Blog

   This morning it is 60 degrees, headed for 75 as it has been for the past week or so.  The trees know the summer is over, having lost most of the brilliantly colored leaves of the past few weeks.  The mountains are looking barren, though the grass and clover are as green as spring, providing excellent grazing for the mountain foragers stocking up for winter.  In the bright waxing moon of last night, we could see 5 deer within yards of the back of the house, filling their bellies on the sweet clover that “Ferdinand” seeks during the day.
     The weather experts are threatening us with a “Frankenstorm,” their term, not mine, a combination of winter storm and spin off of the hurricane edging up the east coast.  The warm days are over, seasonable, then cold temps are forecast for the next few days with serious winter temps in the 20’s at night, not as cold as it will get later, but certainly much colder than we usually see in late October.
     As I am preparing to leave for the weekend with a friend to travel to the Ashville, NC area for a fiber festival, leaving hubby home with the pups, the morning has been spent prepping the outdoors for the winter prediction.  My rosemary shrubs that have wintered indoors for the past few winters have gotten woody and not very productive, so they were cut back along with the remaining basil and flatleaf parsley and brought in to dry on a rack in the garage.  The back deck cushions and umbrella, brushed and stored in the utility area of the basement on the upper root cellar shelves that were otherwise unused this season.  The back deck chairs, stacked and moved to the front porch that has a roof and they will be covered with a contractor’s bag or tarp to keep the cats from nesting on them.

 The peppers have loved the warm sunny days and cool nights, but will not survive the next few nights, so I have picked all of them that are large enough to use for cooking and they will be diced and frozen or strung for drying to be used during the winter months.  The freeze covers on the fall greens were staked down tight, hoping to provide us with another month or two of fresh greens and the potted oregano and thyme brought in to a sunny window.  As the back of our house is south facing, there are a number of windows that serve to provide winter light to the plants brought in from the cold.

     I will return on Sunday night to find the peppers, daisies, late blooming sunflowers and iris leaves burned and brown to be cut back to the ground on the next seasonable, dry fall day.  I guess we have experienced Indian Summer or a quirk of global warming, but today is the garden’s last hurrah.

     Today was lesson # 2, same horse, and I haltered him and brought him from the field unassisted.  I managed to saddle and bridle him also unassisted after our grooming session.  Today’s instructor was a sub and we were sharing the riding arena with another horse and rider, the horse not accustomed to sharing the ring, but it worked out for everyone well.  We used half the ring and she used the other half and when one or the other needed the entire ring, we managed it ok.

     We got a bit more style instruction, a lot more trotting and I am surprisingly, to me, unafraid of the faster, bouncier motion.  Nippers, my ride, needs lots of encouragement to move fast enough to notice, but seems to be a gentle, round bellied paint.  The sub seemed a bit surprised that it was only my second lesson.  Maybe there is hope that I will actually adapt to this.

     The past few days have been unseasonable warm, near summer temps during the day and any toil, horse related, bull chasing, dog walking have been uncomfortable.  The weather forecast shows a significant change over the next few days, with nights in the mid 20’s, rain, perhaps snow.  Our lesson on Monday might be a bit more unpleasant for us.  I think my wardrobe is going to gain the addition of a barn jacket if we are going to continue riding this winter and having to deal with our own animals by next fall.

     Still no photos, maybe Monday.

     Many young girls, develop a love of horses and desire to own and ride one.  Even though I grew up in a rural area, I really never had that desire.

     As our kids grew up and we often spent a few days each summer on the Skyline Drive with them, often a trail ride was suggested by husband or daughter.  Though I did take one or two of these rides, I often elected to hike with one of my sons while hubby and daughter rode.

     We have plenty of land on our farm for a few animals, besides the two dogs and the oft visiting neighbor’s bull, and we have considered a couple of beef cows and perhaps a couple of mature, already broken horses for gentle rides around our property, the neighbor’s property and the local trails for horses.  To take on this responsibility, we first have to determine if we like to ride and if we can handle the grooming and maintenance involved.  Hubby took a 4 lesson session of riding and he liked it, so today we started western riding lessons together.  One of my personality traits is anxiety at trying new things and I rarely suggest trying new things, so I entered today’s lessons with a fair degree of anxiety.  These lessons involve going out into the field, harnessing the horse you are to ride, walking him/her to the riding ring building, combing and brushing the horse, cleaning the hooves, then bridling and saddling the horse before the actual riding part of the lesson.  After learning the basic posture and control and working through walk and trot and how to get off the beast, the preride routine is reversed, unsaddling, unbridling, cleaning hooves, brushing, reharnessing and walking your mount back out to the field to remove the harness and release the horse.  I managed all of this fairly well and actually enjoyed it.  Of course, I think most of my comfort was that I was in a huge building inside a fenced ring with hubby and his horse and the instructor in the ring with me.  This process will be repeated 3 more times in the next couple of weeks and then we decide if we will sign up again.

