BIG news

Meet Jess. Seventeen hundred and fifty pounds of purebred Belgian mare. Her friend Kandy looks a lot like her--seventeen fifty more. Kandy planted her dinner-plate-sized hoof on the end of my boot a few minutes after the farrier was finished, so I'm not putting her photo up.

As of Sunday, they live here. I stood next to them, watching them eat, with the Gaggle of Girls perched on the corral fence. I held my hand flat on the top of my head, then ran it out straight across to Kandy's withers, sure that I was a wee bit taller. Four heads shook "no." Just then Kandy's muzzle came up out of the feed trough, munching alfalfa. Another two or three feet of solid horseflesh stretched above me.

Anyone know where there's some good hay for sale?

P.S. This is NOT a photo editing trick.

Thistling

Musk Thistle is a noxious weed. A single flower will eventually multiply enough to take over an entire pasture, choke out everything edible, and consume a firstborn child if one wanders in unchaperoned.

Looking for thistles.

Merrill is brave enough to thistle alone, but Thistler's Mother, or Dad with a cold drink, might lurk in the periphery, just in case the weeds begin to get the upper hand.

Thistler pops off the seed head, then digs up the prickly stalk. Flowers must be bagged and burned, or they will continue to mature and spread their poison, even while the parent plant is decapitated, uprooted, and left in the sun to die.

In spite of this violence, time slows when you're thistling. Slow enough to search out the nest of a red-winged blackbird that flushes as you pass by.

How Farmers Do Business

We were ten miles from home when a local seed corn salesman spotted us and tailed us to John's alfalfa field.

He idled his pickup by the side of the road, watching as John sized up the afalfa, uprooted a lone pigweed, and pulled our vehicle back onto the gravel.

No cherrywood desk, no secretary bringing coffee, no dialing the phone. If you want to do business with a farmer, you only need to know his vehicle, and maybe where he goes to check his hay.

Sunrise, Sunset

This isn't exactly what I saw when Erica hustled me outside to look at the red morning sun. In reality, the sun was a lot redder, but who would believe me, knowing that, using Photoshop, I could paint it pea green if I wanted to? I think holding the shutter open for more light on the horse bleached the sun a bit, but this was pretty close to reality.

Sunset was just as nice. Have you ever seen a feedyard look so sweet?

We Don't Do Boys

We don't usually do boys, but we can use a little spare muscle when it's time to put up the horse hay. Fortunately, there were some extra boys to be had this week, so we picked up a couple, along with their thirteen-year-old cousin Laura.

The job: pick up seventy-five bales of grass hay, weighing fifty to sixty-five pounds each. Throw them on a hay rack, stack them four or five high, ride the rack to the barn and undo everything you just did. Repeat the whole process a second time.

It is an onerous task on days like this, when the sun is in overdrive and the cloudless Midwest heats up to 96 degrees.

We've done this before, sans boys, but the extra muscle means the work goes faster, the shoulders don't ache quite so much, the sunburn's not so red, and the chatter is lively. Maybe because it's boy-chatter, which we're pretty short on around here.


For example, "I wonder what it would feel like to have one million eggs thrown at you all at once." Or, "What sort of a bug do you suppose made that big splat on your windshield? Do you think it was a horsefly? Which horse's blood do you think is making that splat so red?"



Somehow, these sorts of things don't tend to come up much in our family.


There is reward in this work: riding the rack to the barn, the feel of muscles you'd forgotten you had, ice-cold lemonade when the last bale is set down, the satisfaction of working together, and of a hard job well done.


I'm thankful for strong girls and strong boys to borrow.

My Favorite Duck

This is my favorite duck, rescued for two dollars from a garage sale many years ago.

When the time came to move the duck and the rest of our belongings into this house, we had spent a year with the contractor, drawing plans, moving doorways, picking out faucets and door knobs, choosing juteback or kangaback carpet. I was tired and overwhelmed by major remodeling in addition to homeschooling four girls and helping my husband strike out on his own in the farming world. We slapped white paint on nearly every wall: Git 'R Done and let's move in! That was nine years ago; Duck peeked out from the camouflage of my white walls all that time. I knew he was there, but few others did.

The duck looked over sofas and chairs handed down from relatives, snagged at sales, or dragged home from Goodwill. Finally, last fall, we blew it all up with dynamite and bought the first new furniture we've ever had. THIS celebration required a splash of paint! Duck came out of hiding, waddling through colors like Windmill, Summer Suede and Dark Ochre.

