Mr Big is handing out cigars, it's sextuplets!!!!

Standing watch over his new family!!
Carrie is a teeny tiny little thing but she has a big wide wing span and I am sure that I might see those wings spread a lot in the coming days because of her protecting her little uns!!

Danny raised her up this evening and found 6 babies all tucked up under her wings drying off!!

(and I mean really tucked under there!)

YAY!!!! YAY!!!!!

I have never had a hen to set on a clutch of eggs and actually hatch them!!

I am so tickled!!

There are 7 more eggs so there may be some more!

Best I remember this is day 21.

However, you know that I don't know much about that counting how many days it takes a chicken to hatch ;-))))

They are sooooo tiny and soooo darned cute!

I can't wait to see her running about the barn yard and the babies running along behind her!! Then Roxy running along behind them.....and there goes Carrie spreading those wings........

I am not sure who is more excited Danny or me???

Here is Mr Morangreggor in his cucumber and melon patch.

We have only 3 cukes and they have produced sooooooooo many, I have already made a big patch of lime pickles and will be making dill pickles tomorrow.

We have one Sugar Baby watermelon plant that came up but it is loaded with watermelons!!!

Drum roll please......

this is our first watermelons that we have ever grew!!!

Thank You Thank You!!!!!!

and looky here.....what do ya know??? It's a cantalope!!

another drum roll please......

you guessed it...first ever cantalopes!!!

There are several on the one vine that are bigger than a softball and there are many little ones and it's still blooming!! Yay Yay!!!!

Babies everywhere!!!!

A big drum roll please...........

Robin and Eric are expecting too!!!!!!

March 21st!!!!

Prayers needed please!!

Gotta get to bed now....we have 240 ears of corn to freeze tomorrow!!!

Well I am drinking now!

It took me all day long to get pictures of two of those machines and get them in my etsy store.
I thought I would truly pull my hair out but then I remembered that I could drink and my troubles would float away....................and sweet tea makes me float ;-)

I had a lot of difficulty trying to figure out how to reduce the size of my images in order to upload them. It was soooooooooooooooooooo simple once the light bulb went off!! If you need to know how I will sell that information to you. It is available in my etsy shop!!! hahaha

Go on over to my Etsy shop and see the two machines that I listed and buy them OK??? I have a ton of other vintage items that I plan to list in the next few days that may be interest to you also, so please check back!!

Driving me to drinking......

Now doesn't that just sum it all up?

I think this person has a serging machine, don't you?

hahahahaha

I have so many funny thoughts running thru my mind right now!

ie. My aunt hiding hot beer in her washing machine so her husband would never know that she drank!!! Yes she would do a lot of laundry and she was always SO happy to do so!!!

Hot Beer????? Yuck! Well yuck for any beer!!

I was also thinking of my mother who called me about a year ago and asked me what kind of serging machine I had.

I seriously had a flash go thru my mind of my mother sitting in her sewing room pulling her hair out and maybe sipping something strong from a flask with a cute vintage sewing machine on it.....all because the thread had broke on her serger and she was trying to rethread it in the proper way one thread at a time in a particular order!!!!!

All the while cursing ME with every breathe while hiccupping between curse words and sips!!!!

But.........being the good daughter that I am I thought everyone should endure that experience at least a couple hundred times in their life so I told her to go for it and she purchased a nice Singer serger like one of mine!

I recieved a call from her last week with a question about her serger.......I just about fell out of my chair when she started the conversation that way, thinking to myself...."Oh No she caught on to why I talked her into buying a serger...."

Actually all was good and she wasn't too very upset with the threading. She said that she was always very patient and took her time to make sure she threaded it in the proper order.

Like me she doesn't have to do that very often.

However if something does go wrong.....such as your 4 year old grandson has a temper tantrum and gets mad at you and decides to "work" on your sergers tension.........you WILL start drinking something very strong from a flask in your sewing room and not care whether your husband finds out or not!!!

This comes from me getting ready to bite the bullet and scale down and sell some of my 27 sewing machines. OK So I have now told the whole world about my decision and therefor I will be held accountable for doing just that now!

I collect them.

I love them. Even after sitting for hours on end trying to readjust the tensions post tantrum.

By the way they are all running very very smoothly at this time!!

Colton decided that he probably shouldn't "Work" on my machines any more.

(When Leslie got a used machine that I picked up at a yardsale for her and was having some difficulty getting it to sew, Colton told her that he could fix it cause he "always worked on Granny's"........OMG!!!!!!!!)

It is like cutting off my right arm....my arm used to turn up the flask.....

to get rid of a sewing machine.

