Discovery and Resumption

I have spent the morning discovering blogs by two old friends. We are far flung, but seem to have much in common. The three of us are all learning the foreign language of our husband's homeland, and are putting our houses and families together. It has also served as some blogging inspiration. Whoa, lucky for you!

Much has passed since March. I didn't mark the wildflower season much this year, but with the lack of rain there wasn't much to report. We have cracks in the clay soil you do NOT want to drop your keys down - it would take some vertical gear to retrieve them! The most prolific flower this year was the primrose, although we had a bumper crop of dewberries. I ate many of them from the yard, and Charley picked several bowlfuls for my cereal and his ice cream. We were too busy working on the house though to really harvest them, but it would have been a good year for it. We have made so much progress on the house! Charley got the whole list of stuff to be done by June 1st completed - two weeks ahead of schedule! We have a kitchen cabinet now, with doors, and a tiled backsplash (that was my project, and it turned out great!). We have an entire room devoted to being a library - and that was quite an accomplishment. It is a small room, but it needed new walls, a floor, bookshelves, and books. Charley went to the university auction and got us enough bookshelves to go wall to wall in the small room. Our friend Richard assisted with the new walls, and Charley and I installed a floor. We also unpacked what seemed like hundreds (not really) of boxes of books that have been stored for years. We moved all of my crafty stuff in to that room, and Charley is going to also make a home for his postcard collection. The library takes up most of the top floor of the two-story 10x20 foot cabin where we lived while we built our main house. The rest of the space up there is taken up with a very as-of-yet unfinished bathroom - just a toilet and a sink, and bare drywall. But having no bathtub, I could care less about that room, really. The downstairs of that building has become our shower room/movie room, since it has a shower in it... Charley revamped an old armoir that I scored (for free!) with shelves and stop chains on the doors (so they don't ruin the walls) and I filled it up with towels and other showery-bathroom stuff. That's in one corner, and the rest of that room now houses our video and dvd library (whew, we have a lot of movies. The one case we installed to hold them is NOT enough) and a TV with VHS and DVD capabilities, and our giant blue couch for lounging. We will have to play tetris with the rest of the space to see if we can't fit another chair in there.
Charley also installed a railing on the stairs that lead upstairs to our deck and the library, which is a good thing, because in my newly waddling state, the stairs were beginning to get a bit sketchy. Now I have something to hold onto. We have cleaned out LOTS of junk, and just have to rearrange the copious furniture ( we went a little crazy at the estate sales last year) in the main house to make room for baby stuff. It's all coming along. The major construction is finished, for the time being. We still have to finish that bathroom off, and finish installing our pantry cabinet in our main house, but I'm not terribly concerned about those things getting done in time for me to go into labor. The next big project is to finish our lane and parking area with road base, and put up a shade structure for the cars to park under. Then Charley gets to build his shop! He can't wait to get that started, and it is a big project, starting from the ground up - leveling, pouring a slab - all that. And when the shop is finished, we will then build an addition to the main house, with extra bedrooms and a bathroom with a real bathtub, for me! That's the three year plan, but I'm getting waaaaay ahead of myself. In the meantime I have some baby showers to attend, a visit from my mom coming up, and relaxing to do.
I noticed just the other day that there are three new baby buffalos in the field by the highway on the way into Austin. It seemed later this year, but looking back in my blog, it was just earlier this month, last year that the buffalos were born. I think it seemed earlier because even though we've actually had quite a nice spring, this year the weather has turned to summer on cue, 100 degree days by mid-may. Last year, with the rains, we had spring until June, and so at this time last year the wildflowers were just beginning to simmer down. This year, the land is much more barren, although I have seen a few beebalm flowers lately, and some brown-eyed susans. I've also seen several toads, and many large spiders. The grasshoppers are miniture right now, and the fire ants are up to their usual no good. I doubt the compost heap will volunteer a garden for us us this year, but the fig tree has figs thanks to some diligent watering Charley does. We've decided that next year will be the year we begin our garden, and start some animal husbandry. We're thinking rabbits and chickens. Charley has seen many dead snakes in the road, but none alive. We've also heard some reports of treefrogs around our place, but I have yet to see them in person. The gekos are once again enjoying the lights and screens as perfect bug-catching habitat, and we've seen a couple walking sticks on the house so far. There has been a real lack of butterflies this year, but that goes hand in hand with the lack of wildflowers. I have seen a few female swollowtails, and some hairstreaks, that always come with the vervain. The wild honeysuckle is again this year tenacious, and is about the only thing still blooming. The mesquite trees are all still very green and leafy, giving us lots of privacy, which I appreciate very much.
So that's about it. We're about two months from baby launch, which is getting more real and more exciting every day. I have quite the bump going. The heat is a challenge but Cold Texas Rivers have been my saving grace. The baby moves a LOT and that is quite the odd sensation - I haven't ever gotten used to it. We still don't know the sex - but I love when people ask "What is it?" because I can assure them it is human. I am healthy and happy, and receiving great care from my midwife. We're planning a homebirth, which is why the drive to complete some of this construction so soon. We're almost there. I'll do my best to keep you posted.

It Gets Better

Today: running hot water in the sink! We received our brand new Takagai TK-JR tankless waterheater today, and just after the pancake breakfast, Charley and Phillip installed it. Hot water in the sink! We all washed our hands in celebration. A couple more trips to the hardwear store later, we will also have the washer hooked up and the vent installed. We are waiting on a kit to transform the dryer from a natural gas to LP-run dryer. Our local propane service charges $65 for the kit, but Charley found it for $12 on the internet, so we're waiting on one more shipment.

