Weights, bugs, and monsters

Well, we had quite a day today, up at 6, then milking and chores as fast as possible, cooking our favorite pancake recipe (see below), loading up kids and milk and eggs in the car, and off to town to meet milk customers at 9:30.  After selling milk and eggs I trained at the gym, I'm starting a new strength program, I was getting bored with Starting Strength and decided to try Wendler's 5/3/1.  I warmed up with some jogging, 20# back squats and overhead squats and then did squats and bench press for my main workout  Then did some assistance work - 4 sets of 13 lunges (what I could do in the room I had) with 2- #20 dumbbells,  3 sets of 10 inverted rows, a few sets of push ups and then some stretching and just for fun, some handstands.  It's going to be hard to walk tomorrow, I can feel it already, yay!  Then I delivered some more milk, and then just for fun took the kids to TCBY, we had bought a 1/2 off coupon like Groupon several months ago and needed to use it before it expired.  Finally we got to head home sweet home.

Adult Potato Beetle

Nasty fat larva

It's been looking like rain off and on for the past couple of weeks, but we haven't received more than a few drops, so I went up to water the garden.  I'm thinking it's going to be time for some sort of irrigation system soon, it's getting to where it takes a couple hours to water everything, well, I guess I was also weeding and squishing bugs.  We are overrun with Potato Beetles, I loath the nasty things, the adults are hard bodied and hard to squish, the larva are little bulbous things that look like red dog ticks, and when you squish them they squirt fluorescent orange goo on you.  Keep your mouth closed when you squish, or else...  I usually get hit in the face a couple times, today they got me in the eye, and it burned!  It was awful, I was so angry, nasty bugs! So I squished a bunch more for revenge.

I have one chicken who keeps getting in the garden somehow, despite the fence.  Her favorite place is the compost pile, of course, but the problem is that I've planted bunches of squash in it, well, there used to be bunches, now there's like 6 left.  And this is the 3rd or so planting, the previous ones were scratched up as well.  I've got to find, or buy, some netting to throw over it until the plants get bigger, or kill a chicken...  Though it looked like she might have been  eating potato bugs, at least she was pecking something over in the potatoes before I ran her off, maybe I won't kill her.

I'm trying to find more space in my garden, and I spend too much time pulling weeds from the cement blocks lining my raised beds, so I'm seeing if filling them with herbs and other miscellaneous plants will 

work.  So far it's looking good, I've got probably 15 basil plants spread out around my beds, a couple dill, parsley, sage, even some bell peppers and jalapeno's I couldn't find a place for.  We shall see how it works, hopefully well.

When I got back to the house, there were MONSTERS leering at me thru the sliding glass door, ahhhhhhh!

Yummy Grain Free Pancakes
5 eggs
1/3 cup milk, cream, or coconut milk
1/2 cup almond flour
1/2 cup shredded coconut
1/4 tsp salt
1 tsp baking powder
Throw everything in the blender, blend it up, then make pancakes or waffles.