OH the Coop-Y-Ness!

My chicken coop is 99 percent done. All it lacks is a door and paint. We are buying paint today; the EGE will finish the door tonight.

I am now officially addicted to a site I visited for the first time yesterday. And of course I'm worried about myself, because there's probably no 12-step program for addictive personality as strong as all that. You have to go see it, because she's sick today and trying for 100 sympathy posts. I can totally respect that.

I'm sick today too. I'm not just saying that for the posts. But PLEASE post your condolences. It would be ever so pathetic if I helped the navel gazing goddess reach 100 posts and then I had, like, one.

My sickness is like this: fever, pounding inner ear, and most importantly, I have no voice. This is making the EGE very happy. He likes his peace and quiet A LOT. That's why God punished him, I mean blessed him, with four daughters.

We tried to balance out the noisiness of girl-o-rama with a move to the boondocks, which is very well documented to make no sense. There's a goat farm across the road, right next to the country school and the church. Goats are very, very noisy, especially the babies. I have just learned that this may be why they call them kids.

I just keep typing while I wait for a picture to load. Oh, the joys of dial-up. Now I'm going to leave you with this picture of Fabio... I mean my husband, the Eng-Gen-Eer and master coop builder.

Coop de Ville

Our little chickens are all feathered out. While the girls and their friends sprouted tule fairy wings, the chicks were gaining real wings. They are just not fluffy anymore, nor are they fitting in their cage very well. So my EGE is busy building a new coop. We started on a chicken tractor, which is a super-cool farm implement by which the chickens can till and fertilize for you (who'd-u-thunk). But it was very unweildy even in the planning stages. So the EGE decided on a regular 4x4 coop with egg collection doors, four nesting boxes and a clever roosting ladder made out of -- what else -- an old wooden ladder.

The girls helped this afternoon. They helped a lot. They helped so much we all got kicked inside to take a nap and get out of the EGE's way.

Most importantly as regards us getting booted in the house, the EGE was worried that I'd put his picture on the internet and all the ladies in internetland who read my blog (all four of you) would fall madly in love with him and be swoonish as if he were the margarine commercial guy.

Fabio. That's my Eng-Gen-Eer... Fabio in the disguise of short salt-and-pepper hair and steel toed boots with khaki pants. Hmm.

I should mention we don't eat margarine. This is in no way a thinly veiled advertisement for whichever brand of whipped hydrogenated fat uses the psuedohunky guy with the thin long hair and the fake-o accent. The more I think (or type, which is almost as good as thinking, right?), maybe the EGE should have his picture in an ad.

Back to the chicken coop. Its construction was briefly interrupted so Madeleine and the EGE could deliver Madeleine's horse Seven to a trainer for a month. Sarah, Grace, Laura and I stayed home to cook dinner. That's clearly what I'm doing right now, you say to yourself. Hey! I can cook and blog at the same time.

More Make Believe

Make Believe Fun

The wings turned out ever so cute. A little flannel, a little tule, some elastic and flower petals.

The craft table is buried in the flotsam and jetsam of fun.

Crafting the night away with seven little girls, one tiny baby and one little boy otherwise known as The Crown Prince of Fairyland... ah, wings and paint and glitter, oh my!



The little masks smell like a gas station so KL and I (yes, I had an adult on my team. The I.G. and the Eng-Gen-Eer took big boys to town for a movie... like wise men, really) let the girls glue flower petals all over the masks but we will not be wearing them. What is it with the plastic that smells like gasoline? Yuck.



I just finished making blueberry muffins, otherwise known as fairy cakes. The girls stayed up until almost 1:00 a.m. Now they are all watching Ella Enchanted while drinking homemade hot chocolate and inhaling the muffins. If the EGE doesn't come downstairs soon the breakfast will all be eaten by the dainty ones.

Tagged!

I am so excited because I have not played tag since third grade. I don't know what "meme" stands for, but Misty said I had to do this and I am, above all, an obedient blogger.

