New Life Old Farmers

When I moved here, I had a very clear, well-defined personal reflection on the subject of sewing.

“Sewing skips generations”

and it skipped mine.

I didn’t like to sew.  I could do it and had a few (very few) projects to my name that I enjoyed making.  My kids learned to take their important mending projects to their Grammy and then even to My Loving Spouse. I had heard of quilting groups and maybe, possibly rolled my eyes a teeny, tiny bit.  Moving to the country did not really change my image of that at all. I did, however, move to a town where I had not one girl friend.  This is what we call a desperate situation, where one is forced to take desperate measures.  I was invited to the quilting group at church.  I told them I don’t really sew, that phased them not.  I told them I really don’t know how to quilt.  They were undeterred.  Oh, we’ll teach you.  I went quite honestly, because I knew enough to know, that I needed girl friends, and if I had to sew a bit, well so be it (pun intended). I was ready to join what I assumed would be a quiet, pious bunch.  Luckily, that was not the case.  What I did join was a group of gals with a love for fun, teasing natures, great senses of humor, creative talents, a love for God and amazing gifts of sharing and caring, did I say fun? There is a funny little room at our church built into an upper alcove for a previous pastor who needed ‘quiet’ to meditate or write or whatever.  This funny little room had become a random storage place until one of the quilting gals got an idea.  A really, really great idea that had sharing all over it!  Another quilter had a long arm sewing machine (the machine one uses to do the actual quilting) she was happy to have at church and teach us all how to use it!  As these machines are quite costly most of us quilters would never have the means to buy one or the space to store one.  Not only was she willing to share, she was excited to share, to teach and to encourage us. Using the long arm is a bit like free form doodling on fabric, but after all the work put into the quilt, it is both nerve-wracking and exciting.  My friend quilts for her first time on her son’s wedding present. My first quilt for ‘us’, not a gift of service a fairly big job, because I didn’t know what I was doing.  I took on a harder project than I realized, making up my own pattern.  It really wasn’t until I got my new sewing machine, that I realized why my new friends like to sew/quilt.  It was easy to know why I kept showing up…I liked being with them.  They helped me each step of the way… occasionally uttering a few, “Ut oh’s, did you mean to do that?”, then helping me out of whatever jam I’d gotten myself into.  With all of their help, my first quilt for our home goes through the final stages… In the long arm for quilting, with the lady bug fabric for backing, as we still have a LOT of ladybugs who like to hibernate inside here.  There are two reasons to add quilting. 1.  It holds the backing and the batting all together. 2.  It hides a lot of the mistakes. Off the quilter and ready for binding… The quilt is now at home on the bed it was planned for, and I’d have to say that was the only part of the ‘plan’ that I actually ‘planned.  Patching bits of fabric together is fairly forgiving.  I am proud of this quilt where I did all the steps myself, but what it reminds me of is the great gift I have received…. the acceptance, the encouragement, the fun, the laughter and the love which has been so freely given to me from the quilting gals, my new friends…and I am grateful.

We built a sturdy corral yesterday, which means putting up more fencing, dealing with tractors and very heavy posts.  We’ve finally found a way to make the whole fence building process an awful lot easier…get someone else to do it!

I was shocked at how much faster and simpler the whole project went when there were 4 young adults working on the task.  My Loving Spouse had explained how easy it can be to break a tractor using a post hole auger, so The Offspring were more than happy to have me in charge of driving Jubal and digging the post holes, not to mention supervising (stupidvising).  Just for the record, no tractors were harmed in the making of this corral.

Number One & Four Sons hauled out the rail road ties, making the whole process look easy and light, which truthfully,  it is neither.

This is one sturdy, straight corral.  Team Offspring made it look pretty easy, but I think it had a lot to do with the appropriate ‘supervision’ I provided.  Whatever, we are very, very grateful that the kids wanted to help.  Having it up before the snow is even better and now we just need something to put in it….

Like most American households we are getting ready for Thanksgiving and the day after Thanksgiving, dubbed by Number Two Son as ‘Next Giving’ (my favorite day of the year).  We do not celebrate Black Friday, because…we sort of don’t like to shop, we sort of don’t like crowds and we’re not organized enough to know what we are buying people for Christmas.

We are especially looking forward to Next Giving day, as Number One Son has to work on Thanksgiving, so we will not be together until Next Giving Day.  This year’s Next Giving Day event should top all previous year’s as it is the official Close of The Glory Farm Croquet Season.

There has been a fair amount of croquet played here this season.  Fair warning to anyone who still wants to up their game count or improve their status, you have just about 48 hours to do so…  I would expect there to be a few hardy souls out in the garden playing a bit of croquet tomorrow.  They will need to set up the course and as the ground is frozen, they may need the sledge mall to hammer the wickets and stakes in the ground, of course this means they will first need to retrieve the sledge mall from the log of wood I got it stuck into yesterday.  However, I am sure we can count on Number Four Son to be rounding up the troops for croquet between football games, turkey and pie.

I seriously doubt any of Team Offspring will be able to catch My Loving Spouse as he is way out in front on the leader board.  He could be the best croquet player on the farm, or he was flying under the radar all season, while my children were distracted by their diabolical quest to ‘take out the Mominator’.

There have been some minor rumblings about the current scores…

“I call shenanigans. Pat is sleeping with the scorekeeper.  I demand a recount. “

So, what are your Next Giving Day plans?

As far as Thanksgiving is concerned, seriously…

we truly are very thankful…

daily…

for our life here…

It is a sweet time to be at Glory Farm…

Our Older Girl is here for the week, being kept busy playing with the Offspring, studying, being third-degree’d about her serious boyfriend, taking calls and texts from ‘the‘ boyfriend, watching our favorite movie together and squeezing in a pastry lesson from her Dad…

Yep, life is good….

even if the chickens did eat our festive fall display…

Happy Thanks Giving to you all!

