Give Thanks With a Grateful Heart

In every thing give thanks: for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you.  1 Thessalonians 5:18

Today was a day for giving thanks.  When you think about it, everyday we should be giving thanks.  We are blessed.  I hope that you were able to fellowship with family as we did and enjoy each other's company, good food, and most importantly take time to that God for His provisions.

We met at our home and laughed and reminisced and told funny stories.  My beautiful wife did a great job cooking and preparing everything.  We ate far too much food and sat around the table and made the meal last for hours.

Getting ready to thank God for the food and our many blessings.  Then we'll feast!

Benjamin left early to get ready to hunt as he has a big duck hunt scheduled for first thing in the morning, so when we got ready to warm everything up again to eat supper, he was gone.  He missed out on the photos.  Here's Russ, my Mom, my Dad, and Laura Lee.  She drove in from Baton Rouge for the get-together.

Here's my Mom and Dad.  They brought two turkeys - one was roasted on a rotisserie over a hickory fire.  The other was fried.  Both were so delicious!

And here is four-fifths of our family.  Benjamin made it into the first photo, but missed the evening photos.

What a great Thanksgiving!  Thank you, Lord, for your blessings on me!

Hay There!

The wintry blast that brought temperatures down into the 20's killed the grass in the pasture.  The cows and goats were out grazing, but to be honest, there wasn't much to graze on.  Of course we have all the square bales of hay that we put up in the loft, but we're trying to ration that.  The square bales are some high quality bermuda hay - horse hay, that the cows love.  We give them wedges of it everyday, but we try to make it all the way through the winter.

Our 'everyday hay' is still good hay, just not quite the quality of the square bales, and we purchase it in round bales.  We buy it from a gentleman that brings it to us by trailer and drops it off at our house.  We appreciate his friendship.  His trailer holds 8 round bales and he charges $25 per bale delivered.  That is a great price, in my opinion.  Which brings me back around to the point I was trying to get to in the first paragraph.

The man who brings us hay works on an offshore oil platform and works 14 days off and 14 days on.  When I called an ordered the first 8 bales of the season, he was offshore and wouldn't hit the "beach"  until 14 days later.  Our cows were truly sorry about my timing!  Anyway, the hay got delivered last night.  I quickly rolled out 2 of the 8 bales.  The cows were ecstatic.  One bale went into the bull pen where Aussie (our Jersey bull) and Andy (our Nubian buckling) live.  The other went into the main pasture where Rosie, Clarabelle, Luna, Clarabull, and the goat family (Buckwheat, Annie, Oreo, Salt and Pepper) live.

Our hay guy places the bales outside the pasture and we only roll out one bale at a time in each location for the cows to consume.  I'll put a tarpaulin over the bales outside the pasture to protect it from the rain.  One problem that we do have with hay is that when it rains, the fire ants seek higher ground in the hay.  When we go to roll out the bales, the fire ants tear us up!

Once we roll a bale out, I put the hay ring around the bale to protect it.  Cows are notorious for wasting about as much hay as they eat.  The hay ring avoids some of the waste, but the goats enjoy jumping on top of the bale and do their very best to destroy it.  A new bale in the pasture makes egg-gathering a little bit more adventurous as the hens enjoy laying eggs in the hay.

When I first got home tonight the cows were all circled around the hay ring eating their fill.  When I checked in on them at 9 pm, they had pushed away from the supper table and were sitting down, chewing their cud.  Very happy cows now that they hay has arrived!  Last year they consumed 1 round bale about every 6 days.  We'll see if they average about the same this year.

Other Working Animals on the Farm

With cows and goats and chickens on the property, one needs a little help.  I kind of talked about the help that we have on our little homestead farm a while back.  This weekend I was able to take some photos of our laborers that live in housing that we provide as remuneration for their hard work to ensure that our animals were safe.  These hardworking individuals are tasked with a multitude of duties that keep them busy, night and day, with rarely a day off. 

