Tuesday

Painted at the old house today. Got another load of stuff out. Cleaned. Loaded up an old homemade bookshelf. I had plans for it. I wanted it in the basement to hold my canned stuff. It is parked right next to the freezers. 

It has to be a hundred years old:

Ignore the dust. We had a busy day, did not get home until 6. I had tomatoes to be picked, processed and put into jars for stewed tomatoes

 I am pleased to say that I got it all done and am waiting for the "ping'. (1 down, 7 to go.)

Anyways, what I love about that shelf is that it is made out of a shipping crate. You can see the "use no hooks' on the back. The rest of it is painted. The door is gone. But look at the top of it. The man who made it took the time to 'pretty it up' for whoever he was making it for. Me, being me, imagined a happy little story about a happy little couple in a happy little house about a hundred years ago. I imagine him proudly giving it to her, and her believing she had married the cleverest man in the world. 

How can you get rid of something with a story like that?

(2nd jar pinged)

I also found a very excellent find today. My oldest granddaughter sews little things for herself by hand  but she dearly wanted a sewing machine. She bought herself a child's sewing machine from her own money, but it never did work properly. I read up on it (3rd jar pinged) and my daughter in law and I discussed simply getting her a regular adult sewing machine. The concern was spending a lot of money on an 8 year old's hobby, but today on marketplace. $30! Even if she loses interest, the machine can be sold without losing monry

I could not wait to tell them (4th jar pinged) and her grandma there has offered to teach her to sew. 

Today was my son"s 40th birthday. I sent him a review:

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Great kid. 

Would birth again.

No reply. Poor guy evidently did not find it as funny as I did. His real gift was a bottle of blended bourbon/maple syrup (it actually is quite smooth and I don't even like bourbon) and  pancake makings. He is the master breakfast dad. 

Today was my youngest granddaughter's first full day of preschool. She decided at the lastminute.com she wanted to stay with mom, but she didn't cry. At the end of the day, she was all smiles. She loved it, much to everyone's relief.

5th jar pinged while I was breaking up at cat fight. 

Tomorrow, it is supposed to rain. I am glad for that. It gives me a day off from working on the old house, which is good. I have peppers to chop for the freezer. I imagine we will have another round of tomatoes to pick. Tomorrow night we will have to cover everything. Unbelievably, there are frost warnings.

6th and 7th jars pinged.

Trump claimed today that two burly firemen dragged him from the rubble on 9/11. I remember that day. He called Wwor on his penthouse line

https://youtu.be/aPvemZHnd0s?is=suKje94yYPdlg4wM

The man is crazy. 

In Canada, fancy plaques are going up on public toilets, designating them as trump monuments.

I am waiting on one remaining jar to seal. It is after midnight. Hopefully it will ping without me.

So why, though?

 The question becomes 'what sort of data are data centers storing?' When you have a government that is actively monitoring our online activity, and not hiding the fact, to me, personally, it makes me suspicious of the sudden need for so many.

The trump sycophant running for governor in my state is advocating building these in our "vast unused" rural spaces. She also says these data centers need to be deregulated, meaning local government will have no sway in the decisions made by these behemoths.

I don't think any massive corporation should be deregulated, especially one with the potential to be used against a country's own citizens. 

I can already hear you self proclaimed seeing-both-sides folk snorting and rolling your eyes as you point out valid uses for these storage places. Sure. So let those corporations store their own data. It might be cheaper to use massive storage data centers, but why are we so concerned about making another way to cut costs for corporations? 

Stacey Garrity is trailing Josh Shapiro in that governor's race by double digits right now, very good news.

(Reminder to anonymous: if you don't put your name to your comment it will be deleted.)

What has six heads, twelve legs, makes a lot of flappy, agitated noise? (Answer: six chickens who immediately flock and head straight at any cat looking interested.) After a week, the cats ignore them. I have begun to cautiously turn them out in the morning.

Storms

 We have had some pretty fierce weather here for the last three days. Some pretty violent thunderstorms, torrential downpours. Hail at times. High winds. Tornado warnings. Lots of severe weather warnings. Coming back from Pleasantville tonight, a 20 min drive, we had five alerts. The worst of today's storms passed slightly south of us, so we were spared the brunt of it. 

