When you crawl out of bed and greet yourself in the bathroom mirror; or get ready to go out and try to look skinnier and prettier than you feel; or catch a glimpse of yourself in the grocery store's window front and wonder who the raggedy-haired scrounge in front of you is...do you smile? Cringe? Avoid yourself?
I find myself watching black and white golly-gee-goodness sitcoms and see droves of people coiffed, clean, and respectable. I audibly suggest people should take more pride in their appearance, all the while being surprised at my own when I venture to the store in my garden jeans and oily braids.
But here's a lesson we got this weekend from the sweet innocence of a baby (not quite a toddler). The Mister turned the viewer to Giddy, so he caught his own reflection...and registered delight!
How does your reflection register with yourself?
Where do I begin? I think there's a post that has clogged my brain, and maybe someday I'll get it out so I can move on. In the meantime, you'll never believe what happened around here.
Even though we had a brown/gray Christmas- there has still been a winter hibernation going on. Nursing the boy has been good for hibernation, but bad for my hygiene and sense of accomplishment.
This week I attempted to stretch and yawn out of my cave. I must have an aversion to stupid rip-apart valentines that are just commercials for Nickelodeon and are just a paper trail harvest for a tiny piece of candy.
Small pile of candy on the left. Huge stack of impersonal, never-read valentine garbage on the right.
"When the first baby laughed for the first time, it's laugh broke into a thousand pieces, and they all went skipping about, and that was the beginning of fairies."
JM Barrie
I saw this great idea on Pinterest, and decided we needed to ration our Halloween candy. Plastic wrap twisted around 3 pieces of candy, in 65 bubbles as we count down to our favorite Holiday.
This past Monday, seven (Count them seven!), friends and neighbors that don't live in my house saw me:
*Bed-Headed
*shuffling in my nightgown
*viewing my very personal and triumphant competition with The Mister of the House as to who could get the hairiest legs (that would be me) as my nightgown stops about the middle of my shins.
On Sunday, I was literally on my back with insane lower lumbar spasms initiated by an early morning sneeze in the shower (lame right?). It's now Friday, and I'm up and going again (although very gingerly and with the aid of copious amounts of muscle relaxants).
One of my first acts performed after getting a back that could bend was to shave my legs. Today marks the ability to sit in a chair. I'm celebrating by updating this here blog. 
I wanted to give a waning garden tour, even though I failed to get pictures of the garden in it's full glory. I can't believe it's harvest time already. Here's the baby steps we made in the garden this year.
Remember this dead patch in the spring?
We edged it with railroad ties, had some composted manure hauled in, and planted this.
This was our big heirloom year. I'm going to have to admit that I might be on the fence about some of this. Mostly because we ate approximately two ears of corn from our garden. I'm not sure if it was because of spring-time medical trauma, an insane wet and snowy spring/summer, or the fact that our corn was planted too late, but it wasn't a huge success in the corn department.
I did have a pretty garden though. I transplanted my teepee right in the middle, seeded a winding cosmos path to the teepee, and gave it privacy on three sides with the corn. On the south edge I planted heirloom zucchini, spaghetti squash, pumpkin, and peppers. 
I thought it was a little ironic that I had pretty foliage but NO FLOWERS as of the first day of school. But now with half the plants zinged from frost, the cosmos is high and proud. I love to wind down the path and find an invitation to sit Pocahontas-style in the teepee.
Here's the view from both angles. As a weed barrier, and bug deterrent, I seeded marigolds all around the border. The pops of orange have been a delight this autumn (mostly because that's practically when they showed up too...I guess snow on Memorial Day will do that to you).
Here's that cute baby. He's six months old! He's like a cancer patient all hairless and pale. Isn't he adorable? He is off the charts for his heighth BTW.
Around the edge of the teepee we planted pole beans. About 3/4 of the way around I ran out of our heirloom seeds, so I pulled out leftover pole beans from last year. This is when I really started to wonder (and I have yet to fully research) about hybrid seeds, as they clearly outperformed the heirloom in terms of germination and growth. GMO seeds - lame! Heirloom - necessary and very cool. Hybrid - not sure if I'm going to categorize that in the lame department just yet.
I threw carrot seeds inside the teepee and treated it like groundcover. I wanted it to keep weeds out, and thought that perhaps it would be alright and keep rooting into that dirt even if the kids were playing in the teepee.
This kid is at the stage where he puts everything in his mouth! Ah I just love him!
Chomp. Chomp. Who me? What? Yes stupid goat. I'm staring at you! Our goats got out of the fenced area and went to town eating our...orchard! Out of 9 fruit trees, about 7 were chomped to bits! Damn goats.
Our Mellow Wood Pond experiment this year was Muscovy Ducks. Last year we had a ton of fun with the trout, but that pond dried up lickety split and we didn't have a fishing party before it happened.
The Mister of the House researched Muscovy Ducks and how they are AMAZING bug eaters. Love mosquito larvae and start munching it when their still little ducklings. What with flooding of the rivers and a HUGE mosquito year forecast, I was prepared to get eaten alive. But these ducks (we have 7) really did a great job. The mosquitoes were not bad in our yard or the pond. Plus look how gorgeous they are!
Baby has a drool rash, and older brother has a window in his mouth!
Happy Harvest everyone!
I'm not an amazing photographer, but I do enjoy it. In the past I have enjoyed the editing tricks with google's free picasa software. It was free and good, but lacked a lot of professional photoshop tools. However, I did just bite the bullet in the form of 25 big ones to pay for an annual subscription to Picnik. They also offer free editing options, but their premium tools looked like they would be totally worth it. Here's why I recommend picnik for people that love to take photos.
This summer while the chickens snuck into the garden,
and Rainbow Girl and I milked Betty the Goat,
on the milk stand built by The Mister of the House,
where if you kept a watchful eye you would catch frequent summer accidents averted by toddlers-with-initiative;
and even wobbly-headed newborns became bright-eyed infants before your very eyes (although you're not quite sure how),
...well while all of this happened at The Olsen's over this summer, the flowers bloomed and dangled pollen like candy-bait for kids.
Except pollen isn't bait for kids, just bees. And boy did they work!
Out of two hives we set up this spring, we harvested just ONE this week. The other hive swarmed, and we lost the majority of that hive (plus their delicious honey). But how could we be too sad when we pulled in this harvest?
Have a looksie!
We borrowed this honey extractor from a like-minded neighbor. What a blessing to have like-minded neighbors! The Mister of the House donned his special bee jacket, smoked the bees a bit so they would be nice, and pulled out 7 panels of honeycomb.
After shaving the tips off the combs, we placed the panels into this extractor and cranked the heck out of it!
I pulled some nylons off from my fungus-ridden feet and put them over the valve at the bottom of the extractor.
Those were clean, Gomer. What're you thinking?! But see all the waxy crappy that comes out with it? We used clean new stockings to serve as a filter.
We didn't have the specialty bee cutting knife, so for a second we worried that our cuts were so sloppy we would be wasting too much honey. So we set up more filtering over bowls, just to be prudent.
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| From 2011.FARM PICS |
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