New Life Old Farmers

Tomorrow is our church’s Bazaar.  Bazaar’s are still done here in the country and in a small church like our’s everyone pitches in….making, baking and helping out in all sorts of ways.  The sign up lists are an impressive sight and I am often humbled by the willingness I see in others to serve.  Someone might have sort of signed up their Loving Spouse to make Cornish Pasties, like he did last year.  This works out  pretty well, as he likes to practice first, so we’ve been eating a lot of pasties and sausage rolls for dinner this week.

Last year his pasties never made it out to the selling table, insider information and private purchasing is legal at Bazaar’s as long as the goods make full price.  While most of the set up crew was trying to figure out what the pasties were, they’d been bought and paid for by the one Yankee who had an English grandmother and couldn’t wait to eat them.

This year My Loving Spouse has made twice as many.  I doubt these will make the official selling floor either, as many people now have had a year to try out some of his cooking and are a tad better informed as to what a Cornish pastie is.

…and dinner for us?  We’ve been invited out to The Palace (our favorite family restaurant, with wonderful food and old Trivial pursuit cards on the table) for dinner by Our Friend the Farmer.  This is really nice because,

…we are sort of full of pasties

…we love The Palace

…we love Our Friend the Farmer

…we love to go out to dinner, and this is our first invite out since we moved here….

If you’re in the area, here is my shameless plug for the Bazaar…go, it is tomorrow, Saturday Nov. 16  at Ellensburg Presbyterian.

If you’re working setting up today and looking for ‘insider information’… the pasties will be delivered about noon (wink).

My Loving Souse’s Cornish Pastie Recipe

Meat Mixture –

1 pound gr. beef

1 cup finely chopped carrot

1 cup finely chopped onion

1 cup finely chopped potato

2 tea spoons salt

2 tea-spoon  coarse ground pepper

Pastry –

1 pound flour, sifted

1/4 pound butter

1/4 pound lard

table-spoon salt

sufficient water to make into a workable pastry,

after fat has been rubbed into flour 

roll out thinly,

cut a round circle using a mid-sized plate

add meat mixture to middle, brush edge with an egg wash

fold together and crimp

Brush with egg wash

Bake 10 minutes at 425, reduce heat to 350 and bake for another 40 minutes

Delicious served with gravy!

A small note to a faithful reader,

who has kept her humor, spirit and optimism through years of chemo, chemicals, pills and procedures

be at peace, be free from pain

you have loved, been loved and will be missed

ZL

Pooh is the cat everybody likes, which is sort of an oxymoron in itself for those of us that are dog people.  Pooh also sees herself as a misplaced house cat, who spends a lot of time out in the barn.  Pooh has been known to make a trip to Fred Meyer, as one of her other favorite locations to hang out is in The Teen’s car.  She has even managed to perfect the art of ‘sneaking in’, closely followed by ‘settling in’.

There are a bunch of other cats who are fed here and who manage to keep the mouse population under control.  That is clearly their best feature.  My Loving Spouse is actually a ‘Cat Whisperer’ masquerading as a dog person.  He continually seeks out the opportunity to win over the more feral of the barn cats, his favorite is Rabbit.  Rabbit is a “beautiful cat” (the black and white Tom cat), according to the ‘Cat Whisperer’.  Yesterday, the ‘Cat Whispered’ was making inroads on petting both Rabbit and Roo (the mean black fluff ball), when Pooh came out of no where chasing them all off.  The felines scattered as she made sure everyone knew just who was next in line for the upgrade to house cat.

All I can say about our horses, is that it is a good thing they cannot talk.  If they did, we’re pretty sure, that the only thing they would know to say would be a ‘bad British word’!  One recent night, they managed to sneak into the barn and have a hay eating party.  Dixie even managed to get herself stuck between the bales of hay and of course…there was poop everywhere.  Oh, yes, they look a tad ‘sheepish’ (well not really like sheep-sheep) in this picture, but they are faking it.  Throw out a good pile of hay and they’d be on it!

Our black labs are happy pals.  Like good farm dogs, they go for rides in the truck, smear the windows, shed, chew on fire wood, bring loads of dirt into the house and know a good thing when they see it, called a warm soft bed.  They really are our favorite, as dogs, they are just always happy to see us, remind us we are loved always!