It brings tears to my eyes to just speak of such nonsense.

I mean really?

I bought each and every one of them with a purpose in mind.

I know I know I have a lot of them that do the exact same jobs.......

Sew what???

Please wish me luck and pray for me to get thru this.

I do not want to have to go back to etsy and buy this flask and use it while sitting in my sewing room mourning the loss of one of my machines!

Actually it is soooooooo cute that I may just have to start drinking anyway!!

So if you miss me for a few days, I will either be in the sewing room taking lots of pictures for ebay or in the sewing room in the corner muttering words and hiccupping .............

If anyone needs a sewing machine or serger let me know what you need and I just might have it.....sorry no long arm quilting machines.

My Funny Farm

This little desk calender sums it up!

I truly live on a Funny Farm!

The things that happen around here on a daily basis will crack you up, well they crack me up but I am not right and it doesn't take much to entertain me.

I have one big huge almost 150 pound Nubian goat, Belle, who is absolutely petrified of Roxy our little 5 pound pup!! She has clobbered me with her hooves, ran over me, drug me, kicked over the milk pail once, snorted, ran, kicked at (rarely does she want to stand still enough to kick at her though, cause Roxy might be able to grab her!!)............YOU WOULDN'T BELIEVE HOW AFRAID SHE IS OF ROXY!!!!!!

LOLOLOLOL!!!

Belle is my GREAT milker, sans Roxy in the area, that is a first time freshener and her big beautiful black spotted baby girl was snatched from her before they bonded, at the other farm, so she has never had a baby on her.........TIL NOW!!!!

She has taken over Saphira's twins. She will let them eat and eat and eat and they will not go back to Saphira if they were allowed to stay on Belle!!

Belle gives around a gallon of milk a day but suddenly I was down to a drip.......OMG what has happened? When Saphira came in the barn and it took me about an hour to milk her out I knew what it was. Saphira is a very hard milker, small teats and lightning legs! This was not going to work so I had to start separating them. Belle has to be put in the lower lot and brought thru 2 gates to get her to the milking parlor (sounds more professional when I call it my milking parlor) .......................................... but answer me this PLEASE.....why do goats NOT know how to get thru a gate? They immediately go to the hinge side of the gate, they try to go over it, Belle loves to attempt the under it route getting her neck stuck in the pickets of the gates, she tries to knock it down, she eats at my clothes when she stops for me to latch the gate that I practically have to stand on my head to get latched in the first place. Of course we have the other goats in the field who have to get in on the action too.....you know the grass is greener in HER lot., so I have to keep them from changing lots while wrestling Belle. Yesterday she had a head butting contest with Ellie Mae, while on the lead, while I was upside down latching the gate and I was right in the middle of the fight with my rear in between 2 mad goats weighing 150 poundsish!!!!!

All this trouble to keep me from having to bottle feed 2 babies twice a day????

I am not sure if it wouldn't be easier to bottle feed the babies........

then on top of all of the tricks I have to use to get her to the parlor.......just let her sneak a peek at Roxy lurking under the butterfly bush awaiting a nip at her or my heels.............................OMG!!!!!!!! Of course there is always the puppy action of chasing one of the cats thru the barn door and right between my legs and under the milk stand. I could just scream, I could just give up and bottle the babies, or I could sell the farm!!!!

But I just keep on and take it one milking at a time.

After the initial period of the battle of the hard heads and she is milked.................as she is released from the head chute, she won't step off the milk stand even if Roxy is in there, until she sniffs my hands, both hands, then she sniffs her bag and back to my hands....trying to figure out how I got that milk out??? I dunno?? Then she has to throw her head back and turn it as far as she can stretch it in a 360 turn, 2 or 3 times.......you would have to witness this..hehehehe and then after some gentle tugging she is ready to hop off and go thru the rodeo maneuvers back to her lot again.........only briefly passing thru the lot with her babies Daisy and Duke trying to grab a snort of milk and her trying to drag me to get to them. All the while Saphira has her panties all up in a wad cause Belle is near her babies!

Other than that Belle is a dream goat!!!!

I know she will make a good mother someday, just not happening today!

Yes she has been trained very well and is full of good manners but not here on this funny farm with all the obstacles!!!!!!

Speaking of kids......

I have had more grandkid time this summer than ever before.

Last night was the first night with only Danny and I in the house for well over a week!!

Way too quiet too!!

We got a really really great boat ride in Saturday with the grandkids and Leslie.

The weather was too hot even for the lake.

The water was so hot that you couldn't swim the first time we got out,

It would take your breath away.

