The City Mouse in the Country

     September has always been a harbinger of change for me.   From season to season, from vacation to school, from bachelorhood into married life.  Now I find myself three weeks at least from my last entry and thinking about change once one.  I've tried to start this blog four, five or seventeen times now because this is a hard post for me to write      Because I got a lot on my mind...and I'm not sure who my audience is.  Any one that writes needs an audience.  Are they people interested in country and rural life?  It's not really a homestead blog, nor is a food and recipe blog even though I've covered all that in the past.  Although I've played around with the idea of making it a "learn to cook" blog.     If only I had people that would not mind eating my "weird" creations .  It's one of  the reasons I concentrate on cheese.  Most people like cheese.     So a cooking blog is out.     Or is it about my health journey?  I got some blood work

       In many ways, I want to make this home of ours into a gem.  We have an idea of what we want to paint, what we want to update and what we want to replace completely.     If the weather cooperates, this morning at the time of writing there is a heavy thunderstorm moving through, I hope to add some more rocks to my "Dry Creek" project and start/finish the often delayed fire pit build. Taken from a window during a storm     Well we did not plant a garden this year for a variety of reasons; we do have the room in front of the house for a wonderful and varied garden.   It's also the part of our property that gets the most sun and has a very fine slope away from the home so water can flow out towards our road.     We may never be self sufficient but we can be a little smarter and environmental conscious on what we do, and how we do things.   This is why I am thinking about letting some of our property “Go Wild."     We own roughly 2.5 acres, most of that

       A few days ago I posted that to a site that I belong to that deals with philosophy and religion.  I'm not sure where it's from or who the artist was that originally did the piece.  I would give them credit if I knew.          What intereested me to this little meme was simple.  People are willing to accept the idea of Intelligent Alien Life, of which we have no proof of, without question.   Yet refuse to believe what is true and provable because they are biased in their opinions or it contracts some other deeply held value or belief.      Again, this is a non political blog but, sadly, this article is going to touch upon some religious and political viewpoints that can be controversial.   So you have been warned.      However there is a really huge fallacy here first that needs to be addressed because everyone concentrates on the alien.   What this poster should be saying is "Alien Life."  All the evidence points to the fact that some sort of life exists "

  Special thanks to USA Today      A friend of mine online recently stated that the state of Texas was having a "Come to Jesus" moment.  Meaning that Texans would have some hard decisions to make in the coming weeks due to the winter storm.   Because a lot of the problems that were caused by this storm could have been avoid in the first place by simply listening to experts and making simple adjustments.     My heart goes out to the millions of people who have been without power for anywhere between 24 to 36 hours plus at the time of this writing.   Not being used to that type of cold, they were simply not prepared for roads covered in ice or electric lines snapping.  They were not prepared for the fact that water lines can freeze and or burst in these types of conditions.       Not having to deal with these types of conditions on a day to day basis, they were simply unprepared.       This is not a political blog, we are not going to discuss what happened or are we going to

      I recently read something that both surprised me and shocked me.   I was not looking for a research project, I wasn't even looking for anything but a distraction.   The problem is this particular distraction combined a few things that I love.   Food, being one of them, and History being the other.   It also contained a mystery; which at first seemed like a shock.  However it really something I had never really thought about before...but after a day of research all the puzzle pieces fell into place and it made sense.     So what was the mystery?    Exactly.     Japanese, and to a lesser extent Chinese culture had never really developed a Cheese or Dairy Culture.    I knew for example that in Tibet and other areas Yak's were used for the production of dairy.  Yak's milk is around 6 to 11% butterfat, meaning that it is perfect for things like yogurt, butter and cheese.  Water buffalo and even cattle were also known to both cultures.     However "dairy culture"

           Hey everyone!  Did you know that this page now has a companion Facebook page?    It will have articles, memes and such that interes t me that relate to this page but don't really apply.  Be sure to check it out     Let's be honest, 2020 has been one very odd and stressful year.     Covid hung over Thanksgiving this year like some weird creepy Uncle that the kids shouldn't be left alone with.   In our family, we ended up having two Thanksgiving dinners.  One with my brother and family on the 21st, the other with Sue's family on the 26th.        This has been our first Thanksgiving together with our families in over 15 years.  When we lived in Florida we would come home for Christmas normally, but as children grow and things change, even that holiday seemed to fall by the wayside.       We often invited friends that didn't have family in the area or some of the elderly folk over for Thanksgiving dinner when we lived in Florida.  That became a tradition.