Culling

I wish that word were sculling. That's because sculling is more fun than culling. I made my decision and I have figured who goes and who stays. A hard job let me tell you. I don't like that in the fall there is a the big decision about which sheep stay and which ones go. Two of my older ewes are on the block which I really hate because they are nice sheep but there is no room for feeding pets and if they are causing problems then it is time to move them out. Two of my last year's lambs that lambed this year are also on the block. The decision is based on primarily fleece, but also factors like age, and friendliness, how they handle, whether they're runners, or they're the type that will stay put on our property, health, etc. It is not an easy decision but I have to put my foot down and just do it. I will be picking up 4 new sheep for my flock next week which will bring my numbers up to 21. Far more than I wanted. With the price of hay this year I want to seriously cull my flock and two of my culls are ones I would have kept had hay been more reasonably priced. I won't say whose going and whose staying. That wouldn't be fair.

I will be keeping all of my alpacas (I don't think I will ever get rid of them... I love them too much) and Honeydew, the llama will be staying put as long as she doesn't run off again. We didn't breed Mishka this year, after all, since she is young and there is so much going on with the house renovations that time was considerably lacking. Hubby suggested that I wait a year and while that was not a decision I liked, I felt he was probably wise in making the suggestion. So we will wait for next year when life is not so hectic, to breed her then. She has a dreadful hair cut this year especially around her tail which might affect her ability to breed. We'll have to do a better job next year.

Last night Hubby and I picked up a much needed bale of hay and with grass not growing very well around here this year we were in for a bit of a shock. This year's bales are selling for $40.00 to $60.00 a bale. Compared to last year at $30.00 that is quite expensive. That is why I have to cull so heavily. Here are pics of some of the keepers...


This is Fanny who is a Shetland/Merino. She is a really god mom.


This Is Honeydew the runnaway Llama who will not be running away anymore... or else...


This is Griegg who is an old geezer and a lovely Shetland cross sheep. We don't know what he was crossed with but that's ok. He loves to watch us in the window at night when the light is on. We feel like fish in a fish tank.


This is Mishka... the unbred female alpaca who has lovely divine fleece. I wish we hadn't been so busy this year I would have liked to have her bred.


This is Oscar who is my favorite sheep. He always comes for a scratch and loves getting behind his ears scratched. He is a Blue Faced Liecester/Merino cross ram. But a bigger pig for hay you have never seen.


This is Nelly who is very skittish and will not let us touch her without a fight.... but she has the most beautiful fleece from the whole flock. This is as close as she would let me get.


This is Eddie.... I just love his ears. He will be a stud.... he has a very soft and thick coat. Prime Alpaca fleece.


This is Coal and though he has a funky thing on his nose where he has lost his wool, he is a stud a will be bred with Mishka.


Benny needs a job done on his teeth which will be done in the next few weeks. He will be castrated.


This is Axton and nobody likes him because he spits. But he has a lovely soft fleece but it is thin. I will castrate him too.


This is Dexter and I likw him a lot but I can't breed him becasue he is too closely related to Mishka.... so he will be castrated too.


This is Krunch who has a pretty nice dark brown fleece bordering on black. She is a Shetland and Merino cross. She bred well with our ram last year and that is why she is a keeper.


This is Palmer and he is a Romney/BFL/ Merino cross. I like his fleece and he is a nice calm lamb.


This is Reece and she is a Shetland/BFL/Merino cross and is a lovely little lamb. She was my only white lamb from this year. We had to bottle feed her for the first few days. She made a good come back and is now as round aas she is long.

There you have it.... my flock... at least until next week when the new ones come.

Unlimited Time

How I wish I had... unlimited time..... actually I would need unlimited energy too. There are just too many things that I like to do that I don't have time to do.

