Month: November 2011 (Page 2 of 2)

It can snow any time now. I have all the animal pens ready, including the heated waterers for the winter. I have all the summer things parked where they go for the winter. We put a lean-to over the fire wood and put up another for the mowers and tillers and I moved all the mowers and tillers under it today. It is weird to actually be ready and just waiting for the snow to begin to accumulate. I know I heard something about the possibility tonight, so we will just have to see. Please pray that the weather on Saturday is good for the drive to Superior, though.

I am home alone for a few days because Dad is over in Winsted helping put the new shingles on. I hope he is having fun.

I am getting a lot done. Yesterday I got home in the early afternoon and it was so beautiful outside that I was feeling really motivated. So I cleaned out the chicken house for the winter, then thought I would start on the goat stall, which hasn’t been cleaned out since early last winter. It was a “back breaking” job because you can’t stand up in the stall even when there isn’t 8″ of *** on the floor. So I would work a while, then squat down to straighten my back, then work some more. Getting it out was not too hard, because I just pitched it out the open window into the waiting wheelbarrow. That also meant that I got to straighten up pretty frequently when I went out to haul the wheelbarrow to the middle of the garden and dump it. Once I got the hang of it (figuring how to maneuver the long handles in that small space was the biggest challenge!), I just keep chugging along until it was finished. I hadn’t thought I would be able to do it all in one day, but I did! And I am so excited to have it ready for the winter!

In the evening I headed out to my favorite Friday fish fry place for supper, to find out that they had closed on October 31. Bummer! So I came home and had leftovers and studied in the evening. Then I watched two of my new Feature Films for Families movies. Both were very good. I’ll loan them to whoever wants.

Today I made a long list and it is noon and I am right on schedule. I took the rest of the windows to the dumps, raked up some still-green leaves (see picture below) for the goats, bagged all the dried walnuts and brought them to 126 and closed up the greenhouse for the winter, studied an hour, boxed more stuff upstairs and hauled it over to the 117 upstairs (another hard job!) and am now on lunch break!

Here is a picture of what I found when I got home from work yesterday. Mind you, none of those leaves were there when I left about 5 hours earlier! (kind of spooky with the shadow, don’t you think?) And they don’t seem to have blown off, because they are in a nice even layer totally covering the ground directly beneath the tree.  I wish I would have seen them fall.

I had 17 people in my official first “absolute beginner tai chi” class today. Yup. 17. That is probably too many, but maybe a few won’t come back. Or maybe we’ll just go on with that many. Says something about the interest in tai chi around here, though. I need to get some classes set up in Rice Lake, Barron, Cameron, etc.  The class actually went really well, even with that many.

Only 10 more days until my exam. I am still studying 2 hours every day, so I’m really feeling like I’m getting it. I should be just about sick of it in 10 more days, though. Smart, but sick of it! And ready for the test, hopefully.

The neighbor gal was awakened last night by a noise and found the neighbor boy creeping up her stairs with a flashlight. She chased him out and called the cops. She is, admittedly lots bigger than him, but she was still quite shaken up by it. She’d already caught him stealing things from her garage and shed. We actually have to call the Barron County sheriff for stuff like that, so it was a half hour before they arrived, then another couple hours before they left. At any rate, we have checked the locks on our doors and put a padlock on the garage and Dad is over getting 117 lockable. The kid is only about 14 or so, but his dad doesn’t take it seriously. He excuses it because he is ADHD. Seriously, breaking and entering…? I’m really glad we have Sherlock.

A cute picture of the neighbor girls in their costumes yesterday.