Wednesday, July 24, 2013

Wednesday Brain Dump

1.  Up with the birds (5:30am) to get Wyatt off to...



Desert Eagle Flight Encampment.  If you're on facebook, they may be posting pics over the next week and a half.  (I snagged these photos from last year's posts.)  He was SO EXCITED!  I know, he doesn't show it as much now that he's seventeen and all that, but I know he was pumped.


He'll be studying and flying and studying and flying and studying and flying...


... and may even get to solo before his graduation on the 4th.


2.  There are enough boys in my living room (mine as well as neighbors) right now that you wouldn't know one was missing.  They're playing some kind of game (Risk? Axis and Allies?) and probably trying to take over the world.  Boys.


3.  I've been watering some of my plants, and I'm not going to sneak around in spite of my moonbat enviro-mad neighbor.  This is the Pacific North West, for crying out loud.

I know in some areas of the country (and the world) fresh water is precious and hard to come by and must be conserved carefully.  I get that.  But we're not there.  The "greenies" around here want everyone to buy huge, ugly, black plastic rain tanks to put beside our houses, and catch rain from the gutters.

Right.

That sounds all environmentally responsible and great doesn't it?  But here... we get about nine months of rain.  The tank fills up in about a day or two and then is worthless.  Nobody needs to water anything.

Then we get about three consecutive dry months.  You empty the tank in July and then it sits there (UGLY!) and empty until October.

Meanwhile, God has provided (in our area) a wonderful way to store all that glorious precipation:  SNOW.  The high mountains are covered with snow from about October until June.  The warm spring and summer weather melts the snow, and gravity brings it right down to us.

I'm watering my flowers.


4.  Gunnar got the Sunburn Itch from H*ll last week.  He's definitely my most dramatic child, and prone to tell me Every Single Little Thing that has ever hurt, so I take his reactions with a grain of salt.  But this was different.  Two days after getting a sunburn he started to itch and nearly lost his mind.  It was epically horrible.  I finally got a brain flash that he might be having some kind of histamine flare (where did that come from?), gave him Benadryl and ice packs, and got him calmed down enough to be distracted by something on Netflix until he conked out.  Thank you very much, Top Gear.

Oh well.  Sleeping between 1:30 and 2:30 a.m. is definitely overrated.  Said no one ever.

Having done belated internet "research", have now realized he was NOT exaggerating.  Adults have been stark raving mad over the SIFH; some have even gone to the ER.  One blogger who described his experience and invited others to share their stores had over 750 comments, and still going.

Better restock the Benadryl...


5.  The summer is flying by and I have a birthday party to plan.  Kerry is turning fifty.  Yes, 

50!

A half a century.  So I'm planning a party.  And I'm borrowing a trick from my favorite newly-weds.  I'm sending out invitations without telling anyone where the party is.  

RSVP and I'll give you directions. ;D


6.   Brisket.  I bought a beef brisket on a good sale.  Suggestions for the best way to cook it?  Am leaning toward the crock-pot with sauce of ketchup plus onion soup mix.  You?


7.  I saved the best for last... baby bunnies!  How quickly (not even 48 hours old) they've gone from tiny naked hippos...

  

to adorable, very slightly fuzzy balls of cuteness.


Holland Lop Baby #1


Holland Lop Baby #2


And Holland Lop Baby #3


If I had to guess right now, I'd say they're all males and that two will be gray (like Uncle Podger) and one will be mixed white and gray (like Polly).  The third one was smaller from birth and is still smaller, but warm and lively so we hope he'll thrive.  

We brought Polly out of the nest and Tate held her while we let this baby try to take an extra feed mid-afternoon.  He certainly knew what to do and appeared to be suckling energetically, but it's hard to tell if her milk let down and he got anything.  Unlike humans, rabbits only nurse their babies a couple of times a day, so they've got to be efficient little eaters.  Hope he can get his share.  For now, he's warm and wiggly, so all signs are good :D

10 comments:

melanie said...

Never knew about SBFH :o

Awesome for Wyatt!
{add several more exclamation points!}

Brisket - I had a DELISH smoked brisket sandwich the other night at Claxon's in Altoona {in case you want to google their phone # and ask for a recipe ;-)} -- so my mind goes to potential marinade then a slow smoke in our wishful thinking smoker... Otherwise, slow and saucy in a crock sounds good too!

Herding Grasshoppers said...

Yah, I should've excluded smoker recipes as not possible. Sounds good, though :D

Anonymous said...

I found you off my sil blog out of miry clay. The Ephrata air port was in our back yard growing up. So cool to hear about Flight encampment. My son just finished basic encampment and is loving C.A.P.

Anonymous said...

#5, with no location without rsvp is a stroke of absolute brilliance and I will be putting the method to use for the rest of my life!

sara said...

Julie, I think you live in an old house too, so maybe you'll appreciate this bit of weirdness. One of our back gutters empties into a pipe and the pipe leads to another pipe which fills a cistern located under our dining room floor. I have no idea how we're supposed to get the water out if we need it, but at least it's not an ugly black plastic thing.

When we had a new system put in we actually saved our old water collection tank (from the basement, to hold well water) and it sounds a lot like the things you described. Eventually we'll probably hook it up under the gutter of the barn where no one can see it. :)

Herding Grasshoppers said...

Wow, Sara! is the cistern closed on top? What happens when it gets full?

Very interesting!

Julie

sara said...

It has a heavy cover and then a piece of the hardwood floor fits on top of that. When it fills, there is a run off pipe that empties it into the side yard which slopes down to a creek. It looks deep, can't see the bottom, kind of spooky and scary. It seems to be lined with concrete. We just bought this house at the end of March and it is just full of surprises like that.

Herding Grasshoppers said...

Interesting!

Felicity said...

Living in Sunny South Africa we've had plenty of sunburn, but I don't remember ever itching like crazy afterward... it gets a bit itchy when you start to peel, but not enough to need antihistamine!
I can't believe people worry about conserving water in such a high rainfall area! I suppose there are those that will find something to worry about no matter what! They should come live here for a while ;-)

I hope Wyatt enjoys his time - going solo sounds so exciting!

dlefler said...

1) Baby bunnies!!! Awwww... (clucky over here - I love baby anythings).

2) Your neighbor is NUTS. We live in a similar environment - more water than we can handle for most of the year, then a couple of dry months. We water our flowers. Hasn't she heard of the water cycle? Unless you live in the desert (I did, as a child, and we had to conserve water), there is no reason to let your yard go dry!

Side note: we live in a rural area so we also have regular bonfires. Air pollution is not an issue here. So we have fires in the summer AND water our yard. I think your neighbor would have a stroke if she witnessed our house in the summer, lol!