A good week for me!

This has been an extremely good week, despite some crazy weather and a spring cold. My sinuses have been draining like mad all week, and are finally drying up, thank goodness. I like breathing for some reason. *grin* The weather overall hasn't been horrible, but there was a bad cold snap the other night where temps got down to freezing again. BRRR! Made for a cold drive to work the next morning!

Speaking of work, there's something in the work's to fix the problem of not making enough to survive as easily as I'd like on what I'm making right now, but I don't want to talk about it and spoil the possibilities. I'll tell all the juicy details if things work out as I hope they will.

Around here, I've gotten a lot done. Had some help to get one good-sized tree down near the midden heap, because it's in the way of where I want the chicken coop to go. It's all trimmed up and part of the main trunk was cut to logs by my neighbor/buddy who helps in exchange for homemade cookies. This week's "payment" was peanut butter with peanut butter chips and Reeses Pieces in them. Yummy. I do love to bake, and I'll be glad when things get far enough along that I have a propane pig up here for a real stove/oven and an on-demand water heater. Course, that means having the water to a point that I have a deep-well pump installed for the water heater. I can do just the stove for a start, with a shutoff and a stub off the main pipe to later add on the water heater. I think these things out, because I know it's not always  good idea to go for the whole thing right off. All my projects have to be done in bits and pieces.

Which reminds me, the Merlot started getting torn to pieces this week, too. One end has had a good chunk of the siding taken off, and while I'd love to save the insulation and paneling and studs and all for rebuilding into a chicken coop ... it's going to mostly get burnt in the burn pit. It's all too degraded and brittle, and the studs have some serious dry rot, the insulation has some mold (yes, I'm wearing a mask working on the thing, mold is nasty stuff to deal with), and the paneling is just plain nasty. So it's going to get scrapped as much as possible and the rest burnt to get rid of it. I also got a lead from the metal scrapyard in Harrison where I take my scrap, about a place near them that might take all the broken glass around here off my hands. If so, it's a few more bucks if they'll pay for it. If not, it's not that far out of the way to dump on them when on a regular scrap run. I need to call them Monday, because I didn't get home from errands early enough today to look up the number and call them before they closed.

I also spent some time burning some brush and a lot of those blackberry brambles that didn't set fruit last summer. The ones I cut down are the bunch alongside the house behind the deck. There isn't as much there as I thought there was, because most of the canes are around twenty or so feet long and just arch up and over all over the place. They're so long and have been let go for so many years, the ends of the canes have tipped over and started rooting to make new canes. Yeesh. There's a ton of dead canes in there that just add bulk. They come out pretty easily but good night there is a LOT of that stuff. So about  half of the stuff is gone now, cut down and hauled off to the burn pit and lit off. WHOOSH. Nothing like burning a bunch of green scrub and watching it go up in smoke. I'm beginning to become a bit of pyromaniac when it comes to clearing this place up.

As I write, the trees are greening up, what grass there is is green and growing, and the wildlife is doing well. The birds are singing "my tree!" all day long, I've seen salamanders/geckos and rabbits and mice and SKWIRLS!!!! all over the place. The boys really aren't too happy with the skwirls. They'd like to go catch them, especially Bouncer, but the little furry buggers just sit there outside the window and scold the kitties for even thinking such a thing as coming outside to chase them. I'm not sure what's funnier, the cat's expressions when the skwirls are scolding them, or the skwirls sitting on the stair rail chattering in the front window. The place is starting to look better with every little bit that's done to clean it up, and I find myself often waking up to wonder what the weather will be when I get home from work so I can see about getting outside and getting something done, no matter what I decide my project of the day is.

I tend to skip around between three projects, cutting down trees and scrub brush and brambles and getting them burnt or in the woodpile, clearing up the nasty trash all over the place (including picking up all the scrap metal and chucking it in one of the trash cans I keep around for that purpose), or tearing apart the Merlot. I love working on all of them, and I skip around to keep from getting bored on any one project, so things get looking better in spotty activity, but the spots tend to be about 25 to 30 square feet at a stretch for a day's work on things, which with work and errands and getting email and the little grocery shopping I have to do all meaning I get anywhere from an hour to three hours a day to work around here. I halfway joke that I have two jobs - the one that gives me a paycheck and the farm, and truthfully, with as many hours as I put in here to get things cleared up and ready to do what I want, it is a second, part-time, job. It just doesn't give me a paycheck yet.

And even evenings when it's dark don't get wasted. Between knitting myself socks, crocheting yet another afghan, and working on my doll clothes patterns that I'll eventually be putting on Ravelry to sell (and hopefully on a webstore one of these days), I'm busy then, too. This past week, I spent time on the computer putting together a spreadsheet for all my seed catalogs. Basically, I went through and found all the things I'd LIKE to have, and made some notes in the spreadsheet about price and supplier and such, then sorted it out by the different things (like all the varieties of corn sorted together, and so forth), and deleted the ones that were duplicates with the higher prices. Turns out that my favorite place is, as always, a perennial favorite, Pinetree Garden Seeds. There's several places that will get some business, but a few catalogs just got tossed into the burn pile because I didn't have anything that I wanted from them that I couldn't get somewhere else for less. I'm NOT that interested in paying $3.50 or more for a teeny packet of seeds. Most of what I'm going for is heirloom, or at least open-pollinated.

I feel glad that I found an open-pollinated Acorn Squash, as I love Acorn. It's called Ebony Acorn, and comes from Kitchen Garden Seeds. And I found that summer squash I was looking for from overseas, and it turns out it's a Lebanese heirloom called Coosa. There are some other heirlooms I want to get to try, like a brown slicing cucumber called Brown Russian and a melon called Collective Farm Woman, both being Ukranian heirlooms offered by Cooks Garden. Surprisingly, I found Ghost Chili seeds, aka Bhut Jolokia, from Territorial Seeds. I don't eat hot peppers but this area has a good chunk of hot pepper lovers, not the least being the Hispanic and Marshallese people that come to the area for work. Bhut Jolokia peppers are 300 times hotter than a jalapeno, and earned a spot in the 2007 Guiness Book of World Records as the worlds hottest pepper on the Scoville scale. So just for yucks, I want to grow some and see if they'll sell at the farmer's markets around here. There've just gotta be some people who watch various shows on the food network and travel channel (like Man vs. Food), and who try to delude themselves that the things just CAN'T be all that hot, and they just gotta try 'em. Heehee. I'm mean, I am.

So that's it for this week's news. See you next weekend!