Yesterday I got together with my little local guild at LH's house. We were supposed to be dyeing with natural dyes. Problem.... no open fires. Right now B.C. is so desperate for rain that there is a province wide ban on open fires. No fires... no dyeing. This turned out to be a good thing as we made paper instead. What fun! We made paper that was chartreuse, then we added blue and got a deeper green, almost teal, then we added red and got a rose bordering on brown. All the time we had fun.... fun.... fun. I'm hooked. We've decided that since paper making is a messy project, and is more fun outdoors, and that we really want to do it on a regular basis, we will get together at LH's house and do it once a month through the warmer months. Next month we will make Christmas paper for Christmas cards. I look forward to that. I'm starting to save all red paper. (I'm really sorry that I didn't bring my camera and take pictures. I would have posted them here for you all. But you'll get to see the results when the paper dries out and is finished.)

Yesterday was another hot day and I had hoped that I would get some work done on the house but it just got too hot. Daughter #2 was not feeling well as she has been fighting a sore throat again. I have a feeling that a Tonsillectomy is in her future.
Still though she perked up by evening and was dressed up in a gypsy costume at 9 p.m. last evening ready to play at some game of pretend. Daughter #2 is on the verge of growing up but has a serious case of Peter Pan syndrome. She just doesn't want too. She comes by it honestly because both her Dad and I had trouble growing up. I know I still believed in Santa Claus when I was 12.... she's only 12 now. Poor kid. It is a dreadful thing to not know whether you are a kid or a adolescent teen. She has a creative mind and when derailment happens her creative mind is what pulls her back. Last Christmas, I gave her a book called "The Mysterious Benedict Society" which is a book about a bunch of gifted kids who get into some neat adventures. She read that book and took it to heart and started carrying around a bag that has anything from rope and tweezers, to a magic wand and and sparkles, "because, Mom, you never know when you are going to meet a magical creature or get sucked into a world of fairies."
She's a neat kid. I'm glad to be able to say she's my offspring.

Daughter #1 is much more practical and realistic. She takes everything in her stride and carries on without being phased. She is 13 going on 22 sometimes and yet doesn't hesitate to call me 'Mommy', is completely fascinated with farts and does her nails regularly. Is perfectly happy dissecting a fish eye as wearing a purple and very feminine skirt with her hair in curls. She loves to mountain bike and go for walks in the bush. She loves to read and crochet. She is the quintessential young lady and tom boy all wrapped up into one. I like her besides loving her.


This is them in 2005.

and again...


They look so little... I had forgotten how much they have grown...


How can you not enjoy such exuberance.....


As, through the years they are getting older, growing and maturing into the people the will finally become...


they amaze me with their beauty....


and their joi de vivre...


They are smart...


and lovable....


cool....


nifty...


bizarre...


a little crazy....


themselves ... which is at times interesting.... and to be celebrated...


a pleasure to be around....


fun to watch when they are together...


very different from each other...


and best of all... ours...


Can you tell that I'm proud of my daughters? Sometimes I look at the girls and I wish I could be that young again. But my youth was spent in hospitals and so maybe not. What's nice is to watch them grow up. I enjoy being with them and miss them when they are away. I know I am going to have serious empty nest syndrome when they finally leave home, and though that is still a ways away I feel it looming in the future. I will probably become the weird lady with a holy host of pets which probably won't fill the void. Unlimited time is deceptive. It creeps up on you when you are not looking. You think you have unlimited time but then suddenly you don't anymore. Life is a little like that.

Hubby is off again today to his canoing course and I languor in the heat trying to get some work done. Lucky sod! I think I will go and put another coat of paint on the vanity for the downstairs bathroom and then, maybe then I will spin a little cotton in the mid-day heat.

I thought I had unlimited time for this summer portion of the renovation but now, school opening for the fall term, is baring down on me. I think I have unlimited time for Level 3 homework but all too soon that time will pass and I will be in a panic to finish. I watch my daughters grow and wish I had unlimited time with them... I don't and that is the age old story.

Oh well, that's my philosophical crap for today. Better get back to work.... time's a wasting.

Oh What A Beautiful Morning

Here I sit in my new office and look out on the morning fog... there are birds chasing each other and the sun is beginning to burn through so everything has a golden glow. The grass sparkles with dew. My chickens are out puttering for their early morning foray into the meadow to search for bugs and other interesting edibles. I'm eating a nice breakfast of fried eggs (fresh from the hens butt) and Cheerios. My tea is steeping nicely on the clean counter in the kitchen. Lovely!

