My crazy world. Welcome to it.
I decided that my sister should invent a new service. One where you can rent someone’s kid for a week and see what it’s like. Okay, maybe not, but it’s got some possibilities.
My niece came to stay with us for a week and it was entertaining, to say the least.
We drove every vehicle known to man in the pasture-tractors, trucks, lawn mowers…
Played with the cows and other animals…
And had fun bonding in the sunshine and outdoor air.
I love her 🙂
Here they are, the “chicks” free-ranging outside of their new digs. Needless to say, they LOVE it and are now taking over the entire property. I found chickens in my front yard landscaping this morning.
And here are the calvies out in the pasture. They were fully weaned of their bottles yesterday. I can’t believe that just two months ago they were just this big.
And just for funsies, a pic of the Mr. and I at his FFA banquet. Yay for the end of school!
Ladies and gents, we have a tractor! That means we are real farmers, right?!? Okay, maybe we’re farmerish, but either way, this little piece of grit and steel makes work much easier. It’s an Allis-Chalmers D14 that used to belong to my grandpa. It came off the line in 1954, and all things considered it’s in great shape! I think I’m gonna slap a coat of paint on it this summer, but until then it’s plugging along mowing and digging, scraping and plowing!
Coming soon: pics of the chicks who are now almost fully grown and the chicken coop Mr. M and I built, the goats new digs, and my hugemongous garden!
For some odd reason, whenever spring hits I get the urge to shed my warm woolen socks and wear my fun, colorful shoes that have been in hiding. I have fun, work appropriate (i.e. I can chase kids in them) flats in all colors of the rainbow, and I love love love them! They make me happy. Yesterday I wore a pair that looked like this:
And today I am wearing these:
Tomorrow I think will be red or yellow. Woot!
I realized that I need to post some recipes. So here are a few. BTW, I totally got the Pioneer Woman Cooks cookbook, and I am already in love with it. I am going to make her buttermilk biscuits for my fam this weekend. I’ll let you know how it goes…
Tasty Granola (my own recipe)
1.5 cups oatmeal
1/2Â cup wheat germ
1/4 cup wheat bran
1/4 cup cream of wheat (flavored or unflavored, your call)
1/4 cup brown sugar or raw sugar
2 teaspoons vanilla
1/2 cup canola or other oil
cranberries, walnuts, almonds, whatever else you want to throw in
Mix everything except cranberries or nuts. Bake on a sheet cake pan at 250 degrees for one hour, stirring occasionally. Remove from oven, stir in extras. Yields about 4 cups.
Squash Surprise Casserole
I made/adapted this recipe when I bought a spaghetti squash on the cheap and had no idea what to do with it. The original recipe, from cooks.com, was pretty lame not that great, so I spiced it up a bit.
spaghetti squash, halved
olive oil
half of an onion, chopped
zucchini or yellow squash, chopped
rubbed sage
garlic powder
1 cup of sour cream (I used fat free)
1/2 cup of shredded cheddar
dried bread crumbs of some sort (stuffing mix, stove top, whatever)
Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Roast spaghetti squash on a baking sheet, flesh side down, for 40 minutes. Shred squash with a fork and transfer to an oiled casserole dish (9X13). Leave the oven on.
Heat about 1 tbsp of EVOO in a skillet. Cook onions and zucchini (you can add other veggies here if you like) until translucent and tender. Stir in sour cream. Spread on top of the spaghetti squash in casserole dish. Sprinkle top with bread cubes and cheese. Bake for 15 minutes, or until gold and bubbly. Enjoy! (Oh, I also added turkey to ours to make it a main dish, but it can be a side too!)
I have reached a point in my life where I often look around and wonder if there is anyone in the world doing the same thing as me at the same time. I find it hard to imagine that anyone elses’ “normal” looks like mine does. I smiled as I bottle-fed two calves today and pictured another newly-minted “farm wife” somewhere, learning the ins and outs of animal husbandry and reading books cover to cover, hoping that they will tell her why her ducks won’t brood, or how to artifically inseminate goats.
