hate makes those caps lifesavers under such conditions. Just pop the pill in the empty cap and woola! Success! Sometimes you have to cut the pill up a bit but it is worth the effort.

Mary

Good idea! I have wondered why they don't make fish flavored cat pills.

Mary

We made it to Boise and back safely, yesterday. Hubby's test was an echo cardiogram, very interesting to watch his heart beating on the screen while the tech took pictures of it for the cardiologist to evaluate. The Doc wasn't even in the office complex, he was miles away at the hospital, so we will hear from him later and might have to make another trip, or maybe not. The tech, although he couldn't tell us anything officially, said Hubby's heart would put most 50 year olds to shame! We take that as very good news! The results will be sent to the local Doc, and maybe we won't need to make another trip to Boise. Round trip takes about $40 in gas. We did take advantage of visiting a HD store, and a Walmart, and also having a nice seafood lunch at our favorite restaurant. It was a good day!

After we got back to Baker, we had dinner at the Chinese restaurant, then went to my 7pm meeting for the food coop. We will be moving the store to a larger building, less rent, more space, better location. I think the timing is good, our sales are up 11.3% even with the bad economy. The move will take place in the week between Christmas and New Years, with our annual inventory happening at the same time!

Mary

It snowed! Maybe not in Alaska, but here it did today. The ground is white, the trees still have green leaves, and it is just plain strange! Tomorrow's forecast says mixed rain and snow. Will the garden ever dry out enough for me to rototill it this fall? It's looking doubtful. Maybe we won't ever get the Indian summer we've been expecting. It's strange weather for October. Usually we don't have snow covering the ground for about another month.

On a more positive note, I am thankful we aren't in Colorado where they have 3 ft of the white fluffy stuff! Nothing like putting things in perspective!

This morning the clouds just had a little hole in them for the sun to peek through for about 2 minutes. It cast pinkish splotches on the hills and disappeared for the rest of the day. While I watched the sun, a coyote trotted across the pasture, stopping a couple of times to sniff the air, and he was gone over the hill about the same time the clouds hid the sun.

I haven't finished digging my potatoes, so this morning after it started snowing I went out and dug about 5 more hills of them. They are planted in the ground and have several inches of straw over them, so are insulated well enough to prevent freezing for a while. Some of them have critter nibblings on them, and today while I was digging I found a gopher tunnel leading right into one of the hills. If I dig a few every day, eventually I'll get them all.

As of yesterday, the bull was still happy where we left him, but maybe with this snow on the ground, he might be easily moved by giving him some alfalfa every day, and making him move closer to the gates we want him to go through. The neighbor said he did take him a little hay one day, and saw him eating it, but the next day he didn't go give him any more because he was busy with a project. It would take a few days. There is still plenty of feed out there, so it would be like baiting him with a treat every day. "Here Bully, Bully, come get your treat"! Horses will paw through the snow to get at the grass under it, but cattle do not, so if there is more snow, success will happen faster.

The fire in the wood stove kept the house nice and toasty today. I cooked a pot of pinto beans and will add onion and tomatoes. I'll make cornbread too, we haven't had any cornbread for months, it's a winter thing and my eyes tell me it is winter. Hopefully, tomorrow they will tell me it is not.

God's Warrior

BRRR! I can't believe you have snow already. I can just visualize you out digging the potatoes in the snow. Brrr again!

We have corn bread almost every day and never tire of it but of course we southerners are like that. Smile

The pinto beans, onion and tomatoes sounds like a winner. Think I will fix that tomorrow too. I will have cornbread too. Sometimes I pan fry it in small pancakes and put chopped onion in the batter. Sometimes I put left over corn in the batter. Tomorrow it will be with left over corn. Love the idea of a wood stove and we are preparing to have one installed very soon. I always liked cooking on a wood stove.

