Back to Work Today

Yep, it was back to the usual routine of "gettin' things done" today after taking the day off yesterday for our anniversary.

On August 31st, many years ago, Papa Pea and I joined hearts and hands and embarked on this journey together.

How many years ago, you may ask?  Well, although neither of us can believe it, it is our 54th anniversary.  The time has flown by so very quickly that that many years having passed seems impossible.

As I said, we took the day off in celebration (of making it this long) and ended with a dinner out at a lodge on an inland lake.  This particular lodge and rental cabins were built in the 1920s (hey, longer than we've been married!) and although a bit of modernization has taken place in the form of running water, bathrooms and kitchens, the log lodge and cabins look much the same as they did when first built.  Back in those days, you could build structures almost right on the edge of the lake and our table at the window gave us a wonderful view of the water complete with two loons swimming and diving a stone's throw away.

It was a delightful evening, good food, good drink and, since we were the last table to leave, we had the pleasure of meeting and visiting with the young couple who became the new owners a year ago.  What enjoyable, nice people!

But back to the ol' grindstone today.

First thing this morning, we split and stacked some firewood.  The great thing is that this is wood that shouldn't be touched until the 2018-19 heating season.  What a good feeling that is.

Next I got a stock pot with two chickens starting to slowly cook.  I defrosted and cleaned our freezers a couple of weeks ago and was a bit surprised to see I still had two ducks and several chickens I hadn't used in the last year.  Here it is getting close to butchering time again when new birds will need space in the freezer.  It's not a bad problem to have, but I'll concentrate on cooking up a bird or two each week now.

I needed some veggies to put in with the stewing chickens so went out to the garden to get these.  Looks like we're going to have a great crop of both onions and carrots this year.  The onions were okay last year but all the carrots were about as big around as a pencil!  (Or nearly so.)  Looking much better this year.

What?  Didn't everyone have a semi truck in their backyard today?  No, we didn't order a semi load of poultry feed, but we did get a pallet of bags of feed which should last us well into winter.  The poultry all cheered when the truck pulled in.

Speaking of poultry, a group of Canadian geese landed on the pond again this morning.  This afternoon when I looked up from my continuing work on the strawberry patch (didn't quite finish yet), I found the wild geese contently intermingled with our poultry.  I went in to get my camera to capture the scene and, of course, as soon as I got close enough to the fence to snap a picture, the wild geese waddled quickly away down toward the pond.  If you look closely, you can see them in the upper back of the picture.

Papa Pea and I made another picking of our blueberries.  The grand total for the season so far is just under six gallons.  There are a few more to ripen on the bushes but the season is definitely winding down.

Hooray, hooray, my mini-sunflowers finally started blooming about a week ago.  I just adore them and keep vases of them all around the house.  Such vibrantly cheerful faces they have.  Makes me feel happy just to look at them.