The Mind, It Goes In All Directions

I have so many things I've been wanting to write blog posts about.  Yet, I just can't seem to stop all the thoughts, ideas, impressions, plans, etc from swirling in my mind long enough to write about a single topic, let alone many posts each on a single topic. To say there's a lot going on in my head doesn't even begin to describe it. . . Thank goodness for Yarn Along Wednesdays and Challenge Fridays, or I might never get anything new put on this blog!

Much going on recently at this little place here. Canning tomato juice now that I've gotten canned all the tomatoes and tomato sauce I want for the next twelve months.  We've had some cold nights lately, even into the upper thirties, so the end of the garden is not far off now.  I realized on Sunday (as I was making two gallons of tomato juice) that I have not yet made any tomato paste.  I still have a few small jars of paste left from 2013, so I think I will try to get my goal of tomato juice fulfilled first (oh, about 4 more gallons should be enough, I think), then make paste from whatever tomatoes are left between now and killing frost.  Tomato paste gets used in much more sparing quantities than juice.  DH would quite willingly drink a quart of tomato juice in one sitting if he thought I'd let him get away with it.

DH has been hauling in wood now that he got the wood-hauler trailer fixed.  That repair began as a simple changing out of tires on the trailer, but turned into several broken lug studs that had to be

• tapped out from the hub (they were quite old and rusted on)
• new ones in the correct size located and purchased (this took longer than anticipated)
• new lug studs installed in hub

And then, of course, he had to take the old tires and rims up to the local garage, along with some old truck tires we'd saved for this purpose, and have the old (very dry rotted and bald) trailer tires taken off the rims and the 'new' trailer tires (ie old truck tires, worn but not bald or rotten)  put on the rims.

And after that, he had to bring the 'new' tires on the rims back home and put them on the trailer.  

Start to finish, with work travel and personal travel and family reunion and many weeks of long hours at work that brought him home after dark (yes!!  in June and July!  After dark, which isn't until about 10 or 10:30 p.m. that time of year), and many rainy evenings and weekends when he wasn't away at work or traveling or hosting relatives, this task only took three months.   I kid you not.  We were going to start hauling firewood in from the stacks in the woods in late May.  The last weekend of August arrived, and we had not a single piece of wood brought anywhere close to the wood boiler.  Now, we figure October first as a realistic date of putting the wood boiler into use for the heating season each year. And, from October first until January first is deer season in one form or another (bow, firearm, muzzle loader, late doe) so we must have all our firewood for the season brought up from the woods before October first. Because during deer season you only go to the woods to hunt.

To say we have a ton of firewood to move in the month of September is a vast understatement. One (full) cord of wood can weigh about two tons, and we went through about ten cord last winter.  Yeah, we've got a lot of wood to haul in a short amount of time.

(I figured out how to 'edit' out faces in pictures to keep family anonymous on the blog!)

first of many loads

We have a couple of 'foster' kittens that arrived at this little place here yesterday.  They were brought to us by a friend of DD2's.  I'm not sure what their story is, exactly, but they were orphaned and appear to be about three weeks old (on the phone, I was told only about a week old). 

Somehow, I seem to have become the Orphan Kitten Lady; in other words, people took notice of the abandoned kitten I brought in and fed and cared for last fall until he was old enough to go to a new home.  Apparently now that means that I am the top of the list for who to call when you have a baby cat needing someone to care for it well enough to keep it alive.

*Sigh*.  So, now I have two adorable little fuzzballs on four legs living in my dining room and needing to be fed kitten milk replacer every few hours.

These two aren't the only temporary guests we'll be having this month.  That is a post I need to write solely by itself, and hopefully I will before this week is over.  We have also been busy preparing for our other 'guests' who will be arriving later in September.  The basement has been mostly cleaned out (these guests need more space than a box in the dining room!), and I finally talked DH into getting rid of some of the old and worn out furniture that has been in our basement taking up a lot of space but not getting much use for nearly a decade.