Monday, August 1, 2016

Social life delays blog... normal programming has now resumed!

Well, I'll tell ya! you miss one deadline and the phone starts ringing off the hook - Who knew that so many people rely on our hum drum bi-weekly blog for their breakfast read, and when it doesn't appear UGH the results are terrifying!

So here we are, and the reason for the days delay will be explained soon!

We have a garden shed - it's lovely and it has lots of room to store gardeney type stuff!!

Note the handles, we sorted through many piles of driftwood to find them...


Lots of room....



Nice job Mr M.....



And now Mr M is busy building another shed (being English you can never have too many sheds!)

He is now building a bigger pump house which is going to sit on the backside of the barn and will eventually be attached to our water storage tank!

First he set concrete formers to make it level.  The floor was framed..


Then he put down plywood for the floor...


 
Now he is framing the walls and the roof...
 




By the time the next update happens it should be finished and we will be moving on to clearing and leveling ready for our water tank.

He also went and met with the planning guy, the house plans are all fine and pretty much at a point to submit as soon as we are ready to start.  Still deliberating starting now v's early next Spring, if we complete the footings this year we are effectively building a swimming pool ready for the winter rain, which isn't ideal, so it's still a decision in progress!

So what else has been happening? the garden continues to provide, we have been enjoying all the usual suspects and plus I have been trading my cucumbers for salad from my friend Betty!

All this harvesting got me thinking and contemplating about good old Captain Birdseye and his peas, who cares about what came first "the chicken or the egg", or the good old "what is the meaning of life" crap!  What I want to know is how the heck does the Cap'n produce all those peas!!!!!!  I mean seriously there must be an entire state/country dedicated to the production of peas...

This fairly big bowl.....

 
Produced this fairly paltry amount of perfect green peas...
 
I challenge you NOT to ask this question next time you are eating peas!
 
I also went to the local beekeeping association monthly meeting in Gold Beach.   I am definitely planning to add a hive to my garden in the Spring so I want to be as comfortable and ready as I can be and so am trying to educate myself before I get my hive.
 
It was really interesting, everyone was very nice and friendly and full of advice.  That's the thing with clubs, everyone is an expert and wants to tell you how to do it, but one gentleman did say that the important thing to remember is "the bees haven't read the book and every swarm bee-haves differently"  he encouraged me to read lots of books and get prepared and attend as many meetings as I can so that I have people who will answer my questions.
 
Part of the meeting was a kind of "show and tell" where they demonstrated different ways of extracting honey from the frames, we all got a taste and it was DELICIOUS!! 
 
I am planning to go again plus one of the gentlemen invited myself and Betty to take a tour of his hives sometime, so I am hoping to do that soon!
 
We went out to one of our local farms to do some "u-picking" - Valley Flora Farms http://www.valleyflorafarm.com/  
 
We got strawberries and also thornless blackberries which are enormous, much bigger than wild blackberries and very sweet. 
 

I've been jammin'!


And finally the reason for the much talked about delay, this last weekend Cape Blanco has been hosting the 3rd annual Cape Blanco Music Festival, where they play both kinds of music - Country & Western!!! 

http://capeblancofestival.com/

About 20,000 people descended on our sleepy part of the world and set up camp, completely nuts!! we didn't venture too far not wanting to get tangled up in that demon "traffic".  BUT then our lovely neighbors across the way had managed to "score" some free tickets for the last night we decided to go along and see what it was all about!

To summarize, it consisted mostly of cowboys, short shorts, dust, deck chairs, food, honey buckets (portable loos), cowboy hats.. lots and lots of cowboys hats, cowboys, campers and again short shorts and cowboy boots!

What a laugh, it was great fun, mostly as it is the biggest gathering of people that we have been to for a long time, remember we live in a town of an official population of 1,190 people, give or take a few neighborhoods!  so I was able to get my yearly fix of people watching and standing in line all over and done with in one night!

Kenny Chesney (famous to us non-C&W fans for being married to Renee Zellweger for about 2 months) was the headline act, he put on a great show and despite not knowing hardly any of his songs I did recognize this catchy tune!!

Here's a tune for you Dad!!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWu4aynBK7E
 

 
We had a really fun night, but it is safe to say that these Rockers won't be moving over to the dark side anytime soon....
 
 
 


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