Struggling To Find Ourselves

The plans for parts of our property are coming along!  We continue to make a stride here and a stride there.  All of these plans are meant to improve the property, not only for when and if we ever want to sell it, but also to try things out for our next property.  If, say, the solar hot water heater doesn’t work on this property as well as we figure it should, then there would be no reason to waste the time, materials, money and energy in building a similar one when we get another property.  The attic is the same way….we are planning to insulate a certain way and finish it off in a certain to see how really comfortable it is in the Summers and Winters.  With the coming outage, our attic should be finished, as well as our cabin, and we will very possibly have a set of adult bunk beds
in the cabin by the time the outage comes around next Fall.  It won’t be fancy and it won’t have much, but it will be a place for someone to lay their head on their off hours, and that’s basically all these outage workers are concerned about.

You all have a BLESSED week!

Seems like everyone is in a hectic sort of mind with Christmas next week.  We haven’t seen enough snow to say we have yet, and they don’t really expect us to get any between now and Christmas, so it kind of is hard to believe that Christmas really IS that close.

Lots going on here, in some ways, as we try to prepare for the Winter weather that everyone seems to think is going to have us snowed in for weeks….or at least, that’s the way they make it sound.

Some of our does look like they are getting pretty close to kidding.  There are at least 4 that I am confident enough that they are pregnant that I MIGHT lay bets on it, if the odds were good enough.  There are a couple of others that aren’t quite as obvious, but they are obvious enough for me to be keeping a closer eye on them, in hopes that I can figure out if they ARE pregnant or not BEFORE they surprise us with babies.  We have tapered almost completely off on our milking because of the impending kids in the next 2 or 3 weeks.  I imagine that our last milking for the year will probably be towards the middle of this next week.  I personally don’t really like the idea of not having kids on the ground already and KNOWING, without a doubt, that we will have another doe producing enough to milk before we stop milking altogether, but that’s what my intuition tells me we need to do this time.  If we run out of milk before we have kids and can start milking again, I guess we’ll just have to go to the store and buy some until we can start milking again.  I DON’T like that idea, but that might be the way it has to be for this year.  With this next year, we are going to try to have one group of our does kid in January/February and then we will be bringing a different buck back from Colorado this next week, and we will let him breed our doelings and whatever does haven’t kidded.  By doing that, we SHOULD have two different sets of kidding times, so we SHOULD have does that have had their kids and we are milking them.  By the time the doelings and other non-bred does have their kids in May/June/July and have them up to the age of weaning, so that we can start milking them more, the first batch that had kids in January/February will be ready to breed again.  By having two sets of does dropping at two different times, there should never be any reason for us to have to stop milking and risk having to buy milk from somewhere else.

Well, time to run, so I will let you go for now.  Have a BLESSED week and thanks for reading!

Thanks for the guest post by Kristofer Bartlett

While channel surfing TVByDirect I have noticed a new trend sweeping across the nation. As we all know, our economy has been in the gutter for so long now, people from every walk of life are learning to think outside the box. Channel after channel has stories of smart folks thrift shopping and hitting consignment boutiques to find everything from fashion to home décor. I was so inspired by some of the finds people were discovering on TV, I have started shopping consignments in my very own community. A couple of examples, I have purchased three formal dresses for my teenage daughter for a fraction of the retail cost. Just recently, I came across two very large Venetian art pieces that retail for $270 for only $30. These are just a couple of the great steals I made. The best part, I am supporting my local businesses and helping my community stay strong. I’ve met lots of great local business owners and I feel more connected to my community. What a great trend that anyone can participate in and benefit from.

I found this prompt an interesting prompt, especially considering that I normally don’t think much about fairy tales AND the fact that I haven’t been over to check out the prompts on Sunday Scribblings in AGES!

I guess I could say that I am living part of my fairy tale dreams at the moment, with more parts of them coming true each and every day.  I have a wonderful son who, even though we are having some challenges over the last couple of years, is a GOOD boy and he WILL learn to speak his mind here before too long, and then there are going to be a LOT of people that might not like what he has to say, but they will really have very little choice about submitting to his wishes.  I have a husband who is beyond words.  There just aren’t enough descriptive words for me to use that REALLY describe him.  I have a loving, caring, considerate, respectful, passionate husband who REALLY loves me and my son, and will do anything for us.  I have a husband who has been completely out of debt before, and is on a mission to do that again, including paying off the current mortgage on the house we now live in within the next 10 years or so.  Each new year brings us that much closer to being completely debt free, as we work on paying off the bills and getting them out of the way.  And my husband has bought us a piece of property that is part of my fairy tale dream life.  It’s a small property, but if it is managed correctly, we can do ALOT with it and have it start generating more income, in order that we could move our operation to anywhere else in the world that we wanted to and still make the operation work.  I know what you’re probably thinking….you’re probably thinking that a piece of property is work, and you are right!  It IS work!  But it is work that my husband and I BOTH enjoy, and if/when we can make this small property pay for itself every year, then we will have the operation necessary to move somewhere else to a bigger, better property and have the operation pay for the property there too!