I baked some cupcakes in the oven today, and cooked lunch. The oven runs hot, and the burners are burning with some yellow/orange flame. We're quite sure that the flame should be all blue, so we have a few small kinks to work out, but for the most part we're up and running with a mostly-finished kitchen. Possibly tomorrow the cabinets will be installed, but that's a big job and may take more than one day.

The pancake breakfast was a hoot. We met a few people, and made sure to visit our friend Pricilla at the general store. She had to work during the breakfast, which was across the street from the store. She had the wood burning stove going in the chilly morning, so it was nice to hang out with her for a bit before ducking in for sausage and bacon and hot cakes. A couple of the masons made an attempt to recruit Charley for the Masons - even gave him a tour of their temple. I think he told them that he's all ready to join once they get the bonfire and the goat sacrifice and the dancing girls ready. They laughed nervously and assured him their organization was not pagan or atheist. I guess that means Charley won't be flipping pancakes next year!!! Besides that minor social gaffe, everyone was quite delightful and we always enjoy meeting the people in our small and scattered community. We shopped the garage sale, and made out with a collapsable clothes drying rack and a pizza pan.

I'm serving as the Team Leader of the Box Office Crew at the Old Settlers Music Festival in a couple of weeks, so I've been spending some time on the computer reading and readying documents for our volunteer training meeting tomorrow. I still need three volunteers - locals? anyone interested? It's a good ole time.

The guys have been working hard all day, and we're going to sit back with a big homey steak dinner tonight. Maybe tomorrow we can all take the day off and catch a movie. The baby has been hiccuping and dancing on my bladder more and more, which is a very distracting sensation. Happy weekend to you!

Can it get any better?

Today: Diaper service decision triumph, new Raconteurs album downloaded, and LP in tank and stove in kitchen fully functional! Plus it is Friday. Tomorrow morning we get to enjoy the Lytton Springs Pancake Breakfast at the local Masonic Lodge. The breakfast benefits a fund for scholarships for Lytton Springs Seniors, and will be a great place to meet more local friends. Our friend Phillip may come by this weekend as well, and we will continue work on our kitchen. What a great day!

I Go Out Walkin'

I had a very eventful walk tonight. I saw many wildflowers out and about in Lytton Springs, even a new flower I hadn't seen before and now must identify. There are bluebonnets blooming, but not along the stretch of road that I was walking. All of the blue that I saw was in the form of Bud Light cans. Somebody who drives home on 1854 each night LOVES a Bud Light for the drive home, and seeds the roadsides with their empties. Otherwise it was the usual suspects - vervain, broom, paintbrush, crow poison, dewberries, evening primrose. And a few I didn't expect - wild honey suckle and a small purple bell flower I have yet to identify. I even ran into an old friend- Scoop, the stray kitty who visited the farm late last year. She's filthy dirty, has ditched the undignified collar, and looked a bit thinner than before. But she was crazy for the love, as usual. She stayed in the field across the street where I found her. It was a beautiful evening, cool and gently breezy.I was careful to avoid ant mounds, but it was easy because most of the roadsides had been recently mowed. There were no loose country dogs to scare the bejesus out of me - only fenced barkers. Even a turkey! I stopped several times to admire the huge oak trees growing twisted and massive along my path. I saw a cardinal, and stopped to listen to it twitter. There were solemn cows and horses with their necks bent, intent on the freshly sprouting green food at their feet. I walked home as the sun set on the prairie.

Bon Voyage

Well, after a long hiatus of doing exactly who knows what, besides updating my blog, I have just a few notes. I saw my first patch of bluebonnets on Thursday, February 28th. I saw several more on Friday and Saturday. "That is too early for Bluebonnets!!" as my friend Vico said. We have had a mild end of winter, but little rain, albeit some lately. I do think that my interest in blogging reflects the observable life - greenery, flora, and critters - around the house and out here in the country. It has been fairly brown and quiet for quite some time now, with only a few crow poison flowers and some sow thistle here and there. The first thing I noticed, earlier in the month of Feb, were the proliferation of wild geranium leaves, but no blooms yet. Ah, and I did find some creeping charlie - a favorite weed from childhood that was always being eradicated from the strawberry patch and the yard, more persistent even then dandilions, it seemed to me. And the name cracks me up now, since my husband shares it, but he is not creepy or creeping in anyway.
I am headed off on a week long caribbean cruise tomorrow, and I am all kinds of excited about it, as you might imagine. We stop in Jamaica, Grand Cayman, and Cozumel. It all sounds very exotic and luxurious, something I can use a dose of. We're calling it our Babymoon, which is what you take when you never really took a honeymoon, and you are now having a baby. We are due at the end of July. You may have also noticed the floating baby at the top of the page, it mirrors the development of the peanut inside me. My tummy is sticking out and I have all of the glamourous symptoms of pregnancy at some point in recent history. I always knew that babies took over your life, but who knew that they did it at 9 weeks gestation? I do, now.
So we're off on one adventure after another, and it will all unfold over the spring and summer, along with the buzz of life out here on the farm. Don't expect to hear from me for a while, I'll be sipping (ironically called) Virgin Daquiries and lounging on white sugar sand beaches and dipping my toes in aqua clear waters.