a meaty sunday

Ok, I screwed up. I took pictures yesterday and copied them onto the computer at home last night, but forgot to save them to my laptop. So I have no pictures of our adventure yesterday for this post. And we won't be home for a few days to get them. You'll just have to come back and look at them in a few days.

Anyway, we did have quite the little adventure yesterday. Alfred found a ranch about 45 minutes from us that raises and sells grass fed beef, so we went there yesterday afternoon to check it out and give them a deposit check. The people we met that showed us around, Tammy and Jeff, were seriously the nicest people I have ever met in my life. They showed us all the sheep, even let Alfred feed them (he almost got knocked over, it was really funny), showed us 2 of their big bulls, and then showed us the rest of the herd of cattle. It was really good to see the farm and see Tammy interact with the animals, you could tell that she really cares for them and that they're in good health. She's also the one that slaughters them, so she'll be killing a ewe for us in a week or two!

They also took us to their house, which is right down the road from the ranch, because they had been telling us about the pork kielbasa they made and offered to give us some. We ended up going home with two packages of kielbasa, some ribs, ground venison, a bucket of crabs, and some other cut of pork that I can't remember. Just because they had so much and wanted to share it. Talk about southern hospitality! Combine that with the steak we got from the owner of the ranch to try out the meat before we place our order, and we are probably set for a month! They were telling us about a hog hunt they went on recently - Tammy stabbed a 250 lb hog in the heart to kill it! That's freaking hard core! We ended up spending about 2 hours with them, they were just so friendly. The coolest thing they showed us, which I unfortunately didn't get a picture of, was an alligator head in their freezer. Apparently the gator had gone after Jeff's son, so he killed it (he's a game warden, ha) and kept the head. The gator was 10'2" long! That is huge!! The head took up the whole damn shelf, they're going to stuff it and give it to the son.

Saturday was good too: I went to a used bookstore near Billy's house, spent an hour and 40 minutes and $15 and bought a few books, then we went out to dinner with Ilya and Mercedes after Alfred got back. And no, he did not shoot any hogs.