A Smiling Goat to Begin the Novel

Hello Readers!

I said I'd be back with this post yesterday...might of been the day before yesterday....well, I didn't make it back so here I am now!

:)

I figured we'd start off with a smiling goat and his buddy!

I took a few pictures at The Kansas State Fair the 12th of September but you're not going to see too many of them cause they're just of the kids and grands .... nothing too exciting to anyone but myself.

We spent more time in the petting zoo with this happy goat than we spent anywhere else on the fairgrounds except for the air conditioned building where we charged up the power chair the eldest boy borrowed for me for the day.

The little girl in the green John Deere antler visor in the picture below is the reason the petting zoo was a long stay!

Mind you, that didn't bother me in the least! I used to work for this petting zoo back in 1997. (It makes me feel terribly old to type that number. How can that many years be gone already?) Working for Hedricks was an experience I wouldn't change for anything! 1997 I was 38 years old, in my prime, strong as an ox and free as a bird. I was trying to find myself back then. My husband and I had separated the previous Oct. I 'ran' off with the zoo in July. The boys lived with him and I was off traveling with the petting zoo going to fairs in Kansas, Iowa and Nebraska. It was the first time in my life I had traveled anywhere on my own. I didn't want it to end, but all good things come to an end...

and other good things begin.

Things come full circle and you find yourself in familiar spots from the past sometimes. 

I only wish Gary could have known his grand daughter. She's a gem of a girl.

There's been a lot of issues of loss in my life here in the last two months. 

This little girl made things bearable for me when I spent almost six weeks at my eldest son's house to keep an eye on her while others were seeing another to the next world. She made me laugh many times a day. She gave me hugs and kisses often. She created with me. She exuded sunshine even when it rained. 

The Good Lord gave us children to help us old folks remember the innocence that we are born with. I am so thankful for the grandbabies! All of them, not just this youngest of them.

This pretty girl is my youngest son's wife and that handsome boy in the bandana is youngest son. My wild child. The boy's gonna be 80 and still wearing a bandana over is wild hair! He looks about 12 without his beard!

We were waiting for the sea lion show to start when I took this picture.

We weren't really close enough to get any good pictures of the sea lions. It was a fun show though. Well worth the wait of about a half hour. Everyone  was in need of a break from riding the rides and going through all the exhibits.

That pretty girl took all five boys with her to ride the rides on the midway and both sons and I took Little A with us to look at the exhibits. It worked out well.

Youngest son abandoned us after awhile to join his wife and the grandboys. Four of them theirs and the other eldest son's boy.

They finally gave up the rides sometime around 10pm that evening. A good day had by all involved! Only wish eldest son's wife could have joined us as well. Would have made for a perfect day had that been the case. 

The weather WAS perfect for a day at the fair!

On Sunday eldest son, Little A and grandboy went back to the fair for the last day for a few hours. Eldest had a couple extra tickets still and there was no need to waste them. I didn't have the power chair on Sunday so I was hoofing it that day.

We stayed for almost 11 hours on Tuesday when both sons were there, so the four hours spent on Sunday were not really all that bad. I paid for the walking that much in one day but it was worth all the aches!

We stopped in at Dr. Goddard's Lab to see some space experiments. Dr. Goddard is affiliated with The Cosmosphere in Hutchinson, Ks (where the state fair is held every year). The Cosmosphere is a museum dedicated to space. They have one of the Apollo missions capsules in the museum along with a rocket that went to the moon sitting on their front lawn. It's a really cool museum. They show IMAX films in the planetarium there also. Grandboy was chosen from audience to help with one of the experiments. That was pretty cool! 

That isn't really Dr. Goddard up there doing the experiments, I forget what this fella told us his name was...Dr. Goddard was a pioneer in developing rockets.

