Labor Day Weekend - Sunday

~ Not planning on leaving the homestead today.

~ Hubby wants to do a lot of mowing including our small hay field.

~ Even though it's a gorgeous day outside, I think I'm going to make myself tackle inside chores I've been putting off for too long. It will feel good to get them done. Or at least started.

~ Papa Pea suffered a bit of shell shock yesterday. He and I made a quick trip into town to pick up some free wall cabinets for the garage (fruitless trip as they were gone when we got there) and the crowds of people in town for the holiday weekend almost sent him over the edge. He couldn't wait to turn around and "get the heck out of Dodge!" It just serves to point up what a blessed little sanctuary we have back here in the woods.

~ I tried a new pasta dish for dinner last night that was FABULOUS. If you want to look at the recipe go to the post by The Iowa Housewife here. I made it with the first cutting of my fall crop of spinach from the garden. Boy-howdy, was it good! (Couple of notes: I didn't understand the "1/4 tablespoon water" in the ingredients so just left it out. I only added half as much sausage as called for and, for us, it was fine. Didn't have vermicelli so substituted linguine. I had to cook it a lot longer than the 3 minutes but it turned out fine.)

~ Thanks to Erin's alert to the sale of the reusable canning lids on Tattler's site, I'm going to bite the bullet today and put in the order for my first Tattler lids. I've been debating trying them for a couple of years because of mixed reviews. They sure will be a wonderful money saver in the long run if they work. Thanks again for the heads-up on the sale, Erin!

~ We're letting mama bantam hen and her four little chickies out into the big world of our poultry pasture today for the first time. They'll still have access to their own little house and shelter if fowl society becomes too much for them.

~ We've always felt that September and October were the very best months in our area for getting out and enjoying all the great out-of-doors has to offer. For the years hubby was teaching, of course, it was impossible for us to take advantage of the season as these two months were super-busy ones for him getting into the new school year.

Anyway, for the past few years of his retirement, we've been pretty much hell-bent on working hard on all the things we couldn't get done when he was working full-time off the homestead. This year, we are bound and determined things will be different.

So, good-bye until the first of November.

Hahahaha! (Just trying to be funny.) No, nothing big or grand planned that will take us away from home for more than day trips or possibly short overnights. But we are going to be trying to drop our gloves, hoe, chainsaw, paint brushes and tool belts frequently to get out to canoe, hike, grouse hunt, sight-see and generally make the most of the fantastic couple of months of weather ahead of us. We might even spend some time reading all day on the front deck or in the hammock. 'Course, that would mean we'd have to actually put up the hammock for the first time this summer . . . but stranger things have happened. I can hardly wait!