It’s been a crazy few days. Between Evan’s adventures in botany, his and Maia’s 11th birthdays (which were yesterday), and getting ready to go to Atlanta with my sister for the BlogHer Food ’11 conference, I’ve been a little busy.

Sunday night I was up baking sugar cookies until 1:20 AM.

Tuesday I was up decorating them until 2 AM! That, my folks, is the end of my adventures in sugar cookies. At least for a while. I was so darn tired by the time I finished that I didn’t even take any decent pictures of them when they were done.



I’m bringing my laptop with plenty of work, so while everybody else is out boozing it up I’ll be in my room working away. That’s the plan at least.

This entire week has been a comedy of errors. I guess that would be the right word for it.

First there was the pregnant goat who turned out to not be pregnant, just very very fat. Let’s not even get into all the time, energy and lost sleep over the kids that will never arrive.

Thursday my son, who will hereafter be referred to as “the Knucklehead”, decided with his friend that it would be a good idea to rub poison ivy all over their faces. His friend told him (the Knucklehead claims) that it was a good way to get out of going to school). Brilliant, huh?

Saturday was my sister’s 50th birthday. She was having the party up at her weekend place in Stafford Springs, CT, which is about a 2 hours drive from me. I ended up spending the entire time worrying about Evan, who was clearly miserable and suffering greatly, and finally ended up taking him, in the middle of the party, to the local emergency room. They wouldn’t give him a shot of steroids there for some reason; claimed “they didn’t do that”, which is what his friend, Knucklehead II, had to get that morning at his doctor’s, only to be sent away from the ER with a prescription for steroid pills and arrive at the local pharmacy 3 minutes after it closed for the day. Two hours later we returned to the party in time to grab the leftovers of dinner, and I missed an opportunity to get to know a bunch of my sisters’ friends that I hear about all the time.

I spent my night and into the wee hours of this morning straining the honey I harvested on Thursday and washing and cleaning the wax, only to discover in the end that the honey had a smokey flavor from smoking the hive. Who knew you could smoke honey?? I suppose it might have some uses for a savory dish of some sort, but it’s certainly not what you expect from a spoon full of honey.


And I am ending my night – please note the time of this posting – beginning to make the 100 sugar cookies that I’ve promised my twins for their 11th birthday celebrations in their classrooms on Tuesday. I’ve only gotten half of them done tonight. In the morning I will finish the baking and spend the rest of the day decorating them. How oh how do I get myself into these things.

My friend Cyrena and I spent 8 hours this week cleaning out my attic. We’ve got a great walk-up attic here and over the past 15 years it has collected 6 people’s outgrown clothes, unused lamps, furniture, books and other miscellaneous crap. You could barely walk up there anymore and it was time to do something about it. I was ruthless. This photo doesn’t even show everything I’ve taken out of there, and I’m still not done. It was a good feeling.

Today they got the porch roof completed and the small roof over the entry door completed. I am just loving the look of that back porch. We’re keeping our fingers crossed that the windows arrive tomorrow. I swear I’m moving out there when it’s done.

My bee guy, Mike Paoletto from Paoletto Farms came down today to help me with a hive inspection. I need to take some of the brood comb and start a new colony, but after evaluating it and doing some cleanup of wayward comb we decided it needed to wait another 3-4 weeks to do it. At that time I’ll be able to get the hive I built this winter started and I’m excited about that. I’ll post more about the bees and the honey harvest soon.

And finally I’m off early in the morning for a vet appointment with Cissy and Melina to try and figure out what is going on. Melina has now made it 2 full days past her due date. I spoke to the breeder I bought them from today and she has never had a nigerian dwarf go past 150 days. That got me a little panicked. That and the fact that besides lounging around all day she shows no signs of going into labor. There are too many possibilities, most of them bad, to explain why she hasn’t had the kid yet. The simplest one would be that she simply isn’t pregnant. It’s hard to imagine why she’s so far though! I’ll know more in the morning.

I’m sitting here in my motel room in Emmitsburg, Pennsylvania, working on some posts. I pick up my new baby goat in the morning and I am very excited about that. I had a long day and did a lot of driving.

