A few more interesting pics

I found a few more blogging minutes! Here's more "looking up" pictures.

Interesting Pictures

I have come to the conclusion, after looking through some of our old pictures, that some of the most interesting pictures are produced with the camera pointed up. Here are some of ours. I may put more up later.

News

This morning, Kyle reported a murder that happened in the chicken yard sometime in the night. Our rooster gave his life, our mother hen gave her life, and, as far as we can tell, our little chick gave its life, too. Others may have suffered as well, but the chicken yard is well sheltered in some areas and it is difficult to see in places. With this information, we are forced to come to the conclusion that our new chicken door is malfunctioning. I have also come to the following conclusion: It is difficult to keep empty-headed birds alive!

Well, a bit of boring news now. We happened to be cleaning our inside refrigerator and freezer when, low-and-behold, we found something that looked suspiciously like root beer! Wonder how that got there?! I thought you might be interested in that news, Kaliste! ;)

We are, I think, going to pick some apples Friday. I have a suspicion that the following week will be full of apple stuff, a.k.a. canned apples, dried apples, apple cider, apple juice, apple sauce, apple butter, and we can't forget APPLE SKINS AND CORES! The kitchen shall be a sticky mess, I fear!

Um...more stuff

I've learned to kind of crochet! I thought it was impossible last time I tried (several years ago).

Mama sewed on her four buttons! She says she is going to wait on the hem until she has a hoop skirt though.

Kyle has been trying to revive an old banjo we have had sitting around for years. I think it was given to us, but we may have paid something for it, I don't remember. It has a hard time keeping a tune.

Daddy found a song that he has started calling his theme song. It is "My Cubicle", but he is trying to figure out how to change the last verse. I think he should change the guy singing it too!

Life is truly going along at a normal pace, quite relaxing. I am afraid that will change come Monday. I have to start school then, but I don't have a very heavy schedual this year!

>Addition onto last post!<

We re-watched "Much Ado About Nothing" last night with Daddy. We have now decided, as a family, not to watch it again until it has been edited. Those two scenes are just not good, and not at all necessary to the movie. I still believe it would be a good and enjoyable movie without them!

Stuff...(What do you do when you don't have a "title"?)

The answer to the last question is either to let him come back in his own time or let your kind neighbor put him back in. We don't know which happened the other day.

I finished my "summer school" yesterday just in time to start the other, regular school. We watched "Much Ado About Nothing" yesterday as part of our Shakespeare course that we have just started. I really enjoyed it, but there were a couple of places we had to fast forward through. We have noticed that movies made in England seem to have many of the same actors in them. Emma Thompson is in a lot that we enjoy.

I finished my part of Mama's Civil War dress! I did all her requested changes, and they really made the dress easier than mine. Mama still has to do the hem and sew on four buttons and about 13 hooks and eyes. I may end up doing the hem if she doesn't get around to it soon. I will have to describe the dress because she won't allow me to put pictures on here.

Let's see, her material is a dark blue with white, floral print on it; it truly is beautiful, but you have to see it to appreciate it. She has view a, but her bodice is not gathered or lined. We attached the skirt to the bodice with a casing for elastic. Her skirt is not cartridge pleated like mine; instead it is gathered (which the cartridge pleats really are that too, just more evenly spaced).

New chick update

Mama and little chickie are doing very well!
I'll try not to be like those proud first-baby mothers you hear so much about, but I wanted to put proof up on here for my own sake! We are rather proud, this being our first. =]

Question: How do you re-catch a mad, run-away bull about 10 times your size?

Here are the pictures

I'm afraid they are not very good, but they will have to do.

Looking out across the Mississippi River.

Across from the Alamo the first day in San Antonio eating crushed ice with too much syrup. Very sweet, but at least it was cold!

Waiting for our tables at Landry's.

We have proof! Luke does let others carry him!

Visiting the Alamo.

Luke with his new San Antonio hat and pop-gun.

Dinner in the hotel lobby.

The last few hours in San Antonio.

The journey home from Dickson!

