Quiet

Good morning! It is pretty nice so far. More or less, you know. For some reason, after upgrading to Windows 10 yesterday (which I had to do upstairs), I can’t connect to the internet at the table. Honestly, since Paul got his new router, the connection has been terribly slow but at least it was there. Now it seems to be much more temperamental. Also, I can’t scroll using the side of my touch pad. That’s annoying because I use it often. At least, I used to use it often. I guess I won’t be if it doesn’t work.

Joseph and I have been having fun with the boys’ room this week. Monday we cleaned. Tuesday we finished cleaning. Wednesday we bought paint and most of the supplies we’d need, got things out of the room or piled them up in one pile, and started patching holes in the walls. What an adventure that has been. Just when you think all the holes are patched, you find ten for every one you’ve done. Daniel didn’t make holes in walls. He covered them with silly string but didn’t make holes in them. Holy crud.

Yesterday we finally started painting. We got the ceiling done and Joseph wanted to do more so much that we did the first coat of blue on the two outside walls. For an almost-nine-year-old, Joseph does an excellent job. He did the ceiling above the pile of Cedric’s bed and the mattresses and bunk bed frame we stacked on top of Cedric’s bed and then did quite a bit of the walls. Today we’ll finish the blue walls this morning and then start on the green walls. Hopefully we’ll be able to get the closet done as well.

Tomorrow the quiet will end. Cedric and Seth will be home from camp and Amena will be home from camp.

Yesterday I made the executive decision to just milk the goats in the morning. I think it was a good decision. It means the does can stay out longer eating grass and whatever they can reach and frees up my evenings considerably. I should have made this decision a day earlier and Joseph and I should have gone to Family Night at Camp Wanocksett to be with Cedric and Seth.

It is amazing how much milk we are not going through right now. Joseph and I haven’t even used up an entire gallon. Of course, part of that is due to the fact that whenever I drink milk I cough like crazy. Very annoying, that is.

There has been much else going on but this is all you are going to get for now. Perhaps I’ll add pictures when I get around to telling you how the bedroom turned out. That will not be today and probably not tomorrow or Sunday. Please don’t hold your breath.

Party Thoughts

Good morning!

As some of you know, I spent a few days in the past week getting a letterbox ready to plant in memory of Daniel on the fourth anniversary of our accident. Yesterday evening Paul, Amena, Joseph and I went to a cemetery (I can’t tell you which one because it would be cheating) in Hubbardston and planted it. We walked all over the cemetery and found some interesting things including a headstone indicating the man buried there had served in the  military but he had no flag. I told Joseph to remember where he was so we could give him one next May. Anyway, it was good and this morning I was thinking. . .

Log book, stamp, box, paper towel for wrapping the stamp in, and plastic bag all ready to go. Yes, we did make the log book and carve the stamp ourselves. Because that's just what we do.

I’ve been reading the Harry Potter books and watched the movies last week. If you have read the books or watched the  movies, you may recall that Nearly Headless Nick invites Harry to his Deathday Party. Harry goes with Ron and Hermione and they don’t have a particularly good time because everyone else there is dead, the food is all rotten, and it is in a cold dungeon.

Log book, stamp, etc., in the bag.

After planting the letterbox yesterday, I got to thinking—what a brilliant idea is having a Deathday Party! I mean, it doesn’t make us miss the person any less, but it does take away some of the sadness and it certainly gives us something to do to get our mind off being sad. Then, I was thinking more. We celebrate birthdays so celebrating a deathday really isn’t much different because they’re just flip sides of a coin. I mean, when a person is born, they are just moving from one plane of existence to another and when they die they are doing the same. Do they celebrate deathdays as birthdays in the spirit world? I wonder.

Letterbox ready to be planted. Honestly, it was as much fun planting as it is finding others so I think more planting will be in our future.

Anyway, the next one coming up is Papa; I guess we should start planning. 

I am.

Good afternoon. It’s been an interesting day. And you might be wondering what’s been going on since I haven’t been here for so long. Not much, really. Just this thing called life.