Fairy tales come in all shapes and sizes.  What is yours?

God Bless!

….several little things and some not-so-little things to make our life a bit more simple here at the farm.

We need:  more garden hoses;  a couple of more metal water troughs;  some more HDMI cables;  a couple of more stock tank heaters;  the rest of the material for curtains;  insulation for the attic;  the shed in the backyard moved;  dog collars;  more milk jugs….and the list for the farm will go on and on and on and on.  Farm life says that, when you finally get some of the things on your list of needs and/or wants, there are ALWAYS items to replace them.

Have a BLESSED week!

…that I will ever need to do any research for sectional sofas los angeles bound.  We have a sectional…or should I say…part of a sectional that someone blessed us with a couple of years ago.  We actually ditched the corner section of it because it just did not fit into the floor plan of our house very well.  The other two sections work fairly well, though.  I can’t really ever see us with a full sectional sofa, especially in Los Angeles, though I am SURE there are ALOT of people in Los Angeles that have sectional sofas that actually work with the floor plan of their house.

Have a VERY blessed week!

That has kind of become our theme here on our farm.  It seems like we have ALL been going through the footwear a bit faster than we were before.  Of course, what footwear we DO have, with FEW exceptions, gets ALL of our everyday-doing-whatever wear, whether it’s going to church when we can get there, or going out amongst the goats when they are kidding to introduce ourselves to the kids and check on Mama and such.  What can we say?  Between the rain and snow and mud and the dry-as-a-desert-dust, when we’ve gone from one extreme to the other, and the fact that they don’t make footwear like they used too, we can only expect that our clothes and working tools are going to wear a little faster with all of our use and abuse.  I am not sure I will ever have a pair of zamberlan boots, because I really don’t think they would hold up to the use and abuse of every day on the farm, but I suppose it is a possibility.

Here’s hoping you had a  wonderfully blessed Thanksgiving and are looking forward to the blessings and miracles of the Christmas season.

Have a blessed weekend!

Well, with Thanksgiving upon us, some people’s thoughts turn to the upcoming holidays, or wedding anniversaries or birthdays that happening during the holiday season.  Some people think of the upcoming weddings that they have planned.  In this day and age, alot of people are having their weddings videographed.  I can’t say that I would ever be one of the raleigh wedding videographers, but it is possible that I will try my hand at videography in whatever area of the world that I am in when I finish getting the rest of the equipment.

Have a BLESSED Thanksgiving!

This prompt brought one thing to mind when I saw it this morning…..all of the things that we have  in our “backyard”.

We have a few acres for our backyard right now, and we are using it to support itself, so we have all kinds of different things in our backyard.  We have goats which are multiplying again soon!  We have chickens, who help feed the family.  We have a couple of horses and a mini donkey that will be getting “Christmas Presents” this year, more than likely.  We have a few ducks for the bugs and a goose to help protect the ducks.  We have a couple of guineas to help with the ticks in the Summer months.  We have a couple of dogs to protect the family and “flock”.  And we have a cat that helps take care of the mice.  We have visitors to our backyard, not limited too, but including coyotes, possums, raccoons, skunks, and any number of other visitors.  We have even had a “big cat” of some type visit our North pasture at least once.  We have only seen the tracks…not him.

Our backyard is a magical place sometimes, when you stop to think about the miracle of life that we have a chance to see when eggs hatch or when the goats give birth.  But it can also seem like a place where death/Satan lurks when our visitors get into the chicken pen or when other animals get sick or die…or just come up missing.

Hope you enjoyed the post!  I have enjoyed writing it!
God Bless!

As I sit here and watch the much needed cold rain fall on our pastures, I sit here and realize that sometimes it is easy for us to take things for granted in our every day lives.  Today, I would like to bring to light how easy it is to take living without pain for granted.  I know people that have some sort of real pain EVERY day of EVERY week of EVERY month…and they have been dealing with this pain for literally MONTHS.  I can only imagine that it would be very difficult to imagine a day without pain if you are dealing with it on an all-day-every-day basis.  Would YOU be able to remember days without pain if you had to deal with pain EVERY day?  How would YOU keep your sanity?  One thing I would like to know the answer to is this:  Why do the modern “Doctors” insist on treating the symptom instead of finding the root of the problem?  Is it because they are at such a loss to explain that they REALLY don’t know what the problem is?  Is it because Doctors really don’t have ANY clue sometimes?  Or is it because the rumors are true and the Doctors do REALLY get a kick-back off of the prescriptions that they prescribe?

Just the ramblings of a Kansan on a rainy afternoon!

God Bless!