Tuesday, December 9, 2008
Gas Prices
I was driving around town here and saw a sign advertising gas for $1.33 a gallon. I investigated a little further and discovered you had to buy a deluxe carwash to get the discounted gas. The price at the pump it currently $1.49!!!!! Can you remember that price? It's been 6 or 7 years. Back in the olden days.
I don't get it. 2 or 3 years ago the price of oil was about $20.00 a barrel and gas was about $2.00 a gallon. Right now oil is about $50.00 a barrel and the price of gas is $1.50. That doesn't make sense in my little brain. Guess that's why it took three attempts for me to pass my statistics class in college.
DEC 11, 2008...
UPDATE: I was driving through town this morning and the discounted price for gas with a deluxe carwash is now....$1.25!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Can you believe it? I gotta get my car washed.
I'm just glad to see the price come down. Hopefully it will be this low (or lower) next summer when I go camping with the scouts and young women of the ward. Yea, low prices!!!!
Wednesday, December 3, 2008
Trailing A Lemon
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Happy Thanksgiving...
I was reading Donna's blog and had some thoughts of my own.
I do remember lots of pets on the farm. We had cats, dogs, cows, horses, goats, chickens, pigs, hamsters, gerbils, snakes...you name it, we had it. I lost the snake in my room and Mom had a fit and threatened me if I didn't find it before she came back from the grocery store. I found it and was promptly escorted out of the house with my 'pet' and told to let it go!
Cats. We had cats galore. Mom and we adopted Sleepy and she did have a ton of kittens. Dad calculated that she had at least 60 in her lifetime. The one that stayed the longest was Simon the part Siamese that went to California with us. He had an eventful life. When he was a kitten he and Sleepy went to sleep in the back of Dad's truck. He jumped in and went to work before they could bail out. They rode all the way to work with Dad. He called Mom from work and told her that she should come and get "HER" cat. When we got to Dad's truck there was only Sleepy. We couldn't find Simon for days. Mom and Donna knocked on doors down our road and low and behold they found Simon under the trailer of a little old lady. Simon had jumped out of the truck a couple hundred yards from the house. We figured that he'd jumped out while the truck was traveling at approximately 40mph. He lost a tooth and ripped his lip badly, but survived. He did drool when sound asleep for the rest of his life. YUCK!! Drool spots on your pillow!
Cows. I was a cow person. Still am. I'd rather have a cow for a pet anyday. Does that make me a redneck? I'm asked all the time what my favorite pet is and I respond, "Cow." Think about it. If the world is coming to an end people still have a hard time thinking of eating their cats, dogs and horses. No one thinks twice about eating a cow. Plus I just like bovine. Always have, always will. Wish I could keep on in my backyard, but the neighbors might not like that.
My memories of the cows on our farm are many. Butterball was a great cow. She was mild mannered and bore healthy calves. We ate most of them. I think she only had two or three heifers the rest were bulls. I don't think we ever named here but we had a black angus that was a hoot. She loved watermelon. If you stood by the fence and held up a watermelon rind and whistled she'd run to you. Full out run, not trot, not lope, run! She wanted to be the first there to get the most watermelon. Duke was my pet brahma. He was so tame. We had to get rid of him when we started buying registered stock. I remember the day still. It was foggy and cold. We herded all the cows into the front pasture to put them in the trailer. I was lagging behind and tried to cut Duke out and let him 'escape' to the back woods and we'd have to let him stay. Dad saw me and what I was trying to do and stopped me. I cried when I said goodbye. We replaced those cows with Buddy, Perla, and I can't remember all the names. We then had to get rid of them after a couple of years when we moved to CA. I tried to talk Dad into taking them with us, to no avail.
Dogs. Jack was our faithful mutt that we got off of the Pope family. We had a Jill too, but she got sick and had to be put down. Jack stayed with us for a few years. Probably 5 or 6 years. He was a wanderer. He wandered up into town one time and was 'adopted' by a family. Donna happened to be playing in town with some friends when she spotted him on a leash attached to a little boy. Donna called him and he tried to come, but the little boy dragged him back to his house. Don't know how but Mom and Donna went to the house and retrieved Jack. He still couldn't be stopped from wandering. He wandered into town and went through peoples trash cans and did it once too often. Someone shot him in the leg and he hopped home on three legs that fall. All winter long he stayed in his house/box and Donna and I fed him and watered him and put fresh hay in his house/box until he emerged in the spring with a limp and a large wound on his hind leg. He stayed a little closer to home after that. Too bad. He followed Mom into the woods when she went to visit Dad while he cut firewood. Jack bit into a cyanide trap meant for coyotes and died. Mom felt bad and didn't tell me about that until 5 years later when I was just home off my mission. I'd always thought that he'd been 'adopted' or shot again.