Mary

Yesterday we went to do banking, stopped at a couple of other places, made a quick run through the grocery store, and came home to put the groceries away and had lunch. Then we were off to sell our load of scrap metal, 1800 pounds of it. They unloaded it with a big magnet, a disc about 3 ft in diameter hanging from a big trackhoe. Before they got to us, it was picking up big bites of metal from a pile with a 4 clawed thing, that could have picked up our truck! Then the operator had it grab the magnet, plugged a cord from the magnet into the boom of the trackhoe, and carefully took the load out of our pickup. I sat in the truck cab and watched through the window.

The magnet is activated electrically, so after it was placed on top of our load, suddenly the metal rose up and stuck to it, then it was picked up and the machine swung it out away from the truck to drop the junk on a pile. It took about 4 lifts and 2 or 3 minutes, to empty our truck.

On the way there and back, about an hour trip each way, I was reading an old book by Catherine Marshall, titled To Live Again, which starts with her loosing her husband suddenly to a heart attack, and how she adjusts to life as a widow and gets a book of his sermon's published. I'm only about 1/3 of the way through it. It is a book I believe Sharon who writes here in the Writer's Corner, would like, as Catherine had wanted to be a writer before she married, and never thought it would happen. In those days, after WWII, not many women had careers, so she didn't persue it until after her husband died. She went on to author about 20 books of her own. I plan to read several of them this winter.

Today started out at 22 degrees. Our snow only stayed a day, so I need to dig more potatoes and more weeds. It's laundry day too, I will wash 2 loads and have then ready to hang up when it gets a little warmer. The sun is shining, the wind isn't blowing and it looks like it will be a nice day.

Tomorrow we will be gone all day, another adventure, maybe.

Mary

It was a kind of long day, but a good one. The first tractor dealer, in a town about 2 hours from us, was a young fellow, not too familiar with all the available equipment, so he had to make a bunch of phone calls and ask questions. Their inventory was pretty low, but they did have a snowblower in almost new condition, so we have made a tentative deal on that. It's 6 ft wide, so a couple of passes on our driveway would clear it of snowdrifts. The problem is, Idaho has sales tax, and we don't want to pay it. They say it doesn't matter if we live out of state and they deliver it, we would still have to pay it. We say nonsense, so we'll see where that deal goes. A little time might make them see it our way.

Then we went back into Oregon, to another tractor place about 50 miles from the first one. They had a much bigger inventory. The salesman is in his 60's and has worked with tractors as a farmer and with the dealership for a lot of years. He knows what implements fit which tractor, how it all works and where is is sitting on the lot. We bought a little tractor with a front end loader, a backhoe and a rototiller! The little tractor will run all of them. We have a loader on our big tractor, but it doesn't fit in small spaces. We have lots of uses for the backhoe and the tiller on this tractor will be better able to handle our clay soil, plus, I won't always be able to wrestle the troybuilt tiller to turn it around, so this equipment is a good investment. We'll never wear any of it out. They have an excellent financing program, no interest for 60 months. We knew just what we wanted when we went looking, and didn't have any pressure to buy anything we hadn't asked about.

We had lunch between tractor stops, then went to Home Depot, and got home after dark and dinner time for the critters, who were glad to see us. We never did get down the road to Boise and the Penney's sale. That would have taken another 3 hours which we didn't have. It's just a long ways from anywhere to anywhere else in our area.

Mary

Last night just before I went to sleep, I could hear a fox barking. The voice is lower pitched than a coyote but not quite like a dog. Three quick barks, repeated over and over with maybe 10 seconds between each series. Was he getting an answer, or just hoping?

A few days ago, while reading the ingredients list on a package of rye crackers, I thought, rye flour, water, salt, yeast, hmm, why does this 9.2 oz package cost almost $4.00? No reason that I could see. The coop store sells rye flour, so yesterday I bought some, and this morning I made a batch of crackers. There are many recipes available online for crackers of all kinds, but I didn't find one that had all rye flour.

