A New Picture Pie!

I did a beef pie for Eldon, who kindly brush hogged our pastures a couple of weeks ago. I have been waging war on the thistles (which I've pretty much won) and the cockleburrs (which I have been losing).  Here is what the cockleburrs do to the horses' manes and tails:

This was last October, and trust me, they were totally matted the next day.  I had just brushed out Jacques' tail (the bay horse) when it occurred to me to take a photo.  The grey horse is Chrissie, she was a Christmas pony!  She has just come home from her lessons and is just a very good, sensible horse and she grew up quite a bit while she was gone and is just beautiful. 
Anyhow, I did not want to spend two hours every day taking these out, and they go back to grazing or wallowing in the pasture and they get all gunked up again.  
Eldon took care of most of these for me, there are still some very small ones I have to get with a hoe and have been working on it some.
So I baked him one of my pies:

It tasted great (made one for us, too) but don't think these crusts should be frozen!  By the way, it's an appaloosa horse on there.
I will make him a better one next time.

Cumberland Falls, Part Deux

Last Saturday, we took another trip to Cumberland Falls. We yard saled our way across the state with our friend, Beth.
Our first stop was Burkesville, to the south of us.  Where I found several things of note:

Not Trompe L'Oiel, but still a really nice way to advertise the area's highlights.  There was a neat hot green/lime car at a gas station, a real good old boy car.  I mean, this was right up there with the General Lee!  But I missed the shot.  We stopped for pizza roll ups for lunch and then continued and I saw a wonderful Kentucky thing.  It was a car wash put on by some student group.  But this was just not any carwash!  THIS carwash featured a barbeque, too, so you can eat your pork shoulder and watch the kids wash your car.  Sadly, I did get a photo but the darn car mirror was in the way.  But it was still a hoot to see.
Now this was definitely the find of the day:

A wedding dress?  You may wonder why. Well, to find a wedding dress hanging from a cherry picker at a garage sale is surely wonderful luck here in Kentucky.  I mean, this was the only one any of us had ever seen, so it must surely be very special.
We pushed on.  Beth was in the back seat with the map.  At some point Jerry said "look, we are in Tennessee. Are we supposed to be in Tennessee?" "No, we aren't in Tennessee."  Jerry stated that he saw the state sign and turned around to prove it to Beth, and in just a minute or two we were re-entering Kentucky.  We back tracked a few miles and got on the right right. But I saw this on the way:

I am not sure if Strunk is a family name or what exactly it is.  But it struck me as funny enough to take a photo of.
Soon, we entered one of our favorite "towns".  Honey Bee.  Which has its name because when they were trying to decide what the name should be, the new postmaster was being bothered by some stray honeybees:

The Post office was in a very old building, built in 1862.  It was logs and chinked together.  Big porch and very, very cool. The local 4 H has a craft store there where they sell wood work, quilts, crocheted items, photography and other things.  This is a talented bunch of kids!  Next door was this wonderful old cabin, fixed up and still occupied:

This cabin looks every bit as old as the Post Office.
Old well in front of the house:

We also saw a lot of kudzu.  This is a vine that just takes over everything in its way.  I'm sure the plant in Little Shop of Horrors was based on this plant!  It was brought to the US by someone as an exotic plant, then it was developed as a feed plant as cattle and sheep and goats like it. But it's hard to harvest and so they didn't use it for that.  It was also used as a ground cover to help hold the soil in on hills, etc. But alas, it escaped and now it's all over the South.  Anyhow  you can see it down here:

Then we got to the Falls where dogs are supposed to be on leash:

And in light of dogs being on leash, I thought this was even more appropriate:

The falls are beautiful as usual.  A lot of people were wading around and the kids were having a ball in the water.  It was very pleasant in temperature.

