Combine troubles...

Something is wrong with the combine.  It was smoking a little bit this afternoon.  The guys think it may be an easy fix (they said an injector?), but it could also be something major.  I'm praying for the first to be so!

My mom and Elizabeth went to the funeral of their friend today and then Mom showed Elizabeth around her hometown.  They stopped in at the nursing home and visited Grandpa Harvey too...  It was about 4:30pm when they returned to our farm.

Meanwhile, the menfolk here cleaned out the oats bin, as it's needed for corn, while one kept the combine running, until that problem I mentioned flared up.

I babysat this morning until Paula came home and then she took the girls to visit their grandparents with their princess and minnie-mouse costumes in tow.  I braided "Princess hair" for Johanna...

When I got home, I worked on putting together our Azure order, only to figure out once I placed it that we must have had a week yet to order.  Better early than late, I guess!   I baked bread next and Mom cut up a pumpkin that we'll make into bars in the morning for the funeral.

My parents are going to go to Montana, leaving probably right after noon tomorrow.  The funeral was moved to Saturday, so they'll spend the night at my uncle's place and help him...

*A special farm-note* :  We are getting lots of chicken eggs these days (about 2 dozen a day, and they're just gettin' goin')!  What a wonderful feeling it is to have farm-fresh eggs again!!! 

A journey to Jamestown...

My dad had to go to Enzminger's in Jamestown for grain-bin-drier parts, and I had some things I wanted to talk with him about, so I hopped in for the ride.  :)  We had a good talk...

My aunt LV's funeral will be on Friday in MT.  I'm not sure who from my family is all going yet, but probably two of us will be there.  Please continue praying for my uncle to draw the strength and courage he needs from the Lord! 

My mom and friend, Elizabeth (who is coming here any minute now) will be going to their mutual friend's funeral tomorrow in Eureka.  Please pray for that woman's family as well...   

It's been a sad day...

Aunt LV...

Please be in prayer for my uncle, Russell in Montana.  He just called my mom to tell her that his wife, LV died during the night.   Several months ago, she'd undergone some major heart surgeries and has not been very well since that time.  Last night, she woke up around midnight saying that she couldn't breath.  She went out to sit in a chair in the living room, then called out to my uncle that she still couldn't breath and needed help.  Uncle Russell tried getting a different tube or something for her oxygen, but she said, "This is it, honey" and slipped into a coma.  She died in the airplane on the way to the hospital. 

Uncle LV was Uncle Russells' greatest joy in life.  He met her after having a major motorcycle accident out in CA, and she brought a lot of love and stability into his life.  Aunt LV was one of the most loving, giving, caring people that I know and was so tiny (a lot shorter than I am).  She was always thinking of others.  I remember the time they were here a few years ago and I showed her how to knit.  After that, she sent my mom and I several things that she had knit especially for us....

Aunt LV was born in the Philippines and came over to the US when she was a little girl (I think when she was 8).  I remember her telling me how she was carried from room to room over there and how a servant always dressed her, as her family was wealthy and had servants for everything---even carrying little girls (not babies) around.  Uncle Russell always called her his "Barbie".  He is going to miss her so much!  Please pray with me that God would work through this to bring Uncle Russell closer to himself...  He is just numb with pain right now.

 

It's c-c-c-cold outside!

I had to break the ice on the animal's water troughs at both chores today.  It seems hard to believe that our lovely summer is over.  It is nice to milk a cow without her being fidgety because of flies though!

My dad went to town first thing this morning to get a moisture sample on the next field of corn and then he bought himself a MOISTURE TESTER!  YAY!  No more trips to town...for that, anyway.  He finished one field and checked the next 2, but they were both too wet.  Dad and Jacob just spent the past hour getting everything parked (maybe packed is a better word) into the Quonset, as there is a chance of a couple inches of snow tonight.  Andrew is gone combining for Stan again and still.

Please pray for my mom, as she is having a major tooth-ache.  She went to the dentist today and he said the tooth will have to be pulled, but he couldn't do it now with all of the swelling (he gave her some antibiotics...and pain killers).  She'll also have to get a crown on the tooth next to that one, so please pray that all of that goes well next Monday.  She's in a lot of pain right now.  It's sad that such a small part of our body can give us such pain!

I wasn't expecting to babysit today, but they needed somebody, so I went over and spent all morning and afternoon with "My" cute girls.  Tracy Jo is in the process of being potty trained now--yay!  The girls were actually fighting over who got to go potty first today!  We bundled up like Eskimos and went outside until I got too cold ( I think they would have stayed out forever).  We played "Restaurant" and danced and "exercised".....  The girl's great aunt was there too, so it was fun to visit with her for a while.

I hope and pray that you're all enjoying these days of Autumn! 

