Labor Day Weekend

Who doesn't love a three day weekend? I know this girl sure does! With David occupied in North Carolina at the beach for a wedding, I headed home for the weekend. My sweet friend, Becki's baby shower was this weekend. I enjoyed getting to celebrate her and her upcoming arrival.

{Mindy, Becki, and I}

Big thanks to my friend Johanna for taking this picture. I was horrible and didn't take the first one. Go figure!

The rest of the weekend was pretty laid back. But so perfect just being home. After the shower I took the boys down to the creek to go swim. Thanks to the super rainy season this year, they haven't gotten to go swimming all year. They were absolutely in heaven! They truly love to swim down at the creek.

Give Brutus a ball and he will swim all day. He's a weird bird but I wouldn't have him any other way.

Speaking of birds, I got to experience a phenomenon this weekend that I have never noticed. I asked my dad, and he has never noticed either. But it's one of those things that would be easy to miss. There were so many hummingbirds flying around daddy's cotton field this weekend. They were everywhere! I had no idea that they fed off of the cotton blooms. It was very awesome. I watched them fight with each other, fly across the field dipping and chirping. They are really fascinating creatures.

I got excited earlier this week when I finally spotted a male at my feeder. I have only been seeing the female and I have been patiently waiting to see if the male would show up. Guess he was trying to be all sneaky!

If I had known I was about to hit the hummingbird jackpot, I might not have gotten so excited.

Spot the hummingbird!

I also spotted old peg leg on one of my drives.

Looks like this poor fellow has had a rough life. I named him Capt. Jack Sparrow. Get it? hardy, har, har

Saturday night, we watched some football. I missed the Florida game :-( but we did catch the Clemson vs Georgia game. That was a good one!

Barrett came home with me and the next morning I helped him catch crayfish and explore outside. Poor Brutus came on one walk with us. Needless to say, he was ready to get back to safety!

I took the boys on several rides around the cotton field. JJ was the only one that didn't fall off/jump off of the 4-wheeler. Guess the other two just didn't have it together!

We rode around and checked on the bees. I didn't know they were there until I drove up on them. Thank goodness I didn't disturb them. That could have gotten ugly!

The area around the Chipola and Apalachicola Rivers produces the best honey- Tupelo Honey. The movie Ulee's Gold starring Mrs. Timberlake (Jessica Biel), was filmed in Wewa, St. Joe, and Apalachicola and has a story line that involves tupelo honey production. Just a little FYI. Since it's not the right time of the year to make tupelo, the bees feed off of various other blooms for their pollen.

Anyways, it was good to be back in Calhoun County and to see my family. Hope you all had a great Labor Day as well!

Spring Chicken

I guess my father doesn't have enough to occupy his time....he is super busy converting the cow pasture into crop land for his upcoming cotton crop and of course, his full time job. Guess he now can add chicken raiser to his resume. My mother is super thrilled, if you can imagine {she types sarcastically}. But my little nephew really is beyond thrilled. My mother sent me over these pictures this morning.

Barrett spies his new victims  friends.

Now Barrett, you have to be super careful.....

Yes! This chick is totally at my mercy! Cool!!!

I lub him.

And he lubs me.

My only prayer is that my dogs don't eat Barrett's chickens! He wouldn't be happy with the dogs or with his Sissy! I can't wait until I go home to further investigate my father's new critters.



Memory Lane

This post might not interest anyone but me. Because I am taking a little stroll down memory lane. Some memories that I had really forgotten about. So it was fun for me to remember a much simpler time of being a kid and enjoying life. This past weekend I journeyed to my hometown to go visit my parents. This is always a welcomed sight when I drive into town.

Blountstown, Florida

This was taken as I was just getting into town on Hwy 20. Not much to look at, but I couldn't get too carried away taking pictures while driving. (oops...) So I went on through town and headed out to my parents. As I turned on the road my parents live on, I noticed a strange piece of equipment out in my father's field. Turns out Big Mike has got a new big toy.

My lovely father has gotten the farming bug after his cotton crop last year. So he has decided to get rid of his cows and clear the cow pasture to make more room for crops. That's my father, he always has to have something to do and piddle with. My mother, however, isn't as enthusiastic about his newest endeavor. I got to go watch her throw a Cathy-fit on my father. I was quite amused by the whole thing.

My mother doesn't want her house to be able to be seen from the road and she thought daddy was taking down too many trees. So in typical fashion she marched up to where daddy was working and informed him that he better not cut down too many trees, which of course my father responded to in typical Mike fashion with a shrug of his shoulders. I think his nonresponse infuriates my mother more. I love it. (and I might have egged my mother on to go get onto him, but I'm not fully admitting to that!)

He's making a lot of progress of getting out the trash trees before they come and get the merchantable ones. The area behind my parents house where all of this is going down used to be a thick forest of pine trees and live oaks. Walking through the cleared field made me remember things about this area that I had long forgotten. Like there used to be a road that ran through the property in the woods that hasn't been there for a long time. My brother and I used to spend countless hours back in those woods playing. It wasn't until I stumbled upon this pile that I remembered a special hang out of ours.

It may look like a bunch of junk but at one time it was part of a "treehouse" of sorts. It's what remains of a few ladders and some other metal that we had attached to an old blown over live oak that took a fall during Hurricane Kate in 1985. It was a huge tree that looked something like this, but on a much bigger scale.