Lots of laundry, dishes, stacking wood, picking currants, pulling milk weed, milking, etc., etc., etc.

This morning I made Cedric go with me to Fitchburg where we picked up a couple of shelves for food storage as well as some containers and food storage items that the Nelson-Peterman family either do not have room for in the apartment they are living in momentarily or do not need. In spite of the fact that Paul will say that we don’t need the shelves and they aren’t particularly well made, they were part of a project that the Young Men did four and a half years ago to earn money for scout camp and it is possible that Daniel helped make these particular shelves. Not to mention, they will be used for the reason just mentioned as well as the fact that I do not have enough shelf space to properly organize food storage. Randy Peterman was one of the leaders helping with this project and Daniel liked him.

Paul teaching Seth how to drive the lawn mower. Talk about one happy boy Saturday!

Yesterday I broke the jar for my blender so until the replacement comes, I can’t have smoothies for breakfast unless I get the old blender out and in searching for a replacement I discovered that the old one is from the 1970’s. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing but it doesn’t work as well simply because the jar is smaller and narrower.

Also yesterday, I was scrolling through Facebook and ran across a post from one of my cousins. She has a son named Daniel and so he is Uncle Daniel to the children of his brothers and sisters.  As I looked at it, I thought, “My grandchildren will not know their Uncle Daniel in this life.”

Such is life, eh? What can I do? Well, nothing, really. I mean, I can’t expect people to never mention their sons who may be named Daniel, can I? I can’t run off crying for what can never be. Well, I could, but it wouldn’t do any good, would it? I can’t be offended, because it won’t do a bit of good for me or anyone else.

Pretty Kitty. If you look close, there is a grasshopper under her right front paw. She ate it.

And yet we live in a world where we can’t say or do things for fear of offending people. Can’t have a flag outside my house, no matter which one it is, because it will offend someone. Can’t say the Pledge of Allegiance, it might offend someone. Can’t pray at school, it might offend someone. We can’t describe people (saying that they are white or black or short or tall or fat or skinny or etc., etc., etc.) because it might offend someone. I can’t express my opinion because I might offend someone. You can’t be offended because that will offend someone.

Why can’t we all stop being offended at the drop of a hat? Why can’t we be happy to be alive?

In spite of everything, I am. 

Heavy

I wasn’t going to write today. The last couple of days have been full of cleaning and stacking wood, and taking care of animals and children, etc., etc., etc. Nothing out of the ordinary but busy.

Then this morning while I was drinking my glass of milk that I’ll call breakfast, I was checking my emails and looking at Facebook and on the side there are notifications of things your Facebook friends have liked or commented on and one of them said, “Latino Problems.” Two simple words and my heart was suddenly heavy and I wanted to cry.

The world that we live in is so very messed up. It is going to take a huge purging to make things right and if biblical scholars and others are correct in that the world has been baptized in water already and that it needs to be by fire, it’s ready.

It is okay for Latinos to have problems. It’s okay for other ethnic groups to have problems. But I, being white, am not able to have problems, or at least voice them, for fear of offending someone. Except that I generally voice my opinion anyway because I don’t believe in being politically correct. My opinions are just as valid as anyone else’s and I have just as much right to voice them. Do you find that offensive?

I was raised by two parents who loved me even if they were not good at expressing that love. We were not rich by any stretch of the imagination and when I was in 7^th or 8^th grade, my dad lost his job at the mill because they were going through major changes. For the rest of my growing up years, he struggled to find and keep a job.

I finished growing up and found myself in the unenviable position of being a single mom. I could be on welfare or go to work. I was on welfare but went to work. Until I finished my two-year Associate of Arts degree, I worked part-time but once I was done, I worked full time. During that part time bit my daughter and I were welfare recipients but it was of a short duration.

Interestingly, I went to work for the Siskiyou County Welfare Department; now politically correctly called the Siskiyou County Department of Health and Human Services. Welfare Department is a whole lot shorter people, and takes less ink to print. While I was there, there was a woman who also worked there whose mother was Mexican. This woman was urged to state for the record that she was Latino so they would be able to have that quota filled. She refused.

