Moulting

Dot, the head of poultry operations at the Williamson Farmhouse, has signaled to the rest of the flock that moulting should be in full progress. I would have taken a photo of them earlier in the season of moulting.

But they hide when they are going bald. When chickens moult they look mangy and half naked. They look, in fact, a lot like chickens getting plucked for dinner which I think goes a long way to explaining why they feel like hiding during the worst part of their moulting which goes on for about a month. Most of the girls' feathers are filling in again.

We're having a fly problem right now that we've never had with chickens before. It is normal to have a few flies buzzing around a chicken coop. You should not have a cloud of them. I put a fly trap inside the coop and caught a ton of them. However, now the problem is that they are hanging out in our "breezeway" right next to the run. I'm not sure why. they've had fresh hay and a clean out but I think it may be because we haven't been scraping down their droppings where they roost on top of their hen house.

I think scraps are a problem too. When they don't like a scrap we give them it rots in their run. It's not true that all chickens will love all your scraps. Chickens are individuals just as people are.

Here's what they love:

cruciferous vegetables
melons
beets
slugs
snails
weeds
greens
corn
bread

Here's what they like but would leave alone for something better:

cucumber
apples
plums
grapes
carrot tops
tomatoes

Here's what they don't like at all:

carrots
onions


I need to locate a reference for what's poisonous to hens and what you should avoid for their health. This is information that I would like to include in my poultry raising article in Roost. I'll have to look for that. I'm pretty sure you're not supposed to feed them raw potato. They are natural scavengers (and omnivores, they will eat meat) and so they can eat a lot of things without being harmed but I know that there are some things that aren't good for them.

My girls are still laying but production is easing up. They don't lay as much when they moult and when the daylight hours begin to decrease. I'll have to buy eggs now through spring at least periodically unless I set up artificial light to stimulate laying but I won't do that because it wears the hens down faster.



I would love to hear what other people's hens' favorite scraps are. Do share!

So Long Henna
(and thanks for all the eggs!)

Henna is the dark reddish brown hen third from the left.

The day opened with a blanket of heat over the city. From there on the day just got worse. I know so many people who are really happy to have the heat here ("at last") but I am not one of them for the following reasons:

Heat makes people more likely to kill other people.

I don't like heat rashes and I've got a real nice one under my boobs right now.

It makes my animals extremely uncomfortable.

Iced coffee isn't nearly as nice a way to wake up as hot coffee.

It makes people sweat. I don't know anyone who wears sweat attractively.

It makes people smell. Because of the sweat.

Plus other malodorous things get really ripe in the heat.

In spite of the heat I was enjoying a little moment of complete contentedness with my house and chatting with my sister who is coming with us in the hot-box* to California tomorrow. All was well in spite of the skin blistering sunshine until Philip came in and told me that our hen named Henna had died.

I don't like it when my chickens die. What's worse is that she died of a mysterious cause. We don't know why. I am thankful that she didn't die from being mauled by a wild beast. But I am so sad to lose one of my girls. She was such a hard worker and such a lovely hen. Chickens are not Olympian animals with really long lifespans so if you keep them you must get used to losing them from time to time.

Philip buried her in the yard. So begins the pet cemetery at the new house. We are leaving and now I'm worried to leave my other girls behind. A good friend is going to care for them and the house but what if I come back to no hens?

I have to get up ridiculously early so I am going to simply say that I hope you all are staying cool and if the next time you see me I'm turned inside out, pay no mind.

Goodbye Henna. Thanks for all the eggs and the excellent company. You will be missed by your family and your flock. We send you love to whatever place chicken spirits go when they die. May you feast on a thousand snails a day and never have to lay another damn egg!

*the car

Chicken Run

I miss our hens. I miss hearing them squawk, shuffle, coo, cluck, argue, and preen. A collection of noises that I find soothing, therapeutic, and charming. It's too quiet here. It's time to shake up the neighborhood and introduce them to their new existence living next door to the McMinnville hillbillies.

Oh, totally random (before I forget again): I keep meaning to say that the owner of the Burnside B&B (Liz) was fabulous and I adore her and she cemented her charm when she asked me who Martha Stewart was. How cool is that? Yes, some people don't even know who she is.

Back to the hens...we can't just bring the hen house over and let them roam the yard because the dog will kill them. So a run has to be built first. Although I have yet to see evidence of skunks or raccoons in our own yard, we know they are plentiful in the McMinnville neighborhoods and aside from dogs they are the most serious predator of chickens. Fortifications must be built that cannot be breached by digging or unlatching or climbing in via tree branches. For this reason, building a chicken run is a little bit like building a tiny Fort Knox. Burying chicken wire down in the dirt several inches is a good tactic. Covering the roof of the run is also smart, the other threat is chicken hawks. Yep, hawks that steal and eat chickens.

Because we live in a suburban area, there are set back rules for keeping chickens that we must adhere to. This is predominantly why we are building our chicken run right up against our lovely porch. Normally we would probably find a different spot for them.

All of our animals were intrigued by Philip's mysterious undertaking. They camped out around him, got in his way, perched themselves importantly on the tools, and generally tried to be as unhelpful as possible which is cake to cats and dogs.

Even our neighbor's puppy got in on the act. Chick dug a hole for her under the fence and I didn't discover it until I saw Chick run by twice in one direction...after my double take I noticed that the extra Chick was actually a Rottweiler puppy. This forced caused me to finally meet our neighbors over the back fence. We've agreed to let our dogs be friends since none of us can honestly figure out how to stop a determined black lab from digging her way to China if that's what she wants. Riley is very sweet, super soft, and more spazzy than Angelina on a farm.

Life is good here. We've discovered that we are much too poor to have our house up on the market but much too poor to pay for two mortgages so our friends Anna and Mitch are going to rent it because they really like the house and are supremely tired of living in a rental house with raw sewage leaking into their basement. Yeah, I don't blame them. We are all super happy with this outcome, though it's been a slightly bumpy ride working this all out. (Sorry for all the ups and downs Anna!!) (They've been very kind and patient with me.)

We are also too poor for me to lounge around here all day eating bon bons (locally made, obviously) so I'm looking for a job. I was really depressed about the prospect until I saw that our local library is hiring. Don't get your undies in a bunch over it, I'm sure there's a lot of competition for the position, but I got a glimpse of how working again might actually be exciting. I was beginning to imagine the drudgery it must be to pump ever more expensive gasoline into giant trucks all day when I saw this little light. It may be a long shot, but this is a job that I am ideally suited for, that I have secretly dreamed of even doing even after graduating from FIDM with my associates degree in fashion design.

