We are canning tomatoes! Again! And our counters are still full of ripe tomatoes. This morning we had tomato gravy (a family favorite, even with the 5 year old!), we’ll probably eat some fresh sliced tomatoes with lunch and we’re having BLT’s – Bacon, Lettuce & Tomato sandwiches, for supper tonight. But what a blessing! Last night Grammy made supper. It was a classic summer supper for our family. We had cucumbers, tomatoes, green beans, squash and corn, all fresh from the gardens. That was delicious.
This morning I read some more of the book I’m trying to finish before the end of the month: Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. I am really enjoying it, but it’s making it obvious that the Mansfield Park movies that I’ve seen (the one made around 20 years ago and the most recent) didn’t do justice to the storyline, much less to the individual characters. Of course, we could hardly stand to watch the old one, but we thought the newest one was alright for entertainment – not necessarily for portraying Mansfield Park. In the new one, they entirely left out a bunch of characters, a big chunk of the story, and had a Fanny Price with some sort of strange, bleach-blonde hair. I didn’t much care for her wardrobe either, but I guess that’s a fairly minor detail.
Also this morning, when my brother came in from doing his normal morning chores, he informed us that one of our cows has had her calf. Hurray! We were fearing that her calf wouldn’t make it, because, earlier in the year, the mama had seemed too thin, etc. But, everything seems to be going fine. My 5 year old brother was all excitement to see the new addition to our farm, so, after he and I took the heavy compost bucket to the compost pile (he sat in the wagon with the bucket, and I pulled – he seemed to enjoy taking the compost this time 
), he went with his big brother to see it. I don’t know yet wether it’s a hiefer or a bull. So far we seem to be very successful at producing hiefer calves. I think we’ve only had one bull out of all the calves born here, and we’ve long since eaten him. :)
I think that’s about it for today. Over and out…
