I’m finally posting a fall photoshoot! The leaves turned a lot later than normal this year, but goodness they were beautiful! It was one of the prettiest autumns I can remember in a long time. The photos for today are split between two different locations – my friends’ house while I was housesitting, and our farm, because of course.
Enjoy some warm fall colors for Thanksgiving season!
Welcome back to another scrapbook of random photos and behind-the-scenes shots from the past few months! I’m including some phone photography this time, because… these ducks deserve to be on my blog. *nods* I’ll keep the introduction short since we have a lot of photos to get through, but you guys know how this works. Warm up your scrolling fingers and enjoy some cute animals, pretty skies, bright flowers, etcetera!
I’m finally back with a collection of the random photos I’ve acquired since my last Etcetera post! π Some of the pictures for today include vibrant sunsets, undignified cats, friends’ engagement photos, a baby turtle I rescued, my brother playing drums, and a large collection of paper butterflies.
I’m never quite sure what I hope to accomplish with these posts, but if you’re interested in pretty photos or hearing random bits about a farm girl’s life, mayhaps you will enjoy this scrapbooky collection. π There’s only one way to find out, isn’t there? So, onwards! To the pictures!
I took these photos one morning when a light fog covered our farm. Unfortunately, it cleared up pretty quickly, but I was able to get some nice pictures before it did! I love the way fog makes everything just a little bit magical and enchanted-looking, kind of the way snow does in winter. π Enjoy a foggy walk with me!
Remember when I used to post sunset pictures all the time? I don’t post them as much anymore, for some reason. But today I’m finally back with some more gorgeous sky paintings, as well as photos from a ride around the farm and more pictures of Eeyore, our pet donkey. π I hope you enjoy this summer evening with me!
When I took the baling pictures a while back, I also got a bunch of summery farm photos in the fields nearby. The landscapes on this part of our land are lovely, with bright rows of crops and fences surrounded by buttercups and waving grass. I hope you guys enjoy the photos as much as I enjoyed taking them!
By the time May rolls around, the orchard grass and fescue are getting tall and ripe in the hayfields, ready for the first harvest of the season. I took these photos of my dad and brother baling a field a little while ago, and thought you guys might like to see some behind-the-scenes (and some picturesque farm landscapes π )! I don’t usually photograph tractors or machinery that much, but it was fun for different. π
I’m SO excited to post this photoshoot, because I think it’s one of my favorites ever! The evening was certainly wonderful. β€ Plus, the lighting was so perfect I didn’t have to edit most of these at all! Definitely a bonus. Continue reading →
It’s been AGES since I made the last “Moving On” post, but I wanted to wait until I could finish up this mini-series. And now I can! We are all moved in to the big house now, except for one room of unpacked boxes… yeah, that might take us a while. XD But now, enjoy this account of the most recent phase in our moving process! I can’t go over every single part in detail, so I’m just going to highlight some major chunks: packing and unpacking the house, packing up Dad’s shop, and taking down the old log cabin. Enjoy!
Packing the House
Packing up our old house was exhausting and kind of sad. I can’t remember the rooms ever being empty, since we moved there when I was one. However, it WAS exciting to finally be ready to move into the big house! One day while we were packing I saw this box which used to hold bittersweet vine found on our farm, and I had to get a picture. Moving really is…
Often when I got up in the mornings, I would step between this curtain and the window…
and look out at this view, to see what the weather was like, and wonder what would happen today.
The last evening at our old house was gorgeous. It was sad to think I’ll never see these views from the upstairs windows anymore. I’ll miss them. *sigh*
Some of our family as well as people from church helped us pack up, which was wonderful! Dad got a (not the most beautiful) trailer for our semi, to load up all our stuff. We fit practically our whole house into one trailer. It was strange to see all our familiar furniture stacked together in an unfamiliar place like that.
And then we left. We can come back again, of course, but it will never be the same since the house and the farm are no longer ours. *sigh*
Goodbye, old farm. β€
Unpacking House Stuff
The semi trailer got to our new farm a couple days later, and since my Dad and brothers weren’t available to unpack as soon as we hoped, the girls decided to start in ourselves! We got probably 2/3 of the semi trailer unpacked with just my mom, my grandmother, us three girls. π It was great. I didn’t get too manyΒ pictures of this, but I got a ton of videos! I want to make a fast-motion video of us unloading the trailer. π Here’s a picture of Logan helping us, at least:
It took us two days, I believe, to get to this: AN EMPTY TRAILER!
After we unpacked our dining room table + chairs, we sat down to the first “official” meal in the big house, with delicious food that some of our friends from church kindly brought us. β€
HA HA, here’s one last bonus picture for this section. XD Gram was like, “Allison, where’s your camera? You need a picture of this!” And I hurried off to get it. π
In case you’re wondering, the package is a fridge. One of many, sadly. Dear me, the first fridge we got from Lowes wasn’t the right kind, the second one didn’t work, the third one leaked, the fourth was the wrong kind AGAIN, and we’re still waiting for Lowes to bring the fifth one and HOPEFULLY IT WILL BE RIGHT THIS TIME. Goodness gracious, WHAT ON EARTH IS WRONG WITH LOWES?
Packing the Shop
Once we got the house stuff moved, we went back to our old farm and packed up Dad’s entire shop (which he uses for fixing farm machinery). Let me tell you, that was a job! Over 40 years, the shop had accumulated enough nuts, bolts, screws, paint, ratchets, wrenches, etc. to seriously open their own hardware shop. XD Only it would be an extremely dusty hardware shop.
For some reason I think this looks really neat…
As you can see, Dad has SO many tools in all different sizes, particularly wrenches. I really like this picture. π
The best part of packing was having pizza for lunch. π
Taking Down the Log Cabin
Remember this old, fallen-down log cabin in our backyard?
Well just a few weeks ago, we took it down the rest of the way. I was hoping to find some more neat old letters or other interesting artifacts, but sadly we mostly found… a lot of junk. It was a bigger project to take it down than I expected, but it’s nice not to have to stare at it from half the windows now. π
First, Dad and the boys pushed it over with the telehandler. Next we all clambered up on the roof with a couple of hammers and started extracting the nails so we could peel off the metal. The tar paper under the metal was covered with dead ladybugs and stinkbugs. O.o That was nice.
After we dragged away the roof skeleton, we had to pick out all the leftover boards and junk. That took quite a while.
Thankfully we had the skidloader to help!
Like I said, we didn’t find many valuable old things, but we did find some interesting junk! Including…
Apologies for the awful picture. I was trying to make the junk look at least a BIT prettier but I think I made it worse…?
a rather sad-looking work boot
3-5 fire hoses
a crushed dog kennel
two rusty lawn chairs
a bent-up bike
two very nice terracotta flower pots
a rusty metal flamingo that Megan REALLY wants to restore XD
a blue plastic kiddie pool (which Carmen was EXTREMELY excited about XD)
a large, enormously thick slab of slate
an antique water pump
We are keeping the second half of the aforementioned items. Also some of the century-old heart pine wood.
It was finally cleared away about supper time. We were planning to make a patio around the chimney, but it’s not in the best shape so we might take the chimney down later after all.
And there you have it! A VERY abbreviated account of some moving-related things that we did recently. We are all enjoying living in the big house immensely. It’s just so huge and beautiful! Maybe once we get it decorated I can give you guys a tour. π
What was your favorite section of this post? Do you think Megan should fix up the flamingo? Ever have troubles like we did with our fridge? And what is your favorite kind of pizza?