Our Free Range Flock of Chickens!

  I looked out the window at dusk yesterday and saw our flock of chicken were dressed for the Christmas Holidays! The fact that they are there at all is a reminder ( for me) of the first time I got the courage to ask a beautiful girl out on a date! The fact that she said no, wasn't a great surprise, but her quickly proffered excuse cut VERY DEEP! I had heard I've got to study, wash my hair, just plain No- but NEVER anything that let me know just how low on the dating scale I ranked, she said........ I've got to go catch chickens!

 For the majority of you, who didnt grow up in the country, there's not much nastier, dirtier, or tiring ( short of cleaning out a hog pen or outhouse) than catching chickens! And catching chickens was more desirable than a date with me.

  Well I got up the nerve to ask again and this coming Sunday ( if we make it!) We will be married Forty-Five Years! We never once entertained having any chickens!

Its Been Over 38 Years

 Since we declared our house completed and moved in! Wow 38! Time flies and we have made so many memories in and around this home! Not the least of which was raising our daughter here! Although she has no desire to live here again ( not the house, but Texas- and unfortunately I dont blame her) We thought it was time to go ahead and finish "her" bathroom! Before you grow alarmed the toilet has always worked and there was hot water to the bath, most of the time! So we got started on it the other day! First up installing tile around the tub! I'm watching the U-tub videos while Renee' goes tile shopping! She has voted down my suggestion of stapling shower curtains to the studs!

She has agreed on keeping the Hardie board floor! It has a nice modern design!

 

 PS..... Hallie received a wonderful upbringing!! The foster family she lived with for nearly a year, and who loved her dearly, had a Big, for China, Modern Apartment! But the toilet was a hole in the floor in a porch closet- connected to a sewer line! Pretty standard for then! I used to threaten her with a picture of it but she always dismissed it as "photo-shopped"

I Dont Hunt Anymore,,,,

 But did for most of my life- not for trophy's but because we loved, and still do, wild game and fish! On our little piece of property, which was once in the country, and now is surrounded by thousands of home and ALL the requisite fast food places- we still have plenty of white tail deer in the neighborhood! Most of them, like this buck that ambled by our front porch a few days ago, are descendants of deer living here nearly 38 years when we built our house! Most males live about six years and females eight. So its roughly 5 generations we've seen. Its wonderfully nice to see how nature survives, and thrives in some cases, even as we re-shape this glorious earth  with so little thought for the future to suit our needs of the moment! It makes me hope that maybe we wont totally screw it up!

So its November the First

 Its almost exactly fifty years since I met her, this wonderful woman who just finished her Birthday Month! In spite of spending most of the days in that fifty years with me, she still has grown even more beautiful and most importantly, unlike my first date ask- no longer turns me down to Go Catch Chickens!