july things.

as i look at the photos from july, i am realizing it was pretty uneventful, outside of our trip to the beach. so, this will be quick. i promise.

firstly. there was the fourth of july. my pal stephanie has neighbors who hail from the great city of buffalo (or, well, like me, near buffalo). either way. they are my people. and they invited us to a july fourth cookout and personal fireworks display. obviously, we wore our bills gear, because of the patriotic colors and to represent amongst likeminded friends. we met lots of fun folks and the fireworks they set off were AWESOME. and very close. alarmingly close. 🙂

i made cupcakes for the occasion, but they weren’t all that awesome and i didn’t get a good photo, but since i also have some other cupcakes for the month of july that i made from leftover frosting, and not much content for this official july post, here they are.

now that we are off the road, two things have happened related to the volume of our personal possessions. firstly, we have quite a few items that were stored in the camper that now need a home. and secondly, we upgraded our tent camping gear and it takes up a lot more space than the backpacking type gear i had before. so, what i’m saying is, my minimalist ocd spirit was having a hard time with the storage situation in the garage. i mentioned to derek that it would be nice to have some better shelving and he was off to the races. or, well, to home depot.

if this gets too full, i’m burning it all to the ground. just an FYI.

ok. so other than the usual chicken update and ruby collage, that’s all i’ve got for july. i told you it was lame. that said. the chicken situation is a little wild these days. you may remember that the fifteen new chickens we scheduled to arrive in late august arrived in june. well, this made for some logistical nightmares for our travels, but we managed. we bought a “small animal playpen” to take to the grandlidboms and set them up in their garage for the week.

we have had one casualty amongst the babies, which is usually sort of expected. we noticed that the black australorp (joan jett) wasn’t really growing. we tried some remedies to get her back to health, to no avail. sad. but, we’ve been having fun watching their individual chicken personalities grow. we LOVE cyndi lauper because she jumps out to curiously visit everytime we open the door. but our favorite is definitely eleven, the floofy gray cochin.

we are doing our best to socialize ruby and the chicks. she is still very uncertain about them. and they are starting to be afraid of her a little. but not eleven. she and eleven will be besties i think.

and. well. that’s july.

(disclaimer: ike has been working and sleeping all summer and is still alive, despite how this post would make it seem).