"Holy crap! A house! A honey! A garden! A Small Dog! I live in a 'destination wedding' location!! I couldn't have dreamed this!!! I am just the luckiest girl in all of the cosmos!!!"
And I sob into my journal of positive affirmations (which, in case you were wondering, is right next to my dream board).
Other times in the dead of winter, when our tourist town winds down to a dead stop and I see the same 13 people over and over, I don't feeeeel as grateful.
"What do you mean I can't order Indian food to my door after a ten hour day!? What do you mean to get cake decorating supplies I have to drive two and a half hours to Wenatchee!? It's 2015, what do you mean we CAN'T get internet!!?? What do mean I live here forever!!??? Who are these people!!?? Where am I!??? Who am I!!???"
And in that case, I pick up my axe and start calling for Lliam around the house (which, in case you were wondering, is right next to the dead telepathic black guy that was trying to warn him that somebody is cuckoo for cocoa puffs).
Today, however, there is nothing to fear! Today in fact, I am fully in love with this life we've created and all of it's delicious glories! So! If you have a penchant for sarcasm and prefer The Shining over Gilmore Girls, now would be the time to grab a barf bucket. :)
Homesteading is described in Wikipedia as "a lifestyle or self-sufficiency. It is characterized by subsistence agriculture, home preservation of food stuffs, and it may or may not also involve the small scale production of textiles, clothing, and craftwork for household use or sale."
I FREAKING LOVE HOMESTEADING!!!
It's a little bit country and a little bit rock and roll. Our life is a love child between Little House On the Prairie and Walking Dead. Lliam is incredibly skilled and resourceful. I, on the other hand, am trying my hand for the first time at things like canning and gardening. I mostly stand around taking pictures while he assembles toothpase, old gaskets and a rusty coffee tin into a beautiful bookshelf. Then I exclaim, "Yay, honey! We did it!" Lliam laughs and rolls his eyes. Then I make him dinner like a good girlfriend that has no real homesteading skills. Sigh.
Lliam's property is directly across the street from me. I KNOW!!! So we just pretend we own the street and call our combined properties 'The Compound.' When I bought the house, one of the first decisions we made was to get us some chickens! Lliam had a little shed on his property that was dying for a paint job and some fluffy feathered company.
We got them in late April and they were so utterly tiny. Just a day or two old! This is Mary and Buffy the Vampire Buffer. That's Orca in the back.
This is Buttermilk. Buttermilk is named after that rock star little jumping goat on YouTube. She/He/WeDon'tKnowYet has always been a bit of a bully so we assumed this chick was a rooster. It never grew any spurs but has a partial cock-a-doodle and aggressive nature, so we're still scratching our heads. And that's okay, Buttermilk. We don't need to know. Just be nice to the other ladies, for Pete's Sake!
When we got them it was too cold to have them outside so we kept them in our mudroom with a heat lamp. So tiny!
Within a few days, they had started growing.
Within a week, they looked completely different.
After a month, they were big!
Once it got warm enough and we finished the Chicken Condo, we moved all nine girls in!
Daddy LOVES his girls. He gets a total kick out of them.
They're pretty weird.
This is a picture of them coming out of their tunnel to go play the Superbowl.
This is Uggs our little Silkie Bantam rooster (he's got spurs). Uggs looks like he's wearing Ugg Boots and looks like a bit of a muppet when he walks around. He just kind of keeps to himself and twitches his head every few seconds like he's a little off, maybe inbred. Sweet little bird, though! You can't meet Uggs and not say, "Oh yeah... Poor little guy." Ha! I'm glad he has a good home. Maybe Buttermilk is trying to keep things in line because they know he can't!
This is my favorite picture so far of our girls!
Mary is in the back. There's one in every bunch.
She's just gotta do Mary, man.
Thanks for coming along on our homesteading journey. So many projects going on right now! Next week, I'll take you through the garden. Things are growing!!! Whee!!!
Much love,
Mandi
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