I’ve been up since about 4:30 AM. I couldn’t go back to sleep, so I created a watercolor of a cup of coffee with steam rising from the cup. Looks like a tree trunk. LOL
Anyway, I’m posting this quickly because I have to shower. We’re going Flea Market shopping this morning! One of my favorite things to do! I hope I find some treasures!
For a chance to win a $5 Amazon gift card, solve the puzzle to see what I painted, then comment on any plans, big or small, that you have for today! Happy Saturday!Â
I’m going through a nostalgic phase with my TV viewing habits. I recently rewatched Warehouse 13. I’m currently watching three series that I hop between based on my mood, The Residence (a a fun murder mystery on Netflix), Psych (who doesn’t love Gus and Shawn’s antics?!), and Lost in Space. The latter is a show I watched when it began in the 1960s. It started the year before Star Trek and hooked me on Sci-Fi. I hadn’t rewatched it in all these years but started about a month ago. I’ll be truthful. It doesn’t hold up like the OG Star Trek. It’s hokey, the special effects aren’t very special but bundle it with a hot-as-hell daddy and that theme song/intro, and I’m hooked again. I mean, play this video and tell me it’s not special.
My daughter thinks I’ve lost my mind but had fun working with an AI program to come up with a Lost in Space-style image of me…
Yeah, I would’ve fit right in! Anyway, it’s a sunny Saturday. I have some edits to finish today, and then I’m hitting the pool whether the water is warm enough or not! I hope you all have a wonderful day!
For a chance to win a $5 Amazon gift card, solve the puzzle and tell me whether you were ever hooked on a hokey TV show that still gives you the nostalgia-induced warm fuzzies!
Early in the week, my pee suddenly became a bright orange-pink. Bet you haven’t read something like that as an opener on another writer’s blog, right? Anyways, I sent a urine sample via my dd to my general practitioner, and they put me on antibiotics for another UTI. So far, so good. I’m peeing yellow again. For someone who hadn’t had a UTI in years, having two in as many months is a PITA. I’ve read that’s not uncommon after a radical hysterectomy, though, so I’m not overly concerned.
School ended for the kids this past Wednesday! Woot. We celebrated with takeout and a movie. We watched A Minecraft Movie, and I guess we were in the mood for a silly one, because we all laughed ourselves silly. The 16-year-old provided a critique of how well the movie matched the actual game (she’s a gamer, and Minecraft is one she loves). If you like a childish, zany adventure movie, this one’s for you. It’s a one-timer for me, but we bought it because the 11-year-old will be watching it over and over this summer, no doubt. She already knows the songs Jack Black sang.
I’ve been busy trying to get back my stamina to complete the work I have in front of me. Editing has been going well. My personal space needs some work—straightening, cleaning. While my family pitches in, I like things to be kept in a certain order, so I’ve been trying to give myself little tasks every day to set things right.
In early April, I had my Christmas cacti placed outside on my back porch. It gets morning sunshine only, so not too much for indoor plants. Both plants surprised me with another blooming. Not as many as in late fall, but lovely just the same. The red plant buds are very sparse, but the white is giving more blooms. The picture I’m using for today’s puzzle is one of the white cactus. Have fun!
Solve the puzzle, then tell me some random things that are happening to you in your neck of the woods for a chance to win a $5 Amazon gift card!
It’s Saturday! The kids got through their last full week of school before the long break that starts on Thursday. The pool is beginning to clear up. We can see to the bottom of the shallow end! Woot. Not that we’ll be swimming anytime soon, even if we get the pool water clear. We haven’t had hot enough temperatures, sustained over a couple of weeks, to heat the pool. I remember some years when I was already in the pool by April 15th! Not so this year. It’s frustrating. My incision has healed enough. Why won’t Mother Nature cooperate?
We’re supposed to have some thunderstorms starting this evening. Which got me thinking about the goats. They have a small hut that they huddle inside during storms. We have three goats. They are our pasture and fencing mowers. They keep the brush down. Plus, they’re great entertainment. They’ll climb on anything, and they love to smack their horns together. It makes a horrible racket, and we’re sure they’re murdering each other, but it’s just them maintaining their pecking order. Our three geese keep them company in the pasture, too.
And now, I sound like a boring farm lady, in a farm family, but we’re really not. Yes, we keep goats, chickens, and geese. The only food we raise is eggs. We have too many dogs and cats. I can’t imagine living in a town or city again and not being surrounded by forest and animals.
Anyway, I pulled older photos of our goat babies to share. We no longer have that horse, Brandy, but I do love the “goat porn.” So, today’s puzzle image is one of our goats. I hope you enjoy the puzzle.
