Long post with a few pictures

Saga of the Rushed Dinner

Last night I had my menus fairly planned out. The meat was thawing, and the side dishes were more or less planned. I had read over the recipe for the main dish (a delicious, but very rich, cubed pork loin recipe) earlier, and knew that I had plenty of time. I made the mistake of not having my side dish recipe, scalloped potatoes, printed out. I spent nearly a half hour that should have been used in cubing the loin trying to print that recipe! Around 4:45 pm, I decided to just wing it, and hope it turned out okay. Of course, we had decided to have dinner around 5:30 pm, so I was doing my best to speed things up. Have you ever noticed how things all go wrong right when you really need them to go right? Well, it did last night. I knew a 5:30 pm dinner was out of the question, but I thought that if I hurried enough a 6:00 pm dinner might just be attainable. I dropped a potato in the compost bowl, which was full of kefir and whey, so that made a rather large mess. I try to be a clean cook. I don't always succeed, but I try anyway. Then I sliced a couple of fingers (not bad enough to bleed, just to frustrate) using the mandoline. Finally I somehow managed to use the chef's knife (don't ask me how, I don't know) where the blade caught another of my fingers. Really, I'm usually very good with knives! I've decided that I don't work well when I rush. I did manage to have everything on the table by 6:10 pm I believe (although the potatoes could've cooked a bit longer). And so ends just another day in paradise, or another cooking experience. I can only hope that it was a learning experience too!

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Now for a little update:

I'm still working on the quilt binding. I'm still reading a theology book (Mother Kirk, by Doug Wilson). I'm finding it interesting, but one that I'm unable to read through quickly. It appears that we will be doing seed blocks inside this year. Daddy's set up our green house tables to be able to support a light. All the animals are doing fine. The cat disappears at will, but has been back that last few days. The dogs are still tremendously fat from pig left-overs (We had pig feet on our front porch for the longest time! I couldn't help hoping that those Jehovah's Witness people would show up again!). They also had rib bones from Saturday's dinner. Oh, Daddy fixes the best ribs! The cows are surviving as are the chickens. Clarabelle has been giving up to 2 gallons of milk a day, but the milkers have gone out rather late too. Chuck is so big now, but we can't think of weaning him yet! That would necessitate two milkings a day! Here's a few pictures:

What a greeting that would have been for the Jehovah's Witness!

That's probably 47, our best-looking and best-tempered cow.

The seed block table, newly rigged up with a light. Now, at least, we won't have to worry about bringing them inside when it gets too cold outside!

Friday and Saturday

This past Friday and Saturday some of the wonderful folks from our church (plus a family from GA who are working on getting up here) came to our place and helped us slaughter and butcher the rest of our pigs. We could not have done it without them!!!! Thank y'all so much!!!

Friday afternoon Daddy, Kyle, Luke, Lingo men, and various members of the Fish family slaughtered the three pigs, and hung them in the smoke house. The walk-in cooler is currently out-of-commission, but it was cold enough to leave the halves outside overnight.

Little Smoky was the first to go (Daddy thought he might be smarter than the others and runaway after the first shot).

They had all three done by 4:30pm, at the latest!

Friday evening Mr. Draper, and the Evans' pulled in. After everyone had eaten, there was some conversation, and refreshed our butchering memories with the Meat Man (he could not only use someone to redo the videos, but the website too!) video.

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Saturday morning Mama, Mrs. Evans, and Mrs. Fish started making a batch of soap, but I am not allowed to post any of the pictures Claire got of that process.

The men went out around 10:00am or so and started butchering.

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A few of us were happily occupied inside, where it was warm!

Sausage-maker extraordinaires!

The packaging table was kept pretty busy most of the time.

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Cuties!!!

A few things

This morning the pastures in front of our house were black! I stepped out on the front porch to check it out, and could hardly hear myself think. Apparently, a flock birds had chosen our area as a migratory "rest area." I love being outside when so many birds are here; it's so amazing! When they would all start up to move to the next spot their take-off sounded like a turkey drumming. It's a powerful sound. Watching that sort of thing always brings the greatness of the Lord to the very front of my mind.

