Better than I ever dreamed...

Well, it took most of two days, but my quilt shop is organized, for the most part. I still have a few boxes of books, thread, etc. to go through and organize, but this is wonderful!!

Our little ladies...really their Alex's....

While we were in Kentucky for Thanksgiving, Alex 'allowed' us to take home 5 chickens. Stan really has wanted chickens since we first looked at this property! There is a wonderful chicken coop...just sitting there! SO not right. Stan asked Alex if we could take a few home with us and we would replace them when our eggs hatch...which we have candled and most are doing very well! The bottom picture is a long view of the fenced in coop, totally fenced, including the top! They must have had game fowl in here. The chickens are loving the greens that are growing. They handled the move well and are already laying eggs!! The black chicken is a Turken, it's neck is supposed to be bald. The others are leghorns, including the red one.

When sleep will NOT come.....

Today Stan and I put together my quilting table. It was NOT fun, took hours, and left my hip and knee in a LOT of pain! I soaked and went to bed early, but couldn't sleep. So, at 1 AM I got up and made these!! These are pillow cases for Rising Star Outreach Center in India. It is a group who takes care of the children of lepers. It is a boarding school. In India, it is most common for people to sleep on mats, on the floor, with pillows. Most of these children don't have either. My sister in law, Gloria, and her daughter, Holly, volunteered with both the center and the lepers for a month. Gloria wanted to at least have all the children have pillows and asked for members of the family to make pillow cases for the children, all a little different so they would know which one was their's. It was fun to do this. Having so much, it's difficult to imagine those who don't even have a pillow to lay their heads on. We are SO blessed!

A beautiful day in Kentucky!

We had a great day. The weather was beautiful, so we took advantage and had family pictures. In the back; Brydie, Darcee, and Alex.

In the front; Bridger, Maclain, and Rilynn.

Some people have Black Friday, we just had FUN!!

We had a nice Thanksgiving with Alex and his family. Last Saturday, Alex got a deer, but has been wanting more. His family can get 6 deer on their own land a year, during hunting season, without a license! So, Stan went out with him one morning, I went out with him in the afternoon, and Brydie went with him the next afternoon, which was Thanksgiving. Alex's good friend, Will, on the right, went also, to another area of the property. At the very end, three shots rang out! Alex and Brydie came out and saw a deer down, and Will walked out and said, "Oh, I got that one too?" With three rounds he had gotten three deer! Needless to say, the rest of the evening and the morning after, were spent working on meat preparation. Alex's other really good friend is Mike, on Alex's left. No event that is worth calling an event has to have wrestling! We also had a great fire! It's amazing what a gallon of gas, in the middle of a woodpile, shot with a high powered rifle will do!!!

It was fun to have Eric and Elida and their two little ones come over. It's so nice they have been able to live this close to each other for a little while. Eric will be moving in mid February.

The evil smiles while preparing the 'combustible'.

The dog days of summer are gone.....

Today is a wonderful, misty day. We've had a little rain, more will be coming tonight, but right now, it is beautiful! Next post....Thanksgiving in Kentucky!!! I can hardly wait!

The eggs have arrived!!

Stan has spent many hours on the internet researching chickens, what kind he wants, which are the calmest, which are good dual purpose, etc. So, when we arrived, he put in his order for eggs. The last group arrived today, the incubator is almost full (as full as it will get), and here we go. His research says we should have 75% success rate in the hatching. More pictures to come....

Fall, beautiful Fall...

When we arrived on November 5, 2011, this is what our property and the roads leading to our property looked like. It has been so beautiful! The weather has been in the high 50's to the high 60's everyday. We have had one night that it frosted in the week we have been here. The other nights were in the low to mid 40's. This is one of the reasons we have wanted to leave Northern Cache Valley. It gets and stays SO cold for SO long. The day I took these pictures, Weston had 6 inches of snow, and the day time highs have barely been above freezing. I know we will have some miserable times in the summer with the humidity, but we will love having a 200 day growing season, compared to the 90-100 days we had in Weston. We could still have tomatoes, etc. here, if we had a garden this year. They would have had to be covered a couple of times, but we would have had them. Since we love to garden and preserve our harvest, this will be a wonderful place to live. We also are fortunate to live closer to most of our family. It will be nice to see those we have seen so seldom a bit more.

We'd like a garden next year, but.....

The people, probably several people, before us made some really nice raised beds with weed barrier, really good weed barrier, at the bottom of top soil they had hauled in. However, they, or those after them, let them go fallow. In Missouri, if it is fallow, it goes back to forest.

Stan and I spent a VERY productive day and got the trees out! It was a lot of pulling, prying, shoveling, and at the end with the big ones, the truck and a chain. We were very pleased with the beds and the huge pile we created! However, our little Mantis rototiller quit. I worked and worked on it, but couldn't get it going:( I will need a tiller in there, but that will be another day. The pile doesn't look very big, I should have parked the truck behind it, it would almost hide it!