Shingles...

In between unloading corn-trucks for dad and taking him fuel, Jacob and I cleaned up all of the old shingles and boards that were left from the old barn we took apart 10 years ago...  We threw them all on the burn pile for a future bon-fire!

Andrew still is gone combining.  My dad just got in a little bit ago from combining in our corn fields.  He said the forecast is for at least one more dry day, so hopefully that will be the case.  :)

Sabbath Prayer~

I was thinking of this song from Fiddler On The Roof today and thought I'd share it here: 

10 years (and 10 days)!

My dad hauled 2 loads of scrap-metal-junk to Bismarck today, then took the combine out to get a moisture sample on the corn.  It's still too wet...

It was pretty nice out this afternoon and Mom, Jacob, and I got the beets and carrots in from the garden (oh, and the marigold seeds).  :)  That's all that was out there, so the garden is officially closed for the season. 

Andrew is still combining for farmer Stan.  I haven't seen him all day.

When my dad went to town with the corn sample, he also stopped and bought some ice cream.  Why?  Because we're celebrating 10 years and 10 days of living on this farm!  :)  God has brought us through many struggles and I'm sure we're all stronger for it.  God is good!

Proverbs 31:10-31~

I was not feeling very well today, so didn't do a whole lot (babysat for a while), but God led me to a new blog that was a great encouragement to me...  I think it will bless other adults also, so wanted to share it here: http://club31women.com/my-story/ .

I've also been studying (again) about the Proverbs 31 virtuous woman, so thought I'd share that Bible passage here:

Proverbs 31:10-31 (KJV)

^"10 Who can find a virtuous woman? for her price is far above rubies.
¹¹ The heart of her husband doth safely trust in her, so that he shall have no need of spoil.
¹² She will do him good and not evil all the days of her life.
¹³ She seeketh wool, and flax, and worketh willingly with her hands.
¹⁴ She is like the merchants' ships; she bringeth her food from afar.
¹⁵ She riseth also while it is yet night, and giveth meat to her household, and a portion to her maidens.
¹⁶ She considereth a field, and buyeth it: with the fruit of her hands she planteth a vineyard.
¹⁷ She girdeth her loins with strength, and strengtheneth her arms.
¹⁸ She perceiveth that her merchandise is good: her candle goeth not out by night.
¹⁹ She layeth her hands to the spindle, and her hands hold the distaff.
²⁰ She stretcheth out her hand to the poor; yea, she reacheth forth her hands to the needy.
²¹ She is not afraid of the snow for her household: for all her household are clothed with scarlet.
²² She maketh herself coverings of tapestry; her clothing is silk and purple.
²³ Her husband is known in the gates, when he sitteth among the elders of the land.
²⁴ She maketh fine linen, and selleth it; and delivereth girdles unto the merchant.
²⁵ Strength and honour are her clothing; and she shall rejoice in time to come.
²⁶ She openeth her mouth with wisdom; and in her tongue is the law of kindness.
²⁷ She looketh well to the ways of her household, and eateth not the bread of idleness.
²⁸ Her children arise up, and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praiseth her.
²⁹ Many daughters have done virtuously, but thou excellest them all.
³⁰ Favour is deceitful, and beauty is vain: but a woman that feareth the Lord, she shall be praised.
³¹ Give her of the fruit of her hands; and let her own works praise her in the gates."

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Please pray for my mom now as she has a bad toothache and is thinking it will need to be pulled.  OUCH!

Fixing things----and purple sauerkraut!

My mom had an accident with her tablet a couple of weeks ago with the result being a cracked screen.  Andrew ordered a new screen and, being the mechanically minded man that he is, he fixed it himself too.  Mom sure is glad!  He even talked her into getting a case for it so future accidents are less-likely to happen.

 

 Andrew also installed our new water-pre-filtering system.  Here he's drilling a hole for the small faucet...

 

My mom thought this cabbage was quite interesting looking!

 My brothers helped me for about an hour this afternoon.  I washed and "Cored" the cabbages from our garden and they sliced them...

 We ended up with about twice as much cabbage as you see in this huge kettle...

 That all equaled 17 quarts of well-stuffed jars of sauerkraut.  :)  I left out a few heads of cabbage for frying with onions and for making cole-slaw too.

When I was downstairs this morning, I noticed that our boxes of green tomatoes were turning to red (and some were ready), so I made another batch of tomato soup to can.

My brothers brought up the ladder from downstairs and went up in the attic to get our winter-clothes down.   :(  I guess summer is really over.

The man who'd bought our MF combines came today to pick up 2 more of the headers he also bought.  He still has at least one more load to come and get.

I'll leave you with a quote tonight, as I used to do...

