Nanowrimo is Eating My Brain! (Ongoing)

I must be in the midst of Nanowrimo because:

Today I subsisted on peanut butter and marionberry jam sandwiches and peach turnovers.
While I worked on fixing up the chicken coop, I plotted my next move in my novel.
While I stabilized the fuel in our lawnmowers, I plotted my next move in my novel.
While I put tarps over our pickup truck and the shelving next to the shed, I plotted my next move in my novel.
While I talked with my DH on the phone, we discussed how close we are to be able to subsist on our writing, so that I can write full time.
We also discussed upcoming literary conventions.

And now that it's getting dark outside and I've gotten most of my outside chores done:

I restarted my computer because it was moving too slowly and backed up my novel.
Put dinner in the oven, a ham and sweet potatoes, because they're quick to put in, low maintenance and I can let them roast while I do other stuff (write)
And last but not least, I decided I'd better blog, and what better to blog about than how Nanowrimo has eaten my brain!

I have one more day off before I return to my job tomorrow. It's the perfect storm for (possibly) reaching 50,000 words before the end of the week.

Oh, and eek, I'd better get my garbage out tonight. Don't want to interrupt my early morning writing session, my most productive of the day, by having to go take the garbage to the curb before the collectors show up.

Happy writing, all!

Stuff

Lately I've been feeling exhausted and overwhelmed, not only because of work, although that contributes, or because I also have too many projects in various stages of completion, which of course doesn't help either, but because I have too much stuff to track and maintain and organize. I feel a strong desire to downsize, not so much in the direction of a smaller house, but in terms of unloading things that I don't want or use anymore.

Some of the stuff we have around the house is garbage. It's useless, not just to us, but to anyone really. Some of the things I have in my office are so dirty or water damaged or bug/mouse/creepything infested or stained by the leavings of those things that I don't even want to touch them. Motivating myself to go through those things, especially because I'll want to try to clean/repair/rescue some of those things is tough. The last thing I want to do after a long day at work, or even worse, on my weekend, is wrestle with giant spiders and dust mouse droppings off of something that had once been precious to me.

It's too dry to have a paperwork burning. That's one of my favorite forms of purging mess, is to sort through boxes or bags of paperwork that I didn't feel comfortable just chucking into the recycling bin. It's easy with no guilt and very little desire to retain/rescue individual pages, but it's time consuming. Anyway, since I can't really do my favorite garbage-ridding, I'm looking for ways to downsize the rest of our accumulation.

Donation is easy and convenient for those things we don't want or need anymore. We have a Goodwill station right by the grocery store. But I sometimes wonder if I might be able to get some actual cash money for some of our items.

Unfortunately, a lot of that non-useful-to-us stuff really needs to be cleaned up and organized, and then what? We're a bit too far out to have a garage sale. Ebay would require a big learning curve, and a friend of ours let us know that it can be quite time consuming without any guarantee of making back enough money to offset the time you spend on it, never mind get what the item is actually worth.

So, I'm debating what to tackle in what room, to what extent, and when, and while I debate, of course no progress is being made. Still, it's on my radar. I now that having less stuff will help reduce my stress level and give us less housework overall. When I look at homes that look nice, they tend to have very, very little clutter and almost no stuff in each given room. That would be full of awesome.

As long as I don't have to sacrifice any books. Clearly what we need are more bookshelves. Which technically are stuff, but ... not, right?

Ugh. Stuff. Too much stuff!

Junk

I tried to find something today. It was a fairly important thing that at the time I thought we would need today, ASAP.  Turned out that we didn't, but, I spent about an hour looking for it.

I found:

Boxes of paperwork intended for burning.
Spiderwebs larger than my head.
Enough dust bunnies that they could probably be felted into a fine and substantial hat.
Old CDs I'd burned for bellydance classes that I haven't held in many years.
That although the floor had been recently swept in my office, there was enough accumulated cat litter tracked out of the cat box now that it's extremely unpleasant to walk in there barefooted.
Paycheck stubs from years ago waiting to be filed, along with a huge stack of other to-be-filed material.
That we have an impressive colony of the spiders I loathe and fear the most in our downstairs.

And much, much more.

I'm inspired to get some of this stuff organized, cleaned out, and whatever is junk, thrown away. I would also like the spiders to magically disappear as if they've never existed, and I will pretend that they were all nicely let outside where they belong and will lead their happy, long, creepy spider lives elsewhere.

And I would really, really like to find the disk we were looking for. We found the box, the instructions, the legalese ... but not the disk. Argh. We don't need it, but in case we do, I don't want to search through all that junk again.

Because, seriously. That was scary, and gross.

Review: The FURminator: My Hero

Not that long ago I had lunch with a writer friend of mine, and we got to talking about my ten thousand animals.  She suggested that I use a furminator on our dogs to help strip out their winter coats and help prevent mats that might form too close to the skin and eventually cause serious sores.  She used a big one on her horses, and extolled the virtues of the might furminator to me while we had salad.  I was intrigued, but her description of the price tag made me flinch and file it under the category of pipe dream/luxury item.  I was under the impression it was an electric thingy, too, for whatever reason, and decided that I'd just shave the dogs if needed.

