I am going to give my very beloved family a chance to miss me this weekend.  Time for me to go on one of those adventures I talked about before.  I’ll have my camera and will be visiting with some friends and family here and there.  As usual, my time to so all I want to do is minimal, so it’s like I’m flying through life’s buffet, taking a tiny taste of this and a tiny taste of that.  I’m grateful for the opportunity to do this on a strict budget and for the miracles that opened up to allow it to happen.

Life has been spectacularly good with a few pitfalls here and there.  I had a computer disaster this past week that put a crimp in a lot of things I had to get done.  I still have one drive that needs information transferred and that will happen eventually.  Meanwhile, there is a lot of reinstalling and re-creating and giving up for lost.

Eric has been wonderful lately, despite some challenges we’ve faced here and there.  He is doing great in school and continuing through the Summer semester.

The kids are enjoying summer very much, spending time with friends, sleeping late and being kids.  I love being able to wake up when my body is finished sleeping rather than when the alarm goes off.   That’s one of the blessed gifts of summer.  Our kids go back to school on August 9th, so they aren’t getting much time off this year.  Life moves on.

We had to re-separate the chickens from one another (the 3 laying hens from the 6 remaining pre-layers) because the big ones were just picking on the smaller ones too much.  The littler ones aren’t that much smaller, but they were taking some serious crap.  We even did the trick where you go out with a flashlight at night and slip the younger chickens into the hen house when everyone is sleeping and there was still a great deal of chicken drama.  After the second NIGHT (that’s right NIGHT) of the chickens making major ruckus (“Can you describe the ruckus?”) with one another, Eric put up a fence – a far better fence than the one the kids and I managed and now everyone is safe.  The exception is the poor dear young’un who ran screaming into the night and somehow got out of the pen.  Our impression is that she met up with the business end of one of our local wildlife members.  We found a sad little puddle of feathers, but no bones or other body bits.  Since he ran the fence on Saturday, all has been peaceful in Chickenville.

So I will be back on Tuesday, ready to share and tell great tales of faraway lands.  I wish all of you joy and happiness in the meanwhile.