We went up the lake in hopes that as the fresh water came in from the river that runs thru the mountains it would be cooler and we were right.

It was PERFECT!!!! We swam til we were all prunes!!

Emma decided that day that she was no longer afraid of riding the tube behind the boat and wanted Papa to go faster!!! He went as fast as the boat would go and she said she thought that would be OK!!! hahaha

Now about this MONSTER KID!!!!!!

Where do I begin?

Other than freaking out my goats.....

she has been head butted out of the pasture by a mama goat, head butted by baby goats while playing King Of The Mountain and she only wanted to chew on their long ears!!

She is stepped on numerous times by the milk maid because she stays under her feet wanting attention.......well the goat babies are cuddled too much!

She has a very bad habit of stealing the milkmaids "Make your milking time more pleasurable milking straps"....the nylon rope pieces that I have to tie lightning legs up to be able to touch her. 2 blue ropes that I always just throw over the back of my milking chair when I am finished milking Saphira, aka. Lightning Legs.

I have found these ropes in the flower bed and I know who loves to hide in the flower bed so it must be Roxy. This morning as soon as I, by habit, hung them on the back of the chair, I turned around and they were gone. I heard some growling and grumbling from under the butterfly bush and there they were, Roxy was having her way with them!!

I made it to the house and turned back around only to catch her with the pillow, that I have in my chair as a cushion,
drug out into the yard and then quickly under the butterfly bush. OMG What next?

This is no ordinary butterfly bush either....it is about 15 feet tall and as wide and branches are all the way down to the ground!! I think Roxy's dad will be crawling under there when he gets home and get the remains of the pillow, as I am sure she will shred it to pieces for me.

Now a real concern here about home canning.

I have been canning at home for ......well way too many years to count on my and your fingers and toes and I have never ever had this happen to me.

I have had probably 12 lids pucker like this one this canning season alone.

The lids are always sealed but with a huge pucker.

All the puckered up ones were processed in a boiling water bath too.

What is happening?

These were the lids that came on a new dozen of Kerr jars.

I have some other generic, bought in bulk, lids from the Amish store and it happened
with a few of those too. KNOCK ON A BIG PIECE OF WOOD HERE ..........KNOCK KNOCK on my head........I have not had a single jar not seal in forever but I am sure getting puckers.

Has this ever happened to you or is this just something else to be blamed on living on the

Funny Farm????

When little girls stay at Granny's....

you ride around in the swim wagon with Papa Danny.

you test the water to make sure it is not too cold for your OLD grandparents.

you stand and dream of jumping in before those OLD grandparents are ready.

you finally convince Papa Danny that the water is not too cold.

you try to splash each other as much as possible, cause you know that when she puts the camera down and gets in that you can not splash HER.

you pretend to be a fish.

you giggle and laugh so hard that it echoes down thru the holler for miles.

you go to the worlds largest blackberry patch.

you pick and you eat ALL the blackberries that you want.

you pick all these blackberries in flip flops too.

you chased and caught LOTS of butterflies in Granny's garden.

you helped Granny cook.

you went for ice cream at Tastee-Freeze.

you played with cute puppies.

you milked goats.

you are special enough to be the first to play in Granny Becky's unfinished dollhouse!!

you use your extensive imagination to furnish that dollhouse.

you make Granny and your daddy kiss.......YUCK EMMA!

get your characters in their proper rolls!!

you take the whole family to church!

(I walked in the living room and saw all the dolls lined up on this magazine on the coffee table, she looked up at me and said "Sshhh, they are in church.")

you end your 2 day stay with a romp in the pond in which you allow the whole crowd to come for a swim.

you rub it in greatly to your brother that he only got to stay one night and you got two.

you let your brother rub it in that he gets to stay again this week too!

I think that is a smirk on his face too.

(the other 2 little boys in these pics are not stand in actors, they are real people! They are 2 of the children that Leslie babysits during the week. What a cool babysitter right?)

I am "wored" out.....

That's me napping cause I am wored out from.....
til, sow, weed, water, weed, water, weed, water, pick,
wash, string, break, freeze, cook, eat, repeat

I went on a possum hunt.....

and I got him this time!!!!!

applause applause

applause

Now stop it.....I can't take ALL the credit!

Danny and Colton helped me out here........

This story goes way back to the winter when we had a possum on the porch, then under the chicken coop and then you remember this story about the possum hunt don't ya?

So this week we turned all the 17 baby buckeyes and banties, that I raised in the incubator, in with the hens. I lost one banty the first night and then a buckeye and a banty night before last. Danny and Colton worked on the run of the henhouse last evening hoping no critters could get in but I was still afraid......once you get a free chicken dinner you always want more, right?

