Well, Hello There!

It appears I’ve been away about half a year. Huh. I think I couldn’t log in for a bit and gave up this blog for lost but today I can suddenly login again so… here I am.

The pets are still all with us, late innings for Kisa, she is getting old. She had a seizure a while back but it hasn’t repeated so far. We’re hoping for another few good years with her but we’ll see how it goes. Wish some of these creatures we latch onto could live as long as we do. It’s a crushing blow when any of them dies.

So, we are all currently employed! I know, it’s been a loooong time coming. Four of us have permanent jobs, to varying degrees, and our youngest has Summer employment at least, so we’ll take it. Eldest works at a food co-op, middlest is still at the bakery, youngest is working with his dad on IT and then in the school library, my husband still runs the IT department at the same place and I am still running YA services at my little library. Those of us who’ve been employed long-term have gotten small raises, mine doesn’t even keep up with the cost of living but I’ll take it. I am lucky enough to love my job and have an excellent boss.

A book I helped illustrate as a teenager has gotten re-issued. We had a relaunch event at the library with the author and some of my fellow illustrators. I had to speak, in front of people, eek. It went well though, we even got paid again. Crazy but YAY! Money helps. Randomly my old science teacher attended the event. It was crazy to see her after so long. It’s been decades.

Yeah, I’ve always been kinda this way… hippie dippy, peace love & granola. ^_^

Lots happens in six months. Games have been played, meals have been cooked and eaten, art has been made, milestones reached, tests passed and failed, etc. Youngest went for his first permit test and didn’t make it. They got harder at some point and the questions are now super specific.

Oh! Some friends are expecting twins!!! I am so excited, probably because I am not going to have to get up with them in the middle of the night, but hey, Twins! ^_^ ^_^ Time to brush off my Auntie skills and be ready to lend a hand.

The garden is doing fairly well so far. I mean, not like last year yet but goodish. We had broccoli, strawberries, kale, and basil.. oh, and zucchini! I’m hoping the hot peppers make it, it’s not a good climate for them but our farmshare manages to grow them so I’m trying.

Happy Spring!

Disclaimer: My keyboard is still broken so please excuse anything that should be capitalized and isn’t it only responds to the shift keys when it wants to.

It’s March, late March, and it’s Spring. This is what’s going on in my world.

I am working on a few goals this year;

1. getting a garden going for real this time,

2. becoming a “Fuck Yeah!” friend,

3. getting more movement into my days, (as I sit here blogging like a slug…)

4. eating more veg,

5. becoming more competent at my job, and

6. Decluttering!

There is some progress in all areas, however slight. The beds are in as of last Fall and I hope to get planting (with guidance) soonish. I am saying “Fuck Yeah!” as much as seems safe to friends asking if I want to do stuff. I am on my feet more for sure even if my phone isn’t showing the steps. It, like my little laptop, has issues and it dies a lot. I am eating slightly more veg and focusing on just making sure it happens every day. Tougher than I thought it would be. At work I am taking on some new responsibility, nothing huge, just helping cover while my boss is out on maternity leave. I am practicing to get better at commcat, trouble-shooting when there are issues with computers and printers, planning for Summer Reading as best I can. I also keep signing up for webinars but I have been missing most of them. I am just so burnt out on zoom and all that. I have a few coming up that I plan to actually attend and I intend to view the recordings of the ones I’ve missed. Decluttering is still stupid and complicated because my usual drop off places are still not taking things. meh. I do have some stuff ready to go and I will do more when it makes sense to.

One of my niece’s just got married! ^_^ YAY! So nice to have something to celebrate. She and her new husband looked gorgeous and I was so glad that we could at least be there remotely. My eldest daughter is taking a couple of online classes and doing well. My middlest is getting a little money in with a kind of online gig type thing and took over dish washing and it really helping me out. My youngest is in the final stretch of his senior year and is doing well, sticking with it, getting ready to ease into the future. My husband is still working remotely but is finally scheduled for his first vaccine. (YAY!) We will be celebrating 24 years together later this week. WOW.

