Sometime in the next week or so, with the kind and generous help of my dad (thanks, Dad!) I’m getting a new computer, one that will allow me to put pictures from my camera on my blog. I can’t wait, and I’m taking some photos now in anticipation: last night I got a few of Bernard engaged in her favorite activity—riding Rosemary the cow. Unfortunately I couldn’t capture the song she was singing, something about “I’m just a poor peasant girl…..”—she was making it up as she went.

Today I’m planning to buckle down and finish my business plan, and get ready for my little presentation on Tuesday. It’s our last class, and I have very mixed feelings about that! This has taken an enormous amount of time and energy, especially on top of everything else I’ve got going on, but it’s time that needed to be spent, and it would’ve been so hard to just get started if I hadn’t done this. Just that weekly trip to Asheville has been quite a chunk of time to set aside, and you know what they say—” Taking a day off on a farm sets a person back at least a week.” So it will be good to have a little more time. On the other hand, I’ve kind of enjoyed the outside-imposed structure on my time and life, seeing as how I’m not very good at imposing structure on myself! It’s one of the reasons I enjoy the seasons and rhythms of farming—I know what to do and when to do it! The thing I’m going to miss the most will be my classmates—I feel kind of attached to them, and I’m a little sad to not have this smart and funny and entertaining group of people to look forward to seeing every week. I hope to stay in touch with them.

The kitchen is filled with interesting smells and experiments right now. DH has sort of taken over the winemaking activities here at Moonmeadow Farm, which, if you know him, you know how appropriate that is. So there are five-gallon glass carboys taking up a ridiculous amount of space in our tiny kitchen, filled with things like sumac wine (DH’s current favorite—we’ll see if he ever gets any of it bottled!), blackberry wine, some kind of flower wine—locust and rose, maybe? He never labels anything, so who knows—, blueberry wine, which is the most interesting color—navy blue—completely different from the dark purple of the blackberry, and I think there’s still some pear mead waiting to be bottled in there. So there’s always a yeasty, fruity, fermenty smell floating around the kitchen (which means the whole house, of course).

We’ve also had a couple of big jars of sauerkraut working on the drainboard, adding their own peculiar fragrance, and pans of feta in salt, with that amazing feta odor that’s somewhere between sublime and disgusting (I wrinkle my nose and salivate all at the same time, for a weird variant on Pavlov’s dog). The basket of peaches that’s been sitting on the woodstove smells good on its own, but combined with all the other smells it’s maybe a little much. And, of course the laundry basket of cabbage on the floor just plain stinks.

Thank goodness for the evening scent of nicotiana outside the front window—it’s soothing after a long day of kitchen smells!

For two weeks the telephone hasn’t been quite right, which means that my dial-up internet hasn’t been quite right either. It intensified over the last week, meaning I didn’t have any service at all for long stretches of time. Verizon is the perfect model of an evil corporation, though when I’ve finally been able to talk to actual human beings, they’ve been concerned and helpful and friendly. It’s just that it can take extreme measures to ever actually talk to a human!

Anyway, it turns out the line was broken completely in half, due to some hellacious lightening this summer. The two halves of the wire were still touching, but the slightest movementin the line broke the connection. Annoying? You can’t imagine. It’s fine now.

My grandmother and her husband are coming for a visit today, so I have to go clean house. I’ll try to catch up on here later.

There are baby chicks everywhere: one tiny silver bantam has eight little teeny chicks ranging in color from silver-white to black; Eggheart, who is a small black chicken, (though larger than a bantam) has six in assorted colors; and Blanquita, a white Araucana who lays olive-green eggs, has nine chicks—five white and four chipmunk striped. Hers are purebred, as our rooster is an Araucana, too. And there’s a bantam still setting.

On the pie front, I think I may have finally burned out. It might’ve been the blackberry pie for breakfast yesterday that pushed me over the edge, but now that I’ve gained all the weight back that I lost last year, I’m finally ready to settle down and eat like a normal human being again. Pie for breakfast isn’t normal. Actually, for me, breakfast isn’t normal.

Mountain Microenterprises is great—-it’s really helping me organise all the numbers that are swimming around in my head. I seem to run a little behind everybody else—either because I’m a little slow, or because I have more numbers to deal with. I tell myself it’s the latter. Today we started on marketing issues, but this week I have to continue working on cash flow projections. I finally just got a rough idea of my start-up costs, and it was a mildly pleasant surprise!

Last weekend we got a really nice visit from my sister and brother-in-law and my cute nephew. He really liked the kittens, and I tried to quietly explain to him that they would very much like to go home with him, but his parents stymied my nefarious plan.

Ah well, I could always mail him a couple.