Farm Life

[Christine]

Ah, sunshine! Never lacking here in central Mexico ... we are grateful.

Thank you Laurie for all you are, do and for continuously amazing us with your life. It's been a while since I have shared snippets of my personal life and feelings about ickies like Black Friday, more like a plague that has spread across the globe to places far and wide. For many years I stopped all "traditional" celebrations and it was not easy, the pull of social conventions (engineering) is very strong this time of year. What I feel now is the ability to flow without taking a stance like I once did. Sometimes simply acquiescing to a moment can be full of unexpected pleasure, such was our Thanksgiving dinner.

Sharing moments where magic peeks through all things... feeling blessed for our home online and the sharing you all give so abundantly.

[Spiritwind]

Sometimes simply acquiescing to a moment can be full of unexpected pleasure... I totally agree with this! Beautiful pictures, btw Christine.

I don't have pictures of dinner, but I did take a few of the goaties and some rather cool trees. I also took the girls out for a walk, in two groups of five. I have taken them all out together at once, but I have to be feeling spunky to do that because getting them back in their separate pens mostly requires luck, timing, and bribery.


The three mini-lamancha doelings and the two pregnant does due to kid in December.


The three older girls and the two kids I left with moms.

[Spiritwind]

Two more things worthy of mention is that the shelter for the horse arrived and we should be picking it up today. We still have to build the sides for it, which may have to wait until next weekend, but we're almost there! And yesterday we finally did our project I hinted at before. I have a friend who has a prescription for medical marijuana and she has been raving about how good Rick Simpson's recipe for the oil is. So we decided to try our hand at making some. There are quite a few testimonies from people out there who were basically told to get ready to die, and went home and decided they would rather get well instead. Since I kind of like that idea too, I figured it was worth while to know how to make this amazing and wonderful medicine, which it is. Again we felt like mad scientists, but we were careful. You have to boil off the solvent, which in our case was 99% isopropyl alcohol. But the recipe worked like a charm and it was incredibly easy to make. The only thing I would say is that while it takes a while for the solvent to boil off, it goes faster towards the end, so it's good to watch it pretty close once most of its boiled off. It was cold outside so everyone kept wanting to go hang out by the wood stove. And you have to put it in a container rather quickly because it gets very thick in a hurry. It really is like a black goo.


Really like the stainless steel insert on the rice cooker. Had to order it because all the cookers we looked at locally had that not so wonderful non-stick coating.


We found that the strainer I used for the goats milk worked far better than the coffee filters that he recommends, unless you like to watch paint dry, because that's about how slow it was.

Here is the link to his website and the directions we used:
http://phoenixtears.ca/producing-the-oil/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

PS:

@ Steven - today is warm, today is love - yes indeed!

@ Sandy - I, too, can always feel your frequencies! All of us here, collectively, create more than just the sum total of our energies and intentions. Like crystals, we can hold, amplify, and radiate our intentions and genuine love for life, and it can be felt! It's funny, because I've long realized that we are in a battle of frequencies of sorts, and just by our very act of not succumbing to the prevailing frequency, we are already in the battle even though our focus is peace, knowing that it starts within. It is a choice each of us have made as individuals. Strange to think about, for me anyway. We are warriors of a different sort.

[Christine]

Great minds are alike ... getting a rice cooker soon. Totally tuned we are.

[Spiritwind]

Don't have time to write much today. It's been getting down into the mid to low teens (F) at night and so I'm back to changing out everyone's water at least twice a day. I thought maybe Freckles was getting her hooves trimmed too short and maybe a bit on the overweight side, but it turns out it's her hips from when she drug the barn a few years ago. When it gets cold she gets stiffed up. So we've been putting on her insulated blanket at night and she seems to be doing better.

I dug through the hay and found that there were still a few good bales of the alfalfa/grass hay left, so I can feed Freckles some of that and hopefully I can get her weight down. I have to take responsibility for feeding her too much, even though I partly blame it on getting bad hay and not being able to just go out and buy more. It's a bad habit, and more is not always better. When I just gave her a small piece of the leafy rich alfalfa, she would throw her head around every time I went out the door and whiny at me like she was starving to death, and I unfortunately often fell for it and gave her more. The kitties got my number too! Damn!

