What’s Taters Precious?

Boil ’em, mash ’em, stick ’em in a stew! Potatoes are the staple crop of our homestead, they have only slightly fewer calories than corn or wheat and produce many times more actual nutrition per acre than any other staple crop, except for maybe rice.  But potatoes have the advantage in that they can be grown in a relatively small space, and they will give you a crop even in poor clayey soil and even in partial shade…not as good a crop if conditions were ideal, mind you, but you’ll still get a few good sized taters per plant even in the worst of conditions!  They also have the added bonus of being a “stealth crop”, which makes them most excellent for an “end of the world as we know it” survival type situation.  Most people know what corn and wheat look like, but fewer than most know what a potato plant looks like and the crop is grown underground so that even if would be bandits or looters tried to steal your crops (or raze them and if your crop got razed the potatoes would be protected underground..) more than likely not fully understanding agriculture, they would never think to dig below the plant to look for something edible, ’cause after all, most people are stupid…and when it comes to potatoes you can use that to your advantage! 😀

From this year’s harvest: Red Pontiac, Adirondack Blue and Yukon Gold Potatoes

Potatoes are also easily prepared and paired up with something like homegrown eggs for breakfast or with a nice homegrown roast chicken for dinner, maybe with some steamed homegrown snap beans and a homegrown green salad on the side maybe with homegrown hardboiled eggs on that salad and you have a 2 very full and filling meals!  They also pair well with our goat’s milk and cheese that we produce and can be utilized in so many diverse and numerous ways that there really is no excuse to NOT grow potatoes (unless you don’t have the climate for them ’cause they don’t really like super hot dry weather..) Potatoes are very easy to grow!  I have been growing potatoes every year since the summer of 2008 and the most we have ever grown is about 30 pounds but I hope to grow a lot more than that in the future.   My most favorite is Yukon Gold but I also like Red Pontiac and the good ol’ reliable Kennebec potato.

chitting potatoes on windowsill

They are most often planted in spring, but can be planted in early summer for a late fall harvest.  About 4 weeks before your last frost take your seed potatoes and cut them so that there is at least 2-3 eyes per potato piece and stick the pieces in an egg carton or on a tray and put them in a sheltered brightly lit cool, but not freezing, area like near the window of an unheated room. After about 2 weeks they will have grown little sprouts (this is called “chitting” by the way). About 2-3 weeks before your last frost, a few days before you plan to plant them, dig some very deeply dug rows (at least 12″ but down to 24″ is not unheard of, the deeper the better!) in moderately fertile soil with some compost worked in.  Space the rows about 36″ apart on the center and plant the chitted potato pieces about 6″-8″ apart and 4 inches deep in the rows, but you wanna dig the trench about 1 foot deep and pile the soil to the side in between the rows ’cause we wanna bury the plants as they grow…this way we get way more potatoes per plant! In a few weeks the little potato plants will sprout up out of the ground, when they get about 4 inches tall bury the bottom 1-2 inches with soil and every time the plant grows a few more inches keep filling in the trench with soil never burying more than 1/2 of the plant at one time.  Keep doing this until the trench is filled and even mound the soil around the plants once they begin to grow out the the trench.  All of the potatoes always grow above the seed potato so the more space between the seed potato and the top of the soil, the more room there is for potatoes to grow. After the plants flower and then die back to the ground it’s then time to dig your potatoes…and it’s as simple as that! 😀 Besides the obvious baked potato or mashed potatoes, or the classic “snap beans and taters”, my favorite way to eat our homegrown potatoes are as fried potatoes (also called homefries) fried in chicken fat from some homegrown chicken sometimes with added homegrown onions, peppers, garlic and parsley. I love it for breakfast with fried eggs!

snap beans and potatoes cooked together in the same pot

homegrown fried eggs and taters

There is also potato salad, of course, made with homemade mayo using fresh egg yolks from our hens along with homegrown onions and a mixture of homegrown sweet and mildly hot peppers, with finely chopped homegrown hardboiled eggs and sometimes I add in finely chopped homegrown cucumber too.

chopped boiled taters ready to be made into potato salad

And then there is the deluxe supremo of potato dishes: Scalloped Potatoes!  Thinly sliced homegrown potatoes covered in a medium white sauce made from our homegrown goat’s milks and finely chopped homegrown onions and garlic, with a bit of flour and butter added for thickening and baked in the oven until the sauce is all gooey and the potatoes are falling apart tender *drool*

potatoes sliced and ready to be made into scalloped potatoes

the finished scalloped potatoes

As you can see, when using potatoes as your staple crop, you can get many meals for little work and without needing a whole lot of growing space.  Livestock will also eat cooked potatoes and chickens will eat potato peelings (although I really don’t ever peel the potatoes unless I absolutely have to ’cause doing so removes half the nutrition..) as long as they are not green, compost any green peelings along with the dead potato plants once you dig the potatoes.