Gaming is still the main source of entertainment around here, I think we are in and/or running about… 6-7 games. I am using Pathfinder 2e to run my husband in a one-on-one game. We used to run one-on-one a LOT when we lived far from anyone and had a young child. I’ve missed it like crazy and apparently he has too. ^_^ So I am still struggling with constructing encounters that won’t kill him. LOL. Even with all the charts and whatnot encounters are so brutal. I think I have been thinking about it wrong, like my math is somehow backward or twisted. I’ll get it sorted out. One-on-one is not a thing Pathfinder is super designed for so I am pretty much making my own “adventure path.” It’s fun and challenging and I am enjoying all the prep work. I have part one pretty well finished and have started part two. I’m not sure how many parts it will have. I was thinking two, taking the PC from level one to… 8? 9? 10? But I might keep it going. Have the main quest die down for a while, let him “Witcher” it up monster hunting all over Golarion and then bring the main quest back later. I don’t know, we’ll see how he likes the main quest as he hasn’t even started on it yet. He’s travelling to investigate a rumored event and I’ll have to see if he likes it or if it’s too weird for him. I can do grim and gritty just fine but it’s always leavened with chaos and whimsy which he doesn’t always “get.” If he doesn’t like it I know some people who will so I’ll just save it and rework it for them later and cook something else up for him. I love him so much.

Anyway, I need to get ready for work.

XXXOOO

Reopening & Other Progress

My library will be opening by appointment starting next Tuesday. We have approval from all sorts of boards to allow one family/household at a time come in to browse, use computers etc for 30 minutes at a time. Our local numbers are very low and flat so everyone feels like this is a good move but as we are heading into a season when this virus is likely to surge again, I am nervous. We will be starting with only Tuesday hours and I don’t work Tuesday so, who knows, maybe we will be reevaluating this move before it even changes anything for me specifically.

I’ll be off next week until Friday so I can celebrate the holiday and other things. I welcome the time off to cook and clean for our feast. All the laptops are finally gone now so I can get moving ahead again! We also have 2 slightly raised bed gardens installed at this point and one in progress for what will be our berry patch. We have tentative plans for a live willow fence along the front yard as well. I am looking forward to finally, hopefully, growing a decent portion of our veggies and berries. Even our yard is becoming more organized.

Our new raised beds and future berry patch

Our Thanksgiving feast is pretty much planned and our Yule feast is mostly finalized. I have the main course narrowed down to 2 options and I’ll just order both and see which I get. I’m looking forward to our once a year, amazing turkey next Thursday, and our Yule/Xmas feast next month.

Yesterday I finished 2 projects for Xmas, one was a small, simple project I made 6 of and one was a longer term, lots of work project for a dear friend we are adopting into our clan. (Assuming she doesn’t run screaming into the hills when she realizes we’re all mad here.) I still have a bunch of projects I haven’t even started including a set of Hogwarts cloth napkins I want to make for our table. I’m not into matchy-matching everything except for special occasions. For our big feasts and celebrations I like to go all in and give us a real sense of occasion. I need to keep reminding myself that I am very much on track right now and that it is all under control. I am doing less this year and that’s why I have room for the long-delayed napkin sewing etc.

Got the first two napkins pinned and ready to sew. Only six more to go!

November is Here!

It’s windy and spitting snow this morning on the edge of Cold Swamp. Welcome, November! Halloween/Samhain didn’t really happen here. We wore no costumes, didn’t honor our beloved dead, didn’t hand out candy. We watched a couple of scary movies and ate spider donuts, that is about it. Ah well. We’re all stressed and trying hard to just maintain these days.

I harvested the last of the mint yesterday and made fresh mint tea to go with our sausage, meaball, and potato dinner. It was a ridiculously hearty meal. Tonight’s plan is lentil soup to make up for it. I’ll be at work when my little clan eats it but I’ll either bring some to work or eat when I get home. I love Fall and Winter, love the cold, love coming in from the cold to find the warmth of our fire and drink hot drinks, love the dark that makes our home a little island of light and comfortable coziness. I love wearing the cozy layers of soft clothes, I love being able to stand wearing them without dying of heatstroke, and I love the long, long season of baking and making soup. I love the contrast of the cold and raw outside with the heat indoors. And I love the long, dark nights, the hush of falling snow, and the scent of woodsmoke in the air. I will be making my usual lentil soup, squash soup, and hopefully leek and potato soup, as well as searching for new soups to add to the line-up.

And baking! Oh the bread, the cookies, the homemade cakes! I’m all geared up and ready to shop for feast food here. Got my lists ready to go and might do a few practice runs of some of the trickier items. Muahahaha. Yum. I might try to flip lemon bread and make it with lime since I can’t have lemon anymore. I may have to learn to make pies… I’m not great at it, I can do it, but everyone else’s are better, it is known.

