Sewing Stuff Sept 1-7

 

This is my total mess of a sewing area.  Or, at least, most of it is.  In the far back of the picture is more storage (mostly DD2's stuff she hasn't moved to her current residence or gotten rid of) than sewing area, but it's still kinda in my line of sight when I'm trying to sew.  I'm posting this picture from the very start of September, as I'm hoping to use National Sewing Month to get 15 (or more!) minutes in my sewing area every day of this month and will (hopefully) be able to take a picture of a much less cluttered, much more usable space on September 30th.

Let's see how I did the first seven days:

September 1, I repaired the Poetess's fly mask that is laying over the back of the chair at my sewing machine.  It had several tears in the ears that needed to be hand stitched closed.

Holes do not keep flies out of the Poetess's ears 

(which is the main reason I have her wear a mask.)

Fly-proof once more!

September 2, I sewed up the holes in the toes of a couple of DH's black dress socks.  That only took about five minutes, so I used the rest of my 15 to start putting some things away.  Like scrap flannel from the nightgowns I made K3 and Faline last December.  And knitting and sewing patterns that were also laying out from the same time frame.  I also put a bag of free yarn of several weights, but mostly worsted, that my Mom had given me last fall, into the bin I have for worsted weight yarn.

September 3, I cleaned off a corner of my cutting table and filed away more quilting/sewing patterns as well as threw away the little tags that had been on each square of a quilt block swap I'd participated in back in the early two-thousand-teens.  A couple of years ago I had sewn those blocks into a twin-sized quilt top, which still awaits sandwiching, pin basting, and quilting (all the components for this take up yet another spot on the cutting table 😒).  

Also included in this 15 minutes was sorting out the contents of a cardboard box of DH's grandma's quilting related things that Mother-in-Law had sent to me sometime during the overwhelming years of the mid-to-late twenty-teens.  Inside the box I found lots of fabric marking pencils and spools of thread, a leather thimble, some labels that proclaimed "Specially Made by Ethel" (huh?  Who was Ethel?  Grandma's name was not Ethel.  Nor was her middle name Ethel.), and best of all, a bunch of hexies in what looks to be 60's or early 70's fabrics!!

I've wanted to try sewing hexies into something for a long time.  Now that I know I have pre-cut ones ready for me, maybe I'll actually give it a whirl sometime in the not-too-many-years-distant future.

September 4, I used the sewing machine for the first time since early January!! I mended a seam on a (new, but washed) cloth diaper I had from a pack I bought several years ago to make baby burp cloths out of  (Faline, Buck, Sixlet, Lucky, Octavia) and hadn't used this one yet because one of the center seams on one side had come unstitched during the washing process.  Now it's fixed and ready to be used for a future baby's burp cloth when the time comes to make more!  

I also fixed an inch-long section of a waistline seam on a dress I'd made a long, long time ago that both DD1 and DD2 wore as little girls.  I recently pulled it out of a tote of special things I'd been saving, ran it through the washing machine to freshen it up, and am planning on passing it along to Faline now that she's about the same size.   With my remaining handful of minutes I did a little more cleaning up of the tables that hold my sewing machine, rotary cutting mat, rulers, templates, etc.  I'm getting the itch to work on a real project, not just mending (although there's more mending waiting. . . )

September 5, I didn't get to the sewing area until late in the day, after dark.  I did some more tidying, especially of small fabric scraps that went into a bin of really tiny saved stuff for paper piecing or string quilting.  In the process, I found the shoebox sized plastic container where I keep my leftover binding strips (mainly in case I need to repair binding on a grandkid quilt in the future).  Hooray!  I had binding strips from three baby quilts to add to it, and had been keeping my eye out for it all week when tidying up.

September 6, A little mending with the sewing machine, and more tidying.  Put away larger leftover fabric pieces that were stacked up, each color going into the appropriate bin (bins stashed under the tables).  Put away yet more sewing patterns that were also still out from Christmas sewing last year.

September 7, The sewing area is looking less like a mess compared to at the beginning of the month.  So much so that I can actually use a large portion of my 'cutting table', so I did.  I had found, in my tidying over the week, a fleece 'blanket' that DD2 had brought to me several years ago.  She had intended to make a tied fleece blanket, but when she started to tie it, several of the fringe pieces broke off.  Frustrated, she had given it to me, basically saying she couldn't make it work, and to do with it what I wished.  Well, at the time, I had a ton of stuff going on and so I folded up the two pieces of fleece, partially tied on one side, and set it aside.  Over time, it got moved here and there, and buried under stuff.  

Now that I had found it, I looked at it again, decided that for whatever reason the particular fleece fabric used just wasn't going to work for making a tied blanket where you cut fringes in the sides and then tie top and bottom together with the fringes.  Rather than getting hung up on the why it wasn't working for that/how to make it work, I decided I could make a tied blanket of a different type with it.  Both layers were still lined up with each other, so I laid them out on my now sorta usable cutting table, smoothed the layers, and pin basted them together.  My intention is to use embroidery floss at regular intervals sewn through both layers and then tied into knots as you would if you were tying a quilt rather than quilting it.  Once that's done I'll sew around all four edges and call it a finished and usable blanket.

The fleece blanket in question.

A Long Time Coming

 Lookee what I got!

I finally, after 23 years, have a bench in my mudroom that seats two adults (or four small grandchildren) for putting on and taking off footwear!  This is something I've been wanting, and from time to time keeping an eye out to purchase, for literally decades.

Initially, DH didn't want me to buy one because he was going to make one.  I honestly believe, in 2003, when we were finishing up the house at this little place here enough to get our occupancy permit, that he did have the best intentions on building a bench.  Temporarily, we had two plastic lawn chairs (you know, the white kind that was so popular in the early 2000s) there in the fall and winter.  

Maybe they were actually there longer, as I don't remember what came between them and the small, narrow, not very heavy duty, more decorative than useful, bench that I found at Goodwill around about 2006 or so and stuck in my mudroom.  Yeah, 2006 and DH hadn't had time yet to make me that bench he intended to make.