     No pictures of today’s event, maybe after a couple more lessons.

Autumn, a time for apples, pumpkins, sweet potatoes and brassicas.  With the fall color and mild daytime temperatures, we ventured off to the Blue Ridge Parkway yesterday with the pups.  An hour drive from home, put us on the parkway in Floyd, VA for a short jaunt down to Meadows of Dan and a great country store with local produce of the season.  We stocked up on apples as our trees are too young to produce, cabbages, though I have a few in the garden,  I fear they aren’t going to mature to heads before it gets too cold, sweet potatoes and butternut squash, good keepers for the root cellar and to enjoy as the weather chills and the holidays approach.  Also on our journey, we stopped at Mabry Mill, a historic water driven grist mill for the winter’s supply of corn grits and buckwheat flour.  I’m southern enough to enjoy grits, but not sweet tea.  After our shopping, the pups took a hike with us along one of the trails off the parkway, scouting out potential hikes for when our daughter and her family visit in late November.

A neighbor produced many more pumpkins than she needed and she offered us several, too small for jack-o-lanterns, too large for stuffing, but a good size to bake and puree for pies and pumpkin bread.

When I pulled the tomato plants a few weeks ago, I brought in a dozen or so green smooth tomatoes and put them in a window.  Most are bright red and ready to eat, but have lost some of the summer flavor.

This afternoon I have cut and frozen apples for pies and cooking with pork for dinners or sausage and eggs for breakfasts, have one of the pumpkins baking to puree for the freezer and a loaf of bread, cut most of the tomatoes and a handful of green jalapenos and popped them in the crockpot with beans I put on this morning as the base for chili tonight.

The freezer is filling with the bounty of our garden, the farmer’s market, and the other local goodies, the root cellar is well stocked and we await the off season to enjoy the fruit of the summer and fall toil and preservation.

It is almost time to start dreaming about what will be planted for next season and devouring online and paper catalogs for heirloom seed, drawing a garden plan, and enjoying winter walks.

Life is indeed good on this mountain.

     My tablet is home and once I realized that the new charger from Radio Shack had a polarity to the USB adapter, it took a charge.  The loose connection to the screen is repaired so far and the screen turns on as it is supposed to.  The other issues with this tablet have to do with the entire line of these tablets and I suppose they will be corrected with the newer models, such as a noticable lag time between your command and its response to you, limit to Android apps for word processing and data work and Androids poor response to Blogger, I have to type my text in Blogger on Android, then open the blog in Firefox to add pictures as typing text in Firefox on the tablet results in a jumbled confused mess.  The tablet brand choice was unwise, I fear, but I shall use it until it again fails and reevaluate the market, or perhaps return to a laptop mini.

     At any rate, the week plus near absence has resulted in so many autumn changes.  In the past ten days, the woods have become gold, orange, crimson and plum.  This is a beautiful, albeit brief period before the year’s leaves blanket the woods floor, we can see our two nearest neighbor’s houses through the barren trees, and we await some winter snow for it’s beauty.

     The weather has hovered just above freezing at night, rising to 60’s and low 70’s daily to allow some late blooming of sunflowers and daisies and the thriving of the peppers and fall greens and brassicas in the garden.

     The pups revel in the weather, romping and chasing without overheating, laying in the sun when it is chilly.  The grass has greened up like spring and this has “Ferdinand,” the neighbor’s bull making multiple soiries into our yard daily to feed and fertilize.  The fence has yet to be repaired and it isn’t our job.  The pups continue to see him as a threat instead of just going about their business and play and leaving him alone.  Fortunately he isn’t an agressive bull, just stubborn.  We fear for the pups if they get too close, trying to bark him away, that he might kick out which would probably not end well, so I continue to “out bull” him with the tractor and run him off.  I have learned that if I approach quickly with the engine reved, he bolts before I get to him and if I pursue quickly, he picks up speed and leaves without abusing our trees on the way.

