Officially Summer

Summer and Father's Day arrived on the same day. Brian and the boys came out for some "guy" activity. A new .22 rifle had to be sighted in. Larry insists that only two shots needed to be fired in order to sight in the gun, but, hey, it's a .22-- cheap bullets! What about the fun factor? Fire two shots or shoot the heck out of a cardboard box? No contest.

When Brian finished throwing bullets, Gage helped me bring the ponies back in from grazing. I lead the biggest one, and the two smaller ones generally follow. Sometimes the smallest, Dezi, needs a bit of encouragement to come in. Enter boy on four-wheeler from the rear. Fun for all! Well, not so much for Dezi. Next, time to go fishing at a nearby farm pond, clearly more enticing than fishing in our pond. Larry's job was to take photos. Maybe photographer school would be a good idea. Everybody caught something, but Lane caught the only turtle. They had fun anyway, despite the heat.

It has been a tough season for gardening so far. The spring was so wet! When I managed to find some time when the garden wasn't too wet to plant, I would get a few seeds in; then a downpour would come and beat down any seedlings or wash out any seeds. A neighbor brought over a few squash and cucumbers, but we haven't gotten anything out of our garden yet. I finally have a place in the backyard to plant flowers. You wouldn't think that would be a problem with ownership of 33 acres. That would not take into consideration the goats, chickens and assorted wildlife. I now have an area surrounded by cattle panels and chickenwire. Eventually I hope to cover the less than attractive fencing with greenery. This year, though, I put out a few bedding plants. I also got a box of hummingbird mix seeds. Attract hummingbirds! Sounds good, right? Well, I cleared an area and broadcast the seed. Soon there were all sorts of things germinating. Problem... no indication of what was coming up from the broadcast seed and what was just coming up on its own. Soooo.... the only difference between a flower and a weed is cultivation, right? Right??? Maybe not. Some plants seemed to have stickery stems. Ooooh, don't want those! Pull them up! May have gotten a little carried away. Ornamental grass would be grass that you don't mow, right? Got some of that! And I have a bunch of these big-leaved plants. They're sunflowers, right? Time will tell.

Do Rural people blog?

Maybe I am one of the remaining unconnected rural people. Maybe it is more a result of age than locale. As I approach 60 years of age, I feel more and more out of it. I watch kids texting their little brains out and wonder what I'm missing. I retired from teaching high school partly because I felt so out of touch with students. It could be suggested by some that small school rural students are out of it anyway, but that would make me twice as out-of-it. I no longer listened to the same music, watched the same movies or television programs, and was totally not a gamer. Anyway, it's time to try something different as my mind now has the time to wander.
I know that many people think that teaching is almost "banker's hours" or even better because of all the holiday breaks and summers off. I must have been doing something wrong for thirty years then because I didn't get that sense of leisure. I found myself with no life outside of teaching. I felt the need to retire to find something of myself, if there remained much to find. I feel that sense that "there's got to be something more," but I have no idea what that might be. The paltry sum left of my teacher's retirement check (over half of the net goes to health insurance--as bizarre as that is) does not leave much for exploration financing despite the fact that I am debt free. So... what to do, what to do.... Maybe the only sort of exploration left as a viable option is virtual exploration. I have the means and ,finally, the time.