I got to the greyhound station in Columbus at the end of my sister's egg delivery day. The bus was on time. She was there to pick me up. We visited Monica's. Her son Stephan had his girlfriend that is "the future Mrs. Vaughn" there, a nice slender young woman. Monica is still losing weight. Her figure is nicer than I remember seeing it before. I wish I'd taken in my camera.

     

Katie was a ray of sunshine with green teeth. Just kidding.

  

Tonia wasn't happy. Her husband was wrapped up in serious overtime. They were opening another Subway next week, and the place wasn't ready yet. He had a lot of work to finish in very short week coming. It was looking like the time to herself that she'd been dreaming about for months wasn't going to happen while the rest of us were in Virgina this next week. She's got raging menopausal emotions to deal with on top of everything else. It tinged everything she did with a tightening anger, but not that bad.

      

The next day we did farm work. Katie and I harvested the ripe vegetables. We found something like half a dozen ripe tomatoes and a few peppers. We also staked a few of the tomato vines that had outgrown their previous poles. This is the best garden I remember seeing at my sisters house. Previously the soil had been too sandy to support much plant life beyond pine trees and weeds. Thank you to the livestock for all the soil amendments!

     

Katie feeding the juvenile goats. She also fed a bunch of the chickens. There are quite a few pens of those now. Bryant or Tonia had measured out all of the stuff into cans, so all she had to do was take it to the pens and dump it in the right spot. That was still a lot of stuff to do. She did it well, explaining about the animals to me as we went along.

     

My sister milked the goats one by one. She'd put a can of feed in the metal thing on the stage. She'd let another goat out of the pen. That one would head for the trough of food on the stage. My sister would wash her udder and then milk it dry, squirting the milk with a "squeeze off the top an press it out of the nipple" motion into the steel bucket. Then she'd take the goat and whatever food was left over to the clearing beyond to munch in peace. There was lots of trust in the system. The goat did what she wanted her to without much prompting.

  

Last time I was here my sister's flock had more of a tan color. What happened was that Bryant decided that they needed more egg production, so he'd been buying purebred black ostralarps to add that to the DNA floating around the property. That worked for my Grandfather, so probably it's working here to.

  

The net effect I could see was lots of black feathers in the pens.

     

The beehive was new since the last time I'd been here. Bryant had gotten them from somebody in Alabama. That had been months ago now. They seem to be doing well. Time will tell.

  

When we went into the house my sister had a lot of raw milk to process. She filtered it and then froze some. I think this was a couple of days production plus that.

  

Grace was awesomely proud of winning third place in the Georgia Egg Commission recipe contest. She'd invented a brownie recipe and sent it in. After the cook off she walked away with 3rd place, and a check for $650. The check they'd given her for the picture had prime real estate on the wall in her room. Most of the money was still in her bank account. She'd spent the rest of it for stuff she wanted.

     

The ten finalists had a live cook-off that got TV coverage and everything else. You can get a hard copy of the winning recipes thing at the above address. In the story of last years contest it mentions that Grace was the youngest contestant to place in the money.

     

We spent a couple of hours making mozzarella and ricotta cheeses with the rest of the goat milk. I'd never done that before. I forget which animal we fed the left over whey to. I tasted it and didn't want much. The cheese tasted great!

I think it was about half the goat milk mozzarella we'd just made that went on the pizza. I remember it being very tasty, with plenty of cheese goodness. Another Grace recipe.

The day ended with relaxing on the couches and watching TV shows downloaded from websites. I watched a weird crime investigating mystery about Las Vegas that boggled my mind and went to bed. I think they saw another one after that.