Guineas are funny little birds!

We have one remaining guinea from the 30 or so that I purchased shortly after we moved down here.  They are funny little birds from Africa and excel at eating ticks and bugs.  I figurde that this was exactly what we needed with our acreage here.
Over a period of time, things happened to them. Awful things. They ran away. Some got killed on the road.  One of the neighbors was popping them with a BB gun. And the old livestock guardian dog, a Great Pyrenees, murdered six in an evening, the only thing we could think of was that she was grumpy because of hip pain issues and they went near her feed bowl.  We felt just terrible about all of this.
We were left with one.  Jerry began calling him Hector (we think it's a boy).
Hector has become quite tame in spite of everyone telling us that this doesn't happen.  He sits on the roof, runs up and down it (I have to warn guests that we do NOT have ghosts in the house) and calls out his funny little cackle.  At night he gets in his tree to roost and reads the Guinea Evening News, sadly, there is no one to listen to him, the chickens aren't bright enough to understand, the goats only care about the price of hay and the horses have no interest in what has happened to Hector on the day.  He was quite lonely for a long time but then he discovered the corgis.  And he began to tease them.  One of the neighbors has a pup that comes over and runs up and down, wanting to play with the corgis, and Hector has been watching all of this.  For quite some weeks, he has been making a buzz or two along the edge of the fence, first with the puppies this spring, then with the adults.  Now he does it to all of them and the runs were getting longer and longer.
Today he ran for quite a while and Jerry said "you should be videotaping this" so I did.  I love to make videos and set them to music.  So here is Hector.  You will note that one dog chases him, then another one takes an interest, and then another.  See how many are chasing along the fence by the end!
I hope you enjoy it!
http://youtu.be/xItvEcqHUIQ

Chess Squares/pie/cake, Old Southern Recipe

We had a Puppy Party a few weeks ago, people came to get their new babies, and everyone brought something yummy, we had the grill out and ate ourselves silly.  There were just so many excellent things to try and I no longer eat like a lumberjack, so fortunately, most everyone left something behind.  I ate so good for a week!  :)
Susan brought something excellent called Chess Squares (and I've seen it as Chess Pie, too).  I finally got around to looking up the recipe.  Oh. My. God.  No wonder this stuff is so good.  It has not one redeeming ingredient in it.  You can feel your pants getting tighter, just looking at the photos of it!  See, here, let me show you how that works:

Susan left the leftovers behind, Jerry and I squabbled over who got the last piece.  It's truly delicious and well worth the calories.
Apparently this recipe has been around forever.  I'm adding it to my recipe file!
The best recipe I have found is here, simple, straightforward, and if you go through the comments, you can do it with lemon, coconut, chocolate, etc.  Just read through and see what works for people!
http://www.kevinandamanda.com/recipes/dessert/chess-squares.html
I hope you all enjoy this!

The Devil is Beating His Wife

When I was a kid growing up, my parents used to say "The devil is beating his wife" whenever we would have a rainstorm and the sun would be shining, too.  Although I have not heard anyone saying this here in Kentucky, it is a Southernism that I thought I would tell you all about.  I was thinking about it this morning, so I turned to wikipedia for an explanation:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunshower
So I guess the correct term is sunshower, so I have learned something this morning.
However, I used to think how silly someone was to ever marry the devil, wondered if he killed his wives and kept getting new ones because, really, who would WANT to marry the devil?  This was a deep theological question that I didn't dare ask our pastor or the local priest.  So, I still wonder that.  Does anyone know?  :)

I have to get one of these!

Once again we present our favorite subject, "Only in Kentucky!"  :)
As it happens, I was just driving to work one day.  Looking at the beautiful scenery, enjoying the sunshine.  I got as far as the corner intersection about three miles from the house and saw this sign.  And had to make sure I beat it back up to the intersection the next day before it disappeared. Because I couldn't believe what I was seeing!  I'm not a member of the NRA but I do believe in my second amendment rights and yes, we have guns here.  But not this:

I seriously did not even know they were legal to own!  Maybe you need a special permit?
I have heard of practice shooting and even a turkey shoot where the best shooter wins a turkey.  Or maybe there is a town in Kentucky called Machine Gun and the shoot is there?  Something tells me that none of this is probable.
Anyhow, I guess I have to get one. That way I can be sure of getting my deer this fall.  :)  Hamburger, anyone?

