Vyxxan's Virtual Venture

Archive for the ‘Everyday stuff’ Category

It didn’t start out exciting. Ron spent most of the afternoon cleaning up down tree limbs. He piled them down below the barn, where we like to have our larger bonfires.

So we are sitting there with a fire going, drinking beer, talking, and listening to music. Just a nice relaxing Saturday night.

Then I notice headlights shining across the field. Someone is at the house. Walk around the barn up towards the house and see that it’s a man in uniform knocking on our door.

My first thought was oh crud, there is a burn ban on and he’s here to give us a ticket. But no, the deputy sheriff walked down to meet me in the yard and said that some hikers were lost and from the GPS they were down the hill from us. Could he drive closer to that little valley? Sure.

He drives down and starts doing his siren, talking to the hikers on a cell phone. Can they hear that? Yes they can.

So he leaves with his flashlight, and I told him which way to go to find a path rather than a steep bluff.

Ron and I took the jump starter and our spot light to help things along a bit. Ron could hear them calling back and forth, and then pretty soon here came a girl scrambling up the side of the hill. It’s pitch black, no moon and pretty cold, too. I offered one of my jackets, but what she really wanted was a cigarette from Ron.

After a few minutes another girl came climbing up the hillside. She has a little puppy that she’s carrying. The deputy was close behind and we herded the girls around the pond to the deputies’ car. He gave them a bottle of water and moved stuff out of his backseat so they could get in the car.

It was 8 pm. I don’t know how long they’d been out there hiking, but they were definitely heading in the wrong direction! They’d started from Lincoln lake, which the entrance to is about 2 miles north. The lake itself is closer but it’s pretty dense woods down in that valley to be stumbling around in. Good thing they had a cell phone and could get a signal down in there… and really good that it had a gps signal. 21 year old kids, underdressed for hiking, and lost in the dark but they keep walking, sheesh!

The deputy could have shone his headlights and spotlight into the woods better, but he didn’t. The girls headed for our spotlight that they could see.

After they left, we sat around for a couple more hours talking about it. When you are lost, you aren’t supposed to keep walking… especially in the dark. That’s a good way to get hurt. If they had gone any further south from us they wouldn’t have been rescued as quickly, no good access from the road and no houses for a mile.

Anyhow, it’s not every day we get to be involved in a lost hiker rescue. :)

hugs,
Vyx

I’m thinking about adding an email widget…. If you signed up for it, it would send you an email when I update, rather than having to rely on checking here for updates or reading in your rss reader.

If anyone cares to comment pro or con… please do! I don’t always post links to FB, I don’t tweet… and I’m not even sure I have an RSS feed set up, lol!

Comments, please! Let me know!

hugs,
Vyx

I liked my little blue purse so well that I thought I’d do another one.

This time changing up the pattern a bit, make the purse a bit larger and different colors.

I decided on pink and black. Had to mail order the fun fur, as no one carries it locally. Managed to find wool in the right colors at Hancock Fabrics… the only local store with a good selection of wool!

This is going to be my last knitting/felting project for a while. I need to do some stamping as I’m way behind on rak backs.

Anyhow, before and after photos…

Before felting… and then the bottom before felting, so you can see that this one is rectangular rather than square.

Just out of the washer!

And finally… with the little blue purse. Quite a size difference!

I guess I’m going to have to take it to work with me Monday, to show it off… then call Candice to come get her new purse. :)

Hugs,
Vyx

It felt like spring this weekend and while I was at Lowes buying a new doormat I saw all the packaged bulbs and plants.

I couldn’t resist. I got a package of 5 stargazer lilies and two packaged peonies. I KNOW the darn things will be growing in the bags since they were in the store where it’s warm…. but it’s better to buy em now while the stuff is still alive.

Yesterday I was out digging holes. I planned to put the lilies out in my flower bed and the peonies up by the fence in front of the garage where we have another peony. So I started out digging one hole for the first peony. Not really that much digging… more digging the grass out and getting the rocks out. The dirt up in front of the garage… aside from the part we drive on… is WONDERFUL soil. Thick black dirt, not all clay… and not that many rocks, either. I love it when there aren’t a lot of rocks. The few I found I pitched through the fence to the cow pasture side. Ditto with the sod. But I dug up a huge piece of hinge… solid steel and pretty large. Plus a couple huge nails. Must be from the old farm that used to be here… the old farmhouse is in pieces slowly rotting away down at the bottom of the property.

Then I went over to my flower bed. I had Ron till up a strip a couple years ago… and he pried out a LOT of LARGE rocks. I added a few bags of good garden mix to it and planted brugsmansia and datura the first year. Last year I went with bags of clearanced glads. Tossed about 1/4 of what I bought, moldy or just dried up. I did have good glads last year, though. I ought to have better this year. I =thought= I was digging just outside of the strip and dug up some huge glad bulbs. Probably about 3x the size I planted. Great! I stuck em back in… hope I got em right side up, lol!

So I move over and dig some holes. It was a bit damp, but not muddy. I got a few lilies in and then went back to my peony hole to plant one of those. Surprise! Instead of just one peony in the package, I had two! Well, no problem, I’ll just put the extra one over in my flower bed. It can go where I had some sunflowers last year that didn’t get mulched. I stick my spading fork into the ground and pry… and up comes this whole yard of metal. Dig again and I get what looks like more of it. I’m not sure what it is… it looks like part of a rusted farm implement, something that would be dragged behind a tractor. What it’s doing under a fence and in between posts I don’t know. A bit of it had been sticking out, but I never tried to dig that deep last year in that spot. Good steel, just like the hinge piece… hardly rusted at all.

