Prairie Scraps

 We've had laying hens for three years and last year, you may remember our adventure with meat chickens .  Well, we raised another 50 meat chickens again this year.    Last year's chickens were a pretty good success, but our neighbor's dog, killed 17 of them four days before butchering.  That day, we all cried through trying to salvage all of them as best we could.  Unfortunately, although we processed them all, they tasted horrible, because they had, had a heart attack from being run down by the dogs.  The chickens that made it to butchering day, though, tasted so wonderful through the winter that we just had to do it again!   Our neighbor actually hooks us up and gets the chicks in.  He sells them to us after a week in his hoop house, and then we bring them down to our little addition to the hen house until they can be moved outside.  I will admit that these chickens are not that pretty and the smell really...

This blog is named Prairie Scraps because it is about the scraps of my life, living on the prairie.  Right now, because I've taken on 17 students for piano lessons, my life is about piano lessons.  I'm wading my way through trying to be a good piano teacher! I had, what I think is traditional, classical piano lessons.  I began lessons at the age of 7, when I was a proficient reader, and took lessons until 8th grade.  I worked my way through method books as most students probably did.  As I entered high school, I really wanted to sing in choir, and not be the accompanist, so when  I moved to a new school my Sophomore year, I quit playing and never told anyone I played piano.  Jump ahead a few years, I enrolled in college in the Music Therapy school, and had to take Piano Proficiency classes.  In the first class, I realized I was far to advanced for the class, and subsequently, tested out of all Piano Proficiency.  The teacher I had, c...