Minerva is right at home!

 So I have a puppy!  She is about 6 months old.  So far she has eaten the carpet on the stairs, 16 branches of the cotton wood tree, a hole in the wall, and many other things that I will no doubt discover at a later date.  She is a heeler and puts the geese to bed each night and wakes them up every morning. She has found my sewing room and the cat's litter box which is 3 floors below me.  I have barricades in place to keep her from that level, but it gets tiring to move a wooden barricade every time I need a pin, or something out of the freezer.

She is a very loving little dog, but she is a registered blue heeler and those of you on a farm know what that is!  I would love to take her to my daughter, Dona, who actually has a farm, but she has 3 dogs already and has her hands full with those.  Sadly they are just petting dogs and not working dogs, but it is what it is.

Right now I am at the computer with a cat on my left who will wake up and walk across the desk and step over the keyboard to set on my lap.  This will cause the dog to put his freezing cold nose under my right elbow and root it out of the way so he can get closer.  And that has now happened!  I left the computer briefly, but they await my return!

Now, she has moved her Puppy bed to the stairs and after falling out of it and rolling down the stairs 3 times, she has given up on that endeavor.  I was going to take a picture and post it for you, but this computer is way smarter than me and has hidden everything in a cloud some where and since John Tenorio passed away, I have no one to guide me through this process.  

So now here I set, wondering just what I had on my little mind when I started this blog entry.  I am sure it was important, but I think all I actually succeeded in doing is to make another copy of the 63,224 photos I now have in triplicate, and gave myself a headache.  I do now know that today is Saturday,  which came as a big surprise, since I thought I was on Friday!

So, off I go to let the geese out, after which I will shower and then wonder why I bothered since I have no where to go and nothing to do.  That is how it goes in my world.  How about yours?

Peace!

And that is not right either!!

 I finally got signed in so I can write my blog, but sadly this will not last long!  I am locked out of every bank account,  facebook, etsy, paypal,  my mail, and anything else I ever hoped to do!  My internet went south on me for a few days and when I got it back up and running everything else was new to me!  

I  had something I wanted to tell you, but I forgot what it was.  I do have a new dog.  Her name is Minerva. .  She is a black and white Heeler and she actually likes me.  Sadly she tries to hug my legs when I am walking, which makes me a little nervous since I have brittle bones and stuff!  Not sure I can pay for a broken hip on my budget.

So hopefully, the Internet will stay up for a while and I can get in a few of my accounts and life will be good again.  Sure missed writing the last month or so.

Right now I am very sleepy so I am going to bed.  Hope to be in touch again tomorrow with lots of catching up to do!

Peace!

It is morning!

Click here for the music! 

I seem to function best back in the 1940's.  It was the tail end of the depression and we had nothing, but that is where I was happy.  Maybe not so happy, but secure.  I was safe.  I think that was what draws me back to that era.  We were together in a 2 bedroom house with a wood stove in the dining room, front room, and in the kitchen for cooking.  We carried water from a pump out back until we finally got a sink and pump in the kitchen.  

A coal oil hurricane lamp in the middle of the dining room table gave us light to do our home work.  My fondest memory is setting at that table with a red Chief tablet and a fat pencil  printing my ABC's.  I wrote about that years ago and a wonderful lady, Linda Kelp, who is Michael McQuire's cousin sent me  4 Big Chief tablets from her home up north.  I still have them!  I do not use them.  I wrote on one page of one tablet where they came from and that is all.

It is sad some of the things I do and the things I hoard!  My cupboards are full of cottage cheese containers because I can not bear to throw them away!  We did not have them back then.  I do not know when we became a nation of disposable everything.  I remember when the city dump was a designated area outside of town and that is where people took their tin cans.  Everything else was reused.  Today we call it recycle, but mostly it just goes in the trash and is hauled to the dump.  I understand it is then pressed into a big block and either buried or dumped into the ocean.  I do not see either one of those solutions as being permanent!  Burning it pollutes the air we breathe, so you tell me!

Well, once more I have gotten off track!  I started this wanting to tell you how safe and secure I was as a child even though we had very little in material possessions, and end up wanting to clean up the world and save it for our children.  This old age is not conducive to stringing and article together to a cohesive conclusion!

