What's Gong On?

Lots!

Ok where to start.  We have purchased and installed the fill lines to the septic system, not Bill just has to hook up the line to the main line in the house and we will have toilets!  Woo Hoo!   No pictures as Bill did all of this work last week while I was up here in St. Louis and I haven’t been down there yet to see his handiwork.  We also want to get the furnace ductwork in soon so that we can get the furnace hooked up as well.  Then on to finish putting up the inside walls and insulating to keep all that heat and cool inside!

We’ve decided to start work on the showers as well.  We will build just one shower stall and sink for now since the expense to put in the entire shower house at this time is prohibitive.  The decking alone is over $1200.00!  So, we will build the deck but put up only as much as we need with walls surrounding it for now.  This probably won’t get done before Samhain but should be complete before Beltane next spring. 

As I posted back in July Erik got engaged.  Welllllll there was trouble in paradise it seems and now they are not engaged. There was a week there where he looked like a zombie walking around the house all forlorn and depressed.  But, they got back together last weekend.  They are not engaged again but he is happy again so I like that better.  I’m just hoping they both take it easy with each other and give it time!

Our busy weekends started off last weekend with Mabon at Ozark Avalon.  Meh… it was ok.  I’ve been to better festivals but I go for the people not necessarily the event or the place.  This was only by 3^rd time at OA and by far I explored the land the most this time.  I visited the fairy shrine (interesting) and realized that the road wrapped all the way around the property and back to the community area via a short walk through the woods.  I liked the fact that I could walk it all.  Ritual left a bit to be desired and the drumming just plain sucked!  There was a group there that leads a drum circle in St. Louis.  Their style would be great for a drum circle but not for dancing around the fire.  We kept telling them to slow it down and not be so chaotic but they didn’t seem to listen.  Eventually everyone left the fire to go find a different place to hang out.

I will be heading out this afternoon after work to Bill’s house so that we can load up camping gear and vending stuff to go to a Hoodoo festival in Kentucky this weekend.  Vic the rock lady at PSG talked him into vending with her at this festival.  I’ve never been to a Hoodoo festival before so I don’t really know what to expect but we will be with (non-hoodoo) friends so I’m sure it will be fine. 

Next weekend is our work weekend at the property and my student’s dedication.  Bill says he will be cutting up some downed trees around the campground this coming week so that we can split and stack them next weekend.  I think we need to also build a second outhouse for the other side of the road as we have cleared camping space over there too but we’ll see how that goes.

It must be fall because I'm out of reading material!

Wait... what!  Ok, i mushed together two posts from FB.  I wore jeans to work today for the first time since last spring sometime - it must be fall!  AND  I am on the last book ... I've caught up to all of my authors that I read until November - I need new reading material!
So, here are some of the authors I usually read - any suggestions for something new?
Terry Goodkind, Terry Brooks, Anne Bishop, Jim Butcher, Diana Gabaldon, Laurell K Hamilton, Deborah Harkness, Robert Jordan(grrrr he makes me angry with the last book - it kinda sucked!), Ann and Todd McCaffrey, Sharon Shinn
Ok - so any suggestions?

Time for fall gardening!

Just went to check on my squash and found that the bugs had eaten it all up!  It’s too ugly to take a picture of even!  Gah!  Well, at least I got squash this summer.  I will pull it up and see about planting something there for fall.  I wanted to start a fall garden I guess I have room now!

The tomatoes seem to have gotten a second wind.  They have grown so much and put on so many fruit that the baskets can’t hold them up!  They are falling over into the yard.  As long as they produce though I’m leaving them alone!  The tomato worms got all the tomatoes at the property so these are the only tomatoes I’ll have this fall.  They make good canning. 

Speaking of our garden at the property – it’s done.  We need to get irrigation to it next year and hopefully Bill will be up there more often to take care of it.  I think the heat and dryness (and the deer) took a lot out of it.  I did manage to sauce all the roma tomatoes that came on and got about 6 pints of sauce so I’ll count that as a win.  Bill also found an eggplant last weekend that was about the size of a lime and well past usability.  We must have missed it when we were thinking that the eggplant died during the heat.  Next year we will plant them further from the tomatoes so we can see them better and they don’t get grown over like they did this year.  Live and learn. 

My last free weekend for a while.

