Friday Update - August 2, 2024

It feels as though it's been a while since I have written one of these posts.

• Last week, I had gone out to the store or something, and when I got back home, R. was trying desperately to tell me something about L. and a coyote. It seems there was a moment of great excitement while I was away. L. happened to glance out of the back door and happened to see a scrawny coyote trying (unsuccessfully) to snatch a chicken. L. ran outside and grabbed a shovel from the back porch and went to do battle with the coyote. He turned tail and ran, and L. chased him back beyond the horse pasture. I'm happy to say that we haven't seen a coyote since them. L. thought he wasn't well which either played into his poor chicken snatching skills or he wasn't well because of his poor chicken snatching skills.
• Zorro the rooster, did not acquit himself very well during the whole exchange, deciding to stand far away and make a lot of noise. The coyote was unphased by the noise. 
• Fluffy the rooster gets a pass. The two roosters live together harmoniously because they each have their own little flock of hens they are in charge of and the two groups rarely mix. Fluffy's hens were not the intended victims it seems.
• Last night we had a Buffalo chicken salad for dinner. It was good and I'm pretty impressed that everyone ate it. When I went to make the Buffalo sauce, all we had was some stupidly strong hot sauce leftover from when I would buy every hot sauce I found for TM. It was the only hot sauce in the house, so it's what I used. I purposefully didn't use as much as the recipe called for, but the sauce was still pretty spicy. I thought for sure there would be complaints, but I guess everyone's heat tolerance has improved over the years.
• I finished watching the current season of The Great British Sewing Bee yesterday. I have discovered that if you keep an eye on YouTube, full episodes are occasionally uploaded for a few days until YouTube discovers them and takes them down. I learned that I can't save them for later. So having finished season 10, I really want to be able to go back and watch previous seasons. The only way to do that is to purchase a VPN, which isn't going to happen in the new future.
• D. heads back to school this weekend for his senior year. How can it be his senior year already?
• Not only did we buy a new computer in the past week, but we also got to buy a couple of new phones. J.'s stopped working so needed to be replaced and Y. had been making do with a small iPod which really wasn't sufficient for a 17 year old. But get this! J. left for the phone store after lunch today planning on needing to spend the whole afternoon based on past experience. His whole visit was less than an hour, he got two new phones for free, and our phone bill is going down. I absolutely do not understand cell phone economics.
• I'm on to Plan F or may it's Plan G. with regard to The Dress. As much as I tried to be careful with the washing of the fabric, there was still a little shrinkage. It wasn't very much but it made the difference in how the dress needed to be cut out. I'm moving onto a purchased pattern because the project has moved beyond my ability to create a pattern on my own. 
• I'm getting ready to start seeing clients for my action research project that I'm doing for the post-graduate course I'm taking. I will be researching how working with horses can help mitigate sibling rivalry. I wasn't sure I would be able to find enough volunteers to be clients, but I actually ended up with twice as many as I needed. I'm happy to have a waiting list in case a participant can't complete the program.
• Once I finish the research project, I plan on making the program I'm developing as a regular offering.
• I finished reading The Fox Wife by Yangsze Choo this week. It was a very good story. If you enjoy fantasy, I recommend it. 
• I looked at the number of books I've read this year and am averaging about four books per month. This is about half what I read in a reading year. I think this is not a reading year and that's okay. I don't keep track to reach a goal, but to remember what I've read. I just find it interesting.
• We are reading a Leonidas Witherall book by Phoebe Atwood Taylor at teatime as a sort of palate cleanser after Lonesome Dove. If you enjoy farce and mystery, you would probably love this series. We're nearly done with it, so the question is always what are we going to read next? Whan I asked, many people said they enjoyed having a long book that took us months to read. I liked not having to come up with a new book every few weeks. So, we're going to leap into another long book: A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth. It's even longer than Lonesome Dove having ~1400 pages. I expect it will take us past the new year to finish. This is one of the books that leaped into my top 5 favorite books of all time, and I first read it probably twenty years ago. I'll be curious to see if I love it as much the second time around. I'll also be curious how everyone else will like it. 
• We have three more days of hot and humid temperatures and then it is predicted that we'll be going back to the 70's. I cannot tell you how much we are all looking forward to that. We have survived, with very little complaint from everyone, pretty well without air conditioning, but we will all be thrilled to have some cooler temperatures. 

With that, I'm now going to sit very still in front of a fan and try not to think about the 90's predicted for the next three days.