Warm April In Bitterroot

What a beautiful April we have had in the bitterroot valley. It is 85 degrees today. We have been tilling, watering, and getting the garden ready. Everything is already green and growing in the yard and pasture. We have a ping pong table outside and usually play some rounds later in the evening before the sun goes down. Speaking of the sun going down, it doesn't until almost 9 pm now. I love the long days.

 Monica was gone for 2 weeks on another one of her trips. It was peaceful and calm around here. Although all 4 kids got some crazy flu going around. It knocked them out for a few days. Unbelievably, I did not get it, although I was coughed on for days.

 Our crazy farm is about to grow a lot next month. We have 2 goats due. Mia the yorkie is due. And 5 rabbits are due. Oh, and we added 10 ducks last week. Although the neighbors dog killed 1 already. I dug out a series of ponds going down the back pasture for them. They love to play in water. The horses get in the ponds and play as well. But we are getting 8-12 eggs a day from the ducks and chickens. I fenced in the other side of the pasture so the horses have been feasting on fresh grass for the last 2 weeks. Those horses are crazy. Pepper ran full speed into the fence yesterday and almost knocked the post out of the ground. I can't believe she didn't get hurt. The great danes tied last week, so we'll have some great dane puppies in a couple of months.

 I can't wait until my blacksmithing and stone mason class this summer. I have been wanting to learn those skills for a while.

DOAF

I am getting pretty excited to launch my new site. I think it could become huge as a social platform to communicate with local friends and neighbors. Should be done soon.

It has been an active spring. Michael and I have been shooting a lot. We shoot skeet in the back yard. Abbey and I went horseback riding with Bill last weekend. That was a blast. The weather has been amazing. This winter was very mild. We'll have to start getting the garden in shape.

For anyone that does not believe in karma. The sleezebag ex landlords of ours are losing their home to the bank July 1. What goes around, comes around. They screwed us over along with plenty of other honest people, so it is only fitting. The tenants called me and told me, "Eric, you were right. They are crooks. The Terrys have been taking our money and not paying the mortgage on the house. BOA is auctioning the house July 1. So of course they have to find a new place now, just like we had to. But at least they won't have to deal with Bonnie and Clyde any more.

Baby goats due in May. I am very excited about the goats. We tried some goat milk last week and it was delicious. We plan on making ice cream, butter, cheese and other dairy products with it, too. Self sufficiency takes one step at a time. We have plenty of rabbit meat, that is for sure.

Jak is doing good on his reading lessons. He never wants to do them, but is getting better. I have to do most lessons with him twice. I think I started him a bit too early, but.....

Mild Winter in the Bitterroot

This winter has been much nicer than our first. A lot of sunny days and pretty mild weather for Montana. We have 2 pregnant goats now. 1 alpine and one lamancha. They are both due in May. We'll have a few babies running around and plenty of milk I guess. Our rabbits continue to breed like crazy. We are up to 30 or so. Nice, lean meat and great for rabbit and dumplings. We gets eggs every day although our duck has stopped laying this week. Not sure what is up with her.

Wyatt , Abbey and I went to atlanta during the last week of 2011 and stayed at mom and dads house. I must have put on 10 lbs. All they do it eat and eat and eat. :) Mom spent a couple of days in the hospital with pain in her midsection. We are still not sure what the cause was, but she seems to be better now.
The kids and I went up to Charlotte and went sailing with Gehrig on his 26 ft sailboat. I loved it and could definitely live on the water. My dream.

It is definitely good to be home back in Montana where people are real and care about each other. We have built some great relationships out here and this is definitely home. I am glad Jehovah led us out here, I believe God was leading us to a better way of life.

I started teaching Jak to read this week. I forgot how frustrating it can be to teach a 4 year old to read. But he is catching on. Typical boy, though. He can't sit still. I biked up to the kids school to drop off some lunch money and played football with Wyatts class at recess. Now they all want me to come up there every day at recess. :) Those were the days when I was Wyatt's age 10 and all we did was play football every day all day after school. There was nothing better than that.

Crazy Ex Landlords

So we are getting a solid 10 eggs per day now. One of our ducks mysteriously drowned in the horse trough the other day, kind of weird. I did not know ducks could drown. The ducks are very cool.
We are breeding the goat sometime soon so we'll have babies and milk in the spring. More self sufficient.

We had a great thanksgiving at David and Amys, kudos to them for throwing a great dinner party. The kids had fun playing with Nick and Jacob. I had the privilege to talk with Davids dad for a while. What a wealth of knowledge and experience he has.

And just when you think you have seen the last of our psycho ex landlords, we get 3 voicemail death threats from them. We of course have to go down and file a police report. They basically tell us that since he has no business ever coming to our house, if he does, use deadly force to protect our family if necessary. Then the next day, Jason Terry calls back apologizing. A totally different tone.

Now today someone is using my identity to sign up for match.com and datehookup.com. Probably the ex landlords. It is almost humorous, but we are having the FBI investigate them. This would equate to 5 felonies between the death threats, some cross state issues,  and identity theft. These 2 just keep digging their own grave. It is a shame.

Suburban Bits the Dust

Wow, 3 months since my last post. Life is way too complicated right now. I spent 3 weeks in Atlanta with Michael, picked up Abbey from camp, and drove back to Montana with our stuff. This is the last time I want to do that drive.
It has been a beautiful summer here in Montana. We moved to a new house August 30 after our landlords flaked out. Jason and Nicole Terry ended up being a couple of crooks and scammed us for a 1000 bucks. Live and learn. Karma will get them, I am certain of it.

Anyway, the new place is an older house but on 5 acres, so more room for the animals and farming. We got a dairy goat last week, so that makes 2 horses, 1 goat, 6 chickens, 11 rabbits, 2 dogs and 1 cat. Jenny and Josh helped us put up a fence and I built a structure for the rabbits and chickens.

The kids had to switch schools because of the move and are going to lone rock school now. A very small school, the oldest in Montana. The community is great.

After the grueling move, we have settled in to the new house and things are getting back to normal. Nice high speed internet from rocky mountain.


We get a steady 5 eggs per day now and after a few more months, we'll start eating rabbit regularly. We got some pretty good bounty in the garden in spite of having to harvest early. 10 gallons of potatoes, 10 lbs of carrots, a little corn, strawberries, tomatoes, beans and more. Next year is going to be even better.

Just when I thought things were getting back to normal, some guy hit our suburban today at 80 miles per hour while it was parked on the side of the road and totalled it. He launched it almost 100 feet. Unbelievable.

PHP High CPU

So after wrestling with performance issues for over a week on our web server running PHP, I finally found the culprit.

ob_start();

session_start();

These 2 lines of code in our header file were causing the CPU on our web server to run at 100%. I have not gotten feedback from one of my developers yet on what we were using those for, but they were the culprit. I figured I  would post this in case anyone else ran into this issue since we have been trying to solve this for over a week. We read through tons of web posts on PHP and high CPU, but none applied to our situation. The CPU's on our server were completely maxed out.

Summer 2011

I can't believe it has been 2 months since my last blog. The weather has been absolutely amazing. We have our garden planted with potatoes, corn, strawberries, squash, okra, tomatoes and more. The beans are not looking too good, though.

Our chickens are laying eggs now. Yummy. And we should have some baby rabbits in a month or 2.

Abs headed to camp this week. Monica dropped her off. Kelsie is her counselor. Cool.

We hiked Blodgett with the Callo family yesterday. There are some nice walls in there. Can't wait to climb them. Mill creek is very impressive as well. 700-800 ft walls. But the ticks suck out here.

Mikey has a summer job cutting the grass at a realty company. 40 per week.