Then yesterday I ran into a friend of mine at Petco and she recommended it too (she uses a small one on her cats) so I caved and looked at them.  They're not electric.  I got a medium one for long-haired dogs for my dogs.  I'm glad I didn't get the large one partly because of the extra money, and partly because although it might have been worth it on the big sections, the larger comb would have made it harder to work on their legs and stuff.  And I was happy that it wasn't as expensive as the one my friend used on her horses.  Size makes the difference, it turns out.

Finn had way more undercoat than I realized he had.  Working with the regular undercoat puller I use, I would have cleaned up his hindquarters in a few minutes and considered my work done.  But running the furminator over his supposedly-clean back was enlightening.  Yikes.   I pulled almost as much undercoat off of him as I did Brian, Brian the Fluff Generator, Brian the Puffy Source of Endless Hair, Brian the ... you get the idea.  

For full-time (or in our case, mostly full-time) outdoor animals, pulling out the undercoat isn't just a matter of neatness or appearance.  Those old undercoats hold a lot of dirt, and way too much insulation value for our increasingly warm temperatures.  I'm really glad I helped Finn rid himself of it before August. Heck, if I hadn't pulled it, it might have hung around until his winter coat came in and shoved it off within reach of our normal brushes, and by then the dogs would have been dangerously filthy, even with baths.  It's just too hard to wash that stuff out, even using the awesome rubber brush to help work the suds in down toward the skin.  

Brian had some mats in his fur that I buzzed off so that I could save him some tugging prior to using the tool.  He hates having his mats pulled.  (So far I haven't let them go so long that they end up matted close to the skin but they are clingy ...)  It turns out that I shouldn't have buzzed them after all.  The furminator pulled out the remaining smaller mats very easily and Brian never gave me the 'owie mommy' look he does so often when I'm using a standard undercoat puller.  I ended up not shaving much around his seat and pulled the mats with just the furminator with no trouble at all.  It's kewl, though.  His tail looks a little funny right now, but he'll be fully feathered in no time.

Getting that undercoat out turned out to be especially gratifying in Brian's case.  Both dogs had dirty undercoats, but Brian's hair is a different consistency than Finn's more labrador retriever-like fur.  The dirty undercoat pulled free of his guard hairs and an almost pristine white summer undercoat.  It was almost as good as giving him a bath.  Combing with a nice bath, he'll be in excellent shape to endure the heat we'll most likely experience in August.  These dogs do really well in very cold temperatures, but tend to suffer in anything over 75 degrees F.  The last two years I've taken Brian to get shaved, and this year I planned to shave him myself (after buying a spacer--the one I like to use on him broke) but now I wonder if it might not be unnecessary.  I think just keeping him groomed, and taking him to the river on 90+ degree days, will be sufficient.

The girl sat down and (very gently) furminated Wizard, our big, fat, very happy and formerly feral tiger tabby shorthair cat.  He loved it.  As an experiment I ran a nice cat brush over him.  We didn't get much.  We ran the furminator over it and pulled lots of undercoat and dander along with it.  They have small ones for cats, but I think that we'll use the one for our dogs on the cats as needed, being careful not to push because the teeth on the one we have are sized for long-haired dogs.

Furminators are expensive, but I think they're worth it.  Now that I have one, I don't see any reason to visit a groomer, which will pay back the worth of the comb by next summer, and that's for an ultra-minimalist grooming schedule (once a year.)  

One minor note about the instructions.  They suggest bathing your animal first and letting it fully dry before using the comb.  In our case, I think it makes more sense to use the comb as a kind of dry bath.  And then, when we get around to a big, wet, soapy bath, we won't have to try to clean old, wooly undercoat hair that shouldn't be there in the first place.  And that undercoat really hinders getting the soap down to the skin and makes rinsing that soap out much more difficult.  

Half of Brian's pile.  The rest is outside.  Bear in mind we brushed him last week to get the worst of it off.

Also, because they're pricy, I suggest that folks living within a budget to shop around and maybe investigate getting a used one if possible.  If you do get a used one, be sure to clean it thoroughly and disinfect it in case the animal it was used on had a transmittable disease.  I don't usually recommend a particular vendor, but in this case, Amazon has one of the best prices for new ones available.

I'm happy with the tool.  The dogs enjoyed the attention, and are tons cleaner, lighter, and cooler.  Wins all around.

Update:  Carey is still not home.  We made some calls and put up ads on Craigslist.  We also left some fliers around town.  Keep your fingers crossed for us.  Thanks for your well-wishes.

Blood, Sweat and Seeds

When I got home I had two M&Ms cookies with a cone of whipped cream on top, and then I went to work.  You'd think after a full day at the day job I'd want to put my feet up, or maybe at least cook some dinner and watch a movie or something.

That would be far too sensible.

We had rain in the local forecast, and I remembered I had all these old seeds I hadn't gotten around to planting.  Bags and bags of them.  And I thought, I'll just scatter them around and the rain will soak them in and what comes up, comes up.

But of course it's never that simple.