Brad and I had ladders going up to different limbs and metal rails that went from branch to branch. We even had a vine swing that we would swing on. I found this and quickly remembered why it was there

It is what remains of a dumbbell from an old weight set that we used to have. Brad had that out at the treehouse so he could "work out" back in the day. (we were in elementary school, so he was doing some major working out. ha!) While this stuff means nothing to any of you reading this, it brought back a flood of memories of lazy summer days and things my brother and I would come up with to occupy ourselves. Mainly because my mother would lock us out of the house and demand that we play outside ;-)

Moving on in our journey I can across one of my father's creations that he made.

My mother ran a baby's breath farm on this field way back in the day. And this creation was my father's solution to planting the flowers. Those trays held the seedlings and there were seats attached to the back so you could sit close to the ground and lean over and plant the flowers while the tractor pulled you across the field. Funny story about this contraption was that one year we were all out in the field planting flowers and our springer spaniel, Heather was with us. She then decided to give birth to her litter of puppies right there in the field. So she would run along beside the tractor, plop down, have a puppy and keep going. As we passed the puppies, we would scoop them up and place them in the trays. Poor Heather never had a litter of puppies the normal way. Her first litter she was so freaked out about what was happening, that she jumped in my mother's lap and tried to have the puppy right there in her lap! And her puppies were always mutts. Half springer spaniel and half german shorthair pointer. They were gorgeous if you can imagine. Those two breeds shouldn't be mixed!  

After this, I walked to where the original cow pasture has always been. My father is notorious for never throwing anything away, because "he might can use it one day" and if his flower planting contraption shows, he can make anything out of some scrap metal. One thing that never got used after being discarded was this:

At one time this was attached to a combine and it is used to cut wheat. I don't ever remember daddy growing wheat there at the house, but he must have if it was out in the cow pasture. It was placed in the cow pasture never to be moved again. If you can tell a few trees have grown up below it in the years since it was placed there.

Yeah...100 points to Mike if he can get that thing out of the field now!

Speaking of childhood memories, I found this going through some boxes.

I can't believe I still have the birth certificate to my first Cabbage Patch Kid doll. I'm sure any other girls who grew up in the 80's can remember the craze that was the Cabbage Patch Kid. I think my mom had to fight some ladies off in Woolsworth to acquire this doll for me. HA! And my doll went by Tobie. Manfred was a little too weird to name a baby doll.

I also found this random piece of Ashley history:

Look a little bit closer and you will see why I kept this old FSU registration guide.

There I am in the green sweater concentrating really hard by the looks of my mouth. Ha! Why I kept this I don't know. But it has been kept safe and secure since 2004, so I guess I will keep it around for a few more years :-) Going through some of my old boxes of stuff, I realized I am a major pack rat. I found all kinds of napkins from restaurants that I assume had some significance back in the day, old movie stubs, rodeo tickets, concert tickets, notes passed around in class, old school papers. Name it, I kept it. One of my favorite things I came across was this picture. Maybe I am just being extra sentimental about old David these days ;-)

That's David and me back in August of 2000. This was his last night in Blountstown before he left for the Citadel in Charleston. Just looking at this picture also makes me cringe. That haircut I had. Wow. I can't pull off short hair, but I tried! During that time, I was working at a pharmacy in Panama City and was driving back and forth to work and thought having short hair would be quicker and easier than long hair, so I could save some time getting ready in the morning. That line of thinking got me a hideous haircut! 

Ok, I've probably bored you all to death with my random reminiscences! Thanks for indulging me!

You Dig?

You dig peanuts, that is. My cousin Heath and I had some bonding time on the tractor on Saturday. I rode with him for a couple of hours while he dug peanuts. I'm glad I had my camera in my trunk so that I could take a few pictures of our afternoon of bonding. Mainly, I think I probably just harassed him trying to take so many pictures. Ha ha!! Luckily the tractor has GPS that steers, so Heath didn't have to concentrate so hard on driving and he was completely at my picture-taking mercy!

Let the picture taking fun begin!!

Come on Heath! Look at the camera!

That's better. After that I tried a few more "artistic" shots. (if that's what you want to call it)

Doesn't quite work with camera girl in the mirror. Try again.

That shot took some maneuvering to get me out of the mirror. That's all I will say!

And if you've never seen peanuts dug, here is a close up.

We even got to watch a bald eagle fly around the field, which was pretty cool. Although you can barely see it in the picture.

It was just a gorgeous afternoon, perfect for digging peanuts.

When I hopped out of the tractor to take this shot, the overwhelming smell of freshly dug peanuts just hit me. It's funny how smells can just remind you of memories and that is a smell I associate with growing up. Just something about it. Of course Heath and I then had to discuss other smells we love, one of mine being the smell of diesel fuel and the smell of cotton after it has been picked. Weird as that sounds, its a comforting smell. And because of those associations, I think that is why to this day I hate cilantro. If you have ever played in a wagon of cotton before, you have been up close and personal with a few green stink bugs. And let me tell you what, cilantro tastes to me how a stink bug smells. Anyways, I digress.... All in all we had a fun time and I look forward to going back and taking a few pictures of this:

So Heath better get ready for some more harrassment during cotton picking! But he will have some good pictures for his photo albums. So that is our adventure in digging peanuts. I regret I didn't stop in the other field and take pictures of them combining the peanuts. But that was a dust-fest when I went by the field where that was happening. Yeah...no thanks. My car was fifthy enough from sitting in the digging field.

Guess I'm lucky it has been raining for 24 hours straight and knocked some of the dust off the car!

I will quote Joe Dirt to leave you with: Life's a garden, Dig it!!