Ready for SPRING to get here!!!

WOW! Another year has flown by!!! I don't know where the time goes.  I love to write and the older I get the less I seem to find the time to do it!  Once again RUSH is upon me and college classes start back up on Tuesday.....I DREAD RUSH EVERY SEMESTER!!!..I think I have said that before! lol

Onto better subjects!! Life is busy at Itty Bitty Acres!!!!! I can't believe how many more critters we have acquired!!!  Lets have an introduction, shall we?

First we still have Buzz and Beauty, our miniature black Arabian horses:

And we have our 3 Nigerian Dwarf Goats, Alfalfa, Spanky and Buckwheat:

Then we have 3 Sebastopol Geese, 7 ducks, 5 roosters, 30 hens, and around a dozen guineas:

And of course our two dogs, five cats, and two golden pheasants!!!

Here is a picture with more of our feathered friends in it!

Samson, our spoiled rotten sheltie!

And here is Gracie, my sweet collie:)

We definitely have our hands full! We are hoping to get a couple of turkeys and a couple of white peacocks in the spring and then I think we will be done for awhile!!!                                          

This year I made a GIANT TO DO LIST for 2015!!!( Of course I make one every year in hopes that when my sweet hubs sees it he will think to himself, "I should really help Trish accomplish all the things that are on her TO DO LIST!"......yeah,,,,,that doesn't happen! lol)  However; this year he told me that he has a TO DO LIST too!!! I am so excited!!! So I combined our TO DO LIST to make a MASTER TO DO LIST!!!!! So far I think we are ahead of the game!!!!  I will try to post a pic of our MASTER TO DO LIST and then try to make myself accountable on my blog as we mark things off!!!  Wish me luck!!!

The More I Deal With People The More I Like My Pets!

It has been a very busy few weeks! Last weekend we were blessed to get to have a three day weekend, (the hubs and I took a Friday off) and go visit family in Stephenville Texas. Such a pretty town! All the rolling hills and green grass and trees made me so envious.....I come back to the south plains to blowing dirt and high winds and extreme drought conditions. I feel like we are living in a permanent dust bowl!  I can dust the house before I go to bed and by the next afternoon it looks like I haven't dusted in weeks!

Yesterday I went and spent my morning helping my daughter shampoo carpets at the new place she is moving in to in June, then off to Lubbock to buy plants!!! woohoo!!! So excited to get my garden plants! I couldn't find everything I wanted, but I shall make due! I also bought some Lavender plants! SOOOOOOO excited! I want to start growing Lavender!  I was disappointed when I couldn't find as many plants as I wanted, but start small, fail small! lol.....I am not known for having a green thumb! ....

I think I ended up with 16 English Lavender and 9 Spanish Lavender plants then assorted veggies and herbs!   My sweet hubby tilled the garden site and lavender site today and hopefully the wind will be calm enough at some point this week that I can get some planting done!  I am making manure tea....I hope I can handle the smell so that I can use it! 

My other exciting purchase for the weekend was my awesome find~ A metal red barn bird feeder at Tractor Supply!!! I LOVE it!

Until next time~ sweet country dreams!

 

 

The weather here is crazy!!! One day 90 degrees and the next day snow flurries!!!!!
We have been soooo busy lately that I have felt like a cat chasing my tail!!! I can't even begin to detail all of the things that have been going on here!!!
Come first of June we will be having 19 baby chicks delivered.....I told the hubs, I just may become an EGG Farmer!!! lol....we got all hens, no roosters!!!!
Being a bookkeeper at a college bookstore, I am very very busy in August, September and October and then end of December, January and February and March I stay pretty swamped then get ready for summer sessions that keep things steadily busy at work....I really wanted to do my best to post on my blog at least weekly, but obviously that didn't happen. I am really going to try and do better!
This last week was a sad time at Itty Bitty Acres...we did have two mallard ducks, but we lost one, then about four days later a fox got one of the three roosters I used to have....my gelding got an upper respiratory infection and then one of our favorite barn cats got killed! A week of sadness let me tell you!
On a brighter note, we managed to get a lot of yard and land work done this last weekend despite high winds!!!

