One Shot from Today's Photo Excursion

The result of excessive rain and heat in our part of the country is lavish growth of everything green, turning our countryside into near jungle-like undergrowth.

Dog Days of Summer

Elvis, the beagle would rather be sleeping on the back of the sofa in the family
room, but he is loyal and follows his best friend, me, around in the heat
taking a few photos. 

 Today started out hot and humid which made me rethink my statement about dusting off my camera, but then I had a special incentive.  Holden, our youngest son at 12 years of age, said he would like to go with me so he can take some photos, too.  So, we gathered up the camera, one lens and a polarizing filter and headed down the lane toward photo opps and some good old fashion father and son companionship.  We were joined by Elvis our beagle and Holly our 9 month old black lab.  Holden, Elvis and Holly were all in as we walked and found interesting subjects to photograph all along the way.

Holden has been asking for a GoPro camera and I have hesitated because if he is interested in photography then I would really like for him to learn to compose and snap photos he will enjoy.  I have used my time behind a camera to soothe frayed nerves, calm my moods and sometimes just give me time to think about the ways of the world.  I would like to give that pleasure to him and today was a good start.

Photo by Holden Helms- His first photo of the day was
pretty good.

As we walked along the lane we searched for pretty and interesting subjects for our

Photo by Holden Helms - I think his
composition is good  he was just a
little short of the depth of field.
We are working on that.

 exercise in creativity.  Normally by this time of year the summer drought has taken its hold on our landscape, but because of the excessive August rain, we hare living in a lush, green near jungle environment here in central Mississippi where we live.

I had to try my hand at the same subject
and I think his shots were as good or
better than mine.

We walked about a mile or so and there were shots everywhere.  We tried to be somewhat selective in what we shot, but somethings were just asking to be shot as they posed along the lane leading away from our house.

In the south we have some very interesting problems caused by our high humidity. Right out of the house we encountered a condensation problem on the lens of the camera.  That was a rookie move on my part and trust me I am no rookie.  We didn't acclimate the camera to the temperature change when we took it from our air conditioned house and took it out into a 90+ degree heat 90% humidity so problems arose.  It took us a few minutes in the sunlight, allowing the camera to warm to the outside temperature, to be able to use it with any success.  I carefully cleaned the lens and within just a few minutes we were taking photos of things along our way.

Because of the excessive
rain, vines are covering
anything and everything
 that stands still.

As we wandered kept an eye on our dogs because we have a number of venomous snakes here.  Among them are copperheads, water moccasins and several different types of rattlesnakes just to keep us on our toes as we walk through underbrush.  We normally don't worry about them much, but you do have to watch where you step when you are walking. Today, we were lucky or fortunate or something, and we didn't see any wildlife except bees and one tiny anole (lizard) that was eating insects on a goldenrod bloom.

Photo by Holden Helms - Years ago someone saved a little work and wrapped a piece of barbed wire around this pine tree to save a little time.  Eventually it will either disappear into the tree or kill the old pine tree.  Both may be accomplished in time.

Photo by Holden Helms

Photo by Holden Helms - Holly romping in the tall grass.

Photo by Holden Helms--An intermittent
stream that crosses our property has
running water in it.  That is very unusual
during summer, much less in the
late summer months.

It is difficult to see in this photo, but 

if you look you will see the dark area in the 

upper right third of the photo.  It runs 

toward the center toward the bottom

of the photo.  That is a trail that has 

been traveled more than a few times in

the past few days.

Beautiful results of excessive rain and heat.

Sounds of Morning.

Morning comes silently and then at times nature, the farm sounds and civilization all compete...

Good News and Bad News

There is an old saying Mama's baby, Daddy's maybe.  As distasteful as that saying is, I have news about our little Corgi pups. It is not necessarily good news to someone that is wanting to buy or sell purebred dogs. Our little female Corgi may not be the most virtuous dog in the pen.