I thought I could reintroduce you to our... ahem... interns or working staff.  First there is Big Boy, our Great Pyrenees.  While technically a livestock guardian dog, his idea of guarding and protecting chickens proved to be not exactly what we were looking for.  One day we encountered him guarding our flock.  Sounds good, but the hen he was guarding was bleeding and flapping her broken wings as he was eating her.

Big Boy was banished from the pasture and now is a "watch dog."  He is posted outside the garage and barks his head off relentlessly at passersby and wandering dogs, cats, possums and squirrels.  Here is a photo of our busy animals in action - Big Boy and Ginger.

Ginger is our barn cat.  The idea is that she would live in our barn and hunt rats - except she doesn't reside in the barn.  She lives in our garage and hunts Cat Chow that's poured in her bowl.  She's gotten a little fat and instead of stealthily creeping up on rodents, her primary instinctual craving is for naps in the sun.

Sometimes, if particularly motivated, she'll roll over and change positions.  Due to Ginger's lack of relentless and energetic pursuit of pesky rodents that inhabit our barn, rats have multiplied faster than rabbits and we've resorted to allowing snakes, rat traps, poison and buckets of water do the job of dispatching the rodents in our barn.  Which works out quite nicely for Ginger, giving her more time for napping in the sun.

But she occasionally catches and kills and eats small birds.  A couple of weeks ago, we found remnants of a squirrel that she devoured.  Only a tail and a foot remained.  It must have been a very slow squirrel.

While Big Boy and Ginger might not be perfectly suited to do their appointed tasks, they're part of our family, and we accept them, warts and all.

That's Gonna Leave a Mark

Tonight Tricia told me it was quite a coincidence that I blogged about Rosie's "winter coat"  the other night.  She had been observing that, too. 

Rosie's winter coat

As you can tell from the photo below, she grows thick hair, even on her udder, and it gets in the way when we clean up her bag in preparation for milking time.  Tonight Tricia brought the clippers out to the barn, plugged them in and gave her a haircut on just her udder.  I'll have to get a photo of the change.

Rosie is one that gets real nervous when the clippers get turned on.  The noise of the clippers turning on must be like the noise of a dentist's drill to us.  I guess it is from all the years of being shown in livestock shows.  We'd clip her to get her groomed and ready for the shows.  Rosie never liked it one bit, especially trimming around her face and ears.  Rosie does a funny thing when she gets nervous - she poops.  Tricia told me that when she turned the clippers on, Rosie pooped all over the place.  What a mess she made in the barn.  She finally got the job done, and it will be easier to milk her from now on.

Cleaning up Rosie's udder prior to milking

I wanted to show you something interesting about Rosie's udder in a photo I took this past Saturday:

This picture makes me cringe!

If you look above at one of Rosie's teats, you'll see a big, jagged scar.  Three years ago, I think it was, Rosie stepped on her teat when getting up from sitting down one day.  It made a big cut on her teat.  I know it must have been excruciatingly painful, but over time it healed up.  I remember we were real worried about it at first.  It doesn't negatively affect milk production from that quarter at all - just the stream of milk doesn't come out as tight as it once did.

We always hobble one back leg closest to us when we start milking and then 'strip' out one or two streams of milk from each teat to clear out any bacteria on the plug.

Then we put the bucket that is lined with a cloth "filter" to keep out dust, hay, hair and mosquitoes and flies, and begin milking.

When it is really cold outside, the milk coming out will be steaming! 

Before And After

I had a big double row of zinnias growing on the last row of the garden before the sugar cane.  For months it gave us beautiful technicolor blooms.  Tricia has been picking bouquets and putting them in a vase in the kitchen.  It was my first trial in planting flowers in the vegetable garden.  Last year I planted zinnias right outside the garden in the holes of some cinder blocks that line the ditch that borders the garden.  They did nicely and at the end of the season, I saved the flower heads for seed.  I really didn't know how well they would germinate, but Good Golly, Miss Molly, I think every last seed grew.  I think I'll plant them again next year. 