Four Jobs I’ve Held:
Reporter for Daily Herald & News
Editor for Gartner Group
Heine Wiper for Sissonettes
Real Estate Broker for Rain Country

Four Movies I Could Watch Over and Over
Gone With the Wind
Princess Bride
Pride and Prejudice -- old or new
Sleepless in Seattle

Four Places I’ve Lived:
San Francisco
Klamath Falls
Portland
Ubertiny village in which I reside now

Four TV Shows I Like:
Decorating Cents
Sesame Street
Grey's Anatomy (I confess)
October Road

Four Favorite Foods:
Spinach salad
Garlic mashed potatoes
Sauteed mushrooms
Tiramisu

Four Places I Would Rather Be:
Sylvia Beach Hotel
Powell's bookstore
Sweet Life Patisserie
My Grandma's kitchen

The Lack of Sleep

I am so tired that after I typed "The Lack of Sleep" my own eyes tricked me. I keyed in the title, went to stop the screaming teakettle, and came back to the screen to wonder why I had wanted to write about our lack of sheep.

Baa.

We don't have any sheep, to be sure. At this point I would trade two and a half horses for five sheep. I think it would be fair for everyone. I would no longer have to worry about barrel racing injuries or the anxieties that follow emergency room visits, or the new choices in cast colors. Similarly I could stop worrying about the price of hay, which is really what woke me up before sunrise.

Not the price of hay specifically, which is astronomical (they say because diesel is so high, it costs $10 extra per bale to use the equipment to cut down and bundle the hay, and even the string that ties the bale is a petroleum product, not like you can use it to soothe chapped lips or anything, it's just expensive twine that breaks when you're carrying a 75-pound chunk of compacted dry grass and won't break when you have to open a new bale in a hurry without scissors or your teeth, blah, blah, blah), but the price of everything.

Yup, I woke up to worry about money. More to the point, I got out of bed so that I wouldn't be lying there with money worries spinning through my head faster than a combine burns fossil fuels.

My head is logical like that.

Tonight we are hosting 17 million little girls in a pre-fairy festival extravaganza. I cracked the cleaning whip mercilessly after school yesterday so the hordes (more importantly, their mothers) shouldn't be too freaked out by the cleanliness and orderliness quotient of my house. My 120-year-old floors have been protected by an even layer of toys, laundry, books and the like for too too long. About 119 years since I mopped, I think. It was past time to expose their gleaming beauty to a bunch of extra dress-up shoes and glue and glitter.

Well, at least no one will trip on Elmo dolls or anything while we're crafting wings and painting inexplicably small wooden garden fairies.

Then the nonsleepover can commence. In the morning we have to deliver horses hither and yon, then scramble to get all the little fairy princesses into their outfits, then load up a couple of Suburbans with wings (heh heh, if Suburbans had wings, diesel would go much further) and glittery girls, then of course drive into Eugene because they don't hold Fairy Festivals in Lorane. You have to go to a college town for that.

At least the pictures will be really, really good. I know this because I can't imagine how even I could fail to get good photos in a fairground full of little girls pretending to be flower fairies.

Hello. It should be a very good break from thinking about money. And I can sleep next week, right? Because I'll be counting the sheep I got in trade for the horses.

If You Are Not My Girlfriend

...If you are not my cyber or corporeal girlfriend, click away while you still can.

The baby has an ear infection. I am relieved that it is only an ear infection, because she had a strange cough and a little fever and I called the nurse like a weenie, I mean first-time mom, and asked whether I should worry.

You know you never should do that. You should either worry or just drive in to the doctor already, because the nurse will look at your chart and say, "holy birth control, the woman has four kids, if she's calling, she needs to come in."

So then you will drive like a maniac to get to town on time for the doctor who will make you wait 20 to 1200 minutes. Then the baby will want to nurse right when you're supposed to be stripping her nakie for the cold cruel scale.

Then you'll find out it's an ear infection and -- even worse -- that they don't give antibiotics anymore for ear infections, that's just so outdated now, it's better to let it run its course. Of course.

Then your left boobie will explode with the pressure because the baby can't nurse on that side because it hurts her.

You can't say I didn't warn you it would get ugly. Thanks for reading.

