Pictures from things

Here are some of the other early fall things that have happened.

New front door!

(old front door)

I did a little horsing around

Freki found an old hammer, decided it was a chew toy.

Did you know that Hope Depot has pet carts?

Decks

For the past month. I have done a great deal of work on decks around here. We fixed one, and then took another out.

The first project was replacing a few rotten boards in the deck off our our room. Then painting it with a deck specific paint.  As projects go, it was pretty quick and very cheap.

The door you see is to the master bathroom. The red chair is sitting on the hot tub pad. We have plans to get a hot tub, but it may be a little while.

Last week we removed the deck off of the cabana. I only call it that because the previous previous owners had an above ground pool, and the deck surrounded part of it. The building holds our well equipment and food preservation stuff.

I'm sure it looked great with a pool there. It looked pretty silly with a random herb garden gone wild .

We were able to save most of the decking boards. The support structure was a rotted mess. I am surprised it held the top in place. That all went to the dump, in our heaviest load yet, 1650 pounds.

Beth was here visiting - she and I took down the deck while John was away. More on her visit later.

There is still some work to be done, but we are much closer now.

Blood Moon

For once we had great viewing for a celestial event here! We enjoyed the blood moon eclipse with some friends on Sunday evening. Viewing for us was early, about 8pm, so the kiddos got to see most of it too.

Eclectic taste

On the way home from school today we listened to Metallica (Nothing Else Matters) and Wagner (Ride of the Valkries), both per Odin's request. Thank you Spotify, for making the soundtrack of our afternoon possible.

Apples, Apples, Apples

At our new place we have about 9 Apple trees, 3 pear trees, 1 Asian Pear tree, and 1 plum tree. This year was a high fruit year and they all ripened fairly close together.

We missed out on the early apples, being busy with other projects. We did manage to pick three trees.

We picked even more after this picture was taken. We filled three wooden apple crates and a plastic storage tote.
The tasty eating apples we piled into the fridge. Anytime someone came to visit, they left with fruit. The rest? I'm still drying pear chips, and the plums were made into fruit leather and dried as halves.

With all those apples we decided we needed to take drastic action. So with the help of friends, we pressed them into cider. We rented a press this year, but I am working on building one for next year.

The process was very straight forward; wash, chop, grind , press. It was very time consuming. We worked for about 11 hours and yielded 18.5 gallons of cider. Of that we are fermenting ten gallons into hard cider and the rest we canned the next day for storage. We also saved out about  a gallon for fresh drinking.

Projects update

We are still working to get fully unpacked. Our focus lately has been the workshop. It is coming along nicely and getting close.

We have a couple of new additions to the "lawn crew".

Zarah and Vinnie came for a visit from the farm where I work. Due to the hot and dry summer, grass was at a premium at the farm. These two horses are not used in farm programming very much so they came here to stay for a while. They have helped greatly by eating the apples that fall on the ground.

The goat run got a little upgrade (and a hearty clean out). They do not look very impressed, but they really are. I trimmed their hooves yesterday, we both did a good job.

Odin picked out a rug for his room.

 Our room is much happier now without the black wall.

The goats like the help clean out the trailer

Freki willingly jumps on the trampoline, but does not like bouncing.

Michigan

It seems like the fast forward button was pushed this summer. Our energies have been spent at work, play, and on house projects. Now that the school year routine has started it feels like I can pause to take a breath.

Over a month ago we all went to Michigan for a week.

paddling with friends

swimming with family

Add taking silly pictures

There was a tech session in the dining room

Odin came too - he made Lego glasses

And swam with the fishes