Homestead Diet Day Six

Okay okay I know I said I would have some yummy food things to share today, but things didn’t really go as planned yesterday (do they ever??) and I got caught up in working outside in the delicious 65 degree weather instead of stuck inside the house cooking and preparing food. (I made a HUGE batch of crockpot chili in the A.M., for the family, which cooked all day long while I worked).

I repaired and re-posted the fence on one of our garden plots that got flattened by extreme wet heavy snow that we got in March and I also cleared out brush (damn mulitflora rose invaders, the bane of my existence! 😡 ) that were trying to take over my apple tree saplings.  I mulched the strawberry plants with wasted goat hay (they waste SO MUCH hay!) and planted more radishes, and more lettuce, and cleared out the back garden plot to prepare for more peas and to plant my first plot of snap beans for the year…and ALL of that work took up the majority of my day!  But it sure was fun! 😀

Here is what I ate:

Another “green smoothie” for breakfast (we’ve used up about half of our 10 POUNDS of spinach so far..)

Radishes, spring onions and goat cheese and iced green tea for lunch

And a HUGE spinach salad with fixin’s and herbs from the garden along with 3 hard boiled eggs for dinner and a big glass of RAW goat’s milk

Sorry to cut this short again, but there is much to be done and I’ve got not much to say right now.  I’ve been completely satisfied with my diet thus far and not even been very hungry, except for after doing a lot of hard work and then I am famished …and that’s when spinach never tasted SO GOOD lol

Homestead Diet Day Four

Today is measurements day!

Current Measurements…

Bust: 39 3/4″ (same as last Thursday) Started at 41″

Waist: 33 1/2 ” (1/2 inch loss since last week!) Started at 35″

Hips: 45″ (same as last Thursday) Started at 46″

So far, since April 11th when I began this quest to lose weight, which recently morphed into “The Homestead Diet”, I have lost a total of 3 3/4″ inches! 😀

There is a reason I do these measurements on Thursday, and I will tell you, it’s because if I overeat or eat the wrong things I am most likely to do so on Friday or Saturday and that gives me a whole week to get my diet back in check and on the right track before my next measurements day on Thursday…just a bit of sneakiness on my part 😉

Continuing with “The Homestead Diet”, in which I eat only things that we’re grown here on our homestead (zero calorie flavorings and seasonings being allowed), here is what I ate yesterday:

• A green smoothie consisting of 12 oz. of our goat’s milk, 3 egg yolks from our hens, and 20 LARGE spinach leaves from the garden, along with a bit of stevia, vanilla extract, almond extract and nutmeg
• A spinach salad with radish and swiss chard sprouts that I thinned from the garden, along with radishes and spring onions from the garden, dressed with RAW apple cider vinegar, salt, pepper, and a finely minced clove of garlic that we grew last year (garlic is almost all used up though!) and 2 hardboiled eggs from our hens
• And then 2 eggs scrambled and topped with homemade goat cheese and sauce leftover from Tuesday night’s dinner (it was REALLY good!  the sauce seemed to take on more flavor on the second day..) along with a 12 oz. glass of our RAW goat’s milk

Total Calories: 1,266

As for exercise yesterday, really just more of the same…milking goats twice a day, hauling water buckets twice a day, weeding and digging in the garden, planting TONS of lettuce seeds and harvesting more garden goodies, also picked whole bunches of dandelion blossoms for making some homemade dandelion wine and violet blossoms for making a violet complexion lotion for the face….I do these things every year in the Spring Time 🙂

violet blossoms, they grow ALL OVER the place here in the Springtime

Violet Complexion Lotion: Steep 1 heaping cup of fresh violet blossoms in 1 cup “blood temperature” 95-100 degrees milk (preferably raw goat’s milk for best results) for 24 hours, strain the liquid and use on face and neck like a toner…it’s especially good for oily skin (store in fridge, lasts about 1 week)…you can also eat the blossoms, we like to put them on our salads to make them pretty 🙂

Homestead Diet Day Three

A.K.A “Wherein I gorge myself on spinach” 😉

So, ALL that spinach!  We’ve been eatin’ it that’s for sure!

