worst blogger ever

First I want to apologize for being the worlds worst blogger. I think one of the first rules to blogging is update it at least once a year. This could explain why I have no followers, and if I do or did have any followers I take full responsibility for your insanity and boredom. 

So what do you ask has kept me from blogging the last few years....well mostly laziness(honesty is the best policy). I have had a few surgeries from the neck down. I blame the doctor for the lose screws. 

That Is still not an excuse I could have written about my head being screwed on straight, horrible hospital food in hospitals with no coffee(that should illegal} or having some kinks pulled out of my spine. If I walk like I have a board up my rear its because I have 2 18 inch rods holding my spine in place,,,same thing.

I could have written about how are farm has grown to include pigs that reproduce almost as fast as rabbits. How we constantly have pigs of all sizes terrorizing the property and how I haven't been able to grow a garden since getting them. By the way when they said there's no such thing as to much bacon..they were full of crap. I have researched and tried every bacon recipe google has to offer and all I  gained from that was a couple pant sizes and more bacon. its a vicious cycle...and people are worried about guns and opiates. I wonder if they have a 2 step program for bacon.

  I could have written about how my sweetheart and I celebrated 30 years of marriage and still don't know how we made it. We celebrated by putting our youngest on an airplane and heading to Vegas. Maybe vegas was to celebrate putting our youngest on a plane to school in another state...I forget..

  I could have written how I turned 50 and worse I remember it. We celebrated by fishing at a local pond with the kids and grandkids and worse no one brought me any alcohol. 

  I could have written about how I lost my job by faking back surgery and committing a work violation while under the knife. If your gonna lie people don't document your stupidity and submit it to a government agency.

Life really hasn't changed much in the boonies. The highlight of the week is still reading the weekly police blotter in the local paper. Its good to know I'm not the only one who lost my purse and a cow on the same day.  

 In my spare time I have perfected the use of my electric pressure cooker so I can have dinner done is 15 minutes thus giving myself more spare time. 

 I cant work anymore since my back surgery which means thats just one more excuse I don't have for not keeping up with my blog. 

So since I didn't write about any pf the things I could have written about maybe you could send a little reminder my way once in awhile. Just a little note that says hey you get out of the recliner put some pants on and write. Better yet if youd like my phone number so you can scream obscenities at me that might be more helpful. I need all the inspiration I can get.

  Until next time......... 

Official Rednecks

As we approach our 3rd year anniversary of redneck life we have realized our city blood has officially turned red (well i guess it was red all along but you know what I mean) and we are bonafied rednecks. We have proof of this for example there are enough vehicles on our property including the ones you cant see for the weeds and the ones on blocks to be considered a junk yard anywhere else. We no longer by meat or eggs at the grocery store. We have a hound dog that lays on the front porch and manages to pry open 1 eye at the sound of an intruder and then sleeps it off.We have learned to cook turkey and ham on the grill while at the same time consuming mass amounts of beer while looking for pretty shiny rocks compliments of our home bred and possibly inbred redneck neighbors...dont get me wrong though they are the best neighbors we ever had.  We shoot pretty much anything that moves and a lot of things that don't.  We have furnished our house with items discarded by our fellow rednecks and re-purposed to fit our needs. You know what they say "one mans trash is another mans treasure..lol". My car is pieced together with different colored parts but its ok no one really notices cause of all the dirt and it pretty much looks like the rest of the redneck cars out here. We have a mountain of empty cans that keeps growing and will probably be all that we have to leave our kids upon our death. I make homemade laundry soap instead of  meandering all the way to town for the fancy stuff and we condition our hair with coconut oil and raw eggs and we brew sun tea in a jug on the hood of the car on a daily basis...learned that from uncle Si. We watch the redneck learning show (duck dynasty) regularly but If there is something i have forgotten that rednecks are suppose to do please let me know so i can work on it we rednecks need all the help we can get and then some. I guess its been about a year and 7,523 beers since my last post so i guess your due for an update..hiccup!! Lets see we have a cement walk way now so we can walk to the car without being knee deep in mud, our baby flew coop to get some formal lernin so we got a new baby in the form of a weimeraner. They  are over sized hound dogs with big ears and feet and as bout as much energy as a snail except for when he thinks your leaving or you have food and then hell hath no fury on a 8 month old 120 lb 6ft tall dog that will sit on you and not move til you agree to take him with or give him food. He is supposed to be a hunting dog but is afraid of the chickens so I dont how thats gonna work out and I swear he has rocks for brains so guess what his name is,,,,it aint  Einstein lol.

