Happy Birthday, Birthday Boy!

Another year older and another lopsided German chocolate cake!  (Note: next year I will pay better attention to the recipe, as I didn't note the quantity of evaporated milk in the recipe and dumped in the whole can!  It was easy enough to double the rest of the ingredients, but we'll be eating coconut frosting on everything for weeks.)

For Tom's birthday weekend, we celebrated with family Saturday night, which was a lot of fun.  It was terribly amusing listening to the little one ask over and over again if she could go downstairs if she was careful.  Literally, when she reached the bottom, she would come back up and ask again. 

Part of his present was a weekend void of house projects.  We still did some chores, but he spent a good amount of time tinkering and lounging.  While splitting wood Saturday morning, some "bad" hunters caught our attention.  They were shooting towards the road into a herd of about 50 elk cows.  The property is catty-corner from ours along the highway.

It sure was interesting watching them run this way and that. 

As we were watching, another hunter came into view, though we later realized she was just a scavenger.  A mountain lion got into our neighbor's coop earlier in the week and cleaned them out.  Evidently Felix found an abandoned casualty and brought it over to share with her four kittens.  The circle of life continues...  I will miss seeing all the chickens wandering around and clucking about.