I tried playing my mandolin again recently, hoping it wouldn't bother my wrists. It did. After playing it again, though, I am continually longing to pick it up! I can think of so many excuses to play it: it needs playing so that the it will keep a tune! My fingers will completely forget everything I worked so hard on! I think it's probably best that I don't play it though. :(

Is it really December? It's over 70° outside! What's with that?!? It looks like it'll get colder as the week progresses though. I think Kyle and Luke are going to go up on the mountain to find us a cedar tree that we'll cut down next week. We usually have live Christmas trees, but it should be fun having a tree that we harvested off our own land. According to our long-standing tradition, we'll have tons of finger foods and have Christmas music playing the evening we decorate it.

What's new

We watched Ratatouille the other night. I liked it.

Yesterday, as many of y'all know, Claire and Kyle had music lessons. I stayed home with Luke (got to make cookie dough!). Anyway, "on their way" home, they had to stop by Wal-mart. Kyle stumbled across a double feature DVD set of Gettysburg and Gods and Generals.

The house is a wreck, but that's not really new. The fact that we're more or less trying to deal with it while at the same time trying to cull some of our enormous amount of stuff, that might be new. We've got a large-ish box full of culled videos, several boxes of games and puzzles, several boxes of books, and I think we've got a box of miscellaneous stuff as well (hospital pillows, candle holders, vases, etc.). Our next area, now that we're coming up on that time, probably needs to be Christmas decorations; there's also toys (LOTS of toys), baby and toddler clothes, Cd's, pictures, school stuff, books again, movies again, etc.

Our dishwasher is behaving very badly lately. This is close to the one we have. Even though it is the "Quiet Series," it is quite loud; it has never dried the dishes very well; even the heavy wash (2 hour) cycle leaves the cups and glasses dirtier than when they went in, and now the handle's broken! We have to fiddle with it just to get it to open!

Clarabelle learned how to push her feed bowl through the opening it sits in, so last night Daddy fixed it to where she couldn't do that. Mama and Kyle report that she tried hard to push it though this morning. She's a smart cow, but sometimes I wonder if it wouldn't be easier to deal with a stupid one.

Practice for the Hanging of the Greens service Claire and I are singing in Sunday continues to progress. We are on a shaky line between pretty much well and getting worse as far as our colds go; that's not making practice any easier. Claire's singing "Sweet Little Jesus Boy" and we're both doing "O Holy Night" and "Beautiful Star of Bethlehem."

Ummmmm........ I think that's pretty much it, for now at least.

Randomness

Yesterday was portrait day. Here's my favorite picture of the day:

He's so funny! We had such a hard time getting him to cooperate!

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Claire, our sharpshooter, got some pictures of this weekend.

Anna and Luke making breadsticks.

Two stooges.

Making salsa.

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There's one of these Fallow Deer (Dama dama) near us. It looks very odd! The antlers are palmate, like a moose, and they keep their spots. They are very small, between 100 and 150 pounds in the wild (up to 200 pounds domesticated). They're only three feet or so tall! Originally from the Middle East, Fallow Deer are common in much of Europe and are slowly being introduced by deer farmers to the United States. They are raised mainly for sport (they make unusual trophies, obviously.), and velvet antler which is sold to Asian cultures who use it in medicines.

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Well, tonight's the night! So it's not the night before Thanksgiving, but it's close enough. Our turkeys two remaining live turkeys are going to fulfill their purpose tonight, and one (at least) will go into the brine! We'll enjoy it Thursday. I will miss hearing their noise though; it's been pretty neat. There's always next year!

Chicken conversations

I just couldn't resist!

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"Hmmm... What's that you say, dahling?"

"Hold on, dear, I can't hear you."

"What are those two gossiping about this time!?!"

"Hey there, gals!"

"Would you please get that thing out of my face!"

Picture update

A few evenings ago we butchered a half a steer for a friend. I got the grinding job again. I've decided that they put me there on purpose; I'm not very good at wrapping the meat. :)








We went through our game/puzzle closet the other day. We have boxes and boxes of things to get rid of now!















Everything fits in there so nicely now! We don't have to close the doors quickly so nothing falls out!















Chuck.












Clarabelle.











Daddy, Kyle, and Luke put up some metal siding on the barn as a sort of wind break. That's going to be very nice this winter.










The two turkeys left.











"Little" Smokie












And the other two pigs.

Another calf

31 calved today!!! She seems to be doing much better; for a while there she was barely getting around. Of course it's a little heifer calf; we don't seem to be able to get any bulls that we can turn into future meat. Oh well, we still have a couple or three more calves on the way.