So, using the basic recipe I found as a guide, I modified it a bit, used half whole wheat flour, half rye, cut down the oil by half, and added a little yeast. Now they are out of the oven, broken into rectangles and squares along the score lines I drew with the point of a knife before baking. They weren't very dry, so I put them back in the oven for a few minutes, (still around 400 degrees) and after 10 minutes I turned the sheet of dough over and left it in the oven for another 10 minutes. That helped, so I called them done, broke them into pieces and put them on cake racks to cool.

The flavor is more whole wheat than rye, but good. I took a sample out to hubby who is burning weeds today, he said they are good. However, I will try again, using white flour instead of whole wheat, because I really wanted crackers that taste like rye crisp.

I washed sheets and planned to hang them outside to dry in the sun and gentle breeze. Hubby's weed burning project put an end to using the clothesline today. When he started, the wind was blowing the smoke away from the house, but just before I headed outside with the basket of laundry, I noticed it had changed direction. So I changed direction too, and the sheets are drying on the folding clothes rack in the living room by the woodstove.

My vegie garden did get dry enough to rototill, thanks to a few dry days with a bit of sun and a lot of wind. So, I pulled the tiller out of the shed and did the job, finishing up when it was so dark I could only see the edge of the garden where the dry grass starts. It might be the last time I use the Troybuilt tiller to do the whole thing, since we will have the small tractor in a few days. I had wanted to do the job with the new rototiller attatchment, but didn't want to take a chance on the weather. The forecast for the next few days isn't too promising, however, it said mixed rain and snow today and we have sun, a fairly clear sky and no precipitation at all so far.

Mary

The only precip we have had since I rototilled the garden was just a light shower. So much for the forecast which said we would have the possibility of something falling on us for several days.

We now have the little tractor. It was delivered this morning. I drove it around a little to get familiar with the controls, filled it's little bucket with weeds (dumped yesterday's wheelbarrow load from the flower beds into it) and took it down the hill below the garden to deposit the load on the burn pile. There are a lot of things about this tractor that are different from the big one, so I will be a while getting comfortable using it. We moved a few things around in the hay shed to make room for the little fellow. Big and little, sitting side by side, look like Mutt and Jeff.

Yesterday morning just after daylight and before sunrise, we watched 2 young does in our big pasture. One jumped the fence into the smaller pasture, then walked along the outside of the rail fence looking into the yard. We stood still and watched, with the house lights out, while she made 3 trips along the fence, looking for the right place to jump, but also watching and probably communicating with her friend. We watched as she stopped and wiggled her big fuzzy ears. She also had quite a good crop of white chin whiskers which showed up very well from about 20 ft away with the sky getting very light behind her.

Eventually the other doe jumped into the small pasture and walked about halfway to the yard. That gave the first doe confidence, and she jumped into the yard, nibbled at a rose bush and made her way across the back sidewalk and around the house. She'd obviously been here before! The other doe was thinking about jumping in, so I went out and chased her away. Boing, boing, BOING, over the fence she went, and they both ran across the small pasture, jumped the other fence into the big pasture, and ran over the hill out of sight.

Mary

On Wednesday, hubby raked a bunch of dry weeds away from a couple of our old trees, made a couple of piles a safe distance away and burned them. In late afternoon the weather changed and we got some rain, more rain or snow forecast for overnight, and 25 degrees. Thursday morning the cat knocked something over at 5am, I got up expecting to see a plant from the windowsill on the floor, nope. I went back to bed for another hour and listened to the wind. When I got up again, I looked out the window, and behold, there was a tree on fire!

Things and people moved fast after that! We strung out hoses, one had ice, so had to get another one from the shed, found a couple of those pistol grip nozzles that direct the water so well, one needed a washer, hubby squirted water on the tree while I found a washer for the other nozzle, and finally we were able to attack it from 2 sides, which got rid of the flames and produced lots of smoke. The old tree has been there for over 100 years, behind the old house we tore down, and although the thing is still alive, it has hollows in the trunk. The fire was inside the tree more than outside. Sort of like a giant chimney fire.

