2010....From the Way I Saw It....Part 1

It's been a humdinger of a year from the inside out.  We've had good times and bad times and everything in between.

This time last year we were into some heavy duty construction.  We had torn off the old carport and were putting in the foundations for the new construction.

We kept at it for the entire first part of the year.  My mom made great improvements in her health along the way and was able to stay by herself for longer and longer periods of time.

So over the course of the year, I went from this:

To this:

From this kitchen:

To this kitchen:

There were some bad times during the year too.  My heart was broken in April when I lost my beloved Lovely dog to a speeding school bus.  Her absence is still sorely felt and I miss her more than I can say.

As the year has gone along my transition from jack-booted thug to tomato queen has been taking place at a steady pace.  I planted a garden

Got chickens

got a tractor

and in general have had a grand time returning to my agricultural roots.

I have the best neighbors

and the view off my front porch can be spectacular

The inside of the house is turning out to be pretty wonderful too.  I have tons of living room with great views all around, lots of windows

A beautiful wood stove to curl up in front of

The kitchen is grand, but the pantry is something dreams are made of.  I'm cooking for half the neighborhood, so having lots of food on hand is oh so nice.  Having all my pots and pans in one place and easily available is quiet grand too.

Baby dog and I moved into the house the weekend after July 4 and immediataly threw a party.  I've spent the time after that, getting my things in the house and making it a home.  So much junk and so little storage space.  Looks like some downsizing is in order.

In the meantime greens grew

and fall arrived

The guys came back to work after working their summer elsewhere and installed my woodstove and took care of a gazillion little details that needed doing.

I had planned to decorate the house from stem to stern for Christmas this year but on Dec. 8 my mom had surgery.  She had stints placed in the arteries leading down to her legs.  She was having some severe circulation problems and it was getting critical.  She went through the surgery fine and did great for a day or too afterward.  Then on the following Friday she started having heart fibrillation problems and we've been fighting that ever since. Since she's so weak from the afib and needs help to get around, I simply moved into her guest room for the duration.  So the house will have to wait a bit.  Mom comes first.  I'm happy to report though, that the new medicine her cardiologist put her on is starting to show some results and she is getting stronger daily.  Her blood pressure now seems to be under control and her pulse rate is steady so things are looking up.  Who knows, by New Years I may be back in the house working on it some more.

So that's the year, folks, here at the Farmette.  Some highs, some lows, but overall good.  Retirement is turning out to be a really good thing.  I wish I could have done it sooner.  I'm getting to enjoy life at my own pace and do so many of the little things that I always had to put off before.

Now, on a soft morning I can take my cup of coffee onto my porch, sit in my rocking chair and watch the world go by, as Baby checks out the bug and bird population in the yard.  I watch the sun rise and the sun set and get to enjoy everything in between on both sides.

Stay tuned for more of my year in review posted as the week progresses. 

Life is good.

...And the Fire is So Delightful!

It's in.  It's here.  It's beautiful.

And best of all, it's keeping my house warm and my heating unit isn't struggling to keep up.  It's suppose to get bitterly cold this weekend so it will be nice to curl up in front of a fire with a good book and hibernate.  Can't wait to try that theory out.

Up In Smoke

Winter is arriving fast, even in the south, and I'm trying to get the house tucked up tight for the cold and ugly weather to come.  I'm sooooo close.

Right now we are installing a woodstove.  It's all very exciting.  I love having wood heat.  It's actually going to be my backup and for the ambiance of it all.  We have the power go out a lot up here on the mountain and I just don't want to have to leave my home if it does, so I'm putting in the ability to stay home no matter what the electric company throws at me.

I love what we're doing with it.  When we replaced the roof, we took down the old chimney and I saved the bricks.  So now that I'm putting in the stove, I'm using the old brick as the hearth.  It's so cool, and it just sort of ties the old and the new parts of the house together.

This is what the hearth looks like while the morter is still wet.

We should have the back shield up and the stove installed by Wednesday.  That's a good thing cause it's suppose to get down in the teens that day.  Brrrrrrr.