Hubby returned home last evening to a nice supper of Jambalaya.... which I had thrown in the slow cooker yesterday morning. It was delicious. He then went to work and put up some more of the paneling in Daughter #1's bedroom. He worked until 9 p.m. and then we took a run up to some friends house who live in the back of beyond. (They have no electricity and no running water. They live like pioneers.) We had to go to pick up a canoe for the canoe instructors course that Hubby is attending. The course instructor is short one canoe. Ours won't work because it has a keel. Anyway we had a lovely visit with our friends and stayed until 10:30 at which time we came home. I cleaned up the bathroom where I had knocked out the wall earlier in the day and tore up some of the linoleum. We brushed our teeth and hit the pillow and were snoring in no time. It was a nice interlude from the constant work that has to be done here.

Today I am painting the vanity for the bathroom.... second coat... and clear coating the ceiling in Daughter #1's bedroom. If there's time I have one more board to remove from where the door is going in the bathroom and then I start to rebuild the framing for the door. Then I have to get supper.

Meals have become a real process in our house. I try to cook out on the deck on the barbeque as much as possible but it isn't always possible. We have things that will grill easily like fish fillets and hot dogs.... nice ones, if that's possible... and pork steaks and beef steaks (that doesn't happen very often). Tonight we are having dog turds!

I know I know.... that sounds disgusting but actually all a dog turd is is a lump of meat that tastes like a hamburger but is shaped like a hot dog. When Hubby and I first married I tried making hamburgers out of ground beef that were shaped like hamburger patties, but they always shrunk on the barbeque till they were dwarfed by the bun. I started making them bigger and flatter but we were finally eating half pound hamburgers and nothing seemed to work. I even tried that nifty gadget from Tupperware to flatten the burgers out but they came out too small..... So one day in a fit I made them shaped like a weiner and grilled them with Hot Dog buns instead. (It is also easier to make hot dog buns from bread dough than hamburger buns.) When I served up my weiner shaped hamburgers Hubby told me they looked like dog turds but he liked the idea of eating a sensible sized chunk of meat regardless of the shape and they tasted good. I've been making them that way ever since. And so they are known in our house as Dog Turds. We use everything from ketchup, mustard relish, lettuce, tomato, onion, avacado, cheese, or cheese whiz, barbeque sauce, etc... and they are yummy.

Here's my recipe:

Dog Turds
-package or ground beef. (pref lean)
-chopped onion
-pepper
-dill
-egg (or two depending on how big your package of meat is)
-garlic cloves chopped
-a little barbecue sauce or sometimes I'll use honey (it helps the meat stick together)
-bread or cracker crumbs or cereal crumbs (I use bran buds lots for extra fibre)

Mush this mess of ingredients altogether in a large bowl. Shape into turd type shapes a little longer than your buns (not those buns! the ones in your fridge!!!) Grill on barbeque till done, and insert condiments and extras on buns. Insert dog turd and voila.... summer supper with no hastle.

Hubby once told me that I could use condoms to make a bunch and freeze them.... just make sure the condoms are clean..... don't choke now!

Kitty is hiding in the grass waiting for a mouse and he looks really cute, all orange in this lovely sun through the fog. I'm off to get my brushes out for a day of finishing the ceiling.... I hope you try Dog Turds... if for nothing other than the shock factor.... serve them to guests and don't tell them what they are. Ha ha ; }

Who Can Keep Living Like This

I've come to the conclusion that I am at my wits end. My house is chaos and there is no end in sight. Hubby has his priorities right and has gone off to a canoe instructors course and I think he is happy to leave this craziness behind. I on the other hand continue to struggle with the mess and make a pleasant home for us. (Snork!)

Have a look at what Hubby has run away from and what I would like to run away from too.


This is me a few days ago applying stain to the floor of Daughter #1's room floor.


This is the floor after it was finished.


This is the wall in Daughter #1's bedroom that needs staining... on the right... and the back wall that needs paneling.

I feel pretty good about Daughter #1's bedroom..... except the ceiling needs to be stained too... so here is the rest of the mess....


