Wildlife

In our last blog we added a rat our son caught at his house in a live trap. We need to explain a little more. Our son doesn’t have any more rats at his house than most people have out here in farm country. Rats out here are not a problem like you have in big cities. The rat he caught was a pack rat. They’re big beautiful and real tame. With that truth explained they “are” a real problem if you have one. Go to your barn and open a draw you keep tools in to find it full of odd thing. Remember I said packed full. Pack rats gather up any odd thing they can find. Ribbons or strings, straws and small pieces of wood. They will pull off wires and chew on them before they hide them in their stash. Leave your old truck for a while setting in your back yard and go out to crank it and it won’t start. Open the hood to find the wires chew up or gone. Go to clean their mess up and find things you don’t know where they got it like women sewing stuff. Maybe a cloth measuring tape or a needle ball women leave there needles stuck in complete with needles. Pack rats are fairly good sizes and the weather can get really bad out here. Houses are built for this bad weather and are built very tight. No holes left around pluming or wiring for even little field mice to get in. So where did the sewing stuff come from? Maybe some one some where had something stored in an out building miles away. As for mice you see field mice out here a lot. Mice are a good food source for a lot of wild things to live on out here. Hawks and owls, even coyotes will go for mice. In my young days I wanted to farm and live out my life in harmony with wild things. Only making a living and not worrying about making a lot of money. I believe that is impossible today and has been for a long time. We can only settle for what we can have. Pam and I really enjoy wild life and simple living. The wild life have adapted to humans really well out here. We always live as if we are back on the farm if we can doing thing like making our on sausage and we do make sausage any where in the world as we travel on our boat. One thing we miss that you can’t make traveling is old time sugar cured country ham. You need cold weather and good fresh ham to cure ham the old way. We just cut a sugar cured ham this week we cured and it is so good. There is a breakfast in the old South where I was raised back down on the farm that will always be in my memory. Back on the farm back there houses were cold in the morning and building a fire in a heater was the normal way to live. Getting the house warmer as you cooked you knew you were the one in control of your surroundings. Today most houses the temperature is the same when you get up as it was when you went to bed. Do I want to go back to cold houses. Not really but having breakfast the way it was then is great. Home cured sugar cured ham with home grown grits, fresh eggs and red eyed gravy. Another staple back down on the farm most women of today have lost is home made from scratch biscuits. This is Kansas farm country and you can buy flour here anywhere groceries are for sell. Traveling on our boat in some countries it’s hard to find good flour and harder to buy flour we call low protein flour. Low protein flour is flour not full of bugs. Once in Belize we opened a box of flour in the store at the check out and it was almost black with moving things crawling around. The owner set the box back but left the other boxes on the shelf. We checked later and there was less boxes but there were still selling boxes of high protein flour. 

Our country sugar cured ham.

We have been kitty setting these last few weeks. This is him Cat IN A Hat. He has gone home now. We miss him.

Our son’s dogs had this cat up a tree at his house. At first we thought it was a Bob Cat. It was just a Feral Cat.

Living Simple

Our last blogs have been about the little adventure Pam and I look for now as we past through life. Soon to be 57 years together. We are in our 70s now and feeling it. Both having birthdays, anniversary in March. We enjoy the little thing now but we have seen a little history in the making. I ask Pam’s Granddaddy that lived to 99 years and 10 months what it was like to see history happen like the first car. He said it was just a car and now he had seen one. He said one Christmas his daddy went to town to get supplies and on Christmas day he found an orange in a sock hung on the fire place mantel and few other little thing for Christmas. That was a big thing to him. An orange to eat on Christmas day. Lot bigger to him than seeing a car. Said later he found out his Daddy went to town with their wagon and mule bought a small bag of oranges off the street brought in by a steam train headed north from Florida. Dropping off oranges in towns along the way. First citrus fruit they had seen. What have Pam and I seen to top that. Who can judge. Maybe it would be seeing the space shuttle go up and being as closes as I would want to be. That’s right as closes as we wanted to be. It stared at a marina in Florida where we were going south for the winter on our first sail boat. The dock master said there is a back road that will take you as closes as any one can drive and see the launch pad. Closer than you can get with your boat. He also said there will be some crazies there so be careful. We went in our son’s truck with a cover. He was down visiting us. Cooked a turkey to take with us. Found the place with a clearing on the side of the road to park like the dock master said with just water separating us from the pad. No trees between us and the space shuttle. Better view than we ever expected. Closer than we ever expected. Just before launch of Atlantis there was standing room only and then, there it went. Now being so close was as impressing as any thing we have seen. Then came the crazy the dock master from the marina was talking about. It stared as the shuttle was high enough so you could hear people screaming. It was laughed. Some people crying. Some people praying. Some people singing God Bless America. A few people screaming the devil was so close to us all just then you could feel him and this is his work. We have no business leaving this earth. Then there was a group going to people as we were leaving screaming in people’s faces cursing saying spending this money is wrong with so many of us that need that money. I have a friend that is a Psychiatrist I ask him why people think so different and he will start with all his training. Worthless to me. Doesn’t change anything . Just had and election made me think about all the crazy there that day and why we think so different. At this time in our life we will just take it slow and look for the little adventure like finding a little possum in our garden.