Since our pups were about three days old, I have had a little suspicion that they may not be full Corgi. I broke that news to our family yesterday.  They all should have figured it out before now, but puppies are so cute they just weren't looking for the tell tale signs of Corginess that they, and honestly I should have been looking for.  They all have short legs, they swish their little hips when they walk just like Corgis, but their coloration isn't what it should be. And most important, their ears were not even beginning to stand up like they should if they were Corgi puppies. So anyway, last night I asked our oldest to look up photos of 5 week old Corgi puppies and then compare them to our puppies.  After that I said now find photos of 5 week old half corgi, half Shih Tzu puppies.  Bingo! Cooper our old Shih Tzu will pass the DNA test.  Ponce, bud, you are not the daddy.

To paraphrase the song, he ain't as good as he once was, but he is as good once as he ever was. Ponce is our beautiful 9 year old Corgi who we thought was the daddy of this litter, but last night we had to break the news to him that he is not these babies' daddy.  Logan, our 17 year old immediately went into an impersonation of Maury Povich. Ponce deLeon Redbone Helms, yes that is his name, Ponce deLeon Redbone Helms, your are NOT these puppies daddy.

Luckily for us, Shorgies or Shihgies or Corgtsues or whatever they are called are very cute puppies. they all already have homes. These are four of the cutest puppies you have ever seen.

Taking the Nikon Off the Shelf Again

My father's WWII B-17 flight log, a wool cap, Derby pigskin
covered tobacco pipe and a rabbit's foot. 

It has been several months since I have dusted off my Nikon and taken a long, meandering walk in the woods, but I think I am going to do just that this weekend.  

I arose early this morning and got my camera down off of the shelf, dusted it off, charged the batteries and made certain that everything was in perfect working order.  I re-shelved it and it is ready for me to take on my first photo adventure in months.  

A canopy of leaves in a local park.

Nothing relaxes me more than to go for a long, slow walk through the woods with a camera strap around my neck. So, my plan is to leave my house around daylight Saturday morning walking in whatever direction suits my fancy in search of subjects that appear to need to be photographed. I have no idea how long this trek will take, but it is my intent to stay out until I get enough photos to share a few on this blog.  I can not continue for too long because I will have to get back to the house to prepare my kitchen garden for its fall plantings, but while I am wandering, I expect to completely lose myself in the act of enjoying nature, its beauty and its solitude. 

Late summer mushrooms find
footing beneath the pines.

Ribbons of steel bisecting our
property on a foggy August
morning.

Why do I love photography so much?  It is easy, when I was very young I fell in love with my father's  Kodak Signet 35mm rangefinder camera.  I used it whenever I was allowed to take shots of  the family, our pets, flowers, rocks, horses, or anything else that was still long enough for me to expose a piece of film with their image.  After a while I got my own camera and proceeded to nearly break "my bank account" by buying film and developing more images than I could afford.  By the time I got to college I was ready to learn more about the art and science of the craft of photography.  I took every course available to me as an undergraduate and my love for the art form grew.  It was in my freshman year of college that I found that exposing the film was enjoyable, but  it was in the darkroom that the magic really happened.  In that first year of school I probably spent more time in the darkroom than I did in the sunlight.  Soon I discovered that I could spend as many hours as the light would allow outdoors with camera in hand and then spend most of the night developing film and printing photos of the things I had been admiring all day.  I am not an artist by any stretch of the imagination, merely an avid photographer with a some pretty good training so I took good, not great photos. When film began to give way to digital photography I taught myself to use Adobe Photoshop and found it to be almost as intriguing as the darkroom.    

The country lane leading to our home
in the woods.

While I still have a darkroom full of really good equipment including enlargers, tanks, spools, trays, baths and even old chemicals which I am more than certain are useless except to awaken my memory when I see the yellow and black envelopes containing them, I don't spend time in the dark anymore. I spend what little time I can afford in my busy schedule enhancing photos in Photoshop and sharing them here and there as I can.  I even found my old studio flash equipment and will soon pull it out and see if by some stroke of luck it will work after the many years of neglect I have made it endure.

Maybe by Saturday night, I will know if I still have the eye to photograph the mundane and then bring it to life in such a way that others will want to see the images. Now that is done on a computer screen rather than the photographic paper on which I once printed them but hopefully the same ethereal results will remain.

Until next time...