Libraries are magical places. There were times in my childhood when I spent more hours talking with the librarians than I did my own parents. There are few places that hold as much promise of attainable knowledge and no other place in which you can broaden your experience of the world without leaving town. They smell of books; they represent the ultimate in organization of information; the human imagination is represented in thousands of ways and celebrated nowhere else so thoroughly than in public libraries...all for free.

Reality is a funny thing and who can say what it will look like tomorrow, but today is Sunday and we are all going to go for a bicycle ride together and I am going to dream yet another impossible dream.

The Right To Bare Poultry

(and how eggs don't grow on trees)

I have long believed that more important than a person's right to bare arms, is his/her right to raise poultry. All over the world people, even if they don't have the space for goats, pigs, or cows, raise hens in order to eat the eggs and occasionally butcher themselves a little roast chicken for dinner. Chickens are small compared to other farm animals and require less care and space to live healthily, as well as less expense to feed.

I think it is a serious sign of our great disconnect from our food sources, and from sustainable living that so many towns and cities have outlawed poultry raising. The truth is that chickens are no louder than dogs. I'm not kidding. Dogs are universally allowed in all cities and all towns and no one would ever question our general right to keep dogs, yet hens (not roosters) are generally quieter than dogs except for when they are laying their eggs at which point they can sound like a posse of excited old ladies clucking and cawing and making a ruckus. Which doesn't last for more than twenty minutes a day. Compared to the constant howling and barking of neighborhood dogs, I consider them less of a noise nuisance than canines.

People also seem to think that chickens are dirty and cause for sanitation concerns. While they can get the Avian flu, this is not so common as people fear and can be somewhat prevented by keeping your poultry from any contact with wild birds (which are the carriers for the disease). Chicken poop is not nearly as unsanitary as dog poop and the volume of poop produced by each hen is pretty minimal compared to the amount of poop made by your average dog. With the added bonus that, unlike your dog's poop, the chicken poop is garden gold and if aged and spread over your garden will add to it's overall fertility.

Another thing that's great about keeping hens is the eggs. It's the most obvious reason to keep them. Eggs are a great source of protein and for those of us who don't eat flesh, they are also a great way to get plenty of vitamin B12, without which, we all go crazy and then die. (Did you know that?). Hens all have differing egg laying habits. Some breeds are known to be great layers and others, not so much. It pays to research this. Our current flock have all been exceptional layers until the winter really settled in (which is natural, they slow down or stop laying when daylight hours decrease). We have two Rhode Island Reds, one Barred Rock, one Golden Sex-Link, and one Black Sex-Link. Reading about breeds can give you an idea of what kind of hens are best for you, but a hen can be a real individual and not match the general profile of her breed so don't be shocked if you end up with a rebel Brahma.

To be honest, I keep chickens as much for their own sakes as I do the benefits to the garden and to my kitchen. My parents kept chickens for a few years when I was a kid and I spent quite a bit of time with them. Chickens are curious birds with a very engaging habit of being interested in what their people are up to. Left to wander a garden, in situations where this is both safe and possible, they will follow their people around like puppies. They aren't cuddly pets, though if handled quite a lot as tiny chicks, they are often not averse to being toted around for a little one on one close up time. Though one should always be careful when holding hens close, they see eyeballs as giant shiny objects in need of closer investigation- and you should know that hens investigate everything with their beaks.

I find the company of hens therapeutic. They aren't as stupid as you might think, by the way. You can't measure their intelligence against what we like to think of as our own intelligence. They are birds. They look like little dinosaurs. They have been around for a long time, a lot longer than us. When they look at me, I can see that they think I am one weird creature and their fascination is very funny. Chickens used to be jungle birds that lived in the trees. They could fly, they foraged for insects and fruit, and they have a complex social life that we like to call the "pecking order". I'm not saying these birds could ever be taught to play backgammon, I'm just saying that their cunning is alien to us, but that doesn't mean they're stupid.

Deep in the heart of winter is when many of us plan on the projects we'll begin in the springtime. I know a lot of people who are thinking about keeping hens. Now is the time to read up on them and find out if hens are really a good match for you. I'm going to list for you the basics you need to know in order to decide if you really want to keep chickens:

Check your city ordinance code to find out if keeping hens in your town or city is legal. It is actually surprising how many big cities allow hen keeping compared to how many medium sized towns don't. Always check the code and don't just ask someone in the ordinance office, see the code yourself. Lots of people make assumptions about the legality of hen keeping but don't really know. This information is almost always available online in your city's informational website (most cities have them now).

Make sure you know if there are any laws in the ordinance stating specific distances your chickens must be from kitchens or fence lines. Some cities allow hens but only if they are kept twenty feet from any fence line or kitchen.

Hens need more hens. Don't plan on getting just one hen. They are social birds and need to belong in a flock. The more the merrier, but know that at least three hens is optimum.

For every hen you have you need to allow at least 2 square feet of space in the hen house, and at least 4 square feet of space in the run. What happens if you don't provide each hen with these minimum requirements? They will feel cramped, will most likely get stressed and this will cause them to either pick at themselves or at the weaker hens in the flock. It will also make them more susceptible to disease.

Everything wants to eat your chickens. Dogs and raccoons are a hen's worst enemies. You will need to fortify their run accordingly, even if you have never seen a raccoon in your neighborhood. Raccoons live in many cities and only come out in the daytime if they have rabies. So the first you will know they've visited your yard is when they decimate your flock if you have not locked them in for the night. Even the best behaved dogs go ape-shit when presented with the opportunity for a fresh bite of chicken.

Vacationing is difficult if you have chickens. If you have a lifestyle which includes frequent travel, keeping chickens is not for you. Unless you have someone who lives near by who will enjoy caring for your chickens while you are away. Eggs must be collected every single day or they may start eating their own eggs or stop laying them.

If you let them roam your garden all day long without supervision they will destroy it. Many people have dreams of having hens foraging in their garden because they hear about how great chickens are at getting rid of snails and other pesky bugs. Our first flock was allowed to do this and we quickly learned not to let them out unless we were going to be there to shoo them away from our vegetable seedlings and keep them from digging huge holes where we didn't want them. Chickens are not gentle on gardens.

Think about all those points as you consider starting your own flock. Chickens are, in my opinion, very rewarding animals to keep. They have a lot to offer the urban homestead. I wouldn't choose to live anywhere now that didn't allow hen keeping. When we were looking for places to live here in Oregon the first thing I did for any town we were considering was to look up the city ordinance concerning farm animals in the residential zones. If they didn't allow hen keeping, that town was instantly vetoed as a good place to live.