(Never mind that my daughters refer to the new walls as "light muck" and "dark muck". It's how farm girls are conditioned to think.)

Duck no longer swims on a sea of white. Sometimes, when the light is right, he takes flight across my new dark muck windowshade.

Nebraska Sandhills

Nebraska is not completely flat. Just ask one of the 600 bicyclers who pedaled across it last week, including John's 70-year-old mother. She and four of her cycling friends (all at least several years younger than she) stayed here overnight on their way east. They were tired of eating the sloppy joes provided by host communities en route, so we gave them steak and cake --a big slab of Nebraska beef with all the trimmings, followed by a slice of rich chocolate that Audrey worked over at her cake decorating class earlier that day.

The bikers.

Horse Play

"Playdays" at the Capital City Horse and Pony Club arena are a great way for girls and horses to work out the jitters before facing more serious competition later in the season. The show is judged and ribbons awarded, but 4H garb is not required, and attitudes are a little more relaxed than at bigger shows. We decided to spend Saturday afternoon with the playday horse crowd. My best photos were outside the show ring.

Erica & Merrill, listening to tales between events.

The spectators.

Time to go home.

Snakes

As a kid growing up in Texas, I was warned about rattlesnakes, copperheads, and water moccasins, all poisonous snakes whose venomous bites can be fatal. Water moccasins are also called cottonmouths; when they are frightened they pop open their wide mouths, revealing creamy white insides. My uncles kept always on the lookout for them swimming in the creek next to my grandparents' weekend cabin. Sometimes there'd be a hullabaloo and a hollering; toddlers were snatched up out of the water, and someone ran to get a gun.

Once, my grandfather discovered a nest of rattlesnakes in the crawl space under the cabin. He stretched out on the ground, peered into the semi-dark, and shot their swaying heads one by one.

My other grandparents lived on a wild rolling hillside outside of Austin, thick with scrub mesquite and prickly pear, in which snakes and scorpions were apt to hide. He and my stalwart grandmama cleared the spindly trees and ragged underbrush; then laid stone and wood and concrete blocks by hand until two stories of house and a rooftop deck for star-gazing telescopes looked out over the tangle of Texas scrub. Not yet tired, Grandmama carved out a spot for goldfish ponds and lily pads, an oasis amongst the cactus and scrappy cedars. Barefoot was not an option in a place so full of pricklies. The men shook out their boots before pulling them on each morning, even if they had been indoors all night. "If you're ever once stung by a scorpion," my daddy said, "you'll never forget to shake out your boots."

Eastern Nebraska is tame by comparison. I saw this harmless bull snake sleeping in the afternoon sun on a lazy farm road. Unlike the venomous snakes I encountered in Texas, bull snakes are constricting reptiles, calmly wrapping themselves ever tighter around mice or rabbits, until the prey gives up breathing.

I woke this one gently for the photo shoot; then thanked him by encouraging him to meander into the road ditch, safely away from the next set of tractor wheels.

Vet Work

Our cows graze aimlessly through the summer on several small bits of pasture, none of which lasts very long. Consequently, we must periodically gather the entire bovine population and move them to fresh grass. Sometimes the pastures are close enough that we herd them with horses and four-wheelers and shouting children; other times we pack them into a trailer and haul them. Trailer days may also include a run through the vet's barn, as did Tuesday's adventure. At the vet's, each animal is temporarily immobilized in a squeeze chute, where we deworm, immunize, and poke an insect-repellent flytag in each ear. Flies carry pinkeye, so flytags minimize our chances of dealing with that disease later in the summer.

Baby calves get flytags, too. Audrey and Kendall, the vet tech, are coming at this one with their sixguns loaded.

Sometimes a calf won't stand just right, so Jake serves as a human squeeze chute.

After the baby calves all have their tags, Erica and Merrill run the big mamas, a few at a time, down the alleyways and into the vet barn. The barn is on the small side, and the cows are on the big side, so the girls move only four or five cows at a time. Cows are herding animals--safety in numbers and all that. Peeling off just a few can be a job.

They would sure rather be lolling in the sunshine than going in for a chat with the doc, so Merrill gives them a little encouragement. Get the move on, old girl!

Sources

Where can you get the very best pastry cutter in the whole wide world?

