New Life Old Farmers

I have been making bibs.  I have been making a mess.  I have been learning how to sew better and better…and making a mess.  I have been using fabric bits that I had on hand, which sometimes means digging through that drawer.
Or dumping a scrap basket on the ground to further enhance digging through it…Trying to keep my work space tidy, which is not happening.I tell myself it is a creative mess.I have been having so much fun, I can hardly stand it.  I sew until I am exhausted.  When I wake up in the morning, I cannot wait to begin again.This sewing of bibs is a side venture.  I heard someone say…do what you love…

There are bibs with dogs and bibs with cows.  There are no cat bibs…I cannot imagine buying fabric with cats on it.  If you have a problem with that, then you are a cat person and you can send me cat fabric and I will then make a bib with cats.Sewing makes me think about my Mom.  Now, my Mom could sew!  She could sew so well, that my friends could tell if clothing was store-bought or made by Mom, because Mom’s were always finer.

I was sure that sewing skipped generations, and I was sure it skipped mine… until my Mom was gone.

It makes me sad, that I did not discover my joy of this activity, while she was alive.  The distance sometimes between mother and daughter can be a tough one….I feel as if I have left her out somehow.  So, in honor of my Mom, I am calling my little line of bibs…

Betty Bibs

I am pretty sure she would have loved them…especially the dancing cows!

I have a tough commute.

Out the driveway and down the road…three miles, no turns.  Number Two Son’s commute to college is down the same road and another block to school…that’s it…straight and simple.

However, this is the country…one never knows what a commute may bring.

Monday morning it was a tough one.  In passing a local farm, there was some…activity going on.  However, the ‘activity’ was happening near their sheds at the side of the road.  (Can I just tell you, that I need new glasses.  If I had new glasses, I may have been able to see this coming).  The dispatch truck was parked by the side of the road and had a steer hanging from it.  Yep, it was the day for butchering.  It looked like….

Oh, come on!  You don’t think I’d show you that do you??

Once I realized what it was , I practically ran my car off of the road!  I felt like a true city girl and wanted to wash my eyeballs out.  As soon as I got home, I asked Number Two Son how his commute to school had gone.

“Oh, gosh… I recognized that truck and knew to keep my eyes averted”.

Oh, shoot he is more savvy that I am.  Smart boy.

Good planning dictates that one would clean their chimney before they need the chimney.  We’ve never done this before (the good planning part), we usually wait until the darn chimney doesn’t draw any more and then freeze while My Loving Spouse climbs on the roof and sweeps the chimney.  It is not freezing yet, so it would seem a good time to sweep the chimney, except…My Loving Spouse has just finished recovering from a month-long leg infection.  (We are thrilled and grateful that he does not need two more surgeries on THE Knee and appreciate each and every prayer you sent our way).  Call me crazy, but it didn’t seem to me, that the way to celebrate this was for him to climb up on the roof!  There was some discussion (argument) about who was going up onto the roof to sweep the chimney.  I won the discussion (argument), by pointing out that I was now completely ladder ‘savvy’ after spending all summer on ladders painting the house.

In just minutes, I was scampering up the ladders and onto the roof top.  (All definitions of ‘scampering’ will be defined by the ‘scamper-er’ and any adjustments to the definition of said ‘scampering’ can only be made by other females my age or older who are also willing to ‘scamper’ up ladders as high as these).My Loving Spouse had told me during the discussion (argument),

“You’ll have to stand on the roof”,

but what he meant was, that I’d have to stand on the roof edge!

“Oh, yes, and don’t grab the chimney…some of the bricks are loose.”

Okay…check.  Stand on roof edge… do not grab the only thing around to balance…oh, and yes, it was windy….well, not Ellensburg windy…just breezy.  It was at this point that I started to think about which direction to fall, should I loose my balance.  However, I have learned a lot about ladders this summer, and so I then insisted we add one of our ladders that can collapse over the ridge of the roof.This additional ladder gave me something to stand on and I commenced sweeping…Which is actually hard to do…even if the view is pretty incredible….I’d have to say, that I don’t like chimney sweeping…I don’t feel lucky, (as lucky as can be)…but, it is done!  We can burn the wood stove as the weather cools and commence enjoying fall, and most of all we are grateful.  Grateful that My Loving Spouse will not be down for 6 months with continued surgeries.  As he shared with our church family, the English saying… ‘If you’re upright, you’re all right’.

I might be strutting around the farm just a teeny tiny bit this week.  After selling my steer Bob and now growing for THE Vineyard, I am feeling like a proper farmer…being rewarded for raising my two favorite things…cows and pumpkins!

THE Vineyard is preparing for their harvest festival.  They were so busy tending to the grapes, that they did not come up with a good crop of pumpkins to use for decorating for the festivities.  THE Vineyard turned to the Best Pumpkin grower in Kittitas County…or they turned to The Guy Who Works There’s Mom Who Is Always Talking About Pumpkins…  It was one of those…

The pumpkin selection process was a tad tricky, as this grower is waiting to have THE Grandson here to pick out his pumpkin or pumpkins depending on the love level of his 1-year-old pumpkin picking skills.  I picked pumpkins for them that had actually grown outside of the fence…saving them from the dogs and the chickens.I washed them off…and had them inspected.I loaded them up and delivered them to THE Vineyard.THE Vineyard was duly impressed and rewarded my pumpkin growing skills with gold…or with wine, which is sort of the same thing.Number One Son commented that I got the better deal…but then again he hasn’t actually been out to My Great Pumpkin Patch yet.  I am preparing him to be amazed…and if he isn’t…well, I do have hope in his little son.

