Photography Challenge Day #23 - Sunflare

So I'm going to bend the traditional photographic definition of "sunflare" on this one.

Because when you're at your parents' house and you see this sunset, you decide it counts as sunflare and take a photo of it.

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I want to force myself to practice taking photos a little more, so I'll be posting for this 30 Day Photography Challenge even though the "official" challenge is long over.  However, posts are definitely not daily.

My rules for my self are:

1 - Take everything in manual mode

2 - No post-processing, only SOOC

Phineas and Ferb Cupcakes

Claire and Scott had their birthdays several months ago, but they thought it would be fun to have a swim party at my parents' pool. So we waited until the weather warmed up and had a belated birthday/"Welcome to Summer Vacation!" party the day after school let out.

And what better theme to celebrate summer vacation than Phineas and Ferb?

There's 104 86 days of summer vacation...

I used the same frozen buttercream transfer technique as I used on Kate's Hello Kitty cupcakes a couple years ago. So easy! Made the little buttercream stickers on wax paper ahead of time and kept them in the freezer. The day of, I frosted the cupcakes, my sister helped me roll the edges in sprinkles, then we stuck the buttercream stickers on them! Voila!

But honestly, the cupcakes were about it. We had the same CD of aquatic-themed music from Kate's swim party last year playing. We kept things low key. The kids had a blast swimming, so they didn't need much else.

Just to keep it real, the rest of the "decorating" was this table with a few wild sunflowers cut from my parents' property:

Noel Revisited

We have the plague at our house and I'm in need of a pick-me-up.  Anyone else in the same boat?

So!  More of Noel, but with her mom this time:

How can that little bundle of adorableness not make you smile?

But in case that didn't do the trick, here's a kiss from Nick:

Meet Noel

A week before Christmas, my parents came home and found that a lamb had been born:

It's a girl, and since she was born so close to Christmas, they named her Noel.

The lamb was born to one of the more newly acquired sheep, and she must have already been pregnant when my parents got her.  Sorry Shaun, you're not the father...

We'll see, but it looks like most of the sheep are pregnant.  Some look ready any day now, so I think we'll be seeing a lot more adorable lambs over the next few months.  Squee!

Meet the Chickens

Guess What?

Chicken butt!!!

My parents have about 20 chickens at their place.

They live in this adorable hen house mounted onto a trailer so it can be moved around the property periodically.  (Helps keep the poop from building up too much in one place!):

They are free range and go into the hen house for the night on their own.  The hen house has a light sensor that closes the door when it gets dark.

My parents bought about 20 chicks last spring.

They were supposed to be buff Orpingtons, but most of them ended up being more of a mottled red color.

A few are more buff-ish colored than others:

Every spring, the 1st graders at my kids' school hatch chicken eggs as a class. I volunteered my parents' ranch as a good home for the chicks after they hatched.  Seemed like going to live on a ranch was a better fate than sending them off piece-meal to suburban backyards where they would end up eaten by neighborhood dogs.  So this last spring, my parents also ended up taking in 18 more chicks - a grab bag of breeds.

The chicks grew up and lived free and happy for a time.  But a lot of the breeds were not... ideal.
After awhile, it was decided that they were more ideal for chicken soup. Only a few of the original motley crew "made the cut," but a couple of roosters were included:

As long as these guys stay reasonably non-aggressive and quiet, they get to stay.  But my very NOT morning person sister has sworn that the first time one of these guys wakes her up, he's history.

Stay quiet, my feathered friend...

So you lose a few of the poor behaved birds here.  A few of the weird breeds there.  A few runts got trampled by the others (nature sure is cruel). A few deaths from random natural causes and in the end their numbers dwindled down from 38 to about 20. It's a comfortable group for now, but they're talking about getting more in the spring again.

I've been thrilled because almost every time I see my parents I get fresh free-range eggs!

The chickens have almost entirely eliminated the scorpion problem my parents used to have.  Phew!!