Silver Linings

The Bright Side of a Rainy August

All photos in this post by John Helms

Anyone that knows me knows that I very seldom look on the dark side of an issue.  It is in my nature to look at the bright side of everything. The rains in the south are wreaking havoc on the people of a couple of Mississippi counties and on thousands of people in Louisiana right now.  I pray that no more lives are lost and that their recovery from this natural disaster will be a speedy one.  I try to keep in mind that many times people gain strength in their lives from happenings like this and I hope that this will happen to all of those impacted by this disaster.  

Now, let's look at the brighter side if we can.  When all of this rain has gone, clear skies have returned and the flood waters have receded, what besides a mess and destruction will be left. People will continue to run the race of life.  Some will have to pick up where the storm left them, others like me will just continue to move down the road of life toward the goals I have set for myself, but all will be afforded the opportunity to keep moving.

I was told during a particularly rough time in my life, "it is times like these that build character in a person.  "I have thought about that statement a lot and the longer I live the more I believe it.  Riding down a smooth road all of the time doesn't do anything for a person.  It is through challenges that we learn how to adapt and persevere to what we encounter. The bumps are not speed bumps to slow us down. No those bumps are meant to make us aware that the road beneath us and to help keep us moving down the road so we can get past those rough spots on with the journey.  I have said this thousands of times, if roller coasters were flat no one would get on them.  That is more true in my life now than  ever before. If one never feel sorrow, they never know what real joy is.  If they are never uncomfortable, then the don't appreciate the pleasure of truly comfortable surroundings.  

"it is times like these that build character in a person...if that is the case I could have my on movie franchise, like Superman or Batman, because I must be one hell of a character for all I have gone through in my life." 

I am no philosopher, but I think we have to witness many events to understand the few events we want to remember.  Let me share an example: Because I have always lived in the southern United States, snowfalls are few and far between. Simply put, it doesn't snow often here. Everyone seems to gets excited when on the very rare occasion that a flake or two of snow falls on our countryside. First we are excited, then we are alarmed and then we panic and go to the store and buy all of the bread, milk and toilet paper on the shelves. We think we will be stranded for days and that we have to be prepared for the worst. We are not accustomed to all that snow brings with it during the rare snowy event here in our neck of the woods.  

I remember as a child going out to play in the snow.  Oh my, that was fun.  If we had any, we would put cheap long underwear on under our jeans.  If we didn't long johns, we would more than likely wear our pajamas under our clothes. We would don ourselves in multiple pairs of cotton socks and slip on a pair of mud boots...uninsulated of course, and any sort of coat or hat we could find to try to keep us warm in the cold air we were so unaccustomed to.  How great the cold would feel on our skin.  Brisk air on our faces, snow crunching under our feet, we would meet up with friends and walk for hours with no where to go and specific destination in mind.  The briskness would turn into cold wet hands and numb, wet feet.  After time we would walk uncomfortably home to get out of our wet clothes and to try and find some hot chocolate or soup to warm our cold bodies.  The warmth of a radiating heat of a floor furnace or if you were lucky, a fireplace would seem as wonderful at that moment as the snow did a couple of hours earlier.  It is strange how that happens what we wanted earlier seems far less attractive to us as time goes by.  The cold somehow makes a person crave heat in the winter and just the opposite in the summer.  

At any rate, soon this rain we are enduring now will subside and return on a much more routine schedule of unpredictableness and we will settle back into our mundane or not so maybe not so mundane lives.  The moisture that this rainy period has left in our ground will get us a few more weeks of growing time for those of us with gardens as we move into a traditionally dry time of year. While we ready ourselves to plant our autumn gardens, the moist soil and hot temperatures will prompt the seeds to germinate quickly and grow fast.  Hopefully they will send down deep roots as the moisture in the soil dissipates from the top down and our fall gardens will be much-the-stronger for the harsh weather we have had here in recent days.  

