“ Learn how to see. Realize That everything connects to everything else.”

Leonardo da Vinci.

The whole month of January went by and I didn’t get a post written for that. So this update will be two months combined. There wasn’t much that went on in January anyway.

We kept our Christmas up a little longer in January, we had started a little late when decorating for the holidays when the flu hit our home around Thanksgiving. The flu got comfortable and stayed a little too long in our home. Settled in our lungs and refused to leave. But we got it the heck out eventually. You know how it is.

January was honey harvest time here at Our Little Red House and we also got lots of eggs when all of sudden prices exploded on eggs at the stores. We got so many eggs we ended up sharing our eggs with neighbors and friends. You see…everything works out in the end. When eggs and chickens started becoming hard to come by, many out there in the world started getting extra eggs in their supplies to share with others.

Little tip on the chickens…we switched feed and we also started using weeds around the neighborhood to feed to them that were organic. After those changes their egg production exploded. We lost two chickens before we changed their feed, my husband knew something was up with that and made the correct changes.

My daughter sold some more of her art and my son was successful in growing another brand of mushroom.

It was cold, gray and wet in January here in Arizona. Along with everyone being sick I just didn’t get around to outside garden upkeep, but I did keep up with my inside garden when I felt well enough. It’s so green and pretty. I recommend everyone start experimenting with having indoor gardens, they add to your home décor in such a nice way.

February was a much calmer month. No weirdness happened. Oh yeah, I didn’t mention that up above did I? Something weird happened at our home in January that we caught on one of our cameras outside. I’m choosing not to share the video for privacy protections.

We shared the footage with friends and family and even they thought it was weird. A round mist of some sort was floating around like a orb of some sort that had set our camera systems off, first going to our door then to our huge window out front.

The strange thing was how it set off the cameras. You could see through it. Street lights, cars driving by, helicopter lights…none of those things have set off our cameras before. Maybe there is a new type of flashlight out there that gives off illusions of orbs. Maybe someone was testing it out that morning and was walking the neighborhood, there has to be some explanation…just weird.

Haven’t had anything happen since, so who knows what it was. It bounced or floated towards our door then it bounced up towards the window and then took off. At first when my daughter and husband brought the image to me to watch I thought they were playing a joke on me…

” What is that? are you guys doing an early April fool’s Day?” I asked

My daughter asked me if I and her father were pranking her. We all thought it was a prank. She sent it to her friends and her Christian group sites and they all said it looked real, that they have had that happen to them recently as well. They just pray, as they believed something was targeting their house but couldn’t get in when they saw their orbs.

What is going on? this is such a strange time. Even writing about it is strange…maybe I should erase this whole part of the updates, makes it seem like I’m unbalanced. There are several witnesses and that footage that prove otherwise though. Are we all unbalanced, seeing the same things? See what I mean…just weird.

What kind of an upside down world are we living in? There has to be some explanation for it. Probably just a silly old flashlight or camera malfunction. It’s not a bug, it doesn’t react like a bug. It’s a huge orb that you can see through like a mist, but you can also see it’s outline as being round, it came to the door then up towards the window before leaving.

I sent it to some friends of mine, and they too said that sort of thing is real and that the footage was really good. Our camera footage captured the image clearly. At first they thought it was fake too, but when they heard it was from my house, they knew I wouldn’t make up something like that. Gotta be a joke I told them, someone playing a prank on us. What’s the world coming to when mist ball looking orbs show up at your door early in the morning hours when it’s still dark out?

For everyone that is keeping us in your prayers or have been these past couple of months…thank you, we needed them that’s for sure, especially in January. January was when my family and I were all at our sickest too.

In February we started getting an owl visitor for a few nights. She/he must want our chickens. Aren’t male birds usually really pretty and colorful compared to female birds? This owl looks pretty to me, so it’s a male? Hey, don’t laugh, I’m terrible at the names and types of birds. I do enjoy watching them though.

Early one morning around 2/3am my husband got up to check on why the chickens were making so much noise and he would walk up on that owl. A great horned owl, it was huge, and it did not flinch when my husband opened the back door to check on the chickens.

“ Scoot, get out of here.” my husband tried to get it to leave.

It was resting on the chicken coop just staring back at him. The great horned owl would not move.

“Maybe it was asleep with it’s eyes open” I said to my husband when he was retelling me this story later that morning. Sometimes Alley cat does that.

“Or maybe it couldn’t see you because you were holding a flash light and it blinded the owl.” I continued with my reasons to why the owl did not move right away.There’s always an explanation to everything.