After the Bath... or Big Hair Is Back

I sincerely hope your screen shows this hairdo to its maximum effect. I am going to look at it every time I think I need product for fuller hair. Yes, this is just how hers dries naturally.

Wednesday's Word

I do love Amy Deanne's blog... it's such an encouragement to me. So I keep stealing -- I mean plagiarizing -- I mean joining in for her great ideas. And this post is of course not based on my idea at all, or even Amy's, but God's:

“Instead, speaking the truth in love, we will in all things grow up into him who is the Head, that is, Christ.”- Ephesians 4:15

I love this because it speaks so directly to what I've been walking through lately. It is hard to say the truth sometimes, when avoiding conflict or disagreement is my main life's goal! But when we speak the truth in love, we are walking in Jesus' shoes. Surely many, many people didn't like the truth he spoke, and yet that soft answer does turn away wrath.

I hope you have a blessed day!

Random Rural Sanity Savers Called To Order

I tried this morning to get my farmchicky girlfriends within a 30-mile radius to join me in a very important meeting... at Dutch Brothers. But to no avail.

I am as predicted still working on my endless laundry tackle from yesterday. Good news, though. I found Sarah's lucky pants three-quarters of the way down hamper number 410. She has been singularly unlucky since the day she took them off in a huff in the laundry room. I'm not sure, actually, why she calls them "lucky," since every time she wears them she has a spectacular accident.

(Sarah's middle name is not Grace. Grace's first name is, but it didn't work.)

So the lucky pants are psychedelic, as all lucky pants should be. The pattern is a swirly paisley in pink, blue, yellow and orange. Her former lucky pants were orange bell bottoms with big brown flowers on them. This girl has style. Anyhoo the first lucky pants went the way of the dump after Sarah ripped them out from waist to rear pocket during an Olympic attempt at exiting the tire swing using nothing other than the immense momentum of the 40-foot swinging arc.

I got in big trouble for telling her I had to throw those away. Doncha know I should have framed them for her wall? This is exactly what she suggested when I insisted they were not able to be repaired.

The current lucky pants I thought I had buried after she skidded on the gravel and tore her kneecap open in a wound so gruesome that the school must've been afraid to call me. Because they didn't call, they just put a big bandaid with the sticky part mostly on open wound and ground-in gravel bits. So I had the supreme pleasure that day of soaking, picking out the gravel, considering home schooling.

I thought to myself, these darn lucky pants give the baby girl too much confidence. I can't afford another trip to the ER over lucky pants chutzpah (not sure if I use that word right. anyone?) So I buried the pants. But not deep enough. I honestly had forgotten about them as well as I could with Sarah asking for them every other minute. So I accidentally unearthed them and then washed them last night... discovered a new hole in the knee region... told Sarah she'd have to choose new lucky pants... lost that argument... and then fought with the iron and a flocked red heart-shaped patch for half the morning.

So she wore them to school today. With a striped purple and green top of course. I better not go to Dutch Bros after all. I'll probably be needed at home when the school calls.

STOP the PRESSES

I think it was a blatant attempt to get more praise on this blog, but last night, the Eng-Gen-Eer FOLDED LAUNDRY! I made one little complimentary comment about him having a cruddy weekend hauling heavy stuff while I played baby shower and horseback riding lessons... and now he wants MORE kudos.

Seriously, I can count on one hand the number of times my husband has folded laundry. As is recounted in this blog (kind of a lot), he is an extremely hard worker. Farm-like work and work-like work, well, those are his gigs. We never sat down and made chauvinist lists or anything, it's just the way it worked out.

Anyhoo I blogged yesterday about getting a head start on my Tackle It Tuesday (just love this idea, thanks, Amy Deanne. My laundry room needed tackling and then one of those, you know, excavators. I did take "before" photos as a form of self-flagellation and I may post them if the "after" pics are stunning enough (and if I get done before next Tuesday!).

Back to my husband.

I do believe he's been reading this blog as a way to understand me better. Gee, no pressure or anything. This really funny girl at 40 something crises was just blogging about her husband's desire to connect with her the way she so clearly connects with all of us mommies through her excellent blog. Well, my husband has simply decided to read what I am thinking. It saves so many phone calls during working hours.

