Consolidated

It seems like our three months of spring were consolidated into about three weeks this year!  The crops are finally up, the replanting is finished, and the sidedressing is done.

Two weeks ago on a Sunday morning while I was doing chores, the old farmer's wife saw Gus chase a deer out of our front yard!  We don't know where it came from or where it was going, but that was certainly unusual for us.

All four of our kids will have babies within a year.  Three have arrived and one more to go.  Here are the two most recent with their fathers.

We spent four days at the big family vacation at Grand Beach Inn in Michigan.  I did the typical sleeping, reading, eating, and watching grandkids thing.  We also did a little shopping at the Outlet Mall and then toured the Barker Mansion.  The Barkers owned a rail car manufacturing company (eventually sold to the Pullman Company).  When Barker Jr. and his wife both die in 1910, their only child Catherine, age 14, inherited the 60 million dollar family fortune.  In her later years, she donated the house to Purdue University (for as long as they needed it) and then to Michigan City and it is now a museum and event center.  We enjoy touring old mansions!

We took interstates all the way to Michigan thinking traffic around Chicago and Gary would not be bad on a Sunday afternoon.  Wrong!  Along with bumper to bumper stop and go traffic, we hit heavy rain which made traffic worse.  So, on our way home we took two lane highways all the way.  In rural Indiana our highway passed Fair Oaks Farms.  We decided to stop and eat lunch in their restaurant and buy some of their cheese to show them our support.  They have received a lot of negative publicity lately after a manipulated (and perhaps setup) video showing abuse was posted by animal rights activists.  I always wonder why these undercover activists take time to film cruelty instead of immediately intervening or calling their superiors?  Could it be that publicity is more important to them than animal welfare? 

We tried most of this last week to harvest our wheat, but between the daily pop up showers, heavy dews, and high humidity, we were unable to finish.  Hopefully this next week will cooperate with us. 
I had a couple riders during one session.

Saturday afternoon about 4:00, in the heat, I was going to spray water on the pigs in the hoop buildings.  I couldn't get the hydrant to work and then water started bubbling up out of the ground!  Not good timing to find a backhoe.  Fortunately, when I called Curt B. he was already out with his backhoe burying a dead cow for someone and he was able to come as soon as he was finished with the grave.  Brother headed to the local Ace Hardware for a new hydrant, and what could have been a big weekend problem was solved by suppertime.


 In the days of Shamgar the son of Anath, in the days of Jael, the highways were unoccupied, and the travellers walked through byways.
Judges 5:6