Travel with Mama, brief time at home, hot chili peppers

I will be in the office for today only this week. The good news about that is that Mama gets to make the trip with me this week. We will be heading to Port Huron, MI tomorrow morning. I have two classes to teach to a company there. The classes will be on Wednesday and Thursday respectively. Each class is about seven hours long, which gives me and Mama the evenings off to look around the town. Canada is just across a bridge from Port Huron so Mama and I may drive over the border to look there also. She has not decided yet. I am going to check this morning to see if the rental car policy we use will allow Mama to drive the car while I am in class. If not, she will have to explore on her own – on foot. She is excited about the trip although she is apprehensive about leaving her herds and flocks in the care of anyone else. Nate, Cori and the kids will be at the farm during our absence to help with the feeding, but Mama strongly prefers to do those chores herself. The entire routine happens a lot faster without the pigs in the mix. And hopefully soon, we will sell the boy goats, which will alleviate all the animals in that area – speeding up the feeding process even further.

I spent Saturday getting a couple repairs done. One of which was removing more of the insulation in the ceiling of the coop. A large rat had filled one area to the point that the piece was starting to collapse under the weight of the stored food piled on it. While I was pulling down one piece, I saw our rodent homesteader. Mama was freaking out so I sent her to the house to get my pistol. It was over ten minutes later that she returned with the firearm. The rat was long gone. I guess it was not as urgent a problem as I had imagined. When I asked what took her so long she told me that she was thirsty so she stopped to get a drink and when she headed out of the house she realized she had forgotten her egg basket and as soon as she got her egg basket she realized she needed to use the bathroom. But she hurried through all those distractions so she could get my pistol to me quickly. Oh, well. We will have to apply other means to trap and eliminate the pest.  It is almost a shame the rats cannot be eaten. They are quite large.

My training last week in Las Cruces went well enough. There were some technical issues and the hosting company kept calling their employees out of the class throughout the day, but overall it went smoothly. The area is brushy and mountainous; very sparse in vegetation. I tend to like mountains in all forms and the desert mountains were beautiful to me. There were storm clouds resting on top of the mountains both mornings I was there, adding to the beauty. I am sure it gets boring to those who live in the area, but for a short visit I found the vista worth taking time to enjoy.

On the advice of the man who operates our little dump in Chico, I shopped around for some of the peppers that the area is famous for. I took some shopping to find them but I eventually did. I bought a couple pounds of the hot peppers and a little over a pound of the very hot peppers (Arizona 88) to bring home and share with Harrold. He was thrilled. We have not used any yet but I was given a couple recipes by the locals and Mama and Victoria are ready to try them out. Just the three pounds of the dried peppers filled the suitcase I used to get all the books and related class items to the training session.

We will have peppers for some time to come.