The Trip

Well, the "not probable" happened! We left at 10:30pm Monday night! Mama and Daddy took turns driving through the night, and we made it to Mississippi by 7:30am. We then visited our grandfather for about an hour. From there we made it to Arlington, Texas where we bedded down at our uncle's house. We left early the next morning, and found a Cabela's. We are, unfortunately, deprived of a Cabela's in Tennessee, which makes us all the more ready to step into one for an hour or three. I got a multi-tool key chain there! Guess what! There was a Cracker Barrel right next to it! Great lunch stop! Anyway, we finally made it to San Antonio, and maneuvered our way through the traffic. We actually found the Gardenia Inn on our first try! The Lingo's were there before us, and they kindly helped us haul our stuff up to the beautiful room on the third floor. Once we freshened up, we all went River Walking! We all had a good time of it, and Daddy's wonderful Spanish "abilities" were discovered. We dined at a delicious seafood restaurant called Landry's. After a wonderful dinner, we got to go on a river cruise. It was a lovely as I remembered it being at night, but I think we had a better guide before. We made it back to the B&B, and fell into our beds quite exhausted.

The next morning, we had a delicious (I am afraid I am going to be using that word a lot, but we did have an enormous amount of good food!) breakfast. There were three courses: a fruit bowl, a main dish, and, the best part, a dessert! After the first day, our accommodating hosts learned that Luke ate only the kiwi; that's what they gave him the rest of the time! After the breakfast we headed out to Market Square. We decided to ride the trolley, but we got an extremely rude driver. We got to El Mercado an hour before it opened! So, we decided to walk all the way across town to the Alamo. It was sometime in the course of this walk that Navidad was re-defined. It now means: a navigating father, particularly to the ignorant-"Spanish-speaking" Americans. We got to the Alamo, and spent 1 to 2 hours there. I found a different key chain (than the one I got four years ago), and I got it. Still, the Alamo gift shop is way over-priced! From here, we headed to the information center. There I got yet another key chain; this one described the river walk. I like those that describe things. Then we went to the "trolley office" (those are my words, I'm not sure what it was called officially) where we got a couple of all day passes! Now all we had to do was get the trolley color system down, and get to a trolley stop. We had much better experiences with all the rest of our trolley drivers. Now, we made it to Market Square, and started shopping, window shopping mainly. Finally, most of us got exhausted, and quite hungry. We had lunch at a Mexican restaurant, and a couple of Mexicans came in with guitars. They played us one song, and then demanded (a little strong, I admit) their six dollars. We didn't do that again. After lunch Mama, Luke, and I went back into the shops, and I got a shawl and a skirt. Mama got a skirt, too, but it was for the shawl that we went back in. After this, the adults needed a siesta, so we went back to our rooms. After a little while (we had to let Luke get to sleep), we kids played a couple of games. We finally settled on Scrabble, and played that until we needed to get ready for the Conference. We went to the appropriate place to wait for the doors to be opened. When we got to our seats, we saw our first of Mr. Stouffer and Mr. Lovett. They sat with us for the remainder of the night. After the keynote speaker, Doug Phillips, was done, we all, including the men mentioned above, went to dinner. I learned that the fastest way to another block is through a large hotel! We went through 2 before we settled on Denny's for dinner. We only had to wait a very few minutes for them to seat our crowd of 12 people! The service was great, and the food wasn't bad either. A long day thus comes to an end.

Day three in San Antonio was not quite as exhausting as the previous days. We only had to sit and listen to our chosen speakers. This day we had lunch at, guess, a Mexican restaurant! Apparently one well known and highly acclaimed among the Vision Forum people. We got to see many of them passing through! After lunch was more sitting, but we met more people. We had dinner (pizza this time, not Mexican!) with three other families and Mr. and Mrs. Smith from Smith Family blog in a hotel lobby. This provided very good conversation and an extraordinary view of the river walk. Since the pizza arrived very late, we were late for the last speaker, but we didn't miss too much.

Our last full day in San Antonio was a whirl of activity. We organized ourselves better, and had someone in listening to almost every speaker. For lunch, our guys went out and provided rice, and steak, and a variety of other things to us. For dinner, we ate at another Mexican restaurant with Mr. Fish and his son. That was a laughter-filled meal!

The next morning, we Bradshaw's made a sad departure from our nice little vacation. We enjoyed every minute of our time in San Antonio with such wonderful friends. Unfortunately, the tale does not end here. We got away early enough to be home that night, but the suburban started acting up around Dickson. Fortunately for us, our aunt lives in Dickson, so we barged into her peaceful home at 11:50pm or so. We deprived her of some sleep, I fear. Yesterday morning, Daddy took the car to a transmission shop, but the people there couldn't find anything wrong with the transmission. Daddy also said that the problem is not a little thing, but we still don't know what it is. The next few hours were a maze of cars, rides, and movies, so I will spare any readers that stuff and give you the end result (the movies was all that we kids could safely do alone and keep Luke occupied at the same time). The end result was that Daddy brought the suburban back on the trailer to Aunt Carol's house, and we spent another night at her place.

