Two Weeks

2 weeks from today....

....I will be 23....


....and I will be on a plane...

on my way to this place...





....to spend some time with this person....




....eventually to head to this place.....


....to spend some time with this person....


I can't wait.

The Bull's Job

I have to agree with Pioneer Woman on this one.

The Bull on our farm has got it made and he knows it.
As a result, he is very hard to phase.
The rest of the cows stare at me with mixed fear and curiosity when I approach with my camera. But the bull doesn't even bother to look up.



He knows I won't mess with him.

I mean, who would. This guy is huge.
(he's the 3rd from the left - the slightly taller cow-but in the picture.)

He has football player neck syndrome.
(i.e. his neck is widnerthan his head)

He looks a bit like Ferdinand the Bull.
And like Ferdinand, he doesn't want to fight. He just wants to sit and smell the flowers (proverbially speaking)
He is huge, and I think for the remainder of his stay on our farm, I shall call him Ferdinand.


Side note - these pictures were taken before the 3mp vs 10mp discover of yesterday's post. So they are not living up to the max quality potential. Sorry. Decent pictures will start coming soon)



Read the Manual

As previously mentioned, Mon Amour and I have a very swanky camera. Not and SLR, but still, very cool! Lots of cool manual adjustments and such that eventually we will learn how to use.

Until such a time when we learn how to take advantage of the manual options, we have very much enjoyed the 20x optical zoom, and were pretty enthused about the impressive 10 megapixel capabilities.


Our enthusiasm was kind of smothered as we came to grips with the fact that our pictures were just not looking as high quality as would have thought. But, we thought, perhaps we just can't tell how amazing the quality of our pictures is. I mean, can we really see the difference between, say, 3 megapixels, and 10 megapixels?


Let me answer that question with some pictures.
In case it wasn't clear enough - the answer would be, yes. You can tell. Boy howdy can you tell.
(In case it still isn't clear, the top picture is the better one)
The embarrassing short(ish) version of the story goes something like this: Our camera CAN take 10megapixel pictures. However, it can also take 3, 4, 6 megapixel pictures. And somewhere along the line when Mon Amour were playing with some of the many buttons on the camera, without having read the manual or knowing what we were doing, set the camera to take 3 megapixel pictures. And apparently at that point, we became less intrigued with adjusting random things on the camera, and so there it stayed, at a pathetic 3 megapixels (it could be worse, the camera seems to have one megapixel setting worse than this - yikes!) until one day just a few weeks ago when I actually read the manual, and learned a bit about what we can adjust.
The moral of the story:
READ THE MANUAL!
Time to go take some decent pictures.....

Fields of Flowers

There are a few of these around our little farm house.

Grape Hyacinths, I think they are called.


The are mostly in the flower beds. But we do a have a few that have managed to escape into the yard. It is not really a problem so much as it is cute.


But this goes waaaay beyond cute, into the realm of down right lovely:

In the far field, there is a vast expanse of these flowers.
I drive past them on the way to and from work. But, of course, never have my camera with me and so I don't have any close up pictures of them. And it is a long walk to get all the way over there. I think about making the trek almost every day, but of course, lazy-ness takes over and I never make it that far.

To give you a sense of the distance - the picture above was taking using our camera's fabulous 20x optical zoom. Here is a picture from the same spot, without any zoom.
The flowers are back by that tree line.

Yay for a fabulous zoom capabilities and fields of flowers.


The Bonfire

Remember this cool pile of wood!


Well, yesterday was not too windy, and not too dry. The conditions required for a...






BONFIRE!
of incredible proportions!











Sadly, it was also the first weekend in a long time that Mon Amour and I were away from the farm all day long. So this is the not-so-exciting part of the bonfire that we saw:
Oh the irony.
We missed it.


As we were driving up to the farm, we saw smoke coming from the bonfire location. We both got a bit excited. Then, simultaneously, we noted the relative smallness of the pile of stuff that was burning. Yup, we concluded, we missed it.

Alas.

We have heard that they do a big fire like this once a year, and we should still be here this time next year. So, I guess we will try again in 2010.

I did get some kind of cool pictures of the smoldering remains though.








These pictures were probably taken around 6pm, there were still a few little flames here and there. At about 9:30 when I looked out the window into the darkness, you could still see a small red glow. It must have been a sweet fire.

Marge's Sense of Guilt

Yesterday, Marge was very naughty. She was getting into EVERYTHING!

Among the things that she destroyed was this thing:


Here green fluff stuffed dog-bed.