Well, last week, in one of the earliest freezes I can remember, temperatures dipped into the mid 20's and zapped the zinnias.  In a stunning before and after shot, you can compare the photo above with the same flowers a day after the deep freeze hit.  From delightful to dull in a very short time.

But the flowers weren't the only thing that the freeze claimed.  It also obliterated our okra.  We have harvested loads and loads of okra this year.  We ate it very often and have some frozen for gumbos, too.  It produced for months and was still producing until the north wind freeze dried it.  Here is a photo of the last two plants left standing before I chopped them down.

We often talk about planting seeds in the garden.  Once a plant runs its course, what do you do.  I want to talk about that briefly.  In the past I would just uproot the dead or dying plants and toss them in the compost pile.  That's not a bad thing to do, but there is a better alternative.  Over the years I started to leave the root system intact. 

Okra grows into a large plant.  Some of the okra plants were approaching three inches across at the base of the plant!  Instead of pulling the plant up, I use a cheap but effective pruning saw I bought for next to nothing at Harbor Freight.  I saw the plant top off right above ground level.  Once I'm done, you can't even tell a plant was even there.

So what does that gain me?  A lot.  The roots will quickly rot and the decomposed organic matter will amend the garden soil.  It opens up passageways for rain water and air flow.  The tunnels that the roots opened will help earthworms as they move throughout the soil and finally the roots will feed soil microbes.  Overall, it is a win-win to leave the roots in the soil.

The okra plants themselves are another story.  Some of them were ten feet tall.  After I chopped them down, I piled them in the back of the garden.  I'll cover them with piles of wood chips mixed with some cow poop and allow them to decompose for a year or so.

Once things in the garden were vibrant with a multitude of colors from bright zinnias to the green okra.  Now, everything is dull and drab and dead.  Not for long, though.  The sugar snap peas are growing and are beginning to trellis.  Soon they'll be blooming and there will be more color in the garden.

The Winter Coat

I have a big Columbia camouflage coat that I wear when it gets cold.  It got down to 26 degrees the other day and I broke it out of the coat closet a lot earlier than I usually do.  It did the trick of keeping me nice and warm.  Oftentimes, I'm concerned about the animals when the cold weather kicks in, but mostly when it is cold AND wet.  I've always heard, animals can handle the cold and they can handle wet weather, but being cold and wet is a hard hill for them to climb.

Fortunately, God has created a mechanism in cattle that helps them out during winter.  They don't have to go to a coat closet - they GROW their coats.  They are all registered Jersey cows, and they don't do well in the summer.  In the summer, their coats are slick - not much hair at all.  However, when fall rolls around, their hair really starts growing.  Here is Clarabull.  You can tell he's a little "fuzzy." 

Luna doesn't grow a thick coat.  Clarabelle's coat comes in a little thicker.  Rosie is the cow that really puts a thick winter parka on!  Saturday morning after milking, I walked her out of the barn and was admiring the coat she was wearing.

Yeah, I'm talkin' about you, Rosie.  She always cocks one ear up and looks at us with that goofy look.  Rosie is the cow that likes to lay in the mud like a pig all summer to stay cool.   Now in the winter, she grows a big furry coat to keep herself comfortable.

I took a close-up of 'ol Rosie's belly so you can see just how thick her hair grows around this time every year.  When we are milking her in the barn, we're freezing cold, but it doesn't bother her at all.  You can feel how warm she is.

She grows a lot of hair on her udder, too, though, and sometimes we'll get out the clippers and shave her udder as long hair on her udder can get in the way when you are trying to milk her.  The long hair they grow helps them to stay warm during the winter, but come summertime, they'll shed the winter coat they worked so hard to grow.  It's a neat cycle that God orchestrated.

