What Home Means

Getting the brass tacks from the fertility doc yesterday...my gods, it opened my eyes.

I want a house. I want more room and a place to sink my hands into the soil. I want a yard. I want to live further north, but I'm willing to continue to compromise, if it gets us closer to having a child.

What I do not want, is to start a family, have a child, in that apartment.

That means continuing to put the creation of said child on the back burner. It means saving to move and getting the hell out of our apartment. It means finding work where we want to live, and then finding other means of payment beyond that. I know freelancers don't make dick in this economy, so for me, it means selling my book. Editing it first and then sending it out.

It means learning to save. Stopping all frivolous spending. Downsizing our lives. Working our asses off.

I'm ready.

The New Year

Got to see a chicken up close on New Year's Eve. One of my knitting friends has a small flock. A bunch of us met for coffee and..., and she had to come straight from the avian vet, because one of her ladies is under the weather. We hung out, knitting and chatting, in a zen garden (in the middle of scary Springfield, of all places) with a chicken, a bunny, and a 5 year old darting amidst our feet. Good times. I was in awe of all three of those critters.

Another neat encounter over the holidays: went for a long walk around the inlaws' neighborhood with my niece. She stopped at a corner lot to look for the family's dog, because she knows every frickin' animal within a 2-mile radius, it appears. I looked further into their backyard and discovered that at the far end, they had a shed with a bunch of feathered ladies scratching around. Nice setup, clean looking. The old gentleman heard the dog barking, came out, chatted us up, and we went home with 2 fresh-from-the-backyard eggs, one brown shell, one blue. I was hooked; if I hadn't had K with me, I probably would have asked the guy politely if I could go back and check out his setup.

I'm finally ready to fill my brain with the information necessary to get my farm dreams started. I made it a New Year's resolution. It covers everything from simpler living skills to making things by hand to training dogs and livestock husbandry. This will be a year of buying books, creating a reference library to operate my homestead.

An interesting sidenote is that even though I just got a Kindle Fire for Christmas, I have no desire to download those books to it. I'm using it mainly for leisure and scholarly reading - the classics and fluff. For my farm, I want hardcover and softcover books that I can open and peruse. I just know I'll operate better with that style.

I'm reading what I have before I start buying. That will keep me busy for a while, as I own a fat Eliot Coleman that I found at Chamblin's and haven't cracked the cover of yet. Also, got one of Ashley English's books for xmas, and devoured Barnheart as soon as I unwrapped it. Reading that has me wanting to reread Jenna's other two, which I already own, so I'm set on material for a pinch. But I have my eye on the other 3 books by Ashley, some more Eliot Coleman, and will be researching good books regarding owning and training medium size dog breeds, owning and caring for sheep, and country living/homesteading. The Backyard Homestead and its accompanying Farm Animals guide look great too.

Finally FINALLY feels within my grasp...

Image from here.