Best. Fondue. Ever.

Best fondue ever. Made a roux. Used budweiser instead of wine. Two parts emmenthaler, one part gruyere, a little bit of havarti.

Rock Dove Farm full service day spa.

Hiking. Went for a nice hike down by the creek. Kids found salamanders, crayfish, frogs, minnows. Looked at animal tracks. I got stung by a tenacious yellow jacket I believe, first time this has happened, fortunately there was just one of them.

Very nice day. We finally got a little rain over the last couple of days, we need more.

Peanut decided to scoot under the top line of the gate for his corral this evening and he ran like the wind. Seriously, he was moving fast. We watched as he took off through the field then he went into the upper field and was really moving fast. It was beautiful to see. The upper field is fenced all the way around except for a 12 foot entrance that I opened up for easy access. We got Peanut back without a problem.

Church today was very nice today, Abby went with us. Feast day for St. Peter and St. Paul. Peter means rock. In Aramaic there is only one word for rock, whereas in Greek there is one word for small pebble and one word for boulder, confusion arises because of the gender assignments of greek words similar to that found in other languages. Jesus spoke Aramaic so there is only one word for rock, and Peter was the rock that the church was founded upon.

Berries, Lilies, Drive-ins and Kites

Guests arrived Thursday at the farm. Nanny, Angela, Kaitlyn, Abby, Lily. They relaxed at the farm during the day Friday, and then all went Friday night to the local drive-in movie theatre. Lot's of fun!

Today we had a little wind so the kids flew kites.

Angela went for a walk and took some nice pictures. Baby Lily is now 13 months old and having a great time.

It's Saturday and that means home made pizza and a video party! Yea!

Bears

We live in East TN near the Cumberland Mountains, the Cumberland Plateau, and the Smoky Mountains. Every year there are several local news reports of wandering bears. In the last week there have been two bears in Oak Ridge and West Knoxville. We've not yet seen any bears at our place, but we've got lot's of blackberries a growin'.

Long Tooth Camp Equine

Long: we celebrated the summer solstice and are enjoying the long days. Frequently we are outside and it is almost 10:00 pm when we come in the house at night.

Tooth: John and Mary, my super pods, both were visited recently by the tooth fairy. I'll try to post a picture but it's hard to get the kids to stay still long enough.

Camps: Last week Mary had "Little Divas" summer camp, it was dancing, music, and crafts. She had a great time. John recently had a Lego camp and he's looking forward to visiting Mamaw and Papa in White Stone and going to the Indian Creek summer camp.

Equine: Debby has a horse instructor coming out once a week. We're learning something about the Parelli natural horsemanship methods.

Keepin' Cool

We had a beautiful evening last night, clear sky, bright moon. This morning the temperature was 49 degrees outside when I woke up, very refreshing. What was not so cool was a visitor I spotted outside, a hawk was sitting on a fence post near the house (see picture, this was the best I could get with my cell phone camera). So, I decided to not open up the pigeon loft this morning. My birds are disappointed but at least they are not someone's breakfast.

The cold temp brought a heavy dew. Yesterday Buzz was working again in the upper field to make hay, he should be back at it later today.

I banded two baby pigeons this morning, they are babies of my blue bar hen 721 who won the 300 mile race last fall.

Last night after work I went and rescued another pigeon that showed up at the Tate School of Discovery, it was a fancy little pigeon with band "NPA 8 07 DH 139". I'll try to track down a contact for this bird today. The fancy pigeon is a cute little bird. When you hold one of these it feels like you are just holding a bunch of feathers, they are so light. When you have a racing/homing pigeon in your hand you know you are holding something, they are strong and heavy.

After dinner last night I worked on the riding mower. We have an old John Deere STX46 hydro which we have pretty much abused on the farm. On Monday I removed the mowing deck and loaded it in the Suburban, Debby dropped it off at the local JD dealer. $258 later we had three new blades, new blade bolt kit, new belt, three new idler arm pulleys/bearings, and an engine maintenance kit. I changed the engine oil/oil filter, fuel filter, air filter, and spark plug. I reattached the mower deck. Started right up, should be ready for more bush-hogging uhhmm, I mean grass cutting.

More cool stuff: the AC in my old car has not been working very well so yesterday at lunch I decided to buy one of those $20 AC recharge kits at Walmart. The result was excellent, nice cold air!

John and Mary have been using water to keep cool and have fun. Every evening they are outside playing with their super soaker squirt guns and the hose.

Bird Brain

I was just reading the pigeon mailing list and there was a link to a story about pigeons which claims that pigeons can "recognise their own image, a trait only shared in the animal kingdom by dolphins, elephants and large primates such as chimpanzees".