Fun fact: The house banners from last Xmas/Yule are still up. Yeah, I know, but it’s true. I like to leave them up till sometime in February but this past Feb we were looking at the progress of Covid19 and I thought how the banners coming down each year made me all wistful and I thought I’d leave them up a while longer, you know? until the crisis was past? Yeah, at this point I just don’t know what to tell you. Will it ever be past? I hope so. I really hope so.

Our 18th wedding anniversary is coming up. My husband asked me yesterday what I want to do for it. He is not in a good headspace at all and this was clear as anything when he asked that question. So I asked him what he wants to do and he said something like: “Our options are nil.” It’s sort of true in that we don’t have the option to go out to dinner, or to a movie, or even to go out and browse a bookstore together. (all traditional anniversary activities for us) But I mean we do have options. We could make a nice dinner and eat by candlelight, we could read aloud to each other, we could borrow a movie from the library or watch one of our favorites we already have kicking around. We could even go freeze to death in the shed to get away from the kids for a bit. Insulation and a tiny woodstove have to be the next things for the shed. Yep. How cool would that be?

As much as I love my shed it seems the garden is the priority. I have a very cool lady coming next week to start preparing the first of our gardens. The idea is that it will be sitting there ready for next Spring when it’s time to plant. She’s also going to work on expanding and diversifying our berry patch. I have such endless dreams for this project/series of projects, endless. So many things I want to grow. I can’t wait to be growing and harvesting FOOD.

Tune in next time for who knows what rambling! I should have garden progress updates sometime next week,

Goals for a Renewed Earth

I am not a fan of all this heat, it is horrible, I wish I could live somewhere cooler and more pleasant. I do love a lot about where I’m planted though. It’s beautiful here though I’d like to live wilder. We get a fair amount of wildlife, have a bunch of wild edibles growing in the yard, have some room to garden in if I can ever overcome my lack of skill in that area. I got mint established after 3 years of trying. Don’t laugh! Ok, you can laugh, I suck at gardening, I know it. I have a wild mint that won’t fill the area I gave it but is branching out, finally! I thought it was supposed to take over? I am at the point I can manage not to kill it.

We need some rain too, please, when mint is wilting in the shade it is well past time for some RAIN. I keep having to water the “chocolate mint” in the front yard because it is just suffering. It gets too much sun I think. Didn’t know mint wanted some shade when I put it there. It is spreading a bit though so there might be enough to harvest for tea! The wild blackberries are looking like they will be abundant this year, if we get some rain for them, gods, I want blackberries! I also have some golden raspberry plants my son and I put in that are doing better than you’d think seeing as I’ve been looking after them. Maybe 4 years ago (?) we bought a little plant and put it in the yard, it put out about 7 berries and then winter came and it was gone, I thought it was dead, done, finished, but it came back up! So in late fall I buried the little plant in leaves and put some cloth over it held in place with a few rocks I think. Uncovered it in the spring and it grew bigger that year, gave us some more berries, not many. So I’ve been finding ways to sort of insulate it in the winter since then and it seems to work! It’s spread a bit, sent out its little runners, and it’s a real bush now. I hope we’ll get berries in an amount I can maybe brag a little about. “Yep, a whole pint. I’m a farmer now, one with the land…”

I want to grow my own food! My actual goals are:

To keep encouraging, while somewhat containing, the wild edibles in my yard (like the blackberries!)
Bolstering the mint until it becomes a problem and then I’ll weed it around its edges
Keep the roses productive
Get the golden raspberries established into a berry patch that produces usable quantities
Raised beds, or maybe even mounds, for veggies and such
Lots of productive veggie plants in the raised beds (squashes, onions, potatoes, beans, garlic etc)
A real, awesome herb garden
A little orchard: an apple tree, pear tree, maybe a persimmon tree
a pepper tree!
Maybe some chickens because I love them, and eggs are nice, and chickens eat ticks
Maybe ducks? So, also a little pond for them, they are cute and hilarious, and they eat slugs
Some pretty serious fencing or hedges for privacy mostly
Cold frames too, to extend the growing season!
Maybe a small greenhouse
If I get all that there won’t be any lawn so, yay! no lawn, another thing I want

I just want my little paradise where I can harvest some food and eat it super fresh. I want food I grow myself, that I can preserve and use in the winter. That would make me smile.