My Loving Spouse has redeemed himself as a true ‘dog person’.  Zoe, our pup has outgrown her baby dog collar and we’ve commented, never when we’re near a store, that we need to get her a ‘big dog’ collar.  This morning My Loving Spouse dug out his treasure box, the box he keeps with his bits that are near and dear to his heart….cards, letters, mementos, and at the bottom a leather dog collar from his beloved dog, Kipper.  He slipped the collar on Zoe and said, “Kip had a sweet nature, I don’t think she’d mind.”

And the cow… Elsie Gump… the three-legged bovine?  She is happy being left alone to chomp on a bit of Jack-o-lantern.

No, I am not used to ‘it’.  ‘It’ being Fall, I guess.  No, not the beautiful leaves and colors, but the gray cold, the grasses that are turning yellow and the trees that are mostly bare, and to top it all off with a day that ends with the sun setting at 4:30 pm and then it gets pitch black…really dark…and it is cold.  Well, truthfully, it was cold all day.  My face is chapped from the cold, as we’ve been running around like squirrels trying to get our nuts stored before winter or in our case…trying to get fences built, wood split, the dog room repaired, a quick trip to Yakima to get curtain material to sew.  Except there is no such thing as a ‘quick’ trip to Yakima…we’ve been scurrying about all weekend.  Making progress, but nothing is done, better, but done?  Not at all!

We had a plan…called fence until we’re too tired to stand or we run out of supplies.  We’ve managed to get 6 more posts in with 60 feet of fencing up and about 60 feet more to go.  We’re too old to work ‘strong’ and must work ‘smart’, succeeding in getting in the heavy fence posts using cunning and logic, all the while My Loving Spouse dreams out loud of a budget that includes a large crew of fence builders, to which all he has to do is issue instructions and point.  Since that is not our reality, our plan is to build the fence so sturdy and straight, that it will out live us.  We imagine how great it will look when painted and every crooked old fence still standing about the farm seems to cry out to me… “tear me down”!  All the rails came from the deck we removed, so some of our ‘tearing down’ is now actually going back up.

We’ve no lack of supervision as a few barn cats, Rabbit and Tigger, oversee the fence building operation.

We did end up running out of screws, so the work crew moved indoors, where we could not only keep an eye on the Sunday Football games, but we acquired a new ‘supervisor’ in Zoe the puppy, which was not a help at all!

The dog room, our old cold storage/fat room, lost most of its insulation when the room got leveled and the foundation installed.  ‘Someone’s’ dog ripped out the old dog door and so that room has been cold!  The dog room was getting an upgrade, and it started with a new ply wood floor.  Then a new ‘ugly’ door mat on sale at Lowe’s, which I installed outside around the trim.  This mat is sturdy and tough which is all we want!  As pet ‘doors’ are about $85, My Loving Spouse just makes our own…better and cheaper.

The second step was to build the pups’ a doggy tunnel, which will also get another ‘ugly’ door mat doggy door.  This will keep the wind and the cold from blowing into the dog’s room, keeping it warmer and cozier!

With just these adjustments, the dog’s room is already warmer for our favorite hounds.  Winter is coming, which I am really, really not used to.

For now, we people are pooped, the fire is warm and the wine is open….and tomorrow will bring….more getting ready for winter….nope, I am not used to ‘it’ yet.

I do love Pinterest, except when I don’t!  Some of the wonderful, stunning, beautiful decorating ideas for the home are just beyond me and my immediate reaction is, “Nice, yes, but who is going to dust it?”  Don’t get me wrong, I really do enjoy the creative, fun, and whimsical, wonderful ideas that are on Pinterest, but it can also make me crazy….like voices saying…’hurry up, get ready for Thanksgiving, Christmas is coming and you are not ready, your home does not look perfect yet and you are late.  Late, late, late…’ and then I must remind myself…ah, really?  It is only November 7, 2013.

