Spring! Ahhhhhhhhh.....

Haven't written much, feel like I'm perpetually holding my breath, wondering what might collapse and when in this breathtaking world economy we're living through right now.

But in real life, all has been well. February was weirdly warm, we got some planting done and the little sprouts are doing well. We're helping out Home Grown Food with publicity and running workshops and Steve's been creating fun buttons for them to sell.

Our chickens are doing fine, though our boss girl is molting and she looks a bit odd without a big beautiful bouquet of tail feathers. The three pullets are in the garage now, we put them out in the big coop on warm days and lock them in there. They will have a bit of a time integrating into the flock when they're full-sized, but I hope the hen-pecking won't be too severe.

We missed Nick's birthday party because pertussis was running through his crowd of friends, but short of holing up all winter, there's no escaping the bugs. We went to a really fun, huge, hands-on physics fair at the university the following weekend, and shortly thereafter came down with a lovely coughing crud that we're still expectorating.

Harry is still going to croup, but glory of glories, we went in to urgent care and found that they've created a new liquid steroid formulation that doesn't taste like poison anymore! He was able to slug it down and we didn't have to do the middle of the night drives with the window down for hours on end. I can't tell you what a relief that was!

My folks arrived for a wonderful visit which ends tomorrow, we even got a dash of snow while they were here. They've split their time between our house and Cindi's. On Saturday, Dad came up with Nick and Owen and we met downtown for the St. Patrick's Day parade, which was hokey but fun.

Steve's still got a job (hooray!) and he even negotiated a raise, because he's been so damned efficient that he's reduced his hours by 20 percent. So they're paying him 10 percent more and he's going to make up the other 10 percent of lost time by generating new moneymaking ventures for the magazine, calendars, t-shirts, etc. to sell.

I went out for a mother's brunch out yesterday with a group of six or seven women, all of us unschoolers, down in Boulder, and I was shocked at the degree and rapidity with which the economy has affected them. Two husbands are laid off, two women are going back to work part-time, two are considering how they might manage through a divorce because the financial stresses are creating such strain. It made me realize how fragile people are going to be throughout this crisis and how valuable an extra dose of gentleness for people I meet will be.

I'm excited to get planting and growing. I've been reading up on various intensive gardening methods. I'm going to plant out some potatoes in a protected bed today, but I really want to plant more using this method.

We're going to experiment with some grains. I have amaranth seeds to plant, but eventually i think it would be fun to grow oats and wheat.

My new friend who is hosting a community garden on her land wants to raise piglets and has asked if we want to participate and buy/help raise a piglet. I would like to, though I'm wondering how I'll handle butchering time, when it comes around. (We won't be doing the job ourselves, mind you, but I imagine it will be emotional nonetheless.) I figure either I'll make my peace with it or be motivated to go vegetarian.

I'm still waffling on the dairy goat partnership. I just don't see getting up crack-of-dawn to go over to Rosemary's farm and milk most mornings. Housing here would be problematic. We still haven't figured out how to pen the chickens up to keep them out of our gardens but still able to roam and graze. They're nibbling away on the green grass shoots coming up, and they get very antsy if we lock them in their coop for too long during the day. (Oh, we moved our compost pile from one side of the yard to the other on Friday and the whole thing was loaded with worms. The chickens were positively apoplectic, running back and forth along the fencing we'd put up temporarily so they'd stay out of our way, as Steve carted the smelly goo across the yard. Once we released them ("Release the chickens!" she bellowed, and all the worms quaked, but you couldn't really tell because they were pretty gelatinous to begin with."), they raced over to the new compost pile and walked around the sides of it, heads cocked sideways, beaks darting between the wooden slats to grab whatever critters were unlucky enough to have landed at the outer edges of the pile.

Morning and it's duties calls, so I'll sign off for now!

ps. Maddie just finished a blog post as well, if you haven't found her blog, it's here