Happy New Year!

And I hope it's a blessed and prosperous one for every one of you, my dear Gentle Readers. For me, it's going to start out a bit wonky, since the phone company messed up the billing and double-billed us, and wants it paid off before they fix it. sigh. Such is life, so after this Thursday, I likely won't have internet at home for a bit, till we get this fixed one way or another.

But it's still going to be a great year, I'm sure. I've got seed catalogs on the way, so I can plan for what I hope to put in this year as a garden. I've got catalogs on the way from nurseries, so I can plan out what we want to get in the way of fruit trees to try to get something started that way. I found the seep and cistern, AND the wellhead at the end of 2012, so one way or another, we'll soon have water. Maybe not running water to the house, but at least we won't have to go off the property to fill our water jugs any more, which means less water rationing.

The Merlot is slowly coming apart inside, and getting cleared up so that what's salvageable can be salvaged, what can be burned is getting burned, and what needs to be scrapped out is getting piled up for going to the metal recyclers. With it being a good-sized trailer, that is a LOT of scrap metal from the outside sheathing, all the wiring and nails and screws and various hardware like hinges, the window frames for the jalousie windows, and that's not even counting the steel base frame for the thing. Depending on prices for scrap metal, that's a few hundred to a few thousand dollars for the farm.

We found the barbed wire fence that the last tenant used for a horse pasture - and I'm apalled because you don't want to use barbed wire for horses. They're just dumb enough to get tangled in it and then thrash around to get out of it, and hurt themselves worse. There's a few trees down on part of the fencing that have to get cleared up, but a lot of the scrub brush we've been burning is now going to be repurposed to weave in the barbed wire and make a somewhat sturdier brush fence from it, so we can clear up the trees and rocks in the pasture and use it for a few goats or sheep or even a couple of feeder calves.

We've had a busy few days, with us working Friday, and me Saturday. Quentin would have worked Saturday, too, but had thrown his shoulder out at work Friday towards the end of shift, and it hadn't reduced itself by morning, so he had to take an unwanted day off. He could barely move the thing. Sunday afternoon, it finally finished fixing itself, and goodness that "chunk" was awful loud. Then we worked New Year's Eve, and have today off, before going back to work in the new year. Naturally, yesterday at the end of shift, the big fun was telling everyone, "See you next year!"

Today, not only is it the New Year, and we're enjoying a quiet day at home, since nothing's open, and we haven't yet decided what to do outside, if anything. Mainly because it's kind of chilly out, but also because it's awful darned foggy. It's so foggy, we can't even see the neighboring ridgeline, and we can usually see that if it's daylight. Not today. So we haven't a clue what Quentin will do with his day off. Me, I'm going to spend as much time as I can finishing up downloading some homesteading books and stuff off Baen's free library (if I don't already have it), and more ebooks off my favorite free books for kindle site, eReader IQ, because they have tons (and I do mean tons) of free (at time of  posting) books for the kindle. And since I have Kindle for PC .... well, I have around 4500 or so books from them, plus another 500 or so from various other sites ... I don't think that while I'm offline, that I'll be moping too much. Too many books to read, and as a friend put it to me privately the other day (paraphrased), intelligent people love books. Smart people read, pure and simple, and I'm a major reader, to the point the me, books and food go together. I have a hard time sitting through a meal without reading something, because I want my eyes to experience a joy like my taste buds are.

And in a couple of months, I'll be getting a new laptop. I love my little netbook, but Simon (yes, I name tech) is getting a bit out-of-date. He's only two years old, but he was kind of bordering on lack of usefulness when I got him on sale at Wally World. Now he's only a bitty netbook, and honestly, a 250 gig hard drive is plenty big for me, but the 1MB of RAM isn't near enough for some of the things I need to do, and the screen resolution at 800x600 isn't very good anymore. It means programs tend to want to hang on me a lot, if they run at all. This is getting to be a problem. I doubt I will like Windows 8, but don't have much choice in the matter. Though I do hope there's a way to change the desktop back to a more classic Windows layout, because the sliding and whatnot just doesn't really do it for me in the test runs I've made of lappys while figuring out what I want. It's going to have to be another Wally World special in order to be affordable, but I found one that will work, has twice the hard drive space and RAM as this one, a bigger screen (15.6" vs. 11"), a CD/DVD drive, and, while I don't need it, a separate numeric keypad. I got used to that with all my years of accounting I did, and having to type numbers on the alphanumeric keys just bugs me. I can't quite type them as fast as I can just key them in on a 10-key setup.

So, by the time I'm back online at the house, or shortly after, I'll have a new laptop. Then the fun begins of setting up my software all over again, which is a bit of a pain, as some of it really is kind of hard to make work even on this thing. I may have to figure out something different for some of it. Phoo. I do a lot of pedigree tracking for a horse club I've been involved with for 20 years, and the software I use for it already has problems with Windows 7, in that I have to run it in Win95 mode to get all the features to work. I can't imagine the problems I'll have with it in Windows 8. Microsoft should have stopped at 95 or even 97, because I could still make those do everything I wanted. These new versions are just getting ridiculous. The biggest problem for me will be if we don't have DSL back here, and have to go satellite, because I'll be limited in data that I can transfer, and while I've got most of my files backed up on my google cloud drive, it's nearly 2.5 gig of stuff, and if I'm limited to 10 gig a month, that's a LOT of stuff to dump down to a new computer. May end up having to take the new computer to McDonald's to get stuff dumped down for the bigger programs, my games and my data, so I don't run out of data transfer in the first couple of days.

So anyhow, life is quiet here on the Farm, winter has set in with a vengeance, Ozarks style, and we're quite comfortable hunkering down in the living room where it's warm. I'll post more as I can, and eventually there'll be photos again. With the USB ports messed up in this thing, it's not going to happen any time soon for photos. And yes, I've tried system restore - it turns out it's not the system, it's the BIOS that lost parts of stuff, and I'm not interested in shelling out a small fortune to replace the motherboard when this thing's going to get replaced in a couple of months anyhow. I'll just have to live about it, as my daughter used to say when she was little (she couldn't say "live with it" for some reason, so it came out that she'd say, "Well, I guess I'll just have to live about it." Heehee.)

And with that happy note, I'm out of here for a week or two, till things get organized a bit better or I get a chance to stop by the library and post something. Hugs and love to all - happy homesteading!