Surprise! So, yeah, I haven't actually fallen off the face of the earth. I don't really have an excuse for not blogging lately (or in months, really). Let's just move on, shall we?

 Here's a quick overview of what's happened in the last 6 months. We started with 1 duck. This is Quackers. AKA Quackopotamus, Quackzilla and Quacky. She's a Swedish Blue that we got from a coworker of Gabe's back in November of 2011.

 Then in July another coworker gave us an A-frame chicken coop and we got these two little guys.

They are both Rhode Island Reds. The kids named them Lillyann and Little Feather. Then in August we got two more Rhode Island Red hens and another duck to keep Quacky company. Ducks like to flock so they do better in groups. Quacky was lonely until Penelope came. Penelope's a Rouen. Rouens have the same pattern as wild Mallard ducks. Now they are best duckie friends.

 That brought us to 2 ducks and 4 chickens.

Our first egg! 

MoMo also had a birthday. 8 years old!

She had a party at the skating rink. Here she is skating with her BFF. They could almost be twins...

Daddy got his hunting license and here's his first quail.

He got a few more quail and a Chukar, too, in later hunting excursions. And a couple of rabbits (made some delicious rabbit stew!).

Halloween monster cookies!

 And a ninja and a bee... and some jack o' lanterns. MoMo's jack o' lantern wasn't feeling too well!

Grandma and Papa came to visit at Thanksgiving but I, uh, didn't take any pictures. Sorry.

In December, Daddy took MoMo to the salon to get her hair done.

Then Christmas came. Christmas morning...

And it turns out that Lillyann and Little Feather were roosters! So they had to go. No one really liked hearing them crowing at 3am. Now they're on a farm breeding baby chicks. Speaking of baby chicks...

On Valentine's Day these 6 little cuties came home with us.

They don't have names, yet. But they are getting big! And getting their patterns...especially the black ones who will end up sort of black and white striped. They are Barred Rocks. Plus there are two white ones (Leghorns, maybe, or White Rocks? I just told her to give me 2 white ones because MoMo wanted white), a Buff Orpington, and a Blue Laced Red Wyandotte. So now we've got 8 chickens and 2 ducks and a generous supply of both chicken and duck eggs. We're going to have to start giving them away. And these little ones aren't even laying yet!

The weather's been pretty nice lately. I'm getting spring fever, ready to start planting in the garden. Yesterday the temperature got all the way up to 68! We opened up the windows in the house to air it all out and enjoy the warmer weather. Of course, tomorrow it will probably snow. We have crazy weather like that.

Also I'm pretty excited that I finally have an extra freezer in the garage! So now I can buy meat and things when it's on sale and have room to keep it frozen. I had so little freezer space before that it was ridiculous. And I definitely feel a little old to be so excited about an appliance! But in order to fit the freezer in the garage we had to do some cleaning and reorganizing. It's still a work in progress. But it's gonna be awesome when it's done! Then I can get my craft/sewing supplies and fabric organized. In the meantime I was moving around fabric in the garage and decided I needed to make some quilts with some of it pronto. Yesterday I cut up one of my very favorite lines of fabric, Sultry by Moda. And did some sewing. Hopefully in a day or two I'll have a new quilt top to share. Here's one final picture from yesterday. My little quilter...

She's working on her very own I-Spy quilt. More pics to come...

Well, another summer has come and gone. School started last week so we've had to get back into the school frame of mind. Happily it has been a pretty smooth transition so far. We thoroughly enjoyed our summer with trips to Arizona, Las Vegas (Big R celebrated his birthday at the Adventuredome), and California for Papa's 60th birthday party. This past weekend we spent some time camping in central Nevada. We saw some interesting sights, fished and enjoyed the beautiful weather in the mountains.And believe it or not, Nevada does have mountains with trees and rivers/creeks! We camped at Pine Creek and Kingston Canyon (No, not THAT Kingston Canyon, the one in NV!) On the way is the town of Austin, NV. We've been through before and noticed a castle perched on the top of a hill but this time we decided to stop and take a closer look.

If you'd like to learn a little more about Stokes Castle click here. Not far past Austin we spotted some wildlife.

Hee Haw-Wild Burro

Some more wild burros

They just stared at us. And we took pictures. Then we continued on. Further on, the road passed by Toquima Cave which contains ancient pictographs. Read about it here. We stopped and hiked about 1/4 mile to the cave. (And back)

Pictographs in Toquima Cave

More Pictographs

Wonder what they mean?

View from the mouth of the cave

Big R at Toquima Cave

MoMo (and Daddy) at Toquima Cave.

After hiking back to the truck we continued on to Pine Creek. When we arrived and were scoping out which site we wanted, we spotted a couple of deer right in the middle of the campground. 

Deer at Pine Creek (look at second tree from right-it has ears! LOL )

We chose an awesome spot and set up camp. Well, all the sites are pretty awesome. Most are adjacent to the creek with plenty of trees for shade. As we were coming in we got to talking with a couple who were camping near us which proved to be lucky. Later, they invited us to dinner. They were expecting their kids and grandkids to be there for dinner but at dinner time they still hadn't arrived. They had a whole Thanksgiving-esque feast prepared and didn't want it to go to waste so we got to enjoy an amazing dinner with them-dutch oven roasted turkey breast, stuffing, salad, rolls, cranberry sauce and peach cobbler for dessert! Yum! Thanks Kim and Glenn!