We do have a beautiful home.  I do want it to look warm and inviting and festive, and I do recognize that this is mostly for me.  Most of my family will nod politely and say, “that looks nice”, no matter what I do, so keeping it simple is really best for everyone!  I decided that whatever I got done in one day, was going to be ‘good enough’.  The amazing part, was that when I stopped worrying about being ‘late’ or any other craziness, I really started to enjoy the creativity that comes with adding a bit of Thanksgiving decorating, and managed to dust a little along the way.

Pinterest perfect? Hahahahahaha…. I know it is not.  That is okay with me, this is for us.

My favorite bits are the hand-made clay turkeys made by little hands now grown….

….and our ‘gratitude board’ that we all do have a part in.  It is not perfect either, but a work in progress, just like me.

If you are not getting ready for Thanksgiving then you are probably our family in England and if you do not know what Pinterest is, you are probably Our Friend the Farmer and you’ll have to ask one of the girls in your family.

The Teen and I spent a surprising amount of time canning all types of goodies this harvest.  Both of us were neophytes, so we made a cozy, surprisingly competent team.  I could almost hear my mother muttering things like…”not quite so much, that looks good, are you sure you are doing it right and Wow, this is good.”

These are country apples picked straight from our neighbor’s tree across the street to our table, so our first step was to cut out the worms.  Luckily for us, we did not find any wiggling worms, just a few places where they had been.  Those apple pieces went into the chicken feed pile, as chickens are not as discerning about eating apple bits with worm particles as we are, in fact that is their favorite part.

Love the rose-red color of these apples!

For those of you who have made a lot of applesauce you are now probably screaming, “You left the skin on!!”  Well, it turns out that it is not just our country men neighbors that have all the neat tools.  Our Sweet Neighbor Sue provided us not only with the apples, but an applesauce grinder/saucer/make-the-job-easier-tool.  No peeling apples, very little waste!

We almost ran out of pots and room on the stove.  No, we didn’t plan on washing the walls of the kitchen afterward from all that steam, but the kitchen is a tad cleaner now, because of it.

How cool is this!  Applesauce on one side, skin on the other.  The whole job easier and a fun tool to use.  The Teen was a cranking expert.  We added just a tad of cinnamon and nothing else, for a wonderful sweet batch of beautiful pink applesauce.

 We feeling pretty proud of ourselves as our harvest canning combo came out to:

Applesauce
Beets
Piccalilli
Pears
Beans

Not too shabby!

We informed The Offspring, that we were having a work party weekend and they were ‘invited’ (conscripted) to join us in the fun.

“Woo Hoo”, they said…or something like it.

We are under the gun to get ready for winter and with one winter under my belt, I’d had some… concerns.  Hauling water to our growing herd with frozen hoses was not a situation I wanted to repeat.  All we needed to do was, dig trenches, add piping, install stand pipes and turn the water on…no big deal.

The first stop was (early in the morning) to pick up the ‘Ditch Witch’, a Bob Cat supper digger.  My Loving Spouse popped out of the truck went into the shop, saw no one there, came out and set off the bugler alarm.

“They’ve been broken into”, he told me, “the lock is broken and no one is there”.  We ‘called it’ in to the alarm company to alert them that we were the ones that set off the alarm, but the lock seemed to be broken.  He was instructed to remain in the truck and wait for the police.  A pair of Ellensburg’s finest showed up fairly soon.  They were a cautious, careful duo, who were not immediately won over by My Loving Spouse’s British accent, so he opened his coat to show them he was unarmed, explained what had happened and offered to pick them up some doughnuts, to which they were not amused.  Turns out the lock just looked broken, they hadn’t been burgled, they’d just forgotten to lock up well the night before, so we were back to our working weekend in no time flat.

We off loaded the Ditch Witch and started to dig in…literally.  We knew we had to be careful.  We did not want to dig up and sever the electrical that ran all the power for the barn, the garage and the woodshed!  My Loving Spouse informed us approximately where he believed the power lines to be, and told us all multiple times, that we were going to need to be careful.  It was a great relief to The Offspring and I, that when the power lines did get sort of completely severed, it was while My Loving Spouse was driving the ‘Witch’….(Bad British word).