I was looking through my photos on my laptop, hoping that I had downloaded a few of the particular photos I need for a long-overdue post I’ve been thinking about. I didn’t find them. I did, however, come across the photos from the Crafty Farm Sister’s Great Plains Road Trip last May. Almost a year ago. What a fun trip with my sister.

I haven’t finished the post I’m working on, but I thought I’d just share these two great photos with you.

If you ever get a chance, do go visit the Badlands National Park in South Dakota. Our night there will forever go down as the most memorable camping spot I’ve ever been to. Stunning. And Eleanor was sparkly and newly restored.

I flew home with the twins on Thursday morning from Virginia and I timed my flight so that Amanda would just be arriving on her flight from Kentucky for the long Easter weekend. It’s always wonderful to have her home, but it wasn’t until the next night when I was setting the table for dinner – Baked Rigatoni with Tiny Meatballs that she’d helped me make that afternoon — that I realized how nice it was to be setting the table for 6 again. Then I realized what had been missing lately.

Amanda.


It was so nice to have her home.

She slept a lot, ate a lot, studied a little, and did everything with us. We went to lunch together on Friday and I took all the kids shopping and for haircuts on Saturday. It was just nice having all of my kids together, and it seems to happen less and less often. It’s one of the reasons I’m not going to Wyoming for the summer this year. Amanda will be grown and gone with a family of her own one day soon, (sooner than I’m ready at least), and I don’t want to miss a minute of her while I have the chance.

Yesterday we had tickets for “Workin’ the Soil, Healing the Soul”, which was a tour to discover the life of slaves on plantations, the laws they lived with, and how they survived.

As it happened, I was about 3 pages away from finishing Wench by Dolen-Perkins-Valdez, a historical fiction book chronicling the lives of four slave women—Lizzie, Reenie, Sweet and Mawu—who are their masters’ mistresses. The women meet when their owners vacation at the same summer resort in Ohio. There, they see free blacks for the first time and hear rumors of abolition, sparking their own desires to be free. I learned a lot about slavery that I didn’t already know from this book and I found it difficult to put down every night.

I found this Workin’ the Soil, Healing the Soul tour here at Colonial Williamsburg covered a lot of information that I had just learned in this book, but was certainly information that I would not have known if I hadn’t read this book. There were a lot of facts about slavery you didn’t learn in history class. The dark, dirty truth about slavery and how they were treated. The tour was not “recommended” for children under 10. However, there were lots of kids there, and many were younger than Evan and Maia. The twins had studied slavery this year and were very interested in taking this tour, so I took the twins with me of course. They will be 11 next month.

Now there was one scene in this book where one of the women slaves gets beaten in front of everyone by her master that is quite brutal. The fear of things like this permeated the lives of these slaves. As the tour was winding up one of the two tour leaders took out a whip that was something similar to what a slave master would have used to demonstrate what a normal beating would have been like for a slave being punished.

The law said that a slave could be whipped 39 times.

He beat that whip up against a bare tree only 4 times.

The noise was horrendous.

And, being the emotional basket case that I am, I started to cry.

The tour guides had warned us at the beginning that often people had to walk away from things that were being said. I did not expect this to bother me as it did. Not that it shouldn’t! As that whip was falling on that tree I just couldn’t believe that we actually used to do that to other human beings.

I discreetly lowered my sunglasses while a few tears rolled down my cheeks. The tour guide went on to quote pages from a slave master’s journal where he was writing of some new methods he’d found more useful in getting slave cooperation than the law-prescribed 39 lashings with a whip. He passed around a metal curry comb, which, being a horse owner I am quite familiar with. This man wrote how he’d gotten “very good results” by currying a slave’s back until raw, having another slave rub hay into the wounds and then pouring salt over his or her back and sending them back into the fields to work, while the salty sweat mixed with the salt in the open wounds and baked into his back.

Unbelievable.

Now I probably could have gotten away with this little emotional breakdown of mine had Maia, who was standing next to me, not noticed. She proceeded to kiss my arm like a love-struck peppy le pew, calling attention to me from the entire crowd at her bizarre and sudden infatuation with her mother’s arm.

Geesh.