I closed the chickens up in the building last night, as it was getting dark, so they would surely be secure, I could not stand the thought of losing any more of my babies.

So I got up this morning and lolly gagged around for a while like usual and then it hit me that I had to go open the door and let them out in the run. As I stepped out the back door I saw the possum running around and around in the run!!!!!!!! OMG!!!!!!

I ran inside and grabbed the gun, ran down there, with a haste,

I was not gonna let him get away this time!

Just as I got to the run I spotted something out of the corner of my eye moving around in the run.......................IT WAS ALL 14 OF MY BABIES!!!

I had locked all my babies out of the hen house instead of inside!!!

I am so stupid!!

All the babies were out side and the hens were all inside!

Don't blame me for being blind......Leslie took some scraps down there after I did and emptied them into the run and she didn't see the babies either!!!!

It is a shear wonder that he didn't have all of them for dinner last night.

I guess Danny and Coltons plan worked, it didn't keep him out but it sure kept him in long enough for me to get him!!!!!

When you spend the day with your Granny....

you smile ALL day long.

you play with cute puppies.

you play with cute baby goats.

you spoil cute puppies.

you make cute puppies mean.

you clean and scrub all the animals watering tubs and feed troughs with Granny.

you feed animals.

you dodge all the hummingbirds at the feeders.

you "play" (that's what he called it) in the garden.

you discuss and compare your mother's and your granny's gardens.

you smile all over yourself while picking yellow wax beans.

you beg to help break them.

you eat fresh cucumbers from granny's garden which is your favorite food.

you admire really cute puppies.

you feed cute puppies.




you love really cute puppies.
you swim in the pond, just you and granny.
you pick wild blackberries.
you milk goats.
you watch a lot of cartoons on "the cool cartoon channel, Boomerang".






you rub it in to your little sister that she didn't get to stay with granny and do all this cool stuff.
you let that little sis and your mother eat dinner with you that you picked from the garden.
you help papa repair the chicken lot so the possum doesn't get any more baby chickens.
you whine that the possum has alreay killed 3 baby chicks.
you listen to your little sis say 427 times "it's not fair that I didn't get to stay here today".
you laugh at her.








you end the day with a gut bursting dinner of beef hash over biscuits, cucumbers, german pink tomatoes, chive smashed potatoes, yellow wax beans, green beans and a big ole glass of sweet tea.
you whine because you ate way too much to be able to cut the watermelon that has been in the spring box cooling for a couple days!!
all in all I think Colton really really enjoyed his stay because he asked to stay again tomorrow so we could do more fun stuff!!

(Nana's Yellow Wax Bean recipe)
fabulous and sooooo easy!!!

Finally, the baby elephants are here....

While he was doing this in the pond......
and I was playing with my new swim toy....
(when I was a little girl and my family lived in Fla we would go to Cocoa Beach and all the little rich girls had really cool floats just like this and I would show my dad and ask for one for myself and he always said no, I have been in love with those floats all my life!! Now I have one just like the rich kids! Does this mean that I have made it?)

she was born!!

we checked on her prior to going for a swim and not a sign of labor at all....

came back and glanced thru the field and there they were!

The lightest is a doeling with SPOTS!!!!!

The other is a buckling but he sure is handsome too.

He was just born as we found them.

I kept asking Saphira when WHEN WHEN she would show me her little brown spotted baby girls. I knew what they would look like! I just knew!!

I just did NOT know when they were due!

She got so big so early on and this went on for ever and ever that I had finally decided that she was carrying a baby elephant!!!

Whew glad that is over!!

Our Swimming Pond......

(Photo from an online swimming pond source)

Nope that is not me in that picture above.

I could very well be floating around on my back in that beautiful clear water though.

I did just that today in our fishpond/swimming pond!

It has been around 100 degrees every day this week while Danny has been on vacation.

He has been working of and on each day on the hill above our pond building a fence, digging post holes and running wire, and has threatened to just jump in.....he can't swim and the life jackets have been at the other house......it's a shear wonder that he hasn't sailed in any way as hot as it has been. I wouldn't blame him if he did.

I too have thought about it all week.

When we built the pond we just knew that it's location would leave us the coldest water around these parts, and the fact that it is spring fed from a spring that is right beside it.

We never even thought we would be able to swim in that pond!

However the first year that it filled up it was so hot and that water was so inviting that we decided to try it.

It was just perfect!

The water was so warm.

We swam and swam and swam.

The girls and their families came over several times to swim with us.

I made big plans on how we would fix the area up to look like a swim beach at the lake.

