Goat Training

Guildy has decided that her goat, Rosa, must be trained to be a pack goat. So Rosa gets several lessons per day practicing walking nicely with her little load of grass.

Rosa has actually become a fairly nice goat. For  a long time we referred to her as "Satan's Goat" because she would rise up on her back legs, tilt her head menacingly, and strike her front hooves at whatever poor defenseless child was in her sights.  She and her far less intelligent sister have also broken into my garden, crawled in the car and eaten the CA map out of my road atlas, and eaten the bark off an apple tree, among other offenses. More than once I've been within moments of slaughtering them on the spot. But then I always decide it would be more trouble than it would be worth. Plus I'm short on freezer space. 

Charity Visits Us!!

Last week, my bestest good friend Charity journeyed out west to visit us (and some other people, too). We spent most of the week at Dillon Beach and had a most lovely time relaxing and catching up. We hadn't had a proper live-in-person visit since January, and frankly, between the election and our busy lives, there was a lot to discuss:o)

After picking Charity up at the train. 

Dillon Beach sunset. Josh's mom very graciously let us use her rental house for the week, as the exact days we needed it were open.

Rocky beach adventures.

 

A chilly day necessitating the sharing of Aunt Charity's coat:o)

Beach Photo Shoot

Star Gazing

Awhile back, we took a family 4-wheeler ride up to the top of a ridge to watch the sun set, eat a picnic supper, and star gaze. 

Not bad...as far as sunsets go.

Working furiously to clear grass from our campfire site. Of course the blurriness wasn't planned, but it nicely illustrates the speed with which the girlies move!!

  

Almost dark and ready for the fire. Notice Hadley's  aircast boot. She got two green stick fractures in her  foot about a month ago. She was "trying to fly" off a playset. It didn't work out as well as she had hoped. Thankfully it's all healed up now and she's back to her normal self. 

A fireside chat...

Halloween

My Halloween photography was pretty dismal this year, but you can at least get the idea of what the girls were.

Josh's very talented Mom whipped up the Rapunzel dress and the Indian costume. Guildy did the bead work on her dress.

Rapunzel with her cast iron pan:o)

Guildy's Field Trip

A few weeks ago, Josh and our friend Paul made a trip up to Willits, CA a couple hours away to visit a shop that sells and repairs gas appliances. We needed a gas fridge for our off-grid electrical system, and Paul had a couple that needed worked on. Guildy loves going to work with Josh, so she thought this trip would be fun, too.

Josh and Guildy with the owner of the shop, his monster truck and  a dog. 

Paul loaned Guildy his camera to take pictures of "interesting things" on her field trip. I got a huge kick out of the things that caught her attention and were deemed photo worthy.

Under the hood of the monster truck.

Monster truck trophies:o)

Monster truck and monster dogs....

Gas fittings....

 

Tools....

A lift for loading appliances into the pickup. She took a whole sequence of pictures documenting the loading and unloading of this fridge. 

Close up of the lift.

 

Lunch before heading home:o)

The Tin Toaster

Way back in February and March when we were planning to move from Honduras to California, Josh started looking for a vintage trailer house for us. We've always had a thing for vintage trailers, and we're perhaps the most minimalistic people we know, so of course it seemed logical to downsize our family of five into approximateley 340 square feet. Our little house in Honduras was about 600 square feet, with no storage. The trailer is the picture of efficiency, and I love it!! And who knew it was even eco-chic! Now that we own one and have done all the research, we have found they are actually pretty desirable as homes because they are "recycled" and "green." 

Sparticus Domesticus...or the Tin Teepee...or more accurately, The Tin Toaster.....is a 1956 Spartan, made by the Spartan Aircraft Company in Oklahoma City. After WWII, Spartan quit making aircraft and went into mobile homes. This one is 45' long, the longest that can be pulled down the road without being oversized. It came from Walla Walla, WA, where it had been parked new during a dam construction project and sat ever since in a trailer park. Josh and a friend made the trek up to get it, and apparently it actually tows really well. It's just a little tough getting in and out of gas stations and such. 

Josh worked on the trailer, water system (a spring run about 1/2 mile), and electrical system (an off-grid system with a generator and battery bank that runs on waste veggie oil) through the summer and in August, we finally moved it out to its little home site. (This is where I have to say that Josh is pretty dang amazing for being able to do all that!!!) It still has some shortcomings. The electric fridge and stove are a bit much for the electrical system, so we are looking into a gas fridge and stove. We can recite the wattages of all our electrical appliances and gadgets, as well as the combinations in which they can be run based on the capacity of the system. Convenient? No. A worthy pursuit and fun challenge? We think so. 