Tomorrow I leave for Colonial Williamsburg with the twins for a quick vacation. I will return on Thursday morning just as Amanda is coming home from college for a quick Easter weekend visit. I’m excited to see her! I’m also excited for our little vacation. I’ve never been to Colonial Williamsburg before, but I’ve heard nothing but good things about it.

I will bring laptop and files down with every intention of posting at least something every day, so keep checking back.

I didn’t intend to take a 2-day break from blogging. But sometimes you do just need a break. You wonder why you do it. Is anybody actually reading it? It takes so much time. I went to bed at 8:30 Friday night and slept until 9:00 Saturday morning. I was just tired. I constantly push myself and every few months I just hit the wall and have to go to bed and recharge the batteries. But I really didn’t take the weekend off because of those things. I was just busy with life. Kids. House. Animals. Projects. Cooking. Getting a post up meant going to bed at 2 a.m. rather than midnight, and  I can’t afford to get back into that habit.

I took an all-day drive on Friday to Massachusetts and was back before the bus came. It was too brief of a visit to my favorite part of Connecticut as it flew by my windshield. I did stop to see one piece of land for sale I’ve had my eye on – 78 beautiful acres of cleared pastureland. It was even better than I expected. Can’t you just see me out on my tractor there? Goats and chickens happily roaming? Add a few horses, a cow, and of course a diva llama and I’d be all set.

So I’ll be back to blogging the good stuff tomorrow. I’ve got lots to show you.

I’m not one to normally post something as mundane as “what I did this weekend”, but the truth is I’ve been so busy making things that I don’t have enough time to post things.

On Friday night I went to see one of my favorite authors, David Sedaris, speak at a local theatre with two girlfriends. My kids spent the night at my parents house which they hadn’t done in quite awhile and they were excited about that. I was excited about dinner and being out with my friends; a rare treat for me. I didn’t quite know what to expect from a show by an author, but he was hysterically funny, reading some new stories and from his diary and we all had a great time.

My husband has been away skiing with his brother since Thursday morning, so not having him around changed the dynamic a little bit. It allows me the freedom to do things like make homemade beignets with sausage and bacon for dinner on Saturday night, which we ate while watching a movie.



While I was busy making the beignets and cooking the rest of dinner I was also trying to help the kids with our “Collage” art class. I think they found the concept of collage a bit more challenging to the mind than some of our other art classes. I know I found it challenging myself. I’ve been working on my collage for a few days now and find that I keep going back to it with different ideas. The fun part about collage though is that’s exactly what it’s all about – layers. It was another successful art class.



I’ve been working on turning some of my photographs into collage postcards, cards, and framed pieces. This has been a lot of fun and another one of those things that I find myself coming back to with different ideas and concepts.

This morning Evan discovered why my egg count has been down this past week – we’ve got hoarders under the chicken coop!



The chickens have been stockpiling the eggs – probably for a broody chicken to sit on once they had a full clutch of them. They were oh so sneaky though for small-brained birds and laid them under the coop. As we were inspecting this little hoarding stockpile I looked further back underneath the coop and there was one of my little bantams sitting on eggs! Another hoarder! It’s so sad to me that they don’t understand that without a rooster their eggs will never hatch. Evan took two bantam eggs out of the incubator I’ve got going right now and tried to add them to her eggs, but she didn’t stay on them. She may not have even been doing anything more than adding to another clutch under there.



I’m mentoring a girl for a high school project and we worked this afternoon for a few hours. We are making an outfit our of recycled and repurposed materials. An under-shirt of duct tape with an over-shirt of large paperclips together with a skirt of pink and clear bubble wrap. We’ve even made wooden shoes with leather straps from a suede hat I bought off eBay. I cannot wait to show you the finished product. It’s not anything fit for Project Runway or anything, but it’s been a really fun project for me and Claire to work on. Something to get excited about.

This afternoon I also managed to put together a new recipe of chicken scarpariello which was my dinner tonight and will be everyone’s dinner tomorrow.



I’ll end tonight by showing you how quickly the chicks are growing. They are already getting their wing feathers!

The point I’m trying to make here is that I’ve got lots of things to show you. Hopefully this week I can stop doing for a day or two so I can show you all of these things in more detail. I hope you had a wonderful weekend too!