How To Prepare Spaghetti Squash

We were given a spaghetti squash a few years ago from someone who had a garden overflowing with them and loved it.  The next couple of years we thought that we would just grow our own and not have to rely on kindness from others.  Well, we were unsuccessful in getting them to grow for some reason and gave up on them.  This summer we decided to try our hand at them again and we grew a plant that took over the garden.  I don't know why some years certain plants grow and other years they don't.   Anyway, if  you're fortunate enough to get your hands on a spaghetti squash, here is what you do with it.

Split it in two and scoop out the stuff in the middle.  You can roast the seeds like pumpkin seeds for an extra treat.

Lay it cut side down on a tray with a little bit of water and bake it at 350 degrees for about half an hour.

Take it out and rake over the flesh with a fork.  The strands, or spaghetti, will easily pull away from the rind.  Use this just as you would spaghetti.  

Cut a Rope With Itself

So you find yourself in a situation where you need to cut a rope, but you don't have anything to cut it with. When would this ever happen?  I don't know, but that's not the point. The point is, if you ever are in a situation where you need to cut a rope, you can impress everyone with this little trick. 

Step on one end of the rope, leave some slack and step on the rope with your other foot.  Then loop the rope through the slack and pull up. 

Start sawing back and forth and, depending on how thick your rope is, in a minute or two you will have caused enough friction to "saw" the rope.

The rope is suppose to be cut on the slack part where you were sawing back and forth.  This picture shows how successful we were with that. Only one strand of the rope was cut.

We cut the rope with the part that we were sawing with.  Not sure how it worked this way so we tried other types of rope, aka yarn, and the same thing happened.  Either way, we ended up with two pieces. The only problem is if it cuts with the sawing part of the rope you can't measure how long your two pieces will be.

We Visited A Zoo

 Last week we took a day trip up north for our last big hurrah of the summer before Dancer started school this week.  Truth be told it was one of our only hurrahs of the summer, seems no one has the same days available anymore. We went to a zoo/wildlife/petting zoo place.

Dancer and I posed sweetly on the bear's lap for a picture.  

And then realized, what are we doing, we're sitting on a bear's lap!

Dancer ain't afraid of no bear!

Dad is so hard core he flossed the bear's teeth. 

My picture with Spark.  I guess this is all you get with a 15 year old.

 I did get a picture of both the kids and Paul Bunyan.

On to the petting zoo.  This camel knows where the treats come from and he wanted Dancer to feed him.

Dancer with Mother Goose

The parakeet house was one of the coolest things I have ever seen.  It is a large, screened building with about 75 parakeets in it. All the birds fly from one side of the building to the other in a big swoop.  If you stood with your arms out a bunch of them would land on arm.

They also loved my shoes for some reason.  I don't have any food on them so not sure what the attraction was.  I had to shake them off to get them to leave because they were starting to creep me out.

Not sure why there was a table in there, but as soon as Spark sat down the table filled up with birds.

The cutest thing we saw there was a mom kangaroo giving her little joey a bath in her pouch.

We finished the day off with a Chinese buffet and now we are back to the grind.

New Mother Fail

New chicks are so adorable!!! and fragile we found out this year.

This mother, who was all get any closer and I'll peck both your eyes out, hatched four eggs.  By the time she got done being the mom, usually about three or four weeks, she had one that survived.  That will happen when your favorite place to hang out is in front of the llama and goat feeder.

The chick rearing antics of this mother made us ecstatic when another mother hen came proudly strutting out of the wood pile with about 16 chicks.  Little did we know that she was going to be an even worse mother.  She hauled her chicks on the road where the traffic roars by at 55 mph, through the garden where they couldn't figure out how to get through the fencing, back by the pine trees where the raccoons live and anywhere else perilous she could find.   Two of her chicks are still alive, amazingly, because even though she isn't mothering them anymore, they are still dare devils.  When they are at their regular stomping grounds down by the swamp, where who knows what could jump out and eat them, I hear them laughing in the face of danger.

Chickens - not the sharpest tools in the shed.  That must be why it only takes 21 days for an egg to hatch, any longer and chickens would be extinct.