"Happiness is found along the way, not at the end of the journey." --unknown, but somebody said it!

They'll be excellent cooks someday...

..."My" little girls will be, as they're already starting to "Help" in the kitchen.  :)  We made meatballs today.  Then, we played at having tea-parties for a couple of HOURS!  Next, we built dog-houses out of couch cushions and then listened to about 10 musical books at the same time....  I know I've said this before, but those 2 are so much fun to be around...

My mom and Andrew went to Bismarck.  My mom was able to sell some room partitions she didn't need anymore and Andrew helped get them to the new owner's place.  He had other business in town too, I guess.

My dad and Jacob worked on getting one of our tractors started for 2 HOURS.  It was being very obstinate.  They then worked on getting some drills ready to go for scrap-metal.

Oh, and Andrew posted on his blog today!  :) 

Purple cabbages...

It was a still Autumn day here and my mom and I spent a good portion of the afternoon in the garden, digging sweet potatoes; chopping off the rest of the broccoli heads; and bringing the rest of the (purple) cabbages indoors.  We worked on cleaning off the garden too and stopped for supper just as it started to SNOW.  It hasn't stopped snowing ever since...

My dad hauled the very last of the hay home today and Jacob drove the loader-tractor home.  Andrew got started helping a kind-of neighbor with his harvest (he's running the fancy combine again this year).  :)  

Life is busy on the farm--still!

They made it home!

My brothers arrived about an hour ago.  Yay!    It sounds like they had a wonderful time of fellowship.  :)

A very quiet day!

The boys are still gone, so we had a small table set for 3 all day and took turns doing the chores.  Other than that, it was a usual restful day.  :)

Brotherless...

Shortly after noon today, my brothers packed up Andrew's car once again with clothes/instruments/food and headed North.  They're visiting our friends, the B. family.  Andrew B (the B's son---not my brother) bought a computer from Andrew, so delivering the computer is partially their excuse for the visit.  :) 

Meanwhile, here at home, we had lasagna and apple-raisin salad and pumpkin bars......  ;)

Mom and I cleaned the house, cooked, and put the rest of the peppers in the freezer after saving the seeds for next year.  My dad hauled grain and then hauled hay home. 

Now we're ready for a day of rest!! 

PS.  You can see more corn-maze pictures that the K. family posted here:  http://greenpasturesfarm.blogspot.com/ .   You may even see somebody that you know?

The hunters are here again...

It's that time of year again----when you get behind several slow-driving suburbans or pickups on your short drive home----obviously they're hunters who are looking for something to kill.  I get out of their way as quickly as possible.  ;)

I babysat my Johanna and Tracy Jo again most of the day.  Johanna wanted to play that we were sleeping for a good part of the morning.  It was a gloomy day (weatherwise), so it was easy to oblige her whims and rest in the beds she kept moving around the room.  Tracy just wanted to read books.  Silly girls!

My mom went to a 1-day review class in Bismarck.  She's still gone.  My dad loaded grain onto his semi for a neighbor.  The boys, well, I'm not sure what they did.  I think they were burning more barn-wood today?

"Autumn Fires"

Autumn Fires
~by Robert Louis Stevenson

In the other gardens And all up the vale, From the autumn bonfires See the smoke trail!   Pleasant summer over And all the summer flowers, The red fire blazes, The grey smoke towers.   Sing a song of seasons! Something bright in all! Flowers in the summer, Fires in the fall!

It was so nice that some of us worked outside quite a while.  The guys got a big fire going and burned the old barn-walls and garbage all afternoon.   I baked bread and pizza.  Mom and I made crustless-pumpkin pie.  It was a beautiful Autumn day...

The Country Corn maze---and time to visit friends...

 Andrew and I left for MN bright and early Friday morning (after doing the chores).  It rained part of the journey, but did eventually stop.  We were both amazed at how perfectly flat the North part of MN is...

Andrew drove all the way!  :)  We took his small, stick-shift car which gets great gas-mileage and only had to fill twice on our whole journey.  Not counting the time it took to do some shopping in Fargo, it took about 6 hours to get to the Krahn's farm and corn-maze.  (Here is a link to their blog: http://greenpasturesfarm.blogspot.com/)

Here's another view of the flat land there.  Isn't it pretty?

We saw lots of sugar-beet fields and equipment.  The ground was very wet!

We drove by one town that made/sold tracked vehicles (or maybe they just sold the tracks, I'm not sure?)...

It was neat to drive through Warroad, past the thousands of petunias the Krahn family plants each year for the town and then weeds throughout the summer...

At long last, we came to a sign that let us know we'd come to the right place.

Yay--we made it!

There were several things for people to do besides going through the corn-maze...  Here is the human-fooseball area:

The petting zoo had several farm animals for people to enjoy...

