Trying Something New

Well, I've seen enough cool blogs now to give it a go myself. Besides that, there are so many lovely people in my life who I would like to keep updated on our varied and full life. Life out here on the Lost Coast is so very different from life anywhere else, and the weekend visit or less Drew and I get with all of you is usually FAR insufficient to communicate about what is happening here, and just how much we've been up to.

For example, last weekend I went back to visit my high school, The Athenian School, a small college prep institution where teachers are a lot like friends. One of my old teachers asked, "What have you been up to?" "Well..." I stammered, "I'm mostly a mom right now." Well, this is true, stay-at-home-mom status is almost like two full time jobs, but it doesn't even begin to tell the story about what is happening on our 50 gorgeous acres that we're building from the ground up. Consider the following events during the last week alone:

• A crew of eight people, who are attendees at a local residential dance workshop, taught by local Buto dance specialist Shinichi Lova-Koga, came and donated a morning of work in exchange for breakfast. These three hours turned the corner on our house foundation project, and blessed our garden with the final bed digging needed to provide food for our family. YUM!
• We have closed in the forms for our perimeter foundation, the foundation which will support our passive solar dream home, which we have labored over for more than a month now. We have been actively designing this house for four months, let alone the several years it has been marinating in our hearts and minds.
• We received our first CSA box from the Little Dipper Farm, which included cauliflower, lettuce, beets, kale, chard, peas, and artichokes.
• We ate our first broccoli and beets of the season from our garden, and we continue to eat kale, lettuce, spicy greens, and radishes.

I mean, we've only planted our fruit orchard and berry patches this spring, as well as our windbreak, and begun a patio project with ferro-cement raised beds, too. There are always many projects, simultaneously, being mentally jockeyed and managed in our brains, trying to get the work equivalent of 5 people, out of the two of us, one of whom is handicapped with the toddler factor.

In any event, let this blog be a way to keep in touch with all of you, a way to see what we're doing, with a little explanation of why, and also so you can keep up with Ella, who would likely be 8 years old before we saw some of you.

Happy Reading...