Hoppers

I was just "cleaning out" my camera and realized I never finished up with my home time post. So, let me do that now!Recently there were two kinds of hoppers in my life.
This kind....

and this kind...

When we got home after a long absence, we discovered that indeed the yard needed mowing..badly. And that we had been infested with grasshoppers. I have seriously never seen that many grasshoppers in one place at one time. And it wasn't necessarily just our yard. It was the entire area all the way into Billings. It made me think of the Biblical plagues in Egypt. I can now imagine how truely horrible that must have been!

Just walking across the yard would stir up a cloud of the crunchy things, dozens of them trying to escape our feet. I know they are crunchy because they were all over the porch and side walk and you could hardly walk without stepping on them.  What's even more gross....Ella and Paris loved making a game of hunting them, which was fine, until they also decided to snack on them once the hoppers were caught.

They were also all over my flowers. I was delighted to discover that I had three hollyhocks and three sunflowers volunteer to come back this year, even though they knew from last summer they'd be on their own.

Unfortunately the grasshoppers were delighted with them too. Their lower leaves were nothing but stems, and during the cool mornings, my poor sunflower was weighted down with hoppers.

Normally I don't mind grasshoppers, even enjoy them to some extent, but this was a little extreme.

And let me just go ahead and tell you, mowing the yard...well I had more than one take a giant leap to escape the lawn mower and land down the neck of my shirt. There was quite a bit of squirming and frantic flapping of my shirt while I got the back yard mowed.

Amazingly they didn't come in the house with us, except for a handful that got a free ride. I repotted a plant, sprayed it off with the hose b/c it was dusty, and left it on the porch to dry, foolishly forgetting the hoppers. Later that evening, after I had returned the plant to my kitchen floor, I was fixing dinner and I noticed Paris and Ella staring into the plant with a hypnotized kind of glaze in their eyes. At first I was going to fuss because they have been known to snack on this plant a bit, but then I suddenly had a horrible vision in my mind, and ran to the plant....and sure enough. It was full of grasshoppers. I whisked it back out onto the porch as quickly as possible, and thought I'd managed to prevent any escapes, but the next morning I found one of the beasts on the hallway wall. He found himself quickly tossed out the back door.

I'm hoping they will be gone when we get home for our next break, and I imagine that will be the case. Its certainly cooling off out here, and I saw on the radar this morning that NW Washington will be getting some snow in their mountains over the next couple days. Yep...summer is over in our part of the country. Its time for our two weeks of fall and then the snow will fly! Well that's a bit of an exaggeration...but not much of one.

Have you picked up your copy of the Pioneer Woman's cookbook yet?

I swear I've only run into two recipe's that were just so-so instead of fabulous, and I've tried quite a few of them. This time home I made this one...

...and loved it. This is her pizza crust recipe with her tomato basil pizza. I won't share the recipe because its hers, but I will tell you it uses pesto instead of pizza sauce and Malcolm and I both loved it! No more boxed pizza for me! You need to get her cookbook because as the title suggests. The Pioneer Woman Cooks!

Amidst the cleaning and straightening frenzy preparing to list the house for sale, I did get a little relaxing done. I caught up on all my So You Think You Can Dance episodes that I had DVR'd. I am so addicted to that show! Love it!

And I also did a little porch sitting/nature watching. I do love my songbirds.

Its already been 2 weeks since we left the house and returned to work. It will be a few more till we return home again, but with the coming of fall and the anticipation of winter, I'm enjoying my time out on the road this time around...well what little time we've actually been on the road! The hotel time wasn't so cool!

One evening at home we had a spectacular sunset...

...the kind you usually see in fall and winter. Somehow the sunsets have different looks seasonally, or at least it seems so to me. And so I think that started me on this "its fall....yippee!" kick. I never get tired of a Montana sunset!!!

We're in Helm, CA this morning and just finished unloading our load of feather meal. We're supposedly reloading in Livingston and heading over to Ogden, UT. But Malcolm plans to talk to our broker this morning and see if he can send us through Billings somehow or if he wants us to go to Ogden and then put our truck in the shop in Salt Lake City. Its not feeling well, and we're still loosing power and it was making weird sputtering noises this morning. Cross your fingers that its a quick find and a quick fix!