Summer 2014

Gone too fast.  That would be my first summary of this summer.  

Never really started. That would have to follow.  

And now it is almost the end, evenings waning toward fall.  A chill is in the air in the mornings already, a testament to the brevity of this season, the seaon following the most bitter winter in recent memory, in my memory, in my father's memory.  We've had long winters.  We've had cold winters.  We've had snowy winters.  Never a winter like that.  

Funny to be writing about winter in the middle of August, in the middle of a blog note about the summer.  But there it is.  Last winter cast a long shadow over the sprng and summer, and I feel it's early return in the winds of change.  

Everything was late this summer.  Spring planting was late, made later still by Farmer Mark's hospitalization, surgery, and recovery, which wound its way well into July.  School ran later, thanks to winter, whch robbed us of school days that needed recovery.  The ground didn't warm, the chicken coop didn't get built, the goats were not purchased nor prepared for.  All summer felt like a mad catch-up to get done things that "should have been done" weeks before. 

Rescued materials finished the chicken coop for summer, but still the coop needs finishing.  Some sides are still made of netting, a pleasant, breezy material the ventilates well in the middle of July, but not so well on cold autumn nights.  It is August, and the forecast low overnight tonight is 47 degrees.  Moving too quickly toward fall, and the coop needs work: sides, tarpaper, and a proper roof.  When will it get done?  I have returned to work part time this summer, teaching summer literacy to elementary children, and there is no break before I return full time to my regular teaching job.  Time, time.  

The garden has suffered, and bloomed.  The seed crops mostly got in too late, and there will be no corn this year, but the green beans are thriving, and even as I type, I am monitoring the second batch of green bean quarts in the pressure canner.  There will be a second crop as well in a couple more days, and maybe more.  Sometimes I feel the pressure, and fail to realize: it IS only August, and the crops have two months left.  But I feel the urgency of last winter, of the return to work (when will I can all this food?) and I panic.  The tomatoes I rushed to plant the weekend Mark got his diagnosis.  What kind of wife races to put in 20 tomato plants while her husband lays in the hospital awaiting open heart surgery?  But I knew those plants would make him happy, enrich his healing experience, watching our garden thrive.  And so I took the extra hour and planted the tomatoes.  It was a good use of time as it turns out.  We are putting up a few quarts every couple days, and when the eggplant comes in I'll make sauce.  But time, time......

The cucumber plants are sad and small.  There are a couple pickle size cukes, but little else.  The squash may or may not come in.  I have a couple little baseball size globes on two plants, but I planted eight acorn squash, four spaghetti squash, and eight unknown mixed seeds.  I was planning on a lot more that two fruits.  And the pumpkins.  No fruit yet.  End of October, end of October.... I have to remember that my eminent return to work does not close out the gardening season.  But the urgency remains nonetheless.  

For now I will go pull my green beans out of the pressure canner.  I am done for tonight.  Tomorrow, work at school in the morning and in the garden at night.  And canning and preserving.  I am content to put the fruits of my land up for the winter, long or short, hard or easy, as it may be.  And I will plan.  I will plan for the garden next year and hope for an early spring.  

What good is a blog?

Just ruminating on my ruminating......

I have looked at the icon for the blog at least once a day for the last week and half.  Maybe more.  And each time I think, "I will get to that next."  And I don't.  I always find some other mind candy to pick up the slack in my day, then move on and neglect my poor blogger.  

Solitaire is a big favorite.  Standard 7 Pile solitaire is by far the front runner in this category, followed at a distance by Free Cell.  I rarely play Spider anymore.  I don't know if it is because of the ease of 7 Pile play with my iPad, or if I am just lazy and comfortable with my choices.  I usually can win at Free Cell, it just takes me longer.  7 Pile is a quick and easy game I can usually finish off in two minutes or less.    Spider solitaire has always seemed the most difficult so maybe I am afraid of the challenge.  

I have mostly been able to aviod some of the obvious traps of internet games.  I never played Farmville, and have avoided Candy Crush like the plague.  Never one to be labeled a "follower," I deliberately eschew those games.  I am lured instead to less popular, but no less addicting, games.  I played a game, which name escapes me now, where you built a town.  You could add ever and ever more land and buildings, but there was little value to doing so, other than personal entertainment.  I had a town hall, school, and library, but was soon adding things like bowling alleys and record stores.  It had some fun improvements, but that soon grew tiresome.  Besides, it started costing money to build the better improvements to my town.  So one day I just deleted the whole mess and called it quits.  

My latest distraction is a game called  Home Design, and maybe Home Design Story, I'm not sure which.  You can decorate your space with rooms full of chic, modern, funky, or downright straight funishings.  You can't really design any decorations of your own, and the ideas come straight out of someone else's head, so it's fairly limiting.  But I've reached the pont that to move any further in the game you have to pay money, so I've kind of lost interest.  I'm not into handing over my hard-earned cash for someone else to spend.  I'm not that entertained.  

Which brings me back to my point.  This blog is free to create and post.  It is completely the creature of my own mind, imagination, or introspection.  It is can be used to be cathartic, or at just a diary of my life.  It can serve no meaningful purpose, or I can use it from one year to the next to help guide my choices and seasons on the farm.  It can be deep and meaningful or frivolous and entertaining.  It is another form of mind candy, one I am free to form in my own genre.  And I can entertain others for free.  Bonus.   

As I write this, I am completely distracted by the chickens clucking like maniacs out in the back yard, and the dog chasing them like a fiend, and, in checking on them, chasing them all back up the hill to where they will be safer.  These are the makings of my real life, a life I have deliberately chosen to avoid city life and its particular pressures and strains.  I listen to crazy wildlife at night, and keep myself busy with bred making, jam preserving, and gardening during the day.  I have a normal job, of course, to pay for most of this, but the hope is that the sacrifice now will make it worth the effort in retirement income down the road.   

The Blog is to follow that choice, to document my successes and failures, to serve as a record of the fact that I did live, and live well in the 21st century.  Not well in the financial sense, since I will never be a milionaire (or a thousandaire for that matter), but that I lived well by my own terms and definitions.  I promise to do better at documenting the things that make this life interesing (and catch up on recent events) in the next few days.  Less time spent playing stupid brain games and more time expending some real mind-crafting energy for something of my own.  

Wow! So much time has passed.

     It is spring again, finally spring, after an especially brutal winter. We lost Buddy, our faithful chocolate lab mix. We gained Max, our Rottweiler/Aussie mix, the new big baby of the bunch. Our chickens started laying and provided well through the winter even though it was so cold. Snow fell, and fell, and fell. And it stayed around. We lost power for a week at Christmas and camped out in our house using the stovetop for heat. Aaron cooked up pheasant breast road kill over the campfire Mark kept going to melt snow for wash water. And we ate spaghetti sauce and grape butter, and pickles, and eggplant/spaghetti sauce from the arden well into the fall.  What an encouragement to us to start again this spring.  

     And we got more chickens.  Twelve new babies.  Six Plymouth Barred Rocks for Mark and six Araucanas for me.  I want the green and blue eggs, you see.  So they are all growing up together, and we need to finish the new coop soon.  At about 10 weeks, it became apparent that I would not be getting eggs from one of the new chickens.  She, or should I say HE, was crowing in the mornings and growing beautiful rooster plumage.  Had to be one of my Araucanas, and not the Barred Rock, of course.  So back he went to DUCK N COOP, the local hatcherie we use.  

     So Iwill try to do a better job of blogging our experiences from this point on and forget about catching up any more on what I missed, because, boy, have we already had a spring of it!