  First, it was “green smoothies” consisting of 2c. of our goat’s milk, 4 egg yolks from our hens, 20 LARGE spinach leaves, a bit of stevia and a dash of nutmeg..and it was very surprisingly good!  I made three batches of smoothies and everybody in the family had some, even the toddlers 🙂

my 2 1/2 year old daughter, Charity, with a mouth full of spinach…who says toddlers don’t like vegetables? 😉

Then we had spinach salads, a new batch of homemade homegrown cornbread and our goat’s milk for lunch.  (Charity has juice in her cup in the picture ’cause I gave her grape juice after she finished all her milk..)

And then for dinner, Nathan and I had Indian Food (this dish was too “sophisticated” for the kiddos -ewww mom it looks like throw up- so I made something else for them..).  A recipe that I found online while searching for spinach recipes, called “Palak Paneer”.  It involves an Indian Cheese called paneer, one which I am quite familiar with as it was one of the first cheeses I ever learned to make from our goat’s milk.  Super simple to do!  For the recipe, click here.

the cubed paneer and chopped fresh cilantro from the garden

I used this recipe for the dish, with a few minor changes.  I used RAMPS instead of onions and fortunately we still had a few jars of canned tomatoes leftover from last year, I also used homegrown garlic and garam masala for the seasoning.  And instead of the fresh green chilies I used a few shakes of our own homegrown habanero flakes and it was PLENTY spicy! lol

the finished dish with cilantro sprinkled on top

Total Calories: 1,512

The Homestead Diet Day Two

I did not eat much yesterday at all, and surprisingly I didn’t even feel very hungry.  I did do a lot of work in the garden though, I have decided that I am going to go as long as I can with this homestead diet and that thought has renewed my efforts in caring for the garden and for the land.  I planted more lettuce, radishes, and swiss chard yesterday and thinned out radishes and swiss chard seedlings that were already growing and I erected a “trellis” of sorts for some green peas that are getting too leggy now.   Peas only need about a 3ft. tall trellis so I used branches that I had pruned off the peach trees, ones with all the little twigs on them and stuck them in the ground along the row, all of these branches were about 3-4 ft. tall and the little pea vines will grab on and grow right up ’em without any problem.  We grow A LOT of peas ALL OVER the garden and in places where it would be impractical to erect a permanent trellis, so using fruit tree prunings is a great way to support the peas without much work and when the peas are done I just pull the branches out of the ground and burn them with the rest of the brush that is always being constantly cleared from the land it seems.

This homestead diet has brought to my mind at least one piece of equipment that would be VERY helpful, and that would be a milk separator!  That way I could separate the milk from the cream and use the cream in more ingenious and inventive ways, like for instance I could make goat butter to put on our homegrown vegges or homemade ice cream using a custard mixture of goat cream and eggs from our hens with stevia as a sweetener.  And it would be really nice to have cream in my coffee again too!  ((we’ve had goats since 2009 so it’s been that long since I have used cream in my coffee)).  I can’t decide if I should get a manual one or an electric one though…I’m usually partial to getting electric, just at first,  just to make things easy until I get in the routine of using such a device and then eventually switch over to a manual one.  That was what we did when we started grinding our own flour, first we got an electric grinder, which worked great but it was so loud, I could not even stand to be in the same room with it when it was operating so we very quickly switched over to a manual grinder and sold the electric one on E-Bay, even made a profit on it 😀  But this time I might just go for it and get the manual one, they seem to be running between $150-$200 and there is one type that even comes with it’s own butter churn…

RAMP and goat cheese quiche with spinach salad, I ate ALL this and then went back for seconds lol

So, here is what I ate yesterday:

1/2 of 1 whole RAMP and goat cheese quiche w/ a side of spinach salad topped with radish and swiss chard sprouts that I thinned from the garden

2 pieces of leftover cornbread from the day before

12 oz. of goat’s milk

Drinks: Coffee w/ goat’s milk, iced green tea, and water

Total: 1,231 calories (not much I know, but honestly I was not hungry!  it’s so weird…)

Now, for today, it’s time to tackle the 10 POUNDS of spinach that we picked over the course of the past few days! 😀

dat be 10 POUNDS of spinach

What is a Luddite?

