Ordinary Time

Among some of the things I did today was spending an hour this afternoon finishing a book. Usually I try to keep my fiction reading saved for later in the evening. This works well except when I'm on the last hundred pages or so of a really engrossing book. This was the case this afternoon.  The book? A Drop of Contagion by Robert Jackson Bennett. It is the second in a series (and I hope he writes more), of which The Tainted Cup was the first. I told you about it last month or so. Someone mentioned that they had heard the second wasn't quite as good as the first, so I started with a little trepidation. I'm happy to report that I found the second book as engrossing as the first.  So if you are looking for a rather unusual mystery series, I would highly recommend this one to you. I'm always happy when I find the characters in a mystery series as interesting as the puzzle. This is definitely the case with these books.  The trouble with finding a new series instead of one th...

I am so excited to introduce you to our newest herd member. This is Luke who arrived this afternoon. He didn't have to travel far, just across the street and down the road a bit. Having Luke move over here was mutually beneficial for all parties. We are so happy to be part of his next chapter. Luke is a thoroughbred and a former race horse. He's also on the tall side, being a good six inches taller than Major. He's also super sweet.  The rest of the day was spent with Luke in the pasture that's next to the ponies and Emmy and Major hanging out in the other half of the pasture.  These two were interested but weren't terribly nutty.  And then it was dinner time and time to come in. Ponies got settled first, then Luke got moved to his stall with the bottom Dutch door closed while everyone acclimates, then the other two were brought in.  Well, it seems Emmy is in love. For an hour she did her best mare-in-love behavior while ignoring all food.  You can see that Luke...

Yesterday D. decided he wanted to make brioche so asked I was willing to donate three sticks of butter to the cause. Yes, I am always up for brioche even with butter being a bit expensive. Which is why this morning, fresh brioche right out of the oven greeted me when I got in from the barn.  It was very, very good. And I did indulge. Immoderately.

Last winter L. announced that she wanted to learn to sew. When I asked what she wanted to see, she finally settled on jeans, because finding jeans that fit the way L. wants them to is becoming increasingly difficult. Jeans are not really considered a beginner's project, but since I rarely start with appropriate beginner's project myself, I took a deep breath and ordered a jeans pattern. It would be really fantastic if we could get a jeans pattern to work.  Last month, using this pattern,  L. got a practice pair all cut out. The practice pair is some phenomenally ugly fabric that somehow made its way into my stash. This is very much the best thing to do with it. Things have been going swimmingly until this afternoon.  Today we tackled... or attempted to tackle... the fly front zipper portion. Now, at one point when G. and L. were babies, I took a class all about putting in zippers. I kept my notes and still refer to them when a zipper comes along. But it's been a very long...

This morning when I went out to the barn I discovered a pile of pony poop in the aisle but all ponies were in their stall. It was baffling. Was Buddy getting out and then going back in to his stall before I made it to the barn? If so, how long had this been going on? Ponies.  The mystery was solved when G. mentioned that Buddy was in the aisle when G. went to get hay for the sheep and was returned to his stall. This was good, except that is meant I really and truly needed to do something about the pony stall door guard. It was on its last leg and I had been babying it along by tying all the broken ends together. Clearly, we had reached the end of that road.  I had a little make it due moment this afternoon with the door guard and my sewing machine. Here is my finished product.  I'm pretty proud of it. I restitched the two straps which connect the long, horizontal pieces of webbing. Then I dug out some upholstery material and lined the area between the two long straps to m...

I think we're in good shape for the start of summer.  First, K. has been working and saving very diligently to buy himself a e-bike to make getting around easier. Today after months of work, he came home with one. G. and L. have also been working hard and we actually have a vegetable garden this year. It is already producing and we have had several meals out of it. Today the last of the beds had seeds planted. (Okra, which I love and neither of them do, but they humored me by planting it.) The portions without plants growing all have seeds that are planted.  And summer means the start of summer festivals and I got to weave at a local art festival in Fine Line Creative Arts Center's tent and explained to a lot of people how looms work. 

I am exceedingly happy to tell you that after another back and forth trip to Merrillville, Indiana, the van is back home with a brand new alternator. There were absolutely no issues driving it home. So a week later we are a two car family again.  J. wins the hero award for this. He made many phone calls and wrote even more emails to coordinate between the warranty company and the car repair place in order to get the charges we would be responsible for down to a reasonable amount. Then once all that was sorted out, they needed to actually do the repair. The only up side was that this was an unusual week in that I didn't need to go anywhere except for Monday when J. could work from home.  Thus the end of that particular saga is ended. I don't feel any need to repeat it. It could have been much worse, but the actuality was fairly unpleasant. 