Case in point: Yesterday he brought home two boxes of Diet Coke. Now, I really don't care what his motivation was, because that was a Good Thing (purposely not linking to Martha here).

And then, just when I thought the gestures of husbandly sweetness could not stretch further, I caught him folding tiny t-shirts in the den. The Giants were on TV and the 0-3 month onesies were in his hands. Also lumped up in a pile that resembled folded laundry. Holy clean clothes.

I am so sure today is going to be a good one. Hope yours is too.

What I Wouldn't Do

What wouldn't I do right now for a Diet Coke? That certain fizzy, aspartame-and-caffeine high. If you're my mom (hah, congrats on getting on the Internet, mom!), I quit Diet Coke months ago. Everyone else: feel like driving to my house to deliver?

I have tried everything to avert the craving, to no avail. The baby is asleep, the big girls are planning their outfits for the upcoming Fairy Festival, and I am trying for a head start on "Tackle It Tuesday" in my laundry room (pit) whilst scheming on how to get a Diet Coke into the house.

Hand Over The Baby

Doesn't Connie look happy? Can you see Donna just waiting ever so patiently for her turn?

The ladies of our church threw a baby shower for Laura yesterday afternoon. It was the funnest thing ever! They are so sweet, and Laura will henceforth be the most beautifully dressed girl with the best collection of homemade lovely things. And this is how it went:

We walked in to a room beautifully decorated in vintage lambs and bunnies and little sunbonnet girls. I handed over the baby, ate cake, opened piles of presents and didn't get Laura back for two hours! She slept like an angel through grandma after grandma's arms. Connie, Phyllis, Donna, Kathy, Marge, Kay, Helen, Martha... they were all so happy to have a cuddly little one to hold. In fact, my own mother couldn't even get a turn with Laura. It is making me grin ear to ear just thinking of how lovely and loving those ladies are. Truthfully I should have let them throw a shower sooner, but I thought they were only saying they wanted to, and I didn't want them to feel obligated to buy gifts. Let this be a lesson to me.

Our weekend was the typical whirlwind.

The weather was beautiful, and the the big girls were at Grampa and Gramma's Friday night and Saturday. I hear they had a bonfire, roasted marshmallows, shocked the pool for the season, watched some neighbors come out and hunt turkeys, and rode horses. I am tired out just describing the first half of their weekend!

While they were gone, the Eng-Gen-Eer and I rented a movie, "3:10 to Yuma," which was pretty good. My heart was beating fast with adrenaline, so does that count as a workout? Anyway I cooked stir fry and rice, we watched the movie and generally felt like the house was empty.

Saturday morning the Eng-Gen-Eer made his way to the office and I headed out for my basket making class, which was unfortunately canceled because attendance was too low. So, making the best of it, I called my girlfriend Carolyn and we met at Fleur de Lis, a new Cottage Grove bakery. Super yummy! Then we stopped at an estate sale, where Caro bought an antique sideboard for $10! I exercised extreme restraint, given my family history of furniture disease, and only purchased a vintage typewriter for my small but growing collection. Five bucks!

Then Caro took Laura and me out to her farm south of Cottage Grove, and divided up her celery and garlic starts for us. What an awesome friend. She and her husband Kyle are making a really unique country garden. He carves cedar into benches and scuptural art, and she plants in unusual containers, including a full-size restaurant sink. It all comes together and looks fantastic.

To wrap up my "day out," Laura and I went back to Lorane for another friend's Tupperware party. By the time I was through overspending there, everyone was back home and waiting for dinner.

Sunday brought the usual church freak-out about doing four heads of hair in 20 minutes. Then we went to the sweet baby shower while the Eng-Gen-Eer helped my brother move about three tons of granite and landscape rock (my weekend was so much nicer than my husband's). He even drove the girls to horse clinic for me and had to leave as soon as I arrived to move more junk, I mean building materials.

Finally, we wrapped up Sunday with a big crockpot full of taco soup and our good friends' company. I do believe I need another Homebody Monday.

Yummy! Cherry and Apple and Grape... Wood?