RUSH is here, RUSH is here!

Well it is that time of year for me.....RUSH.  For those who do not know what that is, it is the two weeks before college starts and the two weeks following school starting.  RUSH, RUSH, RUSH.  That is all that we seem to do is RUSH. As the bookkeeper at a college bookstore, this is the busiest time of the year for me.  Fall and Spring Rush keeps me overwhelmed, understaffed and wore out completely!  Financial aid, rentals, millions of receipts, credit cards, charge accounts, billing....the list goes on and on!   The older I get the more I dread RUSH!   Oh well, can't change it and other than detesting RUSH I love my job!

Onto better subjects! We got two more ducks! I may become the crazy duck lady! I love the ducks! We now have a blue Swedish and two female mallards.   They are so stinking cute.  I loved watching our blue Swedish, Mr. Wiggles show his lady friends around!

We had to separate our duck(Mr. Wiggles) from the three roosters....better known as The Three Amigos because the roosters kept picking on him. He was so sad to not be with them and having to be alone, but we found him a couple of friends and I think he will be fine now!
The Three Amigos didn't take to kindly to not being allowed in their chicken run and chicken coop anymore, but until we get the Waddle Waddle Duck Resort built, the ducks get the run and the coop and the roosters get the barn and free range!
Probably in the Spring we will get some pullets so that we can have some laying hens, but there will be no more roosters, but definitely more ducks!

A Little Bit of Rambling.

It has been almost a month since I blogged.   Life sure does get busy sometimes.  I really don't know where this month has gone.  

The best part of this month is that my hubby and I celebrated 22 years of marriage this month! Yea us! I sure do love my hubby! He is definitely a keeper!

Today was a sad day on the farm...our sweet cat, Mr. Beasley had a run in on Highway 114 and did not survive.  Poor Dennis unfortunately is who found him on  the side of the highway right in front of our house.  Dennis is such an animal lover and it was heartbreaking for him to be the one to find him.

Mr. Beasley will be missed. He was an awesome cat and just the sweetest baby ever.  Rest in peace Mr. Beasley, we love you and will miss you.

I recently had a long talk with my Mom and it really opened my eyes to some things. I hate that my sister and I had talked several times in the last several months and talked about the fact that Mom just always seemed grumpy and just flat out unhappy and so unlike herself anymore.  A few weeks ago my kiddos, who are 19 and almost 21 went and surprised my family for a weekend. My kiddos came home and said they really didn't enjoy being around my Mom that she seemed moody and just overall grumpy.  This floored me. I called my sister who lives by Mom and asked her what was going on.  She told me, "that is Mom for you."  My sister and I talked and we agreed something had to change. She sat my Mom down and told her exactly how she had made my kiddos feel and it broke my poor Mom's heart! She would never do anything to hurt one of her grand kids and we all knew that was true. She decided to go to the doctor and he said she definitely has anxiety and prescribed something to help her during stressful situations, but more importantly he told her she has to learn how to deal with stress.  If there is anything anyone gets out of this blog....please let it be this.....people age, and as we age life isn't always as easy to handle as we think it should be.  Things that may have never upset or bothered us before all of the sudden does.   Please, please, please, if you notice someone you love has started to have a personality change, they seem easily upset or stressed, or moody or depressed or negative a lot....love them enough to lovingly talk to them and ask them what is going on and be honest and let them know that you have noticed a difference in their personality.    Mom told me, "I knew that things got to where they were bothering me more, I just didn't realize that it was effecting me in a way that was evident to other people."   
Take care of your family people! It is the only one you got!!!

We have been so much time outside doing yard work and farm maintenance that I haven't been online a whole lot, but I am still here so God bless everyone hope you  had a great July and remember August is just around the corner!

Busy, Busy Bee, Oh My Oh Me!

