A Whole Year of Blathering!

Wow. The Bag Lady is celebrating her one-year blogiversary. Hard to believe how quickly the past year has flown by.

When she started on this journey, she wasn't sure she would have anything to say of much interest to anyone else, and is deeply grateful to the people who have been so supportive and faithful about reading and commenting on a regular basis! She has 'met' so many terrific people through blogging, and has even learned a few things! An amazing feat, as it's not easy to teach an old Bag new tricks!

So thank you all, for being supportive, and for reading the Bag Lady's rambling, babbling blather.

Thanksgiving Report

Well.

The Bag Lady's Thanksgiving dinner went very well.

She managed to take a few photos during the preparations, but when it came time for the carving and final preparation, the camera was forgotten. Can you believe she forgot to take a picture of the turkey!? But she will share a few of the photos that she did manage to take:

Making the cranberry sauce early in the morning:


The turkey is in the(table-top) roaster:

Grandma's home-made buns:

Apple pie (there was home-made pumpkin pie, too, that one of the grandma's brought, but the Bag Lady didn't get a picture of it!):


The Bag Lady decided that one apple pie wasn't enough, so she made up a dessert. She called it Lemon Surprise recipe is in the comment section (it turned out so well that her brother-in-law ate the last piece straight out of the dish, claiming it would save on cleaning another plate! The Bag Lady could almost have put the dish straight back into the cupboard, he did such a good job of cleaning it up!):



Surprise Spread Appetizer (can you tell the dish is shaped like a turkey?):

Here's what's left of the ham after the meal:

Odd-ball potato from the Bag Lady's garden:

Relaxing after the meal - playing a game called "Sequence":

There were 18 people for dinner, and everyone seemed quite happy with the meal. The Bag Lady loves big family gatherings!

The Bag Lady's niece brought gin and tonic to drink, and graciously shared with the Bag Lady. This morning, the Bag Lady is happy to report that she is probably safe from malaria for many, many years to come! (Luckily, though, she doesn't have a headache!) Thanks, Linds! It was delicious!

Now she has to finish cleaning up her kitchen, and later in the day she and the Rancher are going to the home of some friends of theirs to do this all over again!! Yum.

Very Brief Friday Round-up

The Bag Lady has nothing much for you today. She took some pictures last night of a partridge who was hanging around in the feed stacks, but they didn't turn out. ~~sigh~~ She was too far away and it was almost dark, so when she zoomed in to try to get a better shot, the pictures went terribly wrong.

Here is a little video clip she tried to take, but she ended up doing the same thing - tried to zoom in and it didn't work very well! Meh. Nobody's perfect!

She doesn't have much else going on right now, but she feels like she's really busy. How is that possible? Oh, right, she's cooking a big dinner tomorrow and has a multitude of things to do in order to get ready!!




Hope you all have a great weekend!

Black Days

Why is it that "new and improved" so seldom is? Improved, that is.

The Bag Lady uses the Picasa program to save her pictures and video clips, and they recently came out with the newest version. The Bag Lady thought she would download this newer version because it was supposed to be better. New tools for editing pictures, even a program to make movies!!

She is not impressed and wishes now that she hadn't changed. You would think that at her advanced age, she would know better. She has had this kind of thing happen to her several times in the past, but must be a slow learner.

She would switch back, except she's afraid she will lose all the photos and video clips that she took whilst using the new program. What is so wrong with the new program, you ask? Well, for one thing, she can't see her video clips in the thumbnail mode. All of them appear black. In the older version of the program, she could see the first frame of the clip, which helped identify which clip was which. With the "improved" program, all she sees are little blacked out frames. In order to find a particular video, she has to watch them all, then mark down which number is assigned to the video clip she wants. It is so FREAKIN' annoying! What f**king genius came up with this?

And the new editing tools? Useless. If you want to 'smudge' or blur part of a photo, you are supposed to click on it. When you do, the program picks another portion of the picture to insert there!! Suddenly, you'll have someone's foot on top of their face!

The Bag Lady is not impressed.

New and improved? Not in the Bag Lady's books.

Babbling Bag Lady

The Bag Lady had a busy day yesterday. She and the Rancher moved their cows from one pasture to another, a mile away. This involved gathering them all into the corral, then loading them into the stock trailer to drive them to the other field.

If there wasn't a busy highway between the two fields, they would chance a cattle drive. As it is, though, it's easier to make a few trips with the stock trailer.

The Bag Lady now needs to turn her attention to getting ready for Thanksgiving. She is going to make dinner for some of the family, so needs to do some preparation for that. A little house cleaning is in order, and she needs to decide the menu. Turkey and stuffing, of course, and potatoes, carrots and turnips from the garden. Pumpkin pie and apple pie for dessert. Some cranberry sauce, and some kind of salad, with homemade buns to round out the meal.

Sheesh, now the Bag Lady has made herself hungry!

Skull Cramp

The Bag Lady asks to be excused today.

Her dog ate her homework blog post.


(How could she say that about such a cute, innocent-looking pup?)



She is suffering from 'blank brain', most probably due to her headache.

She leaves you with something weird to ponder.....



Any guesses as to what that is?

Autumn Bounty

The Bag Lady had to take some time off from her kitchen duties the other day in order to stack some straw that a neighbour was kind enough to deliver. The Bag Lady's straw-stacking skills are sadly lacking, but she managed to get most of the straw unloaded before the bale fork BROKE! The neighbour rigged it up with a chain in order for the remainder of the straw to be removed from his truck, and the Cow Whisperer welded it back together the next day when he came home from work. Then he finished stacking the straw, bless his tired heart!


On Saturday, the Bag Lady went on a rare foray into town to a pie-making party. (Scenery along the way - click on any photo to enlarge):




Friends of hers have a little apple tree in their yard that produces an amazing amount of apples!

This little tree:

Produced three bags like this (not including the apples that were damaged or fell off the tree):

We processed them:



Put them into pie shells:




Assembly-line style:



And froze them:



For a sum total of 42 pies; 8 of which the Bag Lady brought home to her freezer. There were enough apples left over to make a huge apple crisp, and still have some for jelly or apple sauce, or just eating.

Then the Bag Lady returned to her own kitchen to deal with more tomatoes and peppers. And last night had a typical North American supper of fried chicken, mashed potatoes, coleslaw and apple pie with cheese for dessert.