That little bench stayed in the mudroom until about 2016 when it started to pop apart in places because it really wasn't intended for large adult men to sit on.  I banged those joints back together and moved it to near my front door, where it stayed until around 2019 when I gave it to DD1 for her house.

Next in the mudroom were two 'extra' wooden dining chairs as we had bought six new ones for our dining room table because three of the original six had broken by that point.  It made sense to stick two in the mudroom for everyday use putting on and taking off your shoes, plus they'd be handy when we needed to seat extra people at the table.

At some point, one of the chairs started to deteriorate in strength, and we strapped a booster seat for a grandchild on it to ensure that someone lightweight used it for family meal gatherings.  Which left just one chair in the mudroom.

Yeah, post-2016, DH still had not gotten around to making that bench.  In his defense, from 2014 through Covid 2020 his work schedule was horrendous and I think in many ways both of us were just trying to keep up on the basics (him working 60 or more hours each week, plus work travel, and me trying to work plus do my chores plus take up the slack on the most important chores of his).  Nevertheless, time went by and no custom made by DH bench ever happened.

Fast forward to now.  I happened to be heading out in my trusty rusty Suburban to go run some errands (because one of the errands possibly entailed needing more trunk space than Sweet Madame Blue has) and saw, two miles down the road, a sign for a garage sale.  It happened to be at the house of someone I used to know pretty well; the mom of a friend and softball teammate of DD1 throughout high school. So I pulled in her driveway, partly to see what she was selling and partly just to say hi.

Long story short, after talking to her a bit and finding out how all three of her (now adult) kids were doing (as well as how many grandkids she has), I looked through her sale offerings and I saw this bench!

It's sturdy!  It's big enough for two adults!  It's solid wood!  And the price was very right.  So I told her I couldn't live without it, handed her some cash, put it into the back of the Suburban (yay, cargo space!) and brought it home.

It's going to live in my mudroom forever because this is what I've been wanting and waiting for.  (Unless, of course, in retirement, DH becomes a furniture maker, in which case I will gladly swap it out for a DH-made bench of similar size and styling.  Because now that I've acquired what I've waited 23 years for, an oak--or pine--plank on plank-width legs with no back [his original homemade mudroom bench idea] is not going to do.)

Books Read in 2026: August

Call It Horses by Jessie van Eerden . This one was listed in July, but I'd barely started it so didn't really have anything to say about it.  Now that I finished it, I wanted to give a quick review.  It was not at all what I expected from the blurb on the cover. And, (disappointingly to me) it doesn't have much to do with horses at all, they only come in at the very end of the book. It is not a light read, nor does it have a cute happy ending.  That doesn't mean it was a bad book, it just means its not one you want to pick up if you are currently weighed down by some heavy life circumstances. (Which I wasn't, so I read it, but if I were I don't think I would have had the mental bandwidth to finish the book.)

On to August's list!

Saturday the Rabbi Went Hungry by Harry Kemelman.  This is the second in the series, and I loved it just as much as I did the first.  I got ahold of it from the library via the state library interloan system, and was surprised by how old this particular copy was: 1966!  It actually had the old original due date slip taped on the page inside the back cover with due dates from the 60s and early 70s, then on the inside of the cover itself was a pocket with the due date card which had more stamps from the 70s, 80s, and early 90s. So I not only enjoyed the story itself, but also got great joy seeing a book older than myself still in circulating condition!  Really stood out as to the durability of books printed back then versus books made in this century.  On the other hand, it also made me realize that these stories have fallen out of fashion and tend to languish in library storage rooms these days rather than out on the shelves where browsing readers can see them.  Let's bring them back into popularity because this is a great series and I fully intend to read all of them.

The old blue cloth bound covers of the 60s.

Stitching that held the pages together (stitched, not glued!)

A Dark Path by Linda Castillo.  This is a now-in-print version of several short Kate Burkholder stories that were previously released on Kindle only.  Since I don't Kindle (or any other form of reading books on a screen instead of on paper) I was really happy to see that stories I knew about but wouldn't ever read if they were electronic-only were going to be compiled into an honest to goodness book.  And I wasn't disappointed, either!  Each story is stand alone and roughly 60 pages long.  Perfect for a time when you don't have hours available daily to devote to reading.  They are all well written, with no rushed or sloppy feeling to them.  Really makes me hungry for a whole novel; I hope the author has got a new full-length Kate Burkholder story in the works.

Nantucket Second Chances by Pamela Kelley.  This one was suggested to me by the library's automatic book picking system when I requested a different (not in print yet) novel recently.  Looking on Amazon for the blurb, it sounded like it could possibly be something I'd enjoy reading, so I put a hold on it. It was okay; although if I were to be brutally honest, I didn't like it.  I had a hard time getting into the characters, not just because they were so obviously from a different economic class than me, but also because many of them seemed to be shallow stereotypes.  Similarly, I felt that every drama point resolved too easily and quickly to be realistic.

Murder on the Links by Agatha Christie.  This is her third novel, and in my on-going personal project to read/re-read all of her mysteries (since I read the majority of what I could get my hands on of hers as a teenager, it's been a long time), it was next on my list.  It did not disappoint.  She most definitely was and still is, in my opinion, the queen of murder mysteries.

Oh No, Not Bots!

(I'll start with apologizing for potentially blurry pictures.  Not the best angle, lighting, etc for a cell phone camera when you are crouched next to a horse, leaning slightly into the underbelly danger zone and trying to be quick about it all the while hoping the horse doesn't move.)

Recently, there was an evening when I brought horses in from the pastures to put them in stalls for the night and feed them dinner, and I saw this on the inside of one of Poetess's front legs:

 

BOT EGGS!

Oh no, not bots!  I quickly checked her other legs, and yep, the other front leg had eggs attached to the hairs too.  Which meant, without a doubt, that the time of year the bot flies are out laying eggs had come.