This morning, we had a nice little cramped ride in the truck back home. We went through Centerville, for all those who it holds any significance.

I should also say that our hen is being a very good mother, and that the chick is still alive! There is your long post, Kaliste. Pictures later...maybe.

Hurray!!!

One of our Black Sex-link broody hens hatched an egg! We have been trying to do this for about a month, so we are very excited! I do not think that we have sex-link chicks unfortunately, but the little guy is cute nonetheless! You may thank the father for that brown face; our hens didn't get brown until they were about a year old!The mother still has another egg under her, so we are hoping that she will keep on setting until she hatches that one too! The little feller could be anywhere from one to three days old, but I am leaning a little more on the older side of that estimate. The reason being: there was no prominent egg tooth (from what my limited experience tells me, at least). Now we get to see how our hybrid, hatchery hen is at mothering her "home-grown" hatchling!

Tomorrow morning we are off to Texas by way of... the road. There is a possibility that we will be going by way of Mississippi; another that we will be stopping near Fort Worth, and yet another that we will just go straight there! It is even possible that we will be leaving today! I said possible, not probable.

I forgot to mention the other day that we had canned ten quarts of peaches and several (not many) half pints of tomato sauce.

Quick little thing

I thought I had better post while I have a few minutes. I won't be able to for about two weeks. Come Tuesday morning, we'll be going to the Entrepreneurial Boot Camp put on by Vision Forum in San Antonio. We went to San Antonio about four years ago, and I remember really enjoying the River Walk. We did it at night, and it was absolutely beautiful!

Good News!

I wanted to thank everyone who kept us in their prayers during our dry spell. I am happy to report that we’ve gotten a couple of inches since I last complained, and we are well on our way to a greener world around here!

I have more good news: I finished my Civil War dress! After some recent research I did, I find that it is not at all a period pattern, but it looks good, I think. Claire graciously allowed me to picture her modeling my dress (over an air conditioning vent) for the blog, but she was kind of my dress form through the whole process. :)

This was the pattern I used (Simplicity 4551, view C), and I didn’t have to have anything adjusted! This pattern has the dropped shoulders typical of the period, which saved us from needing to adjust the pattern to fit my broad shoulders. It wasn’t a very confusing pattern (obviously, or I wouldn’t have been able to finish it!), but I took me a while. Also, I changed some the stuff. The trim was supposed to be rickrack, but I wanted mine fancier so I put ribbon on (like you would bias). I also did only three skirt pannels instead of the four; it just seemed like a whole lot less marking (I'm afraid it was driven by laziness =C). The dress is actually quite comfortable, but, allowing room for the hoop, the hem is a bit long! :)I need to make a hoop skirt and an over-hoop-skirt-petticoat thing, but the entire outfit will be done then! Oh, I'm also hoping to find sort of a fancy pin of some sort to close the gap at the collar. Then it will be done! :)

I enjoyed working on this, and am actually eager to get started on Mama’s dress (I agreed to do hers so that it would get done)! Unfortunately for both of us, I only agreed to do it if she would cut it out how she wants it and mark it. I absolutely despise doing those things! There just isn't as much room for creativity on somebody else's dress, but her fabric is lovely! She wants view A, I believe.

Musical memories

I wanted to do this post before I forgot my train of thought.

After several weeks of not playing any music for us, Claire picked up her fiddle and tested the piano again yesterday. This morning she played a song that took me back about three years. She played Fur Elise. I was going through my Elsie Dinsmore books while rocking a baby Luke. I asked her to play other songs that she was learning at the time: Emerald Tocatta, Chariots of Fire, and Prelude in C. Each time I could have almost pointed to the chapter and book I was on at the time she played those most. It happens to me a lot; all I have to do is to hear or smell something and I could tell you what I was doing when a certain memory connected with that happened.

Those couple of months before we moved, and after Luke was born is like a different world, misty-like. When thinking about that time my memory inevitably takes me to the fourth of July 2003. It was days before we were to move, and everything that could be was packed up, but the family was to gather at our house. Right as lunch was being served to everyone, Luke woke up. For the remainder of the meal, I got to hold him. I took my meal afterwards alone. I like remembering those months because, though busy, they were necessarily happy. They were tinged with saddness for leaving the only home we'd ever known, but that only make the time we had more precious. Also during that time, I was Luke's prefered companion. Before Luke was even born is dark, but quiet. :) I hardly remember anything about then, without a promting.