Luddite.  It’s an old term, one dating all the way back to 1811.  According to wikipedia:

“The Luddites were 19th-century English textile artisans who violently protested against the machinery introduced during the Industrial Revolution that made it possible to replace them with less-skilled, low-wage labourers, leaving them without work. Historian Eric Hobsbawm has called their machine wrecking “collective bargaining by riot”, which had been a tactic used in Britain since the Restoration, as the scattering of manufactories throughout the country made large-scale strikes impractical.
Although the origin of the name Luddite is uncertain, a popular theory is that the movement was named after Ned Ludd, allegedly a youth who had smashed two stocking frames 30 years earlier, and whose name had become emblematic of machine destroyers.  The name evolved into the imaginary General Ludd or King Ludd, a figure who, like Robin Hood, was reputed to live in Sherwood Forest.

The movement emerged during the harsh economic climate of the Napoleonic Wars, which saw a rise in difficult working conditions in the new textile factories. The principal objection of the Luddites was the introduction of new wide-framed automated looms that could be operated by cheaper, relatively low-to-unskilled labour, resulting in unemployment among the skilled textile workers. The movement began in Nottingham in 1811 and spread rapidly throughout England over the following two years. Handloom weavers burned mills and pieces of factory machinery, and for a short time the Luddites were so strong that they clashed in battles with the British Army. Many wool and cotton mills were destroyed before the British government suppressed the movement.

In modern usage, “Luddite” is a term describing those opposed to industrialisation, automation, computerisation or new technologies in general.”

I remember the first time someone called me a “Luddite”, and at the time I had no idea what it meant, I had to look it up and do a bit of research, but they were exactly right and they paid me a very high honor by referring to me as such…although I’m pretty sure they meant it as an insult 😉

After “Luddite” comes the word “Hypocrite” because here I am using a computer 🙄

Hypocrisy, however, is the default setting of humanity…we ALL hold ideals that we can never live up to in full…but a hypocrite is one who takes his own standards and ideals, that he cannot live up to, and places them upon another, excepting them to do what he cannot or will not do himself.

I do not do that, I do not care what others do as I am not responsible for the consequences of their decisions…so, why should I care?

No, I may be a Luddite, but I am not a hypocrite.  I am another term altogether, one lost and forgotten, I am an “idealist”.

I think about what I do before I do it, I entertain the possible consequences and ramifications of every decision that I may or may not make and then I determine the best course of action to take (my ideal) and then I proceed to live as close to that ideal as I possibly can, always failing of course, because, after all, that is what we humans do…

“Thus saith the LORD, Stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls.

But they said, We will not walk therein.” ~Jeremiah 6:16 

An ideal is a principle and it has to do with one’s foundational belief system.  I, for one, do not believe that so-called “progress” is necessarily such (and the opposite is called “congress” 😉 )  that most of the technological inventions since the advent of the industrial revolution have actually caused more HARM than good.

I do not believe that work is evil and something to be avoided at all costs.  I do not believe that just because something can be done “faster” that it is necessarily always the better way.  Because I already know the ending, I am more concerned with the process of life than with the so-called “results”.

Life on earth is all about processes, everything is constantly changing, even those things that on the surface still appear the same, everything is in a constant state of degrading and dying…everything on this planet from the moment it is formed begins to decay…it is through these natural cycles of birth and death, of grasping and letting go, that we learn the true spiritual lessons of reality.

“Technology” and machines thwart this natural way of things and that is precisely why mankind, as a whole, loves it so!  But the “natural way of things” (The Old Path, The Good Way) is there for our benefit and for our learning.  The average person in our day and age has the mentality of a toddler though fully grown, just listening to the popular songs on the radio I come across lyrics such as “all eyes on us, all eyes on us” – “I want it, I want it, I want it all” and “I wanna scream and shout and let it all out” and I get the feeling that I’m listening to songs written by toddlers, which is so very telling when looking at the mentality of the population as a whole.

Having been born into a mushy, comfortable, bland existence where they’ve sat on their asses and watched TV for the majority of their lives, being always well fed and well clothed, not having to actually work for anything or even witness the process of work that went on to keep their bellies filled and their backs clothed, having everything they ever wanted and more at the touch of a button or the flick of a switch.

