This is the new trailer they got earlier this year, after my brother in law got a steady job. It has MUCH more space than their old one.

  

Teresa invested all of her lawn cutting and baby sitting money in Daisy, whom she bought right after she had been weaned. The horse has already grown quite a bit since then.

  

This was something like a fifth to a tenth of the adult chicken flock. Teresa and Tonia both thought there had been quite a bit of shrinkage in the size of the flock while they were away in Virginia. Partly because of that, next year Thanksgiving is going to be on the family farm. The Delaware on the right is Uncle Tian Chicken, the only one from their first brood that is still laying eggs. I think she is something like seven years old right now.

That hole in the floor of the rabbit cage was probably dug by a coydog or something like that. Grace told me of finding only blood stains where the rabbit had been.

 

Her other rabbit is still okay. I think this is the hen my sister likes a lot. She is a good fighter, with spurs on her legs. Every year she disappears for a month or two to her hidey hole under the trailer. Then she comes out trailing a dozen or fifteen chicks, many of whom usually turn out to be good layers. No mus, no fuss. She is going to be allowed to do that as many times as she wants.



This is the rest of this years chicken youngsters.



Teresa is looking forward to the time when Daisy is strong enough to get saddle broken. For now she and Grace just run her every day.

  

After they exercised the horse we drove down to Patsy and Lonnies in Tallahassee. Lonnie has a love for things historical. There was lots of interesting stuff in their living room, but at first we just took this picture of his armor. Then later he spent some time showing us his archaeological finds. I took a picture of the Dig-Dug bone because he found in Florida's Peace River. When I asked what a Dig-Dug was he explained "an ancestor of the manatee."

  

I hadn't heard of the Peace River before that, so when I got home I looked it up. It runs south through the middle third of the Florida Peninsula, ending on the gulf coast at Charlotte Harbor.

Lonnie is looking forward to retiring in a couple of years. For my sisters daughters, this was the first time they had met my cousin and her husband. We talked about many things, but when my Dad's upcoming surgery came up Lonnie had a piece of advice. "Get it done at a place that does a thousand of them a year or something like that. They will know the procedure backwards and forwards, and are relatively likely to do it right."



One of Patsy and Lonnies neighbors had a really spectacular diorama of Christmas decorations.

In the end we spent about five hours in Florida.