Visions of Spring

The sun had finally broken through the clouds this week and spring is on everybody's mind. The raised beds we made last year had to go into the ground sometime and this seemed like a good one. The ground was moist more than a foot down, which is where we had to dig the holes for the bottom anchoring posts on the beds, and made it very easy to get them in the ground. We just got the last two beds down today and my green thumb is itching. We've already ordered all the seeds we'll need to plant a huge garden since some will have to be started pretty soon. Growing in our garden this year will be peas, carrots, pumpkins, garlic, onions, leeks, squash, potatoes, peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini, watermelon, cantaloupe, broccoli, cauliflower, strawberries and different kinds of lettuce. Since we already have 50 chickens supplying us with fresh eggs I only need my Jersey cow, goats, sheep and a donkey to complete our small farm! I would love to make more cheeses but just can't find the time (I don't know why ;). We'll be overflowing with vegetables when harvest comes around, but we plan on canning some things, pickling others and just letting anyone who wants the extras come and pick some yummy veggies.

February Blahs

So it's February in the Pacific Northwest, which means rain, clouds and more rain. Everyone is begging for the sun to peak through the constant clouds we have had since December it seems. Once a day the sun comes out for about a half hour, usually while you are at work and you look out the window and plan all the things you are going to do when you get home because the sun is out, but by the time you get off of work it's raining again. You start to personify your pets to the point that they seem like better friends than any human being and that's mostly because you have a severe case of cabin fever and are close to being a hermit. We have had two such visitors to at our home that aren't exactly pets but are pretty close. The first is a pheasant that made his home in a spruce tree in our backyard this fall and has been around all winter. We named him Philip and have been feeding him and all the other wintering birds from a bowl on the back porch. He is terribly tame and not very skittish so you can walk right by him and he'll just look at you like you are a pedestrian passing his porch. We've even seen him in the open chicken yard a time or two. Our other visitor is also a customer of our seed bowl on the porch and that is Chester the mouse. He enjoys the seed and especially appreciates Philip knocking the bowl on it's side so that he can feel safe while he's eating and make a quick get away when someone with a camera shows up. Philip knocks the bowl over when, after he spends too much time conversing with the house finches, sees them sitting on the sides of the bowl, taking their time in the middle. He tries sitting on the side too, because it looks like such fun, but ends up tipping it. He feels pretty embarrassed after this and goes and sulks in his spruce tree. As you can see we here have some major cabin fever.

To break out of our hermit shells I convinced Mom to drive over to Tacoma this weekend to go to the Madrona Winter Fiber Art Retreat, not to take any classes (though they looked like fun) but to go to the Fiber Market Place. We drove over on Saturday and stopped at the North Bend outlet mall, because being from the east-side you have to do that sort of stuff. We made it to the market around 2 or 3 PM and it was raining buckets. We sort of wandered aimlessly in the beginning and then I told Mom that she could have an allowance as part of her birthday present. The wandering became more intent and we first bought some hand dyed roving to spin into some fabulous thread. Then she saw a bunch of very beautiful colors of yarn and picked three of those. We discussed how we should have brought some patterns so that we would buy yarn with purpose, rather than the skeins and skeins we have laying around with no pattern to go to and not enough to make much of anything with. We saw a booth with some beautiful shawl pins and I mentioned how that always sounded like something I wanted to wear some time, a shawl with a shawl pin. So that got us really on a roll and we went and found a pattern for a lovely shawl, then bought enough yarn to make it and went back and got some shawl pins to match. It was a lot of fun. My shawl will be made out of the blue yarn on the left and Mom's is the violet variegated yarn on the right. Then for her birthday (thought it's not until this Friday) I took Mom to the Cheesecake Factory, which is one of her favorites. It was quite a wait for a table and I heard somebody mention something about Valentine's Day, but it is always that full when we go. We had a delicious meal and shared a pineapple upside down cheesecake. Yum yum.

And I am blogging on my new netbook! He was so cute sitting there at Best Buy on sale because nobody wanted him cause he is pink. I named him Arnold the Pygmy Puff because it seemed appropriate.