The days will turn to weeks and the weeks months and soon autumn will arrive with its cooler weather, warm, rich colors and it will be followed by the smell of woodsmoke in the air.  Our gardens will be fading if not gone for the year but we will remember them through the canned and frozen goods we have preserved for colder months.  We will taste a jelly or jam made from the plums or blackberries and summer will come back to us for just a moment.  We will taste it in our minds and we will be there, not in the floods or the torrential rains, but in the vegetables that we picked or the entangled vines we harvested along the pathways of summer.  

Living in the country gives one time to look at things like this and enjoy the life we live. It affords me time to wander down a lonesome forest path or a lane through a pine thicket where i might find a log that is the home to a family of chipmunks or maybe just host to mushrooms or maybe, just maybe on that special walk on that day will lead you to a place that no one has seen in hundreds of years.  It is in that place that I might have a moment that I had not counted on. In that moment I will find a little part of my inner being that I didn't know existed and in finding it discover my special place in this wide universe. It is that lonesome, quiet and secluded part of my world I call "the country."

Rural living is not all it is cracked up to being...it is much, much more.  

There is a lot to write about now. From politics to the Olympics to the weather and everything in between the world is a strange place right now.  North Korea is reaching out to Russia and Russia making deals with South Korea.  Clinton and Trump are going after each other and neither seems to have a real edge on the other regardless of what the mainstream media is saying.  Floods in Louisiana have thousands separated from their homes the rain keeps falling in what is the wettest August I can ever remember.  We are in the heart of Hurricane season and as of now it is "local" storms that are causing more devastation than the big tropical storms.  The middle east is still a hot bed of hate and unrest while here at home, it seems like we didn't learn a thing from the Summers of 1967 and 1968,  Our cities are filled with unrest that is fueled by the media.  There is so much going on that I don't know what to write about.

Summer is in full swing and for those of us heating our homes with wood, we should be stockpiling firewood for the winter, but it is so wet that I can't get my Jeep and trailer into the woods to cut up the downed timber that I normally would be cutting at this time.  If the rain doesn't stop soon, I will have to walk into the woods and cut the downed timber into firewood and wait until it dries enough for me to drive in to pick it up and bring it to my wood pile.  I have not been able to read the signs for what I think the winter will be, but my feeling is that we will have a cold winter here in the south.  That is probably because we have had such mild winters for the past two years.  For several weeks the coyotes have been staying close to our home.  During the past two weeks they have moved on.  I don't hear them at night anymore and that means they have done there hunting here and have moved on to easier hunting.

As a result of their movement, I see am seeing more deer in our area.  Their coats are dark and they are fairly fat for this time of year.  My experience tells me that this could mean that there is a greater than not possibility that we are going to have a cold winter.  I have seen no woolly worms so I can't tell by that.  I have seen some golden rod beginning to bloom.  This is about the same time as last year so no sign here.  It is weeks until they are in full bloom so it is too early to use this as any sort of sign.  So, as for now I am just going to have to go with my feelings that we are in for a harsher winter than we have had in the past couple of years.

Now let's think about the world for a few moments.  I am not a futurist, but it seems we are own the brink of something big.  I hope it is good, but I fear it is something bad.  I think there is desperation among the terrorist in the middle east and desperation generally translates to desperate acts.  I am watching for signs that will provide insight into the future, but as of now anything I say is just a guess and nothing more. I know a lot of people that think the fast growth in the stock market are great signs for the economy, but I see it differently.  The market is nothing more than a reflection of what traders want it to be. The real measure of growth in this country is the growth domestic product and the stock market measures very little into that.  Honestly there are a couple of factors when measured, are a much stronger barometer than the market. The things that should be watched are population growth and personal income growth.  Those two things mean a great deal in the measure of GDP.  We have a huge population growth and a very small growth in personal income.  We need to see a change or our economy is not healthy.  We need to have more people working, more companies feeling good about the economy...good enough to give raises to their employees or it doesn't matter what the stock market does, our economy is not strong.

Ok, I have said enough for one time... I will sign off for now.

Until next time.