First I planted some ancient marigold seeds out in the veggie garden, and then I checked out the area I had planned for my mass old seed dumping ground.  It's about sixty feet long and ten to twenty feet wide, depending on the section.  The kids had, as instructed, dug out the majority of the blackberry roots, so I figured I'd just toss the seeds on the bare ground and go inside and have dinner.  I grabbed a rake (big mistake) and went to break the crust on the soil.

Hard as a rock.  Seriously.  I felt so betrayed!  Normally the soil under blackberries is quite soft.  They form their own sort of (evil) duff that keeps the soil moist and suppresses weeds.  And a few of the areas were like that, but way too much of it felt like baked clay so hard that I understood why even the grass hadn't started to take root there (yet.)  First I debated attacking the areas with a hoe.  Couldn't find one.  Then I considered  a shovel.  Mind you, this is after work, and I knew it would get dark soon, and breaking up rock hard dirt with a shovel is no light, quick task.

The impending darkness settled it for me.  I would get the big rototiller.

One sweaty, sore, throat-sore-from-suppressed-cussing half-hour later I had the whole section tilled.  I scattered the seeds, keeping particular kinds more or less together, raked the now (mostly) soft dirt to roughly cover at least some of the seeds in case they needed to be covered to sprout, and went home.  I had just enough time to gather eggs from the coup and close the chickens in for the night before the dark swooped in.  I had to turn on lights when I came in so that I could find my way around the house.

So now I'm thinking (I'm crazy that way) that I'd just put a whole lot of work into seeding an area that may or may not have viable seeds scattered on it.  So sometime this week I'm going to do yet another ridiculous thing.  I'm going to get a bunch of fresh seeds of something tall, bomb-proof and pretty, like cosmos or baby's breath or bachelor buttons (or maybe all of the above), and mix it with a big bag of potting soil and scatter that around the area as well.

That should fix it up real nice.

And then I'll be done.

Except for putting in the tomatoes, peppers, eggplants and other stuff.

Oh, and I have a few more discounted bulbs to put in.

But then I'll be done.

Really.

Mostly done, anyway.

Bark Dust on the Race Track

Working around a farm: does it make you crazy, or are you crazy to begin with? Based on yesterday, I'd have to vote for number two, because I can't blame any animals (well, okay, one small dog) for my behavior yesterday.

Chase runs up and down along the fence, chasing cars every day. Hence her name. Her previous owner used to let her chase cars w/o the protection of a fenced yard to keep her from running under the tires or potentially getting hit by another car coming along as she retreats, dodges, whatever. It's amazing she survived.

But I digress.

Her happy-making activities have created what I refer to as the racetrack. It's a strip of mud about sixty feet long and 2-5 feet wide with rises at each end that swoop up against the fence. She made those swoops. Seriously. If it were shorter and fatter it would look like a skateboarder tube. That's how many times she's run along this track. She's done this enough that dirt she carries on her paws and dirt she scoots when she takes off from the corner has built up about a foot on each side.

That's a lot of running.

In wet weather she turns into a total mudball. Our other dogs remain pristine and dry by watching the rainy weather from the doghouse or the front porch, a total area that's larger than my living room and quite comfy if their behavior is any indication. Meanwhile the little idio--Chase--is out in the rain running up and down this track, getting soaked and filthy. Which results, eventually, in a bath. She gets more baths than any other animal.

I thought, in order to help her out a bit, it might be nice to cover this track in bark chunks. (Actually, all my life we've called it bark dust. Why dust? I don't know! I don't make up the local slang.) The truck broke down on the way back home (of course) and it had to be towed to our house and very inconveniently placed because the tow truck had bald tires and couldn't make it straight out past the barn.

It was an interesting night.

Anyway, we had two short days of sun, and because of the tow truck drama I wasn't able to unload the bark dust on the first day. No problem! I'll just unload it after work on the second day, because I know it'll rain the following day and we all hate working in the rain, plus Chase would turn into a mudball again before we got it out.

So my very patient daughter and I jumped out of the car as soon as we got home and grabbed the shovels and the wheelbarrow. I quickly change into my should-have-been-work-jeans-but-became-waiting-for-the-tow-truck-pants and we start hauling bark dust to the racetrack. It's already getting dark but I'm sure I can see just fine. For the first two loads. Then it gets kind of iffy. I memorize where all the branches are so that I don't poke my eye out on a tree. My daughter is raking in the dark. I ask her to spread it as evenly as she can up onto the swoops and she protests with a "I can't see a d-ed thing!" and I respond with "well, feel around with your hands and do your best."

That's when I realized I'm crazy. I mean, that's when I realized again that I'm crazy. And it's not Chase's fault.

But we got it done! The stars were beautiful.

Writing, dipped in chocolate

November is such a mess, it's a wonder I'm getting any writing done at all. But I keep on keeping on, and I think the reason has changed just a wee bit. Normally I write because I love writing. Now, writing is actually helping with my mental health.

