Thursday, January 21, 2010

Dead Tired

Gus may look dead but he's not.
Oh, to live a spoiled dog's life!

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Stormy Weather

I had planned on getting the cow preg-checked but for one reason or another never got to it. After checking the calendar and looking at her though it looks to me like she is pregnant.
If my notes are correct then she should be due any time between February and April. I may be wrong, and I have been wrong before, but I'm guessing sooner rather than later. This is her with her last year's calf, taken just a few days ago (between storms).
And speaking of storms, we have actually been getting some rain.
We really need the rain, so it's a good thing. It does make a mess of the pens though. We've been having to clean the tumbleweeds out every couple of days.
Yuckiness!
As I'm sitting here the wind chimes are going crazy and the trees are bending back and forth from the wind. It's not raining yet, but that's coming again too.

It's a good day to stay inside and read a good book!

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

My Roosters

Here's a couple of pictures I took last week of my roosters.

These are cuckoo marans.
This is a wheaten marans.
The wheaten marans rooster is very beautiful. His colors practically glow when he's in the sunlight.

I still haven't brought myself to do anything about the excess of roosters running around. And I'm not sure when anything will happen, but it will happen. Eventually.

Friday, January 15, 2010

A Star In The Making

Okay, I am just a little technologically challenged, I admit. I wanted to post a You Tube video here but I think the reason I can't is because it's a television commercial and there are some sort of rules that say I can't unless I'm the creator, which obviously I'm not. So in lieu of posting the video here I will give you the link.

This is a commercial made for a local restaurant. It was made by a neighbor and friend of Carli's and the company he works with. He is the one in the red shirt. Pay close attention to the baby in the arms of the girl at the very end. That is my little star in the making! BTW that girl is not Carli.

Click here to go to the video!

Thursday, January 14, 2010

Similarities

Yesterday was a fairly nice day, compared to the overcast, foggy, cold, and just plain dreary days we've been having. I took advantage of that to get the baby outside and put her on Flora, her mother's old pony.
Here's a chalk drawing a former neighbor made. This is Carli on her first pony, Madera.
Notice the similarities? PS-Notice the nice form (legs down, toes in.)
Here's what she looked like after we made a few spins around the back yard.
I'd say she enjoyed it.

Wednesday, January 13, 2010

Ready For The Cold

This is from a few days ago when it was really cold out.

The last two days have been fairly warm and we've been able to go out without the heavy coats. From what the weather people have been saying this warm spell isn't going to last. We're ready for whatever comes!

Saturday, January 9, 2010

Chocolate Eggs

My marans chickens have laid their first eggs!
Pretty cool, huh? The reason they are so shiny is because I just washed them and they were still wet.
I found these this morning so I haven't had a chance to try one out. I'm sure they'll taste just like a regular egg. Wouldn't it be neat if they were chocolate inside? HA HA. (I did make a chocolate egg once. Blow the egg out and fill with melted chocolate--simple! Later when it's dried you can peel it and it's chocolate inside! Good for Easter.)

My Saturday is off to a great start. This afternoon my sister in law and one of her daughters will be here from Illinois and then we, along with my daughter and my sister that lives here (mt--the cheesemaker) will be going out to dinner for sushi!

Hope you all have a great day too!

Friday, January 8, 2010

Mosaic Letters

Carli had asked me to make mosaic letters spelling out the baby's name. She had a basic idea of the way she wanted them to look. We discussed size, colors, and fonts and I went to work.

Each block is about 8 inches. She wanted each letter to be a different color with the same color flowers in the background and the letter being the darkest shade. The fill and grout color is white on all the blocks.

Originally I was going to try and make a flower that started with the same name as the letter (ie: E = echinacea, N = nicotiana, etc), but with the tiny space per block it was too difficult to do properly with the tiles I was using. Instead I went with "fantasy" flowers. The one exception is the letter "I", which is green, so I did an oak leaf and an ivy leaf. In retrospect I should have just made green flowers. Oh well.





On the back of each block I put an alligator hanger. Then Carli said she really wanted to hang them using ribbon so I attached "D" rings in each upper corner. That way she could hang the blocks in a jumbly fashion and not worry about getting it crooked. The alligator hangers work well if you have a level line. Another idea would have been to put the letters on a narrow shelf.

I haven't been doing much of any projects lately since I've been watching the baby every day now. (I finished this project last month after most of it was done a couple months ago!) The baby is extremely active now and getting into everything so I really have to watch her.

I think by summer she'll be ready to start riding the pony, at least with a lead line to start. That will be fun. Another little girl corrupted! Hee hee!

Tuesday, January 5, 2010

New Year's Day At CALM

On New Year's Eve my daughter had to work and my husband did not, so we packed up the baby and headed for CALM. That stands for CAlifornia Living Museum and is our local zoo of sorts. It holds animals that are native to California and the inhabitants have been injured and rehabilitated and/or for whatever reason are unable be returned to the wild.

Since half the animals are nocturnal I wasn't able to get a lot of the animals, but here are a few.

Kit fox.
Red fox.
Bald eagle.
Badger. (We don't need no stinkin' badgers!)
Black tailed mule deer. This is a good picture showing why it's called a mule deer.
Raccoon.
Another bald eagle.
Bobcat.
At her favorite, the mule deer enclosure.



I think she had a good time!

Friday, January 1, 2010

Blue Moon

As most of you probably already know, last night was a "blue moon". I thought it would be too cloudy to take a picture but it did clear up a bit and I went out to try and get a picture.

I couldn't remember what the settings were to take a decent picture and I didn't feel like taking the time to get it really right. Let's just blame it on laziness and poor planning. The best I could come up with was this one.
Another problem I had was I couldn't find the tripod. Before I took the above photo I took these below. Not real sharp, I admit.
So I thought I'd have some fun playing around with the editing feature on my laptop. This one almost looks like it's at the beach!
Blue sky.
This was a shot I was messing around with in the camera, trying to make a double exposure of the good moon shot with the tree shot. It didn't work. I'll learn how to do that one of these days.
Some people just have a natural instinct for taking brilliant pictures. They know how to compose the shot and fix all the settings without a lot of thinking. I'm not one of those people. I have to think too hard about the settings so I usually leave it on "automatic".

My son has a friend who is like that. Her camera is similar to mine but believe me, her pictures are amazing! I'm jealous.

Oh well. I have fun anyway.