Life certainly leads us in some amazing directions, if one is brave/silly/willing/crazy enough to go down a new path, which I guess is what this blog is all about…but who knew… just how far off my ‘old’ trail I’d go.

Last week I had a new opportunity and I took it.  The first ‘new’ step was getting Number Two Son to step in for me with the farrier.  (Private horse pedicure person for my extreme city folks).  Beau needed a trim and one of us holds his beautiful head while the farrier trims his hoofs.  Number Two rolled his eyes when he heard where I wanted to go, but he might just have been ‘jealous’ that he wasn’t ‘invited’, either way, he said he’d stand in with horse duty.

Off I went to watch the vet do pregnancy checks on Our Friend the Farmer’s cows.  Yep!  How cool is that!  No, they do not pee into a cup.  They do however in true cow fashion poop a lot and let me tell you that gal, ah yes, the vet was a gal, was covered in poop, fresh and I am assuming warm.  (Sorry…nothing but the truth here).  The cows went into a squeeze do get their injections (done twice a year) and get the preg check.  The cows are really not too crazy about either one, and really I cannot blame them.  The vet puts the cow’s tail to the side and slides her hand inside the cow’s back-end to feel if the cow is bred or ‘open’.  Yes, she wears a very long slimy glove and yes, she offered to let me try, but didn’t realize that when I said ‘yes’, I really meant it.  Darn.  Still I did get to help, load syringes which was pretty neat.

I am sorry there are no pictures, not because I didn’t try, they just didn’t come out.  Here, I’ll help recreate the scene, imagine a short, sturdy gal holding a very large cow’s tail with one hand, she is dirty, her face is leaning all the way on the cow’s back-end and her other arm is ‘missing’ or deep inside the cow…how cool is that?

Pooh our ‘favorite’ barn cat came in for two days to take care of the mouse situation in the kitchen.  Pooh quickly proved an utter failure at house hunting mice, preferring to spend her time curled up on the couch in front of the warm fire.  Go figure!  This after we’d left all the kitchen cupboards open and alerted the female offspring that there would certainly be a dead mouse in the kitchen and to tread lightly! Pooh was evicted to the barn once again where I am sure she is thinking to her furry little self, ‘darn’ (or something like it).

Diner the other evening the Damn Cat was showing all the signs of a current mouse situation in the frying pan drawer.  Number Two Son got up opened the drawer and declared,

“Oh, there it is!”

Whereby I managed the amazing fête of making female-eek-it-is-a-mouse noises while seeking refuge in the farthest corner of the kitchen all the while able to blurt out instructions to  Number Two.

“Throw the Damn Cat in the drawer!!”

All the while My Loving Spouse was making ‘man comments’ that went something like, “Oh, settle down it is just a mouse”.

Yeah, right!

The Damn Cat was thrown in the drawer, where she stayed for about a nano-second, immediately jumping out and the mouse in question fled.

My Loving Spouse turned into the mighty-mouse-hunter-good-husband guy leaving for the store for mouse traps and M&M’s.

Current score

Men 3, Mice 0

Note to visiting female…do not open the frying pan drawer!

It is 10 degrees as I write!  Fahrenheit!  A tad chilly…

I even broke down yesterday and wore my ‘Farm Prada’ coat to town.  I never even heard of ‘Farm Prada’ before I moved here, well actually, I never even heard of most of the stores where you can buy this brand until I moved here….Ranch & Home, Cabela’s, Big R.  ‘Farm Prada’ is also known as Carhartt.  Carhartt is tough and warm…and the hay doesn’t stick to me when I feed the animals, which can be a surprisingly annoying occurrence in other outfits.

I squirreled this coat from Number One Son, who left it here to be his ‘farm coat’.  Luckily for me, he has relinquished the rights to it, because he loves his mother and also because it was a tad tight for him.  This is a good thing, because Farm Prada is not cheap, but it is worth it.  Should Number One have a change of heart and need his coat back, someone would need to go right out and get another one (in Merlot/purple this time) as this coat is a NEED not a want for the winter (fall and cold springs) on the farm here…as seen in many of my cold weather ‘glamour’ shots.

I have come to understand and love my Farm Prada…it is tough and warm, really warm, which is very, very good especially on a day like today…  there are a few other country styles I do not really understand...pink camouflage would be at the top of that list…but to each his own or probably with the pink camo, her own.

Someone (a cat) is sleeping on the job!  This is serious!  After all the darn felines only have one job (keep the mice population under control.  By ‘under control’, I mean fewer mice outside and NO mice inside).

Our inside cat is peculiar, rarely nice to anyone except My Loving Spouse and likes to crawl under the covers on my side of the bed to sleep covering my side of the bed with cat hair.  Her best quality is that she keeps the house free of mice, or so I said so out loud, about a month ago.

“No she doesn’t”, said Number Two.  “I saw one last night.”

“See, I told you not to take food up to your room!”

“It wasn’t in my room it was in the kitchen”

Which was when I did an ‘ut-oh’ inside.  I don’t ‘do’ rodents or dead things…

We hadn’t seen the mouse in question again, except we were suspicious this weekend as The Damn Cat was taking a peculiar stalking kind of interest in the space under the oven.

Today is a cold and damp sort of day and contrary to popular opinion, I can and do cook.  I was just finishing up a nice pot of chili for my family when I saw “IT”….

….. maybe a few of the nice barn cats would like to come inside tonight…

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.