Not even allowed to be able to come to a proper understanding of the most basic process and spiritual principle, that of sowing and reaping, which is in real time learned through the process of planting and growing food, food which is the most basic and intrinsic human need that we all share…it really shouldn’t surprise me that the lyrics of the most popular songs sound like they have been written by toddlers, because the people writing them have never been allowed to develop past the mentality of toddlerhood.

And why?

Because it is through hardship and difficulty that people learn to not be selfish toddlers, and because of technology life has become too easy, so people are never allowed to encounter the necessary struggles and dilemmas that cause a person to grow beyond themselves.  Growth is never achieved willingly, we are too much creatures of comfort for that 🙄

When I was a kid, I had all kinds of questions all of the time, and I was not trying to be rude or annoying with those questions.  On the contrary, what I was trying to do, in the most basic and efficient way possible, was learn of the processes of life that make up this planet.  I remember as a kid, feeling like I got jipped somehow, that I was put on this planet under false pretenses.  I always remember thinking to myself, “this is not the experience that I was promised” of course I never said a word of that to anyone because no one would understand.

When I became an adult, and was finally fully in control of my own life, I decided within myself that I wanted the full “earth experience” ..blood, and guts, and sweat, and tears, and pain, and sorrow, but in the midst of it all the amazing love and beauty and joy and peace and satisfaction that can be found…that is the paradox of Earth.  God said “ask for the old paths, the good ways” and if that is what HE suggested then, in my mind, that was the best way to go!  Up till that point, my earth experience had SUCKED, there was nothing to do but sit on your ass and watch TV.

I wanted to be an active participant, not an interested spectator.  I wanted to get my hands dirty in the dirt and plant things and watch in amazement and delight as these little inconspicuous seeds became a plant, and each one different, and each one unique on it’s own producing fruit that could be used a myriad of ways to delight my tastebuds and nourish my body.  Living in concert with the animal life, getting my eggs from real chickens, my milk from a goat, with the animal benefiting from my care to the point of even creating my own breed of goat or chicken someday.

I wanted to chop wood and fashion and build from it.  I wanted to take stones from the land and create a firepit or a stone wall.  I wanted to hunt an animal and eat it’s meat and use it’s skins to create leather from which I could make clothing or shoes or tools.  I wanted to create my own pottery and decorations, make my own art, work with my own hands.

I wanted to experience what it was like for me, as a woman, to love one man, truly love and know him for one lifetime.  I wanted to know how it felt to have another human grow inside me, live inside me for 9 months and then experience the fruition of this most amazing process by naturally birthing forth this human and all the sensations and feelings that come with it…for this is the very definition of what it means to be human!

If I can’t feel, I’m not mine, I’m not REAL.

Here’s to the TRUE Earth Experience! 😀

About The Stray Chicken

About a month ago, give or take a week, I went outside one morning to feed the chickens the scraps leftover from dinner the night before, when I saw, lurking at the outer edges of the flock, a very young rooster.  He was quite small, and black and white in color, and dodged skittishly in and out of the flock, stealing scraps here and there, trying to avoid the angry and protective pecks of Roostaur, the flock leader.

Being accustomed to strays, and he, seeing that I was the giver of food, followed me over to the shed where I gave him a small scoop of feed by himself, out of the sight of the rest of the flock, who would not hestitate to rob him blind of his meal. I could tell that he must have had an owner at some point because he did not flinch from me when I moved close to him, but would always stay just enough out of reach that he could easily dodge my hand when I reached out to pet him, which is not unusual behavior for a chicken, especially a rooster.

I knew that our second closest neighbor, who lives about a 1/2 mile down the street, had a flock of chickens. Our roosters would often communicate back and forth, crowing to each other, especially in the evening as the sun was setting, much like how dogs “talk” back and forth to each other in a suburban neighborhood.

So, I assumed that the rooster most likely belonged to that flock and, since he was so young, was more than likely run off by an older stronger rooster and so headed in our direction to search out the closest flock.  And so he hung out, and travelled with the flock, always on the outskirts but near enough to make it obvious to the others that he wished to join.  And after awhile Roostaur didn’t seem to mind, for the most part, so as long as he kept his slimy talons off the hens and so peace ensued for a little while.  Until about a week ago.

At about the same time the stray rooster came onto the scene, I began to recognize that I needed to get up earlier in the morning to work on my blog which, as you well know, has being lame and suffering for quite some time due to just a plain ol’ lack of time to devote to it.  I was not taking it seriously nor giving it the proper attention that it deserved, but having deleted so many blogs in the past for just the same reason, I was determined that I would not do the same this time around.  And so it has sat.