Interesting fact: New York city allows poultry keeping but does require permits, Portland OR allows people to keep up to three hens without a permit and more with a permit if you can meet the requirements, San Francisco allows up to 4 hens without a permit, Chicago has no prohibitions on the number of chickens you keep in the city but you are not allowed to kill them.

So if anyone ever tells you that chickens don't belong in metropolitan areas, you can ask them to explain how come the majority of our great American sophisticated cities still provide for their citizens to keep hens? Keeping hens is as fundamental an activity as keeping a garden to feed your family. I would argue that few things can be more American in spirit than providing food for your family from your own property.

A great book to read about keeping chickens is "Keep Chickens!" by Barbara Kilarski. It won't be an adequate resource for anyone planning to keep large numbers of poultry in a farm setting, but for anyone in a suburb or city, it's very good.

One of the best sites on the Internet for reading about chicken breeds is FeatherSite

The Carpet Is Up, The Gloves Are Off

Have you ever tried to convince a chicken to sit still? Have you ever tried to bribe one with food? Have you ever tried to convince one that being a cover-hen is a prestigious line of work? They are a lot less gullible than you would imagine. Not only that? They are totally flighty! Pearl (pictured above) will never win a Nobel prize for being an ill-socialized genius, yet I can't help but admire her natural reticence concerning interactions with humans and her total feminist-like disinterest in modeling. For all that, she did well. Angela and I must have taken about fifty shots of her and it took some real animal-trainer savvy on my part.

Several times I had to soothe her with reminders that I do not eat the flesh of animals nor do I eat my family pets. I think she believed me.

There is a very specific person out there in the world (most likely still in California) who HATES the sounds chickens make. It's kind of sad that this person, who was ultimately evil*, continues to live in my head after making me get rid of my first beloved flock of hens over two years ago. I think about her every time I listen to my girls cooing, clucking, and squawking, sounds that I find deeply therapeutic. (Even the loud squawking they do while laying.) This person had two vacations ruined by the noise that chickens make. I mean, how is that even possible?

I wonder if there will be a time when her name and her chicken hate will stop ringing in my ears? You know what gives me joy, though? The knowledge that if she moved next door to me now, she could not make me get rid of my girls. And if she complained too much? I could legally get seven more of them!!!! Ha ha ha ha ha!!!!!!

The carpet came up and what was revealed underneath was a gorgeous wood floor in great condition. There are three or four deep divots in it that will need filling and fixing, but the rest of it is just perfect! Angela, who weirdly seems to know everything, says that my floors have a wax finish on them (because if I drop water on them they will temporarily discolor) which means I can buff them to make them shine again. I don't think my knee will allow me to do this by hand on all fours. Did I not tell you about my injury?

Let's just put it this way: after a number of years reprogramming myself to stop referring to myself as a klutzomaniac, it appears I used to call myself that for good reason. I have a talent for falling and scraping my knees, breaking my hips, and destroying what little strength I have left in my joints. Not to mention the constant deterioration of my dignity. Last week I fell down and scraped off all seven layers of skin on my right knee. It has a very painful scab on it right now.

So I must go on a search for a good tool for buffing my floors that won't cost a small fortune. Look at that wood! You know, I am beginning to like my house. We ended up choosing a Martha Stewart color for the walls called "Fern Shoot". It's very similar to the brighter green paint chip shown in the last post. Philip has done the detail work and I'm so excited for the room to be done already. It's so much prettier than it was before.

A lesson that almost everyone who buys a house learns is to not wait to make small changes that will increase your happiness and house satisfaction. What happens to so many of us is that we get busy and stressed so we go ahead and fill our brand new living room with our huge load of crap and then months go by and we realize that we still don't have time to paint the walls so we may as well hang pictures up. The job just gets more and more insurmountable. Then you do these things right before you have to sell it and you kick yourself because your house is suddenly the house you always wished it was and now you're preparing to hand it over to someone else. Someone else who is probably going to paint all your pretty walls stark white again right after you hand them the keys.

In spite of learning this lesson repeatedly, I continue to make the same choices, the same mistakes. Time is not actually on my side. I should have done these things right away. Do you know how much dust came clouding up out of that carpet as I yanked it up? Dust my vacuum couldn't suck up, apparently. (And I have a great vacuum.) Dust we've been breathing. Is this why Philip's asthma has gotten worse? Carpets really are filth traps. Yes, I know, I know I always start sounding like Howard Hughes when I talk about wall to wall carpeting. Area rugs can be rolled up and sent to the deep cleaners. Wall to wall sits on it's padding for fifteen years hanging onto every stain, every disgusting particle of cat vomit that reaches the inner sanctum. You can pour as much enzyme solution as you want on your carpet, it just sinks in like the dog pee did. True, it may not smell anymore, but I know it never truly goes away. Dogs can still smell it.

Grossed out now? On top of the filth factor, it strikes me as really awful that now I have to throw this ENORMOUS roll of synthetic disgusting mess in the land fill. I know that synthetics have revolutionized our lives, but maybe it would have been better if all wall to wall had continued to be made out of wool. I didn't choose to install the carpet in the first place, so I shouldn't feel guilty, but I do.

The lesson? Make time to paint the walls. Make time to rip up the carpet. Cause lord knows no one is going to make time for you to do these things. Also? Maybe wall to wall is a health hazard. Can you imagine what would happen if oil supplies really did just suddenly dry up and none of us had solar panels installed against this bleak possibility and we couldn't run our vacuums? People with area rugs would simply take them outside and beat the crap out of them to remove the dust and other debris, but for those with wall to wall? Oh my god. The thought boggles the mind and impresses the fear glands.



*Alright, she's not evil. There are people I adore who don't like chickens. But none of them would have tried to use their newlywed status as a reason why chicken noise is intolerable (it's not "romantic" don't you know). Oh yes, let me get rid of my beloved family pets who make noise for twenty minutes between 1 and 2 pm because that's when you crazy newlyweds would like to have sex and it just isn't working with the noise of those damn chickens which makes things go limp. Jesus.

Raggedy Patches And Feathers For All

This week-end Philip mucked out the chicken run. This is a big job we only do every few months. We add new hay every couple of weeks which freshens up their run and the old hay and droppings compact themselves underneath. Eventually you have got to remove it all and give them all fresh hay and clean out all those old droppings. Philip piled them into our raised beds to age. By springtime the chicken manure should be mellow enough for plants to grow well in it.