So, I guess I will make a pot of coffee and start my day with the local news followed by the national news, neither of which I can do anything about!  I am better off just listening to Merle Haggard sing me back home (click that).

Peace and love!

Security?? For me or From me?

Just spent several hours locked out of most of my accounts because I wanted to share a bit of good news on my blog!  I must confess that after changing passwords on several accounts so I could get to his site, I have forgotten what the good news was!  Not only have I forgotten the good news, but I have forgotten all the passwords and I rather doubt that when I get through posting this, that I will give a big rat's patootie!

Life was so simple when I first ventured into the blogging arena!  But now, I find my desk covered with notes I have written myself, giving myself little hints on how to get into my account.  I must admit, my life was sure a lot simpler back  when I  was stupid and no one wanted to steal my identity.  Right now I do not even want my identity!

When I first ventured into this world of secret words and stuff I signed in to everything with "password".  Worked for me and no one stole my identity.  I could not imagine why anyone would want to be me!  Hell!  I did not even want to be me.  As life in the world of secret passwords began to take on it's own life, my passwords became more and my attention span became shorter.  It was not long before I hated the computer and all it's demands for longer and more complicated passwords.  Gone were the days when one password would open any program.

Last night I got on to pay a bill.  It should have been a 3 minute job.  Needless to say, it did not end up that way.  They insisted I change my password (in case it had been compromised).  That having been done I then had to tranfer money from my bank account to the bill I was paying.  Then I had to change the password on the bank account.  

Now, I am going to post this.  In the good old days I would just add a few labels , state my location and then hit the publish button.  Hopefully this will publish and I can hit another key and it will appear on facebook.  

The sad part is that I do not even remember at this time what I wanted to say to all of you.  I know it was important, but that is all I remember.  

So, until we meet again, Happy Trails and all that.  May the wind be at your back and the road rise to meet you.  The password for today is totalconfusion!!!!

Peace!

I am the old generation.

 Today I awoke with a cat on my bed and a dog beside the bed.  The dog is not mine, but the cat is.  As I lay there thinking what the day held in store, and it suddenly dawned on me, that I had no reason whatsoever to leave my little bed.  Oh, sure the dog and cat need fed and let out for a bathroom break, but other than that I could just lay there all day and no one would know, or care.

Once upon a time I had a mother, father, 4 brothers, 4 sisters, aunts, uncles and lots of cousins.  I had friends galore.  I had places to go and people to see, but sadly that has all changed.  My family is all gone except for one sister that I never talk to or see.  The one friend that I had for many years moved down south some where.  She had a daughter who was very disrespectful to me and my "brood", so we stopped communication.  The friends that I made here in Colorado have mostly died , or pissed me off for one reason or another.  I have no room in my life for deceit, disrespect, and judgementalists.  So I guess, as Mother would say, "I have made my own bed and now I can just sleep in it".  We all know how wise my Mother was!

I live in a 2400 square foot house, all by myself.  I have a cat.  The cat loves me.  I have 7 geese who do not!  They depend on me for food, water and a shed to keep them safe from the foxes and such.  Bret was 8 when I got the geese as babies.  He is 32 now.  Geese, under ideal conditions will live about 16 years.  This makes mine 24 years old.  Every morning when I go to let them out, I expect to find one with his feet in the air, but it has not happened yet.  Someone suggested that I give them to the zoo so they could use them as food for the lions.  That is not happening.

I have always said that when the geese die off, of natural causes, I will sell this place and move somewhere else.  My destination is not set in stone, just so it is some where else.  I entertained the idea of buying a small van and just going from place to place, but even that seems like a lot of work.  I could just call someone to handle an estate sale for me and walk out the door with one suitcase.  That actually is the most appealing scenario at this point.  I could visit each of my kids for a month at a time.  They would be glad to see me twice that way (once when I came and once when I left!)

But for today, I will let the geese out of their pen so they can play in the pond I built for them in the garden area.  I am toying with the idea of planting fruit trees in the garden area.  If I cut down the cottonwood tree, I can fit 2 peach , 2 apricot, and 2 cherry trees in that area.  Or I can just drink another cup of coffee and wait for Jeopardy! to come on this afternoon.  I love that show.  I turn it on at 3:00 and then I wake up about 4:00.

