morning presents

This past week we've been"blessed" with little presents left in the driveway. This morning I got quite the list (warning?) before I headed outside.

This is one of the two smaller field mice who've been enjoying the goose corn and my garden. Unfortunately it wasn't the bigger field rat. Hopefully if the dogs ever get him they'll drag it under the shed or something.
We've also had a dead bird, squashed frog, two unripe pears, a bream, and as of this morning apples (as sides to the mouse, I guess). Oh, and Bobby saw deer eating at the pear tree. Don't they know they're not ripe, yet? Perhaps they were just testing them for me. (yeah, right!)
Maybe tomorrow will actually be a presentless morning!

fireworks

Last night, right as I was about to hop in the bed, the sky lit up. So I did something I haven't been able to do since I was in my teens. I went and grabbed a few extra pillows, made myself comfortable at the foot of the bed, and watched nature's fireworks display. Didn't think to try and snap photos,just enjoyed the moment. It was wonderful! There were times the light seemed to come from under the clouds and illuminated every curve and depth of a cloud mass, then there were times it streaked around and across the clouds, then other times it stretched downward, and occasionally it was just a flash light. There was no rain, just the magnificent display of lights. The wildest lightning (non-scary, that is) that I've ever witnessed was what I dub an "electric storm". We never really heard thunder, but the lightning stretched continuously east to west and west to east across the sky. It looked as if the bolts were chasing each other. That was one of my favorite memories of something I did with my brother, though my Mom wasn't very happy to discover us laying outside on the ground watching! In my stupid defense, we knew not to sit or stand up, nor to be near a try or anything metal. Mother for some bizarre reason still didn't think that was good enough.
Do you think the Chinese got the initial idea of fireworks from watching lightning?

oh la la!

This morning we went with Mrs. Bryan to an estate sale in Spring Hope, NC. All the items listed I had been interested in purchasing sold before we got there, but we thoroughly enjoyed looking around both the house and the property. If we didn't have a place to live, or if this place were in Walker County, AL or in the mountains, we would seriously consider purchasing the place. The house is a log cabin, with the stair railings and upstairs door frames made from tree trunks and limbs. Every room had either a built in bookcase or corner cabinet (and I love both of those things!) and it had a ramp and level doorway on the first floor! Behind the house was an old barn that had once been a chicken house, a shed that had a small pen and two dog houses attached, and an old cow barn/shelter. The cellar/spacing under the house needed a little work, as did the sheds, (okay, and probably the house, too) but it was an absolutely gorgeous place. I don't think my mother-in-law would like living there, but she commented more than once that her eldest and youngest daughter would absolutely love it!
The only down-sides to the house were the limited wall outlets and light fixture attachments (which is why every single room had multiple candles, candle holders, and lanterns for sale! :)
As much as I've always dreamed of taking an old home and fixing it up to live in, and even though this house is very close to livable as is, the reality is we have a home that demands a fair amount of my time and energy. Not to mention that we happen to like the location where we currently are. But if Bobby retired tomorrow and wanted to move, this would be a really cool place to go. And maybe by the time we got it fixed up, we could flip it and head to AL.
Hey, a girl can dream, can't she?

6 month check-up

Well, by next Wednesday this year will be half-way over. While swimming laps this morning I realized I was listening to Christmas music. The range-of-motion teacher had her class stretching to it! It was quite funny, and also a little startling as someone asked me this past week if I had started my Christmas shopping yet. And for the second year in a row, the answer was no. (For new readers, I'm one of those strange people who normally shop all year long!)

This year's project list still does not have anything checked off. And I can honestly say that doesn't bother me. Life has been chock full of exciting, wonderful and even some boring things that have kept me very busy.

Some of the more fun things that have happened during the first 6 months of 2010:

• shopping at a nursery for church plants - I have always wanted to visit the Campbell's nursery on Tryon Rd, and searching for drought-proof plants gave me the perfect opportunity to do so. Even more fun was returning with Rahmatu to thoroughly check out the place. It's nice to have a friend who likes plants just as much, if not more, than I do! Next we're heading to some place downtown Raleigh. The not so fun part of this was digging out all the root-bound ivy in the old planters! I dare not count how many hours were spent on this!
  
• gardening & chickens - these on-going, food producing hobbies provides both entertainment and work! I could probably post something every week about the critters at our place, whether it be deer eating our pears, rats in the garden or broody birds!
• Apples of Gold - this 6 week class usurped my reserved quilting time and kept us up WAY past our bedtime, but the lessons learned where worth the very rough Friday mornings. I enjoyed the time, but was also a thankful when it finally ended and life became a little less hectic. I'm one of those strange people who really does not enjoy having every night of my week filled with something.
• And more classes! - I took a few quilting classes the beginning of this year, and thoroughly enjoyed them.

