Sweetgum Balls

Here you see one of the banes of our farm. . .

Yes, it is the pernicious sweetgum ball from the American Sweetgum tree.  Even in winter, they manage to litter the landscape.

In my estimation, there is nothing sweet about them.  The blasted little prickly “gumballs” are a nuisance.  They catch in the wool of the sheep and llamas, plus they litter the ground and are hard to walk on.

In fact, in California these rotten gumballs are known as “ankle biters” or “ankle twisters”.

They linger, not being prone to rapid decay.  Nope, they just hang around and make a nuisance of themselves, the unwanted guests.

Granted, the trees make shade.

But so do the oaks, walnut trees, hickory trees, and all kinds of other trees we have around here.  And they don’t leave prickly presents on the ground that gets into wool!

If I had my way, I’d cut down every sweetgum tree on the place.  Fortunately for the trees, The Farmer doesn’t agree.  But then he’s never been the one picking the nasty sweetgum balls out of fleeces.  They are hard on your fingers!

There ought to be a law against sweetgum balls.

Water Bowl Surprise

I never know what I’m going to find when I turn over one of the heated water bowls to dump out the old water. 

Back in October, it was a slug with eggs.  This morning, it was a Earthworm Spa.

Nice and warm, slightly moist… just the right kind of beauty treatment for earthworms!

Maybe I should start a worm farm!

P.S. If your heated water bowls are cleaner than mine, I don’t want to hear about it.  The roosters stand in this bowl frequently, and only a toilet bowl brush will scrub off all the grime.  And it’s too cold right now to play in water!  Besides, the water still looks pretty clean, even if the bowl doesn’t.

Right now the priority is clean water, not clean bowls.

Favorites For 2009

Here we are, with 2009 about to be a thing of the past.  I thought I’d do a summary of the year here at Rural Ramblings with a picture from my favorite post for each month.

I know I have a weird sense of humor, but the “Brain Freeze” post in January appealed to me.  It showed my flower pot people – the girl with a head full of ice and the dreaded BRAIN FREEZE, and boy keeled over, because, after all, you must have enough brain mass to prevent total freeze out…

And while in February my post about “Rowdy Roosters” continues to see a lot of visitors, MY personal favorite is “The Cutest Little Cowgirl.”

I know I’m biased, but I think Ellie is indeed the cutest cowgirl I’ve ever seen!

I had a hard time deciding on my favorite post in March.  I like the one I wrote after there was flooding, and I went for a walk in the woods when the waters went down.  There were all sorts of strange things, like a basketball, and yes, “There’s Something Fishy About The Woods” was appropriate, since I found a fish stranded in a very small puddle in the middle of the woods.

Still, I rather like the picture of our crazy cat, who instead of thinking he was a dog this day, decided he was a bird.

Just this once, Spot was “In The Catbird Seat.”

April is tornado season, and we had hail and high winds that brought down a big tree limb.  It landed partially on the den roof, and bent the gutter.

But for catching the action in progress, the “Really Rowdy Roosters” post about a couple of the roosters fighting for dominance won out.

l made several posts in May, but the minute I saw “The Odd Couple“, I knew it to be my favorite for the month.  It’s got a video of our silly little goat, Cinnamon, flirting with Samson.

Personally, I think the video is hysterical, but then, I DID mention I have a weird sense of humor.

June was a big month for chicks. Chicks here, there and everywhere!

Lots of the hens were hatching out chicks, plus I had a few chicken eggs in the incubator that hatched out.

Things were “Going Squirrely” in July. Lots of pictures in this post of – what else? – squirrels.

But I especially liked the video of the squirrel digging furiously in the yard to bury a nut.

I’m afraid my warped sense of humor continues to dominate for August, because I thought the parrot eating The Farmer’s tomatoes was funny.  She may look innocent. . .

. . . or maybe not.  One thing for certain, she sure manages to get into a lot of trouble!

I’ve been watching the turtles in our pond during the warm weather, and caught a big snapping turtle out and about in September.  This “Turtle Triathlon” had pictures of the turtle on land and in the water and on a log.

Fortunately, this snapper was not aggressive.

In October, I think “Lumberjack on the Farm” has the funniest video as I happened to catch The Farmer falling on his… butt.  But!  The funniest pictures are of our crazy parrot again, this time found hidden under the kitchen sink.

Then there was my tongue-in-cheek post in November about “Dead Animals Need Love” from a time when we came back from the store to see all the animals stretched out in the pastures looking like they were dead.

Thankfully, they were only soaking up sunshine and came “back to life” the minute I walked close and they thought I might give them a pet or a treat.

I didn’t even have to look through December to choose a favorite post.  For me, it’s the “Twelve Days Of Christmas, Country Style“, hands down.  What WAS hard was choosing which picture to put here.  I like them all!

