Woo-Hoo Progress!

We made progress this weekend! YAY! This was one of the more productive weekends we've had in quite a while, and it feels great.

For starters, the yard has three less tarps! Yikes, it's sad to admit there were ever that many tarps. But what were we to do with all those cedar shakes? (Quick aside, last summer our very generous friends gave us a HUGE pile of old-growth never been used cedar shake that they had - long story there - which we plan to use to side the cabin on the east side. Well worth the eye-sore for a few months while we tried to figure out where to store it.) We took all the shake out to my folks' property to store, yes, under a tarp, out in the field now that there aren't any goats or horses living there. Which also means I'll be able to plant some veggies this summer since they were in my vegetable garden. We used our shiny new trailer to bring everything in one load, which was better than the three loads it took us to get them here.

We also pretty much finished the mud in the spare bedroom, and it's starting to look like it's coming together. The annoying part about mudding... okay, not *the* annoying part about mudding, as there are lots of annoying parts about mudding... is that it takes so darn long in between coats and you really can't do anything in the middle. It's not like paint, which you let dry for a couple of hours and then jump back in. Mud always seems like it really takes overnight to get good and dry. But we got two more coats on over the weekend, so a light sanding and we should be ready to prime and then paint. I suppose I should start thinking about colors...

And our third big accomplishment, is that the sawmill (which had been hiding under one of those three ugly tarps) now lives safely in the new trailer. Everything for milling is now ready to go - all we have to do is hitch up to the truck and away we go. The really great part is that if it's a job that'll take more than a day, we can leave everything there and know it's safe and go back the next day to finish up.

The trailer is our major purchase of the month. Hopefully of the quarter... We bought a 7x14' Wells Cargo last week. We've been watching craigslist for a while now for just the perfect one and it finally appeared. It's now our mobile-milling-station.

I know I'm not very good at frequent short posts... what I don't know is why it's so hard to find a few minutes to throw something up. So let me see if I can summarize a bit of the month so far...

It's been a month of lobster. Mmmm... Jim brought home two for valentines day. Of course I saved the shells and made yummy stock, which we used to make crab bisque. More mmmm... And then my folks took us out for birthday dinners, and I had the lobster macaroni and cheese. Which I must say, was not macaroni noodles and more like an Alfredo sauce, but super tasty never-the-less. We tried a restaurant that we'd never been to before, Troiani, and we were all quite impressed. Everyone was very pleased with their meal and the service/atmosphere were great.

I had a fabulous day of shopping in the big city with Anandi earlier this month, and managed to find another cashmere sweater that I couldn't live without. And we had friends over for dinner one night and for once when I served fondue, it didn't turn into one big glob of cheese.

So it's been a good month overall. Which works out well, because there was one day that was a wee bit painful when I hit a magic decade mile-marker. But since life is good, I can't, won't and don't even want to complain.