The Rabb's Farm Life Adventures

I only have two "followers" of my blog, but I know that you are reading my posts, so thank you very much!  I would love to have you "follow" me, so if you are so inclined, please click on the link to follow me along this journey.  I was thinking how funny my week was so I had to share some of the humor.   Our countertops were finally installed this week and the final touches completed on the cabinets.  During the process, we discovered that the outlet to the new dishwasher wasn't hot.  Meaning, there wasn't any power going to it.  We knew we needed to contact our electrician friend and have him take a look at it for us.  He gladly came by and fixed the problem.  After he left, however, our bigger problem ensued.  We lost power to our bedroom.  I mean all power, no lights no outlets, which means, no alarm clock, no heater, or blow dryer, etc.  We didn't discover the problem until right around bedtime so we decided to deal with it...

I have been reading posts on Facebook recently about homemade laundry detergent.  We like the idea homemade so I thought, why not?  I made my first batch today.  I must say the process was very easy and I am excited to try it the next time we do laundry.    One of the major eye openers for us since moving to Louisiana has been how much less laundry we do now.  Christopher lives with my parents and Stephanie is away at school so we only have laundry for three now.  It is shocking.  We have five children and though we have never had all five of them at home at the same time, we have had our share of laundry to do.  I remember when we first became a family, laundry piles were large!  It would take all day to do all the laundry, and that didn't mean that it would all be complete at the end of the day.  Today, when we did the laundry we only had two large and one small load.  What a difference!   Most of the recipes I found...

Thanks to major effort and hard work by John, my dad and the cabinet installer, we have a kitchen.  It has all come together beautifully!  I love the cabinets and the appliances.  I haven't cooked a lot of meals yet, simply because we have been really busy with practices for the Living Christmas Tree performance this weekend.  But, I certainly plan to get busy cooking and baking next week.   We hired someone to do the mud and tape work and though he did a pretty good job, he didn't do a good job of the finish work.  We will need to do a little bit of touch up work to the walls in the kitchen and then we will be able to finish the painting.  I love the color.  I even picked out material to make curtains, but haven't finished them as of yet.  The cabinet installer was great.  He was meticulous about making sure everything was straight.  The crown molding at the top of the cabinets is beautiful and I am very pleased with the work he ...

Many have asked for an update on the house renovations so here you go.   As you may remember the washer and dryer were in the kitchen when we moved in.  Well, they are no longer located in the kitchen.  As a matter of fact, nothing is in the kitchen, not even walls.  The kitchen is gutted and the laundry is basically complete.  By complete, I mean, the room has walls, a closet and we are doing laundry in there.  It is a fantastic space and I have even been able to set up my sewing machine in there and have been busy working on sewing projects.   Kitchen cabinets above the washer and dryer were removed.  We hope to reuse them in the laundry room or in the shed.  This is the last time you will be able to see through the laundry room into the living room, these two rooms will have a new purpose now. My carpenters! The windows were appropriate for a dining room but really too big for a laundry room.  The guys worked ...

Do you know what  a cattle guard is?  I take for granted that everyone knows what they are, but I imagine if you didn't grow up on or around a farm you may have no idea.  When I was a little girl, they were sort of my enemy.  You see, a cattle guard is designed so that a cow won't cross over into a different area.  As a little girl I was always afraid I would get my foot caught.  That was back when I had small feet, that is no longer a problem.  We have one at the entrance to the property and another at the entrance to our fenced in yard.  We have a small fenced in area where the house is.  That area is protected from, well, you know, the stuff cows leave behind.  It is the one place I know I don't have to watch for it.  Although, driving down the road is a completely different story.  Please don't think I mind, I love driving down that road.  I usually have the John Denver song stuck in my head.  Ok, everyone sing al...

I've been remiss in posting to my blog lately.  It isn't because I don't have a lot of information to share, but we have been really busy.  We are right in the middle of birthday season for starters. Birthday season begins in June and carries all the way until the end of November.  We start in June with Chris.  He turned 26 this year and he and Jenny are anxiously awaiting the arrival of Amelia Jane, who should make her grand appearance around the 14th of February.  We are really enjoying being closer to them.  They moved into a house of their own in Sulphur in August and they are working to settle in and make it a home before their first child is born. July brings the birthdays of both of our daughters.  Lisa is of course the oldest of our children and the mother of our first grandchild, Logan.  Lisa had told us for years she wasn't having children, I am so glad she changed her mind.  I love being a Nana!  Stephanie's turned 18 this...

Well, it happened.  The worms tried to escape, in the living room!  Yep, we all knew that this day might come, some of us feared it more than others.  Some of you warned me.  You were right! The worms have been doing very well.  They have been working hard to make dirt for us and doing a very good job of it.  We save all of our food scraps and to be honest, the worms are just not keeping up!  We have even resorted to freezing some of our scraps to save for a later date.  Today, however, John used the scraps we had left sitting on the counter all week, in an ice cream container, covered.  Let's just say they were a little putrid.  I prefer not to smell putrid first thing in the morning so, I left the room when he pulled out the Ninja to chop up the food for our worms.  I was getting ready for the day and when I came back into the living room I found him, on the floor, leaned over the worm bed,  apologizing and warning me that ...

We finally have walls going up!  We knew it would happen, we have just had to be patient.  We have so much going on around here, but the framing of the walls for the new laundry room is finished.  We need a doorway closed in on the left side of the room that goes to the old living room and we need a wall between the kitchen and the laundry room, this will extend the hallway through the house a bit more.  We will end up closing off the front door in the living room and that room is going to become a bedroom.  We will then have three bedrooms and the former master bedroom will become the dining room in the future.  Right now it is a catch all/storage room.  We plan to move some of the cabinets from the kitchen into the laundry room to give added storage space and then the new cabinets will arrive on the 20th of September.  We are so excited.  I have lots of memories of the dining room, the room that is becoming the laundry room.  It isn...

When John brought home all the muscadines and scuppernongs the other day he also had a few small jalapeno pepper in the bucket too.  He said he wanted to make some pepper jelly.  I have never eaten pepper jelly so I wasn't sure what it tastes like, but hey, I'm game when it comes to canning.   John likes hot stuff.  He loves peppers, of all sorts, any kind of pepper or hot sauce.  There have been times when we had a collection of different varieties available in our pantry.  There was a period of time when we went grocery shopping he would tell me we were out of hot sauce and we would discuss it a bit and I would give in, knowing that we had some at home, but not wanting my husband to have to do without his precious hot sauce, inevitably I was right and we would end up with 3 or 4 jars at home when we got there.  It has become a running joke when we go shopping now.   Some of the places we have lived have had plenty of room for extra stock...

Have you ever had a muscadine?  How about a scuppernong?  I hadn't either until earlier this week.  John went with my dad to a friends house and he had a full crop of fruit that he wasn't going to harvest.  He told John to help himself, so he came home with a 5 gallon bucket almost full of muscadines and scuppernongs.   The dark ones are muscadines and the lighter ones are scuppernongs.  Muscadines and scuppernongs are wild grapes.  Muscadines are like concord grapes and scuppernongs like white or green grapes.  You don't eat the skin, it is very bitter.  You pop the fruit open and your mouth is filled with a sweet jell like ball, oh, and watch out for the seeds, they are very bitter.  I didn't want to freeze that much fruit so we decided to use the day to make jelly.  We ended up with about 27 jars (mostly 1/2 pints) of delicious jelly.   It was a long day, there are many steps in making jelly.   We have a lo...