From your daughter. Put it on your birthday list. If your birthday is a long way off, you might have to dig for it yourself:

http://www.kingarthurflour.com/shop/detail.jsp?id=6818

As for "Retro Pies", I know absolutely nothing about them. I found this visual gem when I was looking for a graphic for my post. A little Photoshop added the black text and the pastry cutter........voila'! If I ever locate my copious free time, I think I might pop open Photoshop again and make notecards or recipe cards out of this image. Did I mention that I really like Photoshop Elements? Did I mention that it is addictive?

A Green Scene

Muddy green hay dust drifted on the breeze. The cut alfalfa in the foreground and the trees of course were green, too, but greenest of all was the smell. The whole sky was filled with fresh, sweet, strong alfalfa hay smell. It floated on the wind and settled the faintest green on your clothes and deep in your lungs. You could almost taste the living, growing, calf-feeding, horse-munching green. If you have never stood in the cool shade of a freshly-filled hayshed and breathed in alfalfa green, you must come to Farm Camp and try it. For farm-curious folk, the grapple fork alternates lifting bales off of two stacks of alfalfa, one on its right and the other on its left. It drops a bale, twines and all, into a great grinding tub that is hidden behind the stack in the center of this photo. Every time a bale drops, you hear a very loud grrrrummmm, grrrummmm, grrummmm as the tub grinder shreds the bale into small fluffiness. Alfalfa fluff travels up a conveyor belt (see the top of it next to the man in the back of the truck), and plops into the semi. That man climbs the spongy pile, tromping and packing so it won't blow down the gravel road. I guess big men are better at this job than wiry guys, but in the end, large or small, they all come out green.

My niece from the city wants to know why we used a machine for these bales, but made her lift them by hand when she came to Farm Camp. She doesn't know that these weigh between 1100 and 1500 lbs.; the ones we stacked when she was here weighed fifty.

Voila'! A Viola!

voi·là (vwah-lah) Used to call attention to or express satisfaction with a thing shown or accomplished: Mix the ingredients, chill, and—voilà!—a light, tasty dessert. From the French : voi, imperative of voir, to see + là, there. See there!

vi·o·la (vee-oh-luh)–noun. A four-stringed musical instrument of the violin family, slightly larger than the violin; a tenor or alto violin.

Several years ago, Merrill wanted to learn to play the violin. We had no violin, no knowledge about violins, nor any idea of where to find a violin teacher in our tiny little town. Merrill began to ask God about a violin, not mentioning it to anyone else. Several months later, her grandfather bought a violin at a sale. He had no idea that anyone here had an interest in it, but offered it to us on a lark. Voila'---Merrill had a violin.

Recently, Merrill wanted to add viola to her repotoire, but there was no viola in sight. She began praying again. The subject arose once in a coversation with her Aunt Kate, who lit fire and ran. Voila'. Wrapped in God's goodness and Nebraska sunshine, Merrill just had her first viola lesson.

Great big thank yous to Opa and Aunt Kate for the gift of music!

Ye have not because ye ask not. James 4:2. Our heavenly Father is not a puppet whose strings we may pull, nor a sugar daddy from whom we command whatever we want. But He is a loving Father who desires to give us good gifts. Like our earthly fathers, He wants us to ask for the things we need, and even the things we want. Sometimes He says no. But sometimes He's just waiting for us to ask.

Sweet 'n Easy #2 - Cinnamon Raisin Biscuits

This tasty breakfast idea can pop up while you're pouring your coffee, and before you hit your second cup, these whole wheat biscuits will be out of the oven...voila! If you don't speak French, look it up and let me know. Try not to get cinnamon raisin glaze on the dictionary----mama won't like it.

Cinnamon Raisin Biscuits

1 cup whole wheat flour

1 cup white flour

4 tsp. baking powder

1 tsp. salt

1 tsp. cinammon

3/4 cup cold butter

1/2 to 1 cup milk

1 cup raisins

Preheat oven to 450. Cut butter into flours, baking powder, salt & cinnamon. If you have one, use the very best pastry cutter in the whole wide world. Add enough milk for the proper consistency - more for drop biscuits, less for rolled & cut. Add raisins, shape into biscuits. Bake at 450, 10 to 13 minutes.

Cinnamon Raisin Glaze

2 Tbs. soft butter

1 tsp. cinnamon

1 cup powdered sugar

1-2 Tbs. milk

Combine and beat until fluffy. Spread over slightly cooled biscuits.