This part was fun, even though I missed the target!  (It's a water-balloon sling-shot).

The cow-a-saurus...

At 4:00, there was a treasure-hunt in the straw for all kids 12 and under...

The bale-stack for people to climb...   There was a bale-maze too, but I never went through that as they said it was pretty wet and smushy in there.

:)

I went on a hayride with some of the Krahn family.  Mr. K. stopped the tractor by the fence so people could feed the cows some corn-stalks...

It was so great to finally meet Naomi (formerly Krahn) and her husband and children!  It's because of her that we met the Krahn family in the first place (we read each other's blogs because we both enjoy cake-decorating), but  by the time we met the Krahns in person, Naomi was married and had moved away.  They were back for a visit now.  (Naomi's in the black coat here, so it's not a very good picture, but her husband and little girl are easy to see).

A cute scarecrow...

Priscilla and a friend kept the grill going...  Miriam is in the red shirt.  I helped a little bit with running the admissions/concession stand on Friday.  Andrew helped Mr. Krahn and Silas with odds and ends (loading hay trailers and taking tree branches off of neighbor's roofs).

Hosanna K. made this cute cake in celebration of 5 years of having a corn-maze.

This is the K's kitchen----and Miriam and Hosanna in it!

I helped Hosanna make several batches of popcorn balls to sell at the maze...

Yummy!

Mrs. K---and the popcorn-ball makers...

They looked and smelled wonderful!

Looking through picture albums...

Now back to the corn-maze...  

This is part of the obstacle course:

The "Granery" was full of creative things to buy, many of which the K. family had made...

The food and eating area...  If you look closely, you'll see the campfire that the guys moved under the shelter so people could be out of the rain while they dried off.  :)

The area back there is where the bale-maze and slingshot was...

Saturday was a very wet and cold day...

Andrew and I went through the maze when the rain stopped late Saturday afternoon.  We were probably in there around an hour as the maze is that huge!

When you go into the maze, you're given a map so (hopefully) you don't get lost!

The deer-stand in the maze:

While going through the maze, you're supposed to find all of the animals that are marked on the map by a star.  Then, you can also find the 3 bonus animals which aren't marked, which means you need to travel every trail--at least until you find all of the animals.

It was a lot of fun!  I was glad I had my mud-boots along though...

An example of the information about one of the animals found in MN...

This one shows what the maze looks like from the top of the deer-stand.  The beginning of the maze is way back by those flags and buildings...

We had such a nice time with the Krahn family!!!  We played games one evening and watched a movie that Mr. Krahn was in during the second evening (while eating cake and ice-cream).  Plus, we visited a lot about farm life and about witnessing to people (they showed us some neat tracts we hadn't seen before)---and also went to church with their family Sunday morning.  Andrew and I left right after the meal after church.

Next stop?  The U. family!  :)   Their place was right on our way home and was about half way inbetween the K's home and our farm.

In between getting a tour of the U's place (the last time we were there it was very cold outside, so we stayed in the house mostly), and helping them get some corn stored away in the barn-loft for winter, we played several games of volleyball!  

After eating supper and visiting a while, we got started on some fun thinking games.....and didn't stop for another 3 hours or so.  :)    

I only snapped a few pictures, so here they are...  The string-game was funny to watch!

Basically, two people were tied together with strings (looped together once) at their wrists and had to try to get out without cutting the string.  There's a neat trick to this----which we eventually showed to them so now they can tie up all of their friends to see if they can get out.  :)

Hmmmm....

Getting tangled up!

Mr. & Mrs. U...

They got really close to getting it figured out!

My brother...

The U. brothers...  This is a blurry picture, but is funny to see how twisted up they got while trying to get out!

Playing "Bing, bing, bong..."  They taught us a couple of games like this too, so now we can see if the rest of our family/friends can figure these things out.  ;)

Thinking hard.....  They actually picked up on these games pretty quickly.  My favorite game was the "Scissors game"!

We stayed overnight there, then after breakfast, I helped Lydia milk their 2 cows.  We looked through photo albums then, while Andrew figured out what was wrong with their computer.  :)  We joined the ladies for lunch (the menfolk left for work early in the morning) and helped with the dishes, then headed for home.

It rained again a good portion of the 3 hours home...   We finally made it!

Lauretta called me when we were just a few miles from home and asked if she could buy a DVD that Andrew made of Chris and Sarena's wedding.  She actually ended up being 2 vehicles behind us on the HWY, so she pulled in our driveway right after us and got the movie.  :)

It was such a joy to spend parts of 4 days with such wonderfully fun, Godly families!

My dad said that not much happened at home while we were gone---it just rained, and rained, and rained.