We’re hanging in there, are you?

I am starting the day with coffee today. I have cut back drastically on my coffee. For a few months I was drinking half to one pot per day. Before lunch. With cream and sugar. I have found I can get the same energy from orange juice so I do that a few days each week and the coffee once or twice each week. Luckily I didn’t have much of a reaction from the lack of caffine.

I have so many pictures stored up and so many posts in my head but I am completely deadline driven at the moment. I signed a contract to write a short book about water storage for household and emergency use that is due at the end of August. About a day later I was contacted about my proposal for a brief history of my home town. Accepted, and could I have it ready by mid-August? The two projects total are only 100,000 words so it’s not out of the realm of possibility to get it done, in fact I typed (wrote?) 3,000 words on one of them just yesterday. Juggling the two projects along with my 20 hour per week gig and trying to pitch a few other stories here and there is challenging though. Not to mention keeping up with the garden and all of its oddities (things happen, I don’t know why so I end up interneting to try and figure out if I need to be worried!) and not totally ignoring the dog and I am keeping relatively busy. I think the crock-pot will be my friend this summer.

In two weeks we will go on vacation for a week or so down to the Gulf coast in Alabama. I have gotten our first few campgrounds reserved and that is probably all the planning I will get to do. I do know we will be stopping for a short jaunt in New Orleans (I’ve never been) so I put Cafe Du Monde at the top of my list of things to see with beignets and cafe au lait. There are several things in my book of 1,000 Place to See Before You Die in the USA and Canada in the general area we will be in so we will probably try and mark a few off the list. We got four or five of them in Colorado last summer so it will be fun to add a few more. It’s a nice travel journal of sorts. If we visit a place, I make a few notes in the margins along with the date we were there.

Last weekend I went to a basic class about raising chickens. I think chickens will definitely be in our future. Robert wants to make sure we build the shed first, so the plan is to build the shed after vacation and into July and as soon as it is done get the chickens. Well, after we build the coop. I think we will start small with only a few chickens. Unless of course I find out that the local processor will take care of some of them for us for a reasonable price, then we will order 25, raise them all for 6 or 8 weeks and send most of the boys off to Trenton to be ready for the freezer. That I can handle. Doing it ourselves? Not so much. But, we do want to avoid the $64 tomato phenomenon with our little homestead adventures.

I am trying to make sure I put aside money each time I get paid for “projects.” Things like chickens, blueberry bushes, fruit trees, all the cool stuff I want to do for our little bit of land. Robert is much more supportive of my schemes if I have some funds to back them up!

Okay, back to work. And in case you’re wondering, that’s my Texas mug in the picture. It holds probably three 8 oz. cups of coffee at once and has all sorts of Texas-isms on it. My favorite? “You can all go to hell and I’ll go to Texas.” said by Davy Crockett. 🙂 The mug is from our vacation to Fort Worth.