Fall is coming!

Has it really been that long since I was on here? Gracious! Hmmm, what’s been going on? Well, we got some awesome rain this week. I kept thinking that my tomato plants, all brown and parched from the heat, would start looking better from that long drink, until I found out they actually have blight. Poo! I guess we won’t be getting any more tomatoes. We are still getting a lot of okra, though, and putting it up as much as we can. Hopefully, it will keep producing for a few more months. Tomorrow, we’ll be putting in some fall crops of chard, carrots, squash, and cilantro, followed by beets, lettuce, and spinach in another week or so. Maybe our fall crop will be better than the Spring one was! It sure is nice to have some cooler weather, and I’m excited about the cooler months coming.

Our flock is finally proving its worth. We’ve been getting 15-18 eggs a night and are about to start sharing and selling the extras. We’re eating a lot of eggs! We’ve also been nursing a sick rooster for the last two weeks, and he seems to be recovering, which we didn’t really expect. Jake found him lying in the coop, unable to use his legs, so we brought him up to the porch and put him in a cage to try our best. It has been a slow recovery, but he’s made it, and is now able to walk and get around with a little effort. Maybe we can add him back to the flock in a few days. We aren’t sure what happened to the poor fellow, but we lost a hen last week, too, for no apparent reason, so we think they may have gotten mycotoxicosis from eating some moldy feed we had in the corner of the barn. We were meaning to throw it out, but maybe they got into it and got sick. There’s just no way to tell. It’s nice to be able to nurse an animal back to health, though, in any case.

I’ve been feeling much better the last couple weeks, and can see some results from my hormone changes. I have been wearing the heart rate monitor every day, though it only seems to go up when I’m carrying something heavy or walking uphill or up stairs. Even when I’m yelling, which has been less often, it doesn’t go up. Until today… I finally saw that adrenalin spike that I’m supposed to be avoiding, and if you know me at all, you won’t be surprised at the reason. We were at Dairy Queen (remember, we can have anything we want on Friday and Saturday!) and ordered a Turtle Blizzard. Well, if you’re a Blizzard fan, you may know that a Turtle, otherwise known as a Pecan Cluster, Blizzard should have pecans, dipping chocolate, and caramel. This one employee made it wrong last time and put in brownie chunks, or something. Well, she was there today, and I just knew she would make it wrong again, so I told her, “That should have NO chocolate chunks,” in a very polite way. What do you know, she put in the chocolate chunks, after specifically telling me she didn’t! Disaster! I had to go up to the counter, and as she was busy, the manager helped me. It was about that time my watch starting beeping furiously, and my heart rate spiked to 216. LOL! That means I had a surge of adrenalin, and that’s the highest it’s been since I started wearing the thing! I explained to the manager that she wasn’t aware of the proper ingredients in a Turtle Blizzard, and that I needed it remade, please. I was perfectly nice and polite, not an angry, whiny customer, but it was imperative that they address the need to retrain this employee who didn’t have full grasp of the specifications of their popular and lucrative frozen dessert. Anyway, I said you wouldn’t be surprised. Of course it’s dessert that upsets me… especially when I only get real sugar on the weekend! During the week, I’ve tried a few recipes from a ‘naturally healthy’ cookbook, including whole wheat scones, spice cookies, and a strawberry torte that all had very small amounts of honey or maple syrup as the sweetener. We have been pleasantly surprised. I mean, the scones weren’t as good as the white, sugary, glazed ones I normally make, but they will suffice on a weekday, when we are having afternoon tea. The spice cookies and torte were actually very good, and I was totally addicted to the spice cookies. Oh, and there were also the coconut-oatmeal macaroons that DIDN’T work out… they were tasty, but too wet and fell completely apart. So, now it’s Friday, and we are having some real dessert! I COULD have some coffee tomorrow morning, but we’ll see. I haven’t missed it that much, and had a couple of Starbucks on the way to and from Athens last week, so I’m not hurting too much there. It’s probably better just to stay away.

We tried a new culinary feat a couple weeks ago… yogurt. It went okay, but it’s pretty runny. I need to try Alton’s recipe that calls for powdered milk, which may firm it up a bit more, but it’s not too bad, and pretty easy to make with a heating pad. One of our gallons of raw milk soured, so I made the whole thing into yogurt for the chickens, and have even been using it in recipes (like the scratch chocolate fudge cake I just took out of the oven and will be frosting with coconut-pecan frosting). I’ve also thawed out some kefir grains to start using, if I can get them to wake up properly. With the yogurt, the okra, and the kefir, we’re doing some serious fermenting around here! Maybe it’s time for some sourdough…

School is creeping along, and we’ve started walking together as a family in the evenings, when we get done with dinner in time. The kids love it, and it saves me having to do the whole hour on the treadmill. I’ve been attempting to move dinner up into the realm of healthy metabolic function, instead of eating at 8 pm, then getting ready for bed, which is not good for the waistline. Last night, amazingly, we had dinner at 6:15, then went for a 45-minute walk and we were in bed by 9 pm. Woo-hoo! Now, if I can just repeat that every night, we’ll be in good shape.

Tomorrow is the annual Vulcan Fun Shoot, a skeet fundraiser benefitting the Cancer Therapy and Research Center, and Craig and two boys are attending. All the boys like to go, but if they ALL go, that means I have to go, and while I enjoy it for about an hour, I can pass on following Craig around the skeet course and standing around while he talks to company friends for about 6 jours. So, I talked Luke into staying home with me and doing something special while the bigger boys go with Dad. Whew! Just a couple more years, and they can ALL go and leave me here ALONE! Mu-ha-ha-ha-ha! Oh, sorry, sometimes the evil laugh comes out when I’m imagining a day all to myself. Maybe we’ll go have breakfast at the café.

Okay, going to start on dinner… I have a 6 pm goal!