Feb 2010 tally-ho

The chickens produced 14.6 lbs for the month of February. Since the garden isn't producing that is the grand total of produce for the month. The yearly amount is 23.6 pounds.

baby plants

Here are my little baby plants just starting to grow. I have them indoors under gro-lights. They are doing great. You're looking at Chinese cabbage, regular cabbage, broccoli and cauliflower. I also am growing onions from seed and cilantro. It feels good to have something green growing even though it is still COLD outside. I've already clipped off the excess cilantro and used it in a curry dish. YUM!

sock monkeys

DD #3 has always loved monkeys. I made her a sock monkey when she was little and it was lost years ago. She was reminiscing about her old monkeys and I decided to make her a new one. OK, I got carried away and made a little family. For those of you who have never done this before it is extremely forgiving sewing and turns out adorable even if you aren't that great a seamstress. Not like the bride's maid dress I'm working on.... but that's another story.

so awesome

Sometimes someone gives you a gift that defies words. My visiting teacher gave this to me. It reminds me of "bride of chuckie." All those hair thingies are candy. The head is permanently glued to the glass bottle. Which means you can't eat the candy in the jar. The hair candy is stuck into the Styrofoam head with straight pins. This was made as a fund raiser. They obviously expected people to pay money for this. My daughters wanted me to keep it in a prominent place in the living room.

Job

DH got a job!!!!! I may really enjoy doing all my simple living stuff but we still need to have money to pay for electricity and buy car gas. It's not like we're willing to be THAT simple. Besides he wants to work. It's been hard for him not to have one. He's really happy. He'll be working at the exact sort of job he wanted-- medical/surgery at a big hospital.

job interviews

DH had several job interviews this past week. All of which he'd be willing to work at, but is especially hopeful on one of them. This should be an interesting week. I'm sure he'll have a decision to make by the end of the week (or will be having to make the decision by the end of the week).

I want to go where the Lord wants us to go. If He wants us here in St. Louis I'm happy to stay here, if He wants us to move to a new area I'm good with that. I want to go where He wants us to go. If He left it all up to us we'd stay here. Financially it would be a good idea to stay here because we have some recuperating to do!

As a result of not knowing if we'll be staying here in St. Louis or whether we'll be moving I'm having trouble getting up the oomph to start my little plants. I guess I just need to do it. If we do move I'll move the plants, too. Still it's hard to get going on it with everything up in the air.

zumba

We're having so much fun!!! This isn't our church zumba class (we dress more modestly) but this is exactly what we're doing. K~P~, a member in the ward, is a zumba instructor and she offered to lead a class once a week. She's from Columbia and she can do things with her hips that don't work on a 50 year old Scandinavian body. But it sure is fun.

work, or a lack there of

Out of work. That's us these days. DH is looking for a job (and I've never seen anyone work harder at looking for work). He even applied to be a substitute teacher. Boy, did I hate that job. We're doing ok. We still have a financial cushion to fall back on while he's job hunting. Because we live in a small, fairly inexpensive house and were able to pay it off in half the time (and that took A LOT of discipline) and we only have one car and we live fairly simply, because of all those things we are doing ok. We could survive for over a year without a job if we had to (I sure hope we don't have to). It does make me think of all those years that I wanted (and still want) to move to a nicer neighborhood, a nicer home, a better school district. Because we are here DH could afford to quit his good-paying job (that he hated) and go to school to learn something he truly loves. During the time he was in school I could still stay at home and even start my own little business. All the while we have three kids in college. I sure am glad we stayed here in this little house, in this low-class neighborhood, and stuck it out with this school district.

Jan 2010 tally-ho

The total for produce from the garden (ok, it was just eggs this month, but .... ) is 8.9 pounds. They're done with molting and the sun is shining more, their egg production is starting to increase. I'm getting about four eggs a day.

I'm really looking forward to the garden this year. I really want to figure out how to get more tomatoes from my own garden. I've always grown them but some years I get tons and some years it is pretty piddly. I'm inspired by the amount of food others are getting from their gardens.

Eating from our own land is so basic to what I want to be able to do. Since we live on a small suburban plot of land I'm going to farm it as best as I can. I've wanted a small farm since I was a kid. I read way too much Laura Ingalls Wilder and then, as a teenager, I discovered Carla Emery's Encyclopedia of Country Living (both of which are still in print BTW). I've always wanted that sort of life. I'm 50 now and still do not have anything approaching a small farm. On the other hand I doubt I could handle a small farm. No one else in the family feels the drive for simple living the way I do. So I've been given this plot of yard and I'm turning it into a farm. It's past small, it's micro. And it's about as much land as I can handle on my own. We get amazing amounts of food off of it. I'm hoping to vastly exceed my "tally-ho" totals from 2009. If the apple trees produce the poundage will go way up. Some years they produce bushels and bushels. Last year we got four (apples, not bushels, four apples, period). Even if the apple trees don't produce wildly I want to grow a lot more from the yard this year. It's a fun battle-- how to get more food out of the yard each year.