What a brave owl I thought to myself, it seemed to not be afraid of anything.My husband just believes this owl is arrogant.

My husband told me he touched the owl with a little nudge to make it fly off, hoping it would leave. Finally the owl flew away. It came back the next night though but this time it hung out up high on the telephone wire instead of sitting down low on the coop.

Now the chickens are locked up at night instead of being out free like they normally are. We let them out during the day to roam around. The owl still shows up, Yesterday (I am writing this post on a Sunday Feb 26th) my husband went out in the morning during daylight and saw that there were owl feathers all over the ground in front of the wire chicken coop and there was a huge dent like the owl tried to fly into the coop but the wire prevented it of course. What a stubborn owl.

I spent February organizing prints from my photo files and came across some really cool family photos from long ago. I love the stories they tell. Sometimes when I visit the antique shops I will buy old photos but only if there is a story in the photo. These photos down below are family photos from my husband’s side of the family. When I ask him…

“ Who are these people?”

He always answers that he doesn’t really know. Most of the time that is, there are some photos he can explain to me. I want to hear their stories and know their connections to my husband. All I know is that one is his grandpa and some are his aunts and uncles in some of the photos I am sharing with you today. The others are all part of the family growing up on a farm in Minnesota. Note to self…sign all the backs of your old photos for future generations. Or leave descriptions online when you have photos in your computer files.

My father-in-law shared some stories with me when he was alive. Lets just say that from what I heard, Minnesota, especially during the Winter, is a hard place to live. There is a reason my father-in-law moved to Arizona.

I remember one story he shared about attending school in a one room classroom where all ages attended together. He also added that he had to walk everyday for miles to this school house, even when there was snow on the ground. Isn’t that story told all over the place to kids who complain about everything?

“ Well, let me tell you…in my day, we had to walk barefoot in 8ft of snow, having had no breakfast , carrying 50lbs of books, while wild animals chased us, just to get a good education back in the day.”

You know, when you’re really little, you believe everything you see or what you hear. That’s why children are always so vulnerable.

My husband moved here to Arizona with his family when he was 4 years old. He was born in Michigan which is another really cold state. Arizona must have been a nice treat for my father-in-law after living in all those cold states.

Going through all the photos was just the motivation for me to pick up my camera again and start shooting. I started slow, working on colorful page backgrounds to file away for later, for a rainy day as they say. Shooting candy shots. Now that I have the camera back to creating I thought I would take some days and record some of the things and changes I am seeing around this city I grew up in. I can’t believe how different it looks and all the changes every time we go out in it. Thousands of apartments going up, huge warehouses, farmland being destroyed and replaced with more apartments.

I’m so happy I am getting back to being creative again. I was off my game there for awhile because the medications I was on had side effects of being sick to ones stomach . Antibiotics will sometimes do that. You can’t really do anything when you feel under the weather.

Isn’t that crazy how the medications that help heal us come with all kinds of side effects that we also have to recover from once we finish them. This is why it takes so long for us to heal after being sick. I don’t drink or smoke, never did and I’m not big on medications. Maybe my body is extra sensitive to them when I do have to take them because of those reasons. Usually I like to let things heal naturally if I can. My husband’s Nonna did it that way, she was a firm believer in letting your body heal as much as possible the way it was designed. She told all her children this.

Now that I feel back to myself I am creating Spring DIY projects. I also started working on some ASD worksheets for kids and homeschoolers. The early years that is. The ASD worksheets can also be used for anyone who has suffered from strokes that need to work on fine motor skills and occupational therapy. I usually design these paper activities when I am finished working for the day, then I file them away once done. What I call my calming time.

I went shopping at a Japanese dollar store and bought some pretty floral papers that I made into all kinds of fun little Spring projects. I will be sharing some DIY posts about that later. We didn’t do a lot of shopping this past couple of months, the prices here in Phoenix are some of the highest inflation prices in our country. Didn’t used to be that way. Arizona is going through something right now. It’s better if I don’t go too much into what my opinion on what that could be about is. It would be a guess anyway. Best to stay quiet for now and instead work on learning and doing good things as much as possible while getting through whatever “this” is that is happening here in my state.

We also went book shopping , older published books that is.

We made cookies in February but only as a special treat. We used white sugar, wasn’t on one of our No Sugar for 21 days fast, it was Valentine’s Day so we spent that morning making and decorating sugar cookie hearts. Then we bagged them up and passed them out to friends and neighbors.

Prayers this month go to a couple of bloggers I follow, please include them in your prayers and well wishes.