If you have Facebook, you can link to some of today's weather. 

https://www.facebook.com/share/1H5CQt9ZHw/

The weird thing is that the storms have been rolling through in waves, multiple storms over the course of a day. Last night we were awakened at least four times by crazy loud cracks of thunder, once by a prolonged lightning flash.

Still...we have been lucky compared to a lot of folks. 

The chicken coop Levi built for us is solid and good. The chickens seem to know when things are going to turn and they scurry in. I keep food and water inside, because some days they spend more time inside than out. It doesn't seem to bother them.

Ignore the mess in the foreground. I swept the coop out, put fresh chips down. The picture was taken before I raked.

When we get a break in the weather, I turn them lose to get some free range time. They love finding earthworms in the water logged ground. 

I put them in the run when I go inside because I still worry about the cats, but so far, the cats seem afraid of them. 

What the fresh hell is this, Mother?

So I am pretty sure they will be able to eventually free range as I hoped. 

Possum (in the picture above) still doesn't want to come inside. I take her supper out to the greenhouse to keep her food dish from flooding. Tonight, I got caught out there when a storm moved in. The rain pounded down so hard I could not see the house but I had been drying seeds from the wild flowers and put them in empty pill bottles I have stashed down there for that purpose. I labeled the ironweed and the echinacea.

Eventually the rain let up and I scooted back to the house, stopping to close up the chickens for the night. It was so dark they were calmly roosting.

Tiger Kitten still comes in for the night. I feel bad for poor Phantom, the big old feral who has been coming to be fed. The storms have been so bad that he did not come to the house to eat last night. Today he darted to the house between storms and stood gazing pitifully through the sliding door. He ran when I slid the door open to put food in his dish. He always does, but tonight he was hungry enough that he stayed very close. I talked to him and he listened keeping steady eye contact. As soon as the door shut, he was on the porch gobbling supper. 

He is the one I worry about the most with the chickens. He is a hunter. I am pretty sure that he is the reason that Tiger sleeps in at night and Possum holes up in the greenhouse. (Phantom is too large to get access to bother her.) He is fierce. I think that the chickens are too large for him to mess with but I am not going to take a chance. 

Today I baked 4 loaves of zucchini bread and a pan of zucchini brownies.

Anonymous

 I have said it before: all people are entitled to their opinions, but when someone comes here to bemoan all politicians as corrupt but refuses to put their name to their comment, they will be deleted. 

He had a lot of emotion but stated no reasons for that emotion. He invoked the name of 'slick willy' but offered no explanation as to why he was focused on that presidency while overlooking current events. Decrying all politics as corrupt allows a person to avoid taking a stand. 

The comment was deleted. 

What is happening now cannot be normalized. It shouldn't be normalized. It is a time to speak up and to speak out. It is time to own your words. If you can't do this, then do not think your comments will join the words of those who do have that courage. 

Isn't it Moronic

I processed my first batch of tomatoes. Probably 3/4 of a bushel. I turned part of that into a nice pot of 'scratch' spaghetti sauce with my own fresh basil. Tim loves that. 

The rest of it just went into a pot and after cooking down, I used my immersion blender to give a quick whisk. Vòila! 12 pints of tomato sauce. 

Tim made a great discovery over the weekend. He stopped in at Albert-Down-The-Road's perpetual garage sale. There was a newish upright freezer for $150. We have a chest freezer that is probably 35 years old that runs perfectly, but it is inconvenient to dig through, and sometimes things get lost, requiring prolonged digging through frozen stuffs while standing on my head..

We will use the upright for meat storage and the chest for vegetables. In the great sorting, we think we have come up with the perfect organizational system: large Aldi shopping bags! We used crates but the plastic did not stand up to the cold. 

The most exciting thing? Today I am picking up six chickens.

I have a nice picture but blogger is not 'taking' it.

Finally.

Another point

This is something I noticed during yesterday's protest: people were not only tooting and giving us thumbs up, they were hanging out their car windows cheering for us. That has never happened before.

It is changing. 

I just feel like it is changing.

Points To Ponder