Author: rvingwithapurpose

Friday, December 1, 2017

Today was another cloudy, gray day. Dense fog this morning. No drizzle or rain today, just clouds. The forecasters changed their mind on today’s forecast and tomorrow, and now we are suppose to be partly cloudy tomorrow. Had hoped for sunny days while Philip and Lauren are here but we take what we get.

We were busy working in the house, laundry and cleaning, doing a little research and looking at plans for 2018 travel. We never saw the river otter today. We haven’t seen him since early yesterday morning. And contrary to what one person suggested, we did not make sausage out of him. Although we did consider trap and release especially if we saw duck feathers. However, we suspect he may have eaten most of the available fish and frogs and moved on to greener pastures. Unfortunately, we haven’t seen our ducks today either. Maybe if the otter is gone, the ducks will return. While looking for the ducks we did see a pretty doe coming to the pond for water. That was our only wildlife siting today.

Philip and Lauren arrived just in time for dinner. Dorothy and Tabitha have grown so much since June when we saw them last. We didn’t really have much time to spend with them this evening because by the time dinner was over it was time for them to get ready for bed. Looking forward to good times with family this weekend.

Thursday, November 30, 2017

Well, we lost our beautiful fall weather today. It was cloudy and rainy all day. Most of the day it was just a drizzly and foggy. We did see the otter again this morning, but no ducks. Tomorrow it is supposed to improve with the weekend being partly cloudy with highs in the low 60s and lows in the low 40s. We hope the rain is gone because Philip and Lauren and the kids are due to arrive tomorrow. We are so looking forward to their visit and Juno can’t wait to see them. We want good weather so we can go hiking, too.

Today we decided to take the rainy day and spend our time cooking ahead. That way we will be able to spend more time visiting and playing with the kids this weekend. So today we cooked bacon and sausage, and biscuits for breakfasts. We also cooked up the sauce for the spaghetti so the flavors can blend and again it will save us time to visit. There will still be cooking to do and beans to snap, but at least some of it is done. There is still house cleaning to be done in the morning. Please pray with us for safe travel for our Philip and Lauren and our little ones tomorrow. That’s it for today.

Wednesday, November 29, 2017

So the title today was going to be Duck, Duck, Otter (duck, duck, goose), but then more ducks just kept appearing until there were six. As most of you know we love traveling, working on mission projects, and sometimes we are really sad to come back home. But we love the wild life we have here. We love living in the quiet, peaceful woods and just watching all the wildlife. Since coming home Tuesday, we haven’t seen deer or turkeys, but it was lots of fun today to watch the ducks and a new visitor for us, a river otter. We have never seen a river otter on our property, in either of our ponds, before today. He looks to be rather large. We did a little research today and found that they can be found from north to south Alabama. Their first choice in food is fish but if there is not enough fish, they will also eat duck. Now we don’t know if we want him to stay. We enjoy our ducks. One account we read said that the otter would swim under water and grab a duck’s feet as they are swimming. We hope that if that happens here we don’t see it. The ducks do seem to go to the opposite side of the pond from the otter but really don’t seem particularly afraid of him. In the past we have enjoyed watching the ducks raise their babies so maybe the otter should just go somewhere else. Don’t know how to encourage him in that direction. Guess we will just watch for a few days and see what happens.

It was another unseasonably warm (72 degrees), beautiful late fall day. The forecasters keep telling us it is going to be cold in the next ten days but for now we are really enjoying the Alabama weather. They keep postponing the cold which is fine with us.

Today was a get settled in at home day. We unloaded FRED, which didn’t take as long as usual since we were only traveling a week, and packed pretty light. We did keep getting sidetracked watching and taking photos of the otter. We have company arriving Friday so after unloading, we worked on menu plans and then we were off to the stores to buy groceries for the weekend and the LOLs. That took up our day. Hope you are having a great week!

Tuesday, November 28, 2017

It was another cold and frosty morning. FRED was cold this morning. We turned the furnace up and got back in bed until the house warmed up a little. Oh well, we were not in a big hurry to get on the road. We had to wait for the office to open and complete all our paperwork so we could close everything out and head back to Pine Mountain. Glad to have all the warranty work done and have FRED ready for January mission projects.

It was a very uneventful drive on another beautiful day. When we arrived back on the mountain we parked FRED at Helen’s and went to see Randy and Debra at Tom’s house. They have done an awesome job packing up all of Juno’s remaining items and cleaning out the house. The inside is complete! We are going to work on the storage shed after we get FRED unloaded. After some time to visit with Randy and Debra, we moved FRED to our house and unloaded what we needed for the night, ate supper and began the unpacking routine. Much is left to be done but we will work on it some more tomorrow. Three days in a row without pictures. Think that is a first for us. Maybe we will have something picture worthy tomorrow.  Since we have no pictures today, here is what we were doing this day last year.