Names in Kentucky

I have written in a previous post about the wonderful names of towns in Kentucky.  I have discovered that the personal names of people are equally fun and unusual!  I have only run into a Bubba once here and will post on that story sometime in the future.

Here is a list of some of the best ones I’ve found so far:

Hollon

Linwood

Cleve

Tanner

Haywood

Efrian

Elzie

Lera (female)

Triggy

Macy

Delphus

Fllis

Rondal (also Rondell)

Dane

Roex

Tigar

Daron

Ody

Otha (I asked Otha where his name came from and he claimed he never asked his mother.)

Ody

Lenna

Isreal (spelled this way, too)

Condit

And my personal, all time favorite nickname is “Tater”.  Bobby “Tater” Thomas of Munfordville.

I will add unusual names as I find them.

And I have been told that there is a community called Bug Tussle nearby.

Dowsing

When we first moved to Kentucky, a good friend who had a huge background in water resources insisted that we have our septic tank pumped out.  So we did just that.  Not knowing a soul down here, I chose a name out of the local phone book which, as memory serves, was a very professional name, such as “Jim’s Septic Service”.  Well, it is Kentucky and a fella has to name his company something. 

Jim showed up in an older pump type of truck, hopped out, greeted me, shot the sh*t for a few minutes and we sized each other up.  Then he asked a question that I had no answer for.  “Where’s the tank?”

Uh.  I dunno?  I looked at him helplessly.  He surveyed the ground, thought about it for a minute and then said “I’ll bet it’s over there” and pointed to an expanse of grass just where my yard starts to ease into the horses’ pasture.  He said “We can find it.”  I thought maybe he had a map or something in his truck of where everyone in the county had their septic tanks, I mean, they do this for property lines, so maybe down here they added other important stuff, like the septic tanks and buried wires and things.  Nope.

What he pulled out was a highly unscientific piece of equipment.  It was a dowsing rod.  You can read about them here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dowsing

I would like to point out to you the last sentence in the first paragraph:

There is no accepted scientific rationale behind dowsing, and there is no scientific evidence that it is effective.

Well, I saw this guy use this device and I saw it work.  He didn’t strike me as the kind of guy that would show off.  He just wanted to do his job and by golly, he found the septic line and then the tank, a couple of quick digs with his shovel and he found the lid easily.  I know the studies say it’s chance but I SAW this myself.  I asked about a hundred questions about it.  And unless it worked, why would he carry these metal posts around?  So he must have had good success with it.

The “how” and “why” questions still remain with me, though.

Chiggers!

Shortly after I moved down here, the farrier came over to do my horses’ feet.  Using her big file as a pointer, she pointed at my lower legs.  “You’re getting eaten up by chiggers” she said.

And I was.  My lower legs were covered in a number of tiny red pustules, the origin of which I had no idea. And she was right.

I was born and raised in the South and had long heard of chiggers.  But I really never knew what they were other than teeny little “bugs” that would bite you and make you itch.  My mom used to tell my brother and I not to drag down Spanish moss out of the trees and play in it or we’d “get chiggers”. After years of not getting bitten by anything, we continued to do so.

Well, there isn’t any Spanish moss in Kentucky, at least not that I have seen so far.  And Momma was right about this. They itch and hurt like the dickens.  I’d walk along and let my foot/leg move against the other one to get in a little more scratching time.  It was the kind of itch that you would wake yourself up at night, scratching. 

Everyone had a remedy, the most popular one involves nail polish, in the belief that there is a living insect and you can smother it.  Not according to Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiggers

What did help was to prevent them. So although I wear shorts non stop in the warmer months down here, I keep my legs sprayed with bug deterrent when I have to go through the pasture or woods.  I prefer to wear shorts because I can feel if a tick gets on me and I can’t do that if I’m wearing jeans.  I also try to get into the shower right after wandering the fields and hills and scrub my legs as they seem to take a bit of time to get settled in to biting me.  I’ve not gotten them sitting in the grass but maybe it’s because it gets so warm in the yard and it’s hard for them to live there. They seem to prefer longer grass.

My farrier was right. She’s a very wise person.