Saturday

Well its been a week today since blogger decided I wasn't the author of tripsplace and no matter how hard I tried I could not convince whomever other wise; so this is the same ramble but with a new name. I think I had over 30K hits during the period I was on line from 2008 until present. I have a few die hard daily readers and that puts me into celebrity status I think; NOT... but really it's a lot of fun sharing my daily life with those who are interested and maybe we can find some shared experiences. So comment if and when you get the time and chance

This past week has been filled with lots of excitement and plenty of hard work. Now I'm not complaining of hard physical work as I grew up on a farm in Northern Virginia and actually I think hard, physical, sweat a lot work is a form of relaxation for me. I love getting up early in the morning to hear the sounds of stillness; a lonely crow cawing off in the distance, the sound of dew dripping onto the tin roof from the dormer and the birds singing their special songs in the quietness of the dawn. Now I'm only allowed this special privilege when we(Nancy and I) are at our cabin in the mountains of North Carolina just off the Blue Ridge Parkway. We are about 3000 feet in elevation and most of the air here has never been breathed before.

Let me digress just a little as if your a new reader and allow me to tell you why I'm making this post. I have 4 beautiful grand children; 2 boys that are 6 months apart and 2 girls that are equally 6 months apart and with this new blog I'm happy to announce we are expecting our tie breaker grand baby in January. I want them(grand kids) to know who we were in life and hopefully their children will get to know us as well. I have some memories of a couple great grand parents but knew very little about what life was like in their days. Country folk are different when it comes to lifestyles in how they lived their lives. I was a farm boy until I graduated from high school in 1964 and then I became somewhat citified  except for my gardening. I milked cows by hand, helped to butcher our pork(hogs) every Thanksgiving, fed chickens, gathered eggs and even loped a few of their heads off for the Sunday dinner which was always fried chicken, mashed taters and chicken gravy, canned or fresh 1/2 runner green beans, corn on the cob when in season along with sliced 'maters and cukes. We ate what we grew in the gardens and then saved by canning for the winter months.

Growing up in the country also meant no running water thus we hand pumped our water from a well and used a "johnny house". We had a 2 holer and I'm not sure why 'cause no one ever used the other one and we also used the Sears and Robuck catalogs for the wipe. The glossy pages were the worst if you get my drift especially during the winter months. There were many life experiences that set a country boy apart and there was even a song written about a how a "country boy will survive". I wouldn't take anything for those days and I find myself dreaming about what it would be like to have a small farm with a couple cows, horses, pigs and chickens. I have been able to re-create a portion of that life with my gardening skills in both Florida and North Carolina.

We have been blessed in so many ways and one of those is having this cabin in the mountains. We have our families and many of our friends here from time to time and we enjoy entertaining with our many mountain friends here as well. We can do some eatin' and game playing as well. Just last Saturday we had several friends over for a cook out and a new game many had never played before called Balderdash; what a hoot that was and the more folks the merrier. One of our favorite games is Sequence which usually pits the guys vs the gals and since we are usually short a guy we have to have one of the gals play on our side. Needless to say we(guys) seldom win but we have a grand time all the while.

We also have a great church family at Cornerstone Christian Fellowship in Sparta as well as our church family in Tampa at Element. Our son Bobby is the pastor and he started this church a little over 5 years ago and has done a great job with this contemporary style of worship. We have been made to feel welcome and have made some awesome lasting relationships at both locations. We are torn when we leave Florida in June and then again when we leave Sparta in November.

Well this past week we had the "snake from hell" as Nancy calls it. We have a birds nest underneath the back porch that had 4 eggs in it and one afternoon I'm potting up some plants when I noticed this 3 foot or so black snake trying to get to this nest. Well he was unable to do so from beneath the porch so then he decided to crawl onto the back porch and that's when Nancy had a fit, so I took him out into the woods. Well he came back several times so I finally took him for a ride down off our hill in the golf cart. Well 2 days later he is back and once again on the deck and porch. Well Nancy wanted him gone like dead gone for good. So I attempted to do away with it and after some procedures I tossed it into the woods out back. Well 15 minutes later here it comes again making it's way once again towards the porch. So I had to use the ax and haven't seen it since. Seems he lost his head over those baby birds; literally.

I had a good day on Friday as I took my first kayak trip on the New River with some friends from Cornerstone and my best little mountain buddy, Caleb Dalton. This kid is a great fisherman and hunter as well as he and his dad keep us supplied with venison in the Fall and mountain trout in the Summer. Well that's about it except we helped our mountain top buddy, Norman with some gardening work this week as his age and health have become a real threat to his lifestyle. We ate out with our "mountain mom" Helen, her brother Joe and sister Martha on Wednesday. We have been doing our daily hike to the top of the mountain and visited with Joe and Jetta several times. We also visited with John and Shirley on top for awhile but mainly all except for a couple places its quiet and lonely on top. We have been getting some afternoon showers which has helped with the garden and made my lettuce a tasty treat for some critter which ate it off at ground level. I'm getting tomatoes daily from my Florida transplants.

Well I'll sign off for now and hopefully get back into my daily ramble at this blog which really is a continuation of tripsplace. If your a new reader I have lots of ramble as well as some pictures on the original blog that started in 2008, LATER