The Ditch Witch digs a deep, narrow trench just right for a water line that will not freeze (we hope).  The trench is narrow…really narrow.  Luckily for us, Our Friend the Farmer, used this digger a few weeks ago and added an exceedingly thin shovel to his arsenal of digging equipment.  Knowing what we were up to, he dropped off the new shovel for us to use, which we did, almost immediately.

We’d hoped to add two new stand pipes one at each end of the barn.  We’d really needed to make use of our time this Saturday, so we were on ‘it’ no matter the weather.  Luckily, for us, it only rained a little, was cold (not freezing) and the wind only blew in the afternoon (cold wind…very cold).  Yep, it wasn’t all that fun, to continually lie in the dirt looking for leaks.

Somewhere along the dig, we hit what had to be an old ‘dump’ from years gone by, as we unearthed bits of pottery, glass bottles and the top of an old iron stove, to say nothing of wood, wire, rocks and old rusty nails.

We actually did have enough help.  The Offspring reported for duty with good attitudes and giggles, a welcomed change from when they were ‘younger’ and showed up with sarcasm and sullenness.  Our Friend the Farmer stopped by in the afternoon to check on his shovel and was soon bonding with his buddy, My Loving Spouse over the fine tuning of hose clamps and leaks.  I think it was everyone’s good attitude that contributed to the surprisingly small amount of ‘Bad British’ words being uttered.

At the end of the day, we were muddy, tired and wondering where the Advil was, but we were also delighted to stand back and say, ‘we’d done it‘ as the new stand pipe got turned on and the trough filled up easily and quickly.  A long day’s work, but so totally worth it!

As for the severed power lines… well, tomorrow is another day.

After ‘denial’ comes ‘acceptance’…

It was clear that I had arrived at ‘acceptance’ when I found myself ordering not one, but two firewood organizers.  Gone was any sense of my ‘denial’, ‘denial’ that the whole ‘cold’ season was a fluke last year and the need for warmth in the form of large, large piles of firewood a necessity.

If you’ve been raised by my mother, after ‘acceptance’ comes ‘preparedness’ to say nothing of ‘organization’.  In my ‘acceptance’, came the realization that the need for firewood, in the wood shed, on the porch and in the house, was our reality and the cute little fire wood baskets of last year needed replacement with hefty, large, useful and attractive wood storage system/s.

Set and ready and looking good.  Getting the hang of this stuff….bring it on….

We did it.  We got away, on purpose, to have fun, relax, rest and look at the ocean, just the two of us, but as soon as we saw the beach we thought…wouldn’t the dogs have fun here…and wouldn’t it be neat to ride the horses here… but that was about it, surprisingly (sarcastic font needed) no thought about missing the cats.  There is a lot of water (rivers, lakes, ponds, the sound and streams) here in Washington, but the ocean is still the ocean and there is nothing like the sight and sound of the waves.  My Loving Spouse just needed to refuel his soul and look at the sea and so we spent the weekend at Ocean Shores.

There was a brief, but expensive stop along the way at a Sewing machine store.  I am on my 4th quilt on a borrowed sewing machine.  I’ve been doing my research about the sewing machines the other quilters use and as helpful as they’ve tried to be, I was getting no where.  I finally realized, that they all pretty much love the brands they have and that none of them were cheap.  My ‘budget’ was way out of whack.  “Oh…”, I said, “It’ll be hard for me to buy one with out My Loving Spouse.  I’d never be able to spend that kind of money on myself”.  So we stopped at the store….looked around…got hooked by the salesman (who we really liked), did NOT buy the one that came with a laser…but fell for the floor model, which was on sale.  I received My Loving Spouse’s text half way through the selling ‘spiel’.  It can even sew leather and naugahyde (new seats for Whoa Nelly).  We’d spent more than we thought on a machine that has more than we’d ever dreamed…and for much of the weekend I felt both stunned and excited!

Ocean Shores is a small town with a big beach and one can drive right on the beach!  So of course we did…a lot!!  That in itself was quite unique and wonderful, driving by the cliffs and seeing how the wind changed the beach just over night with the ever-changing tides was quite an experience.

