Summer is here, and it brought hurricane like storms and furnace like heat & humidity.

It just hit me that I haven’t posted since April! Sorry!!! Life has been a little hectic… let’s see, May 19, Shaun graduated from high school, and we had tons of family over from all over the place. It was the first time since our wedding in 2001 that we had both sides of the family all under one roof! We had so much fun catching up! My parents were the only family who had seen our farm before then, so Sammy had a blast showing everyone around & was the best tour guide! He even showed off our dirty bedroom; you know, the ONE ROOM you hide all your junk in when people come to visit?! Yep! 🤦‍♀️ The week after everyone had left, one of our turkeys hatched five babies! A few days later, it was quite clear that one of those babies wasn’t a turkey after all…. it was a guinea! Apparently, while Momma Turkey was away from her nest one day, our female guinea thought it would be a good place to lay an egg. 😆 Next came Sammy’s birthday party in June, but with it came storms. The week leading up to his party, we had a good bit of rainy days, and there were storms predicted for the day of his party. If you’ve ever lived in north Louisiana, you know that you take the rain forecast lightly because we never really know what will happen until it happens. The morning of his party, it began to look more and more like we would have some pretty severe weather, so I began to worry a little. Have you ever heard of the “Barksdale Bubble”? There’s an urban legend that there is a supposed mythical force that pops up around the Shreveport/Bossier area to protect Barksdale Air Force Base from Mother Nature. It’s been a running joke since I can remember that the majority of storms break up just before hitting Shreveport because of the Barksdale Bubble. Well, when we moved out to our farm, storms started breaking up and going around us out here, too, so we jokingly say we have a Sparksdale Bubble. I was praying it would “activate” and send everything around us for Sammy’s party since all our friends were driving in from an hour away. Well, the Sparksdale Bubble failed me. The kiddos were playing on this giant 60 ft inflatable obstacle course as we parents were watching the skies, praying it would go around us, when all of a sudden the wind picked up, sending dust and limbs flying everywhere. It was like the tornado scene from The Wizard of Oz, with parents grabbing kids, kids grabbing their shoes, everyone shielding their eyes from the dust & limbs, and running for the house. Thankfully, the power only blinked a few times, but it came a downpour outside. The kids didn’t let that slow them down, though; they had an indoor Nerf War instead. The following week brought more rain, and then a horrible storm late Thursday night. Shaun woke us up around 2 am, and we all gathered in the hallway waiting for what seemed like a hurricane to pass. Lightning was constant, the wind howling, and debris flying everywhere! Honestly, when Hurricane Laura hit Caddo Parish in 2017, the weather wasn’t THIS bad. Shannon looked out at one point during the storm, and our goat shelter had blown over on its side, with our poor Mocha stuck inside, but the lightning was still so bad that it wasn’t safe for us to go out to help her. A few minutes later, we looked out the window and the shelter had blown back down, but now we worried that it could have landed on one of the babies, but it still wasn’t safe to go out to check. About an hour later, the slow-moving storm moved on, and we went out to survey the damage that we could using our spotlights. A tree had split in half in our backyard, narrowly missing our porch. Limbs were literally everywhere we looked. A piece of siding off the corner of the house was in the backyard. A box of painting supplies that had been at the front door was now around on the other side of the house. All the animals were ok, except there was a missing turkey poult. A huge oak tree was down at the road by our driveway, right in the 90-degree curve, on top of power lines, with the top of the tree and the top of the power pole in our yard, blocking our neighbors from being able to leave their houses (we’re on a dead-end road with no other way out). Walking back up to the house from that tree, we spotted a giant hickory tree down on the other side of the house. I spent an hour on hold trying to call in the downed power line in the road that night, while Shannon brought the generator up and got the major necessities, such as our refrigerators and freezers, plugged in. Daylight came, and we found another tree down. This one was a big pine tree on our fence in the pasture with our goats & cows. The power was still out, and there was no estimated time for restoration. It was still pretty cool in our house, but outside felt like a sauna. The heat index reached 114°F, with humidity around 90%. We had so much to clean up outside, so we headed out, along with some of our neighbors, and started clearing as much of the big oak tree out of the road as we could without getting on the power lines. In less than an hour, we were all drenched in sweat and had moved as much as we could, so we then had to wait for the Parish to come and finish moving the tree and for Swepco to fix the downed line. Later that evening, the tree was gone, but there were still over 200,000 people in north Louisiana without power, so it was going to be a while before Swepco could come to fix our lines, or so we thought. A few hours later, Swepco posted a list of expected restoration times: Tuesday at 10 pm for our area, and the following Saturday at 10 pm for Shreveport! I decided we had braved the heat long enough, and we were getting miserable, so I headed about two hours east to borrow some window air-conditioning units and a second generator from my parents. While there, we got an alert that more severe weather was headed our way! We took showers (thankfully, my parents had electricity) & headed home as quickly as possible to beat the next storm. Shaun’s girlfriend was texting him, warning us to stay put because it was getting bad in Shreveport again, but by the time we received the messages we had already headed home, so we kept on. By the grace of God, the storm stayed around I-20 and north of us, so we totally dodged that one (yay for the Sparksdale Bubble!). As we turned onto our dead-end road in the middle of nowhere, we saw an electric company truck! A few minutes later, we saw a neighbor on her porch who gave us a huge smile and a thumbs-up. Our hopes started to rise! As we drove towards our driveway, we could see the light!!! The street light that is; it was ON!!! Almost 48 hours after the storm, we had power! We were so excited! The next few days, the heat index continued to be 110-112°F, so we didn’t get nearly as much work done outside to clean up as we wanted, but you know what, it will still be there when it’s not 1000°F outside, so we will get it when we can, even if it’s just a little at a time. Now it’s still 1000°F, we have a huge mess to clean up, and guess what time it is? Chicken processing time! Yep, our second batch of meat birds is ready to be processed. Remember, our homemade plucker broke towards the end of the first 100 birds we did last fall? Shannon started working on it during the power outage and realized it would cost just as much to fix it as it would cost to replace it, so we have a new one ordered that should be here by the weekend. I’m praying for cooler temperatures, or at least lower heat indexes, next weekend when we get started! Processing 100 chickens in this heat is NOT going to be fun. Wish us luck!