An Old Swing (and a New Electric Chain Saw)

My oldest son bought a home in a nearby town.  It is an older home, but was in great shape.  He's been working on it, making small repairs, painting, and working on landscaping.  He really enjoys home ownership.  He called us and asked if we could come give him some help on a couple of projects that he needed assistance on.  There are a few things that need an extra person or two. 

We drove over Sunday afternoon after church on a beautiful afternoon to assist.  The first project was hanging a swing on his back patio.  The swing has a story.  Tricia recently made a trip to Corpus Christi, Texas to visit her mom and attend her high school class reunion.  While there she brought a swing back that her mom gave her to give to Russ.

The swing was in an old cardboard shipping box that was deteriorated.  Tricia's Dad passed away many years ago.  Before his death, he had bought a swing that he intended to hang.  It is still unclear whether he wanted to hang it at the Garcia home in Corpus Christi or at the ranch.  Regardless, it never got hung and has resided in a box on the floor of my mother-in-law's garage for years.  Tricia's mom decided that she'd like Russ to have it.  He put it together and we hung it on Russ' back patio.  I took the photo below of Russ and Tricia, sitting on the old swing.  After many years, it got hung and will provide relaxation and enjoyment for years to come. 

"Just a swingin'"

Russ had asked me to bring my pole saw.  I have a nifty electric chain saw on a pole that extends out to catch limbs way up high.  Russ had some limbs that he wanted to prune to get away from the roof as well as to thin out excess branches to allow more sunlight to filter in to allow grass to grow better on his shady property.

It was the first time I'd taken the electric chainsaw out of the box.  I have to admit, I was a little leery of an electric chainsaw.  I wanted an electric one because I felt that it was so rare that I used it, if I got a gasoline powered saw, it wouldn't crank when I needed it, but it just doesn't seem like it would be strong enough to do the job.  It did have good ratings on Amazon, but I wanted to see if it warranted those "stars" on the review.  It did!  Russ climbed on top of his garage roof and trimmed limbs from his magnolia tree.  I dragged the cut limbs to the road where his town provides pick-up.

He told me that he was working up on his roof the other day and the ladder fell off the side of his house when he was up on the roof.  I asked him how he got down.  He told me he jumped off the side of the garage and into the magnolia tree and climbed down the tree.  Magnolia trees are great for climbing.  While he trimmed his magnolia tree, I told him to leave limbs to give him a back-up plan should he get stranded on the roof again.

In his front yard facing the road, he has a water oak tree that shades the yard.  The limbs block sunlight and prohibit grass growth on certain parts of the yard.  Russ trimmed limbs until he felt things had opened up a bit.  He is facing east in the photo below and the morning sun will now shine into his yard.

When we were done, Russ asked us to come inside.  He paid us for the work with a slice of chocolate cake and strawberry ice cream.  That sounded like pretty good wages to me!

New Iberia Blues

I've talked in the past about my commute to work.  It's not that bad but construction for the past year and a half has turned a 40 minute commute into a grueling 1 1/2 hour drive on some days.  At first I listened to talk radio to pass the time until I began to realize that I didn't need that stress and blood-pressure rise on my drive home.  I had enough of that by simply gazing into the red tail lights in front of me and the glare of the bright LED headlights on the jacked up Ford behind me that was burning into my eyes through the rear view mirror with the brightness of a thousand suns.

To mitigate that, I got a library card and began listening, once again, to audiobooks.  Ahhhhh...  Now on the drive home I listen with interest to books by some of my favorite authors.  Sometimes, now, I'm so into the book, I sit in the parking lot at work or in the garage at home until I can get to a good "stopping point."

I listen to a number of different books with different genres, authors, etc.  I want to talk to you today about one of my favorite novelists, James Lee Burke.  He lives about 60 miles from me in New Iberia.  If you aren't familiar with his writing, I highly recommend it.  I would describe him as a "Cajun John Grisham."  He writes, among other things, crime novels set in Louisiana.  Burke is a terrific story-teller.  His is an absolute master with using metaphor and his descriptive writing moves you from being a reader to being there at the scene, seeing the sights, smelling the aromas, hearing the sounds.