My DH is being awesome on that front too. He's helping me focus on the right stuff instead of worrying in endless, useless circles. We're still making progress on the porch, and my office, and the house is starting to look spiffy. It's all good, though I have so much pressure from so many fronts--legal, work, social/volunteer, etc.--I'm starting to get stress symptoms. Bad dreams. Cranky tummy. Weird aches and pains.

Some of the stress will go away with Thanksgiving. The time pressure--too much to do, too little time--is not going to let up until December at the very earliest, and probably not until the bitter, cold end of December. So I have to identify and assess down time--what truly qualifies as down time, and what is the highest quality down time. For example, watching good movies really relaxes me, but that feeling doesn't last as long as when I garden.

Writing is turning out to be really high quality down time with long-reaching positive benefits. When I was writing full time, writing was work time. Really fun work time, but I had to organize stretching, snack breaks, running errands, doing housework, etc. around my BICFOK (Butt in Chair Fingers on Keyboard.) And I had to organize computer time around computer time--differentiating offline actual words on page vs. research, networking, communication, marketing, all that good stuff.

Now writing is a retreat. After a long stretch of writing, I have the energy to tackle other stuff. It's actually a subtle difference, because I always enter and then emerge from other worlds when I'm doing the novel thang. That stays the same. I guess it's one of those absence makes the heart grow fonder things. I don't take writing time for granted, therefore it feels more like a treat to be able to write. And I'm happy after I have my treat. It's as if writing suddenly got dipped in chocolate. It may also have possibly been dipped in nuts, but so far my flow still feels okay. I just hope it reads okay.

I'm looking forward to lots more treats tomorrow. I have a rare day off. Wee!

News of the blue&white, black&white, and green&white

The boy painted (nearly) the entire house!!

In other news, a story of mine got held-onto (again, still, or something like that) for final selection for a magazine.  It makes me happy.  I should know in a couple of months if the story will be in or out.

In the garden:

Autumn has arrived on the hill, announced not so much by leaf-fall, colors, or even the scent in the wind but by powdery mildew.  To fight this dastardly disease, you can spray, prune, or both.  (I recommend both, but prune at minimum.)  Removing diseased leaves not only helps slow the spread of the disease, but allows more airflow into the plant.  Powdery mildew likes moist, warm conditions to grow.  Pruning takes away some of the moisture.  Most people notice it on their squashes first, but keep an eye on those grapes.  Now is a fine time to reduce your grape canopy--before problems set in--to help protect your ripening grapes from all kinds of fungal problems.

Ex-Siding Developments

Our siding has some rotten places.

I discovered this when I prepped to paint.  I went up with caulking, started injecting ... and found that a few hand-sized places were essentially painted veneer with sponge-like wood underneath.  I stopped caulking immediately, realizing that I was basically trying to glue together sawdust under a thin coat of wood held together with paint.

After a lot of tapping and testing, we've found all the bad spots, so we'll replace the siding in those areas and paint them while we still have dry weather.  I'm disappointed that we won't have the painting done in time to beat the incoming wet weather, but that's okay.  Another dry spell will come along.  

Eventually.

I hope.

That's both dry and above freezing.

The good news is the vast majority of our siding is surprisingly sound.  Yay!  I'm looking forward to how the house will look when it's all done, and I'll sleep a little easier knowing that we'll be in good shape to weather the next long stretch of years.  All in all, the house really is getting into really good shape.  When I look back at how it was, both home and property, and how it is now, I'm amazed.  

It's hard to realize how far we've come when I discover a problem like this, until I start to think about how major some of our problems were (like my office flooding) compared to what they are now (a little bit of rot that will only take a few hours to deal with.)

I think we're going to be more than okay.  I think this house is turning out great.

Painting ... the House

Normally when I say I'm painting, I mean on canvas or watercolor paper.  This time it's the exterior of our house.

But you know, the finesse-stuff is kinda all the same.  Sure, I'm not going to put a mural on the side of the house or anything (though I'm tempted to put up the occasional 1/4" ladybug here and there like little physical Easter eggs) but paying attention to brush stroke and line is still the same.  The main thing that's different is structure.  I don't have to worry too much about the canvas/paper/ground on a painting.  Prepping surfaces like that for the main event is really pretty easy.  On the house, we have to wash, and scrape off flaking paint, and fill in those little holes that bugs occasionally make in siding.  

It's looking really nice.  I like it, anyway.  And it feels like a familiar task, even though I've never done it.  Sure, I've done the inside walls, but never the outside except for some trim touching-up I did at our prior home.  I'm comfortable with this work, like I've done it a lot.

By the end, I will have done it a lot, I guess.  It's a big house.  Maybe when I'm done, we'll have a grand re-opening or something.  Toast the accomplishment.  Speaking of which, here's a big thank you to my son, who has done most of the work this time.  Did I just say most? you ask.  Yep.  I've had to work, and he's taken up the brush and roller in my place.  Thanks, kiddo.  I very literally couldn't have done this without you, especially with the rainy season looming.

Yay boy, yay painting, yay new-looking house.

The Business of Work

The house has been needing an overhaul for a long time, and we've finally been able to put some serious work into it.  The boy is prepping my office for reconstruction. I've been refinishing some of our badly-neglected woodwork like the window seat and windowsills.  The girl and my DH are keeping the rest of the chores up while this happens.