I have been advertising quite a lot for the different programs I offer at Bittersweet Farm LLC. One of those is Pony Phonics, where a child would play games (with the ponies), practice reading (with the ponies), create stories (about the ponies if they like), and do a lot of other types of hands-on reading readiness and support. After teaching children for decades, I have quite a few effective activities that I used with my own children, and which helped them become excellent readers.  I was thinking today while cleaning stalls (it's an excellent time to think, by the way) about why I think this type of learning is so helpful. I decided it was the sheer physicality of all of these hands-on experiences. Our brains are wired to move through space and to remember the things we do while moving through space. It's why the concept of memory palaces is so effective. It combines movement with ideas.  Sometimes I listen to a recorded book while I'm cleaning stalls. Even months late...

Option A - Post screed about how horrible our government is  Option B - Update everyone on the car saga Option C - Link to old posts so I don't have to write anything  Option D - Share photos that K. sent me from his bike ride to work - - - - - - - - - -

Okay book loving friends, I have another question for you. Have any of you read Jonathan Strange and Mr. Harrell by Susanna Clarke? It gets great critical reviews and I was excited to read it. I am now 125 pages into it and I am still waiting to love it. I'm okay with a slower pace if I like the characters, but so far I don't care for any of the characters at all. I hate spending time with characters I don't like.  So should I soldier on? Is it worth it? I wasn't sure about Cloud Cuckoo Land for about the first quarter, but kept at it and ended up living the book. I don't want to quit this one too soon if the best is yet to come, but boy, has it been a slog so far. It's taken me a week to read those hundred pages and that is a comparative snail's page from my typical reading speed.  I'm really curious as to what others think of it. 

I know, it's Tuesday not Monday, but this is all I've got this evening.  My favorite pair of jeans ripped on the front of one leg and I didn't want to downgrade them to the little better than sweatpants category. I had an idea that I wanted to use embroidery to repair them. But that is as far as I got for several weeks. Then, at the linen weaving class, a friend of mine had a really pretty multi-colored warp. I got to thinking that linen would be an excellent thread to repair the jeans because linen is hard-wearing and strong. So I took some of her loom waste home. Yesterday I finally had a chance to play with it. I'm kind of pleased with how it came out.  A slightly closer view. I've thrown them in the wash, so I'm curious how it will change afterwards because linen gets softer with washing.  I'm also in the process of washing our sheep's fleece. I'm about halfway done, but the weather is going to need to improve for me to finish that task. In the m...

Two cars, nine people, and 347 miles shouldn't be that hard Alternators hate me  Literally swearing at AAA on the phone  People are actually mostly kind... or the tow truck driver who broke the rules and got us off the side of the highway and further down the road  FYI: one large battery will last for exactly one hour without a working alternator  Why does everyone want to spend the night in a hotel in Merrilville, IN? How many times will J. get to drive between home and Merrilville, IN? Ultimately five... which is four times too many  Only the cool moms hang out with their teens at 3 am at IHOP  Getting home while watching the sun rise  [The minivan is still in Indiana while J. argues with the warranty service about paying for the new alternator. Many of us are still recovering from much missed sleep.]

Some pictures from the big day.  And a video of D. receiving his diploma. With his faulty advisor for his senior research. It was a good day and we are extremely proud of D., not only for his academic success, but for who he is as a human being.  Stay tuned tomorrow for the saga of our drive home. 

We all made it to Ohio. Tonight's events were the baccalaureate service (D. sang in the senior choir) followed by a campus party for the seniors and their families. 

There had been warnings of severe weather heading out way all day. While most of the storm headed north into Wisconsin, there were warnings of pop-up super cells that could bring tornadoes and baseball sized hail. That didn't sound particularly enjoyable and J. and I briefly discussed if we could cover the cars in plywood... or something since we don't have a garage or any covered parking. (The answer to that would be no.)  While I'm usually disappointed that a promised thunder storm doesn't appear, tonight I am pretty relieved. There were storms that went north and south of us, but we just had a small bit of rain. (More rain would have been a bit better.) Avoiding giant hail and tornadoes seems like a very good thing.  This is especially true because we leave bright and early tomorrow to head to Duncan's graduation. (We have house sitters staying here to care for all the animals, so the house won't be empty. You'd be hearing this after the fact if that were...

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...