This is Flower-bud. She has lots of pin feathers developing on her bare patches. Pin feathers are the hard sheaths that the new feathers emerge from. They look like thick porcupine needles and just about as comfortable. I want to wrap her in a down comforter until she is no longer so bare bottomed. But these urges are human and she's a bird. She has no need of comforters. The cold air on her body will prompt her body to get on with making new feathers.

And, hello?!, how sick is it of me to wish to cover her in a blanket made from dead bird's feathers? That's like wanting to feed a sick calf beef stock.

One thing our girls love is getting a bunch of fresh hay to kick around. It rustles and flies satisfyingly under their foraging claws. Philip found a rich cache of snails for them too. Always a culinary treasure for both birds and French people. Our hens would find it sacrilegious and mystifying to cover the snails with butter sauce.

Lots of hay for the hen house too. Perhaps they'll start laying in here again. If it weren't for the bird feces in there I'd want to crawl into that little house and sleep all winter with the winds howling around me.

Even though David Bowie's music was the back drop for most of my teen years, what I might call the real voice of my breaking out and sharpening my independence, I would have to say that if there is one singer who's music, lyrics, and voice can capture what my spirit is really all about it would have to be Bob Dylan. If I was to try to tell you who I am underneath all the layers, the B.S.; stripped down to the essentials, it would always be Bob. There are a thousand brilliant voices whose songs I love, whose notes speak to who I am, but Dylan gets it all in one breathless collection of stories.

It's no surprise that I have been hungry for Dylan's music in the last week. When the weather turns in the fall and I start hearing the wheels of winter moving, I come back to where I started. Always back to the beginning. I was born in midwinter and it's where I come to roost. Heading back to winter always makes me feel happy. Sometimes in that childish way where I feel an uplifting inside so steep and bright it catches my breath and exhales in spontaneous laughter. Pure joy for no special reason.

Sometimes in that bittersweet way that melancholic people can be happy within life's vicissitudes, it's known evils and laments. Happy that though life always brings with it a banquet of experiences not all joyous, all of them are worth knowing. Happy that it always comes down to the simplest movements; making the beds with fresh sheets, standing over a hot stove stirring soup, sitting under a blanket with the people you love best in the world.

Dylan's voice is, for me, like the sharp bite in the autumn air that tells birds to start their migration south. Except that I'm always pointed north. I only go south to visit friends and the past. So isn't it appropriate that I'm listening to "Girl From The North Country" right now? I do wish it was the version he recorded with Johnny Cash which has to be one of the most amazing recordings ever. Two of the United States best story tellers. They write about the true spirit of Americans better than anyone else.* They have told our stories and made an imprint so deep we won't forget.

I am a political, earthy, independent, folksy, brash, brave, ordinary, boot-wearing, new, and hearty individual. If Americans were to shed their mansions, their lust for the biggest cars, the cheapest food, and have a look in the mirror, perhaps they would see what I see. What Bob saw. What Johnny saw. I think Americans have always been about newness and the big broad sweep which I suppose is why we love big cars and homes. Back when we were a bunch of German and British immigrants we were a bunch of misfits looking for the new frontier. Everything here was bigger than in England and Germany. It's too bad we had to kill off so many of the people who were already here. But they are also part of the legacy of who we have become. Native Americans are part of this whole mesh of who we are.

Although I am pretty intensely ashamed of my country right now, Bob always reminds me that Americans have a wonderful spirit that I'm proud to be a part of. But like children who have yet to learn that the world does not revolve around them, Americans are busy stepping on everyone and obscenely ignoring other people's needs and human rights.

I will never be a flag waving American. I am too worldly to believe the myth of our great (ever shrinking) freedoms or the myth of our forefathers' great plan for us all...because what they wanted for us is definitely not what we have created and I think they would all be pretty shaken to see how we have interpreted their declarations. A few of them were slave owning people which automatically makes them ineligible for any honest hero worship.

I'm not waving any one else's flag either. There is no country on this earth that has not, at some point in their history, done all the things my country is doing now. The only flag I will ever wave is one of peace. I know humans too well to believe there will ever be a time of complete peace, I am not that naive, but I will never stop hoping for it.

Isn't it funny how one thought leads to another until you find yourself where you had no intention of going?

There was a possible on-line job opportunity that I had to take a test for. I failed it last night. I feel let down a little that I couldn't pass it even though the truth is that I don't think I would have really liked that work. I looked at the local job situation after that and I've got to say it's quite depressing. A dampener on my happy. The truth is, I haven't cultivated the proper good attitude about my necessity to go out of my house to look for low paying full time work that will necessitate my child being in day care. I'm going to need to change that attitude. Life throws us these curve balls and your eyes have to learn to follow them.

So I must turn back to my plan which is to get my house to a place of better order and to do some of the things I need to do that will make it easier to leave it every day and happier to come back to. Like painting my living room, dining room, and "family" room. Like making some curtains to frame the gorgeous storms coming. Like duvet covers to brighten the rooms we dream in. Like a couple of big quilts to snuggle up in when we all come home grumpy and tired from our unhappy situation. Home should always be a place we feel good coming back to. Especially if we must leave it every day unwillingly.

Our finances will allow me a couple of months to do this. Then it's all over. This long happy homesteading dream. I wonder if we've made the right choices. Should Philip have kept looking for work that would pay him enough to live on? But he's happy with where he is, no commute, working for people he likes, and doing work he's good at doing. Would anything else have been available to him? No other opportunities seemed likely to crop up.

This is what life has thrown us. Time to catch it and keep moving.



*My personal opinion which it is not necessary for anyone else to agree with.

Let The Fur Fly

First of all: what's up with all the designers in the world falling in love with fur pelts again? And if they feel they absolutely have to use fur, which I don't care for, why the hell are they designing such distinctly ugly things with them. It seems all the fur designs are being influenced by cave man attire in the form of raggedy vests with swaths of dull hide bisected by tufts of mangy fur. For quite a while fur has been mostly absent from big fashion and now it's having a resurgence. Have the designers just figured we'd all forget the objections to it that were raised in the late nineties? Well, I suppose many women have. Women with more money than style.

I don't think fur is glamorous or pretty or even particularly practical. Fake fur, though, I happen to adore! Although it isn't particularly practical either.

My hens are moulting. The first one to start is Flower-Bud who you see hiding from the camera in the picture above. Normally she comes right out with the rest of them to say hello. She so skillfully evaded me today that for a horrible moment there I thought I would find her dead under the hen house or else missing altogether with drippings to show that she had been snatched. Instead she was hiding because she didn't care for me to see her almost bare fanny. Poor birdie. They lose a lot of their feathers and grow new ones. Usually they stop laying when they do this. Now all the other girls are showing signs of moulting too.