The trash that is at the bottom of the property is crazy… you can see pieces of roof with shingles. Old fridges laying on their sides with the doors hanging open… sheet metal… old pressure tanks from having to get well water out of the ground. Just lots of junk… and all covered over in summer with wild things growing and piles of brush getting tossed in. It’s actually great for wildlife.. the bits of roof make nice covers for animals that don’t actually dig burrows. Piles of brush left alone eventually break down and become dirt. We don’t really notice all that stuff in summer, it’s grown over. But winter… ugh. Could be worse, though… and I’m sure it would be if it didn’t have piles of old sticks and stuff thrown over it.

This is life in the country… and where no one outside of city limits had trash pick up until fairly recently. If you had the land… Just shove it over there, eventually it’ll rot away hopefully. Of course it doesn’t… My Mom’s property had trash pits all over it. When she had her pond dug, we were picking up plastic milk jugs for years. Plastic is forever. My Mom was good, though… she composts everything that can be, and then even before trash pick up would sort stuff out and save it up and haul it out to where the county would let rural customers take trash. Now she has trash pick up… she still composts. She does, however, still burn paper stuff. I’ve found that most people that live out in the country still do that. At least it’s just junk mail and cardboard from packaging… not trying to burn plastic milk jugs. That’s illegal here now, any burning of trash…. but I’ve also found that most people that live outside of town never heard about it. Probably the people that lived in town and had trash pick up voted on that, lol! There are the idiots still… people that don’t want to pay for trash pick up because they never have. They have DUMPS in their yards somewhere. Sometimes multiple dumps. Ugh!

It’s not nice digging up a bit of the yard for a flower bed and coming up with bits of old tin can and broken glass. Or pieces of old farm implements. From what we know, the previous owners of this property never had a vegetable garden…. too many rocks is what they said. That’s pretty unusual around here… everyone has a veggie garden, you did it because it was cheaper than buying food. If you had rocks… you picked them out, along with your children helping… because that is what people did. I’m still trying to find the old farm area where the garden was, though, lol! Ron did his picking up of rocks… he says that he thought he was going to end up with another pond. If you saw the pile of rocks you would understand. It’s HUGE. Perhaps the garden area was that section over where the peony is… NICE dirt. There is always a spot somewhere on an old farmstead where the dirt is good.

Anyhow. Today it rained most of the day and watered in all my new stuff. Now it’s going to flurry and then freeze again. Hope the peonies survive. Hope my new grapes survive. If not… well…we’ll see.

hugs,
Vyx

We don’t usually get this much snow in one winter. I won’t drive in the stuff, I’ve become a weather driving wimp in my old age. Seriously, though… I’ve gone to work only to find that my car won’t stop because they have ice and all we had was rain. So, when it snows or gets icey here, I stay home now. As long as the local schools are closed they won’t count it against me. (or so far, at least!)

Got up at a bit before 4 am this morning planning on going to work. Walk out to the living room where I can see through the window at my car and my car was covered in snow. At least 4 inches, and snow is still falling. Crikey! Can’t the weather guys get it right? It wasn’t supposed to start here until 6 am and this has been coming down for hours by the looks of things. I was gonna go to work and then keep a close eye on things and head home if it looked bad. I decided not to go after they closed the local schools.

From watching news reports all day, the roads were fine. Bit slushy is all… oh, and we have more snow here than where I work. That happens a lot around here. I got a foot of snow once in West Fork, and Springdale had maybe an inch… the job I was at back then was NOT happy with me for calling in. Hey, what can I do? My car can’t get out… I don’t own a 4WD or chains. I’m not risking my life… or risking wrecking my car by driving in it.

So I stayed home today. Got a lot of knitting done, and walked the beagle kids, too. Took the camera out early, and then again when I walked the beagle kids. Plenty of pictures, but could NOT get the photo I wanted of Sadie making snowballs by churning up the snow with her nose. She was doing this whole snow plow thing with her nose… but never when I had the camera out of my pocket.

More pictures… we did our usual walk, down around the pond and all. Underneath the snow there was quite a bit of water, and that melty stuff is gonna turn the roads into total ice slicks by morning. I’ll get up and check it out, but if I feel the least bit scared I’m staying home again. My job is gonna hate me.

I may not have these in the right order… but it’s all snow and all my beagle kids, lol!

They have a lot of fun running around… and they seem to like the snow!

I didn’t even mind walking around in it today… No snow forcing it’s way into my boots. I turned the edges of my coveralls under to fit tighter against my boots. Worked great.

Now, I know this wasn’t a lot of snow… and it wasn’t cold enough to make it stick to the roads like it usually does here. But it’s going to be a mess in the morning when it gets below freezing and freezes all that slush. What can I say? I’m a California girl, and the older I get, the more wimpy I get driving in bad weather. I’ve never been a really brave driver anyhow…. heavy rain will make me pull off the road. I’ve seen some heavy rain… rain that makes EVERYONE go slower… like 35 on the interstate. Well, except maybe the truckers and idiots that then wreck a few miles down. Seen it, don’t want it to be me. You ain’t getting me out there in conditions that can be worse with snow or ice.

Hope everyone enjoys the dog photos, though… they are such good furkids!

hugs,
Vyx