Home again, home again, clippety clop...

 Here's a shot from our family reunion.  We camped from Friday til Sunday and then everyone came together for the potluck doins' on Sunday noon. This is an annual event that I restarted when I was about 19 or 20...years after my grandmother had died and everything came to a grinding halt. The family quit getting together much and I decided that SOMEBODY needed to get something started again.  So, I invited them all out to my farm and we had a wonderful family day together. It has continued...even after I moved away and left the area for years. THAT is the power of family....

  Now, so many of the old ones are dead and gone...many of our parents and aunts and uncles.  More of us have moved away or stopped showing up, but we still have a prettty good crowd show up.  We had between 50 and 60 this year, and there were quite a few missing.

  I was watching all the little girls running around and playing on the swings and chasing bugs and was reminded of my own childhood, when all the cousins would come together and we would behave like wild Indians. I said to my cousin Penny--remember when that was us?? She shook her head no, and laughed.  I have 3 aunts left on my dad's side and they are getting older by the minute. The oldest one went through some serious trauma in the past couple of years and lost her daughter and her husband one right after the other. It has taken all the piss and vinegar out of her and now she is a confused old woman and it breaks my heart. She was always a rowdy and loud funny aunt. She seems to be gone....

   SO...it was a good weekend away, and a dear friend cared for our critters and all was well. The end of this month is Patrick's family reunion up in northern Wisconsin, and he will go, but I probably will not. Between $$ and animals and everything, it is rare that we can both go away at the same time. And that's really okay.

  It rained here Sunday morning after temps hovering near one hundred and the garden has gone bananas. I will go out later today and take some more pictures...it's fun to have the before and afters. lol  The tomatoes are loaded with blossoms and have shot up to about 3 feet tall. The beans and squash are thick and the potatoes...oh my gosh--the potatoes!!!  They have got to be strawed now, as they are huge.  I should be out there now thinning (which is the worst hardest thing for me to do!!) and weeding and putting some strings up for the peas to climb. But I am trying to recover from the weekend and catch up the laundry and clear up all the mess that comes with unloading the camping stuff.  There are ribs thawing in the microwave and I'll cook some corn on the cob and some taters and that will be supper.

  Everyone thinks I am either a genius or crazy for telling (and showing) them how to put Listerine in a spray bottle and use it to keep bugs away.  It really works--a friend told me about it, said she sprays it around her patio furniture on the deck and it keeps them away. I tried it and it really does work. I was running around spraying everybody yesterday.  The heat was crazy there, but we had the nice cool lake to play in and lots of shady trees to sit under and mostly this:  THERE WERE NO CICADAS!!!!!
 [Have I told you abou the 13 year cicada hatch that is going on?? It's like an Alfred Hitchcock movie out there. They are waning , or starting to, and the noise in the air is more like a loud hum than the screeching shrill chainsaw noise they were making trying to attract mates.]  It was an extra blessing to have no cicadas for the whole weekend.  lol

  Okay, I have lots to do before I head off to MissB's for the afternoon. I'm there from 3-8 and it's nearly 11 now. Oh, and 84 degrees, heading for 96. 

  Glad to be home in my own bed with my chooks and my critters around me. They were overjoyed to see us pull up in the drive last night. (That doesn't quite sound right. The chickens and critters are NOT in my bed). lol

  Have a great Monday all....drink lots of water and be kind.




Namaste.