Seeing as it's Thanksgiving I'll tell the story of the Tom turkey. We had a Tom and a few hens that we kept for fun and the eggs. Big eggs! It was one of my chores to feed the chickens and the turkeys when I got home from school. The Tom was a mean one and tried to flog you when you entered his territory (the pen where he and his harem were kept.) Dad showed me how to push the Tom away with a stick to keep him at a distance. One day I guess I'd had a bad day at school. I don't know why. When I entered the turkey pen the Tom came at me and I reared back and baseball swung right at his head. WHACK!!!! And he fell over. I panicked and collected the eggs and headed back into the house to contemplate my punishment. When Dad got home I was too afraid to face him so I avoided him. About 30 minutes later Dad called me into the back yard. With fear and trepidation I dragged my feet into the backyard. Dad asked what was "wrong with the Tom?" I had only knocked him out and not knocked him off. I feined ignorace and considered it a boon. I did tell Dad at a later date exactly what had happened. But that Tom didn't bother me when I went into the pen after that.
We've had a few pets here in Provo too. Cats and a dog and some fish. Not the menagerie we had in Texas. But with luck we'll be able to find some land one day and have a few cows and chickens.
Sunday, November 2, 2008
Halloween 2008
Pretty happy for a girl held together with stitches...
Thursday, October 30, 2008
Snow, Snow, Stay Away...
We carved pumpkins last night. 3 nights before Halloween is kinda late, but had we put them out a couple of weeks ago they would be rotting in the warm weather anyway. Janet and Sarah picked out some of the biggest we've had in a long time. I'll try to get Janet to publish her pictures of the festivities. First I'll have to teach her how.
Janet and the girls have had a blast decorating for Halloween this year. They've gone all out with lights and "Caution" tape. Now they're thinking of building ghosts. Again, I'll try to get photos of the decorations on line in the near future.
Thursday, October 23, 2008
Father/Daughter Activity
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Wednesday, October 8, 2008
Thanksgiving Point
Sarah loved taking pictures of all the flowers and bugs and frogs and...you get the idea.
Sarah's pic of a pergola at the gardens, very cool huh?
Sarah's rose picture.
Me, Dad, Carolinea and David checking out the Koi.
Grandma wasn't interested in the fish so we sat and talked for a while.
Sarah and Caroline bought tickets and used them to ride the ponies.
Doesn't she look natural up there?
Caroline made fast friend with this little pony.
These are supposed to be the tallest man-made falls in the western hemisphere....
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
OOPS!! or OUCH!
After a couple of days the tail dried up and hasn't given her any trouble. She's been nibbling at it and has taken a few millimeters off over the past couple of weeks. I don't know if it will ever be completely gone. The fur ahs been closing around the wound but you can still see the little brown stub sticking out.
Friday, August 22, 2008
2008 Lakeside 7th Ward Youth Conference
In the afternoon we went across the road and played on their private lake. We couldn't swim in it but that was okay because we saw lots of leaches and water snakes. The kids played with the canoes and the floating docks and even the leaders got in the act with an impromptu guitar solo while standing in their boat.
Well, that's when my cameras batteries ran out. Later in the afternoon we went up in the mountains to a zip line and played on that for a couple of hours. While we were up there we saw lightning and heard the thunder and decided to head back. We didn't beat the weather. We got caught by a hail storm and rain for about half and hour. When we got back to the farmhouse we were soaked. Some dry clothes helped and then it was back to cooking for me. After dinner we had a fireside in the barn where it was a little warmer.
Saturday morning we did a service project for the Gomm's by moving some stones that they wanted to use in landscaping and some of the youth cut and raked grass around the lake to make it more accessible to boaters and hikers. After a couple of hours of work we fed the kids and hit the road back to Provo.
Our thanks to Bro. Gomm whose family owns the farm and showed us a great time.