You know how sometimes you know a thing needs to be done but you can't bring yourself to do it? And the longer you wait the harder it gets? What's the longest you've put off doing something distasteful that really needs doing? Days? Months? There is something I should have done ten years ago that I just realized yesterday has been a tremendous weight on my shoulders. Most of the time I insist of myself that I rip band-aids off. That I take care of necessary unpleasantness. However, I loath hurting others and this something I need to do will hurt someone else.

That's life though, isn't it? By the way, I'm not getting a divorce, in case you were worried. There's just a very old tie that has been waiting to be cut and I couldn't bring myself to do it. A tie that has no place in my life. A tie that has worried me, held me back, and stressed me out. The longer I waited the more impossible to do it. I think I kept waiting for life to intervene, to set this tie adrift from me naturally. But the tide kept washing it back to my shore.

Now I have to put this tie in a neat little package and send it off to the place where letters get lost. It is one of the hardest things I've ever had to do and ever since I realized it had to be done, now, I have had the worst heart palpitations. I almost went into a full panic yesterday.

I suppose it has come to me that there are all kinds of house cleaning chores I need to do. Life cleaning chores. I've done so much to heal myself over the years. I've come so far. Yet no matter how healed you are you still have to do a little spirit clean-ups once in a while which also include cleaning out the things in your life that are not working. That are preventing you from moving forward. I've come so far but certain voices can snap me right back to where I started from. Those are not good voices. Whether they come from inside my own head or out of someone else's.

I can't fit anything else on the surfaces in my house. I must clean out the garage including the space that is going to become my new pantry. I can't do anything particularly fast because of my back (which is already on the mend...yay!!). In some ways I actually think my back went out from the stress of this unresolved mess in my life. I had to slow down to a stop and deal with it. It's so easy to put things off when there are so many more fun things to do like make applesauce.

So I am sitting down today to prepare a package to send away from the shores of my life and that carries in it a whole lot of negativity not my own.

I have to admit that I fear retribution just a tiny bit.

This fear creates it's own tiny little stab of fear that I am having a prophetic moment.

Please let that not be true.

The Ranch (garden) Report

I would love to develop a cottage garden. "Cottage" has such a wonderfully pretty sound to it. If it's "cottage-y" it must be cozy and lovely, right? But "Ranch Garden" doesn't have the same ring to it. When I think of "Ranch Garden" what comes to mind is a slightly thirsty landscape covered in a nice bloom of dust. I think of arid deserts, cattle, and scrubby plants. Not very cozy and pretty, though I suppose it has it's own charm.

It's convenient too because I can tell you right now that my most recent gardening method has been to parch everything as a kind of test. Whatever plants are still standing at the end of this season will get to left there to rot all winter long-quite a privilege don't you think?

Buttercup squash don't like to be parched so I only have about two maturing at the moment. I am in love with this one right here. You know, I have never actually eaten a buttercup squash but this is the third time I've tried to grow it because I was seduced by pictures of them in the Seeds Of Change catalog. I can't wait to eat this one. The Pink Banana squash, on the other hand, is capable of making it through a nuclear holocaust and is currently taking over my yard. I'm not sad about that because I've got at least five big ones developing and I know they're good because I've had them from my mother's garden.

This is a Caspian Pink, the winner of our first ever Williamson/Evich family tomato taste test of last year. The Black Krim have turned out quite good this year so we'll have to compare the two if a Caspian gets ripe enough before the Krim's are all gone. I seem to favor tomatoes with Eastern European origins.

There's been some good snail eatin' here at the ranch. These girls now expect to be given escargots every single day, unfortunately, now that I really have quite a lot of snails around, I can't seem to find where they're hiding now that they've caught on to what I do with those I find.

I keep Chick out of the vegetable garden. So while I'm watering she stands there looking devastated. She doesn't really want to spend quality time with me amongst the veg, what she really wants is to get out of our yard all together, which is something she can do in two and a half seconds.

Rudebekia are one of my favorite flowers. I love my mom's yard furniture too which we bought from Keith at the farmer's market.

And lastly, poppy seed pods.

So this morning while Max and I were sitting in bed petting an enthusiastic Chick and Philip was trying to sleep, Max said:

"Wouldn't that be totally funny if Chick licked George Bush to death?"

Wow. And then while I was digesting that gem he popped this one into the room:

"No, wait, what if I talked George Bush to death? I would just talk and talk and talk and talk until he just died because I would never stop talking to him?"


Seriously George, even six year olds are sick of your shit.

Happy Zombie's Hens

Lisa E. and I had a very important mission yesterday: to adopt Monica's three hens for reasons we aren't allowed to reveal just in case it might get back to the girls whom Monica loves. This is the place we stopped at on our way back from collecting the precious cargo for a quick panini to go. You see why we had to stop here, right? Monica actually mentioned this place and we were happy to have found it right before we shriveled up with hunger. The paninis were pretty good, but kind of sat like lumps in our stomachs afterwards. The best part was watching them get made by a swarthy Italian-American beauty whose middle name is Angelina. Not quite as good as having it for a first name, obviously, but pretty good.

Here's Philip, Rex, and Lisa posing with the boxes in which the hens were transported.

There's Georgie peeking out at her new chicken yard.

Rex and Elena are very excited about the new additions to their coop!

Here's Omelet looking not particularly sure about anything. She was a little reluctant to get out of the comfy box.

And here's Snow-Ball who was right at home immediately, like most Americanas are. I have a soft spot for Americana's and am sad I don't have one myself anymore.

(This is for Monica's benefit) Here is the spacious chicken condominium in which your three girls will live. Very luxurious appointments!! It even has a skylight.

Here's my tired boy holding Georgie.

You are probably asking yourself how come there are no pictures of Monica and her house and her FABULOUS studio, huh? You're wondering what kind of moron doesn't take pictures of the first "real life" meeting of blog friends. Me. That's what kind of moron. I am not particularly shy as a rule, except with my camera. About fifty times while we hung out for two hours and drank delicious iced tea and gossiped about all of you out there in blog land, I thought "I should ask Monica if I can take some pictures". Then I didn't. Because it always feels so disrespectful and invasive to punctuate a friendly gathering with photo-snapping. Unless you know everyone super well.

So there are no pictures of Monica or her studio which I've never seen full pictures of on her blog (just partial pictures) and which I pretty much never wanted to leave. It's a wonderful cheery well organized CLEAN space. I've decided that she needs to coach me on fixing mine up. You know, in between all the packing and moving she's going to be doing in the next few weeks.

