Hello baby 'possum! Oh my gawd, it's the cutest baby animal in the whole whole world - this little one belongs on Cute Overload's website. I considered keeping him forever, carrying it on my shoulder for the rest of my life (or in my pocket)...but I gave into putting him back in his wild natural habitat. He looks like a little bandit with sharp teeth and has a rat's tail, his fur was soooooo soft and pretty and his ears where like two beautiful sculptures on his head. He actually started "playin' possum" in the picture below, just rolling around limp like he was already dead - although his tummy was still pumping up and down with life. :) 
Then he came alive and perked up his wittle perfect ears... and did ya know opossums almost never ever have rabies.
ooooooooh, I wuve him forevwa.
XoXo
The house (I am told) was home to a well off slave owner back in the days before equal rights & compassion to all races - the house is very much in the plantation style having a very large porch made of slats of wood on the floor and ceiling, wide columns, and an equally large balcony. It also looked as though it was boasting three large chimneys.
In the picture above there was the little tattered rag blowing off the branch of the tree in the sunlight, and for some reason it was like the creepy icing on the creepy cake for me... something about the house was like a dried up desert with all the aliveness sucked out of it. Yet vibrant green grass, dandelions, azaleas and other plants were growing all around it - the house itself was like an untouched, historical time warp that stopped where ever it had ended, decaying and staying manicured all at once.
I hoped to catch some ghosts in the windows, but didn't get anything that frightening to share. Maybe if I go at night with a flashlight. Do I dare, YES I DO!
Yesterday I went down the road to play at a creek that runs under a bridge. A magical spot that had thick groves of native plants (lilies & elderberries), raccoon footprints in the mud, a smooth rock waterfall, a wittle crawfish, and da' cutest perfect bird's nest nestled neatly in the steal bars above my head. Look closely in the picture above and you can see the nest looking like a pile of bleck on the silver painted metal that holds the bridge together.
Close up the nest was made of moss and mud on the outside, and snuggley twigs & weeds on the inside - making it look like a warm insulated place to be born. I didn't really expect there to be eggs in there since I didn't see a mama bird - I happily got on my nature comrade's shoulders so I could take a close up picture...
Check it out, 5 whole little eggs all wrapped in super adorableness! I plan on going back to see if they hatch and what kind of bird these are from. :)
The solar shower comes with only a water bag, tube, and shower head - there's no difficult assembly and the concept is so simple it's silly. The sun heats the bag for a few hours and makes hot water- which is why it was very important to me to get a PVC free plastic that would not leech into the water.
The bag can be filled anywhere there is water - a tub, sink or cold creek.
Then laid flat in the sun to heat up - on a cool day it really does take 3 hours- on a hot day this baby will scald ya' alot quicker. The directions bragged that the water could end up getting over 100 degrees and I believe it! 
You turn the shower nozzle to release the lovely steaming H2O and use the water pressure from hanging the bag up to let the shower begin. You can use a solar shower anywhere you hang the bag - in your bathroom, on the back porch, from a tree in the woods... through any conditions which will provide some sun for a few hours. I highly recommend it for saving money on hot water bills, making camping easier, when disasters happen or just for some summer time fun. :)
XoXo
I sewed the sides back together, then added the fabric strips from the old hem of the dress for sturdy shoulder ties.
Lastly I sewed on a waistband to tie in the back, by simply stitching up the left and right side seams leaving it loose in the middle and loose at the ties. This was a really quick, easy, and no fuss project that gave me a great little dress to lounge around the house, yard or go to a 
My bow is made of three simple sycamore branches, tied in five places evenly spaced. Then a bow string is tied at the top and bottom, very tightly, giving the bow a little bend (this makes it snap back real good for a better shoot). Your bow branches need to be able to bend some without braking - kinda like the way bridges are built to bend in the wind... so test the branches out first before tieing them all together.
My bow rocked, but my arrow needs time to dry out and get lighter - as you can see in the pic above it's weight would make it flop downward. But HELLS YEAH, I tried some other arrows (made of bamboo and strong dried weeds) on my bow and this thing was awesomely correct!
Shoot and retrieve for good free fun, until eventually you will make a DIY bullseye...which is what I want to do next! If your neighbors are close by you might need a specific target to keep from accidentally impaling people, pets, windows etc... 