I've been trying to introduce the boy to the concept of an eight hour work day.  He hasn't gotten it yet.  Fortunately, I've got three days off in a row next week, so I'll be able to supervise more realistically--letting him know when his breaks and lunch fit in, helping him stay on task without needing a step-by-step breakdown, helping him learn how to be self-directive and learning to pay attention to details.  He's already getting better.  Areas I've asked him to clean out have needed only a little touch-up.  Only one spot really needed serious work after he'd cleaned it, but that was only because he didn't listen to instructions (using chemicals instead of clean water to prep an area for refinishing, so I had to wash it again.)

He's growing up fast, and I think he'll start to realize his own progress and grow even faster when he learns how to learn.  

This is a really rewarding time to be a parent.  I'd like to take pride in creating a functional human being, but I can't take credit for very much except some rudimentary teaching, but even that ... in so many ways, he's created himself.  I just gave him a few materials, and away he went.  

If only the house could clean itself over time ... hmm.  That gives me a story idea.

Long days, and darkness comes sooner

We had a big day today, the boy, the girl and I.  At the end it doesn't seem like that much, but we're all pooped.  We barely got through it all--as the season turns the days grow noticeably shorter.  It already smells like autumn.

We got a shovel, bought three automotive belts on two trips (and returned two,) got a toilet part, and a shovel.

We installed the correct belt (finally) on the rototiller so that I could prep for leeks and kohlrabi (I know, I know, I'm about a month late.)  I managed to condition soil in a 20'x20' plot, which is a nice start, before it got too dark to work.  

I got the part into the toilet so that we'll have no more ghost flushes several times an hour.  Ah, silence.

And the boy and I cut down a not-insubstantial tree, both to thin our woods (for health, the tree was sick) and for firewood.  I'll mark more trees for thinning/firewood sometime in the next few days, with strict instructions not to cut them down w/o my supervision (with cell phone in hand in case there's an accident.)  One that I'm hesitating on has dead tips of branches all over it and dropped all around it on the ground, but it appears to be recovering.  It's a very nice-sized tree, so I would hate to lose it, but if in infects the others, well, I'll be a lot more sad.  I'll try to discover what ails it, but these things are notoriously tough to do.

Tomorrow will be another long day of hard labor, and then in the evening, writing!  But now, to bed, and my half-hour of reading.  My latest book:  How Not to Write a Novel.  I borrowed it from the library, and I'm really looking forward to reading it.

Roof? Woof.

The boy and I climbed the ladder onto the roof and surveyed the job.  Didn't look so bad, and we didn't have to do the south-facing side.  If it were inside the house, it would take maybe an hour to sweep and mop.

And so we began to sweep, and scrub, and discovered the joy that is moss on the roof.

It smells like fish, even when it's dry.  Okay, maybe fish isn't quite right.  Fishy, though, like algae, like the ocean but sans the salt.  It likes to cling tightly to roofing material, which, by the way, is hot in the sun.  Really hot.  As in I couldn't sit on my ass in a new spot without feeling the burn.  But I had to sit sometimes.  Our roof has two levels and I had to get under things and scrape stuff.  Some of it just rolled and bounced off the roof like a lopsided ball, while other bits were more lively and gripped hard.  Those I had to take on with a scrub brush or sometimes, gently, with a screwdriver.

Two days later ...

After work I made some dinner.  While I cooked the boy came into the kitchen and announced that he's finished the last section.  I leap with joy, I heap on the praise, and then remind him that we still have to clean the gutters.

What?

Oh yes, it's time to get back on the roof again.  This time we were on our bellies with our bare arms on the rough, scratchy stuff scraping out handfuls of debris.  It only takes about a half hour, though, and then we rinse.

We climbed down the ladder and surveyed our handiwork.  Ah, the happiness of success and a job well done.

Only now the front of the gutters looks really dirty by comparison, and I notice the paint around the eaves needs to be redone.

It's the curse of a housewife's eye.  Do people really wonder how honey-do lists come to be?  But I'm a working lass now, so I'm free to ignore it for now so I can go earn a paycheck.

Cooped up ... outside?

As is typical in summer, I got up early and started working outside.  Normally I take a mid-day break, but I really wanted to get the chicken coop done.  I don't know how many lemon-lime seltzer waters I went through.  A lot.  I ran through my 10 hour iPod speaker battery, and kept going.  

At dusk, all I had left to do was hang the big 'man' door (the lilac thing laying on its side in the foreground) and the chicken wire enclosure that will give them room to run outside without being endangered by predators.  They'll have access to the goat pasture during the day, but I want them locked up tight at night.  Just hoping to prevent another massacre by marauding raccoons.

The idea of catching them all and putting them back up in the greenhouse appalled me.  So, as darkness began to encroach on the land, I tacked on a wire screen (the area that appears to be a hole with faint green lines) above the tall threshold, and above the wire I put a spare piece of plywood.

That should keep them snug tonight.

I've heard a couple of clucks here and there, in addition to the peeps.  Aw, they're all growing up and learning to P'kaw!