The protagonist in many of his books is Dave Robicheaux.  He has a side kick named Clete Purcell.  They are imperfect guys, with flaws and warts, but are trying to do what is good and right.  The latest installment to the Dave Robicheaux series I read (listened to) was "The New Iberia Blues."  Will Patton narrates many of Burke's audiobooks and does a great job with the accents of the characters and the passion of Burke's writing really comes through.  I enjoyed it and was sad when the Cajun French music played Jolie Blon at the end, signaling the end of the book.

Dave Robicheaux (and Jame Lee Burke) loves his State, the beauty of the live oaks and the Spanish Moss-laced Cypress trees on the bayou and the love affair with the way "Louisiana used to be."  Such melancholy nostalgia really got to me in an excerpt from "New Iberia Blues" I cut and pasted below:

“We had little money but didn’t think of ourselves as poor. Our vision, if I can call it that, was not materialistic. If we had a concept about ourselves, it was egalitarian, although we would not have known what that word meant. We spoke French entirely. There was a bond between Cajuns and people of color. Cajuns didn’t travel, because they believed they lived in the best place on earth. But somehow the worst in us, or outside of us, asserted itself and prevailed and replaced everything that was good in our lives. We traded away our language, our customs, our stands of cypress, our sugarcane acreage, our identity, and our pride. Outsiders ridiculed us and thought us stupid; teachers forbade our children to speak French on the school grounds. Our barrier islands were dredged to extinction. Our coastline was cut with eight thousand miles of industrial channels, destroying the root systems of the sawgrass and the swamps. The bottom of the state continues to wash away in the flume of the Mississippi at a rate of sixteen square miles a year. Much of this we did to ourselves in the same way that a drunk like me will destroy a gift, one that is irreplaceable and extended by a divine hand. Our roadsides are littered with trash, our rain ditches layered with it, our waterways dumping grounds for automobile tires and couches and building material. While we trivialize the implications of our drive-through daiquiri windows and the seediness of our politicians and recite our self-congratulatory mantra, laissez les bons temps rouler, the southern rim of the state hovers on the edge of oblivion, a diminishing, heartbreaking strip of green lace that eventually will be available only in photographs.”
― James Lee Burke, The New Iberia Blues    

I listened to the quote above from disc 4, program 4 on my way home the other day and paused it and then rewinded it and listened again.  I got home and googled "best quotes from New Iberia Blues" and wouldn't you know the above quoted section came up.  (I wasn't the only one who thought that was a good piece of writing!)

But why is that?  Maybe you have to grow up here or live here for a while to read between the lines to get at what he's saying.  It's a lament, a mourning, a sadness for a slow demise of a people, their customs, language, land and culture.  Often we in Louisiana find our state ranked first in everything that is bad and last in everything that is good.  I often scratch my head as I see a contradiction of a state so rich in natural resources (oil, agriculture, forestry, seafood, Mississippi River and deep water ports, etc. etc.) and yet so poor in so many metrics.  It's maddening.

Dave Robicheaux and Clete Purcell, are fictitious characters, but I can identify with them.  They are all around me.  They are imperfect, yet heroes.  They see tragedy and heartbreak all around them, but never give up in doing their best, trying to do good, putting the bad guys away, and enjoying a simple, unpretentious life on the Bayou.  In weaving suspenseful tales of Good versus Evil with thoughtful commentary on the our state, Burke has made the time spent on my commutes much more enjoyable - and time is the most valuable of commodities...

“Age is a peculiar kind of thief. It slips up on you and steps inside your skin and is so quiet and methodical in its work that you never realize it has stolen your youth until you look into the mirror one morning and see a man you don't recognize.” - James Lee Burke

Surveying the Citrus

The seasons change quickly.  As I write this tonight, I can hear the wind chimes on the back patio chiming constantly as 20 mph gusts buffet and announce the arrival of a cold front.  Temperatures will drop to 26 degrees tomorrow night.  Tricia will be bringing in all the plants that she can.  I'll help once I get home from work. 

