At long last…

I’m typing to you from my new laptop. I don’t have access to my pictures from it yet, so just text for tonight. But I can tell you I am thoroughly enjoying it, as one does when one has saved up their pennies whilst banging their head on the desk in frustration as one coddled the old computer along way longer than one should have for as long as I have. That really awful sentence just doesn’t come close to describing it. But hopefully you get the gist. I am happy to have it, and happy I didn’t succumb to a credit card or payment plan just to have it sooner.

I want to direct your attention to a new blog on the scene, Newton Boer Goats by my cousin’s wife. She’s mainly showcasing her photography skills while contemplating a career in that direction, but as a young couple getting started in farming and raising meat goats she’s got a lot of good blogging material to pull from.

Sadly, though, my time for blogging will be sparse as the Big Melon Project comes to fruition. (Ha) I realize I’ve only mentioned the Big Melon Project in passing without many hints as to what I’m talking about. I’m still not going to give you the deets yet, but here’s a pretty generous hint. It involves an editor, a “creative design director”, a photographer, and a food stylist. And I am in full panic mode at this point. Will the melons be ripe enough? Over ripe? Are there enough of them? Is our garden photogenic enough? Did these people know what they were doing when they asked to work with us?

Today Madeline and I picked, scalded, skinned, cored, seeded and pureed enough tomatoes to can 8 quarts of spaghetti sauce. 8 quarts doesn’t sound like that much, but anyone who’s done it knows just how many tomatoes it takes to make 8 quarts of puree. And we didn’t actually get the sauce canned, just the tomato puree done. All the while my mind raced with the things yet to be done for the Big Melon Project. And so this post over at Casaubon’s Book was very timely for me today:

“So when people ask me “how do I do it?” The only possible answer is – I don’t. My life doesn’t look like what you are thinking. That is, the reason I put up that food was because yesterday, I blew off the book, 50 unanswered emails and 3 foot weeds in my garden to do food preservation. Today, I’m blowing off the still uncanned raspberry sauce, the weeds, and the book to write this post, and then homeschool the kids. Every time I am doing something, I’m letting something else lapse, usually something that probably shouldn’t. Right at the moment, I’m praying that the couple who are renovating our garage into a goat barn won’t have to pee at all, so that they don’t see my bathroom. The house has been sacked. I have no idea what we are eating for lunch – we have tomatoes, eggplant and beer. I don’t think good Mommies feed their children beer for lunch, so I guess we’ll be having eggplant ;-).

The reason I can do what I do is that I have a committed (probably ready to be committed) husband who can do much of his work from home, because I’m always more than willing to neglect the housework, and because I work from home. But mostly, because I’m comfortable with chaos.”

Go and read the whole post here. I’ll be practicing my deep breathing and embracing the chaos.