The day after the Folk Fair

New Earrings from Rocky Cross Studio

I didn't get any pictures from this year's Folk Fair, although I saw the Chairman of the Community Association floating around briefly with her camera. We had a fantastic day, though, and saw a lot of great people. I was so tired I could barely enjoy a visit and dinner with my landlord last night but appreciated their good food and company!

I saw the earrings above on Barbara's blog not long ago and fell in love with them! They are more beautiful than I can capture in a photo. Barbara is a talented artist and these unique pieces just shine with her originality and her personality. Each pair is different from all the others and the colors are striking!


Gramy's Old Fashioned Hard Candy

I made another serendipitous connection this weekend as well, with a candy make from Dobson, North Carolina. She was selling her hand made artisan candy at the Folk Fair, and I really like her product. It's nice to be able to sell things you love! This is what I would call a "sanded" drop candy, with lots of wonderful traditional flavors such as peppermint, spearmint, sassafras, horehound, blackberry, orange and more. Very much a local product.


Broccoli from the garden

Tonight's planned menu includes fresh broccoli from the garden! I also picked the last of the blackberries this morning, so I may make up some blackberry milkshakes for dessert. According to my sources these broccoli "flowers" that I cut out of the top of the plant are just the beginning...the plants should produce some smaller ones at the sides. After fighting the cabbage worms for the past two weeks it's nice to have a reward!


Mani and Me

There are lots of senior citizens among the animals here. Lily is getting older, at twelve, while several of the rabbits are seven years old and beyond. Mani, a cat that reached his fifteenth year this summer if I'm remembering correctly, was one of the oldest. This summer "Old Kitty" had become quite feeble. I started feeding him special tidbits, fish, well-cooked chicken, and so on to build him up and he had been looking a bit better the past couple of weeks. But on Wednesday evening he vanished and we haven't seen him since. Unusual in an elderly cat that rarely left the yard by the back door. Nothing out of the ordinary happened this week with the animals so I feel like "Old Kitty" decided his time had come and he slipped away.

When Mani came here fifteen years ago, shortly after I moved in, he was a tiny kitten with a badly injured eye. My aunt in Connecticut helped me pay a rather staggering vet bill because he required special treatment to heal the wound. For many years it took a very close look to even notice that anything had happened to him, however, and he thrived as an outdoor cat. Even as a youngster he never got the hang of what a litter box was about, or he was too independent to care. Mani was one of the old-fashioned, cobby bodied tabbies that I used to have here on the farm as a child. I'll miss those black-velvet little paws!