We did get the lower part of her new shelter built and I also pieced together the metal top part. Unfortunately, on both sides of the cross over pieces that you have to connect to the middle portion we had to grind the piece that inserted into it because it would not fit, all eight of them. Guess they got in a bit of a hurry when they manufactured it. So it took longer than the directions predicted it should take. But now all we have to do is assemble it all together. It's been a long time coming, getting her another shelter, so I am quite happy we're almost there. I have never been a very patient person, so I am still getting many opportunities to work on that.

Lots more going on, but it will have to wait until I have more time. I always have very mixed emotions during these so called holiday times of the year. Christmas especially. Definitely not time now, as I sit for a moment and reflect on the feelings and memories that come up. Suffice it to say I do not support the feeding frenzy consumerism of this time of year. (It's also almost a year since Christine came to visit after leaving Standing Rock and I have many thoughts about where we all are a year later after what began there - like all the leaking pipelines). I always enjoy opportunities to create closer ties with people I care about, but that's about as far as it goes. And there are many ways to show you care, really care, without going out and buying something you probably cannot afford. No one should ever feel bad because they don't have a lot of money to buy stuff for other people all in the name of some holiday that doesn't even resemble what it was at its origin. Definitely not enough time for this rant, LOL!

I'll leave you with a few pictures from the farm. The picture of the fir tree is the biggest tree on this side of the property I think, and it's definitely one of my favorites. I talk to it all the time, promising not to disturb its roots (anymore than we accidentally already did) and how happy I am to just be here, in its awesome presence. I call her the Mother Tree, as that is what she seems like to me. A very nice energy radiates from her.



This next one is Miss Jinjer and her daughter Miracle.


And here is Josephine and Bella (sisters)

[Spiritwind]

Okay, I have to add a little funny, to me anyway. Hope I don't get in trouble. Anyway, I was driving to the city yesterday, feeling very heavy, in part due to the latest travesty having to do with Trump turning over more land to big business. So I turned the music up loud, and intended to transmute what I was feeling and called on my imagination to help. What I saw made me laugh out loud. I saw, rather irreverently, Trump looking like a cartoon figure with a pink shirt on. As I looked I saw him hit with a love bomb and it knocked him off his feet to the left of my minds view, wig flying (and I don't think he wears a wig, LOL) and literally falling to the ground and crying like a baby as he was hit with it. Could not handle all the love. It literally decapacitated him. And I felt so much better, strangely. Imagination is a powerful thing.

[LostNFound]

Well dear lady, The gift, the real blessing is just you sharing this place in your heart. The goaties look so cute. I and Babe have always been this way and we do that all of the time. Some man made up commercialism concept should never be the only time to try to spread some good cheer or whatever it may be. Chasing the god of money, the illusion of things to make one think or perhaps try to feel something that is buried deep inside one day or so a year because it is a conditioned time/response will never allow a truth of ones self to flow, a love that should always shine.

Thank you so much for the gift of your being, of who you are always.

Steven

[Sandy Clark]

I agree 100% with Steven and I love the Farm Life writings and the writer.............mwaauuhh!!

[Spiritwind]

Thank you Sandy and Steven for just being who you are as well!!!

I'm dragging this morning, primarily because I keep pushing myself after I know I should probably stop. I flew through a windshield back in 1991, and landed on my lower back when I hit the ground. And three of my daily chores irritate and delay the healing process when I've over done it (hauling buckets full of frozen and fresh water, and sawing and chopping wood). I know I have to get more creative, but right now I just want to take a nap.

I'm quite excited though, because we pretty much finished the shelter for Miss Freckles, and we barely got done to head in yesterday and turned around to see her go in it. First thing she did was leave a big pile of manure in there. She is actually kind of picky where she goes, so I would sure like to know what she was thinking. I threw some hay in there without really looking, and almost threw it right on the pile. She really was a little stinker yesterday, too, when we let her out to put her shelter up (we had to take part of the fence down). She is rather mission oriented and just about killed herself getting to the back of the hay barn. I tried to block it hoping to keep her out of there, but grossly underestimated her determination. Won't do that next time. We didn't really have any safe place to tie her up so we ended up having to throw her some more hay, even though I'm trying to get her to loose some weight. Anyway, short and sweet today. So so happy she is going to be able to get out of the weather now, so it was all worth it.



I mean, really, just look at that face!

[Sandy Clark]

OMG!! What a Sweetie ...............and she sure suits her name...Hi Freckles <3