Crystal at Faith+Gratitude=Peace+Hope (https://wordpress.com/read/blogs/135589837) is having some health issues. I will leave that up to you to go to her site to read up on what that is about. Please keep Crystal in your prayers so she has a fast recovery and is back to good health soon.

Lisa over at Southern Patches has a sister who is not well and going through treatments, please keep Lisa’s sister in your prayers and well wishes too. (https://southernpatches.net)

And we must not forget Ohio. We all know what’s happening there. My family from my father’s side is originally from an area about an hour outside where that happened. Farmers, and families, just good people over there. Please send prayers to the families and everyone who is effected by this. Disgusting how this small town is being tested.

We had a similar incident here in Arizona that happened a year ago. It was in Tempe.They said only 10 gallons of chemicals spilled in that incident. Below the bridge was the river, the cities drinking water.

A few months before that incident I remember a trip we took up north to Our Little Red House and how one evening right before the sun was going to set, I walked outside to get some towels I had hanging up to dry, and as soon as I stepped outside I saw this cloud formation that was really unusual.

“Hey, you need to see this cloud, it’s so huge and look at it’s shape” I yelled back at the screen door for my husband to come out.

We went up north that week to take a break from the city. You know, just a break from all the distractions of electronics. It was the week of an election and big one too. The clouds up there are so beautiful and at night with no light pollution you can see thousands of stars in the sky. Just unbelievable how many there are when you are many miles away from the cities.

That morning, driving down that dirt road to get to our place, we would be greeted by a huge double rainbow. But later that day a cloud hung over the city we had just left, 3 hours away. It was not a happy cloud to me.

“ That’s the strangest looking cloud I have ever seen” I remember saying to my husband.

I used to love Monsoon season, floating out in the pool while looking up at cloud shapes coming in, turning those shapes into animals through my imagination, always animals with me. I always loved the critters. There was nothing in this shape I could turn it into to create something cheerful.

We must not forget what I mentioned above about what I first saw before this intimidating cloud showed up…that double rainbow. And we all know what the rainbow represents. Yes, that cloud was scary looking, but also that rainbow let’s us all know…the promise (Genesis 9:13-16), God’s promise.

Everything seems to be made to be so frightening now. The secrecy, the different types of versions being told about the same subjects, the unknown for the future…it’s all in my opinion, made to slowly drive many crazy, or at least cause PTSD symptoms. To keep people unbalanced. At least in some areas of the world that is. An emotional experiment of some sort.

We can see that some really terrible things are being allowed to be done that harm people. That’s wrong. Life is a gift and some are treating it so badly. Just evil what is happening around the world right now with the disrespect of people…towards human beings, men and women everywhere.

When we drove back to the city a few months after that cloud in the sky, I remember seeing a huge cloud of black smoke that looked like that cloud formation we had in our backyard months earlier. Now I’m seeing another black cloud and it all seems connected somehow. reminds me of all these smoke clouds from these accidents happening all over our country.

When I saw the smoke cloud here in our state, I remember telling my husband how it reminded me of that cloud we saw in our back yard up north a few months earlier.

“ Remember that, it reminds me of that cloud, what do you think it is?” I asked him. Knowing I had a photo of that cloud in my files somewhere.As soon as I got to the city I looked for that photo to compare it to what I had seen in that smoke.

The closer we got to the cloud of black smoke the more I kept thinking about the white cloud in the sky. When we got home and turned on the news we learned what that black smoke in our city was all about. A train incident.

Anyway, here I go again writing about the surreal feelings this new world we are all experiencing right now feels like. Best to always keep your eyes open…best to really wake up. More and more truths will come to light, that I do know.

Please pray for the ones who are still asleep and not able to see this. Don’t hate them, remember they are blind to what they are doing, like a trance it seems like. Hate is the fuel to keep this ugliness happening. Hate continues the chaos and pain for others. We are all being pushed and manipulated to hate each other. Don’t become that yourself.

Prayers also are needed for the people of Turkey, Brazil and Canada. I can’t forget America, my home country…prayers for America please. Actually since we are on this subject, prayers for the whole world. We are all neighbors after all.

That’s it for updates. Thank you for your visits, likes and follows. Special thanks to Kentucky. Good for you Kentucky…good for you. Another dot maybe? You are all clever ones aren’t you, you already know what the answer to that is.

Just a feeling, but I believe many more good connections like that will follow. I especially love seeing the good ones, don’t you? We need more of the good ones. Remember the rainbow. Stay safe, healthy and happy out there and God bless you all, from all of us at Our Little Red House.

“ When is a revival needed? When carelessness and unconcern keep people asleep.” Billy Sunday