Tomorrow, I hope to stain the coop, put on the galvanized roof, and maybe hang the door (though that's a pain to do alone--the boy is strictly an indoor kitty while he finishes a course of antibiotics prescribed for some very nasty spider bites, and my DH and the girl will be gone for most of the day tomorrow.)  After that, we just have to finish the mini-chicken run, and we're done!  Weeee!

Not a moment too soon.  Writing just in the evenings isn't very productive, and the house looks terrible.  I also have a ton of weeding to do.  Argh!  

There's never anything to do around here ....

Not Cold and Wet ... For Now

Where have I been?  Oh, I've been lazing about, eating bon bons, listening to Queen and singing along when they get to all my favorite parts in their songs.  You know.  Stare at the moon all day ...

Not.

So not.

Yesterday I drove around for hours getting stuff for the new chicken coop.  The peeps are so big now.  So very big.  They're starting to look less like chicks and more like actual chickens, only miniature.  They still have their little soft peeping voices, though.  I especially love the one (I haven't watched them to figure out which one does this) that sounds like a sparrow, complete with a soft twerrrr that she does when she settles down for a nap.  She has such a lovely, talented voice.  

Anyway, after I got the initial supplies, my DH and I set the first four posts.  We were going to make a light chicken coop that we could move around, but things being what they are, and seeing as we have a ton of 4x4s in the barn (4x4s are not light) we decided to build a heavier, permanent structure using mostly the materials we already have on hand.  We worked until late-ish in the evening, and then I fixed meatloaf, mashed potatoes and corn for dinner.

Today will be another all-day work day outside.  We have nice weather so we have to get out there and do stuff while we can.

In other news, sadly, the corn is a wash.  Between cold weather, ceaseless rains, constant slug and worm onslaught, and my inability to go out there daily to help keep pests at bay, nothing survived.  Sadly, half my pumpkins and squashes didn't come up (but at least I do have the other half) and I lost quite a bit of the baby grapes on my gewurtz and canadice grape vines to two recent deer raids.  The veggies that have survived are growing at such a slow pace that it seems like they'll never get any bigger (except for, oddly, the tomatoes which are doing okay, even if the fruit production is going very, very slowly.)  Still, there is some happy news.  Some of the cutting flower beds are sprouting nicely, I have beautiful peppers, basil, catnip and other goodies still in the greenhouse waiting for better weather that still might happen, and even if this summer never really warms up there's always next year.  

Thank goodness that we don't have to survive on what we grow.  I suspect that we would get very thin this year if we didn't have a grocery store to fall back on.  I'm also thankful that if this cool weather continues, I'll have an opportunity for a really spectacular autumn/winter garden, with overwintering carrots, leeks, kohlrabi, and other tasty veggies.

I'll go out and measure the soil temps today.  It may be that I can put out at least some of the peppers now.  That would be nice.  The greenhouse is getting very crowded from tall, lush plants which is aesthetically rewarding, but the plants will never get as big nor produce as much in as they would if they could really spread their roots and streeeetch.

Waste Not, Live Larger

It's the start of another week.  I've had a lot more energy lately, so I'm going to take advantage and try to finish up a bunch of projects.

Do unfinished projects keep anyone else out there from writing at full speed?  I know I write more slowly when my dishes aren't done, and the house looks like a clutter monkey went on a rampage, and the garden is disappearing in the weeds.  But it could be the other way--that I'm falling behind on all these things because I'm not managing my time well.  Writing ends up being just another victim to my snail's pace.

On the other hand, I think there's a danger for a lot of people to over-schedule to the point that it's impossible to get everything done.  I've done that lots.  Sometimes the only remedy is to buckle down and get out from under your commitments, but it's also important to simultaneously say no to additional commitments until I get where I need to be at whatever energy level I'm working at.  People with disabilities or chronic illnesses are probably nodding their heads emphatically, because they know they can only do so much in a day, and on some days just getting up, getting dressed, sitting for a while, then getting undressed and back into bed is all they can really do.  Some can manage even less.  BTW if you haven't read about the Spoon Theory it's definitely worth a look.

The lesson we can all learn from that is to really look hard at our time as a whole, not just where we think we're wasting time.  Professional writers look at how many words they can write in an hour, and how many hours they can work before they start to bleed out of their eyes or before their heads explode.  Folks responsible for cleaning their own living spaces have a good idea how long it takes them to do a load of dishes, or run their laundry for the week (or the day--around here it's a daily chore.)  If I've been struggling for a while, I try to make a mental tally, but it might be more useful to do an actual physical one--making an actual list that includes all the little stuff, and assigning time to it.  It may be that a list like that may reveal that a particular work load is much too heavy when compared against our very human limitations.

Or it may reveal that I've actually been slacking off, playing too many rounds of Snood or surfing the internets for hours rather than the perceived minutes I think I'm surfing.  If I really do need a break, I'd prefer to make that choice and choose something (which may still be Snood or web surfing) than to just do something out of habit.