What are bots and why does it matter if they put eggs on the horses' legs?  Bots are a fly that, as an adult, do not eat.  They only mate, lay eggs, and die.  It is the eggs that are the problem.

Eggs are laid on certain parts of the horses bodies, parts that the horse can reach with it's mouth--say, to rub an itch, or to smack at a different fly that is biting them.  When those eggs are rubbed by the horse's mouth, they come off and are ingested. Once ingested, they hatch, and the larvae dwell in the horse's digestive system as parasites.

As we all know, parasite = bad.

Which means that it is imperative to removed those eggs as soon as I discover them.  The less chance of the horse ingesting them the better.

So, I dug around in the tack room and pulled out my trusty pumice-like bot block.  A bot block is used, with some pressure, in the direction of the hair growth to scrape off those bot eggs.

Bot block employed.

If the horse stands still, and standing still no matter what I'm doing to them is an important skill I teach my horses, it really only takes a couple of minutes to remove those pesky bot eggs.

Leg free of bots once more.

PHEW! Potential crisis averted.  (Crisis being intestinal worms to get rid of, which are much harder to reach than eggs on legs.)

I checked each horse, and did need to do some scraping with the bot block on the other horses too, some as much as Poetess, some less.  A quick daily check has, so far, found no more eggs deposited.  Thankfully this 'season' (botflies) is typically only a few weeks, which means I only have to be diligent in checking for eggs for a little longer.

Did You Know?

 Did you know that September is National Sewing Month (in the US), and has been so since 1982?  I sure didn't!  I only learned of this (or maybe paid attention to the mention of it) today while reading the comment section of a quilting related blog.

I'm not typically a person who hears of an activity and says "Yep, that's for me, I'm doing it!" Usually I need to think on things a good long while and examine them from all sides, determine their worth and feasibility to my life, and then, maybe, I will take part months or years later.

But you know what?  I haven't sewn anything since the very beginning of this year, and for the past two months I've really been having an increasing urge to get back to the sewing machine.

The bowl cozy I sewed in early January.

An urge that I have mostly ignored because my sewing area is buried in lots of not-sewing-related crap.  Plus, it's summer, and there's so much to do outside that I haven't even been able to sort of keep up on.  So how could I possibly rationalize taking time from outdoor tasks and doing some sewing?

Last month I thought I might possibly be able to excuse taking time to sew by saying I was getting a jump on Christmas presents, as both Lucky and Octavia are slated to receive reading pillows this year. I all ready have the pillow forms and I all ready have the fabric.

But still, I couldn't quite bring myself to take the time to clear all the stuff off my sewing area in order to be able to even pull out and cut fabric for those pillows.  So I didn't.

But now!  Now it's National Sewing Month!  And, as that comment I read on that other blog said, devoting just 15 minutes a day to being in the sewing room, whether that was in the form of cleaning, organizing, planning a project, pulling fabric, cutting fabric or actually sewing was not a selfish or unreasonable goal.  It's even something I could do in the evening, when I'm done with outdoor stuff.  I mean, the sun does go down before 8:30 p.m. these days.

OK.  Sign me up.  Yep, that's for me, I'm doing it!

I Canned Them 'Maters

 Last week, I canned the half-bushel of tomatoes that DH had brought home from his run up north with the borrowed truck.  Did I have room in my schedule to can tomatoes?  No, not really.  But here they were, and they only stay good for so long.

So, after getting two horses worked one morning, I spent the next roughly six hours canning tomatoes all by my lonesome (DH was working in-office that day).  Would it have gone faster if I had had a helper?  Not that much.  Most of the time factor was because each canner load takes 40 (pints) to 45 (quarts) minutes to process after the canner comes to a rolling boil.  With 6 quarts and 14 pints to put up, that meant three canner loads.*

Why did I not do all the tomatoes in quart jars and cut down to two loads instead of three?  Because, with just DH and I here, there's only a few recipes I make that require an entire quart of tomatoes anymore. I would rather take an extra hour-ish to do a second canner load of pints than, throughout the coming year, have multiple times where I have a half-jar of tomatoes that is opened and needs to be incorporated into a meal in the next few days before it goes bad.  

Invested time now saves me from potentially wasting time and food later if I have opened jars of tomatoes that don't get eaten soon enough and have to be thrown out. That would waste the time I spent now canning them, plus half a jar of tomatoes.  Hence many more pints than quarts got canned.

*The rack in my canner can easily fit seven pint jars at a time.  Quart jars, sort of, if they are the narrower kind and not the fat-round type.

Haulin'

After DH picked up his newly assigned small SUV, he immediately put in a request to 'borrow' one of the fleet trucks because, as he stated on his request form he had "all ready made several plans requiring a truck (his previously assigned vehicle) for the coming week."  Thankfully, that request was granted and, while he wasn't 'given' the EV truck back, he did get to 'borrow' a one ton diesel pickup for a week.

We decided that we had to make the most of having a truck during that time period, even if it wasn't exactly all things we'd planned to do right then (if it needed doing in the next 1-3 weeks, we rewrote the schedule to be NOW).

So, on the first day he had the truck, after work DH hauled: 

• a free treadmill he had found on Craigslist over the weekend,
• a load of free oak firewood.

On the second day he hauled home another load of that free oak.

On the third day he hauled, you guessed it, a third load of that firewood.