This is the rest of the wood for the ceiling in our bedroom and the bathroom which juts out into the entryway so that you have to be careful not to scratch your legs.



Here is the upstairs bathroom that has a shower hooked up but the toilet is just sitting there not hooked up to anything... and notice the wall behind that has no paneling..... and the shower stall which needs a false wall built to help support it...
And this is my bedroom which really scares me..


This is the his closet.....


and the hers closet... which are nothing more thans heaps of stuff...


Here is the entry to the downstairs bathroom.... we have to hang a blanket so that we can be afforded a little privacy. (notice the mess of dishes to the right that are all clean but have no shelf on which to sit....


Here is the mess in the bathroom except I just smacked out the wall at the bottom of the steps for the new door so now we are back to square one with no privacy..... and there is dirt everywhere..... and I am going to rip out the linoleum while more pictures upload to this blog...... argh!


And the dining room table looks like a tornado hit..


Under the steps is so dirt infested with dust and sawdust that I'm afraid to go near it...


The front door is still not straight since Hubby took it out to put in the tub.... we can't get the door to close properly...


Meanwhile the front porch has a mess that may or may not have been there since school closed...


And if I have a shower I have to drape the wall with towels for privacy...



I'm horrified.... we live in a dump.....I'm starting to feel like it will never end. I want my bathroom back and I want the upstairs bathroom done.... I want a kitchen where I can get supper without tipping over stuff or knocking over dishes....I want some privacy when I shower so that no one sees my fanny..... and I don't see theirs. I want this renovation done....

Meanwhile Hubby is on a lake with a paddle in a canoe for today and two more..... it's enough to get one down. Next week he is going on a fishing trip with a bunch of rangers. I hope my toilet is in by then. I'm off to paint a vanity.... and a wall.... and the floor..... and a rail..... and rip out some linoleum..... finish putting in the bathroom door and the step to the bathroom..... Oh I'm tired just thinking about it.

Challenges

So I am now in my new office. For two days I have not had access to my computer while I moved the furniture around once again.... for the millionth time! Friday morning I got up early to beat the heat. I wanted to get some painting done. All the pine paneling in the office has now had two coats of Diamond Clear Coat... a product I might add, that I have good satisfaction from. Then I painted the new desk top after removing the old one and finished the second coat yesterday morning. It is a challenge to figure out where to put things while you work in that space. I had to move the dinette set out of the sunroom so that I could clear coat the walls. But the desk and computer needed to be in the new office in order to fit the dinette in the living/dining room. Eventually I decided to make the living/dining room a heap of everything while I worked in the office. It worked. Now I just need electricity (I am using an extension cord to one of the outlets in the living/dining room), and I'm too chicken to try to hook it up myself. But it does look really great so far. Phase 1 of the office is done. Yippee!

Friday I had a check up on my eye and things are good there too. The doctor said that my eye was still experiencing some inflammation and to keep using the drops for another week or so. That my vision might take six months to return to normal so to be patient.... like that's my strong point! Still I can't complain.... I'm just glad he didn't say there was permanent damage.

I have prepped the floor of Daughter #1's bedroom because today I will be staining her floor. I am glad it has cooled down today as for the last two days it has been obnoxiously hot. If you worked you were sweating, if you bent over you were sweating, if you breathed you were sweating. There was sweat in places I didn't think was possible to sweat. Did you know that your head could sweat??? I was glad to go shopping yesterday in the air conditioned stores just to get a break.

We went shopping yesterday because Hubby drilled holes in the new tub for the new taps (I think I might have mentioned this) in the wrong place. He boobooed big time. So now we have to cover up his mistake and that can only be done with a new set of taps or new connectors on the inside of the wall. We went into FSJ with the hopes of finding taps that would cover up the booboo, or at least see if we could possibly fix the mess in some way. We did... to the tune of $117.00. An expensive challenge I assure you. But honestly I can't fault him.... I might have done the same thing..... as a matter of a fact I probably would have done the same thing.....

Poor Hubby! He has been hard at it too.

