Christmas Dinner

This was the first time I got to make Christmas dinner myself, and I had to make it 2 days early because I work Christmas Eve and day. It was a little interesting. While I went out to ask my husband something, I heard my neighbor's goat hollering. I knew right away that his head was stuck in the fence... again. He does that quite a bit. The goat was not being too cooperative, the chickens thought I was there to feed them and kept trying to peck me, their dog was trying to lick me in the face when I knelt down to help the goat, and the rooster came after me jumping up and beating me with his wings. Fortunately Vance was over there by then and helped get the rooster away and we freed the goat. Then I could go back and try to finish dinner. I think their turkey could smell that I was cooking turkey too because he was all excited.

This is the rooster that had it in for me.

Mean looking, isn't he?
The bird feeders have been very busy. I have had house finches, Carolina wrens, tufted titmice, red headed woodpeckers, and some gold finches too. I am very excited at what new birds I will see in our new place!

New View, New Rooms, and New Dog

We have been busy working on the house...and working with our new dog. We got Duke about a month and a half ago from a Bloodhound rescue organization. He has been challenging to say the least. Bloodhounds really do require special care, but he is a very sweet dog and learning very quickly.





This is the view from my front porch! Is it not the most awesome thing! I love it here!


If anyone comes to stay, you can sleep here with a view of the creek. This is our makeshift guest room. We will be putting up a wall eventually, but for now it has a divider for some privacy.


This is how it started out.

This is the guest bathroom. Eventually we would like to open it up to the guest bedroom and add a shower to it.

These are more pictures of the creek and the front. Now that it is not so dry and we have been getting some rain, we actually have water in it.


We also painted the front of the house.

I will keep updating as we get more work done!

Pictures of the House

I had taken a whole bunch of pictures, but the memory card messed up. I had some of these on another card. I also have some in here of our creek bed which was very full this morning after a couple of days of rain.

Photos of Some of Our Hummingbirds

We really have been over run with them! We have 3 feeders up which start out full in the morning and then I usually have to refill them at least once during the day. My husband took some of these amazing pictures of just some of them. We have seen up to 12 at one feeder and probably 20-30 out flying around. They let me get extremely close to them and one even perched on my finger to eat when I held it up to the feeder! Of course we didn't get a picture of that, but we got lots of other great ones. Enjoy.










I will be working on a post this weekend hopefully with pictures of the house and our beautiful scenery. One year ago today we were preparing for Ike, which hit us a year ago tomorrow.

Swarms Of Hummingbirds

We were noticing some hummingbirds, so we put up a few more feeders and they came out in droves! They look like a swarm of insects and are not at all shy. We have seen about 15 at a time flying around out there. We are all laughing because they don't seem as pretty when they are all buzzing around like that, they look kind of scary, like a group of wasps, but then one stops and looks at you and you can see how pretty it is. We will be so sad to see them go, but at least we will have a few more weeks with them.

We Are Here!

We are in our new place!!!!!! We love it so much. I wasn't able to get internet for a while after we were here thanks to the internet company repeatedly messing up, but they did try to make up for it and I appreciate that. We are enjoying ourselves so much out here. It was such a great move to make. Our neighbors have all kinds of animals such as chickens, turkeys, cows, longhorns, goats, horses, donkeys...you name it. They have all made us feel very welcome and have been happy to share their knowledge.
The boys like their new school and have made this adjustment so easily, I am just amazed. They have gotten right into country life. We even had our first emergency room visit thanks to boy-country activities. All was well. He could have used some stitches, but the ER docs said it would just be for cosmetic purposes mainly, so we didn't have them. Boys need some good scars, and it was on the inside of his calf where it is not the visible anyways.
All of our animals are loving it. The dogs just don't know what to do with themselves. They think they are in doggie heaven. The cat who barely ever moved before actually leaps and pounces, and will maybe even shed an ounce or 2. Bunny has a brand new outside pen, and frolics is the only word I can think of to describe what he does. I made the turtle a new pen with his own private swimming pool. I will post pictures of everything as soon as we can get everything all hooked up.
I have the feeders up and have had a lot of hummingbirds, a ton of chickadees, and some cardinals. We have seen a couple of deer, but none in our yard. I did have a feeder completely emptied out in one night and I think a deer was responsible.
We have not closed on the house yet, we are leasing it until we close hopefully in a week or so. We did paint the boys bedrooms and recarpet them, with permission. The big changes we don't want to make until we close. I can't wait until it is all done!

Cupcakes and Bunny Luv

We had a going away party on Saturday and our friends came over to help us celebrate this new beginning in our lives. I made these cute cupcakes for the party.


I made a cupcake mix according to recipe, then got skewers and put 3 cupcakes together on them. Next, I put a thin layer of frosting over it, then got my Jelly Bellies. I used different shades of yellow and one shade of white to try to make them more realistic looking. The "butter" on top is a piece of Laffy Taffy and the "pepper" is black colored decorating sugar. They were very cute and got a lot of comments, but I think the black sugar looked a little too much like pepper for most people's tastes.
I also attempted a photo shoot with Bandit, the new bunny my husband found at the park. He is plumping up nicely, but still skinny. At least you can't feel all of his bones when you pick him up anymore. It is very hard to get a bunny on camera. Most of the time, this is what I got because he moved too fast.

Then I got in the cage with him, but he is so sweet and friendly, he just wanted to be next to me and wouldn't get far enough away so I could take his picture.

I finally stood up and got a couple of pictures of him.


I got a couple of bad cat too. She doesn't move much, so those were easy to get.