     The tablet absence also allowed me to complete a sweater for our youngest granddaughter who will be visiting from Florida for Thanksgiving and her first birthday, and to get a good start on a hoodie for her almost  6 year old brother as he has spurted up and outgrown last year’s sweater from Mommom, and to read 2 books checked out of the library.

     Life is grand in the mountains, and I’m back!!!

Our first computer was a Tandy purchased when our children were very young and I was still teaching and “needed” it to create exam question bases.  Of course it was used more by the kids playing Space Quest and other games, but it didn’t take long to realize how much it could be used.

As the years passed, there was always a desktop in the house.  Kids used it for school work, by then I was a school counselor and only used one at work as they were installed in our offices and student data bases were added.  Then I started volunteering as an adult leader with the Boy Scouts and one of my duties for a while was treasurer, which involved keeping up with dues and fees for trips.  Working on paper at the meetings, then coming home and putting the into into a data base, first Excel, then Access.  At this point, hubby took pity on me and bought me a laptop for Christmas and I was hooked.

The internet improved, email became common, then social networking, smart phones and finally ebooks.  Like so many others, I was addicted to the electronic age, the lap top was replaced when the first one failed at age 7.  I’m not a big fan of television, never have been in my adult life, but I love to read and getting an e-reader that I could carry with a whole library of books on it was heaven.  My first e-reader met with an untimely end, my laptop was less important as I was retired and one son was in grad school, so the laptop had been passed on to him for school as I could do email and internet searches on my e-reader, so I was lost without it.  We replaced it 14 months ago with a Tablet.  Much research, playing with them at the store, etc., I went with an Android based tablet with a detachable keyboard that made it look like a laptop mini when attached and I began this blog.

At just about a year old, the tablet started having intermittent screen failure and it was returned for warranty repair, only to find the extended warranty we had purchased was not as advertised and it was no longer under warranty.  That was another blog a few weeks back.  Then a bit over a week ago, it ceased taking a charge and wouldn’t turn on at all.  Again, I am without, having only my phone to connect to the internet and social networks, and I can not do my blog on it.  The tablet has been with an independent repair guy in town for 4 or 5 work days now and I haven’t heard any news or gotten an estimate, so I have been down, blogwise and emotionally.  I read a book and a half on my phone screen trying to get to one in a series I had purchased in paper for our trip to Texas and realized it was 4th in a series.  I finally found books two and three in the library and checked them out.  This morning’s blog is being done on hubby’s laptop while he is not using it, but I miss my tablet.

If it is unrepairable, I guess a new one will be on my birthday/Christmas wish list, but I think I will change brands.

    The weekend has been whirlwind, with a trip to El Paso via Atlanta to a cousin’s surprise 60th birthday celebration.  In Atlanta we met up with another cousin, his wife, his son and his wife.  After a delay, but otherwise uneventful flight, we arrived late Friday night, which seemed later due to the 2 hour time differential.
      Saturday morning started the surprise part, when the 6 of us were tasked with showing up at his house and “hijacking”him for about 6 hours while his wife set up for a huge catered outdoor party.  Bob was stunned when his wife opened the door and there we all were.  After touristing around for the required hours, we dropped him off and went to refresh and dress.  His party was huge, food, wine, a band and lots of other surprise, to him, guests.  His wife did well.
     We are again sitting in an airport, delayed, awaiting leg one of our flight home.  It has been a great time, a good change of pace, but home, the dark and quiet will be welcome tonight.