Seeing a person's quilts on the computer is nothing to seeing them in person. I have such a deeper respect for Monica's quilting skills and talent. She embroiders in tight clean stitches and all her work is really meticulously done. My aunt who is also a quilting perfectionist would absolutely love to see such fine work. It drives my aunt crazy that I don't care if some of my points don't quite match up, or if a few squares are wonky, or if perhaps I make it up as I go along. I have a deep respect for all people who pursue their passions with an eye to detail and I do the same in my apron and garment sewing, but when it comes to quilts I let myself go a little because I just enjoy the process and for me, if it's a little messy at the end it just adds a little mischievous charm.

I believe we should all do some things we enjoy that we don't feel we have to be perfect at. I would never make a shoddy garment, I would never leave a zipper buckled or seam unpressed. However, quilting is my playground and I don't impose the same strict rules of conduct on myself while doing it. This doesn't stop me from admiring the greater works of quilting art done by others.

Just as I expected, Monica is such a wonderfully lively warm person that it took only a couple of minutes before I felt I could sit around with her all day long chatting, looking at patterns, talking shop, and politics, and just everything. I would love to belong to a sewing circle with her.

Well, now her lovely birds have a good new home and I've met another blog friend. It was a good Friday! Canning cherries and picking up laying hens for Lisa's coop are great farm-girl adventures to begin the summer with. Now I must go attend to business so that I can start to work on my studio and complain about the heat.

The Largess Of Spring

See that beautiful lemon thyme plant spilling over the edge of this barrel? I'm going to shear it like a sheep today. Before the spit-bugs find it. I'm going to arrange it in layers in my dehydrator and I'm going to, well, obviously-I'm going to dry it. While I could leave it to it's own devices and let it continue to beautify my landscape and cover itself with self-indulgent flowers, I'm not going to. Thyme is the dried herb I use the most in my cooking. It goes in soups, in the salad dressing I make every few days during salad days, and it also gets crumbled over pan fried potatoes. I'm a sucker for all useful edible plants. While I could sit and rhapsodize over it's beauty all day, why not limit my rhapsodizing to the morning hours and then preserve it for my kitchen so I can appreciate it for months to come?

I use a lot of herbs in my cooking. I generally prefer fresh, but dried is sometimes better. It is my goal to grow most of the herbs I use in cooking and dry enough of them from my own garden to be able to go all year without ever having to buy refills from the bulk herb section in my local health food store. I dry: cayenne peppers, marjoram, thyme, oregano, sage, and hopefully this year I will be able to dry some dill as well.

I grow some herbs that I prefer to use only fresh because I don't like them dried: rosemary, parsley, winter savory, tarragon, and chives. Right now all of these herbs are lush and green in my garden. The Pacific Northwest is a great climate for growing all things meant to be lush and green.

My mother is getting stronger every day and yesterday she was almost back to her old self, chomping at the bit to go to a nursery with me to hunt down certain medicinal herbs she gets excited about. She's the best gardening friend ever, she infects me with her enthusiasm and her excellent ideas. I set her up with a chair in the shade to hang out with me and Philip while we weeded, hauled dirt, planted seeds, and planned the uncharted outskirts of the vegetable beds where six foot tall weeds are staking their claims and scaring the bejeezus out of me.

Together we have been planning a medicinal herb and beneficial insect attracting bed of flowers. So Philip took us to Kraemer's, one of the few retail garden centers here in Mac, so that we could gather up a few gems: stevia (my mom likes to use it for tea), lemon verbena (for drying and selling in the shop for use in tea baths and sachets), echinacea purpurea (which they didn't have), black eyed susan, snap dragons, zinnias, comfrey (which no one around here sells), bread seed poppies (this I actually got from Lisa E.'s garden), artichokes (which, if the quality isn't too great can be enjoyed for the gorgeous resulting thistles), cosmos, and nicotania.

the big bunch of green you see between two of the raised beds is a wonderful clump of blue corn flowers. The bed closest in the picture is now planted out with peppers, tomatilloes, swiss chard, and eggplant. In a few weeks I suspect it will be a forest. I got all my tomatoes planted. All my basil seeds sown. I have also planted my carrot, beet, lettuce, and dill seeds.

I've also planted my pumpkin seeds (with Max's help), my summer squash, and my pink banana squash seeds. I still have my butternut and buttercup seeds to plant. I'm hoping I can get enough winter squash to mature that they will last me well into winter.

Last year's sage plant is now blooming. Directly behind this lovely clump of flowering sage is a huge mound of "compost". That's in quotations because we never turned it and it is still looking a lot like yard debris. Squash is famous for growing well in compost heaps so this is our great experiment: squash grows flamboyantly well in compost heaps when you haven't invited it to, but will it do as well if you intentionally plant them there? Philip covered the mound with some of our "amendment" and I planted casserta squash seeds (a Mexican zucchini), yellow crookneck seeds, and around the base I planted a ton of pink banana winter squash seeds.

My mom planted some pink banana squash in her last vegetable garden a couple of years ago and they get HUGE. I think three of these monsters fully matured. Each one must have weighed about fifteen pounds. They are excellent keepers. We doubted they would be as rich and velvety as our favorite standard: butternut. We were pleasantly surprised at the rich orange dry sweet flesh which my mom stuffed with bread stuffing for Thanksgiving that year. It was superb! What's difficult about the pink banana squash is that since it's size is cumbersome, cutting into one is like having to divide a beef carcass carefully into smaller cuts for later use. This squash is perfect for those of you with a large brood to feed. (If your brood eats squash, that is.)

If I don't get at least a couple banana squashes this fall I will be so sad. I have dreams of making mega quantities of roasted squash soup with garlic and sage so that I can freeze some portions of it for later.

Yesterday was perfect. It was 79 degrees which is just about the hottest I like weather to ever get. Max went to school but the store was closed. I've been sewing and sewing and sewing until I think I've got thread coming out of my eyeballs, I really needed a break. My garden gets so little attention. The weeds are phenomenal and will continue to impress since yesterday was a rare day in which I got to elect to spend all day weeding and planting. Who cares anyway? I'm not trying to impress anyone with my landscaping skills. I just want the edibles and cut flowers and the bees and the butterflies that come with flowering plants.

Yesterday was perfect. My hands will be grungy for days now because I didn't wear gloves. I have dirt under my nails which will not come out in spite of time spent with my nail clippers. I got to give my chickens huge piles of weeds which makes them very happy. My mom sat in the fresh air and we all listened to the birds making their chuckling, cooing, clucky noises and the flutterings of their mild skirmishes over errant unlucky snails.

