Sunny Sunday

At least it began that way!

Lovely poppies and iris, some that were mangled by Friday's hail

I love having horses here and heading down to the barn in the morning, even before my brain is in gear and my body has fully awoken. The birds' songs cheer me and make me smile.

I fill Malachi's tub; a scoop of oat bran, a scoop of Sr. feed, two measures of weight stuff, one measure of digestive stuff and a bit more beet pulp than yesterday.

Malachi humming, "Should I Stay or Should I Go Now"

I check on the progress of the baby pigeons whose mom chose to use the feed bin in the stall we use for storage as her nest. Lord knows, we don't need more, but they are God's creatures, too!

May 30 - just hatched

This morning - 8 days old

I have to bring Malachi out of the paddock, away from his herd. 

The herd, looking longingly at Malachi's food.

I don't tie Malachi anymore. When he has licked his tub clean he wanders off and works on mowing our yard. Until our spate of afternoon storms came I had been working on cleaning out the garage end of the barn while Malachi ate. But now, the truck is wedged in there to keep it safe from hail - and I'm too lazy to move it out and move it back. It seems like a good excuse not to tackle the mess in the garage!

We have been having wicked storms in the afternoon. On Friday I received four alerts on my cell phone about tornado warnings, suggesting I seek shelter immediately. The sirens from the town north of us wailed on and off most of the afternoon. I was sewing in the basement. I was sheltered. Gypsy sought to comfort me by burrowing under my feet. The pounding of the rain and hail was unsettling.

Hail from the first storm on Friday afternoon

Our reward after the storms were over.

Why is it that the pot of gold is never in our yard?!

Oh, wait...

it must be here somewhere.

Life is good!

Home Again, Home Again

We made it home after three days of driving. Granted, we didn't drive miles and miles each day, but we probably had about 20 hours behind the windshield. Mr. Dreamy is becoming a proficient driver of big vehicles and earned a gold star for getting in our gate without any problems whatsoever. Oh, and he turned the big beast around in our driveway. Amazing!
I amused myself as he drove by watching corn fields.... and fields of corn. I saw my fair share of alfalfa in all stages: growing, drying and in the process of being baled. We noted that some farmers mow their fields at great speed, while others take a bit more time. We drove by a lot of dried, golden fields that were probably brown before their time. The drought is terrible.
The other thing that entertained me was driving by signs for towns that I know of in another location. Here is a list of a few of the towns with signs on the Interstates, in the order in which we passed them on our trip home. The state where I associate the name of the town, not where the town is actually located,  is in parenthesis:

A. Decatur (Georgia)

B. LaGrange (Georgia)

C. Ottowa (Ontario, Canada)

D. Geneseo (New York)

E. Rochester (Minnesota)

F. York (Pennsylvania)

G. Williamsburg (Virginia)

H. Corning (New York)

I. Aurora (Colorado)

J. Lexington (Kentucky)

K. Hudson (New York)

If this had been our itinerary, our map would have looked like this: missing the beginning and ending points:

Now, that would be some sort of crazy trip!!

Being a former teacher of Gifted and Talented kids, and loving puzzles myself, I decided to challenge any of you who like this sort of thing, to see if you can figure out our actual itinerary. Can you determine the actual states we drove through as we saw the signs for these towns on the Interstate highways? Our beginning point was actually about 60 miles north of Decatur, somewhere. Our end point, home, is about 45 miles south of Hudson, Somewhere. The winner will get dinner and a ride in the motorhome when we are in your neighborhood! I'll share the real map of our trip home on a later post. 

It's big... but the picture makes it look a lot bigger than it is!

Oh, and see those lovely clouds?

We had five drops of rain per square foot. 

We did get to see a partial rainbow, however.

At least someone is getting rain!

The Power of Positive Thinking

We haven't had rain since the beginning of July. Well, a drop here and a drop there. But not enough to wet the ground. We've had storms go to the south of us. And there are storms that go to the north of us. 

But nothing here.

We often see dense, purply black clouds,
and even beautiful rainbows east of us. 

But nothing here!

We sit on our porch and enjoy watching
Mother Nature's fireworks shows. 

We get to watch rain fall in the distance.

But not here!

Perhaps if I put up a post about rain...

And think positive thoughts...

Maybe we'll get some rain here!