A Long Day

This is Brett, one of our strapping Farm Superheroes. Once I saw him heft a fifty-pound sack of seed corn with one hand. He was holding his cell phone with the other, probably having a nice little chat with his mother while he freighted the tonnage into a pickup bed.

The other night, long after dark, Brett was still working. My daughter's comment upon seeing him testifies to this guy's diligence:

It's pretty bad that I'm in my pajamas when Brett comes to work, then I get dressed and go about my day, and he's still here working when I put my pajamas back on!

Thanks, Brett.

More Help From Photoshop

It was just after a rain when Erica lay on the sofa to finish waking herself up. Passing by, I saw at once the raindrops on the screen, the rich green of the trees behind, and Erica, half silhouetted on the couch. My eyes made a seamless, split-second adjustment from the outdoor brightness to the relative darkness of the girl, with her face half in shadows and half in the soft light.

Eyes---and brains that adjust them and interpret the view---are an intricate and fabulous part of God's creation.

Sometimes, the beauty of a photo is that it doesn't record exactly what your eyes see. For example, part of the fun of the rose pictured on the windowsill in an earlier post is that Audrey in the background is out of focus. Of course, when I took the shot, my eyes saw Audrey in perfect focus.






Other times, however,the trick to taking a good photo is to work with the camera to record what your eye actually does see. The photo to the right is exposed so that the trees and raindrops are lit properly, but you can't see the soft features in Erica's face. Although I liked this shot fairly well, exposing for the proper light outdoors hid too much of Erica's face in darkness.
At left is the result from adjusting my camera for more light. This photo didn't seem too bad, either, but what I really wanted was to record the richness of the outdoor colors AND the points of light reflected by the raindrops on the screen AND the soft light on Erica's features. Perhaps a better photographer than I could have accomplished this with her camera alone, but I needed Photoshop Elements to ride up on its white horse and rescue me. The top photo is the end result, after tweaking the illumination of both parts of the picture.

Brain Games - Syllables

Homeschooling happens anywhere. A question in the car about syllables turned into a brain game recently as we drove home from church. The challenge is this: can you make a sentence in which every word has one more syllable than the preceding one? In the dark of an empty highway home, we cobbled together:

The recent Japanese catastrophe reverberated internationally.

The longer the sentence, the better, but it might be easiest to start with three or four words. You get bonus points if your sentence is logical.

If you come up with one, post it in the Comments, and we'll all celebrate your success with syllables.

Sweet 'n Easy

Cherries are on sale! Pair them with a bit of chilled orange for a very fast and refreshing snack or accompaniment to your summer supper. Fun to make, fun to photograph, fun to eat.

Without Spot or Blemish

Isn't it great that the Lord promises to work in His people, releasing us from who we have been and how we thought, until we are truly without spot or blemish? I had a long day of shopping yesterday in Lincoln. Errands that should have been a snap became laborious, traffic in little ol' Lincoln, Nebraska was more like Dallas/Fort Worth at rush hour, a headache pounded from the inside. It turned out to be a stressful day in which I said and did some things I wish I hadn't. At one point, I got stressed over $1.50, a dollar-fifty, for Pete's sake! I overreacted to something else, and landed too hard on someone I love. Yuck!

The Lord's mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning. Don't hang up yet--the Lord's conversation with us is not over. When He's finished, every spot and wrinkle will be gone, and we will be free to reflect His glory rather than our own sinful natures.

Speaking of spots.........they tend to come around when you have children. The last time one of my kids had spots, I remembered opening lines from The Catnappers by P. G. Wodehouse:

My attention was drawn to the spots on my chest when I was in my bath, singing.....They were pink in color, rather like the first faint flush of dawn, and I viewed them with concern. I am not a fussy man, but I do object to being freckled like a pard.....

"Jeeves," I said at the breakfast table, "I've got spots on my chest."
"Indeed, sir?"
"Pink."
"Indeed, sir?"
"I don't like them."
"A very undrstandable prejudice, sir. Might I inquire if they itch?"
"Sort of."
"I would not advocate scratching them."
"I disagree with you. You have to take a firm line with spots...."

One time last spring the GeorgiaGirl called home, feeling sick with a fever. I just happened to be reading this tale when she called, so I quickly flipped to the opening and read her the bit about Bertie's spots. It made her laugh in her sickbed, which warms the heart of a mother.