Ooh ooh ooh! Today I am going to the Grange to learn how to weave baskets out of fruit wood saplings. This is the Napa of the North, remember, so everyone has grapevines galore. Our Rural Arts Commission (yes, there is such a non-profit) is active and overbooked all Winter with screening art films in the Grange Hall, organizing poetry readings and talent shows, and all manner of indoor artistic activities. Finally, it may be something like Spring outside, and so I get to CUT flexible TWIGS!!! and make something useful/interesting with them.

I will do my darndest to post pictures afterward.

This morning the Eng-gen-eer is out hauling hay from the shop to the barn. I do love him.

Who Me? or The Perils of Lulu

Again I have to apologize for a maudlin post. Yesterday I was just plain stinkin' thinkin' about why do I have to... why doesn't so-and-so... if I could just blurt it out I'd say... and on and on! How ridiculous, really, to dwell on that sort of thing, when I have huge news to report:

I was followed by an unmarked car! For all we know, government agencies with lots of initials are tracking my every blog move now!

Before you decide this is all melodrama, you have to know that I wear many, many hats. Prolly like y'all. Anyway, in my capacity as Girl Friday for my eng-gen-eer husband, I was called upon this week to drive out to the airport for photos. I have performed this photog duty before, it wasn't stressful at all. Heck, no! There was even a Dutch Brothers on the way, so I was glad to go.

In fact, the airport was a relief to me. Any other day my subject might have been a stinky poop--I mean wastewater treatment--plant, or a huge, loud underground pump station, or a brushy, blackberry-bramble-impassable hillside, or a boring subdivision of McMansions. So Grace and Laura and I happily buckled up in the 'burban, and took off for the airport, just 40 miles away or so from home.

These photos didn't have to be fantastic works of art (good thing, 'cause it's wordy little Miriam, not Ansel Adams, you're saying), just representative of the vast project the company had completed last year. I have been attempting to get said eng-gen-eer honey to expense a fancy new Canon digital SLR camera with unbelievable zoomability, but this is not in the immediate cards.

So lacking (VERY IMPORTANT) zoom lens, upon entering Mahlon Sweet airspace, on the ground of course, I had to get sorta close to my intended subjects. I pulled over to take a picture of the airport sign for the proposal cover. I carefully framed a pic in which the sign was fully legible and the tower was in the far ground. I mighta blocked traffic for a minute. But who's gonna hit a huge white Suburban with its hazards on?

At this point I didn't notice the unmarked burgundy Crown Vic behind me.

I slowly cruised around the end of the long-term parking lot, trying for an angle -- and this is not easy to do while 3-month-old is starting to fuss for her next feeding -- that showed some cool runwayage as well as a plane or two. I shot a few pics, then moved on to chain link fence at the edge of the short-term lot for the piece-de-resistance: terminal photos. Ha ha.

Now, right about here in the story, I thought the annoying guy in the Crown Vic might need to pick a parking spot rather than vulture around after me already.

Finally, the perfect vantage point in which the runways looked like silver stripes, the "arrival" and "departure" signs were evident for context, and a few planes were posed like models for scale. The contractor to whom we were submitting this bid would think a professional -- no a TEAM of professionals -- took these photos. They would think there is no other choice but to sub out to us. Really.

The baby's fussing turned abruptly to piercing cries. I decided I was done, with good timing. I turned off the camera, stowed it in the passenger seat. Turned off the hazards and glanced in my rearview mirror.

Oops... Crown Vic guy is still with us. And he's getting out?! I always did like a man in uniform, but there's no need for him to come over to greet us. Oh, there is?

...

So, dear readers, let me tell you that taking multiple photos of all the approaches and perimeters of a smallish city airport is not the least suspicious thing you could do in a big white Suburban.

I'm guessing the screaming baby, wide-eyed preschooler and multiple carseats didn't say terrorist recon to him. So you see, working with your children in tow is valuable on so many levels. And at the risk of getting busted (again), I'll confess here that my visit with the law shook me up enough to stop for a second mocha on my way back to upload the pics, which are now safely embedded in the proposal for survey work.