For a chance to win a $5 Amazon gift card, solve the puzzle then tell me about your plans for the weekend—if you have any.Our plans will be lowkey, and we hope we won’t lose power. Maybe I’ll find an old movie to watch. I’m thinking it’s been too long since I watched that old Johnny Depp movie, The Ninth Gate. Maybe I’ll guilt a kid to watch it with me. I’m not too proud to pull the grandma-card. 🙂
Back when egg prices started to rise, we decided to raise our own chickens again. It’s been a couple of years at least now. We have mature hens that are producing eggs, and we decided to raise some more chicks this year to make sure we keep the population going. We have a pen with a shed we outfitted as a chicken coop, so they’re safe when we put them up at night, but they’re free to roam the very roomy pen area during the day. We feed them chicken food and table scraps. We’re lucky we’ve had few predator intrusions. This past week, we lost Barbara, who was sitting on a nest of eggs, to a predator, our first loss in quite a while—and yes, all the birds have names. We were sad about that because we were really looking forward to the chicks she was going to have. She produced smallish blue eggs.
The new chicks are being cared for in the basement of the house, so yes, I can hear them chirping in the distance. We have a box on stilts we built (er, the SIL built) and a warming lamp suspended over it. They are attended to several times a day.
We have a very diverse population of chickens because we love how they look and love the variety of colored eggs we get. We have Easter eggers, barred rocks, white leghorns crossed with black Sussex, Rhode Island reds, black and blue copper marans, sexlinks (weird name, I know), and red leghorns.
When the chickens are laying steadily, we produce more than we can eat, so we gift them to folks at my SIL’s police department, neighbors, my brother across the street. The eggs themselves are so much more flavorful than what you get in the grocery store, and the yolks are a brilliant yellow-orange. And yes, the outlay to set up a coup, purchase the chickens, and feed them is expensive, but my daughter and SIL, along with help from the children, all pitch in to share the workload. Most of the chickens remain in their enclosure, but we have three chickens, The Sandersons (yes, named for the witches in Hocus Pocus) and Raven (she’s all black), who jump the fence and like to hang with us outside on the patio.
To be clear, I have nothing to do with raising the chickens, but I do enjoy the results!
Anyway, the photo for the puzzle isn’t of our chickens—ours are like I said before, more diverse. However, I was thinking about the chickens as I was trying to come up with a topic for today’s puzzle, and the chicks were chirping loudly, so…
For a chance to win a $5 Amazon gift card, solve the puzzle and tell me whether you have ever raised chickens or would if you could. I know some folks in the suburbs are getting those mini-coups for their backyards. Let me know if you like the idea of fresh eggs and critters in the yard!
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My daughter was a little irked I hadn’t included pictures of our friendly trio, The Sandersons and Raven. So, here they are hanging out.
Today is another one of those obscure, fun holidays I love to highlight here. It’s Astronomy Day! Tonight would be a lovely time to head outside—if the weather cooperates—and look up at the sky. I have a star chart to help orient me to the constellations that are visible. If you have a telescope or a nice set of binoculars, get it out, consult an astronomy app on your phone and have it help you point toward a planet that might be visible. Study the moon!
When I was a kid, I used to check out astronomy books from the library then lay outside on a blanket in the grass with a flashlight and try to find as many constellations as I could. When I lived in Texas, I once attended a Star Party, where folks who owned telescopes, some homemade, set up and let people take a peek into the heavens. It was so much fun!
For a chance to win a $5 Amazon gift card, solve the puzzle, then tell me whether you’ve ever spent time gazing at the stars, waiting for shooting stars or to see the space station or a distant planet. Share a story!
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No judging. This is a practice piece. I’m trying to learn to use my oil pastels, and this was one I did in the middle of the night last night when I couldn’t sleep with minimal lighting. I think it turned out pretty good considering I had no idea what I was doing! 🙂
Anyway, living in a rural area, Spring comes in waves. First the flowering bushes (forsythia, japonica) then the flowering trees (dogwood, red bud). Then the wildflowers pop up in the pasture and yard. My daughter and SIL have gotten into the habit of mowing around the areas they know will bloom with lovely wildflowers. Our favorite blooms are the crimson clover that come up in the ditch beside the road and the edges of the fenced-in yard. My SIL kind of rolls his eyes because he sees them all as weeds, but we try to keep the dandelions and wildflowers (his weeds) alive long enough the bees can get to them before they go to seed. We don’t worry about perfect grass or anything like that. Nature’s blooms are beautiful.
Anyway, that’s today’s puzzle theme—wildflowers. For a chance to win a $5 Amazon gift card, solve the puzzle, then tell me what kinds of natural wildflowers bloom in your area this time of the year. Do you treat them like weeds or adore them like my daughter and I do?