The guys also got my chimney up.  Actually, it's a pipe with a chase around it to look like a chimney.  I think it looks great.

In the meantime, I've been cooking like mad for the guys all week and having a blast doing it.  I love cooking and now that I've got my kitchen up and running, I've been indulging myself.  I've cooked roasts and lots of veggies, big pots of chili and pans of cornbread every day. Yum.

Our greens are growing wildly now that we've had rain.  Sister and I got out and picked and picked and picked and picked.  I'll be canning them up for the next few days.  That will be some good eating when the snow is flying and even into the summer when the greens won't grow.  Yum.

I'll post more pictures as things develop this week.

Construction.......Again!

Well, we are at it again.  We're building.  Actually, we're more like finishing up.  The guys came back in this week to do a lot of minor details that never got done when we started work on the house a year ago.  Can you believe it's been that long ago?  Wow!!

So in the last couple of days, we've gotten the baseboard down in the hallway, the storm door up on the back door, the robe hook up in the bathroom, along with the toilet paper holder and the blinds up in the pantry.   One of the things I love the most is the mirror in the bathroom.

That's not the greatest picture of it, but it's the only one I've got right now.  It's a pretty awesome mirror.  The reflection is showing where my washer and dryer is located tucked in against the gray wall.  The toilet is next to the blue wall.  That rod over the washer and dryer is simply a shower rod I stuck up there to have someplace to put my hangers.  It's going to be replaced with a permanant shelf and rod, sometime next week.  I'll try and get a better shot then.

One other thing I'm really excited about is what I'm doing in the kitchen.  I currently have all the pots and pans in the pantry, which is fine except....they are taking up too much shelf space.  I didn't really have any cabinets, drawers or shelves to put them in, in the kitchen, so then I got hit by an inspiration a couple of weeks ago.  I have an empty wall at the back of the kitchen that I couldn't quiet decide what I wanted to put on so I wouldn't have a big, blank, boring wall.  This is what I came up with.

I'm going to get pegs and hang the pots and pans there a la Julia Child.  It will take care of the wall space, free up my shelf space and put the pots and pans close to hand in the kitchen.  I'm loving it.

If you look on the right side of that photo, you can see the back door where we put up the storm door today.  Baby will love that as I can now open the back door and she can lay there and look out the storm door and keep an eye out for the ground hog that is living under the storage shed.

The big accomplishment today was the back room finally got wired.  It had lights but no electrical outlets that worked all during the summer.  Now I will finally be able to get my office set up and get internet service back there.  I've been living off my mom's computer service all summer.  One more reason I haven't posted as often as I should have.  One of the guys is painting the room tomorrow (after all the work the current paint just needed a freshner) and I will take the weekend and get everything moved in and in place.

Sooooo, the idea is that I have reached the tipping point on the house and everything is falling into place rather rapidly.  By the start of next week, God willing and my back holds out, I should have the pantry organized, the back room in working order and the living room cleaned out.  Oh my!!!!

Winter is Coming......Finally

Well, the cold weather finally got here.  Last night and the night before the temps finally dropped to freezing.  I woke up to a winter wonderland of frost all across the grass.  It took out the last of the garden too, which in a way was nice, because to tell the truth, I was getting a bit tired of it.

I did go out earlier in the week and strip anything that was left in the garden.  I got a mess of peas and lots of green tomatoes of various sizes.  A friend of ours also cleaned out her garden and gave me a load of hot peppers so I'll have plenty of spicy food this winter.  Can't wait.

So it's time to tuck in and snuggle up for the winter.  I don't think I'm going to have a chance to do that for a bit though.  The crew is coming back tomorrow and starting to work on the house again to finish up a lot of the detail work that is keeping me from getting organized.  I'll be posting as it goes along.

The cooler, clearer weather is bringing some amazing sunsets with it.  All the volcanic ash in the atmosphere is showing up at sunset.  Makes you realize why you like living here.