Go Fly a Kite

First let me thank my blogsweet friends for helping uplift Madeleine this week. She had a crushing disappointment when one of her schoolmates insulted her physical appearance terribly in front of the whole class... and even in the face of that, her first thought was to help the little girl who was likewise crushed by a no-show birthday. You are right, Misty, true friends are hard to find at any age. My hope and prayer is that our girls are growing up to be encouragers, loyal and true. And it's a blessing beyond words when they exhibit those wonderful character traits.

My wise father-in-law counsels that in the face of adversity (and I don't know how many of us are facing conflict and adversity, but I hope someone relates!), we must act from a point of knowing who God made us to be, not "react" to the hurtful words or actions of those on the other side of the table.

However, I often slide into the trap of rehearsing what I "should have" said to really GET my point across. Tough conversations play themselves over in my head like a broken record, with different endings. Oh! Like the "Choose Your Own Adventure" books from childhood. "Choose Your Own Confrontation."

If I'm the only one who struggles with this, feel free to click away and come back tomorrow for a Friday Farmgirl craft or garden project... but I'm in an obsessive mood about this subject for today.

Miss Madeleine

If I had to tell you about Madeleine Sahalie in 500 words or less, I'd run out of words before I was half done. My 9-year-old daughter is named after Madeleine L'Engle, the late author of the Wrinkle In Time trilogy, The Two-Part Invention, A Severed Wasp, and many of my very favorite books spanning the genres: poetry, young adult and adult fiction, theology, journals and more.

Our Madeleine goes by "Maddy" with some of her friends, but at home she is usually her full, formal self. She is a serious girl, very introspective and caring, and so her streak of humor is delightful when it breaks through. Upon learning that she was on TV (where her full concentration was evident), she broke into full-on ironic disco moves, singing "I'm so famous/I'm a big star now/I'm so famous/It's a Maddy show."

Recently she independently made herself a chore chart with multiple chores for every day of the week, carefully planned out so that she would be as helpful as possible with the animals and hobby farm tasks. She proposed in writing a $2 a week payment for what amounted to hours and hours of work. We told her we agreed that she is ready for money management, and an allowance is in order. Several hours later, she came back with a verbal request for a raise: "so... would $2.50 be too much?"

She is dramatic and mature, beautiful and smart, talented and kind. She is a brave little horsewoman who broke both arms in a bad fall last September and is now literally and figuratively "back on the horse." She is a friend who cares deeply, and an analyst who dissects problems with great care. She is concerned with others' feelings, and is often the first to signal me that one of her sisters needs some encouragement or guidance but isn't herself able to articulate the need.

I am so grateful that God sent us Madeleine. I wrote a letter earlier this month, saying to her newborn self what I would have said in the first hours after she was born. That letter didn't begin to describe how much we've gained by parenting our oldest daughter, and neither does this post. I am keenly aware that our time with her at home is going more quickly than I'd ever imagined. And yet, she remains at the core the sweet and earnest baby girl.

There is no way to write about her sweetness without referencing Madeleine's opinions. She is, after all, very opinionated! Sometimes this is a source of great frustration for her, because small children's opinions are often dismissed. And she does NOT like being dismissed. We tell her that her strong ideas will serve her well when she expresses them carefully and with forethought.

Finally, I have to say something about the incident that spawned this post: her compassion in action, she spontaneously sat down last night to paint a freehand sign for a classmate whose birthday party was attended by no one. I am so proud of her.

Accountability Sewing

Okay. I know it would have been fun to contemplate the feed bag purse for a while, then let the feedbags stack up in the barn until Ryan went ballistic about saving g-a-r-b-a-g-e, then finally acquiesce and send the bags to the dump with another "I coulda made such cute blankety-blanks" sob story. But then KL threw out the "get real" challenge. And I had a serendipitous homebody day. And the baby took a good nap. So...

The feedbags are woven oilcloth-like fabric. The designs are fun and graphic. It sews together really easily with a regular weight needle. The only real challenge I had (other than not making a plan before I started, lol) was that it is pretty stiff. It was important at the corners to notch it like the picture shows.


