Long days

Whew... It has been a busy week, Silver and I decided to check out our pile of "stuff" we were keeping under a tarp as we were awaiting a place to put them. Well... that wound up being a 2 day project, and about 50% of the things we brought will were wrecked ; but the silliest things survived. In a completely soaked box of books one book was dry as a bone. In another box of things that were to wet to salvage a clock radio was discovered in perfect shape. Our desktops survived in their tucked away space and about 80% of our bagged clothing survived. We have moved the remainder of out things to a new spot and put a better tarp (canvas one) over it and that is where it will remain until out portable arrives, sometime in the middle of next month.

My son's birthday was this week and we wound up having a nacho and movie night when they all came home from school, he got his first "real" watch as his present it is a pocket style but it is designed to be worn on a belt. He was so excited.

I'll write more when I get a chance I'm sitting here as Silver fills our water bottles... hopefully in a week we'll have our well running. Mark Chenail the "Missouri Journal" guy found us some wire for $8, nice deal, when Silver's check comes in we'll pick it up and check and see if the Pullman kitchenette works.

Be Well and Blessed Be...

More Rain...!

I swear I'm getting sick of it raining here, the night of the 15^th it rained from approximately 16:15 to 2:20 am the next morning, and most of the night it was loud nasty lightning and thunder. Let me tell you if you have nocturnal astraphobia (fear of thunderstorms at night, I hope I spelled it right), and you are in a tent and a wicked thunderstorm comes through; you aren't sleeping. I happen to have that particular phobia, and thought I had almost beaten it till that night; the bad part was that by the time the lightning was getting bad it was raining too much to go out and into the car. So I spent a verrrrry long night unable to sleep cringing at every bolt of lightning and thunderclap. I wager if my girls had been awake they would have had a good view of the storm as they were in the car that night. Seeing as how the dogs had gotten their bedding all wet. My son slept through it, the dogs and cats slept through it aside from random playing of course. Even Silver slept through it, 'cept of course when I'd jump half out of my skin with the larger thunders or lightning strikes. I was able to finally get to sleep at about 2:30 am and get a few hours sleep before getting up at 6am to get the kids moving for school.

One of the biggest joys of “living” outside, is cooking outside. When it's raining you tend to eat more junk food as you can't cook anything, now we have the cooking area covered right now; but that only stops rain coming straight down. Part of the problem with that is our deep fryer doesn't have a sealed lip on it so when it rains hard we lose any frying oil in it. Silver is thinking of buying something to put the oil in between uses just to slow it down. Oh speaking of fryer oil we found at Wal-Mart the other day a 2.5 gallon bottle of peanut oil in a restaurant styled bottle (those heavy duty bottles in the boxes), those bottles make good water bottles after they are empty and washed out. Another fun part about your cooking space outside is you cabinets (if you are using any) won't stay clean. We have a nice metal cabinet with a wooden top on it, unfortunately it is painted white... so... needless to say it's looking very dingy right now. Also the wooden top is not going to be useable when we get inside the “Bunk House”, we will have to replace the top when we move it in. Same with my metal computer desk that has a vinyl press board top, that will need to be replaced. Something good that also happened when we went shopping the other day. We started going to the discount groceries out here and one of the two we went to gave us a crate of half pint vanilla shakes for free, they are sitting in our freezer now and we are taking out a few at a time to thaw and drink. The only thing she asked of us is to return the crate to her when we come back by the store, they are still good; she just needed the space in the cooler for another product. I think we were lucky that day.

For those of you who saw those picture of my stroke kitty Crookshanks when he was a kitten I will put us some more of him soon, he has grown into a very handsome young cat; though his head is still slightly crooked. We think he might grow to be larger than his father is, he is already the same size as his father and he isn't a full year old yet.

I'm not sure I mentioned it, but Silver has become healthier since we have moved here. First, before we moved here he was wearing a size 42 pants and now he is down to a 36. Next about 3-6 months before we moved here he was put on insulin, he is a type II diabetic; and besides the insulin he was taking two Glyburide and one Metemorphin (not sure on those spellings) pills twice a day and barely in control of his blood sugar levels. Now if he takes one of the Glyburide's his blood sugar drops below 60 and 90-100 is considered normal... 85 and under are not good. This was all before I started him on vitamin and mineral supplements, with this he has also pretty much stopped drinking coffee and picked up tea drinking instead. If we go out somewhere he might get one cup, but when I first met him he was drinking 3 pots of coffee a day.

Onions and Anniversaries

OK, I know it's a weird name for a topic;but bear with me. I have recently discovered homemade onion rings are excellent! We've been buying mix and our extra onions have been becoming onion rings when we have something with home made fries (I love my french fry cutter!). For example yesterday Silver and I had fries and onion rings for lunch, never thought I'd consider that a good lunch but for some reason it sounded great. It was also light enough that when we had leftovers from our favorite other night dinner. Which was incidentally Yankee pot roast stew, yeah sounds odd; but again trust me it's good. But anywho, I am looking for a recipe for a good batter mix for onion rings so we can make the batter from scratch; if anyone has one I'd appreciate a pass on. The other day when I was adding to my compost pile (normally I have the kids do it but no more!) I found three of the large onions we tossed into due to spoilage sprouting! I pulled them out and have them sitting in front of the compost pile and I am going to see if they do anything more. They have no sign of spoilage now, I'm hoping they will grow some more or maybe send out some bulblets for me to plant.

