Now to put on your thinking caps. Here is this weeks Mystery Photo Challenge
And the winner of this Mystery Photo goes to…. Gene!
Here was the clue
And here is what it actually was. It’s the glass part of an old lightning rod for the barn. Great Job Gene!! 
I’ve been talking that Spring has finally arrived at the farm and let’s just say that it’s not a minute too soon! It’s so nice to go outside that you actually want to be out there! I mean the sun was shining today and it just seems like people (and animals) all are in a much better mood!
So I went out hunting for my next photo challenge this week with my camera and had to stop and check out the chickens. Now I wanted to check them out not because they were naughty or doing something dumb, but just to see what they were doing. And guess what I found out? Well, they really weren’t doing much other than trying to figure out just what in the heck I was doing! So here’s a picture of Duff just kinda hanging out in the spring mud.
Even the chickens were enjoying the warm mud today!
Next I checked out the trees to see how they were doing. And just like the rest of the farm – the small little leaves are just starting to form in the warm spring sunshine. It always so encouraging to see leaves starting in the spring. I’m not sure why this makes me smile, but it does.
Our red maple tree just starting to take leaves. We call this tree the ‘Grandpa Franzen tree’ after my Dad.
I was talking to someone the other day and they were so negative about, well just about everything I think! They were talking about the weather and saying things like, ‘I sure hope it doesn’t flood’ and ‘You know that it might snow again and then we’ll be sorry’. Yikes! First of all, we call these people Downer Debbies. (sorry if you’re name is Debbie!) The reason is because on Saturday Night Live they do a skit where this one girl talks just like the person that I mentioned and pretty much nothing is any good.
Now sure we might get some flooding. Heck we didn’t even get a spring rain to clean anything off yet. And sure we are probably going to get one last snow storm, but it won’t last long!
So just get over it right? Wow, I sure would hate to see this person when things got really bad! But guess what? It’s an absolutely beautiful spring day outside and I think I’m going to stay away from this person for at least a couple of months!
Now I’ve got the biggest clue of all that we’re getting ready for Spring. We were out and about the other day and when we came home kinda late, we stopped at the mailbox to get the mail. Daryl said something on the line like ‘Holy Cow, the mailbox is so full!” Once we got the pile, and it was literally a pile of mail in the house I just had to laugh. There was a huge catalog of farm machinery. There was another catalog of seed corn. There was a postcard for our local Coop spring supper coming up. And there was a catalog that was titled Country Life. And finally there was a Successful Farmer catalog. OK, see what I mean? I’m guessing others are also getting the spring fever. But as I stood and looked at the catalogs, the only one that I thought looked even somewhat interesting was the Country Life magazine, and that’s only because it had some cute ducks on the cover! But for Daryl? Well I think Daryl looked like he died and went to Hog Heaven! He looked over all the mail really close and chose just the best one to start his reading tonight. Now which one was it? I have no clue – but lucky me! He left the duck one on the counter 🙂 Happy Spring!!
It was nice today. No.. it was really nice today! The temperature actually got up to the lower 50 degrees and it was sunny! I saw a saying the other day that made me smile mostly because it was so true! The saying said that you know that you live in Iowa when the weather finally gets to 40 degrees and you can leave your coat at home! How true is that! Like I said it was in the 50’s today and after work and I saw more than one pair of shorts on the street in town today.
As for us? Now don’t get me wrong – I LOVE that winter is almost over, but after saying that you have to take some bad with the good. The bad part of the spring thaw is that the roads get so ‘greasy’. If you are not familiar with that word – you might have never driven on this type of road either.
When you hear someone say that the road is greasy, well it means that when you’re driving down the gravel road you really have to be watching and careful the whole time. Because if you’re not – well you could very well get pulled over to the ditch and possibly even go into the ditch with your car. Why? The frost is starting to come out and it makes the road .. well greasy. And when your driving on it the road kind of sucks you where ever it wants to take you and in most cases – it’s going to be the ditch. And once you’re going, you just have to hope that your car is going to stop .. like soon! This is kind of a season of it’s own in the country and it normally doesn’t last too long. It’s all part of the spring thaw. Soon the roads will be good and the next thing that we’ll all complain about it how dusty they are!