In their spare time, the chickens enjoy table scraps and pecking at my shoes.

They do not enjoy it when Scott keeps trying to chase them.

But they make up for it by occasionally chasing Kate just enough to make her nervous.

Thanksgiving Day

For Thanksgiving, all of my dad's siblings and their families came out to visit.  It was REALLY fun.  I hadn't seen some of them in a REALLY long time.

We spent Thanksgiving Day at my parents' place, engaging activities we most definitely would not have done at home.

The big kids had a little target practice:

This is becoming a Thanksgiving Day tradition:

And I learned to drive the riding lawn mower:

(No, I don't normally dress up to mow the lawn.  I was dressed nice for the holiday and planned to mostly just eat a lot of good food.  Mowing was kind of a spur the moment decision.  I had grass stuck to my suede boots the rest of the day!)

Meet Nick

Last time I introduced you to my parents' sheep.

My parents also have a llama named Nick:

Nick is a guard llama.  His job is to protect the sheep from coyotes, dogs, and other predators.

Before my parents brought Nick home, they had him "fixed."  Or "nicked" as it were.

Nick is a eunuch of sorts. He's been castrated and it's his job to guard "the harem." So "eu-nick" because he got "nicked"... "Nick" became his name.

Nick isn't super friendly, but he loves his alfalfa "treats" and will eat them out of your hand if you are patient.

Meet the Sheep

My parents have a small ranch on the outskirts of one town over.  They've lived there for almost 1.5 years now.  Before that, they lived in a small house on a postage stamp lot in the San Francisco Bay Area of California.  It's been a big change for them and us.  Up until my family moved here, we had never lived near family. It's been really fun having them near by.

It's been EXTRA fun having them live on about 50 acres. (The original purchase was almost 20 acres, but just a few weeks ago they bought a piece of the property adjoining theirs and bumped their total up by about 30 acres.)  When they first bought the property, they were getting an agricultural exemption on their property taxes by having the next door neighbor graze his black angus cattle on "the back 15."  Now they are moving toward raising sheep.  In addition to the sheep, they have a llama, chickens, and a cat.  My sister and her little family live on the property as well and they were raising a few rabbits.  But it turns out rabbits can't handle 107 degree heat, so they didn't survive the summer.  Oops.

Recentlly my mom asked me to take some photos of their animals and their property to put in frames around her house. So as I finish editing some of these, I thought I would introduce y'all.

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Meet the Sheep

My parents have selected a relatively new breed of sheep (developed in 1995).  They are called Royal White.  They are a hair breed, not wool sheep, so they don't need shearing.  They are primarily raised for meat.

They started out with just 3 ewes.  One of the 3 was extremely friendly.  She was the one with a little dot on her nose, so they named her "Dot":

The others are all really skittish, but not Dot.  I wonder if she was bottle fed as a lamb.  She will come up to you and let you pet her.

Dot is fun, but also kind of aggressive. If you have food with you, she will get really pushy.  She will sometimes butt you with her head if she's trying to boss you around. We had to start spanking her because she would head butt Kate and my little niece Jane a lot.  Dot would butt hard enough to knock the little girls down.  I guess Dot thought that since she was bigger than a couple 3 year olds, she could boss them around.

Because one of the original 3 sheep was named Dot, and there was one that was very tall and one that was pretty short, the original trio was dubbed "Yakko, Wakko, and Dot."

But now my parents have added another 6 sheep, bringing the total up to 9. They sleep at night in pens attached to the old barn on the property. At the end of the day, you ring a big cow bell and they all coming running and follow you into the pens where they know you will feed them:

One of the new acquisitions is a ram.  They named him "Shaun the Sheep."  More than one person has been looking at the sheep and has commented that one of them looked like it needed to be milked.  Then you have to tell them, "No, that's Shaun. The male. That ain't udders..."

The sheep have been a lot of fun, and before long, it will be extra fun to see new little lambs (hopefully in February)!!!