we eat and shovel

Some recent happenings at our house include a meal that filled me with an undue amount of pride because of its deliciousness and command of the color spectrum. Behold:

3 food groups represented

There were carrots in "coin" shape, because they actually do taste better that way, globs of spinach for John and Ike and me to eat, rolls with oatmeal in them (remember my addiction?), and a shoulder roast from one of our goats that was tender and juicy. Grant's way of coping with the moral gray area of eating his pet is channeling his sorrow into lip-smacking gluttony. It's nice knowing that we don't have to try to decide which babies to keep this year, and we can just tell ourselves from the get-go that they aren't pets (even though they will be and we will still be sad when we take them to Premium Meat to get turned into white packages). And it is a good feeling to know that the goats are treated well and fed a proper, healthy diet.

We have a couple of black Windsor chairs I bought from a certain local home furnishings company a couple of years ago, which I have had to glue at least 5 times because they kept coming apart. They're okay as long as you don't try to use them for the purpose for which they were intended, so that means they get to be side tables now. I'm very excited about replacing them, because I have had my eye on these chairs for a while now:
Aren't they cute? I need a little more metal in my dining room, and I think these will be perfect. I also painted one of our lamps Case IH red and am waiting for its black and white damask lampshade to arrive. I like when I can make something less horrible out of something and use it for a while longer. I will post pictures when I get it put together.

We have gotten more snow this winter than we have in probably 25 years or so.

You can see the deer tracks criss-crossing the field where they have run towards the road in an attempt to catch the cars.

It's so great, except that I bet Mr. Pigeon Racer will be a sad man this spring, since he failed his perc test three times before he built his house, and that was after a hard drought of multiple years. I bet our basement will flood. My mom says she would never put carpet in a basement, even if it has never flooded, but that's probably because we practically have gills from the number of times our basement flooded while I was growing up. It flooded every week when we irrigated all summer long, and we just sloshed around in it until they rigged up some sort of pump system that sent the water elsewhere. Ahh, the country life.