It was a long weekend – not just because of Labor Day but because Hurricane Isaac came through and we had rain most of the weekend.  It started raining on Friday morning and continued off and on until yesterday morning.  There were times when the sun looked like it was trying to peek out of the clouds but mostly it just rained.  Fortunately, we didn’t get much wind (at least not down at the property) and the rain was the slow soaking in type except for a few downpours here and there.  So really we got what we needed to put this drought to bed I hope.  Friday afternoon was a little touch and go for a bit – there were tornado warnings in the St. Charles and St. Louis area but nothing that caused any damage at home… the kids were all home and didn’t even hear the sirens!  That is a little scary!

So on Saturday morning Bill and I headed over to Perryville to get plumbing to hook up the septic tank.  We weren’t getting anything that the rain would hurt on the trailer but of course just as he started to load the stuff up – we got a downpour!  We managed to hop back inside and wait a few minutes for it to let up and finished loading everything.  We took the back roads home because he was driving slowly so I got to see lots of farms and fields and woods that I don’t usually get to see.  Hopefully we will have a bathroom (or at least a toilet) by Samhain!  I say Samhain because as the title of this blog says – it was the last of our free weekends for a while. 

This coming weekend my daughter turns 17 so I’ll be in St. Louis.  Bill will be coming up sometime this week to put siding up on my house.  We got storm damage from earlier in the spring when we had some pretty bad hail.  He also has to fix some gutters and vent hoods.   The hood of my car is also being ordered right now – I got some damage there that Bill’s neighbor  John is going to fix – good to know a body man and he knows my car intimately now – this will be the 2^nd hood he’s put on it!  So, this weekend I will be in St. Louis for Aubri’s birthday.

She wants to dress up to go out for her birthday this year.  I think we will be going to Olive Garden and I’ll wear the ‘graduation dress’ that I wore to all the graduations I went to this year… might as well wear it and get some use out of it – I’m hopeful it will be too big next year!

The weekend of the 15^th we will be in Columbia Mo camping.  It’s Mabon festival at Ozark Avalon.  The following weekend (the 22) we will be in Tennessee camping again – another festival that Bill will be vending his woodworking things at.  Then we will be camping in our woods the following weekend for the work weekend for Samhain.  (Lots of camping in September!)

October is filling up fast as well.  The first weekend we will be in Arkansas at his family reunion.  I am going to try to get him to bring the trailer so we can bring back a beautiful statue of a Goddess that we’ve looked at for two years!  I want to put her in the Hawthorn grove but we will need the trailer to lay her down for transport.  I’m hoping to talk the owner down another $100 this year so that she will be affordable.

The weekend of October 13 will be our Samhain festival (more camping) and then we will actually have a weekend off on the 20^th before my niece gets married on the 27^th here in St. Louis.  Whewww – lots of weekends full of stuff!

Back to this weekend – we puttered around outside whenever we could – did manage to get back to the woods for a little bit on Sunday just to sit and relax.  Bill ‘fixed’ the drive where the electric went across and the ground was sinking – he filled it in a bit so that there isn’t such a dip now.  We really need to rent a disk and disk the entire yard up to level it – but that is going to have to wait until we are ready to start putting the yard back together after construction!  We still have to pull the old rock house down – all but the few walls that are still solid and move the mound of dirt back behind the ‘barn’ to cover the septic tank and drain pipes.  We have the whole west end of the yard to clear out yet and plant our orchard.  I keep telling him we need to get to that so that the trees can start growing and setting fruit… ah, just another one of those projects that gets put off. 

You see this is how we get off on tangents in the yard and house – we see something that needs to be done and we drop what we are doing to go do it… then we have all these half done projects.  I doubt we are the only ones who do this but it is a bit frustrating to the Capricorn in me!  J

Anyway, between puttering outside we watched a lot of Farscape this weekend.  I own all the seasons (yes, I’m a Sci-Fi geek) but I didn’t have the final movie to tie everything back together so I’ll have to look that up at home and see if I can find it.  I had forgotten my Nook at home (Gasp!) so I watched a lot more TV that I usually do.  May have been a good thing since I finished the book I was reading last night in about 2 hours and would not have had anything else to read… no internet connection at Bill’s house yet so no downloading of new books!  (Another thing to add to the list of to dos!)