Adventures Of Life!

This week started out with very cold temps as low as -4 on Tues at 7:30 am. Warming a bit every day since but still cold. Tuesday we had to go out and do something this waiting for the weather to clear is just killin our minds. So we headed off to see Bollinger Mills which was a huge corn mill. The site is on the National Registry of Historic places. It is winter and their tours are upon demand costing a person $5 a piece. We are cheap skates and so we just took pics and will wait until Summer when the building is open for business all the time. One of four covered bridges left in the state  We then meandered our way south headed for Lake Wappapello . On the route we came across an old cemetery that was overgrown and not kept for many years and as I love to transcribe cemeteries I had to stop just in case nobody had taken these pics yet. Glad I did because nobody had taken pics yet. By this time we started to get hungry so we hunted out a ...

Woops to many buttons...... Today's Blog Anyhow if you find yourself without hot chocolate mix for the kids or yourself  here is an easy mix to fix that outage. Cocoa, Creamer(Plain) take about 2 oz of this 8 oz container add about 2 cups of creamer 2/3 cups of splenda or sugar mix real well.....sometimes you have to add more creamer to get the right color Then add it to a storage container of your choice. I learned about this from my bio mother and still use it today. I have difficulty finding inexpensive sugar free cocoa mix so I decided I could make it myself. I think it tastes better anyhow and the cost....well a creamer of that size which will make approx 3 batches is about 7 bucks and the cocoa which will make about 4 batches cost me 2 bucks. A box of sugar free cocoa is about 5 bucks and it has 8-10 packets in it! This saves me a bundle in hot cocoa mix!!! Copyright © 2014 M.E. Masterson All Photographs Copyright © 2014 M.E. Masterson ...

It  hit a warm 60* here today!!! Can you see the grin from ear to ear?? So after getting Mtn Man off to his folks, I went to work cleaning that nasty mess in the hot tub . Drained it of it's ugliness then took it apart (whatever I could get my grimy hands on to clean) and cleaned (used ODOBAN) it thoroughly. Rinsed it, emptied again(shop vac is used for what is left, emptying it numerous times). Filled it completely added some H2o2 (35% Hydrogen Peroxide-Spa Science Brand) and then ran the jets running it through all the blowers and pipes only to find that there was some lingering uckies!! :( Empty again and yes, used the shop vac again for the third time! Wiped it out again to make sure I didn't have any lingering parts, with a lot of hope and confidence that this time surely it has to be clean I filled it again. Whew this time all was wonderful! This started today around 9 am and ended at 2:30 pm....Yes, I really like my hot tub and can't wait to use it again or should...

 We started the day out slow.....we drove around the neighborhood checking on some property for our "prospective" cows we intend on buying in the spring. We have a lot of nice older neighbors which produced a lot of phone numbers to call. On returning home we noticed the maple syrup operation next door was up and running. I really wanted to take a look but wanted to be invited not just drop in. So we headed back to the house to get started on our gate we wanted to put up in the drive. We logged out 3 cedar trees and used the tops of these for two posts which we did get set today. Isn't that pretty wood?? Letting the posts set up...poured concrete dry mix in the holes so they will stay still...Monday a gate will go in. And so it happened while setting the posts the neighbors showed up and invited us down to see their maple syrup operation. Yeah! 5 gal buckets collecting what looks like water(sap) out of the trees They pour it into the cheesecloth ma...