The Next Chapter in the Book . . .: Chapter 401

Sunday, July 16, 2017

Chapter 401

Happy National Spinach Day!

Reagan, and her family, came to stay for the night before they left for Montana as we are on the way, and they needed to drop the Bear off with us. Reagan has a hundred things she does while here and with one short evening, she had to get to all of them quickly and one of them is to water her garden.

She loves to water and dig in the garden.

She's already getting to eat from her garden.

It doesn't get much fresher than this!

Bear likes to eat fresh carrots out of the garden as well. He even knows how to pull them out of the garden and break them off the stems so he can eat them.

Bear also loves when Amazon packages are delivered and Grama retapes the box with some goodies inside.

After a nice long walk to the local park, he's ready for a nice long nap on the local dog bed.

We are going to Bend this summer and plan on floating down the Dechutes River. It's way cheaper to take our own floaties rather than rent them down there. Bob ordered a six pack of floaties for much less than we could have rented them and since we will have two cars down there, we can run our own shuttle and same some $$$! Then, we can sell them on the streets of Bend and not even have to bring them home.

We thought Chris and Carissa were going to leave Reagan here so they could make a kamikazi trip to Montana for a family wedding. The operative word here, being "family". They finally decided there was no way they could deprive the family of Reagan's presence and decided to take her along. I wholeheartedly agreed, except I had planned a butterfly educational activity for Reagan to watch while she was here. But I've had fun watching the stages of the butterflies since I haven't done this for a long time. My Auntie Karen used to grow butterflies with me when I was a kid.

I started with a jar of five caterpillars, packaged in a jar with food goo at the bottom and paper on the top for them to attach their chrysalis to:

which I put in upright in the pop-up mesh butterfly habitat.It even came with a little stand to put the lid into so the chrysalis can look cooler, I guess. If you really want to know, ask Chelsea.

And, after looking at the chrysalis until the mesh is practically worn out, 3 painted lady butterflies appeared without my observing them appearing. I missed the next two as well. Nitro loved the flitting activity of the butterflies and had knocked their mesh environment to the floor and climbed all over it. I'm sure that did nothing but give the baby butterflies PTSD for the rest of their lives!

The next morning I wake up to this. A dog in a doughnut:

And go downstairs to see this:

Nitro wasn't doing anything notable except sitting on the chair waiting for me to take a selfie of us.

Back in Reagan's garden, the corn is almost 6 foot tall and is tasseling out nicely. We beat "knee high by the 4th of July" by a mile. We should have our 4 ears of corn in time for our vacation when we won't be home to harvest it.

Green beans are getting nice and beanie...

...and the squash is getting nice and squashy.

I had a nice squash harvest today. Too bad I don't like squash. I think I got the squash and cucumber seeds mixed up. Let me know if you want any squash! Back in Indiana, my great-grandmother used to cook the big orange squash blossoms for a meal. This worked on the basic farm premise that anything that is not poisonous is edible. Squash blossoms are cheap structurew to hold up the egg or batter that the flowers are dipped in then fried in the bacon grease from the coffee can full of bacon and fat drippings at the back of the stove, yet another free source of food. Are you getting the idea how farm cooking works?

In the evenings Bear misses his family and bites on his blanket and sighs. For heaven's sake. What big ol' scary German Shepherd sits around with his blankie in his mouth?

Reagan and her cousins at the weddings with fans since it was really hot back there.

I'll watch butterflies all by myself for this picture. Grammy and Grampy Walker with both of their grandchildren, William and Reagan, in the same place at the same time!