After we knocked the fire down, we were peering through the thick smoke trying to find the hot spots. Of course we couldn't see much, so could only stick the nozzle into the tree trunk, angle it upward and squirt water all around in the cavity. From time I could hear the fire flare up, and then a kind of sizzley sound when I hit the right spot with the water.

I got the tractor and raised hubby up in the bucket so he could squirt water downward into one of the higher holes that was spewing a lot of smoke. When we couldn't see any more hot spots, we came into the house for dry clothes, finger thawing and something to eat, then hubby went back out to continue the assault. Every couple of hours for the rest of the day we sprayed water on everything. I shoveled a big wheelbarrow load of charred wood and sawdust out of the center of the tree. This tree is certainly old, it is about 8 ft in diameter at the stump, and has a huge hollowed out, charred center, large enough that I could stand up inside! However, it is not my idea of the perfect tree house. That tree, along with another black willow about 20 ft away, shaded the old homestead house for many decades. The newer section of the old house had newspapers on the walls under the wallpaper, dated 1897.

As I was doing one last check of the tree on Thursday night after dark, I spotted a hot spot in a 2 ft in diameter limb. It was above any place where smoke could get out. I squirted water toward it through a small opening about 10 ft off the ground and could hear it sizzle. The wind had stopped and so I hoped that either the oxygen supply would run out, or the water that got into the cavity would put it out. While looking for hot spots behind funny little ribs of charred wood, I spotted a couple of tin cans, pulled them out and there behind them, completely covered with wood from the outside of the tree, is a big round metal thing. How did that get there? On the outside of the tree, near that place, is a rusty piece of barbed wire.

If the tree dies, well, how could it live after this?, we will make firewood from it, but will borrow our friend's metal detector before we attempt to cut into it. Who knows what else might be imbedded in that tree?

Thurdsay night I didn't sleep much, got up several times to look out the window to make sure everything was dark out there. In the morning daylight, I could only see one small wisp of smoke escaping, and by mid morning there was nothing.

Apparently the fire from the weed piles got into a tree root and followed it to the tree overnight despite the rain, then burned through into the hollow trunk where it had more fuel and wind to fan the flames. Anyhow, no harm done, but we both prefer to wake up in a more leisurely manner.

So we went off to town to do our volunteer things, took hubby's heavy, wet, sooty and smokey jacket to wash in the front loading machine at the laundromat, and did some major grocery shopping, including a 20# turkey for 23 cents a pound that is big enough to feed the family that will visit us for Thanksgiving and stay until Sunday. He is frozen solid, and went directly into the freezer to rest for a week before I need to start thawing him. One of the supermarkets has this kind of special price on turkeys if the customer spends at least $50. That is very easy to do.

While we were in town the snow started, and by the time we started home, the ground was covered and the streets were getting slick. We have just enough to cover the ground here. Overnight temperature last night was 20, and the forecast high today is 32, so it won't be going away. We can't remember a year when the snow came and stayed this early. It must be the result of global warming. Ha!

Mary

Warmer temperatures and wind melted our snow, so we are back to greens, yellows and browns for a while. Snow and rain are in the forecast for the next week, and although the forecast said 80% chance of that wet stuff today, we haven't had anything but wind. This morning about 5 the wind came up very strong, some gusts shook the house. One of the odd things I noticed, was that the water in the toilet bowl was moving with the gusts as the wind changed the pressure in the vent stack.

Today I bundled up in my insulated coveralls that I wear during lambing season, and dug the last of the potatoes. They filled another 5 gallon bucket, that makes 3. After that I picked up windfall apples, filled 2 buckets with those. I'll be doing a lot of peeling, trimming and slicing to make cobbler sized bags of them for the freezer, and some applesauce. The horses will love all the trimmings and peelings.

Hubby was supposed to have an appointment with the heart specialist yesterday, but we got a phone message late Friday that it needed to be rescheduled. We had already made arrangements to drive back to Idaho and pick up a 6 ft wide snow blower that we will put behind our old tractor to clear our driveway this winter.