Time for a Change

Through the years I have gotten to a point at which I hate watching, listening to or reading the news. That is a profound statement coming from a person who dreamed as a young man of being a journalist. From the time I was ten or eleven years old I thought of nothing more than reporting and writing the news. When I graduated from high school I knew I wanted to study the profession so one day I could follow in the footsteps of my journalistic role models. I worked hard, made good grades, and gained the respect of my college professors and the profession I had chosen. Life makes demands on a person's life choices so in time I used what I learned to follow another vocation in an attempt to make a good living for my family. I used my education in journalism along with my business minor to advance my career in marketing and public relations. Through the years I watched from the sidelines as the avocation and original love, journalism, a once honored profession, moved farther and farther from the ethical standards to which it held itself. Now I hardly recognize what it has become. 

In years past, I would wake up early in the morning ready to read and absorb all I could of several local, regional and national newspapers. I glued myself to news radio (not talk radio there is a huge difference) in an attempt to keep up as the world changed. Through the Vietnam war and the hard fought relative peace that followed, I kept myself abreast of all that took place. I idolized men like Walter Cronkite, Edward R. Murrow and Eric Sevareid as they informed a nation hungry for news, knowledge and an understanding of the world around them. Through the years those men grew old and were replaced by many less interested in the truth and more interested in ratings. Slowly, technology changed and as time moved past, so did how the news was reported. The once honored profession that I loved has become a thing unrecognizable to many of us trained in the profession.

Accuracy, fairness and ethics were the components of rule number one of journalism. Yes, scooping the competition was important but not at the cost of accuracy. We checked our sources and rechecked the facts we gained from them. Yes, we called them facts because that is what they were by the time they went to press or were aired for the public. Today it seems rule one is speed. 

Almost all news is reported instantly from hearsay and sources like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. There is no time now to check facts in this world of instant gratification and the constant news flash. Today news is so fresh that all to often it is based on I innuendo and rumors flying through cyberspace with no more basis of fact than a school house rumor. The media today seems to be more a gossip mill than a creator of a ledger of recorded history of the events of the times. The public reads of events from people less concerned about facts and more concerned with their ratings. They listen to loud-mouths and blow-hards pandering to the lowest common denominator while they spew their half truths and tittle-tattle like it is the gospel. Their words of hate are spread like seeds in the wind, falling on the fertile ground of people wanting truth and understanding of things they can't comprehend without the knowledge that facts, veracity and certitude afford. 

I stopped years ago listening and reading this babble. Whether from the right or the left ideology it is nearly impossible to believe what is reported as truth. The majority of what is called news today is no more than empty words spread by scandalous gossipmongers.  

I finally concluded that it was time to stop my reliance on sources unworthy of the  energy I wasted on them. Years ago I started trying to base my opinions of things and people on what I see and not what I read or what I am told by unworthy correspondents. I try to base my understanding on what I know.  I honestly think I see the world and all of its residents more clearly now.

I Can Relate to This Story

Beryl the Heifer relaxing in the Blacklocks's living room 

in their Australian Home.

Photo by CBS Interactive Inc. 

Okay.  This is my kind of story.  A rancher in Australia returned to her wilderness home after running a few errands to find an unexpected visitor in her home.  Beryl a heifer (young female cow) was resting in her living room with her two house dogs. The rancher, Sally Blacklock said the heifer had been orphaned at two days old.  She bottle fed the baby and had become pretty much a pet, loving belly rubs and scratches behind her ears.

It seems Beryl grew up in and out of the house along side the two dogs, until she got too big to stay inside, at which time she was banished to the great outdoors.  Ms. Blacklock said, "She's extremely cheeky, so if we leave a door open she quickly tries to get inside." Blacklock stated even though she is weaned, she knows exactly which drawer the Blacklocks keep the calf milk formula in so when she gets in the house she goes straight there.  "Apart from that, she has wonderful manners," Blacklock said.

Beryl likes to go for walks, go on picnics and ride shotgun in the car when the family goes to town.

Having bottle fed a baby bull to maturity, this story really hits home.  I can definitely relate to it.

Wednesday, April 27, 2016

Politics at its Worst

It is that time of year when seasons are changing, temperatures are rising and once every four years the presidential campaigns are heating up like the temperatures outside. I don't share my political views with folks so don't expect to see that here. Nope, I am not going to bore anyone with my views on this or that candidate. Here is the closest thing you are going to read from me as a political viewpoint. If the GOPs and the Dems would expend as much of their effort talking about how they can change, or think they can change this country to make it a better place for the average citizen and spend less time insulting one another, fighting amongst themselves about political strategies, less time attacking each other and more time telling us why they are the best candidate and how they are going to strengthen our nation, then this whole process would work better. 

