Yes, I’m writing a post on the Solar Eclipse day. We are pretty excited to live within the path of totality. All we have to do is walk out the door, put our glasses on, view it and then walk back into the house. I’m old enough to remember the one back in Feb. of 1979. I was 12 years old and we had to make one of those viewing boxes. I really can’t remember if it was a cloudy day or not. As I type this, I’m going in and out of the house watching the moon slowly cover the sun. My family is laughing at me because I taped my glasses to my face. Ok, maybe they are right to call me a dork. Eclipse is over. All I can say is the eclipse viewing glasses make it an amazing experience. The box we used at school in 1979 only showed the shadows. It was so amazing to actually see the moon moving in front of the sun. All the outside lights came on. The sunlight was really grey in color.

On Friday, Michael finished his first full week of chemo. He is now beginning to get tired easily. Coffee doesn’t taste as good to him anymore. We are grateful he can still eat. We are also grateful our “planted very late garden” is starting to produce nice healthy veggies for him.Although he has the next two weeks off of chemo, he will still go in on each Tuesday to get one of his medications. He likes it when we bring him an “iced kicker” from Dutch Bros. Here is Nicholas with a coffee for his dad.

Here is Michael in the cancer center getting his chemo. That is what his port looks like.

In the last post I mentioned the breeding method we would try this year. The gate was put in the boys pen and this week we put up the cattle panels to divide the upper pasture. We have not separated for breeding yet. Michael wants to avoid the January kidding we did last year. We will probably put them with  their buck sometime in September. Hopefully it will result in kidding sometime around March. As you can see in the picture below, we now have two areas for breeding to take place. Since the entire upper pasture is fenced in, we only needed to separate one area.

Here is one area. You can see we took the chicken’s outside fencing down. They are always all over the upper pasture. This side of the pasture will be for the second breeding area.

Here is the other area.

Here come the goats.

Notice how big the babies are?

Look at our berries. So sad. Not sure if it was the 14° weather we had for about a week or the flooding rains we had for MONTHS. No matter, most of the berries died. Our local nursery will get bare root stock in over the winter. We will buy some to plant in February. Oh, guess what. The chickens have discovered the berries. It has taken them three years but they have discovered them.  At least a couple of times a week we need to escort them out of the berry patch.

On the public school front, Joshua signed up for cross country. He amazes me. He is running five miles a day (prior to this he didn’t run at all) with his teammates. He is so sore and tired but he is keeping with it. This week we will find out both boys’ class schedule. I’m hoping they will walk the school and find out where each classroom is. Nicholas wants to sign up for basketball as a winter sport and track for the spring. Joshua also wants to do baseball in the spring.

The boys had their annual combined birthday air soft war party with about a dozen friends.

These boys young men, are very serious about air soft. I just wish they were serious about not forgetting so much stuff when they leave.

I started the summer pruning of five of the apple trees. The goats love the branches with all those leaves.  We are planning sometime in the future to cut down some of the apple trees. We have so many. We will cut down trees we don’t like (Red Delicious) and replace them with a more pear trees and  plum trees (Italian).

Thanx for following along on this varied journey of ours.

Blessings,
Karen