I'd like to get my hands on some liquid oxygen! That was what he did most of the experiments with... it's some really COOL stuff! You can blow things up with it....not to peices, I don't believe... but UP^^^^^

It doesn't take much to blow a large rubber trash can up into the air about 200 feet is what we were told. He did it with a film cansister and the help of grandboy and a girl about his age. Wasn't feasible to blow up a trash can on the fairgrounds. I'm sure it would have been a safety hazard of some sort. Would be a really cool thing to see though! LOL 

I cut young Gavin's head off but the rest of the grandboys and their mama are in the picture. The boy in the middle is the boy in the last picture doing the science experiment. Is his grandma that his mama was seeing off at the time.

Here's Gavin and his brother Gage (both in red shirts) talking to goats and a Jacob's sheep at the fair on Tuesday.

Fair week was a total success!

Lucky Tigger Murray on the left and Tippy on the right.

These two felines will be coming to my house soon.

On the 25th of August there was a big wing ding for DIL's mom and there were lots of hot dog and hamburger buns leftover from the picnic in the park. They were quite stale by the day we took Lil A and her brother to Carey Park in Hutch to feed the ducks. Most of these are actually geese, but we've always called it 'feeding the ducks'. There are around 100 birds that come to be fed.

Lil A had a grand time! I wanted to show off the sunset picture!

Ducks have always been in Carey Park. Even when I was a kid Ma took us all to the park to feed the ducks and see the rest of the critters that used to be there. We would sometimes feed the llamas or the camels or even the little brown monkeys! There's still a zoo in Carey Park but it's an actual zoo, not just a hodge podge of critters in pens along the road through the park. Now only the ducks are where they've always been. They are free to come and go as they please.

Was around the 18th of September when we went to the Park to feed the ducks all that bread. 

We had a squirrel in the mix too. It was so cute. The fowls come waddling toward us long before we made it to the lake's edge where the picture was taken. There are many trees around this lake and surrounding grounds. A little squirrel came down one of those trees close to the flock of ducks and geese. We were tearing off chunks of bread from the buns and tossing them to the geese. That little squirrel darted out among the fowl, nabbed a chunk of bread and darted back up the tree with it. A few minutes later she was back at the base of that tree, standing up on her hind quarters, begging like a dog, for another chunk of bread. She took probably around half a dozen chunks of bread to her nest before we moved on. I knew it was a she as opposed to a he cause while she was standing up begging, you could see all her teats along her underbelly. I don't think boy squirrels have that feature! I didn't have the camera out yet when this occurred so no picture of a begging squirrel, dang it!

Eldest son on the left, youngest son on the right; standing in my kitchen shooting the breeze on the 24th of September when I came home for about five hours to get some things done here that needed done. This was taken around 1 in the morning.

You already met Lucky Tigger Murray earlier in this post. I almost lost LTM before I ever got to bring her home! She's scalped cause she got caught in the serpentine belt on FIL's Kia the 22nd of Sept. This picture was taken on the 23rd. She was a sore little cat for a few days but relatively unhurt. She is missing a stripe of fur on the other side of her in addition to this and the buggered up ear. FIL couldn't drive his Kia till Tuesday when they finished at the garage putting a new serpentine belt on it. The mechanic said the belt stretched out an inch and a half bigger than it started out being!
LTM was called simply Tigger when I showed up the end of August. No one would give me a straight answer on what this cat's name really was so I started calling her Murray (thinking Murray was a boy). Then a couple weeks later I figured out Murray is a girl but by that time she was used to being called Murray and the grandboy informed me that the cat's name was really Tigger. So she became Tigger Murray and then the incident with the serpentine belt (which should have killed her!) I added Lucky to the beginning of her name. 

She was wound up in that belt when FIL started the vehicle. He went a good five car-lengths (30-40 feet) before the belt came loose enough for the cat to escape. 

As soon as those two kittens get fixed, I'll be bringing them home to my house so I can tick Lola cat off! :) She needs some playmates. That cat is FAT compared to these two!

I made Little A a very happy girl when I gave her this little purple kitty I made one morning while there.