Which reminds me I got a new job working with people with disabilities and I have come to realize they are the only smart ones in this town...or any town for that matter. I have learned alot from them and they remind me daily how simple and wonderful life can be and how crazy and mixed up mine is but I love it. We are in the process of adding a windmill to the solar panels and now we wont be limited to watching tv, doing laundry and taking showers only on sunny days lol I might even get to get me one of those fancy electric boxes that washes the dishes for ya....which would come in handy since the other dishwasher moved out to further his edumacation and we have had to resort to using paper china and red solo cups. 

So there ya have it we are rednecks for life and life couldnt be better. A friend from the city once told me: I saw that we have one dog and you have four. We have a pool that reaches to the middle of our garden, and you have a creek that has no end. We have imported lanterns in our garden, and you have the stars at night. Our patio reaches to the front yard, and you have the whole horizon. We have a small piece of land to live on, and you have fields that go beyond our sight. We have servants who serve us, but you serve others. We buy our food, but you grow yours. We have walls around our property to protect us; and you have friends to protect you.”  Guess we arent doing so bad after all. 

Well it's been 2 years since we left the noise and confusion of city life for the smell and mud of country life. Not a lot has changed except the weeds are taller and there are a few farm animals waddling around now. We did add 10 more solar panels which means we can watch tv almost all day and even do the laundry indoors and we will even get to have air conditioning this summer and the only that will be hot, sticky and covered in flies will be the pigs. We also finally got real counter tops...not that there's anything wrong with plywood and spray paint it kinda added to the rustic redneck feel of the place but its nice not to have to tell company that the specks in the food is my secret seasoning and hoping they don't notice its the same color as the spray paint. Next we hope to put a porch or at least a few steps by the front door that 4 foot drop is a doozy and the cinderblocks keep tipping over....not sure if its cause they are broken and wobbly or we are. I guess theres a reason we finally named this place "broke ass ranch". Even the ducks here are broken 2 of them drowned in the pond.....only here in hicksville on broke ass ranch can ducks drown. But there not the only thing that broke, the tractor has flat tires, the boat needs a starter, the truck needs a new truck, the house needs everything lol and us....definatey broke, bones, joints, wallets and all. This place might be broke   but its all ours paid for free and clear and its full of love and happiness and that makes us feel pretty rich. It can't be to bad our son finally decided sell his city life to the highest bidder and join us in the sticks and is loving it at much as we do. Its great having grandkids here to share our broke ass ranch with. He even noted that our remaining ducks must be broken to cause they cant say "Affleck". 

My daughter got engaged to a new guy with 3 kids add that to her three kids and its makes for alot of fun when they visit. We even added a guest house....it has plenty of room, a microwave, a bathroom, a kitchen, and sleeps 8, and sometimes we even actually to get to use it for camping. 

Like every other redneck its time for me to put my teeth in, run a rake through my hair, pull up my britches and git the chores done. The critters need feeding, weeds need burned and the coyotes need shooting. y'all come back now ya hear!!!! 

still alive

 Well i'ts been a year since we moved to the boonies and a few people even came and visited with out getting lost. The holidays came and went with only 1 or 2 meltdowns, and the family grew and a few new nuts are still falling from the family tree but thats what makes us a family and we love them all. We know spring is in the air because we have been able to remove 6 of the 9 blankets on bed that have protected us from frostbite all winter, and road construction has begun. Down here road construction is a little different. It consists of a guy on a tractor putting new dirt on the road and a guy in a truck spraying water on the road so it dont blow away and another guy standing on the ground watching them and and holding a sign so the 1 or 2 drivers that happen to mosey on by know that this is actually road construction.

Also the local stores are selling live chickens and 25 cent hotdogs and they have already held the first of many dirt races. So of course we bought some chickens hoping we dont manage to kill them off before they lay some eggs, bought a sack of hot dogs and went to the races.

We have begun our summer preparations by setting the yard on fire, scattering cow poop and setting up a trampoline. Also we have cemented some sticks in the ground hoping to keep a steer in the vicinity till we can put him in the freezer.