The next stop was Home Depot in a nearby town with our kitchen counter measurements. We selected countertop material, not formica this time, it will be granite! It's sealed and guaranteed for 15 years. It took quite a while before we decided what color, and since granite is expensive, and permanent, I sure hope we like it. The formica lasted 16 years and has chips along the edges in a couple of places, and it coming loose in other places, and also has knife marks where somebody didn't use a cutting board, and stains where the finish wore off. We will put 4 inch ceramic tile on the walls behind the stove, sink and around the corner where the coffee pot sits on the counter. It will start at the counter top and will be 7 tiles high. The kitchen will certainly look different when it is done!

Nothing will be done about the countertops until after Thanksgiving weekend because there isn't time before. We will have our daughter, son in law, their 4 adult children, 1 husband and 1 boyfriend here through Sunday. Our son and daughter in law who live in town will probably also be here at least part of the time, and also a fellow who is one of our extra kids who lived with us when he was growing up. Sometimes kids just need a family, this one did, and although he was about 20 at the time, he is slow mentally, so it was as if he was about 14. We are the only family he has, so he tries to get here for Thanksgiving and once or twice in the spring or summer.

After we did our deciding at Home Depot, and the clerk entered all our info into their computer system, we went to have a late lunch. We were hunting for a certain place, drove past it, then went down the street a couple more blocks to find a place to make a U turn. And in so doing, we found a nursery we didn't know was there, and decided we had to check it out after we had full tummies.

It is a family owned and operated business, and occupies a building that has parts that were built in 1910, and some more recent ones, like the sunroom. This is no ordinary place, it has unique displays, and even an indoor gazebo with 1/2 x 1 inch wire on it, and song birds living in it! I would dearly love to have a bird cage like that one! They also sell bulk vegetable and flower seeds, their seed drawers are a set of old card catalogue drawers from a library, with oak fronts and brass handles. The store also carries a unique line of hand tools for gardening. We'll go back next spring. They gave us a beautiful calendar for 2010, and I told hubby that the trip would be worth it just for a new one every year! Of course we would have to make another trip in the fall for that, but I don't think we would mind at all.

Mary

About 4am I heard the sound of frozen precipitation hitting the windows, and since I wasn't sleeping anyhow, I got up to turn on the porch light and see for sure. We have about an inch or so, and now, after numerous sun breaks and more flurries, it appears to have stopped. Hubby says the forecast indicates that the next 3 days will be nice, and so it might go away.

Yesterday I was still working on cleaning a flower bed. I thinned out a bunch of wild roses along the fence, taking out the older canes. Now that job is almost finished, with maybe 5 more feet to go. I was running out of daylight yesterday, and had cold feet and fingers besides. The pile of trimmings is still on the lawn, waiting to be taken down the hill to the burn pile. I'm hoping for a few more days with decent weather so I can keep going on it, and dig out more weeds, trim the edges, etc. It still looks pretty shaggy in places. A couple more weeks of warmish, dry weather would be wonderful, but probably won't happen until about April.

Meanwhile, I am still working on those buckets of apples, slicing and freezing them for cobblers this winter, and I also need to make applesauce and apple butter. The house needs some cleaning before our family arrives for Thanksgiving, so there is no lack of things to do.

Mary

Here it is December already! How did that happen? Today is a beautiful, calm, cold, sunny day without wind. I've been working outside, and still have daylight so I will go do more in a few minutes.

We had a wonderful Thanksgiving weekend with the family. Daughter and son in law, and two of the girls arrived late Wednesday. One of the other girls (the RN) had to work until 11pm on Thursday, and the married one was at her inlaws for Thanksgiving day, so they left early on Friday morning and were here by soon after lunchtime, weary but happy to be here. The nurse's boyfriend is a theology student in Portland. He came with them and brought his laptop so he could write a paper over the weekend. We had our turkey dinner on Friday, then had plenty of leftovers for the rest of the weekend.

Saturday was a beautiful day, so we all got outside for some exercise and to trim some trees, burn brush piles, move firewood around, etc. In the midst of all that, hubby and I had to go to a memorial service, but we still had about an hour of daylight left when we got home.