He has the new toilet installed in the downstairs and the old toilet is soaking in vinegar outdoors (that is to remove the hard water crud). We discovered that the new/old vanity that we salvaged from someone else's bathroom renovation, and has been stored in the shed for the last year, is sitting in the back of the shed buried under twenty feet of household furniture and junk.... all the stuff we moved to the shed back in April.....!!! And so the hunt is on to move the junk out of the shed to get to our new/old vanity. It needs a paint job and so that is another job that I need to do, but I can't do it until I get the da-- thing out of the shed. Hubby will be installing the old toilet upstairs if we can get the rest of the crud removed from the old toilet.... and he will be removing the old vanity for a move to the upstairs bathroom. Hopefully E/P will be back on Monday to work on that plumbing. There will be a new wall built in the bathroom to divide the bathroom from the kitchen pantry with the new door being cut into the bathroom and the door installed at the bottom of the steps. Phew! He's getting there.... I think!


This is where the new door will go.


At least today is going to be cooler. Already it is 8 a.m. and I can sit here and not sweat to death. There is definitely a fallish look about things. I am looking out my new window to the south as I write this and the grass has a serious tinge of gold to it. The leaves have lost their fresh green look and the wild flowers that are blooming are the ones that bloom in late summer. There is a haze from distant forest fires and everything looks pinkish golden..... that's not to say that summer is over but that the summer is closing down and even the birds know it. The humming birds have not been so active and I have even seen a few flocks of warblers on the wing..... everything is preparing to head off south. Their young are hatched and raised and now the emphasis is on feeding up before they fly south. I love fall and it is my favorite time of the year....but I'll be honest.... winter scares me and fall is the harbinger of worse things to come. Why can't fall be for three full months rather than the short five weeks that it is?

Anyway the challenge today is to get floors stained without passing out in the heat, and to find the vanity in the shed. One thing is for sure.... I'm going to enjoy writing for the blog in this new office.

By The Thunderin'

Last night we had a sweet reprieve from the heat. I woke this morning around 5 a.m. to hear that the skies had opened up and sent a deluge, with thunder and lighting. It was raining very heavily. I had a look out the window and discovered that ground was giving off steam. It was needed as I watched the grass drying up and turning white over the last week as it died. This will help to replenish the green at least a little.

Not only was there rain outside but there were showers inside too. Daughter #2 was the first to get a shower in our newly hooked up ensuite shower. I was so pleased when Hubby finished everything on the upstairs shower this morning. It means that we don't have to drive to town to cool down.... no more school showers.... woo hoo!

The toilets have to be worked on today. E/P is away for the weekend and God bless him, because he did show up yesterday to help install the drains for the showers and toilets, even though he was hurting. Hubby has to hook up the water for the two new toilets today and hopefully that will mean that we can use the loo upstairs. Next week will require a new door in the downstairs bathroom as well as a new wall.... then in go the vanities both upstairs and down. A little work on the downstairs electrical to accommodate new switches and new lighting and we are done..... well sort of. That's when my work begins.... I have to paint the downstairs walls which will be an off white with a hint of peach with brown cabinets and mirror frame and trim. The towels that I just bought the other day are brown too. All of our old towels will go upstairs and they are blue. So the upstairs bathroom will probably be blue too. I can't believe that I am thinking in terms of colours for bathrooms. It is quite exciting to get that far. While I am painting the bathroom and putting on the finishing touches Hubby will go back to work in the sunroom/office/studio and start putting up the wall board. Then there is the upstairs to finish which will require stain on the floor and walls of the girls rooms and then we have to start on our room..... this, I expect will take us well into the fall. Hubby has to get the new roofing on the electrical shed and I have to paint the North deck not to mention stain the sunroom and organize furniture. Some of this can be done in the fall and will have to be done when we can. The flooring and kitchen counters will have to wait till just before Christmas I expect. So lots of work yet!

There is one last thing to let you know. My eye is definitely on the mend. The distance vision is still not great but it is coming a little bit better every day. The redness is almost gone and it no longer gunks up at night. I have an appointment tomorrow to follow up and see that there is no permanent damage. So all is well....
I'm off to have a shower.... or two.... and get really really clean.