Purple Berry-Pickin' Fingers

Well, we've been sleeping in the house for four weeks now.  Seems like we just moved in last night, in some ways.  And in others, we've always been right here, worrying about the weeds, the landscaping, the fencing, the garden, the falling down garden shed, getting the hot tub installed, getting the garage boxes unpacked, OMG!  It will not stop!

The house looks pretty cool, actually, and we are enjoying living in it.  Bruce likes to pose his manly chef pose with his (now famous) pot filler.  

Yes, we are enjoying our delicious pasta every night (just kidding, although it does seem like we've had a good bit of it lately...).  And I thank the gods every day that Bruce loves to cook.  Because I don't love to cook.  I'd much prefer to sit and stare out the window at all the natural distractions here in our farm wilderness and nature preserve...  It's really tough to get anything done around here.

Great Blue, My Boyfriend Stalker

"Blue" followed me here from our house in Kingston, where we bought goldfish just for him to snack on.  He still visits me here every day, and I know it's not just for the fish.

Why don't they just eat weeds?

When we buy plants to adorn the "rain garden," we have to consider whether they will thrive with their "feet" wet in the pond or if the deer will see them as a tasty snack.  Usually the deer win.  These guys stroll across the yard a couple times a day, even when I'm standing out there!  They couldn't care less about the invading humans, and will continue to eat everything that isn't protected by our famously tacky deer fencing made from fishing line.

OK, so it sounds like it's all nature and peace and sweet animals, right? I wish.  When the UPS truck pulls up and unloads a pallet of long, skinny boxes, that's when reality returns.  The window blinds have arrived and guess who gets to install them!!

Reality Bites

Love is blinds

The blinds are amazing!  and Bruce got them all up in a single weekend.  Before our first actual date he told me he was handy, and that's all I needed to know.  

Meanwhile, the garage is still full of boxes, we're unpacking, organizing, setting up stuff, trying to find things, and in general just going bonkers with our collective tons of possessions...  and starting the blackberry- and tomato-picking and preserving processes...  and catching up on lost time at work... and if I could convey even a minuscule fraction of the workload and crazy freneticism (don't you just love made-up words like that?), but I can't...  

So in the middle of all this, having tomatoes and berries to put by, plus the 5 lbs of pears I bought at Costco for pies, plus several pounds of tiny tart apples from our previous house, plus all the blackberries flinging themselves at me, our neighbors drop by with several tons of plums from their back yard trees.  Well, I'm just sayin', when fruit is fresh-picked, it has to be dealt with immediately, if not sooner.   And we did bring this on ourselves by offering them some of our homemade, incredibly delicious and addictive plum rum from last year, and they mean to get some for themselves by giving us the raw materials to make it for them.  (Want to taste it?  Gotta come here for this special treat!)

Plums & Rum - made for each other...

Plums and rum - made for each other... and we know this based on their spelling.  Yet another ploy by the gods to keep us mellow and submissive.

And speaking of submissive, if Bruce wants something, I try very hard to accommodate, right?  Well, he wants blackberries on his cereal, so I will suffer the stinging nettles, the attack-trained thorns, fruit flies up my nose, and wearing weird berry-picking outfits just to please him.  And I have to say, as an engineer, he wants my picking duties to be as efficient as possible.  And so, to that end, he has created the most incredible invention (patent pending)... a belt-suspended bucket for hands-free picking.  The man is a genius.  But not for inventing this bucket.  He's a genius for figuring out how to trick a person into actually allowing herself to be photographed using it...

Life is good.  Weird, but very good.  Please come by the farm and experience this for yourself!  We'd love to demonstrate!