As for the anniversary part... On Wednesday at about 11pm central time it will be Silver and my anniversary. It will be three years we have known each other, a year and a half in which we have been together in the same home. It is also very funny as the place we met is so very far from where we are now it may surprise you. Silver and I met in an online world called Second Life... for those of you out there who have never seen it or even heard about it. It is an online world that well... you can do anything. Unfortunately you can do anything, but anywho; we met there on September 15^th 11pm central time. It was so amusing that even though both of us weren't living the lives we wanted at the time we both had a dream to live out on a piece of land and raise our own food. I also wanted a place where I could feel was safe for my three kids, Silver wanted the same for his son; but however his son lives with his mother. We have that now, and I am hoping for many many more good years on our land with Silver and my kids.

Be Well and Blessed Be...

Just a brief note

Lookie what I found in my garden before the rains dumped down upon us. It's a cabbage plant thats still fighting to stay alive! I might get a full head yet! It's not the only plant trying to come back since the rains came and the weather has cooled down.

This is one of my remaining broccoli plants 2 of them are trying to make a come back. Not only that but my zucchini is flowering again as is my "patty pan" squashes.

My peppers have lived through the almost no rain and are trying to flower out again, and we have been picking the hot peppers and drying them in our new dehydrator for winter soup and stew flavoring. We picked up a lovely dehydrator at the free shop in Lebanon, MO it works great and has a full set of fruit roll trays!

We have had rain here from Wednesday night through Saturday afternoon and have been drying out bedding since it stopped. I wish the rain would quit just until we get our portable building next month.

Well thats it for now

Be Well and Bright Blessings...

Koran Burning... Why?

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/national/unrepentant_koran_burning_pastor_fRyFidoKwYvdVrG4BgYmLP?CMP=OTC-rss&FEEDNAME=

http://www.doveworld.org

I spent part of this morning being hit with news about a Florida pastor wanting to burn Korans on the anniversary of 9-11. The man is planning to do this as a “warning” a quote from the news story at the top... “"Instead of us being blamed for what other people will do or might do, why don't we send a warning to them?" he said. "Why don't we send a warning to radical Islam and say, don't do it. If you attack us, ... we will attack you."”

I have a problem with this kind of “public display”, it is wrong on many, many levels. Why would anyone want to do something so hateful to people who haven't done anything to anyone. Not everyone who follows the Koran can be blamed for things a few of it's followers do, so why do these people want to hurt the ones who want to live their lives quietly?

To do this shows that the person who thinks it's a good idea is no better than the person they say is wrong. They are their own worst enemy. The second link is for the site for the church that is proposing this “Koran burning”, I wrote them an email telling them I believe they are wrong. I do not know if telling them what people think will change their minds, but I couldn't not say something when I think it is so very wrong.

Ok These are the pictures we were sent of the kitchenette. Up close the base unit looks much bigger, I'm 5'9" and the counter top is up to my chest! It is all metal, the upper is a single unit, the picture the upper is upside down. We still do not know if the whole thing works yet, we aren't picking it up until our building gets delivered.






The refrigerator is larger than it appears in this picture, in this picture the stove is open and the fridge is on the other end; with a small space in between for the pipe and wires. It is a three burner electric stove, and of course a small sink in the middle. Mark told us it came out of an old church so I'm thinking it still works OK.



Notice it's white with black, it's funny the other day we bought a electric roaster/slow cooker that is white with black too!

We discovered that our clay soil is easier to dig in when the ground is wet, so we have dug at least a foot down in the wet clay. thats when we found some stones... one big one in particular, we hope we can get the stone out ourselves. I am hoping to take some pictures of it today if it doesn't rain, then next time I'm in the library I can place them up here. We also had an interesting idea for when the ground is hard and we can't shovel more than a few inches down. With luck our cesspool will be dug before our building arrives, which due to a need to replace my daughter's broken glasses will be next month. I certainly hope she understands how not funny it was to break them when we needed the money for a building to live in. Of course needed to repair a tire didn't help either, but hopefully (crossing fingers harder) nothing else goes wrong.

Be Well.... & Blessed Be

Rainy days

Well we finally got a good rain after not much this summer, which for us was a verrrrrry mixed blessing. Due to a holey tent with more duck tape and plastic than the original, we spent last night in our car sleeping as between the couple holes we missed and the five wet dogs every bit of bedding got wet. Not to mention the "Return of Wolf Lake" everywhere. Now I don't understand how a property that is the highest point has the most standing water. This morning when me and Silver were out enjoying a bite out the radio said that in Springfield they got 4.6 inches of rain just yesterday. We have a flood watch until 11 am today and then it restarts at 2 pm until tomorrow morning. You know we needed the rain but this is a bit much.

This is the outdoor wood stove that Silver built for us to use when we don't have propane to cook with. He took the commercial stove metal base that was dropped on our property and filled it with gravel then set two cinder blocks on it. Then filled the holes in them with gravel, placed the thin cinder blocks on top. Then he put another cinder block behind it, filled it and placed that piece of sheet steel from the same stove on the back and placed a few more of the thin blocks behind it to hold it in place. We use the "leg" pieces from the stove as a place to set the pans, tea pot, etc on top of and burn wood in the center piece. It was funny when he first made it we were out of cooking gas for two weeks and got very good at cooking over that "open fire".