Arnold! Not the Governor!

As a lot of you know, I've been knitting a lot lately. I took a class on knitting a basket with a twisted handle all as one piece and then fulling it in the washer. Well, the original basket was cute (I just received a first place ribbon at the Webster County Fair for that one) but I wanted a much bigger one for practicality purposes. So we did some calculations and came up with what we thought were instructions to double the size of the basket - NOT! What we ended up with was the equivalent of the Arnold Schwartzenegger character in the movie Twins - my first basket being Danny DeVito and my second one being Arnold. I've entered Arnold in the Ozark Empire Fair and we will find out sometime the end of the week if I won anything for it. In the meantime, here is a picture of him all decked out with 18 balls of yarn for the fair. I needle-felted the quilt squares on the side to tie it in with my love of quilting.

New Calf

Ruby finally had her calf. On Friday, the 20th of July she presented us with a large male calf. No wonder Ruby looked as though she was going to have twins. He is quite large. Probably over 50 pounds already. He is absolutely beautiful. A truly white face, with red rims around his eyes. I'm told that this is a good thing because the color around the eyes helps to prevent pink eye on a cow. We've decided that his name is Huevo (cause he won't have any once they band him later this week and that will be the only reminder!) I know, that's sick....whatever! I went over to see him yesterday and to get some pics and when I was out in the field, he came right over to me and got his nosed scratched...he has no shame! Or fear, for that matter.

Newest Additions to our Household

No, Ruby hasn't had her calf yet. We heard Carson barking like mad on Saturday. John went out to see what the commotion was and found that he had 'cornered' two very small kittens in the dog run. It seems that someone dumped 4 kittens near our frog pond on Friday nite and they managed to make their way up to the house during the night and into Saturday afternoon. Unfortunately, Carson didn't like small animals in his run and since they are way too small to elude him, he disposed of two of them. But the other two managed to get somewhere under the deck that he couldn't go. John and I now have 2 barn cats! Since they were cast away into our yard, we've named them Ginger and MaryAnn. They only weigh about a pound each and are probably somewhere between 4 and 6 weeks old. They currently live on the front porch in the kennel that we got to housetrain Carson. Within a week or so, they will be moved down to the barn. John couldn't resist them and I have to admit, they are adorable.

Torrential Rain!!!

We got a torrent of rain on Saturday, along with a frightening Tornado Warning...while John calmly watched the news on TV, I zipped thru the house, packing radio, flashlights, medications, water bottles, cell phone chargers, dog bones and leashes, pillows and blankets. then I took the camera and shot these pics of the amount of water we had coming down and 'raining' off the roof of the barn. The tornado missed us by several miles. The rain and wind did not miss us at all!.

Kitty Centinel

Most folks know we don't own a cat! But we have a barn that has no mice at all. A neighbor has a siamese cat who likes to sleep in the window of our hayloft...it drives our dogs nuts!

It's got no fear as long as our dogs are in the run and the cat is not.

Bambi's kin

Every time my mother comes to visit, we tell her she will get to see the deer that live in our woods. And every time she goes home without seeing any deer. Last week, the dogs went nuts at the door to the back deck...when I went out to see what was making them crazy, some of the deer family were grazing near the burn pile. I got the trusty camera and now here's proof that we have deer on our property, Mom!

Wicked Weather

We sometimes get some wicked weather here in the Ozarks. It's not always easy to tell that the weather is going to change. But on Saturday, it was easy to see that we were in for some fierce winds and rain. This monstrous shelf cloud began to slide in from the north about 7:30 Saturday nite and left quite a bit of moisture in its wake.