Here is a photo of Jerry and I:

And Beth and me:

And Jerry and Beth looking out at the falls:

This is some kind of pretty little flower that was growing around. I don't know what it is:

I love this place!  Beth has lived here a big part of her life and had never been. We were so happy to take her to see it!
Here is a clip of video of the falls:

What I woke up to yesterday morning....

I sat up yesterday morning and the window shades were open and this is my first thing to see of the day:

The one on the left is Nickie, on the right is Michelle.  There is not that much size difference in them, Michelle is a little bit further back.  They are nearly the same age, though, and Nickie is at least a hand bigger (4 inches) than Michelle is.
Next was Hector:

Hector is the last remaining guinea.  The babies I got this year wandered off and I guess from talking with people, that is not uncommon.  Hector, though, has adapted.  He has an interspecies relationship with the big red Rooster who I call Brewster.  Brewster used to chase the guineas something awful, beating them up every chance he got.  Then there was just Hector, so after a while, he decided that maybe Hector wasn't that bad and they could be friends.  Hector does have a brain the size of a pea and he does realize that Brewster is an idiot. So he tolerates Brewster but not sure if they will be much more than nodding acquaintances.  And we all know the saying, what goes around, comes around?  It has.  One of the other two roosters here has decided that Brewster is pond scum and was chasing him around yesterday.  I called out to Brewster "how does it feel?" but he was running so fast I don't think he heard me.  Anyhow, Hector keeps to himself pretty much.  Until this arrived:

This is Tess, a twelve year old corgi wannabe.  There is a healthy dose of cattle dog in there, too. But she is adorable, walks well, gets along with other dogs and I've started to introduce her to the gang. She came with her own flea circus, though.  That has been taken care of.  If you want a perfectly good used corgi mix, call me.  Anyhow, Hector was on the roof watching for things and he started to raise a ruckus. Turns out it was Tess.  He is a very good watchbird! I was extremely surprised that he could realize that this was a different dog!
I went out to the back yard, the girls had moved further up.  Michelle is on the left and Nickie is on the right.

This is Nickie:

This is Michelle:

Both girls are going through the gawky stage but still are pretty and elegant.  I just try not to look at them too hard when I am working with them.  :)
Finally, the sun came up:

And so begins another lovely day in Kentucky. (The cows aren't mine, they belong to the neighbor and were in the way of the sunrise shot.  Ah, well.)

And the garden is finally done!

Ta Daaaaa!  Here it is!  I've been working on it just a few minutes a day, but had Tuesday off and decided, when it cooled off a bit, to just finish it.  The problem is landscape cloth.  I guess I should have laid it down, cut holes and dug holes thru it and then planted the plants but that seemed so....messy. So I put the plants in and then had to lay the cloth around the plants. A real pain, let me tell you.  I don't think there is any easy way to do this and it was further complicated by rose plants, which have thorns, which stick to it if you aren't careful.

 This one shows the hummingbird feeders.  I moved it about 3 or 4 feet from where it was originally located.  The wasps were not happy about it.  I had to move it because I didn't want to lay the cloth over the base of it.  The darker mulch is just damp, it will all be the same color when it dries out in a day or so.

As usual, I was carefully watched by the Peanut Gallery.  This is temporary fence that we put up until we can have a bit of time to fence the front yard properly.  And it's decent enough that I can live with it for the time being.  But it's actually my puppy fencing and will need that set up in the back yard at some point.
This is Carling:

This is Zophia:

This is Trinity and Zophia:

Breakfast at The Hummingbird Cafe

We got up this morning to the usual swarm at the feeders.  There were at least a dozen of them:

And here is another video of them.  They must have been really hungry!

We just love our hummers!

Funny dog video

Oh this one always cheers up my day!  What a great video!

