ABC

It's getting close to back-to-school time.  J leaves for Toledo for her Junior year on Saturday AM bright and early.  I'm sad that our family time is coming to an end.  We have had a good summer though!

In honor of school, we're going through the alphabet today:

A is for apple.  We have half of our apple harvest in, and it was delicious!

B is for beach, boat and bulletin board:

We went for our annual week in Erie the end of July - beginning of August.  The weather was perfect in the mid 70's and mostly sunny.  The water was warm and nice.  We spent a couple of days on the beach, and took a tour on a paddle boat, the Victorian Princess, on the lake.

I have a couple more posts on my refrigerator bulletin board as well.

This is the "Nostalgic Children's Book" edition

This is "Our Favorite Movies" edition

C is for chickens, cycling and cuisine:

We spent a couple of days cycling in Erie - we like to take the 13-mile path around Presque Isle.  We also took a ride close to home on the Greene River Trail.

Once home from vacation, I cleaned out the chicken house and switched the pullets to the larger side, and the old hens and stupid rooster to the smaller side.

We also took a day trip to Wheeling, WV.  We visited our favorite Crepe restaurant, checked out some local antique shops, and came home with take-out from our favorite Italian diner - they make the pasta and sauce from scratch.

This is the kitchen at The Roosevelt - the pots
of pasta and sauce are bubbling on the stove

D is for dangerous:

A couple of weeks ago, we visited Meadowcroft for the day.  The girls tried out their hands at axe throwing and we climbed the 60-some stairs to watch the archeologists digging in the rock shelter.

E is for eggs:

The pullets are finally laying some tiny eggs.  So far, we are averaging about 3 a day.  Hopefully this improves with time!  The problem comes with the fact that 2 of them are still not managing to go outside or return to the chicken house.  I have to go out every morning and evening and shove them through the chicken door!

I could probably go on, but there is laundry and mending to do.  Packing and rearranging to accomplish for J.  And last-minute doctor appointments for J and I.

Enjoy the remainder of your summer!

How My Garden Grows

Just a quick post and a few photos tonight...

My garden is actually starting to produce a few things FINALLY!

I've picked a few tomatoes and enjoyed the thoroughly summertime lunch of tomato sandwiches exactly twice so far.  There are pumkins and winter squash growing to decent size, and tiny cucumbers and yellow squash starting.  The 3rd planting of beans came up, and have since disappeared.  I think I have a total of 8 corn plants after 3 plantings as well.  It's very disappointing.  

I did send a soil sample in for testing.  The results show that the garden is low in phosphorus and high in magnesium.  They gave some suggestions for correcting this, so we will try to make those amendments this fall.

In other news, J and I made these delicious and colorful spring rolls out of crab meat, seasoned rice noodles and veggies last week.  They were lovely!

L and I finally finished painting the grave markers for the kitties and Kali.  Here is our complete Pet Cemetary:

From L to R:  Lizzie, Ernie, Kali...

Kali, Zach, Daisy

And finally, I am enjoying using my new glass fronted side by side freezer/fridge as a giant bulletin board.  I write a "Today in History" factoid on the left, and a quote on the right.

Seldom Seen

We have made a few interesting discoveries up on the Ridge over the past couple of weeks.

I received this box in the mail last week, which contained a bouquet of sunflowers from Chewy.com as a sympathy gift after the loss of our kitty.

They were confused about Lizzie's name...Stella is alive and well.

L and I have been walking around the property and picking wild black raspberries this week.  We haven't seen any up here for a few years.  We already made a peach/black raspberry cobbler this weekend.

On our walks, we found evidence of racoons enjoying the raspberries as well.

I also discovered these in our sad, sad orchard - after 13 years of trying to grow fruit trees, there are 2 whole apples on our apple tree!

There is no end to the surprising things we find up here!

Who's A Pest?

 One of the most fun books that I read to the girls over and over again when they were small, was "Who's A Pest?" by Crosby Newell Bonsall. In it, everyone calls Homer a pest, and while his toboggan gets bigger and bigger, he saves EVERYONE from a big hole in the ground.