On the fourth day, he got up early, got his work computer crunching some numbers and running a data analysis (so he was 'working') then headed up to his Mom's house (which is a 3 hour drive), where (after calling in to a work meeting and setting the computer to running another analysis) he loaded up and brought home:

• about 4 dozen 1" x 6" x 8' roughsawn pine boards
• four 1" x 12" x 8' roughsawn pine planks
• about eight 2" x 4" x 8' roughsawn pine boards
• two of our kayaks he'd left up there earlier in the summer (the ill-fated trip that resulted in a totaled blue truck)
• several milk crates holding boxes of cereal, bags of mini-muffins, a few jars of pickles, a jar of peanut butter, a box of elbow macaroni, 2 jugs of tomato juice, 3 cinnamon bundt cakes, 6 ears of corn and a giant head of cabbage that were leftover from the weekly food pantry delivery that his Mom helps distribute locally.  All of which she wanted DH to pass along to our kids and their families rather than throwing it out.
• a half-bushel of canning tomatoes he picked up from a fruit market on his way home.

On the fifth day he had the truck, he hauled a hay wagon with 68 bales of hay on it that I'd purchased from a local farmer.  After we unloaded the hay into the loft of my barn, he hauled the hay wagon back to its home a mile or so away.

On the sixth day (which was Saturday) he had the truck, he hauled three trailerloads and four truckbeds-ful of more free oak firewood.  

On the seventh day he had the truck, he hauled: 

• another free treadmill (I'm thinking there's going to be a treadmill post appearing on this blog in the next few weeks)
• a pallet of horse bedding
• lumber for the final tack room project (a shelf on each of the two 16' long walls, at about 7' high, for storing the horse-related stuff that is seasonal in nature, or just plain extra. )
• Our mower, back to DD1's house to mow their lawn because their mower died again (mower issue previously mentioned here). . . 

Phew!  It was a busy week. And rereading what I just wrote, it brings to mind The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle.  Except nobody turned into a beautiful butterfly at the end.  They were just very, very tired.  And a little bit sore.  And had a bunch of stuff to put away, redistribute, can, cut/split/stack, and build.  Plus, DH had to give back the nice hefty truck and drive the smallish SUV again.

Wouldn't Ya Know. . .

 I told you about getting my Suburban back road-worthy again so that I could haul horse and chicken feed and things like that without having to arrange for DH to take me in his company-issued truck since the blue truck got totaled and I no longer had a truck to drive.  We figured that was a good solution, as I could do most of the farm related truck-type tasks in the Suburban just as I had for years before we bought the blue truck.  And any large/heavy hauling we needed to do we could use DH's work truck for--the Suburban, being rather elderly and having lived most of it's 21 years outside, was retired from trailer towing a few years ago after we were advised by the local auto mechanic that it wasn't a good idea to pull weight attached to the Suburban's rusty frame anymore. I believe the descriptive phrase he used was "Swiss cheese".

We thought we had it all figured out: Suburban to do the light trucky tasks, and the EV truck DH had been assigned to drive as his work issued vehicle for the heavier stuff.  We could get along without the blue truck just fine, and didn't need to rush into purchasing a replacement (that will be a subject of a future post, give me a few months and perhaps I'll get it written).

And then, wouldn't ya know, the day after we picked the Suburban up from the shop where it had gotten it's brake issues repaired, DH got an email from the company vehicle department at work.  It was time to turn the EV truck in and get his next assigned vehicle.

Which isn't an unusual thing.  In the past four years, since DH got the promotion that qualified him to get a company assigned vehicle for personal use, he has had each one for six to nine or ten months and then they call that vehicle back (where it gets sold as company used) and issue him a brand new one.  The EV truck came to him late last fall, so really, we were kind of expecting it to get called back soon.

What we hadn't expected, was the new vehicle to be what it is.  DH has been assigned one car, two medium-largish SUVs, and two trucks of varying size so far.  We figured he would get something in that category again: something we could haul stuff and tow a trailer with.

Uh, yeah.  This time, not so much.  He got another SUV, but this one is the smallest one yet (not counting the car, as you can't really tow anything with a car).  Ironically it is the same model of SUV that both Honorary Son and DD2 have as their daily drivers.  Works great for them who don't live on farms or haul anything other than passengers, groceries, and occasionally a small piece of furniture.  Will not work well at all for hauling anything big/heavy and shape-shifting like 50 pound grain bags--I know this because I have tried and the cargo space is so small you have to load the bags facing one particular direction and stack them because you can't fit two side by side. Grain bags don't necessarily stack well; they have a tendency to slide on each other and also come flopping out at you as soon as the rear (cargo) door is lifted. This size SUV also doesn't have the guts (or the labeling) to haul our 16 foot trailer with anything on it--like, say a pallet of baled horse bedding, or even two dozen bales of horse bedding. . .  We know this, because we've known this make of vehicle for the past seven years.

Well, poop.  Guess we aren't getting along without a real truck afterall.  Although, on occassion, it is possible for DH to borrow a truck from the fleet at work, provided they aren't all busy/assigned elsewhere on the dates he wishes to borrow one.  Which is how he was able to haul home all that free oak last week.  He requested to borrow a pickup for a week.  And we hauled all kinds of stuff with it.  Which made for a busy week indeed.

Free Oak Firewood? Yes, Please!

 Last week was a busy week in many ways.  One of which was DH hauling a truckload of aged oak firewood home after work three days out of five.  Those three days were his scheduled in-office days, and this free firewood just happened to be less than five miles from where DH reports to work.  A good friend of his who lives nearby alerted him about a neighbor who'd had multiple large oak trees cut down about three years ago and recently had come to the conclusion that he (neighbor) wasn't going to use that wood after all.  Now he just wanted it gone.

Now, oak has high BTU value, which makes it very desirable for using to heat our home in the winter.  As an efficient burning wood, it also has a high price if you were to need to buy it.  So of course free oak is something worth our while to go get if it's a reasonable distance away, or, in this case, pretty much on DH's way home from work.

In addition to those three truck-beds-ful, he also spent about 12 hours on Saturday running back and forth with our 16 foot trailer getting the longer and/or larger diameter stuff that wouldn't fit into the bed of the truck.  Unfortunately Saturday was a day of off and on deluge rain and thunderstorms, which meant sometimes he had to stop loading and take shelter for half an hour or so waiting for the rain to pass before continuing to load wood.

