BAD OMEN

This is the sight outside our front door today:



There are two buzzards sitting on the fence at the water trough.

I wonder who they're waiting for ...

A MOTHER'S LOVE

You probably already know I love my cows. I love the way the look. I love the way they sound. I love the way they smell. (NO, I don't mean the manure smell. I mean the sweet cow smell.) I just love everything about them.

Elsie and her boy are in the pen this week. Els is rehabbing a bad leg and her boy is just mooching. He's big enough to be weaned, but he puts up such a fuss twice a day (milk time) that I gave in and penned him up too. The bad news is that both of them are headed to town next week. Elsie's injury isn't something she'll get over, and the drought and good calf prices have demanded we ship calves a little earlier than ususal.

But they don't know that now! In the meantime, Elsie is enjoying her stay at Moo Motel - shade, hay, cubes, water - all within a short walking distance and without any competition. And her boy is loving a free milk meal whenever he wants.

Oh, and he's loving this, too:

(look at that milk foam in the corner of his mouth - pathetic!)

A mother's love is a great thing - no matter what species you are!

LIONS AND TIGERS AND BEARS! OH MY!

Here's what you'd see if you walked into our family room today:

What's that? You mean not everyone has an elk and a buffalo in the middle of their family room? Huh. I didn't realize that.



"What you lookin' at, Willis?" MOO.

CARDINAL BUFFET

I'm trying very hard to find beauty in the midst of this drought. And I'm trying to post in a positive tone, so as not to let on how desperate we feel for the need for rain - in case you're wondering why you haven't heard from me in a while. It's been hard to find the beauty and positivity! Rain, please. Pretty, pretty please.

We've been watching these cardinals feast for a couple of weeks now. It's a hoot, and a pleasant distraction from the struggles of finding hay, checking water, and so on. So I thought I'd share!

Big John's valiant efforts to save sunflower seeds for next year made it this far:

He harvested the largest, most promising seed heads and hung them on the fence. I think the next step was that someone (me?) was supposed to get paper sacks and bag the flower heads. Oops. And so the sunflowers have hung on the fence for quite a while now...

And then came the cardinals!

And they called all their friends!

And they have feasted gratefully on the forgotten sunflower heads!

It means we won't have any seeds saved for spring planting, but the cardinals are very happy! It's worth it!

UNCLE!

There wasn't much left.

Some spindly, thirsty corn;

some scritchy, scratchy okra;

(yes, I made up "scritchy")

and hot-as-firecrackers peppers.

Lots and lots and lots of peppers.

We finally cried "uncle" and pulled it all. All except my precious herbs. They'll be on the drying rack before too long.

The garden now looks like the rest of our land:

a dry

desert-like

barren wasteland.

WE NEED RAIN. 

PROS AND CONS OF SEWING

My new-found love of sewing



has sparked a new-found need for new shoes.

(And NO, shoe #2 and shoe #3 are NOT the same shoe - color counts.)

YIKES! I need to scout out hiding places before Big John gets home.

These are definitely not teacher shoes!!!!

BEFORE/AFTER

We came home from a wonderful day together a couple of days ago ....


to find water GUSHING out from under the back of the house. NOT GOOD.

Recently, Big John and I ran some flimsy wire garden fencing around the west and south sides of the house - the part of the house that's on pier and beam, the original part of the house. From the time we re-sided the house (1999 or so) until a couple of months ago, all sorts of critters have made the underside of our house their home. Chickens lay eggs under the house. Chicken snakes eat eggs under the house. Dogs escape the heat - or in Belle's case, thunder - under the house. Cats flee from wild tom cats under the house. Things die under the house ... you get the picture. It's a mess. We "fixed" it by running that flimsy fencing around it, and that seemed to do the trick pretty well.

I did notice a couple of weeks ago that Belle had managed to push hard enough to escape some gunfire she heard. Then the chickens found that hole and started to spend the days under there again. So when someone - or more likely, something busted a pipe under the house on Friday, that was the last straw. The flimsy fencing came down this morning ...

and beautiful lattice went up in its place.

Fixed. Once and for all! Or until something else happens.

And so it goes around here. Just another day of home improvement!