My "Me" Day (picture heavy!!)

Yesterday I had a "me" day. I spent the day just doing whatever I felt like doing.  Mostly I just kind of walked around with my camera and took pictures of whatever caught my fancy.  (The kiddos were having their own "me" day inside where it was cool and out of camera's reach!)

My Moonshadow Hyacinth is coming along nicely.  All of that "green" on the ground is weeds.  It's trimmed but definitely weeds.  Green is my goal--not weed free.  :-)

The young tendrils are climbing the trellis that I made for them.  I love seeing them reaching out.  I guide them up the strings and watch them grow as they are stimulated by touching those strings.

I make my own Hummingbird nectar without food coloring which is better for the birds.  I prefer to have roosts on my feeders so that they can have a bit of a rest while sipping the nectar.  This feeder has an "ant moat" on top that I fill with water to keep the ants out..

Beautiful Ruby Throated Hummingbird.

Hummingbird Nectar Recipe:
It's an easy 4:1 ratio of water and sugar.  For this size feeder I used...
Measure 1/2 cup of sugar and 2 cups of water into a small pot. 
Boil for 2 minutes (no more than that as it will make the solution too
strong and attract pests).  Let it cool and pour into the feeder.
Easy peasy!  :-)

More Critters...

Honeybee.

I'm seeing quite a few of these this year.  Yay!

I went chasing after flutterbys.  :-)

This little winged flower has a chunk missing from it's wing.

Pretty little pale yellow butterfly

Beautiful!

Here is one of our garden areas.  We discovered that there was just too much shade in some of the area that we had previously planned to use for our garden.  So we looked around and found some other small sections to work with here and there that gets as much sun as possible.

I've "hilled" the tomato plants.  DH drove the T posts and put on the cages.

There are 13 plants/cages.  I've planted 21 pickling cucumbers (one on each side of the cages--except for one, of course)

to vine up the cage.

There are 2 1/2 more cages for more vining plants here.

I will also find room for some sunflowers too. 

In the next few days I'll be putting down the mulch--newspaper with grass clippings on top.

Fluffy frolicking in the dirt.  She almost laid on one of the baby cucumber plants!!

She's such a unique kitty.

The girls!  I love my chickens!!  The are just the sweetest things and give me the best eggs ever!!

We have this everywhere!!  False strawberries.  They are watery and pretty much tasteless (and tiny!).  I hear that they have medicinal qualities and the leaves make a tea that's very high in vitamin C.  Perhaps someday I'll do something more hands on with them.

A beautiful bloom from my memorial rose bush for our daughter Jessica whom we lost in 1993 at birth.  I can't believe how pretty and dainty even the weeds look in this picture alongside the rose and leaves.  :-)

What do you think of this colorful guy?  Beautiful irredescent colors!!! 

Six Spotted Tiger Beetle.

Bunny Rabbit!!  I hope he stays on THAT side of the fence!!!

This critter sure looks surprised, don't you think.

We found this old bowling ball in an old shed we cleaned out. 

I thought he had such a cute little face!!  :-)

There's fungus amongus!!!

And more fungus...

DH "blading" the driveway.

A nice "bird on a wire" silhouette.

Late afternoon.  Partly cloudy skies but Venus is visable.

The Supermoon emerging from the clouds.

And it disappears again...

It wasn't really this dark but I had to use the manual setting to get a clear picture.   Cloud cover is nearly gone.

Just a few wisps of clouds now.

The beautiful Supermoon!!!

In October (or so) 1993 I was shopping with the children one evening.  All of a sudden, over the treetops emerges a HUGE moon.  Like you see in the pictures.  It's called a "moon illusion".  It was stunning!!  I don't know how many people ever actually get to witness such a thing but I am blessed to have seen such a sight!!  The only thing is...  I want to see another one!!  Gosh I'm greedy!!  :-)

Image: Wikimedia

Goodbye 2011

OK, I confess that I've been a bit naughty by not posting an update as promised. And I fully expected to get at least one lump of coal for Christmas (and I didn't!! Yay!!) :-)

I've taken a serious Internet vacation these past two months and have scarecly been on a computer for anything. Very refreshing. But my brain still looks at nearly everything as potential blog posts!! Ha Ha!! I've missed blogging and reading other blogs.

I hope and pray that everyone had a blessed holiday season!!

I thought I'd wrap up 2011 with a few pictures that I've taken during my break and wanted to share...

While out shopping one day we stopped in at a Hallmark shop and I found these...  I was SO in love!!!

I worked out a pattern in my mind and this is how it turned out. Actually this wasn't the first one that I made but this is the one that I took a picture of--it's for my daughter-in-law for her birthday this past week.

Mind you, I really don't crochet well and only know a few stitches but these just kind of came together on their own.  Sometimes I can just look at something and work it out in my head way easier than trying to follow someone else's pattern. *I* was happy with it anyway.

One day while outside (shortly before Thanksgiving) I came across this gigantic sycamore leaf.  17 inches from tip to tip.  And it was a beautiful leaf too--shiny and heavy.

Son #6 demonstrating how big this leaf was!

Look at the size of this egg.  A double yolker?

Yep (The egg with two yolks at the top is that huge egg)!!  Our family loves eggs fried in butter with the yolk all runny.  Mmmm...

Pecan Bars made with the pecans that we foraged from a nearby conservation area.  You can read about it here.  They were so yummy!!

Our micro-Christmas.  Thanks to my mom and DH's parents we got to have a little bit of Christmas this year.  These were our presents for Christmas Eve.  My youngest sister had sent presents that I kept hidden so that we had more to open on Christmas morning. 

My mom also sent us this giant goody box from Swiss Colony.  We are still working on eating all of this delicious stuff.  There was a lot of goodies!!  :-)

I saved the best picture for last...  On Thanksgiving Day I got to meet my newest grandson for the first time!!  Isn't he a total doll?  What a sweet baby!!