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Now, per request of a certain someone (Don't worry, Caleb, I won't mention any names.) I am going to post an entire paragraph of a couple of week ago when the Lovetts spent a couple of days here. I warned you, sir!!!

Well, where to start... I guess it's always easiest to start at the beginning. So, the Lovett family arrived around 4:00 pm on Wednesday, October 3, 2007. The day before Daddy and Kyle had processed one of our turkeys; I had been nursing it all day. We had dinner around 5:30 pm or 6:00 pm. After dinner Kyle and the certain someone got up a game of Cranium. We played two games of that Wednesday night. For those of you who know (roughly) how to play the game, you know that there are certain parts of the game where you have to silently act out things. Well, the word was "mermaid," and the certain someone had to act it out. He did a very good job! His partner guessed it almost right off. The other word that he acted out later was "nun." Again he did a wonderful job. We learned (if we didn't already know it) that that certain someone can't hardly spell, but he can spell "aqueduct." That's enough Cranium talk, I think. On to Thursday. The men worked very hard on I'm not sure what all. They did electrical work and drywall work, but other than that, I'm not sure. We ladies went to Sir's Fabrics. Kaliste and I discovered how good a Twix Ice Cream bar tastes. ;) We had turkey-pot-pie around 7:00 pm for dinner Thursday evening, and we again played a couple of games of Cranium afterwards. They left the next morning. Well, is that enough? Is that enough information on y'all's visit? Sorry, but we don't have any more pictures of that visit that I can post.

Pig Slaughtering: Start to Finish

Okay, here it is. The pictures aren't very good, but I think they are good enough. I'm not going to comment on them much though; I usually wasn't actually in the process.

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I don't what we'd do without the mule!

Luke got in there and helped a bit. You can just barely see him in this picture.

Again, the mule! This was way better than using the tractor. However, this made it necessary for them to skin and gut right behind the driveway!

Once Daddy and Kyle had skinned the underside of the pig, they pulled him up and skinned his backside.

Then they cut him open...

and dumped out the insides.

The pulley system.

Product #1. Quite good. Mild, though.

Yesterday

What a day we had yesterday!!! We took a couple of little steers from our neighbor to the Carpenters, but along the way we had quite the adventure!

Everything went wrong from the beginning (thankfully not all the way to the end!). Daddy didn't hardly sleep the night before, so he went into work around 3:00 am! Then, when he came home to get some sleep before we had to go to the Franklin/Leiper's Fork area, the phone rang more times! I think we got more calls that morning than we have all day today! After lunch Daddy, Kyle, Luke, and I went to load the steers into our neighbor's trailer. That was much harder and way longer than Daddy was expecting, but we did get them loaded! Once we went back to the house to pick up Mama and Claire we were off! Well, after a few more bathroom breaks.

We made it, without any stops, all the way onto the interstate. Luke was finally asleep, Mama and Daddy were conversing, Claire was working on math, and Kyle was reading. Suddenly a truck pulled up along side us and motioned for us to get over (he was quite panicked). He pulled over to tell us what happened. One of those little steers had leaped out of the trailer!!! We quickly scanned the area for something to block the other steer from getting out. We didn't find anything, so we had to use some straps that happened to be in the back of the suburban. Someone else also pulled over to tell us that he had "seen it all, and the cow was back at that T-Rex place."

Once we got the straps on as well as we could quickly we turned around. We made our first stop at the co-op, which happened to be at that exit. We switched trailers to one of the co-op's that happened to have a flat tire, so we switched to a different one. We left the remaining steer in the other trailer, and went to the T-Rex place.

When we got to that place we pulled out the camera a got a few shots of the community coming together in an emergency. A policeman and a constable were already there kind of guarding the little fella. The man who originally pulled us over came along and helped us; I don't think they could have done it without him. Anyway, after a while of chasing that steer through the field across the road, that man decided they needed a 4-wheeler! The constable took him to his house, and he brought the tool that quickly finished the job. That man was great!

There were no more problems for the rest of the way to the Carpenters! They were all very excited to get the little guys, although Kyle, Cole, and Logan had to lower a pile of dirt so the steers didn't jump over the fence! Mrs. Carpenter and Peyton fixed an excellent dinner, and we got a tour of their house. They have a lovely place! I believe we left around 9:00 pm.

Here are some pictures of our day:

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Then there was today's experience. I don't particularly feel like going over it at the moment, but Mama posted about it fairly accurately and eloquently. Just ignore the "boring" part of it; I haven't said that in quite a while!