Buttercup and Miss Petunia Sparkles

We've had a pretty busy spring/early summer.  I guess it mostly still feels like spring because it has been so unseasonably cool.  We were so dry for so long that now that it won't stop raining, I feel dirty for wishing it would dry out a little, but we are soaked through and through.  It has rained almost every day or every other day for nearly 2 weeks with rain in the forecast nearly every day of the next 7 days.  Anyway, here is some of the momentous things that have happened.

Our oldest daughter graduated 8th grade.  Yup, this is her entire class.  She's the short one, of course.  She won some faculty voted citizen award thingy.  I don't remember what it was, but I remember being very proud... 

This may not qualify as momentous, but I finally figured out how to grow asparagus. We have it in SPADES! Herself made a Cheesy Asparagus Tart.  It was amazing!  If that sounds weird to you, I get that; it sounded weird to me as well, but it was really good.  So cheesy, creamy, savory. She never ceases to amaze me with a wildly diverse and yet healthy menu... Who would think of such a thing?

This was truly momentous; Buttercup had her (and our) first calf!  She was born on 5-15-15 without any problems.  We voted on her name and came up with Miss Petunia Sparkles.

Miss Petunia Sparkles is typical in that, as a bottle calf, she is very friendly and endearing.  This is a shot of our second daughter brushing her.  Miss Petunia Sparkles doesn't give a toot about being brushed, she only thinks about getting fed.

Milking Buttercup has really proven to be a challenge for us.  In some ways, it seems a lot easier than I expected, and in other ways harder.  She has problems with one teat not producing that we haven't figured out, and are pretty worried about it.  But after growing up with beef cattle, her patience with me is just amazing!  She just lets me do my thing back there, and mostly waits compliantly until I am completely done before trying to move on.  She has been producing about 3.5 gallons, twice a day, and just out of 3 teats!  Herself has been experimenting with yogurt, cottage cheese, and pretty soon cheese. 

Is she not the cutest thing ever?  I was a little disappointed that she was a heifer, because now I'm tempted to keep her; if it was a steer, we would have butchered it once it got "of age."

Buttercup in the cover crop; I thought it was just too picturesque.

Sometimes we aren't able to drink the milk for various reasons, like if it gets contaminated with manure, etc, or we just can't drink it or use it fast enough.  We just turn it into bacon; the hogs don't mind if its a little "off", they go nuts!

Our second oldest is our farm-girl!  She loves this stuff, and she loves Miss Petunia Sparkles!  She feeds her almost exclusively, and I have even got scolded once for doing the morning milking without waking her up.

Sometimes farming is pretty dirty work, though.  Here is Oldest and I after Buttercup majorly  splattered us cow poo.  When that happens, you just got to grin and wear it!

In Which I Chronicle the Disastrous Effects Of My Impulsiveness...

One evening Herself was Skyping one of her sisters that lives in China, and her sister mentions that she would like to return to the country that she lived in whilst in the Peace Corps, the Republic of Georgia.  She wanted to do this in order to re-acquaint herself with her friends that she had made and her host family that she stayed with.  Apparently she had developed really good relationships with folks there.  She was lamenting that she didn't want to make the trip by herself but she couldn't find anyone that would catch the vision enough to commit to going with her.  She was saying all this as I came into the room, and I surprised everybody (myself included) by saying "Wifey will go with you!"  This is another classic case of my impulsiveness...

After much discussion, (of course) all the details get hammered out and it is decided when they are going, it still seems all very far away and unimportant.  As the date gets closer, Herself starts compulsively making lists to help her keep track of everything that wants done before she leaves.  :)   

Then on the evening of the big day, she asks me where her passport is.   I realize that it is locked up in the Safety Deposit Box in the vault of our bank!  We were going to leave at 8:30 in the morning the next day, and the bank doesn't open until 9:00.  I texted my banker that evening and he was gracious enough to sneak me in a side door and give me access to the vault prior to the bank opening early that next morning, with plenty enough time to spare.

After that big 'ol airplane swallowed up our Beloved Mama, we went home, the kids were quite energized by the thought of fending for themselves and taking care of Silly, Helpless Daddy.  I came home that evening to a wonderful meal of spaghetti and my favorite home made cookies; peanut butter!  It was awesome!  From there, however, things just sort of unraveled.  Nothing traumatic or anything like that, it just became VERY apparent (really quickly) that there needed to be a full time person in my home taking care of things the way She does, to maintain normalcy.  And we didn't...