Wodehouse was a prolific and very funny writer. If you haven't already read his books, you should. They are great read-alouds for a family with older children.

Digicam Details

This is my camera, a Minolta DiMage 7i. I don't think they make these anymore; digicams have gotten both better and cheaper since I bought it four years ago.

Buying a new digital camera, like buying a car, means you need to consider a number of different features and options. Two of the most basic questions are about megapixels and optical vs. digital zoom.

Megapixels
A five megapixel camera can record up to five million pixels of data every time you take a photo; a four megapixel camera stores four million, etc. The more pixels you record, the greater the detail in your photo. However, more is not always better. For printing photos up to 5x7s, you need three or four megapixels. Four or five megapixels are plenty for good-quality 8x10s.


Optical vs. Digital Zoom
Zooming in with optical zoom is very different from using digital zoom, resulting in vast differences in the quality of your photo. Optical zoom physically moves the lens elements in the camera, to magnify the image before it is recorded digitally. If you are using a five megapixel camera, up to five million pixels of data will be recorded when you click the shutter, even if you have zoomed in with the optical zoom. However, when you use the digital zoom, you are "throwing away" pixels at the edges of the photos and enlarging the pixels that remain, resulting in a loss of detail. This procedure has identical results to cropping the photo on your computer. I never use digital zoom when taking a photo, preferring to record as many pixels as possible. I can always crop (digitally zoom) or "size down" the photo later, but I can never add accurate detail to what I recorded when I pressed the shutter button.

If you are thinking of buying a new digicam, there is a wealth of information and reviews on the internet. Steve's Digicams (http://www.steves-digicams.com/ ) is a very good site that I used extensively when shopping for my Minolta.

Shutterbug's Best Friend

Yes! I did take all the photos (no videos) on this blog, except the one of my grandmama. Thank you for asking and for your encouragement, JeannieBuck.

I use a Minolta DiMage 7i (five megapixel*) digital, with a 7x optical zoom*. The zoom lets me bring the action close, and five megapixels are plenty, since I don't make prints larger than 8x10. The camera also has macro (close-up) capability, which is how I can record the backside of a caterpillar's eyeballs.

But my real secret weapon is not my camera, but Adobe Photoshop Elements. I have a lurking suspicion that I'm not a very good photographer, but may be a decent photo editor. Photoshop Elements, an image editing program, can breathe life into the dry bones of a mediocre photographer's work. With it, you can fix red-eye, increase contrast, remove distractions, change the lighting, and adjust the colors in a photo.

Even more fun, you can add filters to your photos to turn them into art.

To illustrate, here is a photo of Erica from our county fair a couple of years back:

And here is the same photo with a variety of filters applied:














WARNING:
Photoshop is highly addictive!!



I'm working on becoming a better photographer, but, in the meantime, Photoshop Elements is my set of training wheels.

*Tomorrow: More on megapixels and optical vs. digital zoom.

Toadal Success

This is my entry in the Wood Family Heaviest Toad Contest. We were going to make the prize something yummy, like some ice cream, but some of us are trying very hard not to look like the heaviest toad, so we may have to come up with an alternate prize. Right after Toady jumped off the gram scale, it wouldn't work any more. Speaks a lot for the competitiveness of my entry don't you think?

Challenge for the homeschool math students: Does this guy weigh more or less than a McDonald's quarter-pounder?

Room with a View

The clouds were so rich outside an upstairs window this morning, I knew they would make a beautiful cottony backdrop for my deep pink rose. By the time I lined my camera up, the canvas below was more interesting than the one above. Audrey is tending her pots of herbs, oblivious to the fact that she just drifted into a photo shoot.

What's in Your Kitchen? part 2

Angel Biscuits are fluffy because the butter is cut into small chunks rather than blended with the flour. To keep the butter in chunks, you need to start with cold butter; to cut cold, hard butter, you need a pretty stout pastry cutter.


I've been making Angel Biscuits for nearly twenty-five years. Until this month, I never met a cutter worthy of the task. Either the handle breaks off, or the tines bend and snap, rendering the tool useless.










An alternative to a pastry cutter is to use two knives, like my mother does. I can do it, but I don't like to. Now I don't need to, as the ultimate pastry cutter lives in my drawer.

When one of your daughters loves to ferret out clever kitchen gadgets, you don't have to settle for two knives.

Anyway, two knives don't look this good against the placemat.