Out here in the boonies supplies are limited so you make do with what ever you can find. So a rickety old discarded canoe that will never float will be filled with dirt and transformed into a boatload of strawberries/ front yard decoration. old pallets become walls for the corral and old beer cans become a wind chime.

ya I'd say we are fitting into the redneck, hicks from the sticks life style pretty good.  Still working on the moonshine still though.......

Summer time blues

so we have survived our first summer in the country. It wasnt easy but we survived. The hardest part was the heat. You all now we are 100% solar powered which is really cool cause we dont have a power bill. What isnt so cool is the amount of electricity it takes to run an air conditioner or even a fan for that matter. Therefor we can only run the A/C for about an hour a day and fans are a thing of the past. When you live in the desert and 98 degrees is a cool day an hour is not even close to enough. So how do we beat the heat.....daily trips to the local swimming hole known as the "REZ" to locals and we get up at 4 am to do the yard work, water the garden, work on the barn, collect firewood for winter and go to the hills and shovel up truckloads of gravel for the driveway so we arent stranded here for the winter. All this must be done before 10 am to avoid a near fatal heat stroke. We tried to do it at night after it cools down but the bugs here are the size of volkswagons, some people have had to have blood transfusions. 
 Although the barn still only consists of 4 poles standing in the dirt, the garden never grew and we only got a handfull of sagebrush cleared from the entire 60 acres summer wasnt a complete loss. The grandkids came to visit and when they saw 60 acres of dirt they though grandma and grandma had moved to heaven...they didnt even get in trouble for getting dirty.
 We went fishing a few times, thought I caught a big one once it put up quite a fight but it was just a mosquito trying not to drown. There were lots of derbys and rodeos, and the lets not forget the fair. I blinked once so i'm sure I missed most of it but there was a fair.
 I'm sure even mayberry had a bigger fair then the little ho-down this county calls a fair.
I'm not sure how you can call 2 horses, 3 goats, 5 chickens, 1 rabbit, and 1 cow a fair but thats the extent of the animal display at the fair and as fast as they were judged the owners came and took them away....probally because they were hungry(the owners that is).
 some other highlights of the fair was a pet parade where is was hard to distinguish the pets from the owners..the jack ass was my favorite, tractor pulls with 4 different catagories and the same 90 year old farmer pulling in every one of them, dirt races where cars with big lifts and fat tires race in circles in a dirt field, a community talent show in which the person who did pig calls was voted the most talented, and a duct tape contest where people submitted items they had made out of duck tape such as a wallet, beer can holder, slippers, and glasses...i'm not sure who won. If you were to get hungry there was homemade curly fried made by sticking a potato to a craftman drill, Ice cream made by connecting a bowl with beaters to a lawn mower engine, and lemonade made by hitting lemons with a sledge hammer....and people paid to consume this stuff....and lived.  It was small and about 100 yrs out dated but it was fun who knows maybe next year I might enter one of the contests top prize is $5.00.
  Well I should probally go I have to get ready for work. Yes I finally got a job in this hillbilly town. Its not much but it gives me something to do. I work at the local hotel...there are 3 or 4 but I work at the fancy one. Around here you know its fancy when the pool didnt previously serve to hold water for cattle and every room comes equipped with a fly swatter. Oh and I get a discount on rooms if ya ever wanna come visit.....I'll let ya know when clean sheet day is lol