It was a LOT of work, but I had a lot of fun doing it!

I’ve had a lot of fun looking at other peoples blogs too, of course!  I love to see any pictures Robin at Seasons Eatings Farm posts, both on her blog and Facebook.  She has some beautiful photos.  I especially enjoy the ones of pines and snow!

So anyway, here at the end of the year, I want to thank each and everyone of you that has dropped by to read Rural Ramblings.  And I also want to thank all of you out there with your own interesting blogs I enjoy reading.  I can’t name them all, but if I read your blog, I’ll have left at least one comment at some time or another!

I hope 2009 has been a good year for you, and that 2010 will be even better.  And don’t forget us  here at Rural Ramblings!  The welcome mat is always out for visitors to the Rural Ramblings blog.  I love to read comments from visitors.

Happy last day of 2009!

Black Rural Mailbox Is A Pushover

Normally, our nice big, black rural mailbox stands proud and tall, and it’s rare we get a package so big it won’t fit in it.

But one special delivery made our nice big, black rural mailbox a pushover.

I alluded to it earlier in my post “Leveling Things Up” when I mentioned the delivery guy asking The Farmer to use one of his levels cause he (the delivery guy) was here to fix our mailbox.

As you might have already surmised, it needed fixing because he ran into it when he delivered a package.  Now I’m not saying just what kind of delivery truck it was… we get the occasional delivery from the USPS people when something does NOT fit into our mailbox for instance.  And then there’s DHL, FedEx and UPS.  I don’t want the nice young man that was here to get into trouble, so unfortunately, I can’t show all the pictures I took, except one rather doctored up version where I changed the color and shape of the truck…

I believe, however, that you can see the truck wheel was stuck down inside a big ditch, and our mailbox was pushed over.

By the time our neighbor and the delivery guy were done getting the truck out of the ditch, the mailbox was completely out of the ground – they were afraid they were going to damage it so just set it to one side.  Once the truck was out of the way, they just leaned it up against the side of the ditch.

If you look close, you can not only see the ruts in the ground from the stuck truck, but you can see the post is set in a block of concrete which is just laying up against the side of the ditch.  Well, that didn’t last long until the mailbox fell over onto the road.

I went out and tipped it over to the opposite bank so it would be out of the roadway.

The Farmer had to put some big concrete blocks around it the next morning, so it would be upright and where the mail carrier could get to it.

Then the following Saturday the delivery guy came and fixed the mailbox.

So once again, our nice big, black rural mailbox is standing nice and tall, albeit a few feet further down the road.

Let’s just hope there are no more special deliveries that involve ditches and pushed over mailboxes!

Leveling Things Up

Okay any married ladies reading this, I’m just wondering. . .  when your husband loses something, does he ask you what YOU did with it?

The Farmer may protest otherwise, but it seems to me that when something gets misplaced around here, I hold a very responsible position.  That being that somehow, I’m always held responsible.  Not to say I don’t lose my fair share of stuff and then some, but it’s not ALWAYS my fault when we can’t find something.

Recent case in point… Saturday the delivery guy was here to repair our mailbox.  (That’s a story for another day…)   He was setting the post in concrete, and asked The Farmer if he had a level.

Well, he does.  A couple of them in fact.  But he couldn’t find his shorter level.  Later that afternoon, when he was back inside, he wanted to know what project the Cave Geek and I had been working on, and what we’d done with his level.

I informed him we hadn’t been near his level.  I’m not sure he believed me.

Now fast forward from Saturday to this morning.  We’ve got a bunch of roosters penned up, and one of the hens managed to crawl through a little hole and get in with them.  Now one hen in with 9 or so roosters makes for a bad scene for the poor hen.

I managed to chase her inside their building, and shut the cat door leading inside. 

Okay, I know that sounds weird to have a cat door in a chicken house, but cat doors really make great little doorways for chicken houses, because you’ve got a neat sliding panel you can take in and out.  It really comes in handy sometimes, like today.

Anyway!  I slid the panel shut on the cat door, and opened the people sized door to get the hen.  Bet you can’t guess what I found?!

Yep, sure enough, there was the level The Farmer was looking for Saturday.

It’s like this, sometime back he was putting in some new roosts for the roosters.

And I guess he wanted to be sure the roosters weren’t tilting while they slept, and used his level to get the roosts… well, level!

Once I took a picture of the incriminating evidence, I carried the level around to The Farmer’s workshop, and hung it on the peg board.

See, there it is!  It’s probably not in the exact spot The Farmer would hang it, but I don’t think he can miss it.  The level is back in place, and just so everyone knows….

I WAS NOT THE ONE WHO LOST IT!