Besieging castles is hard work. 

Time out for equipment maintenance.

4th of July Trip

Here's some photos taken during our trip to Marshall for the 4th. It's only about 115 miles or so from here; the trip takes a minimum of 2 hrs. because of the two-lane hilly, curvy roads. As you can see from the last photo, Ma was tired by the time we even got there.

Some interesting clouds from the storm we followed all the way to my sister's house. This was taken a little east of Fayetteville. 

Backbone Mountain, from my sister's back yard. 

Close-up of the view from my sister's back yard. The previous photo I posted of the Marshall valley was taken to the right of the big pylon.  

View south of Western Grove. 

Some hills south of Harrison. 

A better view of the hills south of Harrison. 

West view of the Buffalo River from the new & improved Hwy. 65 bridge. Sure it's safer than the old bridge (no more chicken trucks in the river) but it blocks your view something fierce. 

East view of the Buffalo River from the Hwy. 65 bridge. 

"Rock my baby Ma, In da tweetop" 

Cannot find server

Someone's having issues in a major way....can't get to my e-mail or my website. I can get to FoxNews though.

I think I'll just go mow the lawn instead. Heck, the heat index is only 98....positively artic.

Weird Plant

There's this strange vine that popped up out of nowhere in my flowerbed a couple of years ago. I have no idea what it is, and have yet to find anyone who can i.d. it. It's so bizarre-looking that it kinda creeps me out....I keep expecting alien pod people to hatch out of its weird fruit every fall.

Any ideas?

Here's the vines with a fruit still attached. The vines smell so bad when they're touched that I had to wear gloves to re-arrange the vines along the lattice as it grew to keep the smell off my hands. The smell is horrendous, as in gag-a-maggot bad. The flowers smell really bad too, and have no petals. Just yellow starburst-like thingies that surround the pistil. Very weird. 

Strange fruit, eh? Though not as stinky as the vines. 

My Little Slice of Heaven

Here's some photos of our place down home. We hope to retire there someday. Though we'll build up on one of the hillsides by the county road....to get to the main part of the farm where these photos are taken, you need at least a sturdy pickup or 4 wheeler. The road is shall we say, unimproved, and you have to ford the creek three times.

It's fairly inaccessible otherwise, which is just the way I like it.

This is one of the bigger 'washouts' on the farm....I was poking around this one once when I was a kid when I heard a bobcat snarling at me. I hightailed it out of there back to where my dad was checking on the cattle you betcha. A few days later, my mom killed it...she said it was stalking her while she was squirrel hunting. I'm sure the fox caller that sounded like an injured rabbit that she happened to have in her pocket at the time had nothing to do with it. ; ) 

Another hay field, this one's at the lower end of the property. The bluff with the cave entrance is back to the right. I made many additions to my swearing vocabulary here when my dad's hay mower would invariably hit a rock & break one of the cutting blades. 

This is looking down the creek from one of the upper fields. The old house place is behind that grove of trees on the left. There's several paw-paw trees to the right of where Mike was standing when he took this picture. I used to eat 'em by the bucketfuls, though I never understood why anyone would want to 'put 'em in your pocket and save 'em for a rainy day' like the song says...rather like putting a ripe papaya in your pocket. Squishy.