Angus Roberto Walton or ‘Bob’ as we lovingly called him (when he wasn’t getting out) made me a sort of ‘official’ cattle gal.  I had a cow, Agnes and she calved Bob, which grew my herd.   Bob grew…and Bob got out.  Bob liked to eat bananas….and occasionally, Bob got out.

Bob is a Black Angus.  Black Angus are raised for meat.  We were going to have a problem eating Bob.  …and so we did what made sense, we sold Bob. When the buyer came, I chased Bob down with the bike and moved him straight into the loading shoot and right into the trailer.  I acted like I knew just what I was doing…and the truth is…I do.  The buyer got a good healthy steer and we got a good price for him…which really, really makes me a true Cattle Gal…and a little bit sad…and a little bit proud.

Good bye Bob…and we wonder…. if he’s gotten out yet?

The last few days…the last few weeks have been one of those…serious…ugh, more bad news kind of times.  Grief in so many that we care about for loved ones now gone.  Cancer returning in sweet souls and worry…

I must ‘be real’…

My Loving Spouse was ill over two weeks ago and is still not completely well.  The leg with THE Knee is not okay.  There is some sort of infection and where or what it is doing is still an unknown.  It is getting better, but still something is not right.  We get to practice patience as we wait on tests.  I get to practice patience with The Patient.  I know I am being assisted by the Lord because so far I’m doing pretty well and quite honestly I did not get the ‘nursing gene’.

I am a woman of faith.  My theology is fairly simple.

Thank you Jesus for loving me.

Love God…love others…love self.

…and in times where I can fall off the cliff of worry, I cling to the simplest of phrases from The Lord’s Prayer…

“Give us this day our daily bread”…(although I think there should be a ‘please’ in that phrase)…I am reminded that in ‘daily bread’…I can stay in ‘today’ and know that I do have all I need…just for today.

My Sweet Neighbor Sue is the Garage Sale Queen.  Garage sales here have a season, Spring to Fall…and then that is IT.  My Neighbor is hard to beat to a garage sale.  Sometimes we do not even have to go to the sales, she just finds stuff she thinks we might want and calls it in.  We then give her a thumbs up or down.  She knows about the sales…and this weekend it was a sale of…wait for it…fabric!  This entailed a full-blown assault…we packed up the group and got there early.  We all found some good stuff and didn’t spend too much, which of course is the whole point.  The sale was on the other side of town.  You don’t just drive straight home on Garage Sale Saturday with the Garage Sale Queen…you follow the signs…or in my case I followed these two.I followed them to a very large garage sale…at a cemetery.  I am not kidding!I might have mentioned to them a few dozen times that people in California do not have Garage Sales in a Cemetery.

There was the usual garage sale stuff.All great finds for….someone…maybe…?There were cemetery people doing cemetery stuff.The Garage Sale Queen found old Army Radios…a true find!  Her husband has his own little fleet of old army trucks and now he’s got the radios to go with them, very impressive.  I was excited for him.You never know what you’ll find at a Garage Sale.  I might not even know where I’ll find the garage sale!

Crow is a chicken.  Crow is good at sitting on her eggs until hatching.  Crow is a pretty good mother hen.  Crow needs to get a life.  It is fall.  We are not hatching anymore eggs this time of year.  We have enough chickens.  We do not want anymore chicks, check back with us next spring.

Crow has gone broody.  This means she is sitting in the nesting box on any eggs she or anyone else hatches, except some evil human (me) keeps taking her eggs away from her.  Still, as she is very bad at egg counting, she continues to sit there.  My Loving Spouse says she’ll probably do this for about 21 days (the number of days it takes for an egg to hatch).  In the meantime, we do what we can, which means removing her from the nesting box.  I take her out via the back door, because I do not want to be hen-pecked and her beak is always pointing toward the front door.I take her out and plop her on the ground…and there she sits…as if she doesn’t actually know she has been removed from the nest.As Our Friend the Farmer says,

“It is no wonder chickens are at the end of the food chain”.

In my quest to get the house painted, I got ‘off balance’.  Depleted and tired, not from working, but from the single-mindedness of doing one task.  One task, that I do not care for, that kept me from the other tasks that I enjoy.

The proof of my ‘off balanced-ness’ was shown in my absence here…

No regaling you of the amazing-ness of this years pumpkins, oh be still my soul!  You just wait…this years crop could be the best ever, they are so good, My Loving Spouse has stopped rolling his eyes when I mention them.

No tractor driving work…or tractor driving problems…not enough tractor driving at all.

Not enough stories about calves…how much cuter two are than one.  How much more trouble two can find than one and how much harder it is to put two back where they belong than one…Very little sewing…which has become my creative medium…

Very little time to play croquet or ride our horses…which has become our fun.

Very little progress on keeping the house clean, oh well…somethings just do not change…

I am glad… and proud… and often find it unbelievable that we got it done…like everything, it took a price.

Perhaps, I am in recovery mode…

Very soon…you will hear about pumpkins…horse rides…croquet…

Cleaning the house…hmmm, I don’t think so.

Fall is here…with school, football, cooler days…my favorite time of the year…I am looking forward to it all…getting myself and my soul back in balance.

May you be blessed today.