My First Simple Woman's Daybook

Now don't expect one every week...
:P

For Today: June 27th, 2009.

Outside my window: Darkness...

I am thinking: My eyes are sleepy.

I am thankful for: Yogurt.

I am wearing: Jeans and a Cadillac Sky t-shirt. Cadillac Sky is awesome. My favorite newgrass band.

I am reading: Northanger Abby

I am hoping: I'll find some AWESOME bargains tomorrow when my mother and I go yardsaleing. I've never been to a yard sale. Always wanted to go... Looking for hope chest stuff!

I am creating: Too much. I'll post about my knitting tomorrow. (Hopefully...)

I am hearing: Crickets... faintly.

Around the house: Asleep.

One of my favorite things: Yogurt.

What I accomplished since last week: Not playing the one video game that we (my brother and I) really really like. It's a farming game... albeit a rather weird one. Japanese people are odd. No offense, but the games they come out with... are odd. But none the less, I've really enjoyed having it. REALLY. I play it too much. I haven't been sticking to my 1 hour a day rule. So, I went on a WII fast. :P

A few plans for the rest of the week: Yogurt.


... yes, I am very tired.


Here is a picture I am sharing with you:


Yes, this is proof that I'm tired.
... Goodnight.

My Garden!

Hey all! My computer has been having a little internet trouble for the past few days. I'm having to play catch-up on commenting and posting! (I also lost my camera for a few days...) :P

I'll hopefully do a post on all my knitting projects soon. I'll take pictures of my stash. It's been growing... and grooowing... and GROWING... I really need to stop buying yarn!
I'd love to hear your silly stash stories, those of you who knit, so be sure to comment on my next post!

So I'm FINALLY getting around to posting pictures of my garden! I've been meaning to do this for forever. So, here they are. (Now that my computer works and I've found my ever elusive camera!)

Watermelon climbing the fence

Teeny tiny watermelon. Just a little bigger than a pea.


Cucumber plant (No sign of any cukes yet though!)


Cow Peas! I'm really excited about these this year! We have a great crop, and there are NO YELLOWJACKETS!! Last year all the cow peas came in at different times, so that we'd only have a hand full of them ready for eating at one time. AND they were always COVERED with yellowjackets. I'm ALLERGIC and deathly afraid of yellowjackets.


This is what color they will become.



Here are some pole beans. There probably won't be enough to make a meal out of, so we'll just combine them with the cow peas!


Another shot of the pole beans. Next year I want to plant Sugar Snap Peas.


Sandy carrot leaves...


One of our weird, pitiful crook-necked squash. We usually have TONS and TONS of squash, but this year I've only picked two I think. The reason being, we had a nasty, rainy, wet week where several of the plants got powdery mildew. We've grown squash every year of my LIFE I think, and I don't ever remember having such a small crop of squash!


The hideous mildew...
(And maybe some dirt...)


One of our many bell peppers. (We have red, yellow and green.)

Banana pepper. My attempt at showing how big it was by using my thumb as a scale failed... my thumb is closer to the camera than the pepper, therefore, bigger.


Cherry tomatoes


A tall tomato plant (taller than I am...) (looks taller in real life.)



And a small tomato plant. (The size of my foot.)


Sideways watermelon plant and cucumber plant.


My precious pole beans! (I love them!)


My precious pole beans eaten by horrendous june bugs. I despise june bugs. The only organic way I know of to control them is to pick them off one by one. Or, shake them off into a jar. And let them die slowly and painfully. (Lol, not really. I hate to see ANYTHING suffer. EVEN june bugs. So I throw a couple of hydrogen proxide soaked cotton balls in with em' or fill the jar with water so the little buggers drown fast.)


And the adorable, semi-evil snail in my garden! I named him Dill. Isn't he cute?


And a picture for scale. Yes, that is my pinkie. :P Dill is small and cute. :)

Herb Pictures

It'n this cute? I thought up this little idea because there were three basil plants in the one container I bought, and I had run out of pots! I did another cement block with extra dill.
Parsley


Dill

Pinapple Sage (My two favorite colors! Purple and dark green!!)

Basil

Oregano.


Bee Balm



Anyhoo, these are my herbs! I'm gonna (hopefully) post some pictures of my garden soon! (My pole beans and cow peas are finally in!!)

Baking failure...

Sooo... I decided to try my hand at baking last night.

Hehehehee...
Teheheee...
*Snicker*

Sigh... my thumb might be green, but it is absolutely lost in the kitchen. I suppose I'm not THAT bad... but I usually stick to box mixes and such. My brother had my camera at camp, or else I would have taken a picture of the monster I created. It. Was. HILARIOUS.

Really funny looking. I found the recipe on another blog, and thought, "Oh, look what an easy recipe! And I already have all the ingredients!" It's called a Dutch Baby. Which is weird... but anyhoooo...
I mixed it all together, and stuck it in the pan, which I stuck in the oven. I was surprised to see how high the edges rose. Very surprised. Aaaand then I took it out when the edges nearly touched the rack above. It was big. Lol. So anyways, I'm gonna stick to gardening for a while.

