Tonight I decided that I would start packing. It’s going to be a while before I can actually move, but it would be nice to have some things boxed up before that happens. I figure that once I get the floors refinished I can start moving some things in little by little in order to keep down on the number of trips that will have to be made. I’ve been grabbing empty boxes from work that hold the copy paper because they are about the right size for my books. Well, I had five boxes tonight that I filled within 15 minutes. The sad thing is that I didn’t touch any of the books on my shelves. Those were just the books that I had piled in FRONT of my shelf! That’s going to be a foreshadowing of what the move is going to look like, I think. To be fair most of what I have to take with me are books. Is that a bad thing?

My parents bought 7 plastic totes the other night in order to haul home the meat that we had processed. A week ago we took our bull over to be beefed. My dad would have preferred to keep him, but he was getting snotty and there was no way we could turn him out to pasture. He would have easily gone through the fence in order to get at somebody if the mood had struck him. My dad’s friend, who has been around cattle all of his life and makes a living selling cows, looked right at my dad when he saw how the bull was acting and told him that the bull needed to go before it killed somebody. This bull hung over 900 pounds and when all was said and done we hauled somewhere over 800 pounds of meat home. Most of it was ground up into one pound packages. I think that they usually do something like an 85/15 mix. We’ve had people rave about our ground beef. One of my dad’s friends told him that he made hamburgers one night using our beef and it was like eating sirloin burgers. That’s because we grind up the entire cow so all of the good meat goes into it. As my dad says, “It’s hard to screw up ground beef.” People always want to try it because they know where the meat is coming from. They know that there aren’t any antibiotics, no hormones, or anything else bad in there. It can’t be classified as ‘organic’, but that’s fine with me. I dread the day when something happens to my dad and I will have to buy my meat from the grocery store. 😦

Anyway, to get back to the totes, I believe that I’m going to use them for my books. Since all of the meat is now in the freezer the totes are empty. We won’t have another cow to beef until the fall, so they will be free for my use until then. My dad said that when the totes were full of meat they were heavier than all get out. I told him that was good practice for when they are full of books. lol. He didn’t appreciate that comment.

One other thing that I have done tonight is picked out a couple of cross stitch patterns. It has been a while since I’ve stitched a square for a COLE’s Quilt (http://www.our-sma-angels.com/colesquilts/). In order to try to combat some of the depressed feelings I’ve had lately I felt that this would be a good thing on which to focus my thoughts until I get my house. I enjoy doing things for others, and these children and their families really are touched by the quilts. In fact, I have a picture of one of the little girls that I stitched a square for her quilt up on my overhead at work. When I’m feeling bad for myself I can look at that picture of her and how happy she looks and it makes me feel better. I enjoy stitching and if it brings a smile to somebody’s face, then that is all that I could ask.