The changing seasons, like clockwork, also mark the arrival of harvest time for different crops.  This weekend I looked over our citrus.  First, our tangerine trees.  We have three and they are loaded.  Here is one shown below:

These are ripe right now.  We've actually started to pick these and eat them.  Their color is a so bright you almost need sunglasses to look at them.  They are juicy and tart.  Delicious!

As far as other citrus go, they are smaller than an orange.  Little in size, but big in taste!  In the past we've eaten these off the tree, juiced them, made tangerine curd, and tangerine marmalade.  Tricia likes the flavor of these better than all the other citrus.

Here is one of our two navel orange trees.  It too, is loaded with fruit.  We actually made some supporting braces to hold up the limbs so that they don't break under the weight of the heavy fruit.
They are just starting to turn a tinge of orange now.  I read somewhere that the fruit turns the color orange with cooler weather.  If that is true, after tomorrow, these will all be orange!

For a size comparison, you can see that the navel orange is larger than the tangerine. We eat these off the tree, juice them, make a fruit salad with them, and make an olive oil orange cake (a big hit at our house!)

Finally, here is our tiny (but growing) grapefruit tree.  It reminds me a lot of Charlie Brown's Christmas Tree in that it is small and the weight of the fruit is almost too much for the little limbs to bear.  I counted seven (7) grapefruit clinging to the small tree.  The fruit is very sweet.  We harvested less than 7 last year, but enjoyed each one.  No need to add sugar.

And here you can see the relative size of the grapefruit.  It is bigger than the the navel orange.

Over the next several months we'll be enjoying all the citrus.  Then, shortly after we harvest and enjoy all the fruit, the trees will begin blooming and we will be able to enjoy the wonderful fragrance of orange blossoms!

Why Can't We Just Get Along?

In 1977, the Commodores released a song written by Lionel Richie called "Easy."  This was a smooth Motown song about the end of a relationship and that instead of being depressed, he was going to be "easy like Sunday Morning."  I like that song, except our Sunday mornings usually aren't easy.  While we do sleep later than we do on weekdays, we get up and get the chores done, feeding animals, milking cows, opening the nesting boxes, and filling water troughs while rushing to get back inside and get dressed and make it to church.   

Saturday Mornings are much more easy, but the three syllables in the word Saturday don't flow as well!  Saturday morning we woke up and did the normal chores at a slower pace.  The weather was one of those perfect, cool, blue bird days.  I planted a row of turnips in the garden.  I have not been able (yet) to develop a taste for turnips, but I like turnip greens.  We grow them for our cows.  They really dig 'em. 

I joked with Tricia that the weather was so nice that it was time to do some spring cleaning in the fall.  Our springs are very short.  We move from winter to summer so quickly, there's hardly any time to do spring cleaning.  Might as well do it now.  We put together a shelving unit for the garage, cleaned out junk from the garage, patched holes in the walls and primed the holes.  I found a hole behind some junk where rats had eaten a passageway into the walls!  I put carpenter's glue on the some steel wool and patched up that hole.  I was a little disappointed in Big Boy, our Great Pyrenees guard dog and Ginger, our hunting cat, for letting the rats do this literally right under their noses.  How could this happen?  I walked outside the garage and got my answer:

Asleep on the job

Well, ain't that a kick in the pants?!  Sleeping on the job.  That's exactly how the rats gained access.  I thought dogs and cats weren't supposed to be friends?  Big Boy and Ginger dispelled that stereotype by cuddling up together for a snooze in sunlight filtered through the remaining leaves on the pecan tree.  Seems like they are getting along just fine, right?  I had to go get Tricia to show her that dogs and cats can be friends.

I wanted to also show you something else in our backyard - our Cassia tree.  Every year at this time it blooms with beautiful yellow flowers.