*Squeals* I just remembered something!
My daddy took me to Lowes this afternoon (He made me drive there and back in my brother's big ol' truck!!! EEEK!) and he got me 7 different herbs! We got: Rosemary, Oregano, Pinapple Sage (Smells JUST like pinapples!!), Bee Balm, Parsley, Dill, and Sweet Basil! I'll show some pictures in a day or three. (It's dark right now!)

Drawing

I've never really been into drawing... it's just something I randomly do in my spare time. Here are some pictures I've drawn. I don't typically color them, but it is fun. :) Sorry they are so dull. I can't scan, so I had to take pictures, and the lighting wasn't good.

The flowers and the Chickadee I drew yesterday and today, and all the rest I drew over a year ago.

Horse Sitting

I. am. so. EXCITED.
A lady at church happened to mention to my mother that she "horse sits" for a woman she works with. The church lady (whom we don't even know very well) lives a good 20 minutes away from the woman with horses, and that makes for very long trips, twice a day, to feed. When she mentioned this to my mum, my mum told her that I LOVE horses, and I'm always looking for jobs like that. And so the church lady called the horse lady and gave her my number. She called me, and my mother and I went to visit her. She lives probably less than 5 minutes away, and she has 14 animals - 4 adult horses, one three-week old filly, 5 dogs, 2 barn cats and 2 indoor cats. She showed us around the whole farm, told me all the names of the animals, what they eat, what their personality is and such, and told me that I had the job. She is paying me $30 dollars a day to feed 11 of them. (She's leaving the indoor cats enough food and water for the week, and taking one puppy with her.) I'll already be able to pay for my summer camp!! I had been praying that I would get enough babysitting and animal sitting jobs to pay for HALF of my camp fees! Leave it to the Lord to do exceedingly and abundantly more than you can ask or imagine! And what's more, the horse lady told me that if all goes well, it's highly possible that she will continue to use me as a horse sitter, and even let me ride at her barn! (I haven't ridden in over a year.) I'm soooo happy, thank you Lord!

Great to be home again...

Hey all! Our family had a WONDERFUL time at the beach. My brother Austin and his friends Eric and Trey enjoyed fishing and skim-boarding and wake-boarding and playing video games. My mother and I cooked huge meals for them, but they stayed hungry! (You'd never imagine how much three teenage boys can eat until you live with them for a week.) I absolutely LOVED crabbing, and overall I think I caught three crabs. :) Not exactly a success, but it was really fun anyways. (Hey, we only spent a total of maybe 3 or 4 hours crabbing all week.) I also caught a pretty big catfish.
My mother and I spent most of our time together beachcombing. We looked all week for sandollars, and FINALLY both found two on the day before we left! My favorite shells are definitely scallops. They come in SO many colors and varieties, and most look so antique! We also went two hours to Panama City to watch Night at the Museum 2 on a rainy day. We all enjoyed it, and had a wonderful time playing road trip games coming and going.
We had a bonfire on the beach, and Ausin and Trey buried Eric in the sand! It was pretty hilarious. Also, since my dad has been vacationing at this beach his whole life, we got to spend some time with his mother's dear old friend. My father's mother (my grandmother) died when he was in colledge, so I never met her, but I had a wonderful time listening to her best friend Mrs. Dorthy talk with my parents. She also is an avid gardener, and when she heard that I was planning on getting some muscadine vines, she gave me a little muscadine plant in a pot!! I was sooo excited! I still need to decide where to plant it. Anyways, here are some pictures of all this!

Here are some pictures of the guys being silly while crabbing at the beach. (The one in blue is my brother Austin.)


Here's my favorite picture of me. (I think I had just caught a crab!)



And here's the lucky crabs we caught. (Lucky because we never caught enough to keep!)



And here is Eric buried in the sand right next to the bonfire. (No, they wern't trying to catch his hair on fire, he laid there himself to look at the stars, and they just started covering him with sand!)



My beautiful MUSCADINE!



The Old Soda Fountain and ice cream place!


Beautiful, yet random shot of the town.


Lovely tree in front of a yellow house.



The estuary! (A marsh where saltwater and fresh water come together.)



The GRILL! (We eat here every summer.) (Except for this one! :( I was sad that we didn't get to go this year.)



The RAW BAR!! (We ALWAYS ALWAYS eat here. It is a MUST. I even have two of their T-shirts. They sell mostly beer and raw fishy things like oysters. BLEH. How gross. But their regular food is good, and it's a tradition. It is also so close to our beach house we could walk!) (But of course, we are at the beach, and it is hot, and we are on vacation from exercising... so we drive.) :P

(Sorry, it's a terrible picture. I took it from inside a moving car...) :~)