I lined it with the red calico, 100% cotton fabric I pulled out of one of my fabric bins. I was planning to have the lining just inside, but because the feedbag didn't press back like a fabric seam, I folded the calico over. It doesn't look as tidy from a seamstress perspective, but I think the red showing is pretty cute.

I originally cut up a pair of Osh Kosh overalls to make handles, but they didn't work very well, so I used some yellow grosgrain ribbon that I had on hand. I was tempted by the memory of some great purse handles I had seen at JoAnn fabric on my last day out with Sarah, but in the spirit of farmgirl frugality (and to avoid putting off what can be done today or forgot about forever), I used the ribbon. I think it looks fun!

Homebody Monday

More snow on daffodils that I shoveled out of the new horse paddocks straight into this old wooden trug. Note the careful placement of an upside-down sprinkler.

Cousin Makayla and Sarah... very happy to find eachother at the big ballet class.

And Gracie, super tired out after plies:

The Sissonettes, freezing in their leos outside of the class.

Sarah's superthick braid. She gets her hair from me:

Eugene did it! On Sunday afternoon the girls and I helped set a Guiness World Record for the
"World's Largest Ballet Class."

We enjoyed another whirlwind weekend. It snowed ... and snowed... and rained... too yucky to be outdoors, but a great weekend for dancing in the University of Oregon's Mac Court for an attempt at the World's Largest Ballet Class. The numbers were initially a little low, so even I stood at the barre for 45 minutes, attempting plies and developes with the crowd of 580 or so. Holding Laura on one shoulder to boot! I guess I've still "got it." Plus 20 years. As one of the instructors put it, "young dancers have the bodies, midlife dancers have heart."

In other news:

Our church's search for a new pastor continues. We are eager to find the right person since the parsonage is across the road from us. The girls really miss having a family live there.

Grace and Laura and I are having a (sort of) day off. I am calling clients and writing yet more company bios today from home today. Tomorrow morning I get to show property and goodness knows what the rest of the week will bring, so we needed a homebody day.

The chicks are almost completely feathered out. I need to take more photos. Ryan wasn't able to finish the chicken tractor over the weekend, again thanks to snow.

The feedsack purses are the craft project du jour. I will post photos this afternoon, good or bad. I understand there are some sewing challenges going on in blogland. KL at http://www.katiescalamities.blogspot.com/ is determined to sew something today with her unbelievably vast stash of fabric, which I understand grew more over the weekend. Misty at http://www.mistywagner.blogspot.com/ is also (I think) tackling some sewing. Anyone else?

We were blessed last night by our good friends cooking us dinner and dessert and sharing a very special drink to celebrate our business purchase. That was fun!

I think that's all the news that's fit to post. Have a blessed day all...

Big Plans for Today

Some daffodils through a tangle of grapevines. Last year we pruned the grapevines very severely... and a little too late in the year. We had grapes the first year we were here, but last year we didn't get any. They hadn't been pruned in about 20 years, so we had a lot of raw material leftover. If I'd been on top of things I could have made wreaths, wattle fencing, what have you. This year we'll leave the grapevines alone and see what we get. The octogenarian who owned this house for 50-plus years told us there are three varieties. He and his wife also planted my lavender hedge... another favorite thing.

Speaking of raw materials, the girls and I are going to make purses from feedsacks. This is a very farm chic-y thing to do, methinks. In my grandmothers' day, feedsacks were fabric, of course, and saved for everything from dresses to dish towels. We ferret these out at rummage sales and antique shops. But I'm talking about a new tradition (well, if they turn out). Today's feedsacks are tough woven material that's wipeable and water-resistant. They are printed with livestock photos and bright graphics. I'll keep you posted on how that turns out.

Yesterday Laura and I went to my dad's and dug about three dozen strawberry plants. Hurray! I would be out planting now... but it's snowing again. I took some pictures of snow on the pansies, which I shall post later. Maybe with the purse pics.

Today is a big day. We have church, then ballet, then the horse clinic, then KL and the Inspector General and their gang for dinner. KL is bringing spaghetti sauce. I am boiling noodles. I like that division of labor!

I hope your day is blessed and your adventures bigger than life.