Fishing in Pine Creek

   We also did some fishing but unfortunately we didn't have a lot of success. The kids got some bites and Daddy caught a couple but they were little guys so they went back into the creek. MoMo was pretty disappointed that we didn't have any fish to cook up for lunch. But we had a campfire and the kids did some metal detecting around the campsite. They found what Big R called his treasures-mostly fishing weights, bullet shells and such but he did find a nickel and a couple of pennies. Plus a 2 euro coin later in Kingston Canyon.

Campfire

Since we weren't really catching any fish in Pine Creek we decided to try our luck in Kingston Canyon for our last night. We packed up camp and headed back over the Toquima Mountains to Kingston Canyon. In my atlas I noticed that we'd be passing by some hot springs, one called Diana's Punchbowl which sounded very interesting so I suggested we stop and take a look. Now the atlas didn't have any sort of description of the punchbowl so we didn't know precisely what we were looking for. We followed the road out and found hot water flowing but didn't find the source. The actual hot spring. Diana's Punchbowl. Nothing that seemed to fit the name Diana's Punchbowl. Somewhat unimpressed we started heading back to the main road and there was this big hill with a road right up the side. Hubby's got this thing where if he sees a hill  with a road he wants to/needs to drive up it. (And MoMo is right there egging him on to drive up the steepest hills) So seeing the road he figured we'd drive up. When we got to the top we realized the hill WAS the punchbowl! At the top was a huge hole.

Diana's Punchbowl

At the bottom, 30 feet or so down, is steaming hot water. 200 degrees hot according to this site.

So, you know, we stayed well back from the edge because we surely didn't want to fall in and get boiled alive. 

Hello from Diana's Punchbowl

 We made it to Kingston Canyon and we set up camp (again). Glad we have a tent that is super fast to set up and take down! This campground also had sites right along the creek so again we were right next to the water. Further into the canyon there is also a reservoir called Groves Lake. That's where we did most of our fishing in Kingston Canyon. Again, we didn't have much luck fishing. The first evening we went fishing in the lake we could see the fish actually jumping out of the water but they just didn't want any of our worms. There were people fly fishing that did catch a fish or two but we only had worms and didn't catch anything. Still we had a campfire and smores and the kids did metal detecting in out campsite and Big R found the euro coin. The next day we went past the lake to see if other parts of the creek had better fishing. We found a nice spot and Hubby caught a couple trout, though again they were small and went back in the creek. We drove up into the canyon and up Kingston Summit (almost to the top but not quite). The view was incredible.

View to the Notheast from just shy of Kingston Summit

View to the Southwest from just shy of Kingston Summit

We tried Groves Lake again before we had to pack up and head home.The fish seemed to be liking worms more this time. Got some bites but still didn't land any fish. So no fish lunch for us. Maybe next time. But even though we didn't have a lot of luck fishing we had a great time. Exploring. Spotting wildlife and natural wonders. Sitting around the campfire, roasting marshmallows. And we can't wait to do it again.

I just wanted to wish you all a very happy Pi Day! In honor of Pi Day I made a Pi (apple) Pie. Yum! So, how did you celebrate Pi Day?

p.s. the area of my Pi Pie (according to the formula A=πr²) is approximately 70.85 square inches. That's a lot of Pi Pie!

For the longest time I haven't had any inspiration when it comes to scrapping. But it seems I just got it back. So here are 4 layouts I put together.
That last Tooth Fairy layout has a photo that is from a while back. MoMo just lost another tooth this past Monday so she's got a real jack o lantern smile going on now!
cOh, and I also made some old fashioned (cruller) doughnuts. My sister gave me a book full of doughnut recipes for Christmas and these are the first ones I've tried. And they're super yummy! See, here's MoMo scarfing one down. (before losing her last tooth because now she's got a big hole on the top where her tooth used to be!) They definitely have her seal of approval. I think the next ones I'll try are the raised glazed ones...or maybe the devil's food cake...or maybe the blueberry. They all look delicious. I'm really going to have to pace myself. LOL Anyone want to come over for doughnuts?

Today I have pictures for you of my 3 latest quilts! These three are all I Spy quilts that I made for 3 of my nephews for Christmas. Each quilt is made up of 4" novelty fabric blocks. Each quilt used 114 completely different squares. Within each quilt there are no duplicates. The fabrics have so many fun things in them-everything from bees to cars to apples! I participated in 3 fabric swaps to collect so many different squares and I had over 600 squares to choose from when I put each quilt together. The fun part is that in addition to being a snuggly quilt, it is also a game! I included a label on each with a list of things to find on the quilt. My nephew Lil B and I also had a fun time finding an object on the quilt and then challenging the other to find it. I know I had a lot of fun making the quilts and I hope that my nephews enjoy them.
We spend Christmas at my Mom and Dad's house this year and with all my brothers and sisters and nieces and nephews there it was a full house! But despite (or maybe because of) the tight quarters we had a great time. All the cousins have such a great time together. Wish we lived closer together but I do feel fortunate that we usually get most everyone together at last once a year. Well, I guess I better get off the computer and get to making dinner. Until next time...