And that's what it boils down to:  real choices.  Choosing what you do with my life is a huge gift.  I don't want to waste that gift.  When you have a limited amount that you can do in a day, you don't have many options.  When you have a million options, it's easy to not put very much thought into it, which is a shame.  Because when the sky is the limit, the choices we make can lead us to accomplish amazing things.  

Big *ss Clutter

Clearing out big *ss clutter takes strength, flexibility, willpower, and kittehs

I've been doing de-cluttering/clearing-type housework, and I've also started sorting through my Estrogenfest stuff between bouts of writing. If you're on Facebook and you've friended me, you can go take a look at a small sample of pics I took. I didn't post any pics of people I knew that showed faces, which really limited things.

My non-writing goal for the week--sell the no go, er, I mean the Nova. It's not running, so I'm pretty much pricing places that will salvage it. If you're a huge fan of Chevy cars and the idea of a 1987 Chevy Nova being sold for parts breaks your heart, speak up now! We simply don't have the money to keep four cars running, especially when three of them have problems. (The Bruiser and the blue Nissan both need tuneups at bare minimum right now--they're probably running rough for other reasons that I'm dreading to learn about. The Nova has been sitting so long that it'll need its gas tank devarnished in addition to whatever made it stop running on our hill way back when.)

Also, if anyone wants a big piece of walk-behind farm equipment (it has a PTO and more attachments than I can shake a stick at,) let's talk. I'll be cleaning it up and getting into selling condition as one of my summer projects unless someone is willing to pick it up as-is.

I'll also be looking into recycling a couple of non-working lawnmowers. If you love fixing up lawnmowers, speak up! They'll be gone as soon as I can arrange it.

And so goes the ongoing decluttering/reorganization that seems to be an ongoing part of living out in the country. I think we must have a stuff magnet somewhere in our barn or garage or something. I keep finding things that I have a dim or no memory of acquiring. Yikes. It'll be awesome when it's all gone.

Big Goat Day

I haven't posted about the goats in a while. Other than taking care of their daily needs, I haven't done much with the goats lately. So naturally I had to do everything at once yesterday, with the help of my DH.

Imagine taking a ton of tools out to the barn in a wheelbarrow. With the puppies, because they needed some quality time with the goats.

Imagine the goats immediately starting to play with any tools you don't happen to be using at the time.

Imagine the ripe scent of composting manure as we stripped away the relatively clean top layer and started mucking our way down toward bare earth. Mmm mmm mmm. Then of course wee little white flies arrived and hummed about. Then somehow, while going out to check on the dogs, I managed to get a bug, I think it was a flying black ant, in my eye. I got the body and wings out, not sure about all of the legs.

Imagine hauling wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow of muck (my DH did this part all by himself) out to the garden at the far end of our property (on the top side--at least he didn't have to manage the hill.) Some of it was dry and light, some quite damp.

Imagine, just as you're starting to really dig in, the nature of the muck changing such that it wants to come off the ground in big chunks that keep falling off the shovels, sometimes by breaking in the middle like old, crumbling pottery. This same stuff, when chopped at, bounces shovels. Try not to imagine the coughing and the snot as our bodies tried to fend off the dust.

During those times when my DH made a wheelbarrow run, I worked on pulling out the old hay feeder (the goats had torn it to shreds) and put up a new one. Then I took out the old fencing that divided the goat side from the chicken side. So easy to say, so difficult to wrestle with twisted sections of wire field fence and to yank out staples with a hammer (we couldn't find our fencing pliers, which are perfect for this sort of thing.)

Imagine the feeling of satisfaction when we finish spreading the diatomaceous earth and straw. We turned the old chicken coop we kept in the barn into a sleeping shelf for the goats, and Snowblaze immediately had to leap up on top of it. Top bunk! (The inside is big enough for a goat to use as a house, and I suspect that's where Scooter will probably sleep, if not cuddled up to Snowblaze on top. Or they might both end up inside, because Snowblaze had to play around in there too.) The barn glowed with cleanliness and smelled great. I stayed to bask for a while, then buckled down to trim goat hooves. A piece flew off at one point and hit me in the eye. The same eye. But I persevered, and the goats have nicely trimmed hooves again. Those hooves really grew a lot in a month, which is normal for this time of year. Later I'll be able to trim much less frequently.

Left to do--one more dose of Panacur for the season (spring is worm season. Ick!) and the goats could use a good brushing. I also (eventually) want to build a stanchion because when they're not in the mood to stand for hoof trimming, they're pains in the butt. Weirdly, though, I had fun. If you don't have fun doing this sort of thing, rethink any ideas about having livestock.

I was sore even before we finished the work. I'm even more sore today. Maybe I'll take my camera out and take a pic, but it's more likely that I'll make tea and curl up around my computer and write most of today. It's too rainy to garden anyway.

Transitions

I just passed the six hundred post mark. Six hundred posts? Really? In August I'll hit my five year mark, so I guess it's not all that many, all told. Still. That's a lot of yammering.

