Rancho Blessings

 This is a shot of the garden boxes looking northwest from the neighbors long driveway. Part of the barn is visible at the left. Behind the garden boxes is the well house. Directly behind the barn is the dog kennel but this pic is a day or so prior to it being erected.





A hog farm is moving into the neighborhood and directly ...across....the.....street from us. This ought to be...um... interesting.

 Ain't she a beaut?! One of the many yellow crooked neck squash wending its way into our world. It'll be canned or sautéd or perhaps even dehydrated for later use (we have a dozen dehydrators so there are options).




We are pleased with our new 10' x 10' dog kennel/trash protection system. No more trash strewn from here into the next county. I just don't have time to do the cleanup work. I posted "KEEP OUT" signs but someone forgot to teach the critters to read. *Sigh*

The "igloo". What a handy gadget. She's covered with "SnoCoat" sealer and stiffened up a bit too. The new door and new floor are solid as a rock! We will park our gas and kerosene cans, propane tanks, and yard tools in here. The near end has 24" shelves while the opposite end is open for the cans. There is an option to get a diamond plate ramp, too. I may just use a chunk of plywood. Who knows.


"You've got bees!". If we can keep the ants defeated and if we can keep the bees happy, there should be a lot of honey around here next springtime. So far, so good. Yes...we do have an "EpiPen".

"Hey! A wascally wabbit!". Yeah...we have our share of wabbits around here. I killed and cleaned one a couple of years ago. It didn't taste at all like the ones from Kansas. Toooooo gamey for this old not-so-great white hunter. Perhaps at another time when the dog develops a distaste for what's now on her menu. She seemed to like my lovingly prepared rabbit back then.

We have corn in the ear so it won't be all that long before we can chunk an ear or two into the pot. I usually smother my ears with butter, salt, and pepper. It usually takes awhile to clean up my diligently engineered mess (two days is too much, eh?) so we don't do corn on the cob all that often.







Once in awhile I just feel like sharing some of the blessings that are happening here at the ranch. That’s particularly true when I sometimes rant a bit about how tired we get from being as busy as we are (is that proper sentence structure?).

We are truly blessed here at “Rancho Relaxo”. For instance, our garden is taking over the neighborhood. For it to grow at all is a major blessing given that we couldn’t beg the thing to cough up much of anything last year. Connie just harvested a handful of zucchinis and yellow crook necked squash for the sauté pan. They were quite good! The strawberries (remembering that we didn’t get a single berry last season) have overcome their hurdles and have bloomed to bounty!

The corn is as high as an elephant’s eye (which really isn’t all that high as I recall but it is growing rapidly). The squash is taking over the place and “Connie the Canner” will be slicing and dicing herself silly and shoving parts and pieces into canning jars soon.

The Okra Winfrey (groan) is growing by seems to be a bit lazy this season (as compared to last year when it had been replaced [by the Gypsies, no doubt] with plastic clones that didn’t do anything but take up space). Once it kicks itself into gear, we should have plenty to can, fry, and toss into a gumbo.

You may recall that the word, “gumbo” is the original African name for okra. Seems that white folks didn’t want to be associated with anything that black folks like. Still, they did like the rather tasty corn meal breaded and fried treat so they simply renamed it to "okra" (probably a shortened version of "Oklahoma fried! Rah! Rah! Rah!"). How convenient. Some folks say that they don’t like the slime but I would point out that, if they have slimy okra, they are boiling it by itself and not with other ingredients. Fried okras isn’t slimy at all and is one of the greatest of summer harvest delights.

The bell peppers are healthy so we can count on them for spicing up our soups and chili. We have reds, yellows, and greens which should give us some options. Options are our friends.

We have resumed out beekeeping efforts. Our dear friend and brother, Dave Kruze and his wife, Maryann, brought over a herd of them not long ago. After helping them nab another swarm, we now have 4 hives with 9 boxes. The bees appear to be prospering and have not registered a complaint by leaving their digs. This is particularly true after we fought off an attack of small ants. A few weeks ago, the ants plagued another new hive to the point that they up and moved to another neighborhood.

I donned my white space alien bee suit, gloves, and huge screened helmet, grabbed my smoker, and fed my charges some sugar water (with nutritive additives) to keep them going until they can store enough honey to hold them through the winter. It is post “bloom” season and they may not find sufficient flowering around here to warrant sticking around for the long haul.

Dave advised that we should leave the bees alone and not take their honey this year but rather to wait until next year. We can do that. It’ll be worth the wait because we will have a lot of orange honey (we have large orange groves nearby and have 20+ orange trees here at Rancho Relaxo). Good stuff!

Connie just overhauled our bathroom. She put in beautiful white wainscoting and painted the upper wall light blue. That will look great with the new 24” sink, counter top, and new fixtures that replaced the 19” one that was there prior. Also, she had a local contractor put in a nice set of white built-in floor-to-ceiling custom shelves that match everything. We had a tall-but-narrow stand alone shelf in there but it wasn’t big enough to suit us. There were some other tweaks that she had them do and it’s looking sweet.

The computer biz is moving along. I’m still the village blacksmith but it’s obvious that folks like me will not be needed in a few years. The technology is simply moving on without us. That’s not a bad thing. I can always focus more on ministry and such. I will always have a “dinosaur” running though. Fat on the “Cloud” and small screen toys! I need a full-sized e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g. Yes, I am an old Luddite, but I don’t care! I am comfortable with being an old fuddy duddy and I’m not apt to change any time soon (we fuddies don’t  cotton to change)!