With the warm weather another spring tradition happens on our farm. The chickens get their chicken coop door open and they’re free! It’s always funny to watch them for the first time of the season and especially the new 5 little chickens from last year. This is the first time that they’ve been out in the yard since they came to our farm, and I had to laugh how they acted. Most of them did a good job just checking everything out and soon was kind of running around. But the little chicken that I call ‘The Mayor’ wasn’t sure at all what was going on. The Mayor was so used to bossing the other little chickens around and because he was so fast and little, for some reason they let him. But now in the open farm yard – well he was not looking so tough. He just stood by my feet for most of the time that I was outside and I don’t think he liked being out in the fresh air one bit! Once the sun went down, the chickens all did a good job going back into the coop for the night. Then Daryl went out and shut the door back up to keep them safe. We sometimes get fox or other animals visiting us during the night and well that’s a fast way to thin down the chicken population if they’re not locked up. Here’s a picture of some of them that I quick snapped when they were checking out the dirt and seeing Sam the Peacock again. The rest of our chickens decided to head for the cow yard to see if there is any fresh ground corn on the ground that the cows didn’t eat. It’s funny because it’s been maybe 3 to 4 months since they got locked up and once the door opened – these chickens shot across the yard like they were in the Olympics. Have you ever seen a group of 10 chickens running as fast as they could? Believe me … it’s hilarious!! 
But the best part of the day is when the door bell rang and it was Mom carrying a big pan of homemade beef noodle soup! AWESOME!! I’m not sure what I did to deserve a delivery of homemade soup – but hey I’ll take it.
And the photo of the day? Well it’s a good representation of how our dogs also like the nice warm weather. It’s just too bad that their days of coming into our living room are pretty much nonexistent for awhile!
Happy Dogs! Dirty yes, but happy!!
OK, so I’m going to try to write this post and not be too crabby while I’m writing it. What would make me say such a thing? Well let me give you a hint – Day Light Savings Time.
Now you can argue that it saves money in oil consumption and also electricity in homes, but for me? Well I can hardly see the benefit. I mean, there are some of us who are very comfortable with being on time schedules and being able to wake up about 10 minutes before the alarm goes off, only to wait blissfully in bed with the covers pulled up over your head until it actually does go off. Now we have to adjust to this new time schedule and well honestly.. I just don’t like it.
I’ve read a lot this afternoon on the pros and cons of Day Light Savings Time and there is a lot of controversy on it. Some claim that in the first 3 weeks when your body is trying to adjust, car accidents go up, there is more of a chance to have a heart attack, increase in work accidents, and more headaches. OK, I’m thinking that these statistics really depends if you like or don’t like the time change. Now the others who like the change claim that with it being light out longer in the afternoon we’re more productive and it saves energy.
Well as for me? I guess there’s not much that I can do about it except start changing all the clocks that we have in the house. I think I counted around ten.
With Daryl gone all week, there is one thing that I have to do today. And guess what that is? Well if you guessed that I have to wash a couple of dog blankets – then you guessed right!
I had a pretty good routine down this past week. I would get home from work, change clothes, feed the cows and feed the chickens, hang out by the nipco heater for awhile with the dogs and cats, and then off to the house we all would go. All I had to do was to open the french doors and the dogs soon found their spots on the living room floor. Now the only trouble that I had was the kitties also followed me to the house and well… they didn’t get at night at all. But they did get in the morning before work, so it wasn’t all unfair.
Now of course as the night would go on and I’d be in the kitchen, I’d have my visitors sneaking into the kitchen looking for some ham or cheese. I guess they wanted a small snack to tide them over too. So today the blankets are in the washing machine and the dogs don’t even seem to mind playing outside. The weather is warming up pretty nice!
Other things today? I was in the kitchen making some ham and potato soup for dinner so I decided that I wanted to try to make a roasted red pepper hummus for next week’s lunches. Hummus is really a good alternative to other sandwich spreads, so I thought I should be able to do this! First things first, I needed to roast my peppers. The first thing that I did was to get rid of the skin. Now I’ve never really done this before, but I’ve seen it like a bazillion times on the cooking shows. I took the peppers and put them under the broiler until they started to turn black. I think it turned out OK and the skin did just peel off like their’s did.
They look bad, but that’s how they’re supposed to look
So the next thing was to roast them and into the oven they go after they were cut up and had a little olive oil added to them. And in no time they were smelling great! I kind of made up the recipe as I was going (only because I was too lazy to find the real recipe!) but it didn’t taste too bad. I saw on one of the containers in the Health Food Store that they added celery powder. Now I couldn’t find any of the celery powder to buy, but I bought celery seeds the other day and was able to use my new handy dandy coffee/spice grinder to see if I could get some powder. SCORE! It worked pretty good. Now I have no idea what the celery powder tasted like because I just dumped it into the mixture, but it was a pretty good excuse to try out the grinder.
Roasted red pepper hummus.
Other things that got done today was to work a couple of hours on catching up on some paperwork, ordered some more soap stuff (shhhh) and then made a couple of cards that I really should have done earlier this week. Both of them are Thank You cards .
And now for the rest of the night, Daryl and I are going on a road trip to look at cars for William, pick up a couple of gift certificates at some local restaurants (to put in the one Thank You card) and then try out this restaurant that we’ve never been to before.