In the evenings we played board games, and watched some movies. Being early to bed and early to rise people, hubby and I didn't survive the movies, nor did we try very hard.

Although we made some effort to have hubby's post heart attack diet be low fat, it didn't always happen. Pie in 3 yummy flavors just has to be sampled, but he didn't have ice cream on it, so that wasn't all bad. I made the dressing using vegetable oil instead of butter to saute' the onions and celery, and the turkey drippings were skimmed well before I made the gravy. He prefers white meat anyhow so the turkey wasn't a big problem either. Through the weekend there were several bowls of crackers, chips and dip, but he sampled those sparingly, so I think he came through 4 days of feasting without much damage to his diet.

Tomorrow (Dec 3) I will have a basal cell carcinoma taken off my face by a specialist in Boise at the skin surgery clinic. They have more diagnostic tools than my local doctor's office, and will be able to examine the removed tissue with very specialized techniques to be sure that all of the cancerous part is out. I've heard of people having their local doctor do the surgery in his office, and having to return another time or two to have the rest of it removed, and my own doctor told me he could do it or send me to a specialist, so I opted to have it all done right the first time. If you read this before tomorrow morning, please send up a little prayer for me. I know it is no big deal to some, but I am a real chicken when it comes to medical stuff.

Mary

Yesterday's sunrise wasn't much to look at, too much smog and a bunch of low clouds in Boise, but on our way home I did watch the sky turn bright gold above the Owyhee mountains where I have done a lot of riding, then turn bright orange before it faded away. We were in heavy traffic at that time, making all of 15 mph, and I was sitting there using a very cold bottle of water like an icebag. I missed the sunrise this morning. It's pretty cloudy but partly sunny, and started out at about 10 degrees. No more digging after several nights like that, the ground was almost two hard to get weeds out of two days ago, so my shovel can go back into the shed.

Here's an update on my day at the skin surgery clinic.

It went quite smoothly but was time consuming. First they got my face numb and did a biopsy, bandaged it, sent me back to the wating room. About an hour later I went back in and they removed most of the mass, put a pressure bandage on me and sent me back to the waiting room. The tumor is then treated with some coloring agent that turns the cancer cells a different color. By studying the edges of the removed material they can see if they got all of it, nope, they had me come in for another tissue removal, then more waiting. When they had me come in again they said they had it all out, and at that point sewed me up and I was outa there. It's 2 1/2 hours to go there, plus we had rush hour traffic in Boise, then when we left the clinic it was rush hour again. We got home about 6:30. We left here at 4:40am to be there at 8:30 Idaho time, an hour ahead of our time. A long day.

Wooooee! Do I ever have a colorful face this morning! My left eye is almost swollen shut, and I even have bruising on the upper lid and almost to my eyebrow! Good thing I don't have to go anywhere. And when I do, I think I will just tape a 4x4 gauze patch over the whole side of my face so I don't scare anyone.

The actual surgical site is about centered below my left eye, in that crease where we show sunburn when it doesn't show in other places. The tumor was about pea sized, half above the skin, and half below with deeper roots. I looked at the site with a mirror while the doctor explained what he would do to repair it. After suturing the wound together, inner and outer, he made a 1 1/2 inch diagonal dart going from the inside corner of my eye, getting wider at the surgical site, and narrower toward the earlobe. When I smile, that is about where the lines go, so after the color of the incision goes away, long after the bruises and swelling are gone, there won't be a very noticeable scar.

When my MD presented the options to me, I chose to have it all done in one day where they could determine if they had it all. Psyching myself up to have it done once was hard enough, without having to wonder for 2 months, have it reappear, do it again and again until all was gone wasn't an option I considered for more than about the time the doc took to tell me.

CajuninKy

So glad to hear the surgery went well and you won't be having to have it done again.

A shame about your old tree catching fire. If it could only talk it could tell you all about life at your place in years gone by. Has the property been in you or DH's family all those years?