Here is a closeup of the flowers:

The bright yellow color is certainly an eye catcher against the blue sky and brilliant sun.

There's only two weaknesses with the cassia that I can find. 

#1 It does not handle freezing weather.  It will die back down to the ground, but always sprouts back up from the roots.
#2 Its root system is incredibly week.  The entire tree will fall over with the slightest wind and rain.  We have both of our cassia trees staked with t-posts and rope to keep them from falling over.

It was an enjoyable weekend.  I hope you enjoyed yours!

Sleeping With One Eye Open

I find that I like routine.  I like things all laid out with no surprises.  You can settle in, knowing what to expect.  Every once in a while, things get shaken up and the routine takes a back seat to change.  The time change always throws me off-kilter.  This evening when I drove into the driveway, it was dark.  I grabbed my DeWalt 20v light and headed outside.

We capture rainwater in large catch basins in the back of the house.  When we have about 300 gallons of rainwater in containment, I'll turn off the water valve to the water trough and I'll carry 5 gallon buckets of rainwater to the trough until full.  Next, out to the barnyard.  Normally the animals are still eating grass in the pasture, but the new time has changed their routine as well.  They are pretty much tucked in for the night.  Let's take a look.  Maybe we won't disturb them too bad.

The hens are up on their roosts in the hen house.  Their poop is shoveled out once a year and used in the garden as fertilizer.  We wait a year, because chicken poop can be quite "hot" and can burn your plants.  One other thing that can be quite useful is the cobwebs that line the rafters and the ceiling.  Believe it or not, cobwebs can stop bleeding.  One time we had a heifer that was de-horned at the veterinarian's office.  Later that evening, she started bleeding - profusely.  We called the vet in the middle of the night, and he told us to find cobwebs and use in place of gauze.  It's been used since ancient times.  One of the reasons it works is that spider webs are full of Vitamin K, the blood-clotting vitamin.  It worked !

We always close the nesting boxes you see on the left side of the photo.  If you don't, some of the chickens will roost on top of the nesting boxes, filling the boxes with poop, making cleaning the eggs the next day a messy chore.

As I walked out of the hen-house, Annie and Buckwheat have settled in on some hay by the barn door.  Some other chickens have roosted on top of a carrying cage.  I was talking about routine earlier.  Animals are no different.  If I come out tomorrow night, those same chickens will be roosting atop the cage...

These same chickens will be roosting atop the woodpile...

I'm planning to burn this woodpile next week.  I'll remove the hens first, of course.

And these same hens will be atop the pile of bricks.  Do you always sleep on the same side of the bed?  Chickens do the same thing.

Clarabull has his own little place where he beds down at night.  This location was previously a big mud hole until we built a roof over the walkway and brought in loads of wood chips.  This area was once avoided and now it is a peaceful place of rest.

Luna, Clarabelle, and Rosie seem to like this spot.  We throw hay out of the window of the barn that they eat on.  Once finished, they tend to stay in this spot as there are fewer mosquitoes and flies that bother them here.  Of course they are in a routine, too.  They equate seeing me walking to the barn with feed and they mosey to the gate expecting to get fed again.  I hate to disappoint, but Tricia's already fed them.


It's hard work laying eggs and making milk, so I'll leave all the animals alone and let them get som shut-eye.  I'll head back indoors, eat supper, and do the same.

For Crying Out Loud!

Do onions make you cry?  Sometimes when I cut them, tears do well up in my eyes.  Tonight, we had T-bone steaks from our bull calf cooked in a cast iron skillet covered in smothered onions and bell peppers.  So good.  The onions kicked the whole meal up a notch, making us almost have tears of joy as we ate.

We are all out of the homegrown onions we harvested this summer and have had to buy onions.  Well, no time like the present to begin thinking about next year's onion crop.  I buy onion plants from Dixondale Farms.  They are a family farming operation down in Carrizzo Springs, Texas that has been growing onions for 107 years.  (I think they have this onion-growing thing mastered!)  You can click that link above to check out their website.  I was looking at my catalog tonight and made my order.