Going outside listening to the snow geese flying over head. Maybe enjoying a little snow setting by a wood fire. It’s still hot at our boat with storms and with the Chines Virus making it crazy there. For now we will stay here away from as many crazies as we can and keep hoping for the best. We miss our boat but life is good here.

Our son is trying to catch the pack rats that are in around is place

Our house right at sunset

Small Adventures

Pam and I have made our life about having a little adventure in life. Sadly this maybe has had a little or maybe a lot to do with us having very little money in our old age. We hear people say as long as you have enough life is fine. If you believe that maybe we are doing alright “most of the time.” You never hear how hard you have to work sometimes to just have enough. Maybe there is some adventure in the work you have to do to just get by. We left our boat we built (building that was an adventure ) up a river in Guatemala late this summer to come up here to our little house ( just 4 rooms and needs work, another adventure ) out on the prairie in Kansas. Leaving late because of the Chinese virus and it being hard to get a flight out. We planted a late garden up here anyway and called it a meditation garden. I believe spending some quite time in the early morning in your garden is better than meditation. Having home grown tomatoes is always better than store bought and even watching people eat a home grown tomato out of our garden has a combing effect. It’s not the same with a fresh pepper and how a pepper perks up the person eating it. The weather is always an adventure out here and another weather adventure is happening. It was 84F last Wednesday and now it’s snowing. They said it was coming so we went to the garden for the last time this year to reap most, not all of what we planted. We pulled up the green beans plants and pulled all the beans off even the young new growth. No more going to the garden for fresh green beans. Taking the beans plants now stripped of beans to our son’s pet goat at his house she was happy. We pulled all the green tomatoes and wrapped them in paper stored now in the basement. Like I said not all is lost with snow coming. Being from the deep south we have greens planted and they can take some cold. Now walking out to the garden it looks sad but the greens are hanging on under the snow. Today Pam is slow cooking pork with some fresh crushed red peppers and making crackling corn bread. To make cracking corn bread you start with pure pork fat cut into one inch cubes and fry them in a pan until all the grease is cooked out. This is how you make lard. Used the lard then to grease your bread pan and mix the cracklings you have now in the corn meal batter. Bake until golden brown. Eating corn bread with crackling in it gives corn bread an special taste. Fresh greens out of the garden on a cold snowy day setting by a wood fire eating pork raised in the US with crackling corn bread.

greens covered in snow, but they were good.

Going in the basement and found a tomato turning red out of our wrapped stored tomatoes is just another treat. I knew and old man one time that told me adventure some times is not that far away. People with boats go great distances sometimes to find adventure when adventure may be near. I know food in lands “far, far” away sometimes can be an adventure with. Can you even eat this? Maybe there is a reason with food so good here maybe again this is why there is so many people in America that are fat. Getting fat lies in how many calories can you burn in a day with food this good. I will worry about my fat when we go back to our boat and deal with beans and rice for breakfast. Beans and rice for lunch then the treat of the day. Beans and rice for supper with maybe a pepper.

Light snow in October.

Feeding the goat and son’s dogs treats