We have had MANY pests around the hill this Spring and Summer, but none of them have had any redeeming qualities.

We eventually caught 1 racoon, 1 possum, and 2 squirrels in the garden.  Another raccoon and a blue jay were spotted multiple times stealing cat food from the veranda.  They don't have any kitty food to steal any longer, so they are likely being pests at someone else's house.

There are still a pair of crazy cardinals that repeatedly throw themselves against the windows downstairs.  I exercise while holding a yardstick, so that I can tap the window and chase them away.  We also put colorful clings on the windows to try to discourage them, but I'm not sure how to make them leave for good.

The blueberries have come in strong and they are very welcome since we lost our strawberries.  I need to pick them again today.  In the meantime, I had to buy strawberries to make jam with this year.

The other pesky thing we've been dealing with lately is the mass failure of our appliances.  We replaced our dishwasher in May.  When I came in from trying to find our cat last weekend, I found water all over the floor from the deep freeze, which had given up the ghost.  I transferred items to other freezers, including my parents' deep freeze until we could get a new one delivered on Wednesday.  I still don't have everything transferred back.

We hadn't even had the new freezer delivered yet when the extra refrigerator started making clanking and grinding noises, so now we are trying to chose a new refrigerator to order.  

It's maddening!

Miss Elizabeth Bennett

We had a sad, sad weekend.  Our remaining kitty, Miss Elizabeth Bennett, or Lizzie for short, disappeared.

She was acting a bit strange on Friday evening, mouth breathing and not as active as usual, but still appearing happy to see us, and purring quite loudly.  I had planned to try to get her in to the vet on Monday morning.  But she didn't come back Saturday or Sunday morning, so the girls and I went out in the woods to search for her on Sunday.

We found her body in the little hollow in the brambles where she liked to hang out when it is hot outside.

I got poked and cut from all the twigs and brambles, but I was finally able to get her out.  We buried her under the big oak tree, next to her buddy, Ernie (and Kali and Zach and my parents' dog, Daisy.)

Lizzie joined our family after my dad inadvertently caught her in the raccoon trap as a tiny baby.  She chomped down HARD on my finger when I tried to rescue her, but we all fell in love with her in the 2 weeks that we kept her in a cage on the veranda and observed her for signs of rabies, so we ended up keeping her as a friend for Ernie.

The two of them spent a lot of time together until Ernie passed earlier this year.

Her favorite things to do were to find shady places to relax...

...and roll in the dirt...

She would also visit me in the tree house now and then, by climbing up the tree!

She went from being a scared little feral kitten in a trap, to the sweet and beautiful cat that spent a decade as part of our family.  We miss her so much.

This Means War

I didn't realize how long it's been since I've posted anything until I looked at my blog the other day.  It has been a flurry of activity around here for the past 2 months!

In late April, L had a multitude of school activities, including induction into the National Honor Society and prom.

We moved J home from college the last weekend of April and she had elective surgery about 2 1/2 weeks later.  She is doing very well now - stronger and less sore all the time.  She started work just 2 weeks after her surgery, which was rough.  She will be L's supervisor this summer!

L took her SATs the first weekend after she went to prom - she has already received her results, and she did very well.

For Mother's Day we took our annual trip to my favorite nursery, where I got plants for all of my outside pots and hanging planters, as well as a few things for the garden.  I caught sight of this little creature in one of the greenhouses.

Soon after this, the dishwasher died.  We got a new one within a few days, but it took a few more days to get it installed, as we ran into issue after issue that required more parts.

L invited her chemistry class out to the house so that she and her lab partners could demonstrate a fire tornado.

Soon after, L had her Spring choir concert, where she sang a solo.  This was followed closely by finals and her 9th annual End of School Water Battle Party (every year since 2nd grade, except for 2020/Covid year.)

My little chicks from the last post, are now 12 weeks old.  We allowed them to go outside for the first time this weekend, and they seemed to enjoy themselves out there!

I started working on getting the pool opened over Memorial Day weekend.  It was ready for a little dip yesterday afternoon - the soonest that has happened in a few years.  It started out looking rather nasty...