Speaking of ministry and such, our church is doing great! We just had our monthly pot-faith (sounds better than pot luck, eh?) which reinforced the fact that there are some great cooks in our group! I dialed in on some homemade chili and couldn’t seem to keep my spoon dry. Good eatin’.

We also have the newly re-instituted “Soup Wednesday” which is on the second Wednesday of the month. Looks like we will have plenty of “daily bread” around there. I'm keepin' my trusty crockpot warm and at the ready!

The church is growing and we have much peace now that they have a leader who is a man of peace. There is still a lot of things that need to be attended to but we are moving along steadily.

 

Then, there's the "igloo". The "igloo" is actually an old fiberglass cargo container retired from "Flying Tiger Airlines" (bought out by FedEx) that flew countless miles in the belly of a Boeing 747. It's rather large and can hold all kinds of things. So, instead of building a small storage shed (we actually tried that once before and ended up with a barn!), we overhauled the igloo. Now that it has been fixed up, it's easily movable without having to use a D-6 Caterpillar. It didn't take all that long until it was patched, painted, and parked and sporting a new exhaust turbine and some shelves. The plan is to keep our tools and fuels in there. Our gasoline, kerosene (we have a lot of kerosene lamps), and our propane tanks have been in the open air in the pole barn as of late but that's going to change now that we have a lockable storage shed available.  

And, wait folks, there's more (your "Ginzu Knife" commercial for the day)! Sitting out by the pole barn, there's a recently assembled 10' x 10' dog kennel that makes for a perfect trash container enclosure. A tarp cover for the top is on order so we can keep our trash and rubbish tidy and dry. The local critters (of which there are no few) will have to learn to survive without our assistance (and someone needs to teach them to look both ways when crossing the highway too because some of them ain't paying attention).

Connie and I have been yard sale’ing a bit since the weather has warmed up. Talk about blessings! We stopped at an estate sale the other day and loaded up on some goodies that included some vintage books. We got a stack of 7 vintage hard bound books for about ten bucks. After getting them home, I started stuffing them onto eBay along with some books about Corvettes. Within three hours we had sold one book for 12 dollars and we had a starting bid on another for 19.95!  Connie loaded up three dozen canning jars for....$5.00! Zowie! She also found a country style bench flower stand too (which she took home and repainted it and made it look like new)! It fits the rancho perfectly!

At one place, just about everything we bought was for 2 dollars or less in spite of the fact that some of the items were quite expensive (i.e. there was a 105.00 pair of women's high heels from Nordstrom's that straightaway went on eBay)! They guy even sold me a 300 dollar color video camera for an RV (so you can see while backing up and such) for ….get this…40 bucks. It wasn’t junk either! He didn't want to sell it at all but he was being forced to move because they had lost their home (there’s a lot of that going on around here) and were up against the clock and literally couldn’t wait for better prices. They had to be out in two days and were basically throwing stuff at us and we had sense enough to catch it. If that doesn’t make your yeast rise, the same man called us back the next day and asked us if we wanted the entire tailings of the yard sale! We assured him that we did because (most of) it wasn’t junk! Ol’ Ran hooked up the trailer and we hauled it off for him!

Some of the "wasn't junk" stuff, was in a "junk box" that he was planning to take to the e-waste depot in Porterville. I advised him that I had an e-waste pile that a local man hauls off when we call and that I would be glad to take it for him. He was thrilled. I was thrilled too when I dug thought it and found a like-new cassette player. I guess his son was not all that excited about the old technology that has served so well for 40 years but I was! It can be used to record teachings at church until I can get a digital recording studio set up. A Compaq laptop was also in the mix. It was DOA but the power cord will sell on eBay for 10 bucks or so. The screen will sell for 25 dollars or more. There were other items of great interest in there that I didn't overlook.
 

At another yard sale, I picked up a box of “junk” electronics for 10 dollars that had four wireless LAN adapters in the bottom of it (each worth 30 clams)! There we also wireless access points, a wireless router, and all kinds of other goodies for a wire head like me. Then, there was yet another box of similar stuff that no one wanted so I bought that one for 15 dollars. I then tallied the two boxes and I quit counting when I got to about 250 dollars worth of stuff! Not too bad of a day for an ol’ computer dude, I’d say!

Last week a friend and client of ours got a new computer and called us to set it up for her at her place of business in Delano (about an hour southwest from here). After doing all of that, she gave us her old computer which actually had nothing wrong with it (her granddaughter hopes to inherit the new one and didn't want the old one. No problem). So, we now have a nice (though older) computer, flat screen monitor, mouse, and keyboard! Such a deal! We usually give stuff like this away to folks in the church after I tune it up and maybe even upgrade the operating system to Vista (seed to sow, don’tcha know).

Newly hatched grandbaby, Moire Annaliese Howden, is fat, happy, and sweet as a bucket of cupcakes. She is about 10 weeks old and couldn’t be doing better. Her parents are quite proud of this fifth edition to their clan. We went down to see the dedication at their church not long ago on the evening before Mother’s Day. The rest of the grandkiddies are doing great too!

Anyway, that’s the news from “Rancho Relaxo”. Stay tuned to see what is happening around here. I know that I can’t wait to find out just what new blessings will arrive and how the soon-to-arrive hog farm will work out without anyone getting killed. I wanted to do what the sign said and give them a shout “for more info” and ask, “Reckon how long will it take you to move back out?”.

Likewise,  the Schwinn Meridian (adult) tricycle is almost assembled. Can’t wait to take her for a stroll. Most likely, I’ll let the 1.25 hp Honda motor do most of the work, though. As you may have already noted, I am convenience oriented.

Don't touch that dial.