Still, he managed to bring home three trailers full plus fill the truck bed each time.  His friend came along to help unload at this little place here, and so when DH took the friend back home shortly before dark they unhooked and left the trailer here and just filled the truck bed for a fourth load.

That's a lotta wood.  The photo above is just the three trailer's worth and two truck-beds-ful.  It doesn't show the truckloads from earlier in the week (or later on Saturday) that were unloaded into a different spot closer to where we stack our split wood for the winter.

The picture below shows the truck loads from earlier in the week.  That was smaller stuff that mostly won't need to be split, just stacked.  Or maybe cut into the correct length and then stacked, as some are branches as thick as your arm but six or eight foot long.

DH estimates it should be almost the entire winter's worth.  We'll see. . . once it's split and stacked and we can see how many rows we get on the base made of pallets he and Toad prepped the weekend before, we'll have a better idea of how many heating months of wood he just got for the cost of fuel in the truck and his time.

Not Cheeseballs: A Grandkid Tale

 See these?  These, despite the orange coloring on the package, and being snack-sized bags, are not cheeseballs.

Apparently, to a five year old, who is on a long car ride with her Papa and Amma and eldest girl cousin, on a quick glance, they give off the impression that they contain cheeseballs.

This is a story from our family vacation to Myrtle Beach last month.  K3 and Faline rode with DH and I to South Carolina.  DD1 had packed a bag of 'road snacks' for the girls, all being things that she had recently gotten from her community's weekly free food giveaway for famlies with small children (these sorts of things have popped up during the summers in many communities around us since covid, no income limits on who can get them). You cannot pick through what is offered each week, you are simply handed a bag for each child that you have.  This week snack-type items the bag contained were apples, small packages of baby carrots, little bags holding 5-6 grape tomatoes each, cheese and prezel dippers (like you'd put in your kid's lunch box), and these bright orange and white crinkly bags of small crispy feeling snacks.

Faline was super excited about this bag of (to her) mystery goodies that DD1 had sent with her with the instructions that she (Faline) couldn't eat any of the items until Papa or Amma said that it was snack time.  So excited that we were only about five miles down the road from this little place here, and thirty minutes since breakfast, when Faline started asking if she could have a snack. 

About two hours into our long drive the first day of vacation, DH and I finally told her she could choose one snack from the bag. Faline handed me one of these packages and asked if I could open it for her.  She called it cheeseballs, and I didn't read the package at all, just opened the top and handed it back to her.

Shortly after, from the backseat, DH and I heard this exclamation:

"THESE ARE NOT CHEESEBALLS!!!" said emphatically with great disgust. 

Followed by "How could Mom do this to me?!?"

Which, coming from a five year old. this statement of seeming betrayal was incredibly hilarious.  

And, when Faline handed me back the package that I'd opened for her, I could see why she was shocked and felt betrayed.  The bag did not contain cheeseballs.  It held buffalo-flavored fava bean crisps. BLECH!  Yeah, if I'd been expecting cheeseballs and popped one of these spicy crispy beans into my mouth, I'd be sorely disappointed too.  Especially if I was a kid who couldn't read the package and was going only by the coloring and the cartoony figure on it..

I confess that out of curiousity, I did pop one into my mouth.  Uh, that's a big NO from me too.  Not the bean part necessarily, but the strong buffalo flavoring on it.  I'm not a fan of buffalo chicken or anything else buffalo, apparently including fava beans.  Cheeseballs would have been a thousand times tastier.

Make My Horse Life Easier Tip #11

Clamps!  Also known as grip clips, depending on the brand.

I love these things.  These are the kind that screw into the wall and grip the handles of things, thus holding them in place so they don't fall over.  I have them in my garage (broom, rake, spade), in my mudroom closet (broom, mop, etc), and in my barn (manure forks, brooms, etc.).  It's the barn application that I'm going to talk about here.

I could, and did for more than a year, just lean my barn cleaning tools against the wall.  That costs zero money to do and keeps things relatively orderly and upright.

Relatively.  

Which, over time, was not satisfying enough in the neatness or efficiency departments for me.  So in 2025 I took the clamps I had on hand that I'd originally bought for using in my garden shed (and hadn't yet because that project is still unfinishined, DH having lost interest and forgotten about completeing the little details once the walls, roof and doors were assembled together) and installed them in the barn.

I did use two different sizes, the large and medium, if I remember right, depending on how thick of a handle particular things had.

manure forks (and in the bottom right you can see the head of the extension duster)

the old broom I use for 'sweeping' up the saturated bedding in the pee spot(s) in stalls

There are still a few things, like the scoop shovel I use for wet bedding, and as a dust pan when sweeping the aisle, that get propped against the wall because their handles are super thick and I don't have a big enough clamp, but most items are hung and held in place with the clamps.

So now instead of everything being two or three tools deep and having to daily shuffle things to get to other things, and quite often having something get knocked over or tripped on, I have neatness and ease:

ah, tools neatly hung

It's so much more efficient, and satisfying, to have all the handles in a single layer and be able to quickly grab just the tool I want rather than shuffling through them all leaned against the wall .  These clips/clamps are another example of those little things that don't cost much at all but make life so much better.

I Know That My Suburban Lives

 Apologies to anyone familiar with the great hymn I Know That My Redeemer Lives who might see me as being flippant and irreverent.  That is not at all my intent here.  I love that hymn, which is why the title above, in my head, becomes a song sung to that tune.

I know that my Suburban lives!

What comfort this sweet sentence gives.

She lives, who once was given up for dead;

she lives and I'll drive her instead!

Allow me an explanation.  This is our 2005 Suburban that was my vehicle for nearly 20 years.  She's rusty.  She's got over 302,000 miles on her (original!!) engine and transmission.  