City life vs. country folk

I have been writing the entry while sitting in the passenger seat on a very very long road trip to do a small job with my hubby. As we are driving through this insanity called a city I have realized there are several things I do not miss living in the middle of nowhere.  The city has a lot to offer and provides a lot more entertainment than the sagebrush, but something’s make living in the sticks worthwhile.  Like going to the store for 1 thing that you have squeeze your way through the isles between an array of characteristic walmart shoppers only to stand in the check-out line for 2 hours to pay for it because of the 35 available stands only 1 is open. Being hounded by illegal immigrants lurching in parking lots the size of my small town trying to sell you 3 week old tamales made in the trunk of their cars with new corn skins put on them daily to hide the green.  By the time I get to my car I have yelled at at least 20 of them and called them a few names and realized that in the 15 minutes they have been harassing me they miraculously learned English and are now yelling and calling me a few names as I take out my cell phone and say “Hello Immigration”, they can run pretty fast to. I don’t miss Bumper to bumper traffic, horns honking, and fingers flying…down here people don't have bumpers and  actually wave and say hi as there driving down the road with both hands on the wheel, they eat breakfast and do their hair before they get in their cars and don’t have cell phones and will even pull over and let you go by, and the only birds flying are the ones in the air shitting on your car. I don’t miss those orange cones, never ending construction zones and getting cut off at 70 miles an hour on the freeway. There are no orange cones here, only ice cream cones. Road construction consists of putting new dirt or rocks on the roads and people do drive 70 but there are only 2 of them on the road and they are not racing.  I don’t miss cars bouncing and thumping and vibrating down the road so loud you can’t hear your own radio. The only thing down here that bounces and thumps down the road and is very loud is tractors and yes they do rattle your house when they drive by but after about 45 minutes they are past your house and if you don’t like it they can run you over. …lol I don’t miss impolite gangster looking kids with their pants around there knees talking like sailors with pictures and metal all over their bodies. The kids here actually wear clothes that fit, are taught to respect their elders, actually help their parents and are too busy outside to even own a video game….. When kids here want something to do they go swimming in the local rivers and reservoirs, they ride bikes, play with their dogs and/or siblings, they go play in the hills, tip cows, shoot stuff and only go home when they’re hungry…..I seriously have not seen a fat kid yet.  Another thing I don’t miss is the thick, smoggy, foul smelling city air that sticks to your lungs and has a bad taste. Now the air here is pretty aromatic with all the farms and dairies it doesn’t smell like roses but it’s clean, tasteless and I can see through it. And I don’t miss beggars. People standing on street corners asking for food or money. Their signs always say will work for food or money….but if you ask them to work they can’t they have an excuse like oh someone already offered me a job they are coming back but donations are welcome….I am sure they are. We saw an older lady standing by a parking lot holding a sign that read “disabled had 4 back surgeries please help”  If I was disabled and had 4 back surgeries there is no way in hell I could stand on my feet all day long and dance around flashing a sign. When we came out of the store we saw her across the parking lot getting into a Cadillac that was probably only a year or 2 old.  I’ve been looking for  a money making opportunity that isn’t already being done down here but I think if I did that people would just throw produce at me  and I might even get arrested just because the town cop has nothing better to do and the jail cell is collecting dust. Down here people actually work for their money even if it means shoveling shit, cleaning ditches, and selling produce on the roadside.  I don’t miss ugly gang graffiti on every building, fence or wall in town. The closest thing we have to graffiti is the so + so in a heart on the trees in the park. Down here gangs are just groups of friends hanging out having a good time. They have names though bubba jay, Billy Joe and Jim bob. They also have signs…they say “no trespassing violators will be shot survivors will be shot again” , “If you are found here at night…you will be found here in the morning”  and they mean it. They don’t wear certain colors but they all wear the same clothes…wrangler jeans and an old t-shirt and a sideways baseball cap.  They don’t care who is or isn’t in there gang but everybody is welcome and the initiation is who can drink the most beer and  has the highest 4x4. And if you ever wanna leave the gang that’s cool to your always welcome back anytime just bring beer.  And yes they have guns but they are legal, registered guns and they are never pointed at people (unless you ignored the above mentioned signs) only anything else that moves or flies.  They don’t steal either sooner or later you’ll take your junk to the dump and they’ll make good use of it.  They don’t act tough or threaten people either. With a 7mm hunting rifle who needs to be tough, and if piss them off they aren’t gonna threaten ya there just gonna kick your ass. They have gangs fights to but down here they call it mud wrestling, 4 wheeling, demolition derbying  and the rodeo.  I’d like to see them so called gangsters in the city compete with our gangs. The only thing down here with rings and marks on their bodies are the bulls and they get rode hard, whipped and tied up. And in the end there are no losers…everybody gets a beer