This is really when I am happiest. Doing homesteading work. Listening to my hens. Planning medicinal gardens with my mother. My guy hauling dirt for me so I can finish planting my beds out. My seedlings all sprouting. I look at them and see those future meals. I've never grown romano beans so I'm very excited to see them popping up out of the soil. I can't wait to eat them! I will probably steam them and then slather them with butter. Or vinaigrette.

Today I work all day in the store and sew some more. Lots more sewing. But I feel so good. I feel soul satisfied. I may not be happy with my body, I may have financial worries, and yes, there is always the shadow of the unknown hanging over my head, but days like yesterday make it all seem fine. Somehow it will work out. As long as people keep growing food, keep caring for hens, and enjoying each other's company, the world can't be about to collapse. Or at least, if it is, we're going down feeling good.


Incidentally, I hate the word "largess" and have only come to realize this today as I've forced myself to look at the ugly title of this post. I could change it now, instead of leaving this note, but it feels slightly dishonest. I chose the word this morning. The word stays. Being honest is a bitch.



Note: I dreamt disturbing dreams about being in difficult situations with people wanting to kill me last night, only to extricate myself and leap into the presence of a past crush. A crush I had on my neighbor Mark Hoffman when I was a kid. It's so strange to encounter your childhood crushes all grown up in dreams. It's made me think a lot about the reality of those people now. They had their own crushes, and I'm willing to bet cold hard cash that none of the boys I had crushes on had crushes on me. I don't know any details, but my sister ran into Matt Hoffman (Mark's younger brother) a while back and they talked a bit and Tara found out that Mark was living in LA with his girlfriend and that they were about to have a baby. What's weird is to think about how a person and their family can live in your head as a kind of idealized version of themselves. Surely they had their own challenges. Surely their lives weren't as perfect as it seemed to me.

But I remember the Hoffmans as a family in harmony, or at least, as a family not on the verge of combustion every day as we were. Apropos of nothing-they had chickens as we did but I always remember their dad (David I think his name was) slaughtering their chickens at the side of their house. I thought it was gross but also kind of natural. I remember hanging out in their house once or twice and feeling totally scabby, chubby, dirty, and uncouth. What I would love to know is whether they saw me the same way? My sister seems to have uncovered a different view from Matt: that maybe they saw in our family an idealized version of ourselves?

I never cease to wonder why my past comes into my dreams this way? Why on earth did Mark show up? It's not the first time either. I dream about our house on Scenic Drive all the time. It haunts my dreams in a good way, (most of the time), but often in a ghostly way. Visiting that old house in my dreams is like visiting one of my graves. Usually when Mark has shown up in my dreams before I never actually see him, I just know he's visiting his parents. Coming back from college or from a life he's built elsewhere. He remains sequestered in his childhood home and my curious eyes can see nothing because I am the same outsider I've always been.

I always want to know-what is he like now? What does he care about? Who the hell is he anyway? The truth is, I never really knew who the hell he was. All I knew for sure was that he was the best soccer player I knew. Then one day I had to play against his team (we both played soccer with the YMCA) and I was trying to block his ball and he kicked it into the air and as though in slow motion it arced and headed straight for my nose where it hit me with amazing force, knocking me to the ground (and completely out, by the way) with a gusher of a bloody nose. That may have been the first time I became acutely aware of the concept of irony.

Fresh straw at the ranch

Chickens, in case you didn't know it, used to be tree perching jungle birds. They are (or were) excellent foragers which explains how come all a hen needs feel completely fulfilled is to roam around looking for bugs. If only that were all I needed I could have stopped striving so long ago. (One great thing about being a hen is that because your life expectancy is even shorter than the average feline, you have no need for retirement plans. Your kids don't even have to worry about taking care of you because, frankly, they'll be lucky to out live you themselves.)

That's why, if you keep hens in a run, as we do, one of the most essential things you can give them to keep them happy is the sensation of constant foraging. Hens aren't rocket scientists, they don't necessarily notice or care that they are not perching in jungle trees. But they do start feeling listless if there's nothing new for them to scratch in.

We frequently fill our poultry run with fresh straw. The great thing about straw (in case you haven't discovered this for yourself) is that it makes a great deal of satisfying rustling noise when you scratch at it. (This explains why both children and chickens take such delight in romping around in it.) It gives you a feeling of progress as you kick it around and peck at it's golden spikes. It can really make you feel like a wild bird. There are other benefits too, such as providing more of a dry surface when all the dirt in your chicken run is wet with rain.

It's one of my favorite things to see: my hens tearing a new bale of straw apart looking for, presumably, (non-existent) grubs and bugs. They make contented little comments that sound like human babies when they're not crying. Little chirrups and low cooing noises.

Yesterday was gorgeous here. I almost just wrote some poetical trash about the smell of the soil warming in the sun, but then I realized that everyone would instantly lose respect for me if I suddenly turned all gentle and pastoral. So let's just cut to the chase: I got out in the garden and hang it all! if I don't wish I could spend a little bit of every day out there!! You may not want to know what I'm about to tell you, but I think you should know that if I could run around the world with a little bit of dirt on my skin at all times I would feel right at home. In fact, if it didn't dry out my skin so much, I would enjoy rolling in it.

You heard me: I would enjoy ROLLING in it. Dirt smells good. It's beautiful too. It's warm at the top and cool underneath. It reminds me of when humans were a little closer to the ground. It makes me feel slightly feral (but not dangerous). Inhaling, touching, digging, and scratching at the soil makes a lot of the world's troubles seem far away and even fixable.

Let me draw your attention to the fact that I have, for the first time EVER in my gardening life, caged my tomato plants right at the beginning. This is a minor miracle. No, wait, I will venture to say that it is a MAJOR miracle. Right next to PEACE ON EARTH.

My joy at having done something so conventional and exemplary in my garden is slightly mitigated by the fact that these tomato "supports" can barely support themselves. Like most tomato supports, they are about as useful as a car without gasoline.

In fact, I'd kind of like to administer a little Matrix-style kick-ass to the idiots who keep inventing these useless garden "aids" that just make you want to stab yourself in the foot with a shovel in frustration as you watch your tomatoes lean towards the ground in a kind of slow motion action shot bending the thin wire as they go down. Shit, I could cry just thinking about it. Because then you have to start the impossible task of supporting the supports with wooden stakes, or rebar, or use your children to hold up the plants all summer. It takes several wooden stakes to stabilize one of those ridiculous cone shaped tomato cages. So whatever you use, you better have a lot of them/it.