She loves her green fluff stuffed dog bed.

But she also loves to tear things apart with her teeth. So, at this moment in time, chewing was a higher priority than sleeping, so the ripped most of the stuffing out of her bed.

I, of course, fussed at her quite firmly so that she understood I was displeased (after I took a picture of course).

Then I picked up the pieces of her bed and put them somewhere where she couldn't get them.

Now she has no bed, and she wanted to go to sleep. She became all kinds of pathetic, whimpering about the lack of a place to sleep.

Now, if Marge was a reasoning being, she would be able to put 2 and 2 together and realize that it was her own fault that she had no more bed.

But she is NOT a reasoning creature, so she could not make that connection. Which means that we could either get her a new bed which she will eventually destroy. Or we could let her live with the consequences of her actions by not getting her another bed for a while. But, here again, she would learn nothing due to her inability to make such moral connections.

I am looking forward to one day parenting a creature (aka a child) who will at least grow into the ability to understand "consequences". That will be nice.


Baby Bunnies

There are baby bunnies living under our house. I haven't seen more than one at a time yet, but do baby bunnies really happen just one at a time? I don't think so. So there must be more hiding under there somewhere.

They are very cute.


Kind of like this yummy bread from my parent's wonderful bakery is cute.

*

Only the ones under the house are smaller, much fuzzier looking, and less good for eating**.


*A picture of the actual baby bunnies coming soon....hopefully.
**At least, I would prefer not to eat them. Marge has a different opinion though. Which is why Marge will never be allowed to meet the baby bunnies.

A Storm on The Farm

The other day, Mon Amour and I watched a thunderstorm come in. It is pretty cool to watch them come from afar - you can see it raining off in the distance, long before it gets to you.

It started off fairly innocent looking - just the normal line o' clouds.



Then the clouds turned dark. Very dark.

Like Whoa! Very very dark!

So we went inside to watch it from there.
It came over the house (moving from east to west - the kitchen window in this picture faces west)


It was amazing to watch - the clouds were about as black as the ground. And you could watch the two converge on one another.


By this time the rain and the lightening had started. And a few minutes later when the clouds hit the visible horizon, it became pointless to take pictures. It was pitch black dark.



All in all, it wasn't the worst storm I have ever seen, probably didn't actually make it to the top 10 event.
But it was definitely one of the coolest to watch come in.
While watching it from inside - as the clouds slowly got closer to the horizon, it felt like the sky was falling...almost literally.

"Tag Sale"

Surprisingly enough, we did 2 fun things in one weekend. In addition to the graduation brunch of yesterday's post, we also volunteered at Mon Amour's organization's Tag Sale Fundraiser. It's like a yard sale...only its in a parking lot, so we can't call it a "yard" sale, and parking-lot-sale just sounds lame.

We got their early, but not as early as some others. Apparently set up started at about 5:30am. Yikes!

There was lots of stuff to be set up.

There were also these paper mache piggy bags, made by the kids or participate in activities at Mon Amour's organization. They were for collecting donations. I thought they were cute....but this one little old lady that I talked to was VERY upset that someone would waste their time making them. I saw her eyeing them with what I thought was a "aww isn't that cute" face, but when I went to introduce the pigs to her, she was like "Why, in the world, would anyone waste their time making crap like this? There are so many better things to do with your time". She walked off in disgust before I was able to tell her they were made by 3 and 4 year olds who really don't have anything better to do with their time.

Sorry for the shadows in this picture, but this is the tent where I was stationed all morning. At the begining of the day someone asked me if I wanted to be the "banker". I said no. And I meant it. But they said "You should be the banker" and they meant it too....they handed me a wad of cash, and I became the banker. This usually happens to me when I play board games....it had never happened in real life...until this past Saturday.

This fella sold. He wasn't tagged. So someone asked me how much he cost. I said, "A dollar". That was the going rate for me when things weren't tagged. Just call me the Dollar Tree.

After working so hard selling stuff for a dollar, and amassing a huge wad of cash in my hoodie pocket, I surrendered my banking duties, and we celebrated a job well done with one of these:

It (the one in the front) is called a "Frozen Hot Chocolate" It was delicious! It's like the iced coffee of folks who don't like coffee.

Graduation Brunch

I have been slacking on the blogging. Sorry about that, dedicated blog reader(s)

Would you like to know what I did this weekend?
Ok.

This was a fun part of this weekend.....it was a fun brunch in honor of one of my good friend's upcoming graduation.