The Toaster, in all her glory. I'm really looking forward to winter, when my house will be pleasantly warm and sunny with its south-facing front window. Its passive solar heating capacity is great on cold days. Of course, the flip side of that thermal coin is that on a 100 degree day, it's approximately 110 degrees inside. We are almost ready to start building a big porch, which will dramatically reduce the sun exposure, but in the meantime, it's been a hot August and September! Fortunately, our suck-it-up-and-deal-with-the-heat skills are pretty highly developed after a few Honduras summers, so I'm sure we'll make it until cooler weather. Josh also built a wood/waste oil furnace that will sit outside and be connected to the trailer's existing ducting. 

Perhaps the world's nastiest carpet in the living room.

Water damage below most of the windows, typical of old trailers. Josh refinished all the woodwork and replaced a few of the worst birch ply panels. 

The front of the trailer, which is the living room/grown up bedroom.  The original linoleum floors were salvageable in the front half. 

I had visions of lovingly washing down my trailer's woodwork with Murphy Oil soap until it smelled great and shined. In reality, years of occupancy by smoking bachelors made it a much bigger job. I spent days and days with razor blades, steel wool, and Goo Gone getting down to wood!

Even the beastly greasy green stove in the picture above cleaned up okay. I would have loved to chuck it, but thrift prevailed, and with a can of spray paint, it became presentable. I love tiny, efficient kitchens. The opposite wall in the kitchen houses the fridge and tons of pantry/storage space.

From the couch, looking toward the kitchen. 

The bathroom before. Not much different really - on the surface. But all the plumbing is new...no small task!

The cork flooring is also new. The original flooring in the back half of the trailer was bad, so it all got replaced with cork.

 

A "before" of the closets in the back bedroom. The girls sleep in the bedroom on little mattresses I made to fit the space.

 Outside pictures, you ask? Well, I'm going to wait on those for a couple things. Number one, a porch to hide all the stuff we have stored under the trailer. And number two, rain and the grass it will bring. With all the site prep work on red soil pulverized to the consistency of powdered sugar, we kind of look like refugees on the surface of Mars. Of course, the logical solution to the dust problem was to spread several tons of horse manure around the premises to cover the dust and encourage grass to grow. However, it hasn't rained since April (normal for here), so not much grass is coming yet. Thus, I'll wait for a beautiful stand of green grass surrounding the house to take pictures outside!

The Bull Sale

The annual Topline bull sale was a couple weeks ago. Rather than being held at the ranch, as it had been in previous years, it was held at a sale barn south of the Bay area. The sale went well, with no major mishaps and the bulls fetching a nice average price.

Hadley and Talby were appropriately interested in the proceedings - for their ages. They watched for awhile and then  mostly played.

Guildy, on the other hand, watched almost the entire sale - all 178 bulls - just like a pro.  She said later that the guy she sat next to was really nice and let her borrow his program when she had questions. Late in the sale we stepped out for a break, but Guildy had to get back inside because they were done selling the black bulls and were on to the reds, and she was "really looking forward to seeing the reds sell."

The Monterey Bay aquarium is near where the sale barn, so the day before the sale, while the guys were busy washing bulls and getting everything ready, moms and kiddos went to see the fish. It is an AMAZING aquarium! Here are the girls crammed into a peep hole in one of the tanks.

Owen, Oatus, Guildy, and Hadley waiting for the next wave in a  glass exhibit that makes you feel like you're inside the wave.

The crashing wave!!

Busy Girls!

Since I haven't been too faithful to my blog lately, here's a quick smattering of what the girlies have been up to. 

Our trailer is pretty much parked in a pasture, so the cows often visit us in the evenings since we have the only green grass in a 100 mile radius. They like to break down the garden fence and mow down huge mouthfuls of cabbages and such. Fearless Guildy considers it her personal duty to defend our fragile flora.

The creek is just a couple hundred yards from our house,  and the girls like to go the "Picnic Rock" to eat. It sits out in the middle of the stream and provides a delightful place to snack.

We are doing a little history co-op with another homeschool family, our friends the Hance's. This was Roman Day. Here are Guildy, Kayden, Ty, Hadley, Wade, and Bryce.

I really can't believe how big and grown up Guildy is getting.

She takes her BB gun hunting trips very seriously.

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You can take the wild, naked girl out of the jungle, but.....

Potty training Mr. Potato Head.

Now it's Talby's turn.

Often it's a group potty effort. 

Thankfully, we've pretty much conquered potty training. I triumphantly and ceremoniously threw out all my disgusting, worn out cloth diapers a few days ago.