So reason dictated the obvious, that I must needs get up earlier in order that I be able to accomplish all that I wished to do.

Now here is where I start with the excuses lol…I work hard, all day long, cooking 3 meals a day for a family of seven, cleaning up after them all and caring for 5 children (including 2 toddlers, one of which I am still breastfeeding 3-4 times a day) and I homeschool plus I have animals, including 3 goats that I milk twice a day which totals to about 70 minutes a day just devoted to milking and animal care.  And this is just Winter, during the growing season there is also the daily tending of the garden and the preserving of the harvest, but there is also less schoolwork to be done, so it all balances out in the end.

Most days I don’t make it to bed till around midnight and then I usually get up around 7:00 – 8:00 am and 7 hours is just enough sleep for me, especially after having had two babies in two years and all the extra work and sleep deprivation that goes along with that, I felt like I was perfectly justified in taking full adavantage of all the sleep that I could get!  But apparently not, because, as time went on, it was becoming painfully obvious that there just was not enough hours in the day, that something had to give and, as usual, it was going to have to be me *sigh* 🙄

And I have known this, for like a month now… I have been fully aware of the fact that I must needs arise earlier in the day, but for many factors, my own laziness and stubborn procrastination being the most obvious, I have not been getting up earlier, indeed I have, out of sheer rebelliousness been arising even later and later, even as late as 9:00 am one day about a week ago (it was also 2 degrees Fahrenheit outside btw, I just don’t do cold well at all).

So, the next morning, after arising at 9:00 am the morning before, I was sound asleep and I hear this sudden noise in my sleep and it awakens me. I shot straight up in bed, sitting there in my half asleep state listening, I thought it was a child screaming, but then I didn’t hear anything. So I laid down and cuddled back under my covers, and in less than 10 seconds it happened again…a very familiar sound, the crowing of a rooster…a rooster standing on my front porch! My window being right next to the front porch, so it was as if he was crowing right at my window!

I looked at the clock, it was 4:30 am, “He won’t crow for long” I thought to myself while smashing the pillow into my head to block the noise. And he crowed again and again, 12 times before he finally shut up, and I went back to sleep.

The next morning, same thing. And the morning after that, and after that, and after that…the same damn thing every morning for a whole week!! 😡

Now, Roostaur, our flock leader, does not do that. He is a perfect gentleman who does his early morning crowing at the coop where they sleep, which is situated far enough away from the house that you can only very faintly hear his crowing. But apparently this stray rooster has a mind and agenda of his own.

My first thought was this: That chicken is going to DIE! 😈

But then, I usually have a policy against harming strays. Two of our most favorite cats are strays, as was our dog Jack who died last March, one of the best dogs I have ever owned. Call it sentimentality I guess, but I figure God brought the animal into my life, wanted me to have it, for a reason, and so I have always refrained from harming or getting rid of strays, but instead have always gone out of my way to protect and provide for them.

But laying in bed, listening to him crow over and over and over and over and over and over and over again every day for a week….I really wanted to kill that chicken!!

I would lay in bed and fantasize about storming out the door and onto the porch and snapping his skinny little neck with my bare hands and then, as he was quite a young and therefore would be tender chicken, roasting him in the oven with some poatoes and carrots and enjoying him for dinner with a glass of chardonnay…mmmmmmmmm 😎

And then yesterday morning was the worst ever.  He started crowing around 4:30 am again and did not stop until a few minutes after 5:00 am! Usually he would only crow 12-15 times (about 10 minutes total) and then leave and I would go back to sleep, but a whole 1/2 hour of crowing was more than I could take…

“Okay God!” I said, as I sat up and flung my legs over the side of the bed, searching for my house slippers with my feet, being careful not to awaken little Samuel who was beside me sleeping peacefully through it all…

“I’m UP! I’m UP! What do you want?? Why do you keep doing this to me when you know that I just want to sleep??” I whisper-yelled this aloud as I put on my sweater robe and headed into the kitchen to make coffee and start up the heater.

And so, now that He has sent me a frickin’ “alarm-chicken”, I have complied.  When the stray rooster starts crowing I will get up and make a cup of coffee and work on this blog…it seems He has left me little choice otherwise LOL 😆

Now to think of a name. Any Suggestions??