Around the Farmette

Yesterday was Sunday and I just took it easy.  Went to church, took a nap, spent some time with the Baby Dog. In the afternoon, I took the tractor out and just rolled around the farmette a bit to see how things were looking in the semi-fall we are having.

Here's what I saw.

There's still some greenery left

But the woods are full of falling leaves

The persimmon trees are beginning to ripen

And the drought has claimed a few victims this year

It also claimed the hornets, which isn't a bad thing

And back in the barnyard, the chickie babies are disappearing behind a wall of leaves on their yard fence.

So all in all life goes on as it should and the seasons move along.  Life is good.



Fall......Kinda, Sorta

From what I understand for most of the country, fall has arrived.

Well here at the farmette, that might be debatable.  It's getting cooler, somewhat.  The nights are even coolish.  The days are still a bit hot though.  Still up in the 80s, although its finally in the low 80s.  After the high 90s all summer, we thing we're doing well to get 82.  "They" do say that it's going to start going down more next week.  We'll see.

In the meantime, we haven't had rain in so long that instead of the leaves turning colors, they are simply dying and falling off.  I hate it when that happens.  We are getting a touch of color here and there though.

But work on the farmette continues no matter what the time of year it is.  After we dug up the garden at the end of the growing season, we proceeded to throw out all the mustard, collard and turnip seeds that we could find.  Add a couple of sprinklers and we are beginning to see a payoff.

We'll be canning them up soon to last us after the cold weather does actually show up.  Good eating on a snowy day with a pan of cornbread added to the mix.  Yum.

A Trip Back in Time

It was a really neat day today.  After church, Sister and I went to Lake Guntersville to the marina.  Docked at the marina were replicas of the Nina and Pinta ships used by Columbus to discover the New World.  We went on board and saw the way they lived on ship during the time of Columbus.  It's  very tiny.  I can't imagine being stuck on there for three months with a whole lot of people and not having a serious personality conflict with some folks.

The Nina was to scale, but the Pinta is actually about 50 percent larger than the original.  It's still way too small to spend that much time on.  And it got worse.  The Nina was the only survivor of a hurricane in the West Indies and after picking up survivors from the other ships it sailed to Spain with 201 people on board.  The ship is slightly over 1900 square feet and not all of that is available to the crew.  That had to be one uncomfortable trip.

It was an interesting way to spend a warm Sunday afternoon.  Now I've got to do some relearning my history lessons.

My New Toy

I’m totally speechless. I have a tractor. A John Deere tractor. My sister got it for me. She found it yesterday and just bought it for me simply because I needed one. Apparently there was an 80 year old man in the area that wanted a JD tractor even though his children opposed the idea. So he bought himself what he wanted and then found out it wasn’t. The children then had their way and the tractor got returned. So our local tractor company then had to resell the tractor as used even though it only had two hours on the engine. What an awesome deal!

So it was delivered this morning, all bright and shiney. I immediately spent a couple of hours working on landscaping in the back. It’s a learning experience, but oh how much easier than doing it with a shovel and a rake.

I think I’m in love.

Success!!!!!!!!

At Last!  I'm finally able to upload pictures!

I have found a new interest in life.  I bought a trail camera, hung it up at the gate to the lower pastures at the farm and suddenly found myself bird watching.  Wow!  Seems to be the old gate is a perfect landing zone for just about every species of  bird on the place.  I'm having a wonderful time seeing what is coming about.

This could get to be habit forming.

Giving up

Well, the uploading of pictures is still on the blink, so I'm going to give up on posting photos right now. I'll keep working at it, but for now it's going to be word pictures.

It's September but you'd never know it here. It's still hot, and I mean hot. It was 96 degrees here yesterday. Today is a bit cooler with a little cloud cover so that is nice. Getting some rain has become a beautiful dream. It's dry, dry here now. The grass is crunchy and walking creates a dust cloud. I'm so ready for fall to arrive.

The moon has been full for the last few days. A great big round of yellow cheese in the sky. It's been really beautiful. The other day on the first day of fall, was the actually full moon. A true harvest moon.