Peace!

I am a hero!!!

 Yesterday I became a hero!  The day started out as just another day, only I had a grandson with me.  He had spent the night so we had the whole day ahead of us.  We usually take a fairly long walk and that was how we started this day.  We walked up South Road toward 25th lane.  The ditch angles off across the country in a sort of south easterly direction.  Before we got to the ditch we passed the goat house.  It is really not a goat house, but a man lives there who has raised goats since I have lived out here lo onto 40+ years.

We noticed a small goat with his head through the fence munching on a weed.  We stopped to watch, but he just kept straining at the fence.  My grandson noticed that his head seemed to be stuck in the fence.  Crap!  What to do?  The gate to the yard where the owner had his house was locked.  I called out a couple times, but there was not any sign of life forthcoming.  All the rest of the herd was gathered to watch the small goat struggle.

I am not a animal person by nature.  Dogs and cats and an occasional bird does it for me, but it soon became apparent that I was the adult in this situation and if the little goat was going to be freed from the fence, it was going to be me doing the freeing.  I had a short conversation with God, wherein I asked if he could take care of this, but he did not answer.  Great!  I knelt on the ground and touched his horn.  Yep.  He was in there very solid.  He was not going any where anytime soon.  

Now when I find myself in a situation like this I always assume the one who got into the pickle was a male.  I being the alpha female needed to solve this some how.  With the grandson breathing down my neck I grasped the little guy with one hand on his nose, (in case a goat bites) and the other on the horn.  He was very calm as I raised his nose so I could manuver the tip of his horn through the fence.  That being accomplished the nose and other horn quickly slipped through the fence.  He looked at me with what I hoped was a look of gratitude, turned to his herd, kicked up his back feet and ran for the barn, followed by the rest of the herd.

It was at that point that my grandson declared I was a hero!  I had saved the goat!  I must say, I did have a very warm feeling at that moment.  It is kinda nice to have a kid think I am  a hero, even if it was sheer luck that it worked out so well!  The owner of the goat will never know what transpired while he slept, but my grandson and I know.  I just talked to my son and my grandson never mentioned it to him, but that is alright.

For just a little while I was a hero and my grandson looked at me as something more than a cookie machine.  The little goat has probably forgotten his predicament.  He will no doubt grow up to be dinner on someone's plate.  

It is called the circle of life!

Peace!

Do geese eat grasshoppers?

   There are grasshoppers in my yard bigger than my cat!  They try to jump on my leg for a free ride around the yard, but I do not let that happen. I do not like their sticky legs.  I do not like their little tight lips, nor their bugged out eyes.  They are tricky little varmints.  They can land on a light bulb and not fall off before  propelling themselves off in any direction, except to the direction I thought they were going to jump.

They are not afraid of humans.  Insect spray does not harm them.  They eat everything in sight except weeds.   They do not eat weeds. They travel in packs!  They go from a tiny thing the size of a gnat into a 3 inch long giant grasshopper in seven minutes! 

If it were not for the fact that they are the most destructive things on planet Earth, they would be fascinating creatures.  They can fly.  They can take off from a dead standstill and become airborne in a blur.  They can jump further than a kangaroo.  I think they fly.  They are both aerodynamic and waterproof.  I think they chew tobacco, although I do not know where they get it!

I do not know where they sleep, or if they sleep.  I know I go out early in the morning and there is no sign of them, and suddenly the air is full of them.  Insecticide does not phase them.  I did buy something once that the man told me makes them sterile.  Birth control for grasshoppers??  That did not work either. I think it actually increased the horde!

I have seen my mother goose try to catch and eat one, but she failed in that endeavor, so I am guessing the geese prefer grain.

So, I am praying for frost.  It will not kill them, but it slows them down.  Back in the days of the pioneers, they talked of "herds of locusts, that blocked out the sun!"  They don't fool me.  It was those damn grasshoppers!  

They can put a man on the moon, but they cannot find a spray to eliminate the grasshoppers.  So what can we do to get rid of them?

 My answer to this is , "who knows?"  Just pull up my big girl pants and move on!  Winter will come someday!