People should not be hired because of the color of their skin but for the content of their minds and their abilities. Color of skin should just be something that makes us each unique; something that tells a little, but certainly not all, of our ethic background.

Please look at this picture closely. I just took it this morning. Does my skin look white to you? All those hairs used to be dark brown. They were so dark that when I was in 5th grade I shaved some off my right arm and quickly decided that dark hair on my arms was better than no hair at all.
When I was working for my phlebotomy internship, I got to draw blood from a lot of different people. Many of them were of African decent. I got to look at the skin of all these people very closely and I can tell you that I never saw any black skin. One man in particular I remember. I looked at his arm and it was beautiful. There was blue and green and yellow and red. All right there. It was his skin. No black, but all these other colors. It was beautiful.
Black is the absence of color.

While you are having the fabulous day I hope you do, I would welcome any thoughts or comments about this. 

Humid Day

Good morning! When the paper you write milk weights on is so damp it’s hard to write on, you know it is too humid. The temperature is a pretty nice 71° and the humidity outside is 84%. I suspect it is higher than that in the house because I’ve had to do some laundry this morning and I’ve been busy in the kitchen.

On that paper is some interesting information if you care about such things and milk weights and I have to say that I do. I’ve been keeping the kids from the does for a couple of weeks now and decided it was time to keep them apart at night as well yesterday. Milk production for Goldilocks and Snowflake went up during the day which was to be expected and it has now gone way up for during the night which is also to be expected.  Zoey has been pretty consistent in the high 50’s and low 60’s morning and evening. This morning she was at 61.9 ounces. Goldilocks outdid her with 64.7. That’s to be expected as well, I suppose, since Goldilocks is a larger goat and half Saanen and Zoey kidded for the first time this spring. Still, now I’m going to be dealing with more than a gallon each milking. Holy cow.

Yesterday Joanna had some excitement. She cut her finger at work. Joanna being Joanna, this can be a big deal depending on where her platelet count is. She’d gone in to have her blood drawn last week but the doctor said that while her count was down, it wasn’t down enough to warrant drugs. So she cut her finger yesterday and had to go to the ER because it was bleeding so much. A bandaid did no good at all. A wad of gauze didn’t do much good although by the time the ER doctor looked at it, the bleeding had slowed. When he removed it, the flow started again but said that it wasn’t “that bad” so he wouldn’t give her prednisone either. He would give her 800 mg ibuprofen though, which makes you bleed more. He actually had to put a tourniquet around her finger to slow the bleeding while he probed the cut. I really wonder what they consider to be “bad”.

The gauze.She now has three stitches in her finger and some nasty bruises where the doctor stuck her for pain killers at the base of her finger. The only good thing is that she can't work today and that is only a mixed blessing.

This morning I got up after having slept really well (I did my stretches yesterday while I was waiting for the goats to finish eating once I was done milking) and was instantly assailed by the humid conditions when I stepped out the bedroom door. Yikes! Can we move west, already?

The pot just after I added a gallon of milk for cheesemaking.

I milked and let the kids back in with the does. I cleaned up a bunch of dog poop and pee in the library. I made chocolate, butterscotch, and vanilla pudding. I went to the basement and got one of the box fans and put it in one of the living room windows to draw in some of the cooler air. I put a load of towel on to dry and need to start another load to wash but haven’t yet. I watered the goats and fed and watered the dogs. I fed Kitty. I put milk on for yogurt and cheese. I made an awesome smoothie for breakfast and already finished drinking a glass of it. Making a smoothie included stemming two packages of strawberries: one for the smoothie, one to put in the freezer.  So far, that’s about it.

The pudding: chocolate, butterscotch, vanilla. 

Have a wondiferous day!

Confession on July 4th

Good morning and Happy 4^th of July! It is a lovely day here so far: cool (61°), overcast, and humid (68%). Just kidding on that last one; by now you should know how I feel about that.