The company was delightful and the food was excellent.


and on top of that, there was one of these included in the brunch.
Mimosas. Yummy.


Oh, and the best part - I got to hang out with this fellow. Aka my husband.
Because of his school, we don't really hang out much these days.

AND! We took a picture of us. We also never do that.
At least we are not slacking in the pictures of us department.

Too Cute: Part 8

It's been raining a lot around here these days.
It is a very slow moving system, that is coming from the northeast (weird, isn't it? weather systems around here usually come from the south west, or perhaps the north west, ....not the north east)

This has made for some very cold, dreary, unmotivated days.

It's on days like this that Marge and I don't make it very far on our walks. 5 minutes into the walk Marge has jumped in every muddy puddle in the drive way, and is went to her nose, and I am not much less wet.

So, after 5 minutes, we come in, and Marge does this.
Allllllll day long.
Literally.

It's too cute.

And kind of path
etically depressing at the same time. If it were possible to be depressed on behalf of some thing, I would be depressed for Marge. How can she live with herself knowing that that she is sleeping away at least 2/3 of her life?? (yes, she typically sleeps 16+ hours a day.)

Who knows.

But, she is just a little dog after all, and she seems to very much enjoy her waking hours (and her sleeping ones too for that matter), so I guess all is well in the life of Marge.

Though it would be nice if the rain would go away so we could both at least pretend not to live a sedentary life...

Free Stuff

I love this website.

For a variety of reasons.
  1. You fill out the forms, you get free stuff.
  2. The free stuff typically comes with sweet coupons
  3. Even if the free stuff isn't all that great - thanks to this website, we actually get mail from time to time! If it weren't for this website, I think that I could check my mail once a week and really not be missing much. I love getting mail, even when it comes from a cold, mechanized distribution center.
Here are a few of the fun things I have received recently as a result of this website:


Shampoo. There are lots of shampoo samples usually...tis not a ton of shampoo, but you get a few washes out of it - and then if you like it, there is a coupon to buy more!



Toilet paper. Definitely one of the most random items. It was a individual sized roll...meaning there was more cardboard in the middle than there was actual TP wrapped around it.
But again...came with an excellent coupon.



Yummy desserts. This thing was tiny - look at the cake mix part itself, it must be like 2 Tablespoons of powder. Add water. Microwave. And two bites later you are done. But, it was free...I will take two bites of chocolately yummy-ness for free.



A single paper towel. Definitely the fanciest paper towel ever. They don't when they say its like a real towel. They probably cost more than I like to pay for paper towels ....but for a brief moment, I could pretend that I had splurged on paper towels.


Cream of Wheat, a coupon, and a Ziploc Bag, need I say more.

We have also gotten lots of little snack foods, and many other random things

In summary, if you like getting free stuff, I would highly recommend this website.

I would definitely recommend creating an email account exclusively for signing up for these offers; most will require you put in an email address, and unless you like getting junk emails you will want to direct those elsewhere.

Also, don't hold your breath in anticipation after signing up for a really cool sample. It might arrive by the end of the week...but it might also take 2 months. So, fill out the form and forget about it. It will get to you eventually, and, honestly, if for some reason it never does - what have you lost? Really just the 30 seconds it took you to fill out the form.

The Aroma of Spring

It doesn't quite feel like spring yet. I believe Wednesday's forecast is for a high of 47 (brrrr).
But it is starting to look, and smell like spring.

There is the beautiful smell of spring flowers...

...the refreshing mist of a brisk early morning...

....the freshness of newly mowed grass...



...and of course....








...the ever present smell of freshly spread manure.

They were doing lots of spreading last week. When they first started (right in front of my house) I tried to convince myself that it was just plain old mud, or perhaps just really dirty water.
But, as they sun got higher, and the air got a little warmer, and the wind began to blow across the field towards my house....there was no more fooling myself.

It is definitely manure.


Lovely Ladies

This weekend I got to hang out with some lovely ladies.


On Friday because I didn't have to work, I hung out with this lovely little lady:and her lovely mom.
We had a very lovely time.



Then on Saturday, I went to a bridal shower for for this lovely lady:
This was also a very delightful time.
I got to catch up with quite a few lovely ladies at the shower, including my matching-named friends from high school (well, from other parts of life too I suppose, but we were quite the trio in high school). QE1, Me and QE2 (aka the guest of honor)
Did I get the #s correct? I always forget which one of your was 1 and which was 2. :-)