The smell of cinamon and orange rounds and other spices simmering on the stove reminds me of several Christmas's. Fudge and custard takes me back to a couple of birthdays when that was my requested "cake". Seeing dead ladybugs in the window, makes me feel just like I did one year back a Sturbridge. When Kyle bangs out a one-note melody "Ode to Joy" on the piano, it is just like he did it when he was a little thing with huge eyes, running around in cowboy boots. The taste of orange cream cicles reminds me of the caffeteria at the school I attended for kindergarten and first grade. I won't even go into the memories that I see when I think of that school.

I'd better stop or I'll go on forever and ever through the years with this road of memories.

To think, I can do all that, and I'm not even 16 yet! I'd better warn Mama and Daddy not to do this! = D

RAIN! .....and that other stuff

Guess what?!! WE GOT RAIN!!!!!!!! Several days ago, but it was a deliciously wet downpour. It turns out that this blessing puts us over the ¾" mark for the past couple of months! While it was raining we were inside busy canning tomatoes. Could you have ever guessed?! I am guilty; I'm just very tired of dealing with the endless tomatoes!!!!

The day after the rain (you can see how I measure things now) we froze our rather small crop of corn.

Then Tuesday we picked even more tomatoes! Wednesday morning we sat them out on the counter and canned tomatoes, and the tomato paste (it turned out puree) Mama and Daddy made the night before. Canning all that still left us with a whole counter full!

Tomatoes, Beans, and Good Friends

These past couple of weeks have been pretty busy. We canned tomatoes several days ago, and today, but I don't know how many quarts or pints we've done this year.





We've also picked, shelled, and frozen our crop of butter beans. It didn't turn out near as bad as I feared, thank goodness!

We also dropped in on our good friends of Atlanta! We didn't get there in time for worship Lord's Day, but as usual we had great fellowship!

The Weather and a Water Bath

Life in Tennessee is rather unusual sometimes. Just this morning I was coming up to the house from picking the garden wondering how in the world it could be so dry and yet so humid! I don't understand it! We haven't had even ½ an inch of rain total in something like eight weeks! The pastures look awful everywhere around here, and the garden isn't thriving. The squash and cucumbers are drying up, even with the extra watering I'm giving them every couple of days. The tomato plants are even wilting from the bottom up, and we've not even canned any yet!!! Thankfully, the peppers don't seem to be doing too bad. The corn and the butter beans are having the same problem: the fruit is not filling out. The corn already has tassles turning, but the ears aren't even as thick as two of my fingers in some cases! The butter beans are being rather heavily attacked by the bugs; I'm hoping we'll be able to get a fairly good crop before they loose all their leaves! Okay, enough complaining! On to something else.

Well, we canned some bread and butter pickles yesterday. The cucumbers aren't doing bad enough to quit bearing, that's for sure. For all the pictures my sister takes, somehow she managed to forget to get a good finished product picture! The pickles sealed by a water bath, like the cherries, but they are also hot when you put them into the jars.

We discover everytime we can that we love our fryers! We again had two going, and they really make the whole process much faster and more enjoyable. I'm sure we'll be using them again when we can the tomatoes later this week. The tomatoes also use the water bath method too, if I remember correctly.

More Chickens!

Well, lately we've been having some overhead predator problems. The hawks have gotten several of our laying hens and a young rooster (not the Buff). Today Daddy went and got 14 or 15 young hens from a friend who had 50+ birds. They are red and black sex-link, which means you can tell the males from the females when they hatch because they're a different color. We were down to only a few birds and one's a rooster, possibly two broodies, and plenty of hawks to kill the others. We were getting about 3 eggs a day, so we are looking forward to having some more eggs once these start laying.
We've got one of the broodies on a few eggs, and we are hoping that she'll hatch several. Raising our own chicks will be a new experience, and, since it keeps us from being beholden to the hatcheries, a good one I think.

Ten Steps of... Chicken Processing!

Step one: Catching the chicken!!! We brought these stinky things from their tractor out to the barn area, a.k.a., the processing plant, using three large computer boxes and a diesel-powered mule.