Photos from a year ago

 Now, remember that I told you all that I had so many photos from the last year?  Here are some from about a year ago.
We have Tabi on the back of the couch. The corgis really love this couch, there is a wide back area and they are up high.  We had some problems with them leaping over it but when we separated the two couches and made a traffic path through them, voila!  No more leaping off the back of it.  We had lived here for some weeks before Kathy sat on one end one day and for some reason, stuck her hand down between the cushions, felt something and thought it was the tv remote. Being ever helpful, she grasped whatever it was and tried to bring it up.  The back of the area she was sitting in went down and her feet went up!  I was sitting there and talking to her and the expression was priceless...it turns out that there was a recliner in that part of the couch!  So I leapt up and started to pull down cushions and I found there was also a queen sized hide a bed there!  We have used this for company a couple of times, it is a bit public but hey, it works.  :)  That was a lovely bonus for us, since the previous owner had left the couch behind.  By the way, in the deep South we called them sofas when I was growing up.  In Denver they are called couches.  In Ohio they are called davenports (took me a while to figure this out when I lived up there) and in Ontario they are called Chesterfields.  There.  You have learned some new trivia today!

Here is a beautiful moon rise in the evening just after sunset:

I caught this photo of Kentucky,one of the world's cutest corgi pups, hiding in the child's play slide that the pups like to play in and hide under.  It was just so cute with his little eye watching what I was doing and so very sure that he was undetected:

This is our breezeway, for lack of a better term.  A long room between the garage and the house.  It was used as an aviary for the owner who built this place, has skylights in it.  But an ugly concrete floor. So I got Lowe's to come out and put in a new asphalt floor like what they have in the supermarkets.  It looks wonderful but just a bit of advice, I was way overcharged for the skill and effort this took to put in.  It probably took the man 2-3 hours to do it.  So don't go to Lowe's or other home stores to have this done. They had given us an estimate to do the floors in the house in tile (not all of it, just the main area) for $10,500, just for labor. I had the brains to walk away from that one.  In any case, the workman did a great job and it is a snap to clean up, as I want all my floors to be.  In this room, I have a raised tub, air conditioning and all the comforts of home for bathing and grooming my dogs and having a place for the girls to go into isolation when they are in season.  It's not particularly organized in this photo.  I have almost all the boxes unpacked or at least in a place where they need to be so they can be unpacked.  Currently I am in a "the stuff is more or less where it needs to be, so now let's actually organize it and make it look good".  I started in the kitchen this morning, moved some things around and am satisfied with the one counter.

I move things from here to there, why is the address book on the kitchen counter, it belongs on the desk sort of thing.  Unless you have moved with this amount of stuff, animals and trying to get basically out of someone else's house and leave, you will never understand this concept.  I still have curtains to make, etc, a lot of things to do.  And found a wonderful place to buy curtain material yesterday so now have to find some time to measure the window and decide what to do with that big window.  And what color, etc.  :)
Here is one of my favorite photos of Jerry. This was taken the morning after he arrived here:

He had gotten here about mid afternoon the day before, Kathy and I had decided to knock off and go get a sandwich or a coke or something at McDonald's.  Jerry had called a couple of hours before and said he was nearly here.  I thought we had just enough time to go and when we pulled in the parking lot, I was looking at a car that was an exact replica of ours.  Huh?  I walked over to see and sure enough, Jerry had stopped for something to eat.  It was the first time he had driven down here on his own, he was hungry and decided to eat something before coming home.  We walked into the place and he was there, standing in line, so I walked up and touched his arm and said "Hi" and he turned and looked at me and smiled one of the happiest smiles I have ever seen on his face. We'd been separated for two months with just one quick short trip up north for me to get the rest of the goats and another small load of "stuff".  We all sat and ate and he was so excited to nearly "home".  So he followed us home then.  And because Google maps has us on the wrong side of the road, he kept trying to turn that way and did so for several weeks afterwards!  He just got it in his head that is where the house was.
Anyhow, he took his cup of coffee out and just sat there, looking at the beautiful view and was out there for quite some time.  A long journey for him, not in terms of miles traveled the past two days but in terms of the whole moving process over the past few months.