So what's coming up (Lord willing) for the last 6 months of 2010? Hopefully you'll finally be seeing pictures of some completed projects, as well as various stages of others. And of course they'll be a few more trips sprinkled in, along with classes, ramblings, and Christmas ideas. Onward 2010!

memories

This past weekend I had the wonderful opportunity to spend with my family.
There's nothing more pleasant and strange than doing things you did as a child, only as an adult.
As a child I always enjoyed working in the garden with my Dad. The only difference is that now I ask questions and discuss various ways to do things while working instead of waiting for instructions on what to do. The only down side is that it makes me wish I were closer so I could help them out more.
Another wonderful highlight was the news that my cousin's two teenage girls accepted Christ while at camp! I am SO excited for them as individuals and as a family!
One of the neat things from this weekend was the time with my 10 year old nephew and his 6 year old sister. We had what has become the normal "drawing challenge" where we all sit down with paper and pencils and Aunt Monica assigns a topic or item to draw, and the three of us draw it on our own piece of paper. The previous two times we were together we did this, and evidently it was important enough to them and my Mom that Mom had saved all our artwork from the last time and we had to pull out the folder and laugh at our pictures. Another wonderful highlight was that Mason had saved some of his better drawings in a three ring binder and brought for me to see. It was one of those special, but calm times that will always be in my mind.
But not everything was that calm. In the midst of the Alabama heat and humidity where walking outside makes your hair collapse and your skin "glisten" (the ladylike word for "sweat"), I took mercy on them from the upper porch and squirted them with water guns as they showed off their bike skills. Needless to say, we had numerous water gun battles after that.
And between the return trip home and my day of "work" at the polls, I've appliqued and appliqued and appliqued. On the way to church last night I started counting squares, thinking for certain I had enough to start piecing the quilt top together. Sadly, I'm 36 squares short. I'm going to refigure and recalculate before I sew any more, though. I guess my concept of time is another area where I take after my Mom - neither one of us is very good at judging how long a project will take.
Which brings me to today. Between the travel, erratic sleeping, and the early morning, late night of Tuesday and the rush to run errands and church Wednesday, today was the day my body said "Enough!" and repeatedly crashed on me. In between grocery runs, laundry, gardening, and minor cleaning, I napped. My body is still protesting, though not quite as badly. I began the iron enriched foods at supper, and we'll try to continue them on the next few days and see if that does the trick. There's nothing like greens, beans, and OJ to pump up the iron count and energy (or to give you gas!), but after all these years I'm finally learning that when fatigue sets in to this degree my iron count is usually close to depletion. And when that happens, my emotions quickly follow.
Meanwhile, Big Buff moved with her hind parts in front of the small door, so we relocated her to the old dog pen today!!! For the last 3 hours she has protested, squawked, and done her best to fly the coop, but has finally gone to her nest with the 6 eggs I allotted her. Hopefully tomorrow egg production in the hen house will return to normal and she can hatch out her biddies in her new location if she chooses. And I can boil an egg without any thought as to what might be inside. AHHH...the little things in life I so often take for granted!
And the summer brazenly and blazingly continues.

if

if I had to be a prairie woman in the 1800's, i'd probably die
if I had to work outside in the garden every morning, i'd probably die
or else be a whole lot skinnier and more exhausted
if I weeded my garden on a regular basis it wouldn't look so bad
if tilling the earth was easy God wouldn't have made it part of the punishment
if my tomatoes don't start ripening correctly i'm going to be one upset person
if it weren't for the fact that i have too much to do, i'd be heading to the store for a dr.pepper
it's too hot for chocolate
are you in shock that i actually wrote that?

returning to our "roots"

Aggression...it's been in the media quite a bit lately. Bob Etheridge reacting aggressively to aggressive "kids" on the street; a NC Republican chairman pushing a critical Democrat and receiving a nose punch in return, and a police officer on the news this morning for slugging a young woman after she shoved him.
I know we like to think of ourselves as a civilized society, but the reality is we're actually quite tame in comparison with historical Americans and other countries. It's not unheard of for Japanese and Korean governments to have out and out brawls during governmental meetings, and the US Congress in its earlier years actually had one Congressman cane another.
But the real clincher was the Confederate States of America Congress, where members accosted each other so much that it prompted then Vice-President Stephens to say it was a good thing their meetings were closed to the public and kept private "some of the most disgraceful scenes ever enacted by a legislative body." Among some of the assaults: Benjamin Hill of GA bloodied William Yancey of AL with his inkstand. During an argument, the Journal Clerk of House shot and killed the House Chief Clerk, and Henry Foot of TN attacked colleagues various times with the following objects: his fists, a bowie knife, a revolver, and his umbrella.
So comparing our past with today's "assault and atrocities", we're actually quite tame. I mean, what's a little punch in the nose or grabbing a person by the scruff a neck compared to being beaten with a cane, umbrella, or inkstand? I'll leave it to each individual reader to decide whether or not our society has actually become more civilized or wimpier. :)