I keep meaning to make my own wooden tomato cages because I certainly have the skills now to do it, but I never have the time. UUUURRRRGGGHH! It is possible to buy tomato stakes that actually work well, but they are generally way too pricey for a person who plants at least fifteen tomato plants each year.

I'll bet you're noticing how closely I have planted my tomatoes. I'll bet you're dying to tell me that this is not a good idea. Go ahead. (I'm waiting right now, big pause in writing...) Now listen up: here's the sound of me pretending to listen...

See, in my family, we tend to buck trends. There is a trend I've noticed for gardeners to spread out all their plants, like, a mile apart. What we tend to do is to plant everything breath-takingly close together. Somehow both ways get good results for people. So I'm not going to tell you to close the gap between your tomatoes. No matter how much I'm aching to do so. My trap is shut on this matter.

Unless you ask me for some of my tomatoes at the end of the summer because you have too few of them. Then I'll probably say something.

Yesterday when I was mentioning my quest for more blogs with garden content in them, I failed to mention two very important ones. I would like to do so now. When I first started my blog and went looking around for people with similar interests I almost immediately found one called Her Able Hands which had such good writing on it about gardens and food that I was totally mesmerized. Not only that, but right away I knew I had to convince her that we were cut from the same cloth and needed to be friends.

She has sometimes written about parenting, juggling work outside the home with her desires to do work that matters to her even more like market gardening. But her main focus is growing food and eating it. Her blog made me excited to get back outside to grow my own food, then bring it inside to my kitchen to do something fresh and new with it. I've been reading her blog almost every day now for a year. I highly recommend that you visit her soon.

Much more recently my attention was turned to the blog of a commenter here called Zanthan Gardens. This is a wonderful garden site with beautiful photos of M. Sinclair Stevens' garden and the interesting plants in it. The writing is excellent, informative, and thoughtful. It was connecting with this blog that reminded me how much I love hearing people talk about plants and plant culture. I am a garden geek. If you are a garden geek too, this is a great spot to feed the muse. M. Sinclair Stevens knows all the Latin plant names. I know only enough Latin names for the plants in my garden to impress those who have never stepped foot in a yard.

Every once in a while I get the irresistible urge to eat donuts. Especially if I'm feeling at all low or physically gross. I guess the philosophy behind eating something with absolutely no nutritional value that has been deep fried in grease and slathered with sugar is that if you already feel low or physically repulsive, a donut or two isn't going to make you feel any worse.

Which is a patently stupid philosophy and no one is going to get their doctorate on this one. Just fatter and greasy smelling.

I've been craving a donut all week long and NOT eating them because I lost six pounds and I was trying to be strong and all that crap so I can eventually look like Pamela Anderson (right after I get my lip and boob job, obviously).

I broke down this morning. I ate TWO of those sugar and grease bombs. I am now kind of wishing I could go to the hospital to get my stomach pumped. I haven't once in my life eaten a donut and not regretted it. This makes me a lot more similar to my dog than I'm comfortable with.

I kind of wish I was one of my chickens. I wonder if anyone would notice if I just penned myself up with them and ate feed all day and curled up in a corner of the hen house? How comfortable and peaceful that sounds.

I think I'll go pretend I'm a figment of Andre Norton's imagination. Even though she's dead.

The Williamson Ranch report

Pearl photographs well. I wonder how much like Lindsay Lohan she'd be if she were a person? Personally I think Pearl has more dignity. She never gets caught in compromising photos. You might be able to make the argument that if there were any roosters in the run she'd be a whole different creature. I don't know, she could be a lesbian. There's no way to know these things.

A few days ago I was the poultry paparazzi and caught Flower Bud in the act of laying an egg. This is a rarely seen activity as they prefer to do their laying away from prying eyes. If she had hands, she would have taken my camera and smashed it like Tom Cruise. You can tell by that angry glare in her eye. Isn't she cute?

There are over six hundred daffodils and other Narcissus out there beginning to pop up in my garden. I love that, the first hint of a spring in our future. I'm in no hurry to shuffle out of winter though, especially since it might snow tomorrow. Still, one of my favorite flowers is the narcissus.

I realize that I am boring you stiff with all these photos of the boxes. But, whatever. I got lots of work done yesterday. Working on more variations. Future Girl had some interesting suggestions, most of which I will probably stubbornly ignore. However, I think she mentioned something that I agree with.

She suggested having only one strap. I did the two because it adds more of a color splash on the news print. But I could do a thicker strap and only have one. It would simplify the production process. I haven't decided yet. I'm going to mull it over today while we are visiting Astoria.

There are three sizes of boxes. I've decided to come up with prices for them empty, and then do a few gift sets in them where you get a big price break on the boxes. I think they're pretty enough that I would buy one just to put lovely things in. Like a hat box. What do hand decorated hat boxes adorned with silk roses cost out there? I have to do a lot of work for these, but I can't make them prohibitively priced.

This one only has one strap because it's all that would fit. No star because it's too small. This box is only seven inches across. The smallest one.

I've thought about this and I think I may offer two wrapping options at Dustpan Alley: the standard (free) wrapping with the fabric rosette on kraft paper, and then offer one that costs five dollars that is the one with the newsprint over the kraft paper with the band of red fabric, and the poppies. I really love wrapping presents fancy, but I couldn't do that poppies and vintage newsprint one for free because of the cost of the materials. I think I'll show an example on the wall so people can choose.

Things are picking up around the website. We got another order yesterday. Yay! I can't even tell you how exciting it is to us. Also: I sold a Bitter Betty Industries decoupaged box yesterday. It was something the girl who bought it had seen in our store and come back to buy after thinking about it.

I still don't have my Valentine window complete, and I have my mom here now. Somehow I will have to spend some time in the store this week to complete the sewing for it. I'm already trying to plan out my spring windows. Naturally my mom has lots of ideas. She's an amazing artist and has a good eye for composition and a wonderful way of putting colors together. However, I told her that I have to do it my way, I have to be cautious as I learn this new window dressing art which isn't quite the same as painting a still life. I need to apply the things I've learned from Bitter Betty first. I can't just jump in and do some elaborate theme. I need simplicity first.

Well, I suppose I had better be off now. I have to go study some Oregon maps to see how far away Astoria is. Max is not at all thrilled at the idea of a road trip. So that will make it extra fun. There's nothing like a reluctant traveller strapped to the back seat. In fact he has informed me that he plans to lock himself in his room so we can't make him come with us.


*We chickened out. We decided to go to Pacific City because it takes half the time. Which means that if Max is going to be difficult, we'll only have to be in the car with a super grump for half the time.