Splash Dog!

This is the favorite Jump for the Toy spot. I took these photos with the iPhone.

Farm Club Appreciation Day

I love my Farm Club, so I hosted a day just for them when there was no work (although Stephany came early just to help me stack hay in the barn), just food and visiting...oh, and party games. Thanks to Dona for all these photos. There is always good food when Farm Club does a potluck. No skimping on desserts. Kathleen shared her treasures from a recent trip to Russia that included seeing sheep and visiting with the shepherd in Gotland. Stephany charted an old Elizabeth Zimmerman pattern and is knitting it up in Imperial Yarn Company's Columbia. Prizes were awarded to the winners of the party games. How many sheep pellets in the container? 660.  Stephany seems stumped (or frightened) by the contents of the bag--things gathered from the barn. I had told everyone that there was nothing disgusting or dangerous.Mary shared the warp just off the loom. This is four towels from the Friendship Towel Kit supporting the Natural Dye Project in Guatemala. In the background is the preview of my big Estate Sale that will be over Labor Day weekend.

Beating the Commute

For the last couple of weeks I've seen helicopters transporting equipment and parts for work on the high voltage power lines that are about a mile from here. I get a good view from the haystack, but even with my 300 mm lens I have to do a lot of cropping to bring in the image and then it's not sharp. Today it wasn't just equipment. They were transporting people from one tower to the next. There were two helicopters going back and forth. The yellow one has equipment in this photo. This was fascinating to watch. Here is a very grainy close-up. That looks like a giant picnic basket. Do you suppose it's lunch time? Off to the next job.

Views from the Pasture

This morning in the pasture.

White-tailed kite.

Road Trip to TX - Day 10 (Part 2)

When I left off the last Road Trip post we had just entered New Mexico on the evening of the tenth day of our adventure. When we drive I have a mapbook open on my lap--not because we don't know where to go, but because it is more interesting to see the names of geographic features and points of interest that me might not otherwise know as well as figure out which are public lands where we can camp. I supplement that with looking things up on the iPhone.It was late and we needed to stay somewhere. I saw that if we veered off Highway 10 a bit we could camp in the Organ Mountains. The mountains lit by the setting sun, taken while driving up Highway 70.Water tank outside of the Space Mural Museum at the town of Organ (population about 300 in 2010).This is a photo of the east side of the Organ Mountains, taken as we drove past the entry sign. That is because I was actually looking for something a little different. I don't remember what I googled but what I found on the iPhone was Organ Pipe National Monument which, yes, does have camping, and where we figured there would still be space on a weekday night in the middle of the summer. We had to drive a few miles down the road before we could turn back to the road to the campgrounds.  A view of White Sands at the base of these mountains. White Sands Missile Range is almost 3200 square miles and the town of White Sands is at the southern end. We had considered going to the White Sands National Monument before going to Texas but it was one of those times where even though we drove "right by it" according to the map we weren't really that close. We chose to go to Carlsbad Caverns instead. Here was White Sands again. The map shows that there is a visitor center and a museum in the town that is separate from the National Monument, which is 40 miles or so further north. But this was late in the day and at this point we were on a schedule to get home.

We found the campgrounds which were at the base of the Organ Mountains. What I didn't figure out until I was looking at my iPhone later that night was that the reason the road didn't look right and the other descriptions were a bit off was that we were at BLM's Organ Mountains National Recreation Area, not Organ Pipe National Monument which is in southern Arizona. OOPS! Good thing it all worked out or we might have found ourselves trying to find a motel back in Las Cruces.

Ginny and the Drone

We had an interesting day here yesterday. Sarah and Bruce Barker of RightAfterThis.com were here to film an episode of a documentary series called Farm to Table and focused, at least for the first episodes, on women in farming. Farm Club members were here to weigh and sort the older lambs and Sarah and Bruce flimed us as well as other aspects of the farm. The only chance I had to take photos was when I heard Ginny barking at Bruce's drone. Backgrounds aren't great and I didn't have a very long lens so I cropped a lot, but here are the photos I got of Ginny.

 

So Many Blogs, So Little Time

I am behind on blogs and I don't know which to do first. I didn't finish the blog posts on our trip to Texas. The last one I did was Day 9 but there are three more. I want to share photos of my very cute granddaughter whose birthday is today. I interrupted my Texas posts with a post of the Wragg Fire and now I have more photos of after the fire flared up yesterday.Then there is the State Fair which is worthy of a couple of posts.

However I am too tired tonight to do any of them. I woke up in the chair at my desk, dragged myself and my computer to the other room where the whole house fan is pulling a breeze through the house after our 108 degree day and I may just go back to sleep here.