Ordinary Time

As we continue our trip back through the past weekend, we come to Saturday morning. We inherited quite a bit of poison ivy when we bought this property. Over the past nearly eight years I've been slowly waging war against it, cleaning out a section and keeping it on maintenance while moving to the next section. It is a slow process. It is also a job that falls to me because J. reacts so very badly to poison ivy that he daren't go near it.  So Saturday, because the morning was overcast and cooler seemed the perfect time to do battle with an area I had previously cleaned out, but for some reason never did the spring maintenance on last year. It was bad. Here is the before picture. This is behind the back patio. There is a lot of poison ivy in there; you can see it climbing up the cement wall as well as the trunk of the maple tree. There's a lot in there. Everything that is not poison ivy is honeysuckle, another plant that I routinely battle. At least I can do that without don...

This past weekend was so full that I'm going to take a couple of days to write about it. I showed you Sunday's doings all ready, so now we'll head back to Saturday night.  As you know, we're reading through A Suitable Boy this year at teatime. (We're on page 985 out of 1349 for those keeping track. Maybe we'll finish it by fall.) A small subplot is that a couple of the characters are in their university's production of Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare. I did a brief synopsis for everyone at that point in the story, but also realized that this half of my children aren't nearly as familiar with Shakespeare's plays as the older half were. I had a brief moment of being sad about this.  You need this back story to understand why, when I saw an advertisement from a local theater company that they were opening a production of Twelfth Night last weekend that I immediately went and bought eight adult prices tickets. (Sadly, no student rate, which is proba...

Last week I was in a three-day linen weaving class. Weaving with linen is a little different from weaving with my usual fiber of cotton, silk, or wool. Unwashed linen yarn is much more difficult to contain and definitely has a life of it's own. After trying different ways to weave it, I found I created the best selvedge by having a dry warp and a wet weft, which meant I had to soak each of my bobbins before I wove with them.  Here is the project I made. It's a table runner and it is two shades of blue which are much brighter than appear in the photo. I don't know why my phone doesn't capture accurate colors.  I also started washing the fleece from our sheep. I stared with half of Fred's, and it is now drying. Clark's is currently soaking in water to get the dust and dirt out. I would have taken a picture, but a photo of a black fleece is only interesting so many times. It seems as though Fred's fleece washed really well. I'll know for sure when it's ...

It was a beautiful day for Mother's Day. We finished getting the back porch ready for summer, did some planting, I got to read a bit, then most adult children were able to make it for dinner... which I had nothing to do with.  (Pictures by K.) Nefertiti also had a lovely day. For the past few days she's been looking out the back door and mewing longingly. It sounded just like she was saying, "Out, out, out, out." It was sad and pathetic. This afternoon Y. put Nefertiti's harness on her and took the poor cat outside. For the next few hours, Nefertiti was the happiest cat in the world. (Pictures by Y.) (The rest of the pictures are by K.) This is Duck, who is our only duck right now. This is a rare picture of her out of the coop because she has been spending most of her days brooding a clutch of chicken eggs. Woe to the person or chicken who gets too close to her while she is sitting. No, I have no idea if they will actually hatch, nor do I have any idea of how a du...

I was taking a weaving class for much of the week and tonight was the Inclusive Game Night that our church hosts once a month. This means I don't have a lot of extra energy for writing. The weekend also promises to be busy, so I'm not sure you should expect too much for the next couple of days, either. Maybe Monday things will go back to normal and I'll have brain space to write.  I did get some nettle leaves dehydrated today, though. 

  Fluffy the Rooster has officially moved out of the chicken pen and into the barn. His choice, not ours, but I think it was wise on his part. He now follows me around the barn during morning chores. If you want to see a video of him crowing, head to my business FB page (search for Bittersweet Farm LLC) and you'll find it there. That isn't quite the sneaky way to drive traffic that it seems. I just don't have the energy after a very full day to upload it to YouTube so I can upload it here. Its really just sheer laziness.  I do wish he'd choose a different roosting spot, though, because I'm tired of cleaning off the top of the barn medicine chest every morning. I took a picture of that to share with J., but I didn't think you would really want to see it. Maybe I'll save it when I need a visual the next time politics causes me to write a post.