Prior to five years ago, I had never really tried to grow onions, other than growing green onions.  Now I plant them every year.  The first thing you'll want to do is determine what type of variety works best in your area.  Since we are in the deep south, the Short Day Varieties work best for us.  I like to order the Short Day Sampler and I order two bundles.  Each bundle contains 50 - 75 onion plants.  The sampler is just that - in contains a mixture of 1015Y Texas Super Sweet, Texas Early White, and Red Creole onions.  It is very affordable at approximately $9 per sampler bundle.

I receive them in early to mid-January and get them in the ground shortly thereafter.  I have to give positive reviews to Dixondale Farms.  If you order from them, you can receive an email newsletter called "The Onion Patch" that keeps you up to date with proper care of onion plants to guarantee a bumper crop.  They also have onion recipes like the one I cut & pasted below:

Wow!  I have to try this.  I love a good grilled cheese sandwich, but adding grilled onions and mushrooms to it?  Goodness gracious!  Does that sound great?!  Can't wait to try it...

Benjamin and I - Callin' Baton Rouge

Tricia was out of town at her high school reunion.  I was a bachelor at home, taking care of the animals.  I got a call from my Mom Friday night and she and Dad offered us two tickets to the LSU - Auburn Football Game.  Unfortunately, Russ had to work on Saturday and wasn't able to join us, but Benjamin and I headed east for an hour and got on our way to watch the Tigers play.

We woke up and milked the cows and then got on our way.  It was a cloudy, chilly morning as we crossed the Mighty Mississippi River at around 9:30 am.  On the western side of the bridge, if you roll your windows down, you can smell coffee beans roasting at the Community Coffee Plant.

We arrived on campus and parked at perhaps the farthest parking spot that existed on the eastern side of campus and walked toward all the action.  We crossed the Parade Grounds with a great view of Memorial Tower or the Campanile with Old Glory flying.  The tower is 175 feet tall and was built in 1923 as a memorial to Louisiana soldiers that died in World War I.

We walked by the Pete Maravich Assembly Center to Mike the Tiger's habitat.  Mike was pacing back and forth...

What a beautiful cat!

We heard that SEC Nation was set up across Nicholson Drive, so we wanted to go see what that was all about.  The live broadcast had Tim Tebow, Paul Finebaum, Marcus Spears, and Laura Rutledge reporting and interacting with a large crowd.  Below you can see Tim Tebow tossing footballs to the crowd. 

Benjamin and I walked back toward Tiger Stadium, grabbed a bowl of chicken and sausage gumbo and sat down to watch the sights and sounds of game day.  If you look at the facade of Tiger Stadium, you'll see a number of windows.  Odd.  There's an interesting story behind that.  In 1931 LSU needed more dormitory rooms.  Huey P. Long, the governor of Louisiana wanted to enlarge the football stadium.  It seemed to be a stalemate until it was decided that BOTH could win.  They built the dorm rooms INSIDE the stadium.  The windows you see are part of 430 rooms for 1,500 students.  After football games, students would often return to their rooms with things knocked off the walls and dressers from the noise and vibration of the big game.  No students actually live in the dorms in the stadium anymore, however.

A rare 'selfie' of Benjamin and me under the stately oaks on North Stadium Drive.

The football team walked down Victory Hill and Benjamin was able to give QB Joe Burrow a high five!  Then the Golden Band from Tigerland marched down the hill and played those four notes that makes Mike the Tiger stand right up and roar!  The crowd roared too!

The team went through pregame drills, met on the eye of the tiger and got ready for action!

We sang Louisiana Saturday Night and Callin' Baton Rouge and then the band played the Alma Mater and the National Anthem and we got ready for kickoff.

LSU won the game and improved our record to 8 - 0.  Benjamin and I had a great day together at the game!  Geaux Tigers!