I have moved again!

Though not off the property. Just that it finally got nice enough that the furniture could be moved back where it belongs, instead of me hunkering down in the living room all the time. It's kind of nice. The bed looks so nice being back in the bedroom, and it's nice to have my desk back in front of the window in the living room, with my comfy chair to sit in. Though to be sure, it's kind of odd to sit at a desk again. The windows are all uncovered, and opened as much as possible to allow for all the breeze I can get. I'm going to have to get a box fan to move air around when it gets much hotter come deep summer, because it does get extremely warm around here in the deepest parts of summer.

And with having the furniture back where it belongs, and the last of the cold weather finally gone, I dug out my little container of peach pits from the freezer to let them thaw out and come to room temp. A 40-pound bag of top soil (U$1.49 at the hardware store) will give me MORE than enough soil to start the peach seeds in and see if I can get them to grow as an experiment, plus some left over to top off the blueberry bushes I plan on getting over the next several weeks. The Wal-Mart in Huntsville near work has Southern Highbush Blueberry bushes for U$10 each, and I think a few tires are going to get set up next to the house where the blackberry brambles have been cleared out so far. Then I'll fill them with some of my compost I've been building since I've been here, filling it around the root balls, then top off with some good topsoil from that bag, and wait to see how many blueberries I can get out of about three or four bushes.

I love blueberries a LOT. For that matter, I love fruits and vegetables a lot. I do like my meat, but I've always been more of a "meat is a side dish" person rather than a "meat is the entree" person. I like a good salad any time of the year, fruits and veggies any time of the year. And hopefully starting this year, I can get busy with a lot of that. It may be done in bits and pieces, but that's what reclaiming this place is all about, getting it all done bit by bit.

What's great about moving everything back where it belongs this weekend is that it's also allowed me to do my spring cleaning. So cobwebs are swept down, the floors are swept up, and the place is beginning to feel like a home rather than like a motel room. I am once again comfortable, content, and enjoying things here. And to top it off, a couple of weeks ago, I hit my one year at the plant and turned in my vacation hours for the money. Who needs days off when I can take the money and run?

Which leads to what I spent much of it on, lol. I want a new laptop, but considering my cellphone got stolen a few weeks back from my lunchbag at work, I opted for a new cheapo StraightTalk phone. It's going to become not only my phone, but used for the farm business stuff as well. I got myself a computer item, though, in the form of a zippered messenger bag to hold my laptop. It'll come in handy for all my trips to McDonald's on Sundays, until I can get things going on for internet at home again. And finally, I got myself one of the things I wanted from my fresh season checks that I didn't get due to circumstances at the time ... my little 8" battery-operated Black & Decker chainsaw! It's kind of cute, if such a tool can be cute. I prefer hand tools, but with as much small brush and trees and such as there is to clear up around here, a small chainsaw will come in awful handy for getting it down and cut up. My handsaw works really well, but it's slow going. With my new little "toy", I can get three or four times as much done in the same amount of time at the very least, which means the place will get cleaned up in no time flat compared to the progress that's been ongoing.

Another project I worked on this last week was that nasty old tool shed that had a tree dropped on it. Some of the tree had been cut off it before, so people could get back to the other trailers, but the shed was so mangled, there was no hope of ever being able to put it back together for use. So when I got off work at 1PM Thursday, and got home, I changed clothes, grabbed my Carhartt gloves and a phillips head screwdriver, went out and kicked it into high gear. Sadly, the screws are all really short and mostly got lost in the leaves and such on the ground, but other than the base frame, one side, and half the back, I got the rest of it all apart in about two hours. The one side that's still left requires me to take the loppers out first and push it back down on the ground so I can cut away all the blackberry brambles that have grown up around and into it before I can get at the screws, unless I really enjoy the idea of getting sliced up by the briers. (I don't.) So a couple more hours of work, and then it's out with the tin snips to cut things to pieces that will fit in the car, and another small load of scrap metal is off to the scrap yard. Yay me!

Let's see ... I also had a friend help me get a bunch more scrap off the place, including that nasty fridge that had once been in the house. It only brought about US$40, but it paid for his gas and got us lunch, and it cleared up a small chunk of the yard around the deck. Though, of course, it reveals even MORE trash there that has to get cleaned up. Such is life around here, but there's a lot less of the junk than there was, anyhow!

So here it is around 530 PM on Saturday night and I'm heading to the kitchen to fix me some dinner, and then I'm going to goof off on a computer game or knit or something before heading to beddy-bye. I've had a very busy week, and today was really, REALLY busy, and it's time for me to get more things done. Till next weekend!

Addendum:

Whilst doing my weekly blog catch up on my three favorite blogs (Yarn Harlot, LawDogFiles, and TYWKIWDBI), the last one had a good post right at the top of the page about a Pop Tart gun incident at a school in Anne Arundel County, as well as a reaction from a Chicago-area church over the incident. You can read the blog post here. Minnesotan has some links to things involved in the story there, and it's a good read. As a staunch supporter of the US Constitution and Bill of Rights, to see a Second Amendment post where a church has such a strong reaction to the school's serious silliness amazes me and gives me a small bit of hope that there are still some people in the world who aren't completely nuts.