Seven Quick Takes-- Come Holy Spirit, to this Mad House

1.) I made a cool thing for our gate! 

Cardboard and paint are kind of magical...

Decorating our front gate for holidays is apparently becoming my thing. I'm planning on hanging this on the gate for Pentecost Sunday. 

I made it with the remains of the cardboard heart I made for Divine Mercy Sunday this year, and I cut out, painted, and added the dove. It's not the best artistic creation ever, and it's maybe a little small to hang on a gate, but I think it gets the general idea across and I had fun making it. 


2.) So. Much. BUTTERNUT SQUASH.

This was taken a few days ago. It's increased since then. 

The garden has been very productive, which is great, but what am I going to DO with all of this?

Does it work in pie? Is butternut squash pie a thing? 

We also harvested our first cantaloupe of the season. 

It was a little under ripe, but not by much. Still tasty. 

I planted some seed I saved from a melon we bought at the store. Only a couple of seeds actually germinated and became vines, but those vines are insanely productive. Assuming no sudden plague or disaster (which isn't a given, it's actually been an insanely bad year for caterpillars) we should have quite a few ripening in the next week or so. 

3.) The school year is (mostly) over.

Chris's school where he teaches had an in-person, actual graduation ceremony...which they were able to pull off only by having all the staff and teachers wear masks and gloves, putting students and parents through in family groups rather than all at once, and observing strict social distancing protocol. Everyone not in line to go inside or currently graduating in the basketball court had to wait outside in their cars. 

So, it happened, but it was weird. And took four hours.

Every student sort of got their own little mini graduation ceremony though, so that was kind of cool.

4.) I had a chicken live in my walk-in shower for an afternoon.

Sleepy chicken...

One of my chickens is sick. She's acting really sluggish and not her usual self, so we brought her inside to isolate her from our other birds in case whatever she has is contagious.

Unfortunately the dim light in the bathroom meant she just slept the whole time, so we moved her out to an isolated yard and set up a 'hospital coop' for her. Hopefully she rallies, but we'll see. (The vets in our area don't accept chickens as patients, which is actually pretty common, so any care she receives is what we can do on our own).

 If she's not improved or visibly suffering in a week or so, we're probably going to have to euthanize her. Not a fun prospect, but part of having livestock. 

5.) We finished the tank, moved it, and laid line.

 

It was a very busy two days, and now the front yard is all sorts of chewed up, but we finally have that propane tank in place! Now all we have to do is hook it up to the house, fill 'er up, and we're good to go. 

I'm actually really proud of all the work my husband did in planning all this out: renting the Ditch Witch to dig the trenches to lay line, actually laying the line (and hooking our house up to our well so we're no longer dependent on municipal water while he was already digging), and putting it all together. It's exciting to see our little homestead actually start to look like a homestead. 

6.) I wrote a new page for my blog. 

Not gonna lie, I'm still getting the hang of screen shots. 

I discovered a few months back that it's possible to create pages that are always visible as tabs on Blogger, and not just posts that cycle through. This opens up some new possibilities. 

I've already created a bio page , but now I'm starting to experiment a little more with what else I can do with it. 

I think I may have overshot a bit-- I decided to make my next page a resource list for those who have suffered sexual abuse at the hands of the Church. It's a cause that is very close to me personally, and I like the idea of being able to offer something easily accessible for people who need the information, or just want to learn a little more about the issue. 

Next, I'll probably do something a little more normal and put a list of my most popular posts or something. 

7.) Cabin fever is beginning to take hold. 

I know this sounds crazy to y'all up north, but down here in South Texas it's already starting to get HOT. It's been very humid with all the rain we've been getting, the mosquitoes are numerous, and it's too hot (about 95 degrees in the afternoon) to spend time outside until about 5 or 6pm, when a breeze finally kicks up. 

So the kids have been spending more time inside, and I've found it much easier to slip into social media la la land and engage in stupid political Facebook arguments that take up way too much emotional and mental energy and leave me stomping around the house fuming. 

This is NOT an ideal combination, to put it mildly. 

I'm working on stepping away from my phone and social media, but I'm also desperately missing our local library right about now-- it was one of a very few air conditioned places that was both kid friendly and free. Stuff is slowly beginning to open back up, but the libraries have only gotten as far as offering curbside pickup.  

Which is great...but it just isn't the same. 

Oh well. I'll figure out something. 

See the rest of this week's takes here.