We've plowed up the garden. It was pretty much spent. Dug up somewhere around 100 pounds of potatoes, got a few onions and the last of the peppers out. Considering we didn't really do anything to help the garden out this year, we got a lot of food out of it. If we had put in any effort, we might really have produced a good deal more.

Then we planted half of the plot in wheat and half in winter greens. They are all coming up in great abundance. We are having to water them, however. The greens will be ready for picking in about another week or so, and the dogs are grazing on the wheat. They love it.

The chickens have grown double in size since we got them, which is good. The bad news is the majority of them seem to be turning out to be roosters. This could get to be an interesting situation soon. I'm either going to have to find somebody that needs roosters or learn how to process a chicken.

The house is almost done. I ran out of money for a spell so things got put on hold for a bit. Luckily, what is missing is small things, a bit of baseboard here, a touch of paint there, a mirror needing to be hung elsewhere. I've been living there since June, doing things in bits and pieces to get it done. Slowly but surely it's coming together. I got my house in Denver rented out so my builder will be coming back soon to finish up the odds and ends.

I love my house. It's turning out to be everything I wanted it to be. It's Home.

My Bad!

I'm so sorry folks for not posting anything in the last three months. I haven't forgotten about the blog, I just can't get my computer going and I don't have the money to buy a new one. I promise to keep trying and post lots and lots of pics as soon as I get something up and running.

In the meantime, I will let you know with words what is happening. I am actually living in the house! It's such a wonderful thing. I moved in on Friday July 10. I can't begin to describe the joy of getting to sleep in my own bed. There's nothing like it. Getting to snuggle down in my big fluffy king size bed with my doggie curled up at my feet. It was amazing.

Since then, it's been a matter of getting the small stuff done. The punch list as my contractor calls it. Putting on switch plates, bits of base board, touch up paint, painting the door, putting all my belongings in place. Things like that. We still have lots of little things to do, but the only big thing left is to get the porch painted and the entrance ramp built.

My contractor has been off building a deck for a high end client at the river this week and last, but that's just as well, cause I don't have enough work to keep them busy full time, and I'm a bit short on the money end of things too. Soo0000..........

I just keep plugging along, and things keep getting done, slowly but surely. I promise to take some time and make another run at the computer's photos this weekend and get something up for everybody to see.

Oops!

Bear with me folks. My computer is down with all my photos on it so I'm not able to post this week's progress. And there was so much to show!

The floor is down, the cabinets arrived on Friday, and so did the appliances. In the meantime, the gutters were installed and got their first workout about five minutes after the guys finished. My contractor brought his nephew with him this week and set him to work doing detailed weed eating around all the contruction debris laying around. At least now, I might be able to see the snake before I step on him.

I promise I will work on the computer and get pictures posted soon.

The Floors Are In! The Floors Are In!

It's true, the flooring is down. It's absolutely gorgeous and somehow or another, the floor was just the right size and I had practically no waste and the last boards in fit perfectly, and we didn't have to cut them. My contractor couldn't believe it cause that sort of thing just does not happen. It also left me with a lot more left over than we had figured for. Oh well, a nice little spot somewhere, sometime in the future.

Paint and Plants

Things seem to be moving so s l o w l y right now. Maybe it's just that I am impatient, but I so want this to move along. Seems like finishing takes forever.

We've started painting the walls. That is a slow process, cause you have to paint and then let dry and then paint and let dry. And there is just no hurrying it. But we definitely want to get the paint on before the floor goes down, because I just have horrifying visions of dropping a gallon of paint on my beautiful wood floors.

So the ceiling is going to be Informal Ivory and the walls are Moonlight Yellow.




In the process of all this, I now have a spotted dog, as Baby likes to cut corners a bit.



While I am watching paint dry, I've been outside doing a bit of gardening.




It it really takes off and grows and the bugs don't defeat me, I should have an abundance of produce for summer eating and putting by for the winter. I also have fruits coming on like gangbusters as we didn't have a blossom freeze to take out the forming fruit.

Peaches


Pears


I should be busy this summer preserving like mad. Hope it turns out as well as I want it too. I'll keep you posted.