When we ordered Sweet Madame Blue in 2023, the Suburban went from my daily driver to my winter beater.  And then, in May 2025, her brakes started grinding, and DH didn't have time to replace them.  So she sat for a few months.  Then he decided that maybe he'd take her to the local auto repair shop and have them replace the brakes instead of doing it himself.  But it wasn't a priority, so she sat for another few months.  Then it was time for Sweet Madame Blue to go into hibernation in the garage for the winter, and, rather than do anything about getting those brakes fixed so I could drive the Suburban all winter, he decided it was just easier if I used the blue truck as my winter ride.

At one point, January, I think, he decided that rather than fix those brakes on the Suburban, he would just put her up for sale, as is.  We'd gotten a good twenty years out of her.  She's been from one coast to the other with us: Michigan to Florida, Michigan to South Carolina (multiple times), Michigan to Oregon. Multiple other states, even a few locations in Canada. She'd been through four teenage drivers and a (male) driver (and his buddies) who didn't always make the best decisions, and she had all the dents to show for it.  But yet, every time I (or anyone else) turned the key, she fired right up.  She wasn't ready for the scrap yard yet.  She just needed someone willing to replace the little things as they continued to get worn out over the miles and years. (Which, given recent history, was no longer DH.)

So, she sat at the end of our driveway, a for sale sign in her window, all winter and most of the spring.  Finding out that Craigslist now charges for automobile for sale ads, DH declined to list her online with them.  And, since he doesn't do Facebook, he declined to list her there either.  We're out in the country on a side road; we don't get much traffic other than tractors and our other rural neighbors (who mostly all have four-wheel drive vehicles of their own already).  Which means there wasn't much awareness of or inquiries into our Suburban.  One guy (a rural neighbor) wanted to know if we'd trade her for a dump truck load of gravel (uh, no.  Not unless that guy wanted to also give us some cash with that gravel, which he didn't).  But other than that, no interest at all.  So DH finally brought her back up to the house and parked her in our parking area.

And then, in June, he and the blue truck had an intimate encounter with a deer.  If you've been reading my blog this summer, you know how that turned out.  So, once we'd made our final decision on what to do with the totaled blue truck (you can read that here), I looked at DH and said:

"Why don't we take the Suburban in to get her brakes fixed, and she can be my winter beater again this year and I can also use her this summer and fall for hauling things like bags of grain that I used to get in the blue truck?  That way I don't have to arrange for you to go after work (and before the feed store closes) to get that sort of stuff  with me with your company truck."

Wonder of wonders, he agreed with me.  Probably because for over a month he'd found it rather inconvenient to haul farm related things for me.  A week later (because, if you know my DH, he only moves quickly on his own whims), we dropped her off at the local auto repair shop that we've used for more than a decade for things DH doesn't have the time (or tools in some cases) to fix himself.

And now, she's back on the road again!  I don't feel quite so helpless in terms of hauling things, I don't have to make arrangements with DH to go with me buy 50 pound bags of animal feed.  Because, honestly, that was really cramping my style, not to mention fuc messing up my horse training/barn work schedule.

I know that my Suburban lives! 

What comfort this sweet sentence gives.

She lives, who once was given up for dead;

she lives and I'll drive her instead!

Jedi's Progress

Jedi has been here for just over four months.  I am very pleased with his progress since he arrived in mid-April.  When he came, he was skinnier than I had expected (hadn't laid eyes on him in a couple of weeks since K3 and I had gone out for a test ride on him).  He was also way jumpier, tense almost all the time when being handled and didn't seem to know how to cross-tie.

April, a quick picture in a brief moment of stillness in the cross ties 

(at that time he would stand still for up to a minute, as long as there were other horses in the barn with him.)

I'm very happy with his weight gain, he's starting to look round now, and his spine no longer is a ridge that runs down his back.

nice 'flat' spine, not a ridge of bones

He also stands nicely in the cross ties most of the time, even without other horses in the barn with him.  I can trust him to stand quietly for a grandkid to groom him and not knock them over with a sudden jump sideways or forward, and he doesn't ever pull back on the ties.

Early August, he now stands calmly all by himself (no other horses in the barn) most of the time.

Also note how more filled out his body is compared to the April picture.

 He trusts us (me, DH, K3, and lately Faline has started handling him) now and isn't tense around us.  He does still have moments of forgetting to respect personal space--usually when being led out to the pasture--but even those are becoming fewer and farther between.

K3 and I have taught him to longe calmly rather than race around us in frantic circles.  He is learning to take polite contact with the longe line, and also to stay out on the end of it for his circle rather than crowding us or trying to cut through the center with a hugely drooping line that he could get his feet tangled in.

He stands quietly at the mounting block for kids to get on, and Faline to get off.  He still fidgets when I go to mount him, but not as badly.  We're still overcoming old habits and his prior (lack of??) training.

a business-like walk

K3 rides him around at walk and trot, his steering has improved and he hasn't walked (or trotted) through her reins in a while.  His trot, which was so tense and very sewing-machine-like (legs going straight up and down), is becoming more relaxed and longer strides forward with his legs.

K3 riding a long trot stride!

He has improved so much, in fact, that earlier this month I decided he was probably safe enough (trustworthy enough) to try putting Faline on.

Faline, posing for a picture pre-ride.

With me leading him, and DD1 walking on his right side as a spotter, Faline has ridden him twice now, about 10 minutes each time, at a walk.  She's never been on a horse before, so she's a little intimidated by his size and the newness of sitting up on a living thing that moves on its own.  Both rides have been very successful in terms of her enjoyment, and his good behavior.

We are on the right track, for sure.  I believe he will be (probably next year, since I don't see any of the grandkids riding much in the cold weather) a good horse that they all can ride and be safe on.  Which was the whole point of buying him.

Bye-Bye, Blue Truck

 Well, we finally got everything all sorted out with what to do with the Blue Truck after DH hit a deer with it back in late June.  Insurance claim, repair estimates, the insurance company declaring it totaled, do we want to salvage it (buy it back from the insurance company and take market value untotaled minus market value totaled as our settlement), let the insurance company have it (and get a settlement for entire pretotaled market value), if we salvage it do we want to repair it ourselves or pay a body shop to repair it or just sell it as-is to someone else (theoretically getting the same dollar figure overall as if we had let the insurance company have it). . .