A Few P's

It's Father's day, so I start with wishing all the proud Papa's out there a wonderful day. Picture shows Papa with John climbing Old Rag Mountain for Papa's birthday April 5, 2008.

This morning it was Pancakes, and Debby said "this is the best thing ever". She was referring to the electric griddle we bought recently when our stove was being fixed. We have a griddle frying pan that goes on the stove top but the electric griddle is really nice. We would not have bought the griddle if we did not have a problem with the stove, which is now fixed.

Last night was Pizza night at the Pillers, we usually make pizza's from scratch on Saturday nights and have a video party. The dough recipe is from Paula Deen:
1 envelope active dry yeast
1 tbsp sugar
1-1/4 cups warm water
3-1/4 cups all-purpose flour
2 tsp salt
1 tbsp olive oil
corn meal

We make the pizza on a pizza peel sprinkled with corn meal and slide it onto a pre-heated pizza stone in the oven. Mmmm good!

Next is a Pasture update, I finished fencing a few acres of pasture behind the house yesterday, this morning we put Peanut our welsh Pony out there and he is very Pleased indeed. The fence perimeter is about 1800 feet, it was a big job and took a lot of hard work. Since we've gotten the horse I have learned a lot about fencing. This particular fence is electric, it uses a solar powered pulsed low impedance energizer and white electric fence tape. Horses are prey animals and frequently injure themselves on fences. This fence has good visibility and is safe. And relatively inexpensive and low maintenance. I also chose to go with the electric tape because I think it's safer for those wild and crazy rock doves that zig zag zoom around the place.

World Record!

Today we had a little celebration at work to recognize our recent Guinness World Record. I work in the Reasearch Accelerator Division of the Spallation Neutron Source facility at Oak Ridge National Lab and over the past few years we have set several new world records. This time it was for reliable production of high intensity pulsed neutron beams delivered to target research stations via a 1/2 MegaWatt pulsed proton beam.

That's all nice and fine of course but what really matters was the free ice cream provided after the ceremony!

Pigeon Presentation

Earlier this week I got a call from Marvin Wilson, he works with the Pathfinder youth group program for the Oak Ridge Seventh Day Adventist church. Marvin wanted to know if I could come out and give their group a presentation. Sure!

This morning I gave a 2 hour presentation to their group. I brought four racing pigeons and the kids really enjoyed seeing the birds and petting them. We took the birds outside and released them. I called home to let Debby know that the birds were released at 10:26 am. Debby called back to let us know that the birds were home at 10:42. Not bad, it takes me 40 minutes to drive home from Oak Ridge while the birds made the trip in just 16 minutes!

I brought the Share the Blue Sky DVD and we watched Marathon in the Sky and Pigeons Go To School. They had a very nice audio visual setup in the chapel with a large projection screen, good lighting, excellent sound.

I also brought some materials from the American Racing Pigeon Union, the kids really enjoyed coloring the pigeon handout and also doing the crossword and maze handouts.

Several parents were in the audience, there were a lot of good questions and hopefully I was able to provide some good answers.

All in all it was a lot of fun. Marvin wants their group to get started with a homing pigeon project and perhaps get other pathfinder groups involved as well.

Hay there!

The Thew family attends our church (Blessed Sacrament), they homeschool their kids, and they have a couple of horses. The Dad, Buzz Thew, is a public school teacher (oh, the irony) and is off for the summer break.

Buzz has a Massey Ferguson tractor and implements needed to make square hay bales (tedder, rake, baler) along with a truck and trailer.

We don't yet have any farm equipment but I'm hoping to get a tractor before too long.

Buzz and his family have been up at our place most of the last week making hay in one of our fields. They will take half of the hay they make and we will keep half.

Yesterday we cleaned out the barn and got one trailer load (80 square bales) of hay stacked inside. We have room in the barn for about 200 more bales.

The hay smells really good. Peanut has taste tested it and approves. Actually the hay is pretty good quality.

Last night we took the kids on a little hay ride, just before a beautiful sunset, with the sweet aroma of fresh hay wafting about. Very nice!

First Blog post!

OK, we're going to give blogging a try. I've been keeping some journal type records of my own (online using google docs) but thought we might try a blog for family/farm activities primarily for our own enjoyment but also for friends and family.

As for the name of the blog, we moved to a farm and are keeping rock doves, aka columba livia, aka homing pigeons.

And in case you're wondering, blog is short for web log, so a blog is sort of a web based journal.

Who are we? We are the Piller Family; Chip, Debby, John, and Mary. We live on a 120 acre farm in Oakdale, TN, USA.