The tiny town was just perfect for us!  We poked around enjoying every store they had and were both surprised and delighted at the offerings.  The prices were good.  The content was interesting.  The humor brought out loud laughter often and it was a delightful time.  Oh, and we spent very little money, which was good given the whole sewing machine store stop!

I love these small stores strung so colorfully together.  What an improvement over a ‘mini-strip mall’ (and yes they had those too).

We clearly stumbled on the whole eating out in a new place.  We’d been advised to have razor clams and eggs for breakfast, which honestly seemed a bit more on the extreme clam eating learning curve than we were probably ready for, so Friday night at what looked like the the last ‘decent’ restaurant open on our way, we did try razor clams.  I’d been raised in the ‘clean your plate’ age, but still only managed to eat three bites of my razor clam fritters.  My Loving Spouse did eat his whole dinner of fried razor clams and then got to spend the night with them as they ‘revisited’ him often.  We were assured by the locals that if we didn’t like razor clams, we just ate at the wrong place, which I am sure was at least half-true.  Our dinner was topped only by our lunch the next day somewhere ‘nameless’ up the coast at what we thought was a road side ‘diner’, but turned into more of a ‘colorful’, tough, mid-life, loud, never-been-a-beauty queen, chic bar.  We did pay our tab, but otherwise, it was eat and run!  We did find the ‘right’ restaurant for us, but only managed on it at the last-minute, for a piece of pie (heavenly and reasonable) and yes, we’ll be back to the “Home Port”.

We drove along the coast with the forest on one side and the ocean on the other, with plenty of blue skies.  Small houses dotted along in different states of repair, some well cared for others old and aged, almost all decorated with different buoys rolled in from the sea.  We drove through part of the Indian reservation and I was ‘disturbed’ by the squalor that they chose to live in.  I say ‘chose’ as we all do have the choice to pick up after ourselves, keep our homes tidy and take care of what we have to live with.  I’d never really seen this up close and it made me sad and anxious to leave the area.

The Off Spring managed to keep all the animals alive and the house from burning down so we consider it all a success, especially as Elsie Gump took the opportunity to break out of the pasture and try a chomp on the roses.  Number Two Son became the cattle wrangler, mostly by making noise behind the three-legged cow to get her back into a more secure pasture….but whatever works!

We had a great time away and as always were glad to be home, greeted by a beautiful carpet of yellow leaves and …the cats.

‘We’ had a lazy fall day yesterday, except the ‘we’ was not I, nor was it My Loving Spouse.  It was our beautiful Beau.  The weather has been downright glorious, warm in the day..70 degrees, with blue skies and colorful leaves everywhere!  I wanted to ride my horse up on the trail and enjoy the beautiful day and the fall colors from a different view.  I scurried through my work and proceeded to saddle up Beau.  Beau already has started to grow a woolly winter coat, so I’d thought I’d made a good choice to take advantage of a ride while we still could.

I often feel as if I should pinch myself, when I think “I have a horse“!  No one on the streets where we grew up had horses.  Horse ownership in the town was available to only the very rich and those owners were knowledgeable and able, about what needed to be done in order to ride.  To find myself as the horse ‘readier’ still catches me by surprise, especially when I clean their hoofs and think how far I’ve come!

So with the fall beauty everywhere, I readied us for a wonderful peaceful ride.

Except it wasn’t…  Beau was being lazy.  He did not want to go for a ride.  He especially did not want to go without the other horses and instead of acting like a the proud and beautiful quarter horse he is, he acted like a stubborn mule (sorry, mule lovers).  He did a lot of backing up, when I wanted him to go forward, so instead we went around in circles.  I pulling his head around to move his feet and remind him/us who is boss.  We did move down the trail, but instead of it being the pleasurably, beautiful, relaxing ride I envisioned, it looked more like we were making figure eights down the trail as I had to keep after him about which way I wanted us to go.  By turning him in circles, it forces him to move his feet, especially effective when he is being lazy.  Noticeably this post is now lacking the plethora of fall trail ride pictures I’d anticipated.

When we got back to the farm, we did more figure eights.  This time around the barrels in our ‘arena’ and we did not go at a walk, but kicked it/him in gear and finally got into a nice ‘racing’ lope around reminding me once again how far I’ve come…even if I do still hang on tight!