Happy New Year!!!

I pray that you will have a blessed 2012!!!

I'm Still Here... Barely :-)

Not a lot of time for the computer nowadays.  Still unearthing, sorting, packing and moving a lifetime's worth of accumulations for a family of 12.  Why are we such packrats anyways??  You'd think that I grew up in the Great Depression or something!! 

It's looking like we will be able to stay in this place for another couple of months (which is a good thing with the snails pace at which I'm getting things done!) but we're hoping to be totally moved by the first part of June.  Hopefully it's not just wishful thinking.  Seems like everytime I'm getting somewhere some distraction comes along.  But such is life--well, mine anyway.

Here's the latest additions to our family...

There are

• 5 Americanas (Easter Egg Chicken): green, blue, or pinkish colored eggs
• 5 Golden Laced Wyandottes: brown eggs
• 5 Welsummers: dark brown speckled eggs

All are pullets (females: hens) ordered from Cackle Hatchery.  Or at least they are supposed to be.  Sometimes we get a cockerel (male: rooster) by mistake.  But if we don't end up with a male I'll have to go to our local farm supply store and buy one.  We like the protection they give to the hens and want our eggs to be fertilized. 

We've had them for a few days now and they're doing great!!  We love having chickens.

On a health note...
As if I didn't have enough trouble with my blood sugar (keeping it down), I've been worried lately about Son #3 keeping his high enough.  Hypoglycemia and diabetes both run in our families (and usually go hand in hand at different stages of life). 

He gave me quite the scare yesterday!!  He and Daughter #2 were staying over at the Cousins house for the weekend and had went to WalMart.  Some of the Cousins were donating blood at the Mobile Red Cross site there and Son #3 was waiting for them when he got to feeling really lousy.  He decided to go into WalMart and buy a soda figuring that his blood sugar was too low.  Well sure enough!  He said he got in the door and woke up on the floor.  He said that there was no one around and he must have come out of it really quickly.  Sadly he busted up his chin and broke a tooth.  To do his momma proud, he refused to go to the hospital (stubborness, dislike of doctors, and lack of money appears to run in our family!).  My sister has a lot of good practical, hands on medical knowledge so I had her do a assessment to see how he was and she said that his chin could probably use stitches but he was refusing to go.  So they put some Tienchi Powder on the wound with some added liquid Band-aid.

He'll probably have to get some work done to the broken tooth soon.  It was in the back (probably weakened by a cavity) so it's not noticible.  I told him that he was very fortunate that he didn't bite of his tongue or something!!  (DH had a cousin who fell down and bit his tongue clean down the middle--longways.  Yeah, really.  Go figure!)

What a ham...

Happy Mother's Day!!!
We are not celebrating this year for various, personal reasons.  But I hope all of you have a wonderful Mother's Day!!

I'm hoping to be able to catch up on all the blogs that I follow soon!  I sure miss everybody!!  :-)

Summertime Critter Fun

Be sure to click on the pictures to enlarge!!

Our family loves studying critters and taking pictures to remember them by. We find all sorts of cool creatures.

A giant moth

We've found lots of turtles this year. Our little Dachshund Olivia finds them and we hear her barking her "turtle bark" and we have to rescue them.

A very strange looking bug

A butterfly sipping some apple juice. You can see it's long straw-like tongue sucking up the juice.

A flower within a flower

As fall draws closer we are seeing lots more of these guys. This was a really cool spider. It was all monochromatic with blacks and grays. He was hanging in the corner of our front door.

We went out to check out the multi-headed sunflower (a mutant from a giant gray striped one that that has reproduced to continue the multi-heads--there is like 10 or more flowers crowded all over the stem) and saw the bumble bee. The kids inspected it even closer and found this crab like spider. The bumble bee was dead and the spider was having a fancy gourmet dinner with its pincers embedded in the bee's head. Eeeewww!!

There were frogs and snakes too but couldn't find any of those pictures. I wish I would've gotten a picture of the enormous "writing" spider I found in the garden. It was the biggest I've ever seen and probably would have been as big as the palm of my hand all stretched out. Beautiful. All yellow and black--the kind that writes the "zig-zags" in their webs.

We've also been "plagued" with raccoons this summer. A family of them. They drive our dogs crazy all night (thus driving us crazy too!) and steal food from the cat and dog feeders--expensive!! They're so cute though. Unfortunately they've killed all of our chickens... so cute or no cute, they have got to go!!

It Was Lost But Now It's Found...

Hooray!!!! Today Son #1 brought me my camera!! It was amongst a bag of stuff that had been sitting in his truck for some time. What a relief!!! I mean you can see why I was so distraught when access to these pictures weren't to be had...

Three crazy little boys with their fake mustaches!! Gives me the giggles each time I see them!!

And Son #6's Sixth birthday!! What a cutie!!

Our new buckling Zinnie whom DH brought home to me from Tennessee on his way home from his trip to the HPBA show in Orlando over a month ago.

Never having had just one goat kid before we didn't account for the kid's loneliness (our big goats had a hard time accepting him into the herd. Poor little guy!!). Thinking to kill 2 birds with one stone we decided that we would get him a companion and decided that a Great Pyrenees puppy would do the trick. Her name is Daisy and she is a rascal. She only wants to be with people (not good for a livestock dog) and is way too frisky!! She jumps on us (not nice when she's full grown), bites us, scratches us, etc... We're trying to use her real name and not "bad dog" when we attempt to discipline/train her. :-) Ah, the first year is the hardest!! She sure is pretty though!

While I'm trying to not grieve too terribly for all the lost picture opportunities, I'm so happy to have my camera back!! Moving on now...