a little catch up (with those fries)

The "fries" part of that title, of course, has to do with the heat wave we're experiencing here in the northeast, with that past two days in the 100s. Yes, the 100s. That doesn't really happen here. Especially not two days in a row. Tuesday's temperature hit 102, which tied the all time heat record for this state. (Only twice before has it been that hot in CT.) And I'm pretty sure yesterday was even hotter, so that's a new all-time heat record. Sorry I lived to see that record broken....hopefully it'll never happen again!

But anyway, that is NOT what this post is about. This post is about everything that happened for the 10 days previous to those temperatures. Which was the 10 days The Map Man was home from work on his "vacation". We've not spent 10 whole days together since....since....well, it was well before the children were born, I assure you. And needless to say, we got a LOT accomplished during that time frame!


Of course, we did a bunch of work around the farm. We built an outdoor pen and shelter for our adolescent turkeys and moved them out there from the shed they'd been brooding in. It's a relief (for both them and us) to have them in roomier quarters. We also put in a new line of fencing in the sheep pasture to give them a bit more room to graze, and removed an old unneeded line. The Man cut the knee-deep grass in the front yard with a scythe (we'll rake it up and give it to the turkeys for bedding), because the sheep flock just wasn't able to keep up with the grass. He also weed-wacked here and there where needed, so that we're looking a bit more neat than we had been. (A very rainy spring meant a whole lot of tall green stuff!) We loaded up the van with our stinky old sofa pieces and a bunch of other junk and he did a big dump run (which we're hoping to repeat each weekend this summer to get rid of a bulk of the JUNK kicking around here). I cleaned the "farm bathroom" (aka, our laundry room, where this is also a toilet and sink that has been buried under above-mentioned JUNK for years) so that it is now actually a usable bathroom (gasp!). I cleaned the dog room - or rather, that half of the "family room" that the dogs spend the night in -- I cleaned out more JUNK, reorganized the JUNK that is actually staying, and put down a new flooring underneath everything in that half of the room.

I picked 66 new chicks up from the post office at the airport (where they arrived the same day they hatched in Ohio -- isn't the modern world an amazing thing?). We got them set up indoors, then moved them to the brooder shed at the end of the week when they outgrew their space, and once the turkeys were done using it. Some of these are already sold. Of the rest, half will be kept for laying, and half will be raised for eating. I took Cheer (one of our Collies) in to be spayed, took two of the other dogs in for required rabies vaccines, got Joy (the other Collie) started on meds for leaking urine (an old-girl-dog thing), and The Man got all 4 of them licensed. We moved some new-to-us furniture from a friend's house to ours. We found a great bed on the road-side with a free sign on it and hauled that home, too. We donated some unneeded furniture to the local theater group for our upcoming musical and hauled it there. We installed an air conditioner in the kids' bedroom window (just in time, too!).

We also had a bunch of fun. The boys played with the new chicks. We went to the lake. We went swimming in my sister's pool. We threw a 50th wedding anniversary party for The Man's parents, and enjoyed visiting with family we hadn't seen in quite some time. We went to dance class and musical rehearsals. We saw a couple of movies. (Toy Story 3 is much to intense for sensitive kids! Eclipse is perfect for vampire-and-werewolf-loving adults.) We went out for ice cream (repeatedly), and burgers, and picnics, and parties. We all went to the town's fireworks display, and The Man took the boys to a neighboring town's displays while I was at work one evening.

Even though we didn't go far or do anything too out of the ordinary, The Map Man declared it the perfect vacation.

And now he's back to work, and we're in the swing of our summer rhythms. Which I'll blog about more tomorrow. Or the next day. Or whenever I get around to it.

In the meantime, I want to give a shout out to Cameron, our 20-ish year old barn cat, who is clearly on the down slope of life at this point. I don't expect him to be with us much longer, but wanted to post a photo while he's still relatively healthy, albeit definitely showing his age. We adopted him as a young adult when we first moved here from a woman who rescued him from an abusive situation. He had a busted leg and head trauma when he first came to live with us (he had suffered a prolonged period of physical abuse and had been drop-kicked by his previous owner on the day the rescuer got her hands on him). He's named after the woman who saved his life. He was a top-notch mouser in his days, although he's been decided retired for several years now, and he has always been a friendly pleasant cat to have around, which is amazing considering what his first couple of years were like. He's a testament to the powers of healing of love and good care, and to the generosity of spirit that animals possess. The same can be said about all of our cats, actually. It's just Cameron's turn to shine.