Happy Thanksgiving...

So, it's a week before Thanksgiving and the temperature yesterday was 70 degrees. The same for today. So Brian and I are going golfing this afternoon. What wonderful weather. It's supposed to be warm next week too. Think we can convince our wives that we need to go golfing on Thanksgiving morning? HA!

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.

Halloween 2008

Last Wednesday Janet and Sarah picked out 4 very large and pretty pumpkins. They were HUGE!

Mandy struggled taming her pumpkin...

Sarah dispatched hers with ease...

Mine was scrumptious...

I wasn't very inspired while carving mine...

Sarah wanted to do the pumpkins barfing, but it doesn't translate very well in the dark...

I think this one is Janet's...

Amanda's...

A nighttime shot of our front yard. I'll get a daytime shot that's clearer. Our's was referred to as the Scooby House or the Twinkling House (because of the blinking lights hanging from the trees.)

Halloween morning was gorgeous and red as the sun came up under the clouds...how does the saying go? Red sky in morning, sailor take warning. Sunday it rained all day.

Riley, Sarah, Sara, and Heather

Amanda and her boyfriend, Alec, dressed up as Jack Skellington and Sally from "The Nightmare Before Christmas" Amanda made both of their costumes from scratch.

Don't know if he looks better with or without the hat.
Pretty happy for a girl held together with stitches...

Thought you might be interested in what Janet has been up to the past week and a half. She's been putting up apple jelly and apple syrup. We had a bumper crop of red delicious apples. I think she said we'll have 12 quarts of syrup and I'll bet three times as much jelly. A lot of the jelly we'll put in the little half pints and give them away to co-workers for Christmas. This picture is just the first days product...