My father use to say we should put those people who are arguing about nothing, back-biting, bragging about their own accomplishments which no one else seems to want to mention, in a room, and give each of them a blivet and let 'em have a good old fashion free for all. Let the two who come out the cleanest, battle it out in the polls in November to see who wins. H

What is a blivet you ask? For those of you who may not know, my father explained it this way: a blivet is a 50 pound burlap sack, stuffed with 100 pounds of horse manure. That seems to be what most of them are shoveling our way now...a sack of manure so let's let them fight it out with an overstuffed sack of it.

I have been listening to their pitches for what seems like an eternity now. They haven't shown me much. What I want to hear is what they are going to do to make my life better and to make the lives of other people like me better. What happened to decorum, kindness, politeness and treating others as we would have them treat ouselves? I know what has happened. We have sunk to a nation of sound bites. We express ourselves in 140 +or- character unpunctuated spurts of gobbledygook. The media is no better.

It is time that our politicians should stand their ground on their principles and compromise on the details of how we can accomplish our goals.  Not every issue is based on principles. Now days most issues that are important to politicians are those that somehow surface from the whims of pollsters who can manipulate their questions to get the most bang from the publicity their results may or may not e politicians, rather than embracing substance, are drawn into this little game of grabbing headlines. We don't find statesmen much in Washington anymore. Nope, we find puppets to this issue or that issue or this cause or that cause. 

We all should be depressed by what we see in this election cycle. Are you better off than you were a few years ago? Do you really think any of this litter of candidates have a roadmap or a plan to improve your life? I sincerely hope that the winner of this presidential race can make this country a better place for ALL of us, but I doubt that is going to happen.

Photos of New Pups and a few other things.

PUPPY UPDATE: A couple of weeks ago I promised I would post a photo of our new corgi pups.  I took the photo and never posted it so, here it is. At that stage in their lives, they look more like tiny seal pups, shiny and slick than corgi pups.

I am proud to say they are all healthy and strong and growing rapidly.They are actually beginning to walk and sit up on their own.

The second photo is of Captain.  He is going to be staying with us.  Logan, our oldest son claimed him when Captain was about three days old.  If you look at the first photo, Captain is the one with his rear side facing us.

As you can see in the second photo, they are taking on their Corgi characteristics.  Their bodies are getting longer and their legs aren't. Their ears are growing larger, but they are still too young for their ears to start standing.  We chose not to dock their tails since we are not going to register them.  Usually their tails are docked to about an inch long.  We just didn't want to put them through that.

A FEW OTHER THINGS

Garden-- We have planted our little bed garden  Believe or not, we will eat fresh veggies out of it all summer.  There are tomato plants, cantaloupe, squash, sweet and banana peppers, okra, beans, basil, and a few other things, all in about 125 square feet.  When it gets a little prettier and grows some, I will include photos of it.

Lawn-- Last September our relatively new lawn mower broke down.  It was not the mower, it was operator error.  I finally order the part, took the tractor apart and replaced the part.  It is just like new and yesterday Holden and I whipped the yard and surrounding area into shape.  We don't look like we live in  jungle anymore.  There is always more to do and we will be busy with it all summer and fall.

I now have to repair our lawn trailer so we can move things here and there around the yard.

WHERE WAS WINTER?

Spring didn't want to arrive but then again, neither did winter.  We never had temperatures lower than the mid 20s F in our area and we only had those three or four times.  Usually we burn about three or more cords of wood to heat our house.  This winter we only used a little more than one cord.

While it didn't get cold, we continued to have frosts until late March. While that is about normal, we don't expect it to stay too cool to plant our summer gardens if we don't have much of a winter.  Anyway, it is warm enough now and most all of the first round of gardening is in the ground and beginning to grow.  As I said, I will keep you posted on the gardens progress.  