Then I think I must be nuts. Really nuts, that I think this is all normal now. I mean, who butchers their own hogs and spends weekends grinding sausage, making their own laundry soap, researching the best and fastest way to make bread and enjoying all of it?
I guess I do. And I’m kind of really enjoying being insane the new normal.
See those cute pictures? They are going to go in my guest bedroom when it’s done. AND I MADE THEM. Serious. On the greatest, most glorious new machine known to man. A Cricut.
Our library got a Cricut through inter-library loan (I didn’t know this was possible, but it is) and my friend and I decided to go try it out. We scrapbook, we make cards, we like crafty things. It was addictive really cool. I wish they could have had it for a really long time, but alas, we had to part. But not before I cut out about everything I could think of.
So what do I want on this Wednesday. A Cricut, of course. Someday!
With all of the snowdays we have had lately, I have been getting a lot of my projects done around the house. That includes giving new life to some of the free furniture we have. I started with this-reupholstering a chair I got from my sis:
And then decided to tackle repainting all of our free mismatched bedroom furniture. The headboard my mom found on the side of the road went from this:
 To this!
And our dressers finally match. New paint, new hardware…and our room no longer looks like a college dorm. Now, when we get all of the wallpaper down and everything revamped upstairs it will be incredible!
Not bad for about a $20 project, eh?
Today I will lace up my running shoes, yet again, and give this another gung-ho effort. I have not run in 6 weeks, since the snow and cold temps hit. But it’s warming up again, and it’s time for me to get my butt in gear!
Who’s with me?!?
Not really, but I should have. This post really has nothing to do with weight loss. At all. Except that I probably peed my pants.
Well the hot gossip around the farm today is how I just had the most traumatic weekend of my life. Short of someone dying, or a major medical event, it was the most horrific thing I have ever been through. Seriously. Shortly after we moved in, we realized that there was a swarm of bees living in the eaves at the top of our roof. No biggie, my husbands’ a bee keeper, right? Well, he called around and everyone said that if they aren’t getting in the house (which they weren’t) to leave them until late winter, cause then they are hibernating and you can get them out easier. Cool. So, here we are in late winter, and on Saturday Mr. M says that he thinks we should get the bees out. It was a nicer day, so we wouldn’t freeze or anything, and the bees were still in “hibernation.” Cool. So, we get out our big ladders, and remove the boards where we suspect the bees to be. They are not there. Crap. So we continue to saw off the side of our house, and we finally find the HUGE comb where they are living in the side of our house. It’s probably a 5 foot by 5 foot span. And, when Mr. M took of the chunk of siding it RAINED BEES ON MY HEAD. Like, 2,000 bees. I cried. Not lying, I bawled like a baby. (We were, by the way, wearing protective bee gear. That didn’t keep me from being very, very scared.) We decided to be done for the day (this took about 5 hours) and called it quits until Sunday.
Sunday morning we headed out at about 8am. We hacked away at the comb, putting it into one of Mr. M’s hives. It was three combs thick in that space. The bees were not happy, nor were they hibernating any more. After we got it all out, and cleaned the inside wall of the house, we had to reassemble everything and bee proof it so that they couldn’t get back in. I had to stand on a ladder with bees swarming around my head and try to nail boards back to the house. I don’t like ladders or bees. Enter mental breakdown #2. I was standing on the ladder holding a board above my head, bees in my face, scared to death, sobbing. Andy was on the other ladder, and he’s telling me to just drop the board and get down, it’s okay, and I DID IT ANYWAYS. Because I am superwoman. Just kidding. But I felt like it. I don’t think I convey to you just how scared I was. It was insane.
The moral of the story is that I took a sick day today to recover from my mental trauma. Happy Valentine’s Day.
(And you can laugh a little at my pain. It’s fine.)
Crazy Mrs. M 