Fluttering, fleeces, a fright, and Father's Day

The hurrier I go, the behinder I get – at least on my blog! As a result, you are going to get a several-course meal, should you choose to partake. I'm already losing track of what happened which day, so these are all from "recently."

A red-winged blackbird visited us! I've see them down in the valley but never before at our feeder, so I grabbed my camera to document it.

Oops.

I try to document my lambs' progress when I can. Friday I got photos of two ewe lambs I'd really like to keep, Bernadette and Bette. Bernadette is the moorit (dark); Bette is the musket (lighter). They are cousins and half-sisters, having the same sire and out of ewes who are full sisters. Bette has an incredibly soft fleece, plus a long topline, perfect tail, and "a leg in each corner." Bernadette isn't quite as soft but measures up everywhere else, with the bonus of not having the fading gene. She also has pizzaz. ;-)

Then there's Bogie. He is the biggest lamb by far, with tiny "chocolate chip" scurs and a lovely musket fleece (although he looks dark in the photo above). I'm undecided about his future. His tail is long; while he could yet grow into it, do I want to wait and see or just wether him now? Such are the decisions of a shepherd.... Anyway, as big as he is, he always seems to lead the charge of escapees. Does THIS look like a sheep pasture to you?

How about this? Little truants; they wander around sampling things they shouldn't and collecting trash in their beautiful baby fleeces. The only one who rarely leaves the pasture is Bacall; I guess she's a mama's girl.

My dahlias didn't survive our wet winter, which is giving my Stella D'Oro dallies room to shine in my island flower bed. The white flags are thick this year, and the spirea are blushing pink.

I saw the beauties below in someone else's yard over the weekend. I have no idea what they are; they look like exotic orchids!

Just in time for the official start of summer, our weather has turned hot. Sniff; I miss the cool temps and lovely clouds already.

The other night I headed out for evening chores and saw color in the west. We don't have an unobstructed view of sunsets from our house, so I hiked up our gravel road to get a better look.

Saturday night while we were brushing our teeth, the water in our faucets spit, sputtered – and QUIT. We figured that either our pump died (we haven't replaced it in the 22 years we've lived here) or our well dried up (a dread of mine; it only gives 4-5 gallons/minute but it's the sweetest water I've ever tasted). There was nothing that could be done about it then, so we went to bed and tried not to think about another big-ticket item to add to the list (our dishwasher is on the fritz, my car needs a new intake manifold, and $1k worth of hay is waiting for us to pick up next Sunday).

On Father's Day morning we assessed what we needed to get by until we could call a well service company Monday morning. Rick called our neighbor down the hill to see if we could fill a couple water barrels at their place, and Dennis offered to help Rick trouble-shoot a couple things. Six months ago he had to replace his pressure switch, and thought that might be our problem. Praise the Lord and our wonderful neighbor, it was! He sent Rick off to Lowe's for parts, then came back up to help Rick install them. When water began flowing through our pipes again, it was with better pressure than before. We are so, so thankful!

Rick picked strawberries from our patch for the first time last week. For Father's Day, I made some of his favorite foods for dinner, including a strawberry rhubarb pie. Last night, he and Brian picked strawberries again, and got four times as much as the first picking.

They picked, so I prepped. Twelve pints are now in the freezer.

When I finally fell into bed at midnight, fumes of freshly offended skunk wafted through my open window. At least our dogs were in for the night!

That's it for now from . . .