There were a lot of scenarios to run through in making our decision.  That took several weeks, especially as we had our family vacation to Myrtle Beach not too many weeks after the deer hit took place.  There was just a ton going on during that time frame and trying to figure out each what if for the Blue Truck's future couldn't always be the front and center thing of conversation between DH and I.  So the calendar turned to August before we finally made our decision and wrapped everything up with the insurance company.

We salvaged the truck.  We did not let the insurance company have it.

DH talked to a few family members in regards to their interest in the truck as is; each of them had expressed, in the past, an interest in purchasing it if we should ever sell it.  Would any of them be interested in it now, knowing what repairs it needed?

Yes.  One of them would.  They didn't care about the cosmetics of the dented pieces that still work perfectly fine.  With no mechanical damage, the truck still operates exactly as a truck should.  They knew someone who, for their labor, would do the repairs on the safety features if the family member bought (new or from a salvage yard) the parts.

But did we really want to sell it?  Or did we want to see what a dealer (probably the one whose collision center had done the repair estimate for the insurance claim) would give us for it as a trade in if we ordered a brand new truck?  Afterall, DH has been rolling around the idea of a new truck, perhaps a three-quarter ton, for a few years now.  Plus, in the Spring, it will be four years since we bought Sweet Madame Blue, and part of DH's 'level' with his employer (and the accompanying company vehicle) requires us to purchase a new (of that brand) vehicle every four years. . . 

After many hours of soul searching (mostly on DH's part, as my opinion could only be given so many times without it starting to feel like a character attack), it was decided that we would not repair the truck ourselves.  Because a) DH really doesn't have the desire to do that stuff--work on auto repairs--anymore, b) lacking desire it would be something to easily put off for months and months and (you get the picture), c) I absolutely refuse to drive it lacking some necessary saftey features--part of the repairs that would be a pain in the ass to do and likely be put off (such as replacing the seat belts).

We decided not to pay a collision center/body shop to do the repairs because other than the seat belts and side airbags, they are easy enough for a person with desire and a little knowledge to do themselves.

We decided to sell the truck, in it's current condition, to the family member who wanted it for the same price as the insurance had deducted as it's crashed value in our insurance claim.  Late last week, DH delivered it to them.

So, bye-bye Blue Truck.  Thank you for your service.  Sorry you met that deer in late June, sorry that we won't be owning you anymore.  Hopefully family member does right by you and appreciates the work you will do for them.

Blue Truck, when it was new

Anansi

In late July, I stopped in my local library to return the book I had taken on vacation with me, and while I was there I saw a tray with about six tiny cups holding baby spider plants.  I also noticed that the library--which is very tiny as libraries go--had been somewhat rearranged in the about three weeks it had been since I was last there.  There was now a big spider plant in a pot in the front window behind the checkout desk, and, I suspected, that big spider plant was the source of the little 'potted' babies.

The tray had a sign that said "Free", and each little spider plant had a popsicle stick in it with a small envelope hanging from the stick that said "Adopt a baby spider plant".  Inside the envelope was a small booklet on baby spider plant care.

Each little (paper, looks like a ketchup cup from Burger King) pot had a small, infant sized wrist band taped around it, and each of those bands sported a name.  Every name was a character in a book, and while I didn't recognize all of them, I suspect they had something spider-related in common.

When I read this one, Anansi, I knew that I would be taking a baby spider plant home with me.  Because Anansi is not only a character in a book, but it is also a song by Raffi.  When my kids were little, we listened to a lot of Raffi. We had many Raffi cds. The lyrics to Anansi immediately popped into my head:

Anansi, he is a spider,

Anansi, he is a man.

Anasi, he is a lazy one,

Do as little as he can. . .

The song goes on of course, look it up if you don't know it (beware, it will stick in your head!).

Yep, that little plant, that Anansi, was definitely waiting for me to show up and claim it.  So I did.  He went home with me, cherished like an unexpected prize.

Once home, I opened the envelope and found the care booklet. Also inside the little envelope, was a teeny tiny certificate of adoption with the plant's name on it and other parts to be filled in by the adopter.  The envelope, booklet and adoption certificate are all very cute and remind me of the little things inside the pages of the Jolly Postman books.  Whomever at the library came up with this idea for rehoming their (unwanted--not enough room) baby spider plants did a brilliant job.

This little Anansi has gotten a new, bigger, more durable pot.  And a place with indirect light.  I had been wanting a spider plant for a while, it's been many years since my last one died (cats?  young children?), and now I have a new baby one to enjoy.

Games Horse People Play

 There are many 'games' that people who spend copious amounts of time around horses are familiar with.  Probably the most well known is "Catch Me If You Can" (which sometimes is also called "Tag, You're It"), where the horse person goes out into the pasture to catch the horse and bring them in (usually to ride, sometimes for the farrier or the vet), and the horse, spying the person from across the pasture comes part of the way to the person, then spins and runs off in the opposite direction.  If the person gives chase, following the horse, this can go on for a long time. That one is one of my most hated games, and I refuse to play it unless absolutely necessary (there are ways to train this out of a horse, but you must be diligent in the process).

There's also "Find the Shoe", in which the horse loses one of their shoes, either by getting it sucked off in mucky spring mud, or steps on the heel of it with the toe of a rear foot while running and wrenching it loose (in which instance it may go briefly airborne).  Either way, there's a metal shoe out in the pasture somewhere, and the person is tasked with finding it.  Over the years, and working and multiple farms with shod horses, I've gotten to what is probably expert level in that game.  It's time consuming, but I can succeed.