Wow life sure has been busy lately! I made a promise to myself that when I started this blog, it was really just a journal for me and for my family and friends to be able to follow along and keep up with our journey here at Itty Bitty Acres.  I promised myself that I would blog daily!!! Hahahaha! Epic fail on my part!.....I had good intentions, but sometimes my brain is so tired by the time evening rolls around that I can't think of a thing to blog about, and yet all day long a million things went thru my head.   Go figure.   I will be exhausted and then lay down to go to sleep and think of a million things that I want to write about, but I know if I get up and start writing it will wake me up and then 5:45am will come way too soon.
So what has been going on at Itty Bitty Acres? 
  Well we have been working our tails off on the chicken run and chicken coop. Had to do some maintenance work on the barn, had to do some major yard work, we are still cleaning up debris from the last wind storm and we both have been super busy at work, you know the place......the one that actually pays you! lol. 
We had company come out and visit with all of the animals one night so that was fun and the weather here has been H-O-T, HOT. I am talking 108, 105, 104, hot. We still had to be out in the heat working around the property and I think we overdid it just a little bit.  This past weekend, we chilled out a little and only worked outside in the early morning hours, and the evening hours.  We even sneaked in an afternoon nap on Saturday!!!!!!Can you believe it???? Me taking a nap is almost unheard of and if I do take a nap I take a 15 minute power nap and that is it and those are very rare, but on Saturday I told my husband that I was taking a nap and that he should too!

His response was "Really?" (I won't lie, I am known as quite the slave driver!)
 I replied, "Really."  
His response was, "For how long?" 
and my answer was, "until we wake up" 
and his response was, "Is this a trick?"

I assured him it was not and I crashed on the love seat and he crashed on the sofa and 3 and 1/2 hours later, I woke up......and felt like I had been hit by a truck! It made me remember why I don't take naps!!!! My hubby on the other hand, said it made him feel great!

THEN.......on Sunday afternoon, he took another nap and I read a really good book!  So that was our week in a nutshell.......oh

And we got to watch one of our chickens peck my poor Nigerian Dwarf goat in the butt!!!! Poor dear felt violated I am sure, then yesterday said chicken pecked me on the foot, and pecked Buzz our miniature horse on the nose and then tonight took off chasing our cat....Poor Mr. Beasley didn't know what to think!!! 

Oh and did I mention that I think that we have three roosters?????? Yep I think that just might be the case.....wonder if that is why the little booger that is pecking everyone?   

Well that is our adventurous week here at Itty Bitty Acres in a nutshell. 
How was your week?
God Bless Everyone!

It Is Monday!

Good evening everyone!!!! I hope everyone had an awesome Monday and enjoyed their weekend! I wish we could have 3 day weekends....1 day for indoor cleaning, 1 day for outdoor cleaning, and 1 day for having nothing but fun.......
(sigh)..wouldn't that be nice?

We had a very good weekend, worked hard on the chicken run, hopefully get more done on the coop this next weekend and mowed the entire 2 and 1/2 acres and weed eated until the weed eater died :( I think we might have spent a little too much time in the heat, both my hubby  and I kind of felt icky last night.

We both had a busy day today at work and I came home and discovered that my son's $1200 laptop had crashed! I am beyond furious!  This is a Dell laptop that is a year and a half old. We paid $150 back in February because it did the infamous blue screen of death. Last time they told us it was an operating system issue, this time they say it is a virus in the boot drive.  Hmmm.....so it is doing the exact same thing, but the cause is not the same? Imagine that?   For another $150 they will fix it again......SMH.   I have bought $300 Acer laptops from Walmart that are better than this! My son had to have this particular laptop with a Terabyte hard drive and some fancy video card in order to do Architecture at Texas Tech.......$1200 in my book is freaking expensive to last a year and a half and go down twice!
I don't know who we will get to fix it, but I know it won't be DELL. I think their computers and their customer service sucks!
Onto better topics, went outside to visit all of our feathered friends and fur buddies and all my cares just went away watching them run and play. While watching them chase bugs and each other I forgot about the fact that I had a $1350 paper weight in the form of  a laptop, that our weed eater died, and now the industrial fan for the dogs and cats out in the shop has died as well.....oh and did I forget to mention that we now have a bad tire on the boat trailer, and the hot tub now has a leak we can't find?
Everything aside.....I love my life here at Itty Bitty Acres.
Goodnight my friends and God Bless.