The first obvious example is wal-mart...  I decided to go shopping for groceries.  Now ordinarily, I avoid this place like the Ebola Virus, but one "Mustn't Grumble", so I trudged off to the my least of favorite stores.  (It may as well had a sign that stated: "Abandon hope all ye who enter here".  Anyway, I spent an HOUR AND A HALF looking for my list of 15 grocery items!!! An hour and a half!!! I realized that I knew where NOTHING was!  Now, I'm not suggesting that all I came home with was 15 items, noooo, in fact it cost me well over 200.00 dollars, but it took me that long to find the items on my list.  I was really frustrated by the time that I was done, but I was so proud of myself for sticking it through and getting my stuff. And not killing anybody or yelling at anyone in the meantime...

But sticking with the theme that things were different around the house without Mama, I quickly realized that there was a lot of stuff that happened around the house that I didn't (couldn't) care about.  One thing I realized quite quickly was this: How do single moms that work full time do it?!?  My work is very flexible, and I have very competent staff to get stuff done in my absence, so I took a lot of time off; going in late and coming home early, and I have my in-laws living right next door to help with child care, running to the library, etc, and all my kids have been doing their own laundry (and mine) for quite some time now, and I didn't hardly ever have to cook, and it was still nonstop chaos.

So, what are you going to do when your hospitable Wifey is gone over the 4th of July, and you have a bunch of family around (from both sides), and that family has friends with large families from out of state around, what are you going to do?  I'll tell you; you host a Fourth of July Party without caring how well it is executed, that's what you do.  And you invite literally anyone who wants to come.  There was more than 50 people there, including some of them that I'd never met before, and most looked like they were having fun.

It was unseasonably cool most of the time that Herself was gone, which was nice with the extra traffic of Roper kids going in and out; I wore out a few flyswatters, though.  But we finally developed a gait of unsteady rhythm; mostly winging it, with all the extra company, unregulated bedtime hours, sporadic meal times, we lived in Splendid Squalor, without any sort of schedule.  For the first time in my children's life, they lived in unchecked chaos; it was fun at first, but they were Sooo ready for Herself to come back and restore order in our lives.  As was I.

As for myself; I was nearly a basket-case from the beginning, but as the days wore on my resolve to "stay calm and carry on" was wearing pretty thin.  I found myself pretty irritable and lonely, and towards the end, even depressed (very unusual for me) for lack of Mama. Overall, I'm so glad she went, I'm delighted for her to have this experience to travel to another country, because I'm not at a point in my life where I'm willing to take 16 days off and go do that sort of thing, and I know she has a strong desire to do such things, but I can't really see the circumstances that it will ever happen like this again... Here are a few pictures of the fun Mama was having without us:

Above: The Black Sea

Beans, beans, and more beans...

Those of you who know me best, know that not all of my decisions are 100% reasoned out.  But when I'm being generous to myself, I refer to myself as "Impulsive". I was perusing the aisles of Sam's Club the other day, and saw a 40 pound bag of beans.  "Hey," I says to myself, "I could can those, and they would last forever!"  What I should have said to myself would have sounded a lot more like: "Keep walking, Jack, you've got enough projects!", but alas, in the cart the beans went.

Anyway, this is what 40 pounds of beans canned looks like: (Who knew? They SWELL!)

At final count, there were about 120 pints, and I think 21 quarts of beans.  I had been planning building fence all weekend, and still did get a lot done, but I just squeezed it in between trips to the shed to check the canner.  I also had some good and cheerful helpers, though!  Couldn't have got it all done without my kiddos...

Why do I do this to myself...

Sometimes I find my life really rewarding; sometimes I find it really overwhelming. I just came in from building 7 little 4X4 sheep pens around the places where I'm going to have fruit trees planted here sometime in the middle of the week.  The term "sheep pens" is something of a misnomer, though; they are going to keep the sheep out as the sheep like to eat small saplings and bark and leaves.  I spent all stinking afternoon out there, barely finishing before dark, and spent probably 25.00 per each on them, (yeah, not counting the stupid tree) between the panel fencing and the posts.  I bet I've planted (counting re-planting) close to 35-40 fruit/nut trees, not even counting the maples and Austrian Pines, and thus far received nearly nothing out any of them. So far, we've eating roughly 6 Apricots, 1 Peach, and maybe 5 Pears.  I've dumped Hundreds of dollars into these stupid trees.  I thought my turkey meat was expensive!

Someday, I'm certain, it's going to really pay off.  I'm sure that there will be a year that I'm going to have a lot of time on my hands, we will be close to starving, I've done a good job of taking care of the trees, it will have been a good wet year, there will be hardly any bugs, and there will be lots of fruit on them.  I will pick all this luscious fruit, can it, and we will all be full and happy and watch everybody else slowly starve to death around us, and we will just sit back and laugh and laugh and wonder at the cleverness of me...  Why else would one go to sooo much trouble just to have fruit or nut trees.  Jeez, it would be one thing if I had nothing else to do.

I think that I will issue a self imposed moratorium on fruit trees for my farmlet.  At least until I start reaping and benefiting from some of my labor.