Step two: A couple of the boys were especially eager to kill some Cornish Cross birds. I was all for that; it meant I didn't have to do that part (that's a good thing)! We had three traffic cones that the guys putting in our city water had left; we put them to good use by cutting off the tops and hanging them upside down. This was for easier killing of the chicken, and to hold them still while they were bleeding to death!

Step three: "Cut off its head and give the bird to me, please!" Yep, we cut off their heads before we scalded them. We threw the heads into the woods and the cats loved them!
"No! That one's not been through yet! Don't cut off the feet!" We learned that it's very hard to take a chicken out of the scalder without any feet to grab.

Step four: The actual scalding was quite easy. I have never noticed any of that "horrid wet feather smell" I've heard talked about, but they were rather heavy to take out all hot and dripping wet!
Sometimes the tongs worked to take the bird out; sometimes they didn't.I mainly used them to push the bird down in the 150°F water. We kept the birds in the water for approximately one minute, but some required a little more than that.


Step five: The dripping, hot, dead things then went to the chicken plucker. We had a hose person and a switch controller. These jobs were pretty interchangeable, and could be done by just one person if necessary.

There was a problem with the plucker though. Feathers kept getting caught in the belt, causing it to slip off. That is just another thing that probably needs to be done before we use the plucker again: a feather plate guard. This problem can be helped, however.

Claire, who mainly worked the hose, learned to hose the feathers off the plucker really well after every bird. This greatly reduces the risk of the aforementioned problem.

Step six: Once the chicken goes through the plucker, which only takes about 30 seconds on the long ones, it goes to the eviscerating table, a.k.a., the guttin' table.
Since this is the part I absolutely cannot stand, I don't know too much about it.
Throughout this whole process, up until here, the birds can still... squeak, cluck, "beep" (Luke's word), make noise. We are not really sure what to call it. It's a chicken noise, but the bird is dead and the head is cut off. It's really quite funny! We've all had a good laugh over it. The gutting, however, takes the wind pipe out and the dead birds are, therefore, de-vocalized.

Step seven: This step is just a quick, but very thorough rinsing of the bird. For Luke it was a chance to play with and in the hose without getting in too much trouble.


Step eight: We did a bit of extra clean-up and trim work and bagged them. Then we put them in a cooler of ice until they could be taken up to the house and put away properly.

Step nine: The clean-up of the processing site did not take long at all! Everybody pitched in and we got it cleared away pretty fast.

Step ten: Unfortunately, I do not have a picture of this step. This step was the last and probably the most satisfying in some respects. We rotisseried a couple of the Cornish Cross chickens that we killed and had them for dinner last night! We will have to learn how to cook with these birds. I think our motto will have to be, for cooking at least, "a little longer, a little slower". The meat had good flavor, but it turned out a little tough. We're learning though!
Step ten has an amusing story with it. Luke found out we were eating our chickens and he saw some seasoning on a piece he had. He said "I don't think I cleaned this one good enough.", which was absolutely hilarious because he was kind of helping with the cleaning, but, more so, because he was hardly fazed by it at all. He looked like he would have gone on eating even with the knowledge that he hadn't cleaned it very well! He proves, once more, that little ones understand much more than we give them credit for, just by showing us that he knew what to look for while cleaning the chickens!

Hmm... even more canning!

Cherries!!! They were great while still in the pitted, uncooked stage so we're hoping they'll be just as good in the cooked, canned stage, too! We've never done cherries before, and we just followed the directions in Mama's canning book. These didn't have to go in the pressure canner, so that saved a lot of time. We got it all done in about 2 and a half hours; we did 11 pints from four of those bags that you can get at Wal-mart. I love cherries!!! andI can't wait to try these.

More Canning

Beans, beans, beans! You just can't help singing the "Belles on Their Toes" song! Here, instead of baked beans (or whatever they had), are 38 pints of green beans. That makes a total of... a whole lot of beans that we've canned this year. This was our last batch, and with all our other catches , we ought to have enough to last the year!
This morning Mama and Grammy and others canned our sauerkraut. I was outside helping Daddy put up gates and fences. It was hot today! Thankfully it wasn't too humid, but still, it was hot! The ground, too, is suffering from this weather we're having. It's as hard as a rock, and I mean that. When we hit a rock with a t-post it's hard to tell the difference. Daddy and I got up enough fence to get the cattle on better grass. Both our pastures are looking really rough. It's in times like these that you can't help wondering: what would Mr. Salatin do if he were in our situation? I should not complain though, for all I know he may be!