I dreamed of getting up early on summer mornings and swimming laps across the pond before breakfast. Swimming and sunbathing all afternoon.

Who was I kidding here?

The end of that summer we spotted a couple turtles and a snake.

The next Spring another snake.

Danny had some excavating to do around the pond and cut the timber off of the hillside before we could finish the work that we wanted to do....the dream of how the place would look had to be put on hold til he got the time to do all that work.

We then saw all the creepy crawlys and I put a big halt on the plans!!

It turned off dry and the spring almost dried up to where we only had a small trickle of water coming in. The eco system of the pond was so screwed up that we had so much string algea that we would have gotten strangled had we tried to swim in that dirty water.

So we gave up for several years now...often threatening that we should just jump in anyway.

Fast foward a couple more years..........The water has come back full force in the spring and we have a big swoosh of water feeding the pond. The eco system has finally come into it's own and the water is clear as a crystal.

So in we went today and OMG we had a blast!!

I found a life jacket for him. I can swim but i used Emma's little yellow ducky float to play around on.....hence NO pictures!

We had so much fun and we discussed at length how we would go ahead as planned and finally finish up our lake beach type area. We might even get a sliding board for the grandkids to slide from the dock!!!

He will haul a load of sand in, ( I am thinking white sand like Destin Beach Fla) he has already leveled the area off beside the dock for the beach.

I want some lounge chairs to sit on the grass above the sandy area.

He is going to put a cover over the dock with a shelter that extends back from the water where we can have a picnic table, a grill and a small fridge. An outdoor lakeside kitchen!!

We already have power down there.

We will have to have a johnny house like Terri's!

OMG Just speaking of this makes me sooooo happy!

We did not see any snakes or other creepy crawly's today so I will just have to suck it up and grow me a ......well grow up and not be such a fraidy cat anymore!

Danny said that when they see the 2 great white whales jump in the water they all run for their life anyway!!

We plan to get on this newest/rescheduled project soon so we can enjoy the rest of the summer in the water!

If you can't reach me in the mornings I just may be swimming those laps ;-)))

Won't you come join me for a swim?

I promise the snakes will run when they see me in that child size rubber ducky float!!!!

I bought me a green alligator float tonight!! I will let you use it!!

You guys just have to come and see Danny do a "Geronimo" off the dock like he does off the back of the boat!! OMG It will crack you up! Sorta a bellyflop/cannonball!!

Mountain Feist puppies!

Leslie's Mountain Feist, Chi Chi had 9 puppies about 5 weeks ago!

Yes 9 puppies!!

Leslie and her family had the nerve to take off to Myrtle Beach this week and leave Danny and I in charge of this herd of pups too!

What fun it has been, let me tell ya!

9 pups this age and size in one place is a hoot!!

Leslie and her family are missing these little guys really bad she says.

I will be a missing them next week too.

All but one, we are bringing Miss Roxy home with us!

She is the only female out of the 9...WOW!!

(they decided that they like dry dog food like the big dogs tonight)

This big bad boy is MoJo!

Leslie and Travis are keeping him.

OMG this little fella will take your hand off.

He is so dagumed mean!

It's hillarious to watch him.

He will be a good guard dog for them.

Chi Chi is such a good mommy too.

Could you just imagine breast feeding 9???

OUCH they have lots of teeth too!

I never got a picture of all 9 of them together.



They were everywhere!
Like trying to keep up with 9- 2 year old children, only cuter!!

It was also around 100 degrees again today so they were panting a lot with all their playing!

Roxy on the left and Mojo beside her.

This little fella wants to come home with me really really bad but Danny says no.

He says we do not need another mouth to feed!

So I will be the one spoiling Roxy!

I am going to make a sissy dog out of her...teheeeeee

I have already named him Spot!

Spot is doing tricks to try and win my love..........he can roll over already and he is only 5 weeks!

Danny has a plan for Roxy.....our neighbor at The Fairy's Rest, Jesse, has a mountain feist named Patch. She looks just like Roxy! Patch is a really good squirrel dog......need I say more??

Danny has to keep up with the hunting friends ya know.

If Roxy is as smart as Patch he will be happy.

He says these are going to make good hunting dogs cause of their wide noses!!

We will see.

He had her treeing tonight up on the side of a tree too.

Gotta get em started young!

I know there will be a lot of sad faces in the next couple weeks when all but one of these guys leave for their new homes!!

Love the little red guys, don't you?

Roxy!!!!! hahaha

Bad Boys, Bad Boys...........

I wish you all could have seen these little dudes in person, they are almost as sweet as little baby goats!