I suppose this is my face of success above - an MTV elfish roar. Primal, dirty, and fashionable. XOXO
About half of the basement windows are busted in some way or another - which means animals probably will be making all sorts of homes, nests, and hopefully little babies in there! Ya'll this house rocks - it might be my 2nd favorite place to live ever. :)
One of the many things I love about living rural is how gracefully life and death are melded together in one grand show of perfection - rarely have I stumbled upon anything decaying in the woods and said "oh gross", but rather made my own peace with mortality. Yesterday me and my nature lovin' comrade took a walk along a fence line only to discover almost an entire cow in 
When I looked up I was then in awe of the height and graceful features in such a humble container - it was like a European Chapel waiting for Michael Angelo to come and paint the thing into religious fervor!
My next adventure may lead me to climb those open hatch doors like spider man, maybe even my cell phone would work all the way up there. :)
When Cody broke it's neck just like instructed in the sustainable farming book, the rooster shit on him in it's moment of death. Ya heard me right - if you do this method don't point the ass towards yourself! Ok, and here is where it gets kinda nasty...
In order to "bleed" the dead chicken you have to chop it's head off. What I don't think anyone expected was how "alive" the chicken's nervous system still is after dieing...there was a moment of panic when one guy in the group was screaming that they were still alive because it looked as though their beaks were opening and closing while blood dripped from it's mouth. But NOTHING prepared me for what came next...When the heads were being lopped off, the wings of the birds began flapping REALLY hard like they were going to fly away headless while the blood was draining NOT barely at all into the bucket placed there to catch it!
Instead there was a horror movie blood bath that I had to turn away from in order not to throw up - blood splattered all over the place as the wings flapped out of control, and I kept saying "oh my gawd this is like fucking Hellraiser!" This was the moment of trauma, reality, and a little demoralizing for some (judging by the looks on people's faces)... the book had not mentioned this. Obviously there are better ways to do it. The porch had to be hosed down, the house had blood on it, and people's clothes were splattered.
The more voodoo stages were when I felt more comfortable to join in, which meant the plucking of the feathers was calling me. I have a mind that works like a Native American (maybe cause I am 1/16th Cherokee) and I kept thinking of ways to use all the parts that may seem like waste to us. Feather boa, a comforter, feather pillows, feather headdress, feather bikini... it gets hard when there's so much blood on it though.
I stayed pretty calm throughout, except when I was screaming in disgust and making or laughing at terrible chicken jokes. I am kinda shocked at how chill I look while holding the naked & stanky bird in this pic below.
Nikki (pictured below) was the only other lady present and was totally working it, but the girl was slowly becoming traumatized by the whole show (she eventually gave the whole project her middle finger from her front porch). Dipping the now dead foul smelling birds into boiling water, having trouble getting the quills out the chicken's skin, puke-ish jokes, bleeding necks, piles of bloody feathers, plus a strange organ full of rocks falling out their severed head. Did I mentioned it smelled more then terrible?
We had to work the feather plucking for way too long, attempting to get all the hard bits out... but never succeeded 100%. There must be a time honored plucking method (like pull with the grain or against the grain, dip in boiling water first, do it on a sunny day , etc...)
The intestines were too much for me to handle, I had to throw a rubber glove over it to hide them till it was all pulled out by Brandon (in the pic below). In the end they looked like gag gift rubber chickens thrown off Mardi Gras floats...
Then using an axe to split the wood, he hit the back of it with a rock (you can use a hammer but the metal on metal sound is sick). This is done on the longer part of the log & on all four sides to create the shape of the handle. As seen below, the woods splits down to the circular saw mark made.
He continued this step all the way around till the handle of the mallet was approximately the desired grip size.
Then using a tool I can't remember the name of (so someone help me in the comments section) the mallet handle was smoothed down and given a more rounded shape, making it much easier to hold.
The last carving step is to repeat the axe and rock splitting on the short heavy end of the log, creating a square shaped head for cave man quality whacking! After finishing his, 
Regardless of the fact that no bath took place and the water didn't even get warm much less boil (a hella lot of sizzling and bubbling though), and the smoke from the stove nearly choked us - I was still happy cause sometimes it's kinda fun to have a project fail completely. :) So the pic below is my not bathed clean self, since I had promised some peeps I was going to take tasteful bath pictures and post them here in my brilliant success glory, instead here is what accepting failing glory looks like!
As you can see in the picture above the 
The room had previously been an "art" room and had spray paint graffiti, paint splotches and various other stuff on the wall to be painted over - 
This last pic is a close up of the textures it gives. I want to note that the most brilliant feature of this paint is that it is 
Each 
Cows, Old Car & Silo, Tadpoles, Pig, Violets, Rock Piles, Mountains, and Farm Stuff Galore!