Another milestone, though more a spring-oriented one: the tulips and pears are in full bloom, while the last of the quince, and peach blossoms are fading. The apple blossom buds have just started to barely open, which means it's time to plant asparagus seeds. The instructions on the packet don't recommend direct-seeding, but I'm following Gardening West of the Cascades and I want to give it at least one year so I can see for myself how well his methods work. I have a couple of asparagus survivors from the great greenhouse upset, so I'm not putting all my eggs in one basket, but that does leave a lot less margin (I'd planned on six seedlings and fourteen direct-seeded plants) than I'd initially worked toward.

The DH and I are one step closer to a finished ceiling downstairs. I spent the sunny part of yesterday painting the first coat on our new ceiling--on the ground, where I don't have to rest every few minutes to let all the blood return to my hands. He got a ton of mowing done, and now the orchard field looks gorgeous, like something out of a postcard. The girl had JR (our rabbit) out hopping around for over an hour, which must have felt great to him after several rainy days stuck all day in his cage. We celebrated with yummy bbq, and the bunny got fresh mowing clippings as a treat.

In writing news, I'm finding that working on House of Goats is easier, at least for the moment, than writing first draft short stories. I don't know if it's that I'm coming down with the same illness that have sent both kids to bed, or if my creative energy is being siphoned into trying to manage and organize the return of the downstairs to a lovely living space. It is creative work (and a lot of elbow grease) to essentially build a to-do list and put the items into the proper order. For example, we had to consider whether or not to tear out the laundry room wall. I think it'll be okay. It doesn't feel unusually cold (which would suggest that it's soaked with water) and I don't see any discoloration. So I decided to run the clothes drier, a lot, to keep the place vented and warm to assist in drying. Which involves not only going through our normal laundry needs, but also curtains and such.

Stuff like that. Every aspect of the downstairs, from the ceiling joints and sections where the ceiling tore or damaged part of the wall, down to figuring out where and how to start eliminating the piles of dust, to figuring out a cleaning schedule so that the kids' rooms don't become dangerously filthy not only from their own lifestyles but encroaching remodeling, takes a surprising amount of creative energy.

So imagine my surprise when I started painting again recently. Imagine my even larger surprise when I had a dream about painting portraits, and woke up thinking that the techniques I used in the dreams would actually work.

Now I just need some writing dreams where my dream writing techniques would actually work ... But I'm getting lots of writing done overall, so I guess I shouldn't complain. Maybe my difficulties with short stories right now are a bit inevitable anyway. I've always been primarily a book-length writer, and as my energy gets eaten up, it's natural that I'll favor that length. It's my understanding as well that if (when!) I start getting books published, I might very well end up with a schedule from the publisher as far as what books they'll want to see next (usually sequels.) Combine that with my own plans for what books I want to write, and that will leave less and less time for short story writing. The increased difficulty of writing short stories (for me), decreases in time, and decreases in energy, make the slow reduction of short story production seem inevitable. I guess it's another transition, like quince to tulips. But I think I'll always write short stories. They're not only fun, but they let me explore ideas that wouldn't necessarily fill a book, they let me play with different voices, and they teach me lots about writing.

A Writer's Process

I don't usually have trouble keeping BIC (butt in chair) but some days ...

Perhaps a writer might decide that the house is becoming too much of a distraction, and some cleaning has to happen. This writer might, then, do the dishes, followed by a carpet steam-cleaning that gets about half the living room damp and the upstairs mostly uninhabitable due to carpet shampoo stench. The downstairs might be even worse, due to slowly decomposing rat nests. The solution? Paint that unattractive, scraped-up section of wall under the window seat RED.

The writer might have some RED paint from a previous paint job. Perhaps her daughter wanted her closet door trimmed in red, and the writer reflects, with a gentle smile on her face, on the fact that the RED paint job looks fabulous to this day. So she could therefore find a partial quart in the laundry room, and take it upstairs. Of course all writers have painter's tape just laying around, rolls and rolls of it from a sale at a hardware store.

(See, packrats aren't all bad.)

It might be, then, that after the writer tapes off the area and pats a little RED paint around on the wall, she will recall that this is a particularly translucent red (Velvet Cake, Miller Paint) and that she'll need some serious painting supplies. So she must merrily go, singing a song, to the hardware store where she will pick up some phosphate-free TSP (the rest can be used on something else, say a deck re-stain) and fancy primer on sale for half off! which she kindly asks to have some red put into it ...

... so that it's PINK.

Sadly, this does not change the fact that rather translucent reds remain translucent and any area she happens to accidentally double touch or add a little extra paint will be noticeably darker than the rest. The writer may contemplate this problem, and decide the only solution is to go to Home Depot where she has a gift card, and get a different RED.

Of course writers who are also watercolor artists can be wise in the ways of RED paint, and so the writer is somewhat likely to select the correct RED, a slightly warmer, opaque red called Red Delicious (Glidden Paint.) Being a writer has its disadvantages, though, because writers often forget to use the gift card and just swipe their debit card.

The result will have no choice but to turn out fabulous. The carpet stench must in time subside from extended drying, and therefore the writer may (the next day) at last breathe a happy sigh and write. Later, she will have the option to remove the painter's tape at her leisure, with the assistance of a very sharp knife.

Sharp knives do come in handy sometimes, as do the DHs who carry them.