A Sunny Reprieve

After all those days of rain, we are into a sunny stretch and getting things done. Four blueberry bushes and three huckleberries are now a part of our permanent landscape. The vertical frames for the garden boxes are done, and just in time since the peas are sprouting like mad (11 days of rain followed by warm weather will do that). We just found out that we are getting two baby chicks from a neighbor whose school class hatched some, but they couldn't keep them. Yay! Two new little peepers. We weren't planning on having chicks this year, so we'll have to scramble a bit for accomodations and see if I can remember how to do this baby chicken thing. We muddled through it last year by the seat of our pants, so I'm sure we'll do fine.

In my head these days, I'm prioritizing the projects that we would like to do and the items we'd like to get over the next few years: Rainwater catchment, building our own wind generator (more for a fun project than in any serious energy-producing capability, but who knows), buying two tandem bicycles for more long range cycling with the kids, building a grape arbor and a kiwi arbor, putting in three fruit trees, clearing all the horrible, invasive ivy out of our woods (lucky for me, with my horrible poison oak symptoms, DH gets that job), clearing the site for the picnic area and the fire pit (I think Friday night summertime campfires with friends sounds like fun, and we've got a lot of scrap wood we need to get rid of that won't fit in our fireplace). It's a lot, and we'll tackle it bit by bit. Whatever the future holds, it can't hurt us to become more self-sufficient and energy-independent.