I was sitting out on the patio one day and the air changed... the light more than the air. I looked up in the sky when Little A said she could see an airplane (I didn't see an airplane anywhere). I saw this instead. I think this is a sun dog? It was a ring around the sun. I'd never seen anything like it before and was quite pleased to see the camera caught it just as it looked to me. I put the top of the tree in the picture to let me know what it was later on when the pictures were downloaded. 

Little A says she can hear Santa Clause and he will be here soon. Like RIGHT NOW!  I kept telling her he wasn't coming quite that soon but she kept insisting he WAS coming soon. She is fascinated with airplanes. The kids live in the flight path of McConnell Air Force Base in Wichita and they see many different kinds of planes and helicopters frequently right above their house. Little A gets excited about every single one of them!

When eldest son brought me home on the 29th of September we took a scenic route I couldn't duplicate if I tried! Was an adventurous road home! It was a beautiful day for a drive as you can tell from the clear blue skies in the pictures below.

One the exchange of Highway 14 and Interstate 70 we suddenly decided we'd skip getting on the interstate to head west and go north on the dirt road to Lincoln, passed all the new wind turbines they've put in the last two years...still adding to the numbers there right now.

Doing this put us in the middle of post rock country!

That stone in the picture above is a limestone rock fence post. It's probably been standing in that spot for neigh on 140 years or so.

Nothing but farmland as far as the eye can see! A stone fence post keeping sentinel in front of a milo field.

After we went down the dirt road heading north aways I couldn't tell you where we went. Twisting, winding, taking us where the wind blew for quite a few miles.

The ride home shouldn't take more than three hours to make when you drive paved roads. We drove very few paved roads the last 130 miles or so. It took us almost 5 hours to get home!

Which was OK cause we did not have a schedule to adhere to!

The trees are doing a fine job of readying for the winter.

The colors in Kansas in the fall come short of the colors in New England, I will admit. The change is still quite lovely though.

This rock intrigues me. It is just a very large granite type stone standing on the edge of fence behind the barbed wire fence. It was on the corner of a T intersection in a dirt road. Eldest caught a glimpse of the rock just as he was passing the intersection. We turned around to see this rock up close and changed the course of our journey. We really did go just where we pleased!

I was sitting in the passenger's seat taking pictures while the boy drove. This one surprised me when I downloaded the smart card. I did well with getting the KEEP OUT tire centered in the picture going down the road! And look at that band of red center picture! The sumac is just gorgeous in the fall! That splash of red is so pretty! 

SO pretty!

Eldest son tells me milo is harvested after the first frost. 

Soybeans are still in the fields too. I don't think I included any soybean fields though. Soybeans have to dry on the vine....similar to how they leave wheat in the fields to dry before harvesting. 

I believe we were in Osborne county (we seemed to travel many miles in Osborne county) when we came across this old round barn. Eldest stopped for this picture.

Changing trees. Trees aren't thick like this everywhere in Kansas.

Wind damage probably. 

A herd of yearlings. We stopped and talked to these youngsters.

No. I did not tell them their fortune. My sister Susan would be so proud of me! :)

She hates it when I tell cows what is in store for them.

They had a beautiful view of the prairie in this pasture!

Talking to cows is a fun pastime. I know it's silly but it is fun!

In my neck of the woods there are a lot of cows to talk to. Puts a smile on my face every time I do it!

A herd of cows with many different colored cows is called a rainbow herd.

sumac  (will take you to a new window to tell you all you ever wanted to know about sumac over at wikipedia)

I went to Hays with Ma this afternoon and sumac is a deeper shade of red today than it was this past Sunday when these pictures were taken.

If I had to choose the prettiest sight in Kansas any time of the year, the sumac turning red in the fall would be my choice!  The second would be a roiling thunderstorm!

We shall get back to artwork in the next post and there won't be so much chatter from my jabbery self! :)

Thanks for hanging in there!

You all behave yourselves if you can.

Be good to one another.

It matters!

Peace

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