All in all it’s a really great Saturday!
Have you ever pulled into your driveway and know that there is something that is wrong and out of place? Well that’s what was going on in our farm tonight. I pulled into the yard and there stood Giggles by the cow yard. The kicker is that he was on the outside of the cow yard and not with Sassy. He looked both guilty and scared at the same time and wanted bad to get back into the yard with her.
So I hurried up and changed clothes and out I went before he decided that maybe he just wanted to run around or something. It didn’t take much coaxing and all I really had to do was to open the gate and once he saw that it was open- well he ran pretty fast. I was a little worried though because both Ed and No Ears was spying the open gate and with me giving treats all week to the cows, I didn’t want them to come out to meet me to get their treat! But everyone was back where they belong and I’m thinking that Giggles just climbed on this one snow bank and up and over the fence he went. To be honest I didn’t look too hard. He looked like if he could cry, he would have! So his exploring days are probably over for awhile.
Other things going on around here is that it’s that time again when we have a full moon. Even though the moon looked pretty cool and awesome, I was reading that it’s the smallest moon of 2015. Want to know what else that I read up on it? OK, here it goes… these are some of the other names for this month’s moon – The Abenaki call it the mozokas, or moose hunter moon, while it’s known to the Anishnaabe, or Ojibwe/Chippewa, as bebookwaadaagame-giizis(oog), or snow crust moon. The perhaps more optimistic (or more southerly) Creek call it tasahcucee, little spring moon. To the Shawnee it’s shkipiye kwiitha, or sap moon. Now EVERYONE is moon smart tonight! 🙂 
Before the moon came out tonight, the sun was shining for most of the day. This sure makes it feel so much warmer, and because of that the barn cats all were sunbathing in the barn door. This door faces the South and it also must block the wind because I’ve caught them doing this more than once these past few days. 
And to finish off the night I cut my Orange and Poppy Seed soap that I made the other day. I think it’ll be OK, I just don’t know if I’m going to like all the poppy seed stuff going on while I’m in the shower. I guess I’ll find out in a couple of weeks!
Orange Poppy Seed Soap
And the winner of this week’s Mystery Photo is…… JUDY!
This type of scale was used to weigh milk. We used one like it when we were growing up in the barn. Mom said that every night we would hang the pail of milk that we got from each cow and weigh it. Then we’d record the weight and if the cow wasn’t giving enough milk to keep her – well, she would get sold!
Here was the clue 
And here was the total picture. The hook on the bottom of the scale was to hold the milk pail. Later on when we were growing up, I think we used the hook more to hold the barn radio. If you ever milked cows you know that there always is a radio playing. And along with that, there always was a debate what station we got to listen to on the radio!
This is the Mystery Photo for this week -have any ideas on what it was used for?
OK, let’s see what the possibilities are that I could have done tonight.
Clean house? Nope that wasn’t it. Put away the laundry? That wasn’t it either. Make a batch of soap? ding ding ding.. you’re a winner!!
I suppose that I could have been doing something better with my time, but I really wanted to try to make a two different colored soap. And with Daryl gone to a meeting – it was a perfect night to try it out.
Well first things first. I had found a new recipe and I actually had all the oils to do it. SCORE! Now to figure out what color to make it. The recipe called out for the end soap to add two colors to the base color, but I was just hoping to get one additional color. The real trick was to match the fragrances that I have to the two colors that I also have. Yea.. it wasn’t going so well. So finally I looked in my cupboard and found some turmeric and poppy seeds. OK, now I have a plan. The base color would be plain and then I’ll color the top color with the turmeric to give it the orange color and add poppy seeds and orange fragrance. Man I’m thinking that I’m pretty smart. So I mix in the spice to a small amount of oil and set it aside while the other oils and lye mixture is cooling. Now I’m just checking out other soap blogs on the web when I see that you can add your spices that you want to add to your soap straight to your lye mixture. Hey, that sounds good doesn’t it? It’s supposed to really enhance your color. So I grab the bottle and pour a gob of it into the cooling lye mixture. Then I stand back and was thinking man it’s sure orange. Crap! I just made the whole batch orange!!! Well it was too late and now to come up with the next plan. So the final soap is one that is all orange and the bottom half has poppy seeds in it and the top has orange fragrance and doesn’t have any poppy seeds.
Oh well, there’s always next time to do a better job!
The photo of the day is one that I took when I was just heading to town after work tonight. I could hear this really loud noise when I was outside and couldn’t for the life of me figure just what it was. Finally it dawned on me that it was a helicopter getting closer and closer to our farm. So I grabbed a camera to snap a picture to show just how low these helicopters were flying. The picture really doesn’t do it justice – but believe me they were low!
Can you see the two helicopters?