Until next time...

Stop By Tomorrow for New Puppy Pictures

If Belle is willing, I will be photographing our new puppies tomorrow.  They are less than a week old but gaining weight by the day.  

Stop by the blog tomorrow and I may also drop a few pics of our new chicks into the blog.  They are almost four weeks old and getting fully feathered.  We bought Dominiques, Gold Laced Wyandenottes, Silver Laced Wyandenottes and Rhode Island Reds (though I don't think my Dominiques are Dominiqes and won't know until they are a little older). They are still 12 fine looking little hens.

I hope to see you tomorrow.

Your Legacy Could Be a Tree You Plant

Today is another beautiful spring day in the southern U.S. The rain that was threatening our area yesterday didn't materialize and today it is clear with temperatures in the mid 70s F. Everything is turning green and gardens are beginning to blossom all around us.

We have four new babies at our house.  Our youngest Pembroke Welsh Corgi, Belle, had puppies last Sunday morning. This was her first litter and we weren't sure how she would handle them.  She is an outstanding mom.  Unfortunately, there were two runts born with the four strong and healthy pups. We immediately noticed that they were having trouble nursing and began bottle feeding them.

Pembroke Welsh Corgi --Photo from Wikipedia

I bottle fed them every two hours and was not able to save either one of them.  The whole family fought for them and with them and they spent the little over one day they had on earth in loving warm hands.  They both left this world with full tummies and a family that had done everything it could to pull them through the hard hand life dealt them.  It is not ever easy to lose animals, no easier because the were never destined to make it, but it is a fact of life that not all puppies, kittens, foals, chicks,calves or any other baby are going to make it.  I feel better knowing we fought hard for them, though.

The Friendship Oak at The University of Southern Mississippi's
Gulf Coast Campus, Long Beach,, MS

On to a happier note.  I read this morning that the city of Gulfport, MS has a new campaign to plant live-oak trees throughout the coastal counties.  This is not unusual, since live-oaks some of the hardiest coastal trees one can find.  They live an extremely long time and are able to withstand extremely strong winds, excessive amounts of rain and pretty much anything else the climate can dish out to them except prolonged cold which they never get along the Gulf Coast.  It is not unusual that they are being planted as a tree of choice.  No, what is a bit unusual is that they are being started from acorns that grew on the ancient Friendship Oak from the Gulf Coast Campus of The University of Southern Mississippi.  This tree was a sapling when Christopher Columbus made his first trip to the new world and now its saplings are being planted all over the coast, so in 500 or 600 years from now, folks will be sitting in the shade of their giant limbs sipping a cool one and talking about way back then when these trees were planted.

Plant a tree and leave a living legacy.

Tonight will be busy around our house.  We will be manning the concession stand at the park and taking our youngest to soccer practice.  Then home for a late evening meal to celebrate our 17 year old's birthday.  After that we will find a little time to relax and enjoy family time before retiring for the evening.

Until next time...
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It Has Been Much Too Long

It has been entirely too long since my last post.  I have no excuses just a good solid reason.  I didn't have them time to write so I didn't. I needed to write for my own sanity, but I always have found something more important to do that sit down at my computer and tap out a few lines of words.

Writing is therapeutic to me.  I write when I feel the need to express myself, even if I am the only one that will ever read it.  Sitting down with my fingers on the keyboard relaxes me, it sets my mind at ease and helps me to unwind.  Over the next few weeks I will be trying to take the time to write in this journal.  I will attempt to provide updates into my everyday life and maybe along the way I will share something that is interesting, funny, useful or thought provoking.

Because of my "day job" I many times have to temper my words and avoid subjects all together.  You may see those subjects hidden in my writings but they, for the time being, cannot appear overtly in print. While this may be the case, I mostly write about everyday things.  I write about sunrises , sunsets and all the mundane things that occur during the day.  I very seldom broach subjects of international or even national interest.  My writing is about what is going on right here around me.  It is is about life, living and happiness.  

I have a lot to update about my family, our pets and farm animals and hopefully the garden that will be planted this weekend.

For now, I will be signing off, but you will be betting more reports for this country journal as time goes on.

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