There are a few things I do miss about the city though.  Movie theaters with current movies and padded seats, ethnic restaurants. Haven’t had Chinese, Mexican or Italian in months.  Coffee… these people have never even heard of a cappuccino they boil their coffee in cast iron pots on the stove top and you can actually chew it.  Libraries with books for people who made it past the 5^th grade.  Radio stations….any music will do.  Drive through car washes that do the work for me. The car wash here has 2 bays complete with garden hose and they even provide towels and bottles of window cleaner at no extra cost. .  Newspapers with real news I have no idea what goes on out in the real world anymore. Our newspaper is about 3 pages thick and some of the recent headlines read as follows “free pressure pot gauge testing at the health dept”  “Mr jones motorhome caught fire while driving it to town for a safety inspection…it failed” “garden workshop..learn how to plant stuff” “job announcement:  canal worker, must have truck and boots” and the weather report : possible wind(it’s windy here every day ) sunshine unless its cloudy then it might rain. And an occasional getting hitched or just died announcement.   Good alcohol the liquor store is very small and you only have about 4 or 5 kinds to choose from and I think there all homemade. All our wonderful friends who are afraid to visit us in the sticks for fear of never finding their way back out. Bust most of all our family…they maybe dysfunctional but they are our kids, grand kids, sisters, brothers, nieces, nephews  and cousins,  all us nuts fell from the same tree and we love them all with all our hearts and miss them dearly.

4th of July country style

Well summer is half way over and we have survived our first 2 months living in the country,  And  I finally now where at in the country we call it 'Dinkley". Apparently our property sits on the border of two of the smallest towns you ever saw delta and Hinkley and this left the local mail officials scratching their heads for weeks.  Now these small town people aren’t that hard to confuse anyway but when your bedroom is one town and your kitchen is in another they are completely lost.  Which probably explains why it takes an envelope that’s coming from a few miles away weeks to find your mail box?  After much deliberation, a few calls to the state’s main post office, a case of Tylenol and determining which postal carriers junk yard truck had the least amount of miles  they  finally gave me an address and a mailbox. I like our mail carrier though he has only hit our mailbox a couple times and always  has a milk bone for our pup who meets him at the mailbox to shred our mail.   The garden is growing but barely.  It has been a battle between me, and the  rabbits, mice, crappy soil and scorching desert sun but  I’m winning with the help of a semi-automatic  22 caliber rifle , a psychotic  ½ Australian  Shepard ½ blue healer pup and 100 feet of hose.  I’m excited for the fall harvest , should hopefully be enough to fill at least 2 or 3 jars. 

It has been pretty hot but the house stays fairly cool ,  and the reservoir is just a few minutes away with plenty of shade and shore side tables it’s a great place to cool off and there only a few beer cans floating in there and only has the faint smell and color of the dairy up river.

We just celebrated our first Fourth of July here and it wasn’t to bad.  Sweet little old farmers who smell like their cattle gathered eggs and slaughtered their  pigs and made breakfast in the park. Served with silver dollar…..make that copper penny  pancakes and fresh squeezed orange juice kept on the only table in the sun right next to the milk. Right after  breakfast was the parade where most of the business on main street we nice enough to provide rusted lopsided chairs to keep you comfortable why you watch the parade. It was a nice parade and lasted almost a whole hour and consisted of every farm tractor in the county, every horse in the county, the local cop, the volunteer fire fighter, and the high school kids…all 5 of them.  At the end of the day there was a demolition derby the third one this year. This town celebrates everything by smashing up cars or havin a rodeo….probably cuz that’s all they know how to do. They are very resourceful to.  Just because you just beat the shit out of your car doesn’t mean its not still a good car…you just get some new plastic and duct tape for the windows and your good to go for months and years…..you can even reuse them at the next derby.  There is no junk yard here and the local auto part store carries lots of duct tape, super glue and bailing wire…all other parts are special order.

But that’s pretty much how all the businesses in town are. They’re all open different days of the month except the laundry mat which is open every day and also doubles as a gossip center for the old timers and a used clothing donation center if you take your eyes off your clothes for more than 3 minutes.  There are 2 grocery stores 1 of which usually has some fresh food at one time or another.  There’s a small café called the rancher that actually smells like a ranch and 1 little 2 bar stool tavern called curly’s   ran by a little old bald man in bib overalls and is very popular with the 80+ locals who sit and take turns for hours singing karaoke to Buck Owens which sounds similar to the same sounds heard at the local dairy.  Mother nature helped the derby this time. The only thing better than smashing up cars is doing it in the mud.  Drivers spit mud all over spectators hanging on to metal  fencing and sitting on metal bleachers…..not even flinching at the big ol bolts of lightning flashing overhead.  They were careful not to get mud on the fireworks that they were lighting with their cigarettes. The volunteer fire fighter was there for safety and the show was a success.  Andy by the time everybody got back to their trucks, 4 wheelers, and horses and got home the rain had them all cleaned up and they didn’t even have to take a bath.  Hope you all had a fun 4^th of July to.