Another is "Where's My Halter?",  where the horse, turned out with a halter on either rubs it off on something (their leg, a tree, the water trough, a fence post, the edge of a run-in shed or other building) or entices their pasturemate(s) to play Bitey-Face and pull the halter off for them.  Then the horse person must search the pasture to find the halter so they can put it back on and lead the horse from the pasture back to the barn or whereever else the person had it in mind to take the horse.  I also avoid this one by not leaving halters on during turnout (a few exceptions being if the horse is new and unfamiliar with the barn routine or hard to catch [see "Catch Me If You Can"]).

The latest one I have had the dubious honor of playing (thanks, Tubbs) is "Fly Mask, Or Pile of Horse Poop?"  Tubbs always wears a fly mask over his face when he goes outside, even in the cold weather when there are no flies.  This is because he once had a cancerous tumor on the lower lid of his right eye, which, during treatment of said tumor, left him with light sensitivity and decreased vision in that eye as well as missing a small chunk of eyelid.  So he wears his mask as both protection from bugs and other things that might get into that eye and as sunglasses against the UV rays.

Tubbs, however, would prefer not to wear a mask.  He likes to try to rub his off.  He also has a tendencey to shred them.  A couple of weeks ago, his owner brought him out a brand new mask to replace the one he wore into dilapidation.  The 'old' mask was a light grey color.  The new mask is a stylish black (he's a black horse, so this one, at a glance, blends right into his head).  Unfortunately the mask not only matches the color of his hair, it matches the color of every manure pile in his pasture.

So, one recent evening, when I went to bring the horses into their stalls for dinner, I found Tubbs mask-less.  Which meant, ready or not, I got to play "Fly Mask, Or Pile of Horse Poop?" and try to find his mask in the expanse of pasture.

In the three pictures above, can you tell which black splotch is a pile of poop and which is the fly mask?

If you said the fly mask is in the third picture, you'd be correct.  But without getting up close, it's hard to tell which is which.  Definitely not a fun game when you are searching an acre of pasture.  Then again, none of these games horses like to volunteer their people to play are very fun.  Just another reason horse people are crazy.

A Drive Down Memory Lane

 Or, actually, down Queens Lane, which is the name of the road my paternal grandparents lived on for about 10 years after my grandmother retired from her factory job (Grandpa was 11 years older than her an had been retired for a while) and they moved from Michigan to Southeastern Ohio to be nearer to her family (she was born in eastern Kentucky and had several siblings still living in Kentucky at the time).  For several summers, my brother and I would go spend a week with Grandpa and Grandma at their 'farm', which was two acres on a hill side next to a small dairy farm, and they grew a huge garden.  Our visits always happened to coincide with the peak of green bean harvesting and canning.

But it's been over 35 years since I was last there.  When they moved, and sold it, in early 1992 to be nearer my Uncle in the Akron area because Grandpa had quite bad Alzheimer's by then, and Grandma had never learned to drive a car, I was living in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan with DH as he was working on finishing his engineering degree.  

On our way home from the Myrtle Beach vacation in July, our route took us not terribly far from the little town they had lived outside of.  DH asked if I wanted to detour and drive past their old place, and I said sure!  He had never been there, only heard stories from me about it. That was the piece of land that inspired so much of my desire for my own plot of land in the country with a big garden, and I had so many fun memories of the place that how could I pass up this chance to revisit it?

I knew that their old single-wide house trailer was long gone from the property. The people they had sold the land to had built their own home on it.  But I thought I would recognize the land, the big red pole barn.  And surely the neighboring dairy farm would be a dead giveaway.  Or the small house and metal sided shed that belonged to the neighbor on the other side of Grandpa and Grandma's place.

Nope.  Nope.  And nope again.  Instead of having been built up in the last 34 years (35 since my last visit), the whole area seems to have become grown over and more wild.  Even the narrow road, always about one and a half car widths, had become less civilized.  More of a two-track in some sections than an actual county-maintained road.  The old houses I remembered?  Most of them gone. The chicken man's shack of a house, I couldn't even tell you where it had been. The dairy farm?  Not a building left!!  The big red pole barn at Grandpa and Grandma's?  Also gone. The other neighbor's house and shed?  You guessed it, gone.

The only way I even recognized the place was as we came around a curve in the road, and it began to rise to a hill up ahead.  My whole body strained forward, towards that hill.  My body knew that hill even though absolutely nothing else was how I'd remembered it.  As we crested the hill, my head turned left and I saw an unfamiliar house with unfamiliar small outbuildings, and I knew, I just knew sure as the sun rises in the east that once upon a time, I had swung on a stick tied to a piece of rope tied to the sturdy branch of a tree that grew atop the embankment edging the road.  Right there.  In the early 1980s, a 9 or 10 or 11 year old me had swung out over that exact spot in the road.  And somewhere hidden behind the house that now stood on the hill, my Grandma had been inside the house trailer pressure canning beans, and Grandpa had sat in the shade of an apple tree that no longer existed.  And behind that house trailer, behind that apple tree, on the other side of a field fence that was long gone, in a pasture that now was full of brush and trees,  brown Guernseys once grazed, waiting for the farmer's son to drive around on his three-wheeler to round them up for milking.  Way down at the bottom on the hill, now all in brush, used to be the other neighbor's shed, that if I threw with all my might, I could lob an apple from that apple tree by the house trailer on top of the hill and just barely peg the shed with a satisfying pinging sound.

Everything was both familiar and totally unrecognizable at the same time.

For a good hour or more after that, as we drove, on the interstate again, DH and I talked about what that piece of land had been, who the people had been, how life had been.  It was a great way to pass the time on our long journey home to this little place here.  A place that in many ways, is now what that little two acres in rural Ohio had been then.

(Except I don't swing out over the road on a stick on a rope no more.  I also don't lob apples at other people's sheds.  I do pick and can green beans, and walk in fields, and hear the mooing of cows at my neighbor's dairy farm.  Unfortunately those cows don't graze in grassy pastures, they stand in free stall barns all day and have ground food brought to them by tractor loads.)