     This morning as we were leaving the property to go into town for lunch and some doggy socialization, we spotted a small black bear in the three acre woods between our house and our nearest neighbor’s house.  The bear was only about 150 lbs and may have overnighted in the culvert that goes under our driveway a few hundred feet from the front ofthe house.  I think that might be the case as Ranger was unusually curious about the smells coming from that culvert when he was out for a morning romp with Shadow.  I have only had one other bear sighting since moving here, when one hauled across the width of the upper part of our land like it was being chased and into those same woods.  We know they are up here, hearing tales of them being seen at Mountain Lake or of one being hunted on an adjacent farm, but we seldom see them.  Typically they are shy and are not seen near the houses unless bird feeders are left outside, and I don’t feed the birds here except with berry laden bushes or seed bearing flowers.
     It isn’t uncommon to see squirrel, rabbits, deer, turkeys, chipmunks, an occassional groundhog and the seasonal assortment of birds.
     All of these critters, even the field mice, moles and voles that the cats bring home are expected.
     Our property has wire fence nearly all the way around it, much of it very old and not well maintained, but two adjacent farms have cattle and generally the fencing between their land and ours is better maintained, however, one of these farmers is less diligent about this and there must be a branch or small tree down over it now as “Ferdinand,” his bull (our name for him) has taken a liking to the grass in our front yard, coming over nearly daily.  I wouldn’t mind his assistance at mowing and the fertilizer he leaves behind, except the pups don’t care for the intruder so close to the house and charge after him barking.  He doesn’t have horns, but he is a huge dude and he isn’t frightened by them at all.  We are fearful that one of them may get kicked if they get too close, so every time we are going to let them out, we have to do a bull check first and if he is out there, I have to go get the tractor and run him off, it is the only thing that sends him sauntering back toward his own farm.  He is going over or through a fence, through a deep creek bed and up a steep bank to get on our land, and when run off, he has to stop and show his displeasure by head butting one or more of the cedar trees on the edge of the mowed yard.

  I have just spent more than an hour on the phone with a medical bureaucracy trying to get my Prescription drug coverage for Medicare in effect.  I have an advanced college degree and low blood pressure and by the end of the call, I feel I need a prescription to calm down and lower my blood pressure.
The agents with whom you must deal are trained only to read a script and react to the correct answer with the next part of the script.  There is no way around this script, nothing you can say to get them to skip on to the application.
I called, knowing exactly what plan I wanted, how much it costs, and what it covers, I had done my homework.  I was able to tell them up front, that I wasn’t eligible for assistance, was healthy, had never lived outside of the country, had not gotten out of an extended care facility or hospital (I had done my homework), but it did no good, they had to go through the script.
My phone was on speaker, so hubby was listening in and when the call finally ended with the agent saying, “Thank you for calling, sweetie,” he too was stressed.

Retirement has given me the time to try many new to me, but ancient arts/crafts.  Upon notification that I was to become a grandmother, I dug out some knitting needles and refreshed on a long abandoned art, making baby sweaters, soakers, and shirts, all from organic undyed baby soft wool and cotton.  The next 8 years have allowed me to produce dozens of sweaters from tiny to men’s,  half a dozen or so baby blankets, scores of hats and scarves, four Christmas stockings and several pair of socks.  This love of fiber urged me to dig out the sewing machine and make a couple of machine quilted baby blankets and a Christmas stocking.  Though I dearly love quilts and all of our beds are spread with them, making quilts really hasn’t grabbed my interest, yet.

  Handling yarn, did interest me in the fibers I was knitting and drove me to investigate spinning, first with a drop spindle and this summer with a newly acquired, but nearly 50 year old spinning wheel and falling in love with another ancient art.
From the time I was a teen, I have loved digging in the dirt, gardening with my Dad, later having anything from a few potted tomatoes to a small city garden at most of our homes.  Here in the mountains, on our 30 acre farm, the garden is substantial and organic and there are a few young fruit trees added to the products we grow.

  This garden, the fruit trees, wild and cultivated berries have gotten me canning, making jelly, pickles and sauces to preserve this garden goodness for the cold non productive winter months.

  Recently, I have toyed with the idea of making soap as well.  Not wanting to get too involved, nor spend too much money until I tried it and saw if I enjoyed it, I purchased only a single mold and a few pounds of a high quality soap base that I could heat, scent with essential oils, dye with natural dyes from tumeric, cinnamon, lavender and a few other spices.  I think I am hooked.  I am about to embark on making my own soap from fats and lye.  Of course, I can  buy good quality homemade soap from the local craft fairs and weekly from the farmer’s market, but it is expensive, I don’t always care for the available scents and I didn’t have a hand in its making.

Back when our children were small, I taught myself to make baskets.  Several of the ones that I made are still used to haul produce in from the garden, to store yarn and to decorate the kitchen area of our log home.  These baskets were all made from reed purchased for caning and basket making or from kits, but with the easy availability of grape and other vines, I have considered refreshing those skills and making a few storage baskets for the root cellar from the vines on our property with the ribs from flexible twigs.
These ancient arts have long appealed to me, along with a few I haven’t tried, it is a great feeling and sense of accomplishment to use products from our land and my hands.