BIRDS-N-BLOOM

It is such a beautiful morning out today. It's in the high 70's this morning with a nice breeze. I was enjoying the view from the porch so I thought I'd share. This is momma bird. I showed you her nest a few posts ago. I was excited to hear little baby chirps coming from here yesterday. Momma bird is constantly bringing in bugs for her little ones.
I tried to take a picture of the babies without disturbing them.Since she built her nest at an angle it's hard to see them.I didn't want to be too close to them so this is the best that I could get.You can see one of them with their mouth open and the other one sleeping near him.

I love this tree.

Our tomato's growing like weeds. Can you see all of the green tomato's?

We have 2 types of watermelon. Ones that are supposed to be 9+ lbs and are round and then we have these long ones that can get around 15+ lbs. This is our first long one. We have about 8 big round ones and a few handful of small ones just starting to form.

Our first big honeydew

One of our cantaloupe.

These are the sunflowers that I planted by seed. They are full of bees happily pollinating away.

fishing

Chris and Leia went fishing here on base. They also fished on Father's Day ,but didn't catch anything. That gave Leia the fishing bug.Around 7 last night she said," if I eat all my dinner daddy will you take me fishing?" So Chris couldn't say no. Leia ended up catching 4 fish and Chris caught a few as well. Most of them though got away before being pulled up all the way. Leia has a thing for worms. They don't gross her out or anything.In my garden she's always looking for a pet worm.

This was on Sunday when they tried to go fishing on the boat. It was just too hot to sit in open water to fish. Not to mention we were paying by the hour to use the boat.

Another fish that Leia caught.

This is one of Chris' first fish. He said the last one they caught was a huge one. They could see the body of it when reeling it in. But the line snapped in half. The fish got away.

Father's Day.

We went to the zoo for Father's Day. They had it where Chris and Leia were free. Chris saw this guy carrying around something and the guy noticed Chris watching him. He came over and introduced us to his pet snake Herman. He was part of the snake act put on earlier that day.
This is one of Leia's favorite places to see. They even jumped in and swam. We watched the zoo people come in and take out some eggs. The penguins acted sad after that.They went looking for them.The nest was in the back to the left. I know they can't have a bunch of new babies due to over crowding and that it changes the behaviors of the animals to be protective. I just hope from a mommies prospective they are incubated and hatched for another zoo.

The elephants love the red clay.

This bear came as close as he could to us.He was like I could eat you all if I could figure out how to cross this ravine. Leia milking a cow.

We watched a short 3-D movie. It was really cool. The little kid behind us keep saying to her dad "I can't touch it!" A few times I would look over to Leia and see her moving her head like she was trying to get away from what was coming out at her. It was priceless. A few times she grabbed Chris' arm for reassurance that she wasn't going to get hit. It wasn't a scary moving. It was about animals. So the monkeys would throw oranges at us and the turtle came up to sniff us. Cute things like that.We're in our 3-D glasses.

The aquarium is one of Leia's favorite. She didn't want to leave. I liked it because it had air condition.

Happy Father's Day

16 year anniversary

We went to Lake Wateree for our 16th Anniversary

Leia and Chris went swimming at their beach. We miss our boat and being out on the water. So to do something fun for our anniversary we rented a boat. This boat was a hunk of junk. It was filthy dirty, full of spiders, and a dead fish. On top of it you could only max go 10 MPH. We should have demanded our money back, but we were determined to go out and have fun.

Leia liked being co-pilot

I miss my boat, I MISS my boat, I MISS MY boat,I MISS MY BOAT!!!

They got out to swim. We also fished for a while. They didn't catch anything.

A map of Lake Wateree. It's pretty big.We maybe did 1/4 of the lake. We had boat issues. The boat couldn't go fast nor could we get the boat to plain correctly.

Leia enjoying being out on the boat.

There were some mansions on the water. A few houses down would be trailers. The majority of houses though were average houses.

Even though the boat had seen better days we did have fun. It was nice being out on the water seeing the scenery.We had a good anniversary.

new picks from the garden

We now have some beans growing. We washed them up and snapped them.I will cook these tonight. Yes more and more of these guys. I did end up making a killer casserole with them. A new favorite for me. One of these Zucks was made into another loaf of Z bread. I do give it away as well as eat it. I know it's not good for the diet. I know I know.I've made 4 loves total and gave 2 away.

And then the next day I picked this load of veggies from the garden. And that's an additional 5 more zucks and squashes.The cherry tomato's are fantastic. They are so sweet and have that nice tomato acid taste the I love. I froze the blueberries and blackberries, used the peppers and Z&S in the casserole mentioned above, and ate the tomato's. YUM!!!!

This morning Chris came and kissed me goodbye and told me that I have another big harvest out there for me to pick. I can't see how because I just picked all of this Saturday night and there was nothing else to pick. I'm excited to see what has literally grown overnight.(Sunday I had checked and there wasn't anything). I'll post pictures if I pick a bunch.

cotton museum

We were driving home one day from Florance and I saw this tiny sign that said Cotton Museum this way. I was on a mission to find some raw cotton so I marked it on my GPS to visit it this week. I was glad we did. I thought it was going to be a boring tour for the kids.Turns out it had a lot of great history and a few activities for the kids. Plus a super cool gift shop. The people who ran it were true southerners. So kind and very informative. So if your ever my way and want to see a cotton museum, I know where to take you. An antique (modern) cotton gin. This was the newest one that they had.
The Mexican Bowl Weevil that almost took control of killing all the cotton plants rendering SC for 2 years with worthless cotton fields.They figured out how to kill them with arsenic and cotton was back in the game of being South Carolina's biggest crop.





A loom that turned the fine wisps of strands of cotton into fabric. This one could make 6 yards in 1 minute.

One of the ways they made yarn out of cleaned cotton

This is Jennifer Y. and her kids. They were feeling the cotton to see if they could tell the different grades of cotton. There were 10 different grades. I could only tell the difference between 5ish. A cotton bush

The cotton Gin by Eli Whitney. It wasn't the first cotton gin. There was one invented 3000 years prior. But that one could only do long grains. Eli Whitney invented a cotton gin for short grains,which is what was grown in the U.S. The invention of the Gin greatly reduced the cleaning time of the cotton. Unfortunately that meant for more slavery. More and more fields were planted, so they needed extra people to plant and pick the cotton.

Another version of a cotton gin.

A big bale of cotton

The weight system that they used to weigh cotton. It was 41 cents a pound of clean cotton. It takes 1400 pounds of raw seeded cotton to make 500 pounds of clean cotton. That's a lot of work.

The kids feeling the difference of fresh picked cotton lint v/s the processed cleaned cotton. I was shocked how big the cotton seeds are and how many there were. There are 6-8 seeds per pod of cotton.

Another loom