JP and I managed to get away for a vacation on our own last week.  The girls stayed home alone - J was working, and L held down the fort.  We drove up North of Toronto and spent the first day at a Nordic spa - this type of spa involves using heat (sauna and hot tub) and cold (plunge pools and buckets) interspersed with relaxation on warm rocks or other relaxation rooms.  There were no cell phones allowed there, and talking was discouraged.  We managed to get a quick pic outside before we left.

We drove down to Cleveland the following day, and we were able to see a musical - which we greatly enjoyed!  We stayed close to the port, so we could see ships and the Brown's stadium, and we could walk to various restaurants and shops.

We had just started getting some delicious strawberries out of our garden prior to our vacation and were looking forward to getting some more when we returned.

Unfortunately, the garden has not been doing very well this year.  A couple of days after I planted out all of those little plants that I had carefully tended since February, I went out and found the majority of them eaten down to the ground.  I found a small area of fencing that hadn't been reinforced with chicken wire to keep the rabbits out and repaired that.  Then I bought a bunch of new plants, and I planted them out right before we left on vacation.  L cared for them well the entire time we were away.  I went down to pick strawberries yesterday and found this:

SOMEthing tore holes in my protective netting and actually PULLED STRAWBERRIES THROUGH THE NETTING!  ALL of the strawberries were gone.  Many of the new plants that I planted were pulled out by the roots or missing altogether.  There were holes dug in the mulch all over the garden.  There was also incriminating raccoon scat.  We set a trap last night, but although we did catch a coon overnight, it apparently got back into the garden before that and wreaked havoc again.  I also saw a squirrel leaving my strawberry bed as I drove down the driveway this afternoon, so tonight there is a squirrel trap AND a raccoon trap set down there.  THIS MEANS WAR!

I'm so discouraged.  I have spent so many hours and now so much money trying to grow food, this is a huge setback this late in the growing season.  SIGH.

Hopefully summer will move at a bit slower of pace from here on out.

Happy Easter, Do You Wanna Dance?

L's Easter/Spring Break was eclipsed by my illness and her Spring Musical.  We had to cancel our weekend in Toledo with J due to illness, and L had 4 hours of rehearsal every day except for Good Friday, so that was that.

I did try to do some Easter-y things, masked of course.  Having binge watched an entire season of "Great British Baking Show" over the previous 2 days, I decided to make Hot Cross Buns for Good Friday.  This involved 10 minutes of kneading dough, which was actually quite therapeutic.  They were delicious and I will definitely be baking these again, although I might cheat and use the bread hook on my KitchenAid instead of all that kneading.

I also boiled some eggs, and I expected L to help me decorate them, but she was much too busy.  I ended up using paint pens to paint them, which was not actually a good idea, because I could only paint about 1/3 of the egg, and then I had to let it dry before moving on.  They looked ok from far away.

For Easter brunch, I made beignets, which we enjoyed hot with fresh berries.  Yummy!

We have had some lovely weather, in fact, it has been a bit warm and dry!  Midweek, I ended up watering the peas that I planted, and just discovered yesterday that 2 of them have come up.  I'm hoping for better germination than that!

In the meantime, my asparagus has been sprouting, and I'm guessing that the rain over the weekend may really get it going.

JP spent a few days last week DIY-ing a 100 year old sink that we scavenged from our public library before a renovation project over a year ago.  The library is housed in a mansion built between 1900 and 1905 and gifted to the library by the previous owner.  The sink is now part of an outdoor sink/potting bench, which I think is wonderful!  I will stain the wood once it dries a bit...perhaps this fall.

L's show opened on Friday night.  I spent Thursday night and all day Friday washing, mending, ironing and steaming costumes!  They did a wonderful job, and it looked like they all had a fun time!  The show was titled "Do You Wanna Dance?"

I started back to work last week as well following the bout of COVID.  I am still getting tired sooner than typical, and my chest gets really tight when I exercise, but otherwise I'm doing fine. Yesterday and today are my days to recover from the show.  I ended up grooming and bathing the dog on Saturday, pushing the lawn mower out back yesterday, and I have to clean house today as well as attend the library Board meeting this evening.  Sigh.  Will life EVER slow down?