I have a serious problem

It's Gladys.

She follows me everywhere. She's been helping me work in the garden for some time now, and loves that I dig up worms for her and feed them to her.

Because of that, she thinks I've always got them. She goes everywhere I go... now she's taken to sitting on my hand like some kind of fancy falcon and she won't leave. She just sits there.

When I leave her to go do other work she gives me horribly sad looks and makes me feel terrible. If you have animals, you know the look I'm talking about.

I'm really not sure how to deal with this.

We dug some potatoes earlier, and she thought that was great fun because of course, we usually find worms. She even helped me dig. I couldn't help but laugh when Douglas sprawled out in the grass beside us and Gladys was digging like crazy in the same hole I was, me after potatoes, her after bugs.

Proud potato grower

I found her some corn that was leftover and gave her a treat.

Norman wanted some too

Got bugs?

After we decided to go for a walk and guess who decided to go as well?

She really likes the dogs, and I'm pretty sure she thinks she is one of them.

I have no doubt she thinks she should be in the house and she is probably planning on how she'll get in right now. Come to think of it, yesterday morning the living room door was open a crack and we couldn't explain why. It was probably her. One day we'll wake up and find her sitting on the couch watching TV eating watermelon.

We found this little guy on our way home from the garden... He wasn't really thrilled to see us.

This morning I woke up to a quiet house. No Quail talking, no Kakarikis. The Prairie dogs moved back into the living room from our sun room, where they spend a good deal of the summer nights by our bedroom. Usually they are up bright and early in the sun room and they wake us up running on their wheel. But not today.

They started waking up while I was making coffee. This is their usual routine inside, they are lazy, they sleep until we get up and they know there will be food and entertainment. (They love TV.)

As I was heading to the door with the little dogs, I noticed something peek around the side of the camper in the driveway.

A turkey. My first thought was "I know all of mine went in their coop last night" and then I realized of course, it was a wild one. So I waited a second before opening the door and letting the dogs out and in the meantime, about a dozen turkeys (hens) all went through the driveway and up the trail that runs along my goat yard fence. Me and the dogs went outside to their pee area and the turkeys came around our new loop road we built for our big camper.... we were about 50 feet from there, and they all followed it around and down one of our other trails. Douglas and Norman spotted them, but I stopped Norman from barking and Douglas just kind of looked at me like he wasn't shocked at all to see all these turkeys walking by.

It's been cooling off in the evenings, which is wonderful. We've had a couple small fires and yesterday Kevin split some wood and brought it to the house. There will be no need for full blown fires and most mornings have been too warm to warrant a fire, but the evenings are starting to call for a nice, small one.

We had a frost Friday night. I didn't notice until Saturday evening when my pumpkins looked like this:

and the creek is turning red and is in all it's glory:

We've been gone since Wednesday morning, we returned to the farm Friday night. We went down to Syracuse New York, and spent two nights at a hotel. We had a couple other reasons for going there, so we figured we would just make a little break out of it, which was great. It recharged the batteries.

Wednesday night we went to our favorite restaurant in Syracuse, the Clam Bar, it has the best seafood in the city. We stuffed ourselves. Kevin had steak, and I had blackened grouper, and we had oysters and clams. They have by far the best triple chocolate cake I've ever eaten. I rarely have desert out, but when I do, I never look twice at chocolate cake. I can't even describe this cake. It's just worth every bite.

Thursday night we went to the famous Dinosaur BBQ, which was on Man Vs Food and was voted America's Best BBQ spot on Good Morning America. It's a small place and they pack you in good. We waited in the bar area for about 1/2 hour which we were told was good, some people have waited 3 or more. Lots of talking, lots of people pushing and trying to get through. This was like being on another planet for me. Rarely am I in this kind of situation... I like my barn a lot better.



But I will say, it was worth the wait. We got a good seat, and the food was great. Kevin had ribs, which were the best thing we ate, and I had pulled pork and brisket.

We hit up my favorite used book store I've mentioned before and I stocked up on some winter reading. I'm so excited. I've already started reading one, it's called "Widow of the South" by Robert Hicks.

This one I'm really excited about... I didn't even read what it was about, just grabbed it, no questions asked!

It's time for evening chores. I forget that the nights are coming quicker now, it's dark earlier and it seems to come so suddenly instead of slowly now.

Jackson has been spending his days enjoying the last of the green grass by the house and in the evening he walks up to his yard and I put him to bed with his treats. I've noticed some of the goats have been getting pretty fuzzy, so the cold is on it's way. We winterized our small camper today and moved it which was a huge job, but it's out of the way now, so we can bring our woodbox in to start filling up. Hopefully tomorrow we'll be able to find time to pick some of our apples too.