I have a confession to make. When, at 7:00 in the morning, I have gotten up before 6:00 whether I feel like it or not, fed the cat and dogs, milked, fed and watered the goats, consolidated the milk into as few gallon jars as possible so I have more clean jars to fill up, strained milk and put it away (I actually forgot to do this the other day; the dogs were happy), put a load of laundry on to wash, put the last batch of yogurt in containers, washed all the dishes and equipment I use for milking and making yogurt (because I wash them with a bit of bleach in the water), and put a gallon of milk in the pot to start another batch of yogurt, I feel somewhat annoyed when at 10:00 people get up and say we’re wasting daylight. Really?!!!?? Not me sister (or brother)!

This is the same turkey I put a picture of in here a week or two ago. How do I know? Because I took it the same day. Just a half a minute before the other one, actually. I love turkeys. Well, the bronze ones, anyway. They are so pretty and just go about doing what they do. I wonder if her friends complain when she gets back from foraging that she took too long and that her chicks were misbehaving. Probably not. So, aside from the fact that she might get shot and eaten later this year, I think we could learn something from the turkeys we see. Even considering the fact she might get shot and eaten. We should just do what we are supposed to do; be happy with what we have. And just do it because we don't know how much time is allotted us in this life.

The last few days have been pretty good. Wednesday we cleaned the living room and what a job that was. Holy smokes! Yesterday we cleaned the library and I thought that was going to be a job and a half but it really wasn’t that bad. I did have to fold all the laundry on the couch but I got a head start on that one by folding most of it Thursday before I went to bed.

Thursday Seth, Joseph and I went to Coggshall Park in Fitchburg and found one letterbox. We looked for another one (along with Amy, Drayton, and Logan Troop and Cheri, Mac, Quinn, and Tanner Brimhall) but did not find it. There are two more we can look for but we needed to get home and feed the sisters lunch. In the afternoon, Joanna, Amena, Seth, and Joseph went with me to look for some more but number one, we had limited time because Amena needed to put the neighbor’s horse to bed at 5:00, two, I forgot the clues at home, and three, the bugs were bad and we did not find the first one we were looking for.

Today, being Independence Day, I’m not sure what we’ll be doing. Fireworks no longer happen only on the 4^th of July but if we can find some close enough, I’m sure we’ll do that. Otherwise, I see stacking wood in our day as well as possibly a trip to Barre Falls Dam for a couple of letterboxes.

Have a fantastic day!

The Folly of Scales

Good rainy morning! I am having a lovely delicious strawberry smoothie for breakfast as I type this with spinach and a banana. And, of course, yogurt and a bit of sugar. Very good. Almost as good as the blackberry from yesterday. Maybe as good.

Yesterday morning I stepped on the scale because I’m doing yet another biggest loser challenge. I was somewhat surprised that the number on the scale ended with a 7 when last week at the same time it ended with a 4.5 and I’ve been pretty good about what and how much I eat. This morning, just for fun, I stepped on the scale to see what it would say and the last number was 5. Interesting, that. Oh, the folly of scales.

Yesterday after lunch, Seth, Joseph and I took Misty to Doannes  Falls to find a letterbox that Laura and I found in December. It had the clue for a mystery box and I remembered most of it but not all of it and I didn’t take a picture of it or write it down last time which was pretty silly. This time we found it and were surprised to find a hitchhiker stamp. How cool is that? We went to look for the mystery box but the only place to park was in a bank parking lot and I don’t like parking in bank parking lots unless I’m going in the bank so we’ll go back later. We also found one at a church in Gardner. Very cool.

Tomorrow, if all goes as planned, at least some of us will go find as many as four at Coggshall Park in Fitchburg.

Today, it is raining as I mentioned earlier. It’s really raining now, though, whereas earlier it was just sprinkling. We are also having some thunder which is always cool.

Tonight we are making cookie dough at church which should be fun.

And that is all for now. Have a fantabulous day!