Summertime home and away

Homefront
One of our chickens is called Broody. She looks like a barred rock, those salt-and-pepper colored chickens, but with a little more black than most. She's tried several times over the years to hatch some eggs (which is called going broody, and is not super common among modern domesticated chickens, thus her name), and normally we try to dissuade her from it, as she usually tries in winter. But recently she tried again, and we decided to let her go for it. She was pretty dedicated too, always on the nest box with 20 or so eggs underneath her, but every once in a while she'd get up to eat and either another chicken would take her spot or she'd just get confused, and end up on the wrong nest. So no go in the end. Not that we need any more chickens, but we thought maybe it was time to turn some into soup at some point.

Speaking of chicken soup, we've been working lately on trying to scale ourselves back a little, both to create a little more leisure time and soon enough, a little more babyface time. Successes so far have been mixed. Good successes have included 1) the returning of the alpacas, 2) the purchase of a new used car (I guess that's not quite scaling back, but good given the totaling of previous car in montana, and our upcoming need to fit both hay and a carseat into the back of a vehicle (subaru station wagon found on craigslist from a guy who lives two hours away, but who actually turned out to be someone Mike works with -- small town (or towns) I guess)), and 3) the purchase of riding lawn mower (cute, eh? and so far, very very useful).



Partial successes have included using the goats as lawn mowers -- they do a good job of it but the logistics make it hard to do as often as we'd like to -- for now we have to take them out of the pen on leashes and then Mike lifts them up one by one to put them inside the electric fence -- so we're working on a better system. And in general there are probably just too many goats right now -- they are, as you know, very cute, so if you know of anyone who wants a few dwarf goats (especially boys, so we can whittle down more to girls and maybe do more milking, maybe), let me know.





Less successful pieces probably revolve around the garden right now. Well, the part of the garden with asparagus, raspberries, and strawberries has been really successful, mostly due to the incorporation of weed cloth when my mama was visiting. The rest of the garden is, well, too big for our schedules this year. Between my decreasing ability to weed (both because of big belly and because of a busier work schedule) and our multiple June travels (more below) the weeds got a bit out of hand. We considered scrapping the whole deal, and then we considered retilling it and planting something like wheat that doesn't need weeding (or much of anything until harvest), but in the end Mike decided that he could squeeze in some weeding after work, at least for the salvageable parts, and for the rest, we might still consider winter wheat, which gets planted at end of summer and harvested next spring (probably where the tomatoes/onions/peppers are -- not much success there so far and our summer tends to be too short for them anyway, given that we started them a little late). Anyway, Mike's had quite a bit of success knocking good chunks off here and there so far (still weedy on the left, weeded on the right).



Oh, and meanwhile we have eaten radishes and lettuce that made their way up through the weeds.



Travels
Many travels the last few weeks. A week in Minnesota for a wedding preceded by a couple of days on the Oregon coast for a different wedding. Mike, internet reverend that he is, had had a long dry spell in the wedding department, and then within three days he officiated two of them. The first was at a lighthouse near the ocean (I don't have good during-wedding pics but this was before with some other friends from Wenatchee),





and the second was for Mike's dad and his girlfriend of 16 years -- much Cochran-side-of-family time ensued plus a little boatride out on the MN lakes, despite the unseasonably cold temperatures (oh, and a visit to the grandma in the last photo, plus other family/friend visits that remain picture-less for now).







Despite having just spent a week out of town, and despite the garden yelling for weeding, Mike and I decided to take advantage of three-day fourth of July weekend to go to the San Juan Islands on the Puget sound of western Washington. A four hour drive to Anacortes and one hour ferry ride to Orcas island later, we stayed at a rental cabin on the property of a naturopath named Magda and spent the weekend walking around the beaches and eating big breakfasts and looking inside pottery shops and hiking around a lake and driving up to the top of a mountain with a good island view.











And the following weekend (which was last weekend) included two more treats -- a birthday-party hike for a friend's 50th bday party (don't worry, we only went partway up the trail, til it got too steep for big-belly-me) and then a visit from our friends Zhao & Jonathan from Utah, with a requisite stop in the faux-Bavarian village of Leavenworth.



Meanwhile, all is well around here. I'm home today because we have a plumber up to fix a bunch of longstanding drain problems and put in a deeper kitchen sink and maybe set up piping for a water softener (our well water is really really hard and full of iron, and stains everything red). As for pregnancy stuff, all is going well, still can't say I'm a huge fan, but it won't last forever (hopefully). Actually, I find I really have very little to say about it -- looking forward to feeling less big and swelly soon-ish, but all the important parts (kiddo, me, mike) are looking good, so that's really all we can ask for.

Interesting note on the pending-kiddo stuff, though. I mentioned to Zhao and Jonathan, as I had mentioned on the blog a few posts ago, that we were taken a little by surprise at the extent of negativeness that popped out when people started talking to us about having kids. Friends we visited in Minnesota actually said they found the same thing -- one compared it to when you're in high school and the kids one year ahead of you say, "Well, just wait until you get to calculus, then you'll see what hard is," which made me think that maybe we've just been lucky enough to be outside of a context for the last 15 years in which your peers are all doing more or less the same thing as you, and so now being back inside the more "universal" realms of childbearing, the calculus dynamics come back into play(?). But our friends who live now in a very Mormon part of Utah said they actually see the opposite -- that everyone they meet is so singularly positive about having kids that they feel like they never get any realism to balance it. Which made me think that maybe there's something too about the more secular less "family values-y" culture that we seem to interact with more these days, and wonder if perhaps people guided towards cultivating individual interests and careers rather than towards larger families have just ended up more surprised by the difficulties and less appreciative (or at least less communicative) of the fun parts of kids... anyway, just ponderings... :)

Meanwhile, I imagine you'll get still at least one or even two more blog posts before babyface makes his/her out-of-utero appearance, but will keep keeping you posted :)