Purdyville

Yesterday I cleaned up my side of the bedroom. Winter clothes in the drawers, summer clothes packed away. Got rid of all the boxes I was saving (to wrap birthday presents in) except the shoeboxes and some boxes I think I can hold magazines. Still an awful lot of papers and catalogs to take care [...]

The Beginning of The End Butchering was an early November affair this year. The chicks of this spring didn’t fatten up quite as fast as I would have liked, but by early November they were ready to go. Or, I should more rightly say, I was ready for them to go. That is one advantage [...]

Menu: Chicken and Dumplings, lower fat Chocolate Surprise Cake 2 gallons Purdyville Juice Comments: This is the same recipe I posted here, except I used 98% Fat Free Campbell’s condensed Cream of Chicken and Cream of Celery soups. I’m happy to report nobody tasted any difference. Titi made up the cake recipe to use up [...]

Yesterday morning, one of the local farmers, John Andromedas called with predictable news: The sheep with “allergies” had died of a nose tumor. The vet told John the sheep had allergies much earlier this year, and John’s faith in the vet started to waver once it started getting bitterly cold, and the sheep’s “allergies” kept [...]

I was driving along and saw some whitish thing on the road, nothing that looked to extraordinary, but it moved in a funny way. Slowing down to better apprehend if it was something I could run over (a plastic bag) or needed to avoid, I suddenly saw that the object–presumably trash–was in fact involved in [...]

Today we went shopping. Wait–hold everything. Back up. Deirdre is obsessed with babies. She looooooooooves babies. Babies are wonderful. We recently had a baby visiting over here, and Deirdre wanted to adopt it. She held it as much as we would let her and was fascinated by it’s tiny hands (tinier than hers), and soft [...]

Winter has arrived. It has come swiftly, suddenly, and with savageness. October was, over all, a mild month. There was no bitter chill, and even days when the weather was unusually mild. Frost, this fall, came very late. So, as fall gave way toward winter it was mild weather leading into . . . what? [...]

My inbox collapsed on Saturday. No, not my email inbox. My actual, physical inbox–at Staples they call it a letter tray. This was a brown plastic two-tray job that I think Mom gave me once upon a time. When you enter our house, the first thing you see in our kitchen is a two drawer [...]

Deirdre also likes sitting on the potty, but she just doesn’t “get” it. It’s like “Sitting on the Potty is so much fun!!” but she has no clue that there might actually be a REASON for sitting on it. She likes picking out her clothes. She has very, very, very insistent one word sentences, which [...]

In this issue: Arlan(20) Writes about birthdays Caleb(3) Writes about Deidre Evan(10) Writes about his garden Owen(6) Writes about the Summer Reading Program Find the current issue of TWIP on the web at http://www.purdyville.com/twip/current.html Many Happy Returns By Arlan At our house birthdays only come 14 times a year—and never when you need them, like [...]