We have a mystery at our house, a silly mystery, but a mystery all the same.

On our front lawn there are four geese that appear to be grazing on the lawn.  They look so real that people will stop, back up, and look again.  The geese have become a neighborhood favorite. 

Our neighborhood has a diverse personality, not only among the people who live on our little dirt road, but also in the animals that live here.  My neighbor has miniatures:  three donkeys, three goats, and a pig.  Needless to say, the donkeys can be pretty noisy when someone approaches their area, the goats just bleat quietly, and the pig makes little noise.  If you get down-wind of their pen, you can tell there are animals nearby without seeing a thing.

At our house, our big dog Jake announces every visitor whether a person or a visiting annimal.  He has a hound-like baying he makes, which isn’t typical of Norwegian Elkhounds, even though they’re in the hound family.
So, you can see that part of the popularity of our geese is that they neither honk (a goose-like quality) nor do they poop and stink up the yard.

What’s the mystery?  Well, every morning,
something has knocked over the geese. 

This morning one is sitting back on his tail in surprise,
 

while another seems to have had a bad landing and is trying to play ostrich with his head in the grass.                   

Still another is eating away in a flower bed full of weeds. 

The last goose looks like he knows something and is ready to attack it,

 if he can figure out what “IT” is.

There’s the mystery.  We don’t know who or what is tipping over our geese, but every morning when we look out, there they are in some un-goose-like position.  I’ve begun to wonder if it’s the weeds growing under their feet.  It’s a mystery to me.

I’ll upload pictures in a minute here.

Later —————-

Well, the pictures are here, but I can’t figure out how to get them placed correctly in the text.  I guess you’ll have to work it out.

 Marilynne

Jake’s a Norwegian Elkhound.  He’s big, he’s fluffy, and when he begins to lose his winter coat there’s fur flying everywhere.  The last few days have been summery and warm in Southern California and Jake is miserable in his winter coat.  What was thick and warm and cozy on cold nights has now become hot and yucky.

So, today I decided to give him a good brush.  First of all, you have to convince Jake he has to stand by you and submit to being brushed.  I didn’t have a problem with this until after I started taking him out for grooming.  So long as I was the one doing the brushing he seemed to enjoy it.

So, I slipped his leash over his neck and spent the next few minutes convincing him we were NOT going for a walk.  Then I began to brush him with a grooming comb.

At first nothing much happens, but as you continue to brush, the silky warm winter hair begins to loosten and come to the surface.  It’s almost like the comb is telling it it’s time to let go.  At first just a few silky strands begin to fly, most of them settling back on his coat like they don’t want to leave home.  Then I begin to brush up great wads of the stuff and I have to keep cleaning the comb. 

I put the loose hair into a large empty flower pot I keep handy for the purpose.  But the hair wads on the brush, but when I try to clean it off onto the pot, the hair wants to stick to my hands.

I continue to brush and comb.  Jake begins to get into it – at one point easing down onto the veranda so I can reach his belly.  I comb and comb and comb.  The pot fills up and I begin to push it back down inside, condensing the fur.

However loose fur begins to fly.  It collects in big clouds on the veranda and collects like snow drifts in the corners.  It also sticks to my clothing.  Pretty soon I’m sure I not only look like a dog, but smell like one too.  Every once in a while Jake sneaks a lick to my face to let me know it’s OK to look and smell like him.  At least he likes it.

I brush for a half hour or more.  Now there are clouds of loose hair on Jake and I can swipe them off with my hand.  When I’m tired, I give up.  There’s hair enough left for another day of grooming.  Right now, Jake is reminding me I promised him a walk.  It’s so much fun to be a dog owner.

Marilynne

I’ve spent most of the day painting roses in watercolor: beautiful, impossibly lush roses. It’s a meticulous task, not one to be done in an hour or so. Still, when the watercolors flow into the water and begin to spread, I watch in wonder. Gail squeals.

I have watercolor class and lab on Tuesdays – all day. I spent the day getting a 0.2 ounce brush full of water or paint and applying it to paper. So, why am I exhausted?

In part it’s because I get so absorbed in what I’m doing that I hardly move. After a while my back starts to complain, but it doesn’t stop me.

For a break, I joined the beginners to make a collage with colored tissue paper and laundry starch. The hardest part of that was finding some laundry starch and tearing the tissue paper into bits. The most fun part of that task was tearing colored tissue into odd shapes and slathering on the starch with abandon. There are not that many things one can do these days with complete abandon.

Right now it looks and feels like a kindergarten project, but I have some ideas on how to improve on it.

I hope you had some fun today. I know my husband did. Because I wasn’t home, he spent all day working in his vegetable garden. He puts his seedling under a cloche or bell-shaped plastic cap. That keeps the seedling warm and protects it from the rabbits. We have lots of rabbits. However, something, and I suspect it isn’t the rabbits, is knocking off the cap and eating the seedlings. That doesn’t make him happy. Right now, he is outside planning bigger barricades.

We’ll see how the week goes. I hope your week is going well.

Marilynne

I haven’t a drop of Irish blood in me, but today I decided to cook scones and corned beef and cabbage for dinner. It was good.

Our granddaughter was here with us. She’d been invited up to harvest some fresh peas for herself. She and her grandfather spent a good part of the afternoon picking peas. If you’re not a gardener, I will explain that peas are the same color as the vine and the leaves. Add to that that the vines are bushy and planted closely together and you’ll see it takes some determination and a good eye to be sure you’ve got all the peas that are ready to eat.

My hubbie planted both Chinese peas (edible pod) and the regular peas that you need to take from the pod. Shell enough peas to have for dinner and you’ll soon decide you like the Chinese peas better. We steam them or just eat them raw.

So, with the peas picked, I decided it was the right time to cook corned beef and cabbage. I’d already bought the corned beef and the cabbage, but I hadn’t found a recipe yet. Well, as any good cook can tell you, there appear to be as many ways to cook corned beef and cabbage as there are cooks to cook it.

So, I had the corned beef simmering on the stove for hours (1 hour for every pound of corned beef), and the vegetables prepared so there was nothing to do but wait and eat.

But wait a minute. How about some freshly baked scones to go with it. Out came the cookbook and I started in. Somehow I mismeasured the flour (too little), didn’t have heavy whipping cream (used 2% milk and a half cup of plain yogurt), and soon was heavy into making my first scones. By now my granddaughter was helping me and we were talking about how an experienced cook just substitutes when she doesn’t have the right ingredients. (She’s already that kind of a cook.)

We were probably doing too much talking and not enough paying attention, because when it was time to turn the dough onto the board and knead it – it looked pretty sticky. I didn’t want to take the time to figure out what my mistake was, so I just turned it out on the board. I couldn’t do much with the dough but coat my fingers 1/2 inch deep with dough. I kept washing my hands and adding flour. By then I realized that I had washed a good part of my batter down the sink. Resolutely I kept adding flour until my goodness! I had something that looked like bread under my hands. So I followed through and finished up, put them in the oven to bake and told everyone not to expect much.

The scones were delicious and just the right accompanyment with the corned beef and cabbage (cooked also with yellow potatoes and onions). It was a fine meal.

I was just lucky. (Luck of the Irish?) If it tastes good the method doesn’t matter – right?

Marilynne